I really loved this episode.
Especially when someone pointed out the fallacy of believing north = up and south = down, which is that way only because we live in a world where most map projections on a wall show north as up and south as down.
It doesn't look like that at all from outer space.
North being up hasn't always been the case; for quite some time, east was commonly up and west down; it's where the "orient" in "orientation" comes from.
Which side is up really depends on how you imagine the earth going around the sun. If you look at the earth from its side as it revolves around the sun and you choose to depict the earth moving counter clockwise, the north is up. If you consider the earth revolving around the sun clockwise, south is up. The earth is at an angle, of course, but that angle isn't enough to really change the definitions of up and down.
North being up makes logical sense when you consider that around 87% of humanity lives in the northern hemisphere. We generally read top to bottom and the populated parts of the earth are often what we're really interested in.
There's also the choice of "north" that matters. There are many definitions for what constitutes as the north since the magnetic poles don't stay in a single place on the surface and the top/bottom of the spinning planet isn't anywhere near the magnetic poles. Then there's the north star moving as we move through the galaxy, making any north determined by celestial navigation questionable over time; currently Polaris is commonly used as the pole star, but on humanity's time scale that's a relatively recent (±1300 years) development.
The Mercator projection map was the map I was most exposed to in school and was on my bedroom wall at home when I was going to Elementary school. Later on when I went to college, I saw the Peters Projection map (and had that on the wall above my desk in my apartment. This map rebooted my brain in that it showed a more truthful representation of how large an area was in relation to other areas.
I do happen to think that the prevalence and persistence of the Mercator projection's use with its grossly distorted representations of northern hemisphere land regions encouraged distorted thinking about geopolitics. That the since the northern continents and their countries appear larger than southern countries, this also encouraged the mistaken belief that the north was more important than the south.
Sounds to me like Viking is as Viking does. Raiding and pillaging still inflicts the same result on victims whether carried out under a monarch's banner or by independent agents. Maybe use of his word describing where the pillaging and plundering was happening is similar to why the word 'typhoon' and 'hurricane' is used to describe the same meteorological phenomenon. It depends on where it is happening. Use of the word in history will also depend on the perspective of who is telling the history, whether you identify with the conquerors or the conquered.
Alexander the Great to western historians is Alexander the Accursed to the Persians.
I was introduced to programming in *NIX environments by Informix 4GL, which after learning I could generate the intermediary C code files with an option provided by its 4glcc (or something like that) command, led me to C. I was fascinated by how many lines of C code were generated with a 'let' assignment statement, and also by how assignments in 4GL were mapped to push and pop operations on a stack variable.
I also saw the link to RPG in the article. I took an RPG programming class in 1983, and I'm glad I forgot most of that.
My Informix 4GL days were simply the most productive of my career. We were able to do so much, so quickly using these systems. Along with the domain expert, I was able to, single handedly, create an entire distribution system in less than a year. Order Entry, Credit/Debit memos, Inventory and planning, shipping and traffic, the gazillion reports, custom forms (let's hear it for dot matrix printers and their myriad of escape codes), and workflows, posting to AP, AR, GL, all of the exotic (and ever changing) pricing, discount, and royalty models. It was not uncommon for a typical order to hit 50 different accounts in the GL.
One on one interviews with the users, direct user support ("Yea, hang on, I'll be right there"), seeing their face light up when you showed them something they liked, getting yelled at when things got rocky, the whole kit. The back office staff was about 50 people. The IT fellow knew the business, so I interacted directly with him, and coded everything up. The GL/AR/AP system was pre-existing, I didn't have to write that.
We were a small consulting firm that customized an existing accounting package. Most customers didn't need anything as big as this. But even then, we had another fellow do essentially the same thing for a warehouse company. Hook up with an internal domain expert and pound out their entire system.
We're talking green screen, and green bar paper here. So, "UI" was trivial. UI discussions centered around how best to abbreviate field names or codes to cram more on particularly loaded screens, and what field order to use.
CRUD screens and reports in an hour. Thank heavens for decimal math.
A simpler time to be sure, but we got so much accomplished.
Informix 4GL was imperfect, as are all things, but we rarely had to say "no" to something because of it.
A snarky tagline used to say, "Informix-4GL is not 4G, and it's barely an L."
