What I Learned Today

During my latest volunteer time at the library, I was asked to shelve more books. (Not that I really needed asking—I was already heading for the shelving carts.) I was given four shelves’ worth of “E” books (about 150 books, or probably 1/3 of the library’s holdings in that section). I think “E” stands for “Elementary”; these are books marked as Level 1, 2, or 3, which I gather is something like grades 1-3. At any rate, when I reached the “E” section, I found that it was already in severe disarray. So I sat down (these shelves are at kids’ height) and started shelf-reading and swapping books back into proper order.

During this process, I observed first-hand three specific sources of shelf entropy:

• A toddler playing the “game” of remove-and-replace-randomly. (Possibly an attempt to imitate what I was doing, but not with any sense of the actual order.)
• An indecisive and sulky 6-year-old who was told by her mother to “get 12 books”. She’d pull out a book, glance at it, and either thrust it back onto the shelf somewhere else, or … throw it on the ground.
• The same 6-year-old’s embarrassed mother, who would pick up each discarded book and put it back somewhere on the shelf… not only in some new location, but with the spine facing inward! While this made it easy to spot misplaced books, I was puzzled as to how anyone would assume that that’s the proper thing to do in a library. Especially while I’m sitting two feet away obviously ordering the books myself.

As I worked, I overheard one of the children’s librarians advising an adult reader, who was participating in the library’s Literacy tutoring program and wanted to know which books to start with. The librarian said,

“Here’s the advice I give kids: the rule of 5. Open the book and read the first page. Each time you reach a word you don’t know, count it on a finger. If you get to 5 by the end of the first page, the book is too hard. If you only get to 1, it’s too easy. Find a book somewhere in the middle, and that will mean you’re learning.”

This advice struck me in two ways. First, how long has it been since I deliberately tried to find an English book to read that would actively stretch my vocabulary? And second, my, how wonderful it would be to have access to a huge selection of children’s books in whatever foreign language I wanted to learn! I’ve picked up kids’ books in Japanese and French on various trips, but they’re harder to come by here, and often pricey to order remotely. But a library! That would be perfect! Do the ESL learners here know how lucky they are? :) And are they aware of their anti-entropic efforts?

“The pursuit of knowledge is my own little battle against the second law of thermodynamics.” – Jeff Vinocur

Henry David Thoreau was a fascinating character: intense, passionate, obnoxious, arrogant, and possessed of a lyrical mind. I cannot help but like the man, even as he exasperates. He was given to making jabs at society, the government, technology, law, his neighbors, and anyone who wanted to give him advice:

“I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors.”

Yet he had his own heroes, and looked up to Emerson (as just one example) enough to follow the latter’s advice on variety of subjects.

Walden itself starts humbly enough:

“I should not obtrude my affairs so much on the notice of my readers if very particular inquiries had not been made by my townsmen concerning my mode of life…”

but quickly moves on to convey a sort of impatience with us as readers, lazy desperate folk that we are; if only we would wake up and realize the brilliance of his own plan, that we could live mortgage-free and debt-free by simply walking into the woods, building our own simple houses, and giving up meat.

Thoreau is most pleasurable to read when he is least snarky (he does love a good pun), as when advocating an open and curious approach to life:

“We should come home from far, from adventures, and perils, and discoveries each day, with new experience and character.”

or when he is exalting in the beauty of his beloved Pond and its surroundings:

“Sky water. It needs no fence. […] a mirror in which all impurity presented to it sinks, swept and dusted by the sun’s hazy brush,—this is the light dust-cloth,—which retains no breath that is breathed on it, but sends its own to float as clouds high above its surface, and be reflected in its bosom still.”

And I know what he means when he says he cannot spare his moonlight (and I know he does not mean that he dislikes people).

And he offers some other valuable ideas, aside from the musings on solitude and self-sufficiency that pepper Walden:

“… the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”

“I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and I threw them out the window in disgust.”

And most everyone’s heard the bit about why he went to the woods in the first place. But this quote perhaps is the one that will stick with me most, for now:

“I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one.”

We have so very many lives to live! As many as we choose. Kudos to Thoreau for being willing to try out his Walden experiment and, when he’d learned what he wanted, to move on. Everything changes.

Today I got to show off my ability to alphabetize. I’ve been volunteering at the library for the past two months, and I have encouraged them to give me any and all odd jobs that may need to be done (I do love variety!). So first I served as a greeter, helping patrons find their way around the library; then I stood around the computers and helped people log in, save documents, and print; then I learned how to mend books (repair spines, tape dust jackets, repair ripped pages); then I learned how to re-barcode books. They’re now discussing how to set up a special station near the computers for me, so that I can do one of these craft-tasks but be “on call” for any computer assistance that is needed, freeing up the reference librarians to do, well, reference things.

I had also offered to help out with book shelving. Apparently this task falls into a sensitive subject zone: how much work to allow volunteers to do versus work that is reserved for qualified librarians (or librarians in training). Initially I was told that shelving was for actual employees (called “pages”, which still cracks me up), but then today that’s exactly what I was asked to do. The volunteer coordinator said, “I told them that you have a Ph.D.”

I was first given a test cart of books to alphabetize. My trainer gave me tips that effectively translated to “I like to do selection sort, but let’s start you with insertion sort because it’s more straightforward.” Alas, when he checked my results, I had in fact mis-ordered one Babysitter’s Club book. I was however forgiven this mistake and then sent off to shelve the books.

