Pebbles on the beach Newton picked up the pebbles on his metaphoric beach with an intellectual objective in mind, but his ancestor in paleolithic times picked up real minerals because he enjoyed looking at them: quite inadvertently he started the chain of practice and craftsmanship and thought that led to the diversity of specialized materials and generalized theory today. More like the early Homo sapiens than the sixteenth-century intellectual giant I have enjoyed a life of rather undisciplined wandering and search. Apologia searchcuriosity
Marginalia Search A Website search.marginalia.nu I want to show you that that Internet you used to go exploring is still very much there. There are still tons of small personal websites, and a wealth of long form text from both the past and the present. So it's a search engine. It's perhaps not the greatest at finding what you already knew was there, instead it is designed to help you find some things you didn't even know you were looking for. The art of finding what you didn’t know you were looking forIn Defense of BrowsingMillion Short micrositessearchdiscoveryserendipity
Million Short A Website millionshort.com Million Short makes it easy to discover sites that just don't make it to the top of the search engine results for whatever reason – whether it be poor SEO, new site, small marketing budget, or competitive keywords. The Million Short technology gives users access to the wealth of untapped information on the web. Marginalia Search searchwww
A brief foray into vectorial semantics An Article by James Somers jsomers.net One of the best (and easiest) ways to start making sense of a document is to highlight its “important” words, or the words that appear within that document more often than chance would predict. That’s the idea behind Amazon.com’s “Statistically Improbable Phrases”: Amazon.com’s Statistically Improbable Phrases, or “SIPs”, are the most distinctive phrases in the text of books in the Search Inside!™ program. To identify SIPs, our computers scan the text of all books in the Search Inside! program. If they find a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to all Search Inside! books, that phrase is a SIP in that book. mathmeaningwordsnotetakingsearchchance
Brave New World A Novel by Aldous Huxley A man who dreams of fewer thingsBetween desire and its consummationEnding is better than mendingI am I, and wish I wasn’tSubjected to some great trial+1 More
A man who dreams of fewer things “He was a philosopher, if you know what that was.” “A man who dreams of fewer things than there are in heaven and earth.” philosophydreams
Between desire and its consummation Feeling lurks in that interval of time between desire and its consummation. emotiondesire
Ending is better than mending “We always throw away old clothes. Ending is better than mending, ending is better than mending, ending is better…” noveltyrepairtrashwastemelancholyending
Subjected to some great trial Often in the past he had wondered what it would be like to be subjected (soma-less and with nothing but his own inward resources to rely on) to some great trial, some pain, some persecution; he had even longed for affliction. As recently as a week ago, in the Director’s office, he had imagined himself courageously resisting, stoically accepting suffering without a word. Prometheus painsuffering