Independent Learning Forum

Since I set up this blog, I've had a lot less commentary from e-mail than I expected. Since I upgraded my web server account so that I now have access to statistics, I see that the Sapience Knowledge Base is indeed getting traffic, but no one is taking the trouble to give me any feedback on the site. For some time, I've been interested in trying to build a community of independent learners, and a web-based forum has been on my wish list. That wish has become a reality, and the Independent Learning Forum can be found now at
http://www.sapiencekb.com/forum This suggests another shift in emphasis for this particular blog, so I plan to be putting announcements about the Knowledge Base on that forum, while I talk here more about techniques of self-directed education.

Update and rambling

I mentioned a while ago that I was thinking of just taking notes on a day's work on the knowledge base and wandering through it. This represents the kind of work I do on it in a day, and illustrates how this organization connects a hierarchical organization, but also gives the user of this knowledge base freedom to ramble. Where I've gone, others may follow. Suggestions from anyone who uses the knowledge base may well influence the decisions I make in developing it.

I started in science, and connected to the Royal Society, one of the oldest learned societies, and a major influence in the development of modern science, which led to a reconsideration of history. For this subject, I decided to go into particular groups and connect to the World History association, which led back to history. I decided to look at material culture, and connect a particular page that I had developed, Communications technology. This, I decided, has roots in science so I went back there. There, I decided that studies of material culture have progressed enough since I wrote that section that I needed to revise the application of it to science entirely. This led to revisiting material culture, and I reached an important development point by adding a page for clothing and dress. I decided material culture had a connection to physical anthropology. This has some connection to geohistory, which I connected to solar system, history, which is so undeveloped that it led back up to science. Continuing the development of science lad to language, which I have hardly looked at for a while. This needed some development of personal studies. I decided to look at its history and push that back to late classical times. I wasn't quite sure how to go about developing that, so I skipped to early medieval times. This led me to considering Pakistan, which let to human geography. Human geography had an almost complete set of subdivision, so to finish it, I added Oceanic Geography. To more fully incorporate this, I went to the next higher level to consider Anthropology. Review of the fundamentals of that subject led to Geohistory. Here, saw that I had another almost complete set of subdivisions and I could add Precambrian geology. This led back up to Geology, which needed a connection to the structure of matter, which needed a connection to quantum physics, which needed a connection to nonrigid mechanics, which I connected to Sociology. I decided to approach this by examining some of its early roots in middle preahistory. This led back into physical anthropology, which this time I pursued into its roots in study of the human body. The human body has a partial set of subdivisions, so I stopped to add human disease, and back up to personal studies again. This time, I decided to push the connections to history back further into early classical, which led into biographies. I had decided earlier that I needed to start adding more biographies, so I added a page for Napoleon. Biographies connect somewhat to social foundations, and here I added a new page for social control. This led back up to Anthropology, which this time I connected to ecology, and I added a new page for system ecology. Taking this back up to biology, I decided that I could start pushing its history a little but further back, and connected to the 18th century, which I referred back to biography. The next entry to be added to that list was Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, Here I decided to start checking Late medieval history to be sure that everyone who should have been added by now has been. This led to Martin Luther. Luther I connected to the social institutions, and here I decided to go back to the beginnings and connect this to middle prehistory. Middle prehistory could be connected to human ecology as the next logical step, and here things begin to get a bit tricky, because I really don't like the way I had divided human ecology anymore. This page was old enough and my general approach has changed since I last worked on it, so I rewrote the biology section again. This let back to biology, and I took this back to the 17th century, which led back to biography and the addition of a page for William Morton. I decided that since I'm using the application of history to biography as a method of searching the biographical list, I don't need to link biography directly to either history or classical and medieval history, since these now no longer have direct connections to individuals. Historical individuals have long been distributed to the particular periods, and now, so have classical and medieval individuals. Early classical, late classical, early medieval, and late medieval history now each have a set of prominent individuals. That wound up the day's work.

Site upgrade

Doteasy.com, which hosts the Sapience Knowledge Base, just offered a deal for full service that was too good to pass up, which is going to let me add some features that should make it more interesting. Before I publish the current version, I want to get the site map current.
I've started to revive my other active blog, From the Ground as a political/current events blog, so I've been doing a little work on that, somewhat at the expense of this one, but I haven't dropped work on it.

I decided that no version of the planned approach was working well, so for now, I'm just going to let the SKB just grow naturally and see what happens. So far, that's resulting in more developments in science, in areas that I have neglected, and it's occurred to me that, rather than providing dry summaries, it may be more interesting to any potential readers to describe some of my meandering progress.

Science

I keep experimenting with different approaches to building and expanding the knowledge base, because no one of them works all the time. I had about given up on a bottom-up approach, but I thought I'd give it another try.

There is a lot to be said for simple appreciation of nature. Going for a walk outdoors, seeking the sky clouds, sun, moon (if it's up), trees, grass, birds, bugs, and small animals, the breeze... All these are ways of experiencing and appreciating nature. Every day, even every hour, brings its own new experiences. All the various parts and facets of nature seem to be woven together, almost in one seamless web., and this overall, or holistic view, is an important part of understanding and appreciating nature.
But, for the purposes of science, it's necessary to focus on one thing at a time, and by convention it's useful to group things that are similar in some way together. The trees, grass, birds, bugs, and small animals, we recognize as living things. Even the sticks of wood that have fallen from the trees, we recognize as once having been living, and for a time we focus on them and call the subject biology.
The ground we walk on, the clouds, the breeze, and any streams that may happen to be flowing nearby, we recognize as nonliving, and are part of earth science.
The sun and moon belong to astronomy.
There are two more branches of science, which are less obvious: The substances things are made of is considered as part of chemistry, and heat and warmth, and light and darkness, and sound are considered to belong to physics.
What's often missing in education is the ability, once we have isolated and analyzed all these things and taken them apart, is bringing them back together and appreciating the whole.

Also, there is the fact that the study of nature is a human activity, performed by people, acting in society. The tools, ideas, and occupations that scientists use and follow, the social institutions, the communities and peoples that produce them, and the history of the whole scientific enterprise are also connected, so that the whole can be overwhelming to contemplate. So, I go back to looking at one small piece at a time.

Slow grind

For some times I've been frustrated with the emphasis on the form of history and sociology, but limited content, and I've been looking for a way to balance out the developments. For instance, history depends rather heavily on biographies, but I've been doing fine divisions of history and now working on biographies at all. So, I've mades some adjustments, and the situation seens to be improving.

Apparently *someone* is reading this blog...I got a comment from a reader. I'm just going to raise an eyebrow at the apparent claim of superiority of Hard Knocks U. to any other. (Speaking as an alumnus of HKU myself). And wonder which "we" he is speaking of that no longer sees any value in sociology. And wonder what the use or non-use of guns has to do with anything I've been writing about.

Global society

It's been something of a frustrating week, as my various possible schemes for developing the knowledge base keep conflicting with each other. But I am making progress, of a sort: the top-down approach is penetrating into the middle levels.
There still isn't much new in history at any level. The problem is principally that at this stage, I'm still connecting to fairly high-level abstract topics instead of getting down to the details that make a subject more interesting and colorful.
Likewise, there isn't a great deal new in the subject of sociology. In order to make real progress in considering peoples of the world, I need to bring particular nations back into the development guide. In the area of social structure and change, I have managed to get started on the general theme of the industrial revolution and its various subdivisions and associated movements.
Most of the progress has come in institutions, enough that I'm starting to see the outlines of global society. At this point, there is limited progress on the major religions of the world, since these have already been developed to a certain extent. There has been a little bit more progress in government, particularly international government. Economics has been progressing more slowly, but I'm starting to bring in some major corporations. I've also begun to identify major universities. I haven't identified any families of worldwide scope or influence.
There still hasn't been as much noteworthy development in other areas, but there has been some progress.

