the Mundaneum

The NYT article about the Mundaneum:

In 1934, Otlet sketched out plans for a global network of computers (or “electric telescopes,” as he called them) that would allow people to search and browse through millions of interlinked documents, images, audio and video files. He described how people would use the devices to send messages to one another, share files and even congregate in online social networks.

John Crowley comments:

The article naturally describes it as a precursor of the Web, but it's also a direct descendant of the Memory Theaters of the Renaissance, at least one of which was actually constructed in much the same way as this card-file system was supposed to be, with large categories governing sub- and sub-sub-categories.

It's hard for me to get a solid idea from this article of what the thing was. Or really there are two things -- the Mundaneum actually built and operated, and the unrealizable electronic system described in the book. The Mundaneum sounds a good deal like a card catalog with cross-references, or like Yahoo as it began. The cross-references are metadata applied by the cataloguer, rather than links from text to text?

This earlier and longer article by the same author points out two interesting features of the Mundaneum: It indexed to a sub-book level. And it used a "facet-based" classification, rather than hierarchical.

THE GÖMBÖC

http://www.gomboc.eu/site.php?inc=0&menuId=8

Convexity and homogeneity are crucial properties of Gömböc. Weebles are straightforward examples of inhomogenous objects with Gömböc-type behaviour. Similarly, it is easy to create homogenous but concave Gömböc-like forms due to the fact that concave bodies cannot roll on all points of their circumference.

Shapes with a unique stable equilibrium are called monostatic; those with only one additional unstable point are referred to as mono-monostatic. Thus the Gömböc is the first convex, homogenous, mono-monostatic object.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gomboc

Gömb in Hungarian means "sphere", and gömböc refers to a sphere-like object. (It is mostly known in the folk culture as kis gömböc, a round creature in the loft that remained from a killed pig, which swallows everyone one after the other who goes to see what happened to the previous ones.[4])