My unwritten book, Apples and Oranges

"Knowledge is classification"
John Dewey, 1925


For nearly fifty years, I collected notes for a book I titled Apples and Oranges: Intellectual Categories and Their History. I last added an item five years ago.

Sure, now that I'm retired, I could actually start writing the book, but it would take a lot of work, and I'm not sure how many people would be interested in it. The other day, I thought I should at least mention it here.

I began thinking about academic departments and majors, but I was also intrigued by the numbered section of Roget's Thesaurus, which I found fascinating. My 1962 edition has eight classes, each with numerous divisions and sub-sections — 1040 numbered entries in all. In the latest edition, there are six classes and 1000 entries. Clearly, there's some history to be told here.

Along the way, I learned about the trivium and quadrivium. I have notes on the history of encyclopedias and the Dewey Decimal System and the Library of Congress classifications.

I have lengthy excerpts (Thanks, Xerox!) of books on the subject by Langridge, Palmer, Herdman, Sayers, Hutchins, Amsler and Sowa; notes about books by Maltby, Ranganathan, and others; quotes from Aristotle, Kant, John Stuart Mill, Wells, Lenat, Landau, Fodor, and Lakoff.

Being a computer scientist, I added notes about clustering algorithms, taxonomies, and the rise and fall of categories and classes in the Smalltalk browser.

Autographs ― Dave Eggers

Dave Eggers' most recent book, The Monk of Mokha is about Mokhtar Alkhanshali, a young Yemeni American who becomes a coffee entrepreneur. Both of them were scheduled to speak at the Los Angeles central library last night.

I'm not a coffee drinker, and I'm not very interested in that book, but I went hoping to hear Eggers and get his autograph. I was only partly successful, and not the part you might expect.

Eggers got stuck in transit, and didn't arrive until after the talk! Alkhanshali spoke for nearly an hour. It was mildly interesting. Eggers arrived just in time to sign books, and most people had multiple books for him to autograph. Plus, he first talked to some of the library staff, then to the two people who had spoken briefly before Alkhanshali.

They were serving special coffee at the reception, and I hear it was very good, but there were long lines for that, and I really didn't want to have coffee late at night, so I didn't stand in line.

I'm glad I got the autograph, and I look forward to reading the book, but I still felt that most of the evening was a waste of my time.

(Index of autographs)