Details

As well as trying to be comprehensive, I also mean my knowledge base to be useful. A couple of times lately, I've tried taking a particular news story and analyzed it a bit. Take, for instance, the story of the bombing a mosque in Baghdad, Iraq, by suspected al-Qaeda members. This item might have been filed under History-Modern History-20th century-Early 21st century-Late 2000s-2007-2nd quarter-June. It might have also been filed under Sociology-Peoples-Asiatic Peoples-Middle East, or Sociology-Peoples-Nations-Iraq, or Sociology-Communities-Baghdad. Or, Institutions-Religion-Particular Religion-Abrahamic Religion-Islam. Or Culture-Behavioral culture-Cultural events=Disasters. Or, Culture-Material culture-Buildings. Or, Anthropology-Particular groups-al Qaeda. But most of these subjects are not quite developed this far, and if they are, they aren't yet well enough connected to each other.
A great deal of the development of the knowledge base has been driven more or less internally and more or less mechanically. However, in the interest of making it more useful, I'm going to be using more external cues.
I don't have a specific report on what new pages have been added or developed recently, but there have been some. For instance, I now have a page on the United Nations, which is something I've been aiming for for a while.

Back again

No, there haven't been any disasters. I've just been sidetracked for the past couple of weeks.
For one, I got in a debate with some feminists on a mailing list, which ate practically a whole weekend. and then I decided that my development guide wasn't working the way I wanted it to, and started it over. It's still not entirely caught up to where I had it, but it's close enough that I'm generating new links, as well as getting around to some topics that have been waiting forever for me to even touch.

History is not greatly changed. There is still a distinct emphasis on modern history with a secondary emphasis on classical and medieval history. Within modern history, there is a significant emphasis on the last two centuries, and in the last century, mostly on the last 30 years. I am giving a bit more attention to the future.
The emphasis on what I call sociology is being shifted. I've put a lot of emphasis on development of particular nations in the past few months, until I found that the nations I was most interested were too recently added and too far down the list for me to get to, and plan for developing them was too rigid and inflexible. So, now, I have fewer nations scheduled for development, but more emphasis on the major groups of people. Western civilization and Asiatic peoples, are the predominant groups. I also decided that my list of cities wasn't adding much, so this has been rather toned down. On the other hand, the investigation of social structure and change has developed well in the last few months, so It's getting a more prominent role.
I'm also giving more attention to the institutional areas; more religion and government that I had. I'd like to flatten this out a bit more, with attention to economics, education, and families, but that should begin to happen as more areas are better developed.
One of the developments I'm most pleased with is that some long-dormant areas are starting to be reactivated. Sports is a subject I've been avoiding, since I have no great personal interest in them. Quite some time ago a friend who is an engineer asked where I was going to put a section on that: Now I have a more specific answer. Math is another area I've been avoiding, for a different reason, in spite of the fact that I am very much interested in it, and that's showed up on my development list. Literature promises to show up soon, and various forms of physical objects should also start appearing.
Another area I've neglected for a while, simply because I didn't know much about it, is various parts of what I call anthropology, but that's about to be fully included.
Personal studies are also being brought in. I consider this to be one of the more interesting developments, because a lot of history, society, institutions, culture, and so forth is linked to biography. When I started working on this version of the Knowledge base, I build a lot of it on biographies, and then I shifted away from that approach, so I will be glad to get these worked back in.
Science is another area I am anxious to get included, because I have a lot of personal interest in it. However, I've found that there is a whole lot more to the world (at least, the human world) than science accounts for, and I've been scrambling to catch up in everything else. But that, too, is getting worked in.

Fluff and Flutter, and political succession

The fluff and flutter refers to how I've been developing the knowledge base. Anyone who's more interested in political succession should skip to the end.
Saturday night, after I had done my blog post, I thought more about the idea I had, and decided it probably wasn't going to work. But I was also rather unsatisfied with the pace things are going. The demand-oriented approach is still basically the approach I want, but it was starting to look like a lot of others that have lost focus and bogged down; too mechanical and not satisfying enough. I decided that this was because I had made too many arbitrary rules for myself that resulted in a lot of bouncing around and not making the connections that needed to be made while focusing too much on ones that were less important. Fluff and flutter, in other words. So, I decided, it was time to go back and revise my rules for deciding which connections to look at next. On to the review of progress.
The connections of the main history page to the rest of the base are fairly solid and well developed, and there wasn't anything that called for a general overview of history, so no additions there. For Classical and medieval history, I made connections to National governments and government structure. Modern history included reviewing of links to cities of Western Civilization. In the 19th century, international government (There were plenty of alliances and diplomatic agreements that preceded the kind of international arrangements we are familiar with), and government structure. The 20th century now has links to the section on particular schools, not that I have any of them yet) , and to Educational organization. The early 21st century now allows a peek into periods just before ( late 1990s) and just after ( the future), and future studies can make some use of the industrial revolution (and developments related to it) and industrial societies.
For sociology, there is a connection to educational organization and cultural institutions (for instance libraries and museums). People are connected to religious beliefs, modern compact types of international government, national governments, government forms, and government activities. Nations are clear to connect to a couple more cities. Communities in general weren't called on to link to anything, but for Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro have summaries for the 19th century. (I'd heard of Copacabana, but I didn't know that's where it was) There wasn't anything at the general level for social structure and change, but the industrial revolution can now be connected to peoples, and industrial societies to the 20th century.
There was a fair amount of work within institutions. For religion in general, I have a connection to futures studies, and for beliefs, one to peoples. There was more activity in government, to the early 21st century and into the future, and particular governments also into the early 21st century. For international governments there is a connection to culture, and modern compacts have a connection to sociology. National governments have a connection to peoples and institutions, government structure to the 20th century, and forms of government have some connection to modern history. (That's forms like republics, monarchies, and so forth, not like those the United States Internal Revenue Service inflicts on taxpayers, .although eventually I may get around to those, too). In government activities, I added a new page, succession. That's for inheritance, appointments, elections, coups and assassinations,, and other methods for gaining political position and power. There wasn't any call for economics, this time, but there was for education. There were a couple of checks called for. In particular schools I added a page for secondary schools, educational organization linked to peoples, and for cultural institutions, to modern history.
There were a few other link checks I didn't mention, but most of the others involved either creations of new links, or some expansion on the discussion. that was already in place. Overall, it felt more like real progress.

Since a great deal of what is recorded as history is political, I thought I'd throw in an aside. Few things make you more aware of how important the problem of succession in government is than a review of history. There are several possible methods, including inheritance (not used much anymore), appointment (usually for lower officials), election, and coups and assassinations. Have I left any out, or does that cover most of the possibilities? Inheritance has a problem, mostly because there is no way to guarantee that your heir will be any good at the job. of governing. Appointment is a problem, because who is going to do the appointing, and do they have power to rectify a bad decision? Election has problems, because what if the election is rigged, the loser doesn't accept the results, and what if the incumbent refuses to step down when the term of office is up? Coups and revolutions present a problem, because the ruler has the advantage and you usually have to catch him (rarely her) by surprise, the struggle is likely to be bloody and disruptive, and it sets a very bad precedent: The next fellow has just as good a right to overthrow you.

External Demand

Have I mentioned lately that I'm looking for feedback and comments, either on the web site or this blog? Not that I want to beg too desperately, but it's been some time since any visitor to either has commented. I thought that one of the most basic factors of having a successful web site is to have useful, interesting content. I'm not so sure this is either, yet. Since I'm using an "on demand" approach to developing this site, I'd like to see some external demand, from interested visitors or users, and not just the internal demand. Hmm..now there's a thought..

More small steps. From the main history page, I did a little more pushing of religion, but it didn't amount to any big changes. More or less by coincidence rather than design, I was also reviewing and improving the connections to religion in the classical and medieval period. Years ago when I took a History of Western Civilization course in college, it was evident that the Catholic church was so bound up with medieval European history that it was impossible to talk about the one without bringing in the other. That would be the case for the world history in general, and if it were not for the fact that Americans are in general as poorly educated in world history as they are in religion, it would be one way to introduce the subject.
There wasn't as much of a push for modern history today as there has been earlier, so I made little progress, but the 20th century is now a little better connected to Government. I finished a cycle of review for the early 21st century, although it's still a bit bare of events.
From the main sociology page, there are better connections to economics. There wasn't much progress in peoples or nations, although I did add some expansion of modern history for Algeria, Afghanistan, Peru, and Nepal.

