the emperor of lists

content/post/2021/10/collective-creativity.md

@@ -6,6 +6,7 @@ categories:
   - learning
 tags:
   - creativity
+  - history
 ---
 
 Mysterious voices echo from an enormous villa footed in the epicenter of ancient Rome. Well-recognized men---men with status and knowledge---are invited in to what seems to be a very private party. The house is owned by Scipio Aemilianus, a member of one of the most powerful Roman families at the time, and a big Greek literature geek. The predominant voice that bounces off the walls of the decadent chambers belongs to Panaetius of Rhodes, the seventh Stoic scholarch. Among the regular listeners, besides Scipio: Polybius the historian and Publius Rutilius Rufus. 

content/post/2021/10/ditch-scrum.md

@@ -15,7 +15,7 @@ Many of those Big Tech teams are portrayed like Dream Teams where everything mov
 
 In my experience, 90% of the times, they're not. 
 
-As for the reason not to choose for Scrum: because it's a traditionally heavyweight champion to tackle big bald projects that knocked the waterfall method out of the park---and has become just as slow since. Many of the traditions that come with it (meeting 1, meeting 2, decision 3, artifact 4) bog down the team and the decision process, up to a point that apparently Big Tech talks about Product Managers instead of Project Managers now. Product _Owners_, a staple in the Scrum world, are shoved aside. 
+As for the reason not to choose for Scrum: because it's a traditionally heavyweight champion to tackle big bold projects that knocked the waterfall method out of the park---and has become just as slow since. Many of the traditions that come with it (meeting 1, meeting 2, decision 3, artifact 4) bog down the team and the decision process, up to a point that apparently Big Tech talks about Product Managers instead of Project Managers now. Product _Owners_, a staple in the Scrum world, are shoved aside. 
 
 In-between all those exuberant and wordy job titles, it becomes hard to discern the forest for the trees. In all honesty, I can't make out a difference between the PM and the PM---whether the P stands for Product or Project is simply beyond me. What we do know, according to Gergely's survey, is this:
 

content/post/2021/11/emperor-of-lists.md

@@ -0,0 +1,49 @@
+---
+title: The Emperor of Lists
+date: 2021-11-01T17:17:00+01:00
+categories:
+  - learning
+tags:
+  - history
+---
+
+We humans love our lists. The other day, I was bored made yet another one. Inspired by Retro Gamer's _Top 100 Games To Play Before You Die_ (The Nintendo Consoles Edition)---of which I played 57 and only finished 21---I shambled around the house to count the amount of games I own, played, and finished for each Nintendo Console. 
+
+The result is, depending on the console, depressing. I should stop buying and start playing. In my defense, I sold and rebought a lot of copies, which does render the results semi-useless. I'm doing all right on the Nintendo Switch: 96% of the games I bought were actually played, and 57% of them finished. That's pretty good! I played 84% of the DS games I own, but only finished 42% of them. Game Boy rates are even worse: 61%/25%. Somehow, actually slogging through to get to the end lost its appeal. 
+
+But hey, I made a list, and it somehow made me feel better.  
+
+Lists have been used since ancient times to counter the irrevocable advance of chaos. We make lists to take back control (at least partially). TODO items, project lists, scrum backlog tasks, currently working at post-its, 56 places to visit before you die, 12 clothes to wear this winter, top 10 movies of 2020, 34 bad habits to get rid of, top 3 holy grail fountain pens, 5 best role playing games of all times, the best and worst bakeries in the vicinity, and so forth---the list of lists is pretty endless. 
+
+To quote Umberto Eco, which I encountered in Irene Vallejo's more than excellent [Papyrus](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57328964) book:
+
+> Lists are the origin of culture.
+
+Writing has started thanks to lists. We had to keep track of our weaponry inventory, the amount of breads that customers still had to pay, and how much grain was still in stock at the granary. Although it seems difficult to imagine, back then, people's lives depended on that knowledge. The first written texts found by archeologists are not proza, nor quotes or commonplace books: they were simple lists. 
+
+A lot of ancient knowledge got lost in time thanks to nature or human-inflicted disasters. Papyrus, if exceptionally-well preserved, lasts for "only" 200 years. In the absence of the printing press, a small fire ("whoopsie-daisy!") immediately wipes out important pieces of human civilization. 
+
+After the death of Alexander The Great, any piece of papyrus Ptolemy The First could lay his hands on would be confiscated and copied. This marked the start of a culturally and intellectually important era: that of The Great Library of Alexandria. But in ancient times, books weren't books, they were scrolls, and one had to constantly scroll down and up to read tiny inscriptions on brittle papyrus. No easy to read book covers, works divided in multiple scrolls, well-hidden in an ever increasing library... 
+
+They were in need of a list. 
+
+Callimachus of Cyrene, or as Irene likes to call him _the grandfather of the librarians_, was also a list-addict. Thanks to Callimachus, The Great Library finally got organized: things were sorted, authors and possible copies were traced, errors were rectified. And yes, a whopping list was painfully constructed (and sadly, later lost): [The Pinakes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinakes), or "the tables". Callimachus was the first Western cartographer of literature. 
+
+The Pinakes could easily be seen as the Emperor of Lists. It was later consulted, cited and partially copied countless of times. Greek writers started publishing works like _The Best Chefs in Greece_ or _On Reading_. These works contained... more lists! Based upon the mother-of-lists, of course, as they didn't want to go through the painful process and rather relied on Callimachus' efforts.
+
+Thanks to other works that survived and mention The Pinakes, we now know that:
+
+- Aeschylus and Sophocles wrote more than 73 and 100 plays respectively, of which the great majority is lost;
+- Aristotle's taxonomy of knowledge might have been influenced by the categorization of the list;
+- The Great Library of Alexandria once contained more than 500.000 scrolls, which were _all_ lost! The Pinakes itself needed more scrolls than Homer's Ilias.
+
+Digging through time while reading Vallejo's Papyrus got me completely mesmerized. The Pinakes itself got lost and a staggering amount of literature got lost. That makes me think about my own written work. Would any of it still be relevant after 200 years, if I'd written it on papyrus and the mold started setting in, or the bugs started filling their belly? If you stroll through a library, so many works you randomly pick up will be irrelevant even after 20 years: everything technology-related unless you're looking for nostalgia, laughably badly-written cooking books, "self help manuals", business bullshit, stiff or mind-numbing novels. 
+
+I wouldn't mind burning those. Still, who decides on what's "important for humanity" and what's not? A few ancient pyromaniacs did---by accident or otherwise. Caesar was forced to burn down a part of his fleet docked in Alexandria to prevent the invaders from taking over the city. The invaders didn't---the fire did. Whoopsie-daisy, again?
+
+Herodotus' [Histories](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histories_(Herodotus)), Aristotle's, Seneca's, Cicero's, Marcus Aurelius', ... works---those are generally deemed _very_ relevant, even (and especially) today. And are one of the lucky few that made it to this century. Who knows what important philosophical works have been lost... 
+
+Maybe I should start making a list of things to burn and a list of things to archive? But that's too much ground to cover, so I'll probably be better off creating _top 1000 books to read before I die_ first. 
+
+Wait, is there a list of top 1000 lists somewhere, so I can get this thing jump-started? 
+