Which half? One day when I was a junior medical student, a very important Boston surgeon visited the school and delivered a great treatise on a large number of patients who had undergone successful operations for vascular reconstruction. At the end of the lecture, a young student at the back of the room timidly asked, "Do you have any controls?" Well the great surgeon drew himself up to his full height, hit the desk, and said, "Do you mean did I not operate on half of the patients?" The hall grew very quiet then. The voice at the back of the room hesitantly replied, "Yes, that's what I had in mind." Then the visitor's fist really came down as he thundered, "Of course not. That would have doomed half of them to their death!" God, it was quiet then, and one could scarcely hear the small voice ask, "Which half?" E.E. Peacock Jr., Seeing With Fresh Eyes science
A web of books A proof of concept for an RSS-like books feed Thinking through building some kind of “web of books” I realized that we could use something similar to RSS to build a kind of decentralized GoodReads powered by indie sites and an underlying easy to parse format. I created a proof of concept by converting my own bookshelf into a JSON file https://tomcritchlow.com/library.json. If you think of several sites publishing their bookshelf as a library.json file you can imagine a bookshelf “feed reader” that let’s you keep track of friends bookshelves readingcontentwww