More steps

More on the progress of the knowledge base.
There wasn't much new stuff added to history. Although I made a pass through a few of the more prominent nations, peoples, and communities, there were just small additions. What I did get was a little bit clearer idea of how the topic of social change can be applied to history; a few changes in wording that make that section more than just a collection of links. I had dome similarly for religion the last time through.
Part of this is because prehistory, antiquity, and classical and medieval history have been pushing the same subjects. In modern history, I'm doing the kind of checking of links to nations of Western civilization that I was doing for history in general a few days back. There has been a little development in the 19th and 20th century, principally in religion and economics, respectively, but nothing really much to report.
Improvement of topics supporting the main peoples of the world have been going much faster, now that a full set of virtual links to communities are done. Social structure and change and religion Inquiries into nations have been advancing its set of virtual links to communities. There are lots of links to particular nations, but most of these are just creepy-crawling through a review of their links to historical topics. However, I did get a little expansion of the bare history topic for Uganda, Uzbekistan, and Saudi Arabia. The major groups of peoples, Western Civilization, Asiatic peoples, Africans, and American Indians, aren't moving very fast yet, and probably won't for a while.
Communities are also a spot where I'm past the hard part of making virtual links to nations, and this subject is demanding connections to religion. Specific cities are generally still tied up in the high levels of history. Social structure and change in general has just started reviewing its (real) links to nations and communities, and has a while to go yet.
Institutions are still checking connections to nations. With all the subjects pushing religion, I've made some fair progress and and have a new page for European pagans, which will eventually point to things such as Greek, Roman, Celtic, Germanic, Norse, and Slavic religion and mythology. There are slight stirrings in government, but nothing much substantial.

There is a post on the blog By Study and Also By Faith that links to an interview of Dr. Stephan Prothero of Boston University about his new book on Religious Literacy. Not that my opinion has ever counted for much, but I do happen to agree with him. But please, don't cut all the math.

Another update

I got the latest updates, including all the additions and changes I've mentioned since April 30, published to the web, in case anyone wants to see what I was talking about. About a half a dozen more new links are included in that batch, but none really worth am extended discussion.
I had finished going through links from the history main page, and I've started cycling through them again. This is going to be another case of fairly slow going for a day or so, since I've been starting out with nations and cities of Western civilization, and at the moment all references to nations and cities lead to short threads that check links and don't include anything new. I should be getting out of that thicket before long.

Changes, Self-Education, and History

It occurred to me that, although I'm talking a lot about the Sapience Knowledge Base, I didn't have a link to it. I thought I did, but it might have been on one of my posts which is now buried in the archives. It has also occurred to me that I might do well to link the blog to other blogs, and reserve reference links for the web site. I have also begun to add labels for specific topics that I discuss. So, I have completely revised and reorganized the links section.

Although the title of this blog would lead one to expect that there is something about self-directed education here, I've posted precious little on that specific topic. One of the reasons is that I consider self-directed education to be a part of education. More specifically, it has a lot in common with research, which I take to be a part of education. Without that connection to other areas of education or even other subjects, I feel like I'm discussing in a vacuum, as a meaningless abstract generality. Give it a context and a connection to something else, give it parts, and I can then say something meaningful about it. With today's developments, I have an application: specifically history, so I can now say something meaningful about education in general and self education in particular.

When I first began considering how to structure the topic of education in this knowledge base, and what its parts and processes were, I decided that the foundation of education is the discovery of new knowledge, which generally involves a research process. One cannot teach what one has not first learned. Then comes teaching, and then comes the organization of the process, and finally, schools. Since I'm working outside the school system, I decided that I needed to pay attention to the roots of the subject, but because I had structured my studies from a "top down" approach, I had trouble getting to that particular area. Now I have a connection.

I've noticed for some time the complaint that "history is boring", at least, as it's often taught in school. I'm not sure that I have a better answer for that than anyone else, but I might just observe not that a child's knowledge and memory start at the self and the immediate environment, and go outward. A child is far less likely to be interested in the history of the world, than in the history of his own local neighborhood, and less interested in what happened long ago and far away than what happened yesterday or last month, unless there is something in that tale of long ago and far away that makes a connection to right now. Another has to do with the approach taken by professional historians in the past century or so. In their attempts to be scientific, factually correct, and manageable the amount of source material they have to work with, they have tended to become highly specialized, and technically dry. Many works of professional historians are unreadable to the nonspecialist. While historians have been accused of concentrating too much on the "his" in history, many have forgotten the "story" part.
But enough rant on that subject. In general terms, a self-directed student might wish to focus on research, on learning from someone else, on organizing a learning project, or pay for a pre-compiled package (complete with certification) from a recognized school.

I hadn't expected to add any new links from the history main page for a while yet, but one to Democratic (national) governments appeared. I got a lot further in checking links than I had expected, and in the process rewrote the section on how education applies to history. Since that's been an area I wanted to get around to for some time, I was very pleased to finally see it appear. I was expecting a fair amount of demand for prehistory, and there was, but it came mostly in the form of checking already existing links, rather than creating new one. Antiquity has a new link to hunting and gathering societies, and Classical and Medieval history a new link to Judaism. No new links from Modern history main page: I'm doing a lot of checking links to particular countries and cities of Western civilization. The 18th century, though, ahas a new link to Southeast Asia, the 19th century to pagan religion, the early 19th to institutions, the late 20th century to social structure and change, and the current quarter of 2007 a link to institutions.
I have nothing new for the main page in sociology. For peoples and nations I'm examining virtual links to communities, and for communities, virtual links to nations, and for social structure and change, I've wrapped up history for the time being and am about to start checking real links to nations. (A virtual link is one that exists only on my development guide, for the purpose of helping assure that I don't develop low-level topics before having considering them at a higher level.) I am actually looking at pages to nations and cities, but mostly these include already-developed links to history, so it's checking, not any new development.
For the main institutions page, I'm also checking links to nations, so there's no news there. But, for the individual sections, things are starting to move. For particular religions of the world, I now have a link to this year's news. I can connect pagan religion to the major peoples. Abrahamic religion to this decade. I gave Government connections to the 19th century, and government activities back to prehistory. Economics is linked to the 19th century, economic activities to modern history, and industries to history in general. I also added a new page, for building and construction industries. I also have links to the history of teaching and the history of research. I especially wanted to get to these the first real, tangible development of these subjects.
As a bonus that I wasn't expecting to get to today, I have culture linked to the current quarter and month, so that now when the catalog of recent events lists sports and the like, I have some place to discuss them. (Personally, I don't think I could care about them less than I do, but since they are highly visible part of society, I almost have to give them some attention to them.) The area of applied science now connects to antiquity, at least better than it did.

