Thursday, March 30, 2017
You hardy few who read my blog can now search it. I wanted to categorize by subject the 100+ entries, but I could not figure out how. Instead, I managed to add a search box. I tried this search box using the words "swim" and "France" and "Germany," one at a time. Up popped related blog entries. I don't know how a search finds all related entries or even how it finds one entry. Try a few searches. As one of my high school math teachers said upon giving the class several questions to work on, "Have fun with these."
Imagine having a search function for one's memory. Wait, we have that, or have we? Is memory true, or reconstructed?
"What is truth?" as Pontius Pilate asked Jesus. Mao Tse Tung tried, and advertisers, educators, and other "engineers of the human soul," in Josef Skvorecky's words, try to reconstruct people via re-education. After its 1861-85 civil war, the United States "reconstructed" the defeated Confederacy.
What search word would find this blog entry? What would Jesus type?
That's hard to say, because I tried various search words and got a wide variety of blog entries: "flower," "book," and "England" each brought up more than one blog entry.
By contrast, the search word "Leningrad" brought up only one entry, from September, 2016. I wrote that entry after I attended a lecture in Manchester's downtown library. A professor from England, who teaches in England and Russia, spoke for an hour, to a crowd of fewer than 50, about the 1941-44 German blockade of Leningrad. That entry's few photos understate the fascinating display then at the library, in the 75th anniversary year of the start of the blockade. In 1962, Manchester and Leningrad became sister cities. Leningrad has since become St. Petersburg, its name for generations until the early twentieth century.
It seems that re-titling blog entries will not ease searching for them. For example, the word "flower" is not in the title of the entries which that search term found, and none of the entries had a flower theme, although the word was in each entry.
The early-twentieth century English scientist Arthur Eddington said that the universe was not only stranger than we imagine, but stranger than we can imagine. This blog's search mechanism seems stranger than I can imagine. I welcome insights from imaginative readers.
Context, context. It's the agar that facts make sense in. A word search is a wonderful thing, and fascinating in its own linguistic way. But the enormous gap between it and an index is why we still need humans to build the latter. A word search is great if you're looking for unicorn, but not if you're looking for horse.
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