Would a better understanding of the unity of mind and nature speak at all to how we might better live in this world? And, specifically, what would it say about learning?

This is a huge question. I am literate in several areas, but a rank novice in others. For starters, I expect to traipse across the nature of time; the quantum enigma; Goethe’s way of science; Bohm on wholeness; Buddhist concepts of time-being and mind-nature; the Batesons on the epistemology of the sacred; Wittgenstein’s investigation of language.

Sounds far out doesn’t it? Definitely. But so much fun, even if nothing comes of it.

I’ll be lost in the confusion of learning and thinking for a long time I expect. Hence the sabbatical. I’m afraid that if I tried to write blogs throughout this process, that they might be totally inarticulate. When I have something that seems worth saying, I’ll write again.

If anyone has any suggestions about source materials, I would be very grateful for your recommendations.

Thanks, Gary

It would work something like this:

1. A browser on the device would access an HTML document on the Internet.
2. The device would convert the HTML into an ereader format like EPUB.
3. The device could then be used to read the document. Nice crisp fonts and graphics, easy for old eyes to read.
4. While reading I could highlight portions of the text, from snippets to paragraphs at the minimum.
5. Highlighted text could be tagged with key words or categories.
6. I could also add any margin notes or general comments.
7. All highlighted text, tags, margin notes, comments, and the source url could then be stored in a database on the device.
8. The database could be searched on any of the items saved.
9. Reports (eg, sql queries) could be constructed and run via a user interface to conduct complicated searches. This would probably include chained queries.
10. The device would contain a simple word processor useful for creating outlines or initial drafts of a story, article, post, etc. And, of course, a way to get the output off the device and into more elaborate software for more processing.

Ideally it would all be open source.

My impression is that portions of the device exist currently, but I’m not aware of anything that pulls all the pieces together into a single product.

If you are aware of anything like I describe or even if you just have suggestions, please add a comment on this post. Thanks!

There will be weeks where things chug along “normally,” only to be interrupted by an intense burst of blogging energy when several interesting and different ideas appear in just a few days from various bloggers.

It’s not that one interesting idea appears and many people jump on it. Rather, several interesting ideas all appear simultaneously. The blogosphere seems to percolate for a while and then erupt with a volcanic salvo.

One explanation is peaks in my own internal rhythms. Possibly these periods coincide with what I perceive as blogospheric episodes? Some of that must be true. But there seems more to it.

Does anyone else experience this? And, if so, do you have an explanation? It’s kind of spooky to imagine that the blogosphere is somehow organic.

In the process I realized how the additions and deletions over the past year reflect changing interests and emphasis on my part. Not too long ago, my feeds nearly all related to education and learning. They were organized into three categories: Individuals; Organizations; and Publications.

The revised structure uses 4 categories: Data Science; Learning Systems; First Principles; and Miscellaneous.

Education and learning is still featured prominently, but the largest number of feeds now falls under Data Science. This reflects my project work with XQuery et al. But it also reflects a change in the edu-blogging world that I’m not certain how to interpret. I’ve only been blogging for 2+ years, so my historical perspective is short. But it seems like there are quite a few people who wrote active and interesting blogs 2 years ago who now write less frequently and with changed focus (eg, more personal and less controversial). Maybe it’s Twitter; maybe blogging has lost some luster; maybe it’s the weight of work and life; maybe it’s something else entirely. But these were voices I enjoyed, so the relative silence feels like a loss.

The category I’m most excited about growing is First Principles. I struggled a bit naming this category. It’s meant to include disparate dreams and imaginations of the world as it could be and should be, rather than how it is.

Now for the bookmarks. Here, I think the Daodejing got it right … “There is no greater calamity than not knowing what is enough.”

I’m not certain, however, that SQL Primer is the best resource for some of the questions I now see. A better book would be a prior one I wrote with co-author Alex Sirota and called Oracle SQL: 101 Frequently Asked Questions. It’s structured around answers to 121 of the most common problems that writers of SQL and SQL*Plus face when crafting ad hoc queries against Oracle databases.

For a computer book, however, this book is OLD. It was published in 1997, so I figured its useful days were history. But the search questions I now see in my web stats indicate the book would still serve as a helpful reference.

If you’re at all interested, the book is now available in the SQL 101 FAQ tab. You can download the entire book as a 5.1M pdf or you can download individual sections and chapters.

In March 2001 just before I returned to the Northeast (U.S.) to start a new job, I wrote and published a book called Oracle SQL Primer: Learning the Craft. This one has favorite status in my heart. In a geeky kind of way, it’s a wonderful book … even if I do say so myself.

The book presents a philosophy of writing queries, so you can do useful things with data normally bound into large databases. The environment happens to be Oracle and SQL, but there’s an artistry … a craft, if you will, of writing any query. It’s the beauty and art of query writing that makes me fond of this book.

Unfortunately the new job took control of my life, and I never marketed the book. Consequently it barely sold in comparison to two earlier books about SQL that I wrote. In 2005 I closed Komenda Inc., the company that published the book and through which I did contract consulting. At that point the book went out of print. Only a few dozen copies of the print edition still exist.

It recently occurred to me that someone might still benefit from the book. Eight years old is an eternity for a computer book and, certainly, Oracle and SQL have progressed beyond their representation in Oracle SQL Primer. But there is still much that can be learned from this book. I’ve worked with hundreds of developers who write SQL, and I think it’s fair to say that even the most advanced of them find that the philosophy of query writing is new and valuable.

At this point, I’m still working to provide one of the appendices. Hopefully that will be available soon. The problem is that I’m taking the printer’s final PDF files from an old PC running Windows 98 that has not been powered up in 4 years. So the file transfers have been an … interesting … experience. If I’m able to retrieve this final file, I’ll bundle all the PDF’s together so the book can be downloaded in total.

Like the rest of the original material on this blog site, I’ve licensed Oracle SQL Primer under a Creative Commons Attribution license. If you’re unfamiliar with this license, click on the image below. I got into the publishing business because the author’s contract I was offered for my first book was so egregious that I just said, “Don’t be silly.” So I published it myself with Komenda, which was named after a small fishing village in Ghana where I spent 2 magical years in the Peace Corps during the late 1960′s.

If anyone finds the book useful, I’d love to hear from you.

Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Content Summary
Preface

Chapters
1: Getting Oriented
2: Exploring
3: SQL Basics
4: Table Joins
5: Join Solutions
6: Query Construction
7: Who
8: Where
9: What
10: Formatting Reports
11: Report Templates
12: Operators
13: Functions
14: Ad Hoc Queries

Appendices
A: Table Documentation
B: Utility Programs
C: Operators
D: Functions
E: SQL*Plus Commands [not yet available]
F: Answers to Exercises

References
Index