Small steps

The threads of inquiry starting from history are pushing the development of religion and government. I recently reorganized Asiatic religions, and the history page now reflects this reorganization. Otherwise, I haven't added a great deal to my knowledge of history.
Not much has gone on in earlier areas of history, except that particular nations are starting to push prehistory a little, and the effect of that push is to develop social structure and change a little. As usual, modern history is getting the lion's share of attention I finished a review of modern history. On the plus side, this will let me select priorities for development better. On the minus side, it seems like everything is needed! This is going to be focusing for a while on particular peoples, nations, and cities; just to get them fully incorporated into the "study on demand" approach. The next time through, I hope to have a better idea of which ones to pay attention to.
For the 19th century, I expanded the discussion of Asiatic religions a bit, and finally got around to a note in the 20th century on modern world governmental organizations, such as the United Nations, European Union, and NATO. I've been wanting to include this subject for a long time, and it's nice to have a toehold. In the late 21st century, (the last 7 years, as I've mentioned), I have a start on discussion of economics.
Sociology has been helping drive development of religion, but doesn't have any new links. I'm checking virtual links from peoples to particular cities, and from nations to particular cities, and checking virtual links from communities to particular nations. This doesn't immediately contribute much to the knowledge base, but it will help later when I go to work on specific details, as in which nations have which cities and which cities belong to which nations. A historical survey of social structure and change hasn't yielded a whole lot of new and useful information, but I do have this linked to the future now.
For institutions in general I am also checking links to nations of the world, except that these are actual links. There has been progress in religion, for instance, a place for a survey of major religions in the past 7 years and more specifically in the last two. I have links from Christianity to nations, so that I can start gathering detail, Judaism in modern times, Islam and Asiatic religions in the 20th century. Government has also been progressing with a a 20th century peek ad international governments, and a modern history look at particular types of governments. (this is approximately the reverse of the other link: One starts in the 20th century and considers the role of modern international organizations, the other starts with these organizations and considered their modern history. The idea is to be able to approach the subject from either side.
I have a development plan which lists each page, the links from it, I have made and checked, and the ones that are planned to be made and checked. In many cases, there are more links already existing, than I have on the list, in other cases, these are new links to be created. I'm making a special effort to keep this matched to the actual state of work, and I also like to keep a digest so I can see at a glance where I am and guess where I will be going.
So, at a guess, I will be advancing review of nations and cities of Western Civilization, in the process giving more weight to earlier periods of history, connecting peoples and communities to each other at least in principle, and also starting to move from religion to government.
I've also been thinking about publishing all these updates I've been talking about to the web, but since the knowledge base is so thoroughly cross-linked, it more or less to be published all at once, rather than a few pieces at a time. It doesn't seem economical to do that until updates have been sufficiently significant. Some of the changes I've discussed here, and some that I haven't will make more sense when they're put together instead of in disconnected fragments, in perhaps a week or so.

Spinning wheels

I did quite a bit of link checking, but it's astonishing how little real progress I actually made on adding anything. Hopefully it's groundwork for more interesting developments. Some days are like that, whichever approach I use.

Minor progress

A minor mishap, with maybe an update or two lost. I didn't keep my list of specific areas updated, but I've made substantial progress in checking the links from history to particular cities, and a large number of links from modern history. I also completed the initial review of links from Sociology. Sometimes it's tempting to say. "It's all important!" and check everything, but that's not the idea. I skipped the opportunity to use it for a somewhat connected survey of history, and have selected a bunch of lower-level topics that I've been wanting to get to for some time. i seemed to make more progress in religion than anything else, but most of that was link-checking.

More small steps

It seems like I accomplished a bit less today than usual, but still, a few steps forward is nice. In classical and medieval history, I created a link to the class structure of society. For modern history, I made a link to industries and another to educational organization. Social structure in the 19th century and social change in the early 21st finish out the day's progress in history.
The lardest share of new links came in sociology. One of them, the main sociology page, I created a link to industrial technology. The effect of tools and machinery has a large effect on different areas of society: this is one of the detail areas I've been hoping to explore, and it's still only a beginning I have the star of a historical sketch for Saudi Arabia, so I'm not entirely neglecting the various nations. Social structure and change is now linked to the last seven years, so I can start making notes on current events. It's often hard to note the beginnings of new or major social movements. These are often only visible in hindsight. but others can be followed with a little bit of historical background. The daily news is pretty much a jumble of unrelated events if events don't follow some kind of pattern. As part of this same theme, I also have a link to social changes in the late 2000s and into the future. For types of society, I also have links to the early 21st century and into the future. Getting a little bit more specific about one type of society, I have notes on modern history for industrial society.
For education in general, I created a link to the 19th century so I have a little more history to work with, and for educational organization, a peek back into classical and medieval history.
I mentioned industrial technology, and now I have a very brief sketch for its history.

It's hard to predict exactly what the demand is going to be, but I'm anticipating a couple of milestones. More stuff coming soon.

Small steps

I did record one of my threads of review and development, but decided it was too long, so I'll try a shorter one. Not much happened in development of history, but I created or expanded links from classical and medieval history to hunting and gathering societies, from modern history to government activities, from the 19th century to the Industrial Revolution, and from the early 21st century to Western civilization.
Even less happened in sociology, except that social change, and particular changes, were linked to the early 21st century, and agrarian societies to modern times. There was mostly a lot of link-checking and review among these areas.
I made more progress among the institutions. I have Christianity in the 19th century and Roman Catholicism in modern times, Islam in classical and medieval times, and secularism in classical and medieval times. Then there is government in early medieval times, particular governments in classical and medieval times, a new page for traditional empires, national governments in classical and medieval times, a new page for dictatorships, and government structure in antiquity.
I also added a note on antiquity to material culture, and created a page for communications technology.
This kind of refinement among the institutions is the kind of thing I have been itching to do. I decided some time ago that I would be better off starting my studies of political science almost from scratch, rather than by studying the works of other so-called experts, since there is so much disagreement among them anyway. There is also a tendency to ignore the history of government and only consider modern forms. What I have so far is a rough sketch, which will be refined as I gather more information.

A bit slower

I didn't make a whole lot of progress in history. The systematic review of links from history has now switched to starting threads of connected links in areas which seem to be particularly useful to history. I started with various peoples, a couple of areas within social structure and change, and began inquiries into religion. I skipped over particular cities this time. The systematic review of links from Classical and medieval history pulled ahead of antiquity, and began to include various areas of sociology for it. The review of links from Modern history pulled further ahead and has served as the source for inquires about religion and government. Inquiries beginning from the 19th century advanced a little, into social structure, and those starting from the 20th century went a little further, into social structure and change. The early 21st century continued to develop, and even connections for 2007: I may get to the point where these growing stubs of pages can support actual content.
There is also minimal progress in Socioology, although inquiries on religion, government, and economics have been starting from here. The current set of inquiries into history starting from the peoples of the world is done for now, and here particular communities will have something to contribute. Within social structure and change, there is some progress; mostly, I expanded my page on what I call the agrarian revolution.
The most significant progress came in the area of Institutions. I completely revised the page on Asiatic religions, so that instead of having eight pages below it, there are three: Persian, Indian, and Oriental. I also expanded the page on educational organization.
There was still minimal activity in culture.

It occurs to me that I ought to post a sample thread to gve a better idea of what I'm doing. I hope to do that tomorrow.

Wandering

In the newer approach I've been using, when I start out on a topic, I never know here I'm going to end up. However, if I start out enough times, the paths cross and recross often enough that I wind up developing the topics that most need to be developed, or so I hope. At he moment, because I start everything with history and work down into more detail. history is getting a lot of attention. Also, since I tend to start at the present and working backward while I'm researching a history, there is a heavy focus on more recent periods of history. Most of these trips are starting and ending at the major history level, which has a set of things to go after next that I'm reasonably happy with. A sizable fraction of these went through modern history, Another good fraction went through the 20th century, and more than I expected went through the new early 21st century page. For the sociology page, I've also done a good job of reviewing its links, all the way into education. For peoples of the world, I got a long way through history links, though not much detail in the particular peoples. I did quite a few inquiries starting from general history about nations, which wound up extensively developing my list of theoretical links from the nations page, but not much for any one of them. (Since that's just an alphabetical list, I'm not linking it to other areas the way I do most other pages). I intend to handle the communities page similarly. I didn't get very far through the social institutions, but there was a little bit of spillover from the three or four areas that were reviewing links to it.
A couple of areas that I've been curious about, such as the history of modern types of international governments, the history of forms of government, and economic prehistory, and the 18th century history of world religions, opened for examination. These are still huge areas.
The other day I got curious about how much I've actually written on this knowledge base, so I totaled up the file sizes on my system and came up with a total of about 3300 K, which I estimate to be in the neighborhood of 600 pages of text. It's past the point where anyone can go through the whole thing in one sitting.

