/home/bill/web/ProjMajor/History/231022 emto Steve Wickson, 900year climate cycle.html

To : Steven Wickson
Subject : 900 year climate cycle

First of all, your book is fun. There is a tremendous amount of historical detail in your book, which is great. Your description of [astro, climate] processes was helpful, as it's far too easy to forget the details, and there were gems new to me here and there. Your historical tables are golden.

The Friends of Science buffet-presentation night, 17Oct2023, was one of those weird timing coincidences. I bought your book at the Friends of Science event, and while reading it I can't help thinking about my webSite I am just finishing, a large part of which is something like a book index for a priority-for-me book that I am reading (see note "webSite support to help read through a book" below my signature block).

Given the huge amount of detail in your book, it would be fantastic to have the table of historical events in electronic form on a public webPage at some later date. For now, that would probably kill your book sales, but once sales have tapered off, and especially if you write another book, it could dramatically extend the [reach, utility] of your book(s), and take it to an entirely greater scope of functionality.

I would be interested in any ideas you may have on how to make the "themes webPage" and "TopMenu" (links below) more effect for [myself, others] as readers, and for people who might consider purchasing Grossberg's book. If you know nothing of the topics of Grossberg's book, that is even better: can you at least get a better idea of what the book is about, or does the [detail, webPage] hide that in a general sense?

Anyways, just a thought...


Bill Howell, Bill@BillHowell.ca 1-587-707-2027
Member of Hussar Lion's Club & Sundowners, (retired from volunteer FireFighters Jan2021)
http://www.BillHowell.ca/ (browser shows root directory of webSite)
http://www.BillHowell.ca/home.html (start webPage browsing)
P.O. Box 299, Hussar, Alberta, T0J1S0


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webSite support to help read through a book
themes webPage
TopMenu

Since last Mar2023, I've been working towards posting 3 simple questions to the Connectionist (neural network etc) blog, in light of finally [buy, read]ing a profound book, Stephen Grossberg "Conscious Mind, Resonant Brain", and the public amazement following the free [access, use] of chatGPT. These two subjects became potentially linked when I looked at the fundamental building block of Transformer Neural Networks (TrNNs), which resembled some of Stephen Grossberg's NN structures from ?1970s?), as illustrated in his book (I had long forgotten his details).

There are ~620 figures and 5 tables in the book, and it's a pain to flip back and forth through the book to compare [figure, text]s. I first typed out html lists of [chapters, sections, captions for [figure, table]s], which was a huge amount of work. About as much work was my porting of my webSite Management System software from the QNial programming language to bash script (badly out-of-date webSite, as I am in a multi-year project to revamp my QNial libraries according to a "Computability of symbol names" approach (a bit like oject-oriented, somewhat).

I screen-captured images of the [figure, text]s from a Kindle version of the book (I don't read Kindle - I like paper books). Unfortunately, I have no easy way to capture Kindle text, so typing was necessary, and it was also necessary to add text that appears in the images to the captions.

The html lists of [chapters, sections, captions for [figure, table]s] make it easy to :
Additionally : Collected themes, and the ability of a reader to [search, download, transform] data "relatively easily" transform the very nature of books to a far more utilitarian level.

I am sure others are also combining ideas like this with "Large Language Models" like Google BARD, OpenAI chatGPT, etc, etc.

The author Stephen Grossberg gave me permission to post the images on my webSite. At the end of the day, my simple "captions as a cheap index" approach REQUIRES someone to purchase the book to understand the [image, theme]s. As such, it may help booksales, but it's too early to say, as I haven't even posted my blog on Connectionists yet, so no-one knows about the webSite (still very incomplete, cheap, but I can't work much longer on it as other priorities are far behind!).


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timelines of history (from other sources)

see my history webDirectory, especially : I came to the conclusion that I didn't have any detail going further back in history to do time series analysis, but perhaps there is far more data now.


The "[Simple, Great]est cycle concept" of all? :
I was stunned by this. Puetz also worked with ?Prokopf? (UofCarleton in Ottawa, collaborated with Tim Patterson) on geological series, as well as other geology professors. But the concept spans just about everything to TeraYears <grin>, with imaginative statistical testing.

I wonder if it borderline-attains a "small-world universal approximation" characteristic, tending towards Fourier series for what it does. I had scribbled the Mayan calendar on my 7.5 ky chart of history, and looked a bit at the Mayan calendar in 2010-2012 when we were all going to die. That's what it reminded me of most, times a few million.

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Howell's previous, very incomplete, history projects

I've always liked history, but really got dragged into it by my father (died Dec2022), with whom I worked on two projects : Another fun (but extremely dark, surprisingly) source was :