I understand the sentiment, although in reality it wasn't that bad. What I4GL and its ilk accomplished was to make a passable bridge between SQL and a vanilla procedural programming language, which still had the usual SQL/procedural impedance mismatches, but was miles ahead of horrors like Embedded SQL/C (as you've alluded to with the remark about generated C's verbosity.) I did my share of I4GL programming and still remember it semi-fondly.
I'll add Cataloging the World, by Alex Wright and Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929 by Markus Krajewski plus few relatively recent articles:
There are surely many others and following those we arrive to classic PIM publications, witch is "the system to organize personal digital information" in the end!
Thanks for these insights and listing these alternatives in one place and showing their commonalities (like tagging, hierarchies, and parsing/subdividing). One book I have found interesting along those lines is "The Discipline of Organizing".
https://berkeley.pressbooks.pub/tdo4p/
Tangentially, William Kent's "Data and Reality" (the first two editions especially) also explores the larger meta-issues of moving from human-ish nuanced thinking to more limited formal representations (i.e. "The map is not the territory").
http://www.bkent.net/Doc/darxrp.htm
I have my own FOSS explorations to make software related to these sorts of themes called Pointrel/Twirlip -- but still a work in progress after over forty years. Indirectly Pointrel did in a sense help inspire Wordnet though. :-) And Wordnet was core to the rise of Google (via Adsense) which claims to want to organize the world's information (even if they may have other goals as well).
These are still good guidelines. I would propose some additional guidelines, that as a tool developer myself, will make the tool more accessible and useful.
Provide custom format options, such as --format-json or format--<x> to produce output in JSON or other popular formats.
Implement both short and long options (e.g., -f/--filename) consistent with other command line tools.
Implement a --verbose and/or --debug option to enable more detailed output when needed for troubleshooting.
Provide a --version option to display the tool's version and then exit.
Provide a --help option to display program usage and options and then exit.
Provide useful error messages that at minimum inform the user what went wrong when the program aborted.
As a corollary to the previous guideline, output noisy error output like stack traces, etc. when --verbose is used and an error is encountered.
After exploring this for a while, scrolling through these comments with the up and down arrows was a bit disorienting for me. The illusion of of navigating more than 2 dimensions persisted a little while on this page for me.
I live in the Twin Cities, but moved there from Detroit over twenty years ago when a Minnesota-based company bought the company where I was a contract developer and offered me a permanent position if I relocated (which they completely expensed). The company also agreed to fly me out for a weekend to visit the Twin Cities. I visited the downtown and Uptown and knew I would love living there. And I still love it here almost 25 years later. (I did live in the SF Bay Area from early 2016 to late 2018 then moved back to the T.C.)
I just wish I could get some decent coney dogs or Buddy's Pizza out here. (No I haven't been to Uncle Frankie's yet)
Going back to mason's point though the size of Greater Detroit metropolitan area is hugely underestimated. And not tapping into that area for market or talent opportunities (or delicious Coney dogs) is an unfortunate mistake.
Course if you prefer Lafayette Coney Island you're out of luck ;<).
Buddy's Pizza is finally starting to expand all over Michigan. Got one going in just down the street next Spring. Eventually they will make it out your way. Until then there's always GoldBelly:
Moral Politics, by George Lakoff: this book offered a new perspective on not just the discussion and language of politics, but sent me down the rabbit hole of cognitive linguistics and "embedded mind" in books he authored or co-authored, such as "Metaphors We Live By", "Philosophy in the Flesh", and "Where Mathematics Comes From".
Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond: Gave me a deeper insight into the geographic underpinnings of civilization and history, and how available resources and climate allowed some early settlements to grow into mighty empires, while others struggled to subsist. It also improved my Civilization 3 game playing. ;)
The Language of Mathematics by Keith Devlin: Sparked a renewed interest in mathematics through historical narratives of the development of our number systems, mathematicians and numerous mathematical topics.
The Code Book by Simon Singh: Kicked off my historical and professional interest in cryptography and keeping secrets.
Flow by Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi: Showed me how to make the best use of every minute, especially waiting at bus/train stops, and helped me recognize what I really like doing.
Notably, GGS is not held in especially high esteem by academic historians. If you are interested in a widely loved piece of geographic history, Braudel's The Mediterranean is considered a classic.
I started reading "Metaphors We Live By" after reading your comment because I thought it had a cool-sounding title. It's so interesting! I'll have to take a look at the others in your list too