More progress

In the last few days, I'd been continuing this need-based approach to development of the knowledge base. One advantage of it is that in the process, I'm doing a fair amount of link checking. I finished a review of everything that supports history and added a number of new pages in the process. Not all of these are equally valuable, and a lot of my approaches to deciding which ones to work on have been far too mechanical.
One of the frustrating things about the approaches I have been using is that, although I have been adding nations to the knowledge base in approximate order of decreasing population, this is only weakly correlated with their historical significance. For instance, Indonesia is far larger than the United Kingdom, but the latter had a globe-spanning empire 70 years ago, while the former did not. It didn't help any that I was developing them in the same order I had added them, and didn't have any way to fix or adjust it. I hope this new approach works better.
Prehistory, antiquity, and classical and medieval history have all been progressing slowly and prompting examination of the major peoples. I did expand a few nations before I decided that my former approach to nations and the new one were incompatible, and set them aside for later. Modern history has been progressing rather faster, and is starting to prompt examination of social structure and change. There is also a fair concentration on the most recent 20 years.
In the area I call sociology, I have been expanding my consideration of the religious roots of society. Other areas are going more slowly, but there is progress.

Today's progress

For the general history page, I got through reviewing the connections to various areas of social structure and change, which in my new approach, will allow me to start working on those areas.
Prehistory was in demand for a few new areas, so I made a little progress. Classical and medieval history was not. Modern history was demanded by several areas, so at the main page I went through reviewing the connections to a number of peoples. There was a little progress in the 8th century, but the most significant was in the 19th, where I added outlines of the 19th century in Ukraine, South Africa, Colombia, and Myanmar.
Ukraine is an area that has more or less escaped my attention before, and during the 19th century, it was principally part of the Russian Empire. I still don't know a great deal about it: the more interesting events seem to have happened earlier and later. I was rather hazier on the details of South Africa as well. Colombia became independent of Spain fairly early. I've observed before that Latin American independence did not go nearly the same direction that the United States did. Reviewing this era brought up the reason, why? The British takeover of Myanmar in the 19th century proceeded at about the same pace as Southern Africa. Since it was called Burma up til 1989, the name still sounds unfamiliar.
This brought up a couple of other questions. I really would like to get around to working on biographies again, but have kept getting diverted. I don't have a proper historical outline of the growth (and decline) of the British Empire, but there is a place for it under the general heading of government; specifically colonial empires.
For the 20th century, I made a little progress at reviewing major groups of peoples, but this section isn't yet in heavy demand.

For sociology, I was mostly doing a detailed review of how it ought to be supported by history. Peoples of the world and communities aren't yet in heavy demand, so they got off lightly. Social structure and change is in demand, principally from history, so consideration of quite a few sections got started. I added new pages for hunting-gathering peoples, which I have some interest in, and institutional structure, which is another area where I have had some interest. Most of these are poorly developed, but since quit a few areas link to them, this section has potential for some rapid growth.

Changing directions

I got up to a certain point in the development of sociology, which involved rewriting the history section of that page, and also rewriting the history section of the peoples page, and decided I'd had enough of the linear approach for a time. I've tried what I've called a needs-centered approach before, so I'll have to try this again.

In developing in history, what I most need is to discuss peoples of the world, which has nations as the basic raw material. I gave a basic outline for a few more nations, including Algeria, Afghanistan, Peru, and Nepal. This basic outline is so sparse that it's practically useless, but it's something that can be build on. Although I have been working on histories of particular cities, I decided to skip that this time.
I didn't make much progress in prehistory, for one because few subjects demand its development, and for another because I don't have an easy source for how prehistoric anthropology and archeology have developed.
Likewise for antiquity, although I've located what should be a starting point on working on its detail. Classical and medieval history area are also less demanded.
Most of the need is for more modern history, so for Tanzania, Kenya, Canada, and Morocco, I expanded some. For Tanzania and Kenya, the outlines of early modern and colonial history were similar. Canada was more familiar, since it's North American and derives largely from British culture. I couldn't make sense of Morocco...it was late, and my source material wasn't well written, so I'm going to have to attack that in more detail later. Within modern history, I have a clearer idea of how I'm going to attack the 8th, 18th, and 20th centuries, and I haven't forgotten about the newly created early 21st century.

Sociology doesn't need history as much as it does other areas such as institutions, but history is available to work with, so it's being examined. Since I just did a major examination of sociology and peoples from the point of view of history, there's nothing much to add here. I did decide to release more nations for development. I'm also starting to work on Western civilization, Asiatic peoples, African peoples, and American Indian peoples, though these are in the early stages of having their history examined again. As I mentioned, I'm de-emphasizing communities and cities, but there are quite a few of them that can be developed.

Late 20th and early 21st century

I got almost further than I had planned on. For the main page of the late 20th century, I did a little bit of cleanup with some important missing incidents, and did some looking up of the United Kingdom, Congo, Italy, and South Korea. I've kept reasonable track of Great Britain, so there weren't any surprises there. but I hadn't known about the Congo. This used to be known as the Belgian Congo back in the bad old colonial days, and not too long after independence, it was renamed Zaire. Then, when I wasn't paying attention, its name was changed back to the Democratic republic of the Congo. The history of Italy in this period turned out to be an almost incomprehensible mess, full of detail and party acronyms that mean next to nothing to me. This is another of the kind of things that motivate this project in the first place. With a little bit of earlier history for background, links to what else was going on at the time, and a little bit of detail on political parties and the Roman Catholic church, this should begin to make more sense. I've also paid little attention to South Korean politics, so this didn't make a whole lot of sense to me ether. But at least I know a little bit more than I did before. I also did the usual extending of links to other areas. I haven't worked as far back in this period, comparatively speaking as I have in others, but I did get a fair amount done.

For the early 1990s, I made connections to the United States, China, India, and Indonesia. I had a hard time recalling events of the early Clinton administration, so this was a useful reminder. I had studied this period before, when it was more recent, and had it on an old version of the web site. Events in a few countries have progressed in the last five years or so and I had been working in other areas, so I hadn't kept caught up.

For the late 1990s, I made connections to Brazil, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Russia. I suppose what struck me most in Pakistan and Bangladesh (as well as the Congo, more generally speaking) was that democratic or republican forms of government mean very little if there is no respect for the rule of law. It is just too easy for a "strong man" to ignore the law, or rewrite it according to whim. Then I keep seeing how frequently the leaders in these countries are charged with corruption of some form.

I also got a start on the early 21st century. This was fairly easy to do, since all I had to do was create the appropriate page, create links from it and back-links to it, and just move a couple of paragraphs wholesale from the late 20th. There's more to do, since a lot of countries that have some information from 2001 and later need to be properly linked, but I have a start. I'm getting closer to being able to work on current events; something I had started to do back in December and January. I had to set that aside and work on particular nations, because they pages were so badly underdeveloped, but I'm catching back up.

Mid and late-mid 20th century

The mid-20th century is dominated by events of World War II, although I keep getting reminded that I'm also describing events of the early Cold War, and not to overdo World War II. I've been looking at such things as the the beginning of the Cold war as it played out in Germany, liberation of Vietnam from France following the war, the effective independence and autonomy of Egypt, and modernization attempts in Ethiopia.
The late-mid 20th century is surprisingly obscure, although the nations I'm working on were not the most prominent. But I would expect to find more on Post-war French history, more on Turkey and pre-Revolutionary Iran, and Thailand. This may have something to do with the fact that these events are still in living memory and have not yet been thoroughly assimilated by historians, and the political struggles launched during this period are still going on to some extent. Also, these regions are not well covered by Western media.

While I was looking at Ethiopia, I was distracted by a reference to Prester John, a mythical personage who in medieval times was supposed to rule a Christian kingdom somewhere in central or east Asia. That led to a discussion of a personage in early Christian history called John the presbyter, who may or may not have been the same as the apostle John, and thence into questions of New Testament authorship. After reviewing some of this commentary, I was forcibly reminded me again of one of the pitfalls of scholarship, which is that some scholars tend to bring their own preconceptions and and preferences to a study, and reach conclusions which are then taken by others to be absolute fact, while others bring different preconceptions and prejudices and present their own conclusions as fact. The result is, of course, confusion and dispute.
Since Vietnam came up, in the period just preceding the Vietnam war, I took the chance to check some of my facts. I saw something about the Tonkin incident which prompted the US to authorize sending large number of troops to Vietnam, and noted the comment that one interpretation was that the government analysts who studied this incident did essentially the same thing: choose from a mass of conflicting details, those things that supported the picture they wish to present. And isn't this essentially what happened before the invasion of Iraq, with regard to the evidence of weapons of mass destruction? The tendency to see what we want or expect to see, while ignoring contrary evidence is all too common.
However, I also note that there is a difference in these cases. Ometimes, one has too little evidence to work with, in the other, one has too much.

