Thanks to alert commenters Katherine Bertolucci and Richard Carter, I spent yesterday morning reading Stephen Jay Gould’s The Lying Stones of Marrakech and remembering how much I miss him. What a mind and what a writer! And I admired his political engagement as well.

In the essay Katherine points to, Gould finds a marginal change Lamarck made in one of his own books. From that Gould shows how Lamarck’s intellectual honesty led him not only to undo his own theory, but to come to a new vision of the role of contingency (history, accidents) in the development of species — a view with much less order, logic and obvious divinity than before. Gould sweeps from the minute to the grand, at every level explaining clearly the scientific, historic and social contexts.

The closest I came to knowing him personally is through my sister-in-law who sang in choir with him. But I feel that I know him personally through his writing. It’s so sad that he died so young.

One passing comment from the book: Gould refers to the New England farmer who has a box of string labeled “Pieces of string too short to keep.” [Technorati tag: StephenJayGould]

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A video of my keynote to the National Educational Computing Conference last week is available at KidzOnline. (I come after Ben Franklin (!) and the NECC’s president, maybe 20 minutes in.) (Free registration and Windows Media Player required.)

As a result of my talk, I heard from The Old Friar, who just retired after 38 years as a teacher and administrator and has started a blog addressing fundamental educational questions.

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Amazon has added a new auto-tagging feature: It’s now listing the capitalized phrases in books and letting you see all the books that use those phrases. (More at the You’re It blog.)

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Alexandra Samuel posts the full text of her story on tagging that ran in The Toronto Star. Good story either way. And, of course, you have to love the way in which posting the full story is getting to be common. [Technorati tags: tags taxonomy]

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Peter van Dijck continues his hunt for categories that are — whether they’re labeled that way or not — “everything else.” I find it slightly disturbing that I think this is a cool pursuit. [Technorati tag: taxonomy]

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I was thumbing through an Italian newspaper in my morning hunt for cognates when I realized that while the information in the paper is noise to me, I am fluent in the metadata. I know that this is a headline, that is an ad, this is a caption, that is a pointer to the page on which the article is continued, this is a table of contents, that is a byline.

Of course that’s predictable: The information in the paper is primarily linguistic while the metadata is typographic and positional. Nevertheless, my fluency in metadata extends to every newspaper in every language I’ve ever seen, from Chinese to Twi. Metadata: The new Esperanto. [Technorati tag: metadata]

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In the course of researching a column for KMWorld:

The Encyclopedia Britannica has about 65,000 topics spread across 32 volumes, for a total of 44,000,000 words. Average size of a topic: 676 words. [source]

Wikipedia has over 500,000 topics in English. Average length (using year-old figures): 294 .

BTW, I may have found an error in Wikipedia’s Britannica entry. It currently says: “As of 2004, the most complete version of Encyclopædia Britannica contains about 120,000 articles, with 44 million words.” That page count refers to the online version, but I think the word count applies to the print version. I haven’t found a word count for the online version.

I haven’t corrected the Wikipedia article because I haven’t found a source that really clarifies this. Besides, I’ve never gotten a fact right. [Technorati tag: wikipedia]

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Del.icio.us has a feature in beta that lets you collect a set of your tags into a “bundle” that then shows up at the top of the your personal page. For example, if you declare the tags “parody,” “sarcasm” and “puns” to be part of a “humor” bundle, all three of those tags will be listed under a big, bold “Humor” on the right hand side of your del.icio.us home page. You can create a bundle by going to http://del.icio.us/settings/YOURUSERID/bundle.

(Thanks to Hanan Cohen who found this at LibraryStuff who found it at BlogDriversWaltz. Very interesting discussions at both those sites.) [Technorati tags: taxonomy tags folksonomy delicious]

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Just as we knew blogging was succeeding because of the hundred different plays on the word, “folksonomy” is now spawning its own, including “fauxonomy,” a phrase used by Tom Coates and used in The Daily Chump‘s tagline, so to speak. (I myself am guilty of the highly forced “folksongnomic.”) [Technorati tags: folksonomy fauxonomy]

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Rebecca reports on the use of tagging by Chinese bloggers. Also, in response to a post by Joi Ito, “If you are posting something on your blog about Chinese-Japanese tensions, Sino-Japanese history debates, and related issues (or if you’re uploading related photos to the web),” she recommends you use the tag “cn_jp_dialog.”

Also, GlobalVoices has a great post about Chinese bloggers managing to post about the anti-Japanese rallies even though they are not supposed to. (One of the main IM services blocks messages that contain the word “march,” for example.) [Technorati tags: cn_jp_dialog tags globalvoices]

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