Perplexed

Dr. Dobb's Journal July 1997

My world consists of those items that I've filed away in their proper places, and all that other stuff. It has taken me altogether too long to figure out that nearly all the interesting stuff is in the second category, the unfiled mess. Properly filed things become less interesting through the very act of filing them. And the most interesting things are the things that I couldn't file if I tried.

I refer to the nonplace where I file these unfiled items as my futility closet, because of the futility of trying to find anything there. All my best search strategies are directed at finding filed things; I have almost no algorithms for sifting through the muddle in my futility closet. But there should be some algorithm I could use, other than blind stumbling search. There's really a lot that I know about this uncategorized category.

For one thing, everything there is there because I once thought it was interesting or useful. That narrows it a lot. And these things have a lot of connections to one another and even to items that are properly filed. They just don't fit well into any of my tidy hierarchies. I think the answer has something to do with being precise about uncertainty, but I don't know precisely what. I'm perplexed.

That could be a clue right there. Ted Nelson once defined the word "perplex" (apparently coined by Frederick C. Crews in The Poo Perplex) as "a precisely delineated muddle." Precision about uncertainty. Ted thinks that one of the many virtues of hypertext is that it allows "the true uncertainties of thought to be accurately recorded."

Actually, I thought that was the definition of this column.

New subject. I mentioned here recently that I was setting up a Hall of Flame web site to which anyone can submit nominations for particularly dumb things that deserve recognition.

My inspiration was an old magazine by Roger Price called Grump, with the subtitle "For people who are Fed Up with all the Dumb Things that are going on." (I'm doing the capitalization from memory.) The site is up at http://www.cruzio.com/~mswaine/. It's getting some good dumb-thing contributions, and I'll share some of the dumbest here from time to time.

I hesitate to suggest this, but since I already did (see my "Programming Paradigms" column elsewhere in this issue), I guess it's too late for reconsideration. If you have written or come across any song parodies that deal with programming themes, send them my way. I haven't created a web page for them yet, and I don't know for sure that I will, but that's the idea. My hesitation comes from my poetic sensitivity. I can't write poetry, can hardly carry a tune, but I was cursed with an ear for meter. Poetry that tries to follow some meter and fails hurts my ears. I suspect I'm inviting some pain. We'll see.

By the way, Reid Byers offers a more high-tone theme for my Hall of Flame web site:

I think what Roger Price was talking about (and I remember Grump fondly) is the same thing Barbara Tuchmann wrote of in her wonderful book, The March of Folly. Tuchmann defines folly as people acting against their own self-interest. Her historic examples include The Trojan Horse, England during the American Revolution, the U.S. in Vietnam. Thought this might make a good working definition for your project.

The March of Folly. Cool. Thanks, Reid.

--Michael Swaine