Early and early mid 20th century

Due to other distractions, progress today was even slower than I had anticipated. For one, trying to expand on the history of nations while still keeping a fairly quick summary is a challenge, and involves more thought and writing than just creating links does.
There wasn't much new information about the early 20th century that I hadn't already known. Of the nations I looked at, the most detailed information available was on the history of Russia, which I was already roughly familiar with.
The early-mid 20th century mostly clarified the relationship between Japan and China before and at the beginning of World War II, and I got a little more information on social reform in Mexico.

Some other thoughts that have been surfacing from my other reading in the past few days. I have a persistent interest in the role of religion in history.
The author I mentioned the other day is Lois McMaster Bujold, and there are a number of interviews with her posted at her website at http://www.dendarii.com/. She mentions in one of them that in medieval times, the church ran a lot of facilities, such as schools, hospitals, shelters, and so forth, that government does today. The interplay between all these various things is part of what I want to explore on my site.
Yesterday when I was looking at United States history, I noticed a fair amount of conflict between labor movements and capitalists, and that socialism and the labor movement became allied. There are echoes of that same association in today's politics, which is something I would eventually like to explore. While I do have an interest in politics and government, I have repeatedly found myself disadvantaged by not having facts to back up my opinions, which is why I'm trying to make this blog more educational than overtly political.
I'm vaguely familiar with the state-sponsored atheist ideology of Communism that Lenin attempted to impose in Russia, which is part of why I never had any sympathy with Communism during the time of the Cold War (I was growing up in the 1960s, when it was still very much a live concern.) In the last chapter of a book I'm using for information about religious traditions. (The Great Religions, by Richard Cavendish) , the observation is made that Communism addressed similar concerns to those of religion, and functioned and was structured like one. I've been criticized for arguing that atheism should be treated along with other entirely varieties of religion, but I'm certainly not the first or only person to do so, and I'm not going to try to answer all this critic's claims and arguments right now. But I am interested in the subject, and hope to work back around to it.
I'm not even going to argue that religion is all or always good. While it's clear that the Japanese were highly militaristic up to their defeat in World War II, I haven't seen much discussion of a possible connection between Japanese militarism and state-sponsored Shinto. One of the concerns of the Mexican government during the early-mid 20th century was curbing the influence of the Roman Catholic church on it. This was nothing new to the Protestant world, which had done the same four centuries earlier, but the Reformation never took hold in Latin America.
Also during the time period I'm looking at were when some of the major corporations of today originated, but I'm going to have to save this interesting topic as well. Since the principal source I'm using now ( Isaac Asimov's "Chronology of the World") only goes up to the end of World War II, I'm going to go to other sources for history after that. I worry a little bit about depending so heavily on one source, but that's only a starting point: I am likely to revise to the point of unrecognizability as I add more detail. Eventually, I want to get to the point where I'm using more scholarly methods including documentation of sources for history, so I might as well at least name the source I'm using. If it's incomplete (which it is, no if about it), or wrong, I'll fix it later. But what I was going to say was that doing an internet search on, for instance, the mid-20th century of Germany is going to go even more slowly. I may not even get to the late 20th century before the weekend.
Soeaking of the late 20th century, one of the things I've been dissatisfied with is the placement of current events in the late 20th century. However, I had my reasons for that placement, which included plans to start making a changeover in early May. That time has come, starting Monday. Details will follow.

16th to 19th centuries

I went about roughly the pace that I expected to do, which is quite a bit slower than what I wanted. When I was browsing the Internet yesterday, I noticed that one of my favorite authors commented that while she was writing one of her books, it stayed about three chapters from the end for five chapters.
For the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, I was looking up and adding information for that period on four cities each, along with minimal extending of the aids, which just goes to show how far behind where I would like them to be some of them are.
That would have been about the extent of it for the 19th century as well, except that I was able to go a level deeper. The stubs of the 20-year periods (from the late 18th century) through the 19th century are now caught up to where they ought to be at this stage of development. The work I have been doing with developing the histories of nations finally reached into what I call the late 19th century, 1881 to 1900, and I was able to add a little more detail to the histories of the United States, China, India, and Indonesia for this period, although the obnoxious problem of Western bias which gives the Asian nations too little attention surfaced again, as it is likely to continue to do.
The problems I've noted of having too little information or having it in the wrong place aren't quite as easy to fix as I had thought, although I got it closer to correct when I was working on the late 18th century. I expect I should be able to fix things in the next development cycle, starting with what's left in this one. I'm now clear to work on the 20th century.

Classical, Medieval, and modern history

I went ahead with the classical and medieval section, and on the main page, added a bunch of links into social structure and change and social institutions. But when I look at specifics, this section is also mostly frozen.
I also did some work on the main modern history page, again mostly adding links into the social structure and change and institutions. I also did some writing in the various sections related to particular peoples that, as I think about it, needs to go in different sections from where I put it. I didn't get to tackling the individual centuries of the modern period yet, but those are coming up.

Prehistory and antiquity

I started going through history in general again, and made quite a few links to pages I created in the last round. It's a relief to be able to make better connections, especially to areas within religion, government, and economics.
I also made some progress at adding connections for prehistory. But when I got down into lower levels, early prehistory, middle prehistory, and late prehistory, I ran into a barrier. For one, I don't know nearly enough about how the field of prehistoric archeology has developed in the 20th century to give anything like an outline of the subject. For another, I haven't pursued particular countries or communities back this far in any detail. So, there's no real content to this section. That leads me to the conclusion that I'm going to be freezing progress in prehistory for a while, except as I'm able to make connections to the main prehistory page.
I ran into similar problems with antiquity. Although this has some highly interesting topics that I can connect at the main antiquity page, I'm going to have to freeze development of its detail for a time. However, I hope to be able to pick it back up before long.

When I was trying to look up material on the internet on 20th century archeology, I was unable to find a web site that gives a good summary. I did find references to a number of books that discuss the history of archaeology, which would be fine if I had convenient access to a good library, but right now I don't. This is an area where I'm going to have to wait.
Also, when I went to look at the sequence of events to give detail to early prehistory, I found such a difference of opinion among different prehistorians about exactly what took place when, that I didn't even try to put together what looked like a consensus. I've found this kind of situation time and again when I'm exploring a topic. I'd like to investigate such puzzles, but lack the expertise.

Culture and stuff

The thorough revision of culture didn't happen. All I managed was to get links to particular nations updated, without going into many more specifics. I also didn't do much with anthropology or personal studies except complete their sets of links to earlier history, and I didn't touch science at all. I also did a few technical changes, revising the file structure, and published the whole update to the web.
So, I'll be starting the cycle back over, mostly with history, although I may look at other areas just for the sake of variety.

Institutions again

I thought that I was going to be able to go through the rest of the social institutions rather quickly, but it turned out not to be so. I wound up adding new stuff to sections that I hadn't updated in over four months. This was quite a more substantial treatment that the last one a few days ago.
In government, I pushed a little bit farther in particular governments, starting with international government. I now have a page for what I call modern compacts, which will eventually include sections on the UN, for instance. I also did a substantial revision of national governments. I had been uncertain how I was going to classify them, but finally settled on grouping them as monarchies, dictatorships, and democratic governments. I also took a look at local governments, which are going to be far more numerous than the national ones. Some time ago, I had done a revision of government structure, which stood up to re-examination, so I created a new page in connection with it, for types of government. This section will be a little broader and more generic than the classification for national governments, since it needs to include local governments as well. I have also been rather stuck on how to classify government activities, but I've been reading enough history that I decided to go with a simple three-part division: Administration, succession, and state relations (which will include warfare). I also have law, but I still didn't get to that part this time.
In Economics, as well as adding links to a few more nations and cities, I also made significant progress. I decided to accelerate the program for dealing with companies to four at a time instead of one at a time, to follow the same pattern I have been doing for long lists in nations, cities, and biographies. I also began a new page for economic system behavior. I didn't get to every section, but most of them have more links.
In education, besides adding interconnections. I started tracking down lists of major world-class universities, since a country-by-country listing is far too massive for a start. I haven't made that start yet, but it will be coming.
I didn't get very far with families, but made several connections, especially to my most populous four nations, which completes the set of institutions for those four.
Some of the additions and extensions are so substantial that I am likely to publish an update to the knowledge base when I finish this round of development. Similar revisions are likely to be coming from the culture area, as I take a good close look at a couple of sections that have been more or less interfering with my progress.

