#8 - Good References, a Structure to Climb

Google has got a nice feature for defining a search date range. I always use that for checking papers, articles and writings in general. Older papers are usually better written and more thoughtful.

Some general problems become bolder as telecommunication technology evolves. Communication and data publishing changed dramatically, in such a way it is reaches a bigger proportion of people in less time. It may be appropriately to say a more fluid mode as opposed to crystallise thoughts or rationales. Perhaps that would be called a more fluid reality by Zygmunt Bauman..

To publishing an article on the internet, if one has got some basic connections, writing a piece and publishing that can be an almost immediate event.

Even unthoughtful one-liners can mess up general opinion. Take Brazil's president Bolsonaro, whose sons publish a lot of obscenities in his name and in the name of the Republic at Twitter.

That is how people are getting used to ever more, writing very short text. Incomplete text should be called note and as such a collection of notes are not organised very much, by definition.

Also, size of a text does not mean it is better or worse than a shorter text, although usually the shorter the harder to understand.

There is too much of the same ideas, ever poorer modification of existing bases for some unhelpful sophistication of one own creativity.

That may not be a new problem, however that is for certain more common now quantitatively than before, when a researcher wants to conform to general opinion, fearing cuts in research budgets or even salary. An overflow of limits means the paper may be under serious methodological problems when that suffices to say there is consensus and one's research confirms consensus.
Consensus should not be more important than a very well defined and rational function, which leverages logical deduction of further general aspects.

I reckon Einstein's genius may be in great part due to the fact of the environment he was brought up in, and also because of his acknowledgement and decision of developing on top of very important primitives defined by other scientists. Synthesis is harder than analysis, one needs a general understanding of the overall picture and be able to remove noise from what is really important.

I am not sure it is healthy to long to be like Einstein. Francis Crick and Ken Thompson would agree. Ken would probably also say to just do your own thing, no need to have got bigger perspectives than what is feasible at the time.

I fear this post has developed into something else than the title may strictly suggest. Indeed writing about Einstein made me question what are my objectives with this website and my youtube channel, anyways? Too much thinking, I will just leave it at that for now.

News about the website. I changed website structure a little more. There are two important directories in the website structure which are the graphics 'gfx' and resources 'res' directories. The res directory will hold anything that is not graphical, such as audio or text, although PDFs could arguably be placed in the gfx directory, too.

A robots.txt file was added to the home page directory. It has not got much, of importance only a pointer to a sitemap file.

I am using two scripts from Poor Man's Webmaster Tools to make a sitemap.txt and a sitemap.html files. While I will soon link the sitemap.html to visitors in the home page, Google, Bing, Yahoo! Search, DuckDuckGo and other engines will actually prefer to read a sitemap.xml file, because it can hold some information about the links, such as last update time, update frequency and priority (this latter is not currently consumed by Google bots as explicitly said in Google's website).

It was not much hard to make the third sitemap script which generates a xml file last night, although it took me approximately 2-3 hours to write it.. Here is a static copy of the script. Although I will be improving it over time, it may serve as an example for some other person who reads this here.

The sitemap.xml file should actually be uploaded to these search engines (they have got a form for that), but I reckon if you are patient, you can just add the sitemap pointer to the robots.txt and the robots will eventually reach that.