It ended up taking me over an hour to shelve about 30 books. Juvenile Fiction was in a serious state of disarray. For every few books I shelved, there was a new one I discovered out of place that needed fixing. I was also “fronting” the shelves (bringing all the books forward to the same level for easy viewing). The amount of existing disorder was likely not attributable to the “pages” but instead to the happy, careless browsing of the under-10 crowd. I spent a good ten minutes on the Babysitter’s Club section alone (apparently I am not the only one who has made a mistake there). There are over 100 books in this series, most of which the library owns. I garnered great satisfaction from each decrease in entropy that I achieved. Really, is there a task better suited to my sensibilities? I already start twitching from the effort it takes to avoid doing this in bookstores.

As a side effect of this shelving, I now know the Juvenile Fiction section better, and can even respond usefully when children ask where the Horrible Harry or Magic Treehouse or High School Musical books are. Next time I may even be permitted to work with the Dewey Decimal System. Non-fiction, here I come!

(Book image by David Sillitoe)

I recently discovered Google Squared, an interesting combination of web search and automated information extraction. Actually, it reminds me strongly of the strictly formatted report we had to write in 6th grade English class on frogs. You had to draw a square chart and then label the rows with different kinds of information about frogs, like how they reproduce, what kind of food they eat, and where they live. You then labeled the columns with different information sources, like “Encyclopedia Britannica”, and then you filled in each square with what source X reported about property Y. You then used this chart to write the report itself. This was supposed to teach you how to do research, in the “look up information” sense of the word.

With Google Squared, though, the system figures out what the rows should be (different examples of the category you searched on) and what the columns should be (different properties of each of the examples). It’s fascinating, although you immediately run up against the limitations of current state-of-the-art IE (Information Extraction) technology.

Exhibit A: mars spacecraft

This produces a nice collection of Mars spacecraft, with columns for “mass”, “launch vehicle”, and “launch date.” The first thing I wanted to do was sort by launch date. Unfortunately, the columns aren’t sortable. You can however add your own columns, so I tried “cost”. This looked mostly reasonable, except that “Phoenix” was cited as $350M, “Mars Phoenix Lander” was $420M, Mariner was $2.6 (dollars?), and the Spirit rover was $10,000 (if only!). However, a really neat feature is that each factoid reports its source if you hover over it, and you can click to see other candidate values as well as a confidence rating. All of the values under “cost” were rated low-confidence, even the ones that looked accurate to me.

Exhibit B: science fiction authors

This yielded a combination of books and authors, with the auto-chosen columns being “publisher”, “language”, and “Australia” (?!). Specifying “science fiction author” yields the same list of items, but with different columns: “publisher”, “ISBN”, and “language”.

Exhibit C: ballroom dance

This yielded an excellent list of ballroom dances. Unfortunately, the columns (“typical instrument”, “mainstream popular” (?), and “stylistic origins”) were almost entirely unpopulated with data. I tried to add “tempo”, but this yielded a result for tango only (33 mpm). That one could definitely use work!

In summary, I’d say it’s a very cool idea (and fun to play with), but still definitely at the beta level. Doing a good job of information extraction from unrestricted text (the Web) is a really hard task. Keep at it, Google!

Reading, like talking, serves many different purposes: entertainment, education, enlightenment, et cetera. A few months ago, I sampled an audio lecture on “Books That Have Made History: Books That Can Change Your Life” from The Teaching Company. I was so impressed by this single lecture that I purchased the entire 36-lecture course and recently started listening to it. And wow: that sample was definitely characteristic of the whole course. Dr. J. Rufus Fears is simply one of the best orators that I have ever had the pleasure of listening to, especially in a course setting. I actually finish each of his lectures feeling uplifted, energized, and excited about all of the grand ideas that we don’t often take time to meditate upon—but which are critical to our existence: Does God exist? Do good and evil exist? What is the role of duty in our lives? What about social justice? Courage, ambition, and honor? And the kicker: What is the purpose of my life?

Dr. Fears’s definition of a “great book” is not simply one that appears on an Educated Person’s Reading List, but one from which he believes we can individually derive lessons useful in our own lives, here and now. “What do great books say to you?” he asks. And even more importantly, “What personal wisdom can you derive from them?”

We’ve begun with The Iliad, The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, and The Bhagavad Gita, none of which I had previously read (although I did read Ilium, by Dan Simmons, which familiarized me with the story of the Iliad, in its own way). All three discuss the notion of duty and life purpose quite heavily. The Iliad advocates a personal quest to discover what purpose the gods have selected for you, and then pursuit of that goal with both courage and moderation. Marcus Aurelius, who managed to find time to write his Meditations while actively fighting to defend the borders of the Roman Empire, had a very stoic approach to life, and likewise believed that everyone must determine their assigned duty and then do it to the best of their ability, regardless of their own inclinations. The Bhagavad Gita (which I’m now in the middle of reading) makes an even stronger case for subjugating your will, your desires, your body, and your senses to your duty, being attached only to the fulfillment of it, but not to the outcome and side effects (positive or negative). I think there’s a certain danger in following your duty so narrowly, because what happens if you guess wrong about what that duty is? If you’re Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, you may end up killing friends and relatives in a misguided battle, believing that it was your duty simply to be a warrior and fight.

In terms of applying these ideas to my own life, a pre-destined duty is a bit of a strange concept to me… but a purpose in life—now that I can subscribe to. Pre-destined or not, what other reason to live on day to day than at the behest of a grand Purpose? It’s always been clear to me what mine is, whether inbred or emergent: to study and learn and grow in understanding about the world, and people, and ideas, as much as I can possibly absorb. (I’m fortunate enough to have my credo already encapsulated by someone else, in this case a song by Cat Stevens: “There’s so much left to know, and I’m on the road to find out.”) And ultimately, I want to be able to turn it around and share what I’ve learned, with anyone of like-minded interests. If I am very lucky, they’ll do the same for me along the road to find out.