More religion

The last post on this particular subject was about a month ago. I did a thorough review of this section. Most of what I accoplished was in particular religions. Within Abrahamic religion, I added a page under Crhistianity on Orthodoxy, and within Asiatic religion, created the first of pages on specific tradition, on Buddhism. In comparison, the religious organization, practice, and belief pages are just getting started, but on my next pass through the History and Sociology sections I will have something to stand as well as a clearer picture of where I am in the investigation of religion.

Sociology

I decided to start going deeper in the late 20th century a little earlier than I had planned, and immediately ran into a tough slog of trying to pick out the major events between 1996 and 2000 for the four countries I mentioned last. I finally got this done, but I'm not really thrilled by the prospect of doing more in another few days.
After, this, I started digging into sociology. History hasn't really advanced far enough to add much to sociology, and with the minuscule amount of work I did on the institutions last time around, i didn't get very far. I more or less declared a temporary freeze on adding more nations a few weeks back until I caught up with history and other connections, but given how many areas are depending on peoples, which are now frozen, and given that I've made substantial progress in getting the histories caught up to my plan, I'm seriously considering removing the freeze for a round. I thought my work on particular peoples was going well, but when I was looking through Oriental peoples and doing notes on the mid 19th century, I found that I didn't have a note on the opening of Japan, either in the history section for that period, or for the United States. I had it in Japanese history, but I can tell that I need to do more on adding landmark events in particular countries to the general summaries in the history.
I also did more work on connecting cities with other areas of sociology. I have been concentrating on nations and still need to do some catching up with communities.
Most significantly, I did substantial digging into social structure and change, and added a page each to social change, social types, and social structure. This section, which has more to do with what is usually called sociology, is starting to take shape. I've had an interest in analyzing societies and communities for some time, and this section will be where I keep the tools. So far, there isn't enough content, but at least I have a place to add it, and the various links that will be sprouting between this section and other areas will start to provide that content.

More history

I've been continuing a cycle of development in history. There isn't a whole lot I can do with early, middle, or late prehistory, since I keep running into barriers. The appropriate low-level divisions of social structure and change, institutions, and culture just aren't quite well enough developed. Much the same can be said for antiquity, though I did manage to link to some of the newer areas of social structure and change. The same for classical and medieval history. In modern history, I managed to extend the history of several cities backwards a century. In modern history, I was able to get several countries extended back. The US, China, India, and Indonesia now have sketches noting at least some of the highlights for the entire century, although Indonesia in particular still lacks events.

Institutions plus

For all the interest I have in expanding my knowledge of institutions, when I got to that section I didn't do much beyond creating a few links, although several of them were to particular nations. The development program just hasn't quite progressed that far. For culture, I managed to add a page for customs, but not much more. I did nothing in the other major sections.
When I got this far, I went back around to considering the main history page. I took a look a the World History Association, read over the copy of their first newsletter, and it appears that my approach fits well with that of this association. I linked the general history page to the various new pages of social structure and change. The comment in the WHA Bulletin that international patterns and changes in society are part of what distinguishes world history from a more traditional approach echoes the reason I think these are important links. In my development plan, I hihglingted more of the specific sections I want to develop as aids to history.
I also got down to the prehistory page. Although my knowledge of the development of prehistoric archaeology in the 20th century is pretty vague, I got in a couple of references. The areas of social structure and change I would like to link to for this period, such as hunting-gathering peoples and the agricultural revolution, are undeveloped, so I had to leave these mostly undeveloped. Evidence for the various social institutions is also lacking, although there is room for a connection to pagan religion (also an undeveloped subect.) Material culture, which is the only really relevant area of culture for prehistory, is also badly underdeveloped.

Skimming

I've been doing a fairly quick skim through various sections of the knowledge base. I ran almost all the way through my history section, and principally noted where I need to do more work. I've developed social structure and change enough that various areas can connect to it. I noted that in history, a lot of what I call the heavy lifting involving history of particular nations is now down to the 20th century, so I'll be concentrating there before long. I also took a run through the sociology section. I didn't do any substantial work with peoples and nations, but for communities, I had done some work on the modern history, and I did more in connecting cities within the sociology section. Most of the new work came in social structure and change.
As a first try, I have particular changes divided into three major periods. The first is what I call the agricultural or Neolithic revolution, when people began settling down and farming. The next is the Agrarian revolution, or the process of civilization, when literature and metal working came into used. The final and most recent is what I call the Industrial revolution. Each of these have various movements and stages in it, which I hope to cover in more detail, but for now, I'm just getting the basics. I've also done some work on identifying the corresponding peoples' a more static view of where a society is in its cultural development, and I've been looking at social structure. Nowadays, quite a few of these aspects of society can be quantified and measured, but I'm stuck on doing that until I get deeper in to the social institutions and culture. I've been wanting to concentrate more on social institutions for some time, but keep getting held back by other developments. However, the inadequate development I now have is starting to hold up everything else, so I will be concentrating more on it soon.

Update published

After an exhausting afternoon of loking up and adding snippets of city histories, the latest major update of the Sapience Knowledge Base has now been published to the web. I'm ready to break for a break for a day or few.

19th century and an apology

I finally got cought up on my program for outlining the history of nations up through the 20th century., though I still don't have the last few months work posted to the web yet.
I've also been taking a peak at the history of a few cities, but that's been lagging far behind nations and I have a bunch of catching up to do.
The e-mail addresses for this blog and for the web site are regularly bombarded with spam and nothing else for two and three months at a time, and I haven't noticed any legitimate replies, so I've let the e-mil boxes fill up instead of checking them. I'm in the middle of cleaning them out again to make room for any legitimate contact, so in the off chance that someone has visited either and has tried to leave a comment that I've missed, my apologies.

18th Century

I've been continuing with history of particular nations lately, inching forward through history. I got to 18th century history of France, which includes the "Age of Reason" in France leading up through the French Revolution, and for some reason couldn't bring myself to go on to the 19th century, which in my peculiar scheme of development involves different countries. I don't particularly care a great deal for Modern European history. Since I'm not a European, the various wars between Country X and its neighbor Country Y just don't interest me that much, although at some future time, I may want to know more about some particular war.
Instead, I found myself going back to the beginning with prehistory and filling in a few more of the connections between that and other subjects. That gives me more reason, when I start looking at these other subjects, to begin at the beginning with their history. I'm getting anxious to look at some of these other areas, but I hate leaving things unfinished until I get to a proper break point, which is going to keep pulling me back to history for a while.

Back again

I've been offline for about a month due to problems with my internet connection, which are now being resolved. In the meantime, I've added a substantial amount of content to the histories of particular nations, and I hope to be able to post the added material by the weekend.

Religion

Some days I'm able to get a fair amount accomplished, other days I'm not. I got references to religion in about a half dozen cities, and then in the next phase, references to specific religions traditions in a few nations, and then again ran out of steam. I did some talking about my biblical chronology theory to a friend, and writing more about it to others. ( a couple of people mentioned Velikovsy, whom I don't consider reliable, although apparently some of his work is less wildly speculative than other parts.

