Hi

Nothing exceptionally new to say...but its always nice to hear from you though there's always a little sorrow to hear that friends are having a [bit of a] rough time.

Just thought I'd respond even though not much to say. Am sitting here at my desk contemplating a night of work - its the last day of my weekend. The work goes in phases. Its a large ambitious thing. Sometimes it holds well together - I see it as a whole. But other times its just a welter of details. Thats necessary since the details are the working out of the ideas. I suppose it would be more efficient to have slaves working on the details...but its an advantage in the long run that I work on the details. My thinking is that next time the stuff converges to a point of clarity I will work up a resume and use it to look for work. I still want a position where either I can work on my interests or get more money/intellectual satisfaction or all of the above. The present work, however, permits time for my own interests - I recall the 60+ hour work weeks required when I was teaching and consulting. And the present work is rewarding in the human dimension though there are certain frustrating things about it. One is the "hierarchy". Another is the institutional aspect. Last week a Doctor got fired. Not everyone agreed with his approach but he was very smart and certainly competent. The process was intended to be secretive but turned out to be messy. I'm sure the main reason was that he discharged patients quickly, kept the census low, and the profits also low.

Here's one of the details I'm working on. Its minor but still time consuming. I have the Encyclopedia Britannica on CD. It is organized alphabetically, and to permit "browsing" with Netscape the information is arranged in chunks and links to make it browsable. This is good for information seeking but not for conceptual organization. Britannica also has a conceptual organization but does not use it to organize the articles because that would sell less copies. Economics again. The project I'm working on is organizing the articles according to the conceptual logic. It involves knowing the organization of knowledge and the inner programming [superficially]. Long term what I'd like to is: given a table of contents, to automate the process of organizing the articles according to the table. This would be a way of organizing/reorganizing knowledge and information. Its not a new topic but happens to be a chapter in database/knowledge base theory. I am not an expert and don't want to be but have an interesting angle on it. That is, by comparing two different organizations of the same set of ideas one can learn something [I suppose that's obvious] but, more, one can set the automation such that if done on a computer with a database program the learning becomes at least semi-automated. I did that last year with Microsoft Access [database program]...can't remember whether I mentioned that to you in one of my letters.

Well. This is already longer than intended. Just meant to say hi and wish you well. Will write again. Please keep in touch.
Much love,

Anil