A Life of Archivement

I once read an answer in a chemistry test that went like this: "An atom of fluorine accepts one electron easily to archive a stable configuration." I remember thinking to myself, "That's a cheap librarian for you." How ionic.

But it's not such a joke when you realise that your male ancestor has succumbed to the creeping danger of all those who live in academia, especially historians and their ilk. There are literally hundreds and thousands of books stashed in unruly piles and plastic bags all around the house. There are papers dating back to the time of Constantine (well, John Constantine, maybe). The whole thing is like an archaeological dig, not a house. You need to grid and measure, take notes, examine the trash.

There is buried treasure too. I found a battered little blue book which, to my mixed mortification and excitement, turned out to contain a record of my first few months. Apparently, my first words to the world were, "Hiyo!" instead of the more common "Mama!" It seems to have perturbed my mother, and my sister observed with a ghoulish satisfaction that my niece has followed suit.

There are unopened bills dating back to the last millennium, and minutes of meetings best left unremembered. There are literally STACKS of old correspondence. Buried at the back of it all, I found a drawer containing the letters I received from old friends. And the photo albums from the days before there was an internet. Old memories.

Older still, my ancestor has kept VIDEOTAPES. And a cassette player! Argh! I need to help him clear all this up soon, before he retires and brings back yet another few thousand books. I have returned to dust, just as the Good Book says.

Teachers' Handbooks

I spent a lot of today reading teachers' handbooks. These are a kind of esoteric document visited upon professional teachers in real-life schools.

They are long, systematically-structured documents, nowadays found as often online as not. They have incredible detail. They talk about relationships and practices and all kinds of stuff. And they contradict themselves a lot. And no school is ever run according to the teachers' handbook. In fact, I am quite certain that no school is ever run according to the principals' handbook either. I have looked, and I have found none upright — no, not one.

In fact, it is amusing, interesting and instructive to see where the handbooks make it impossible to actually run a school. The most obvious problem is too much detail; lay down a complex enough code, and a whole class of interpreters must spring up just to handle the error functions. Worse still, if the code is cumbersome enough, by the time one cycle completes, the next is already competing for processing time. Then everything locks up.

Fortunately, humans are clever. They can rank tasks by some sort of internal priority, and while giving minimal compliance, they just discard tasks which block up the process or slow it down. The end-product is close to the desired perfection, most times.

I will be more specific in future posts. Or at least, in my doctoral thesis.