Biblical chronology

The other day when I was working in ancient history, specifically the 2nd Millennium BC, trying to identify some key events, was a bit unhappy with all the approximate dates I was finding in the reference I was using, and went hunting online for a few others. I ran across the Wikipedia article on ancient chronology, and found that it claims ancient history is pretty solid and well known back to about 750 BC, but before that, the fuzziness gets worse and worse, due to multiple uncertainties in the primary sources that are used for dating. This led down a side track of biblical history. I'm already aware that archaeologists have had difficulty identifying the time and place of key events in biblical history, even those that ought to have left some traces. The Bible itself isn't much help, because there are too many uncertainties in the various time periods such as reigns of kings that it gives, and there are few clear synchronizations to non-Israelite history, especially in the pre-exile period. I'm not a strict biblical literalist...although I do believe that God spoke to prophets, I don't believe that makes the record free of error, and as something of an amateur scholar, I like to have as much independent verification as possible before I trust in something as a fact.
I see that many non-believing and atheistic scholars seem to want to seize on any apparent contradiction between the biblical account and archaeological finds as positive proof that the whole Bible is a piece of fiction, while Christian apologetics is full of amateurs who grasp at straws and spin elaborate theories to supplement missing facts and cannot agree among themselves. This has been a minor irritant for some time, but when I saw again how thin the evidence is for some of the "accepted wisdom", and how it leads otherwise competent people to draw absurd conclusions (for instance that Joshua arrived several hundred years after the destruction of Jericho), or on the other hand, that that 300 years of Egyptian history is missing, it fired up my determination to do something to clarify the situation.
First, with my scientific education, I'm reasonably content with radio-carbon dating as a valid method of getting the approximate date of remains, although I believe that this should be combined with other evidence.
So, I went hunting late last night for more information. I'd encountered a couple of sources before that broadened my mind to other hypotheses for the dating of the Israelite Exodus than the one given. I'm not sure what reasons people give for the dating of it between the 12th and 14th Century BC, or the association of Ramses II with the Pharaoh of the Exodus, (besides the names of the treasure cities the Israelites were supposed to have built) but I was generally aware that evidence for the exodus hadn't been located, at least in that period.
Recently I read a comment that the line in "Raiders of the Lost Ark" "They're digging in the wrong place!" drew chuckles among a group of archaeologists, because it's something of an occupational hazard. Likewise, looking at the wrong time has to be similarly hazardous, when one is dealing with uncertainties of chronology as great as 300 years. But that's a side note. What drew my attention were the various web pages constructed by those who have added up the dates in the Bible and concluded that the Exodus took place around 1400 BC. That's about 200 years back from a traditional date equating the Pharaoh of the Exodus with Ramses. Also, I was having a problem with the conclusions drawn from the excavation of Jericho by Kathleen Kenyon. Some were citing her research claiming that there was no evidence for Joshua's conquest of Canaan, others were saying it dovetailed nicely with other evidence. What I finally decided was that her date for the destruction of a strongly-fortified Canaanite City had been verified at in 1995 at about 1562 BC +/- 38 years, and to take that as evidence that best fits the biblical account. That's a a century and a half earlier or so than traditionally described, but I don't think the Israelites wandering in the wilderness or living in tents were all that meticulous about chronology, and some attempts to reconstruct biblical chronology push the exodus back to about this far.
Next I decided to look for an appropriate Pharaoh for the Exodus. I'd seen a work that claims the "Pharaoh's daughter" who rescued Moses was Hatshepsut, and in various places I'd seen suggestions that the "Pharaoh who knew not Joseph" came from one of the dynasties that succeeded the Hyksos. I didn't find one that seemed to satisfy what I remember, so I decided to review Egyptian chronology, and look up some of the unsolved problems in Egyptology, and found a clue. One of the various speculations on the nature of the Exodus and the plagues associates it with with the major eruption of Thera, at some date that I hadn't been able to find exactly. Apparently this has been pinned at 1613 BC +/- 13 years. Reconciling this date with traditional chronology for Egypt has produced about a 100 year discrepancy, but this is within the approximate range of error for Egyptian chronology at this period. What grabbed my attention, though, was that this is about 50 years before the date given for the destruction of Jericho, which fits reasonably well with an approximate 40 year wandering in the wilderness described in the Pentateuch.
I had long ago set the possible correlation of Thera and the biblical plagues as an interesting possibility to be re-examined if and when other evidence came along, and this fits the category of additional evidence I was looking for. So now I have this as a working hypothesis for the correlation of events in ancient history. Since I'm hardly even an amateur in the field, there could be a lot wrong with this theory. But it seems there are worse ones in print. The debate about Biblical chronology lies somewhere near the heart of the conflict between scientific atheist and devout believer, between Christian or Jew and Muslim, and at the intersection of the Greek World, Assyriology, Egyptology, and other specialized disciplines. I would like to see a better resolution than anything I have seen yet.
PS. The reason I have added this was because it ocurred to me, before I put myself down for the night, I did a Wiki search on "Independent Scholar", which led me quickly to an on-line copy of the Independent Scholar's handbook, a work which helped put me on the path to Independent Learning, and was rereading it. This blog is probably the closest I'm going to come to an intellectual journal, and so I decided to start recording intellectual diversions as well as the work I'm doing on my web site. This counts as a diversion...not something that's part of my main effort, but something to set aside for now and come back to some day.

Institutions

I mentioned that I wanted to strengthen my ties between nations and communities and the subject of institutions of society, and I got as much of that done as I had planned. Then I realize that wasn't nearly going deep enough, and I started making connections specifically with religion. I got through linking the two dozen nations I had planned, and half of the two dozen cities, and ran out of steam for the day. There's more I want to do with religion before I move on to the next subject, but I need to get more specific.

National connections

I skimmed past studies of the future and started digging into the areas I call sociology. Just adding a few nations to the list inspired a cascade of other events. For one, it;s painfully clear that I need to take quite a few of these nations and look into their history before modern times in order to give substance to earlier periods of history. I've been listing nations in order of population size, which has very little direct correlation with international significance. Some of the connections I was making illustrate this. After all, a nation such s Tanzania doesn't greatly affect the United States, but the United Kingdom and India have had a great deal to do with one another. I did a little more sorting these into major groups. I still don't have enough nations to quite divide up Western Civilization into its subdivisions, but Asiatic peoples are well represented even if incomplete. I added more cities, and made preliminary connections to rather more areas of peoples and social structure and change. I need to do a little more digging into the history of various cities, especially earlier history if they have it. With better connections to nations, I can also manage links of cities to each other, which may be useful when I go to do things like trade routes. I've never been too pleased with how my sections on social structure and change are coming, but that may be because I need to get down to brass tacks of particular examples. Then, too, the whole area of Institutions, which I will be looking at next, is not as well connected to the areas of sociology as I would like, so I will be looking at those connections. In the meantime, though, I'm reasonably pleased with today's progress.

Here again

I've never actually quit working on the Sapience Knowledge Base, but it has been a while since I've reported on on it here. I hope to have a new round of updates posted online in a day or two.
I've added substantially to the section on prehistory and a fair amount of new content to antiquity. I note that there are still considerable discrepancies in various ancient chronologies, so there is even now not a single chronology of the ancient world that is accepted as having a sound basis by scholars. Since biblical archaeology falls within this period, there are still major problems reconciling the Biblical account with accounts from other nations. I find this frustrating.
More recently, I'm starting to work backward through the classical and medieval periods for some of the currently most populous nations, and into the 19th century for those same ones. I;ve beenun using a mental analogy of the aids to a subject as tools for investigating it, and I keep finding that my tools aren't quite sharp enough. The list of nations is, for now, about the sharpest and most useful of them.

Current events

I've expanded my notes on events of the past three years, and improving the connections to the particular peoples I've been considering. I've created a couple of new pages to break up events of the last year into quarters.
Rather than work extensively with whole groups of peoples as I've been doing before, I decided to go back to an earlier approach and add one nation at a time. The three most populous nations of the world are China, India, and the United States, so I've been working on getting current events connected. These were most of the way there already, so it wasn't too hard, but getting the new quarter year pages all the way down to these specific nations will take a few more rounds of development.
The USA page is getting big enough that it's going to have to be broken up. I want to start including individual state pages, as well as regional pages, covering more than one state. I will eventually be doing the same with China and India, but this isn't an immediate goal.
I've also made some progress on the social structure and change pages, and on connecting these to history and peoples of the world. There will be a couple of new and expanded connections in the next set of updates.
I had planned to do more work with institutions and culture, but I'm going to have to put these off until tomorrow, at least.