Does anyone have a favorite software for keeping records of their documents? I don’t need anything very complicated, but I think it would need the following minimum features:

* Handles both electronic and physical documents.
* Let’s me specify a hierarchical location for each (e.g. server:directory for electronic and box:folder for physical).
* Adding pictures/scans of documents should be easy.
* Meta-data, notes, and tags, with searches over them.
* Adding new documents with minimal information should be very fast.

I recently had to go through my projects and collect a list of working titles for anything that had reached some kind of draft stage. I’m posting these here for prosperity.

• Multiscale management of the distributed fishery commons
• Inferring spatio-temporal anchoveta stocks using catch series and plankton measurements
• Entropy rates of spatially distributed state machines
• Optimal Slash-and-Burn Farming
• Glaciers and Flooding in Himalayan River Basins
• An Open Model for Climate Behaviors
• Self-Organized Criticality in Marine Ecology and Sustainable Development
• A Tool for Crowd-Sourcing Empirical Meta-Analyses
• Performance of agricultural process models using global data
• Destabilization through crop failures: a mechanism for climate to drive conflict
• System regressions: inferring the structure of interconnected feedbacks
• No heat is an island: population as a driver of the heat island effect
• Emotions, elections, and Hurricane Sandy
• Probabilistic model coupling: an amalgamated approach to modeling
• Planet on a plate: the drivers of food production and consumption decisions and their impacts
• Global Benefits of Marine Protected Areas
• Creating the commons: fisheries and the World Bank
• Path Dependence, Political Competition, and Renewable Energy Policy: A Dynamic Model

Everyone’s heard of the logistic map:

It’s elegant, it’s powerful (a classic for modeling ecosystems, e.g.), and it’s incredibly chaotic. As you change r, its internal frequency doubles, and then redoubles over a shorter span, and then again and again, until it reaches an infinity frequency over a finite distance. So you get beautiful fractal pictures like the following, bursting with internal structure:

But they rarely tell you how you get the picture, or what it means. The closest you get is that these are “asymptotic” values– a meaningless statement for something that never settles down.

So, I made an animation. In it, I just keep adding new points, each with a value of r and an initial value of x, and let them fly.

My Oakland apartment came with a single shelf of rather interesting books, including an anthology of religious texts called “The Sacred Writings of the World’s Great Religions”, by S. E. Frost, 1943.

I’ve gotten quite taken with it. It’s definitely edited for a Christian audience, and I there’s some Orientalism in its choice of “great religions”, but it does a great job of capturing the “good parts” of a number of works I’m familiar with, a nice balance between cutting and providing long-enough passages, and including a lot that I want to read.

I’ll be leaving Oakland in a few weeks, and started going through and collecting digital forms of all the material there, but I realized I was undoing much of the editing that I appreciated about the book. So, I’ve started to transcribe what I’m calling an “Extended Table of Contents“, and put it in dropbox so you can see it while I fill it out.

It’s actually an org-mode file, but you can read it as text, and I’m labeling it a txt so you don’t have to download it to open it. So far, I just have the first part on Hinduism filled out beyond the simple table of contents, and I’ve included links to digital copies through Taoism.

If anyone else has well-edited anthologies that complement this one, I would love to hear them.

A recent discussion reminded me of a crowd-sourced trivia game that I built a few years ago. It’s very simple: anyone can add questions labeled with a category, and when you play, each “card” has 5 questions on it. You can play it on your own, but it’s more fun with a group. Just like with Trivia Pursuit, one person or team is answering and another is reading the card. You can let the answerer pick a category, and then read them the question.

I put a password access on it, to keep the spam bots out. Like it says in the message: username is “play”, password is “now”. Try it out:

Play Now

There’s some elegance in the implementation. The questions you’ve written are saved in your session, so you can get a list of them and edit them. The questions you’ve answered are there too, so you won’t get the same question twice. Let me know if you have a use for it or want more features!

A poem that contributes to the Epic of Gilgamesh offers this advice:

Let your belly be full,
  enjoy yourself always by day and by night!
Make merry each day,
  dance and play day and night!
Let your clothes be clean,
  let your head be washed, may you bathe in water!
Gaze on the child who holds your hand,
  let your wife enjoy your repeated embrace!

And here is what Ecclesiastics tells us to do:

Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy and drink thy wine with a merry heart….
Let thy garments be always white, and let thy head not lack ointment.
Live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest all the days of thy life.

These two have been paired before– it was an introduction to the Epic that laid it out for me as I have here. But two elements missing, which do not change the meaning but add some needed nuance.

In the Epic, the wise woman, Shiduri, is admonishing Gilgamesh to do his duty as a king, not to live like a fool. Gilgamesh has been wandering around dirty and ragged– like a fool– looking for immortality. But he is told:

  when the gods created mankind,
death they dispensed to mankind,
  life they kept for themselves.

In the quote Ecclesiastics, the ellipsis is hiding “for God now accepteth thy works.”, and the passage continues:

for that is thy portion in this life, and in thy labor which thou takest under the sun.
Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge; nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.

This is about death and about duty. To live joyfully not as simpletons, but as kings.

It brings to mind one more ancient poem:

As long as you live, shine,
Let nothing grieve you beyond measure.
For your life is short,
And time will claim its tribute.

I have a feeling that 2014 will be the best year yet.

For new years this year, I’ve made a new toy for you all to play with!

It’s a way to annotate the web, and then to see everyone else’s annotations like tapping into a vast community of viewers. You can add comments or draw on top of the pages.

Check it out: WebPen

There are a lot of pages that still mess it up though– either which manage to break my proxy (or break under my proxy), or where there just aren’t decent elements to attach the comments to.

So, I’m interested in hearing about bugs, but I’m also not too worried about them. I just want to get it so that it’s fun to use. Let me know what you think!