Scientific posting should resume

The few, the brave, followers of this blog have surely noticed that posts about matters scientific have nearly disappeared.  Here’s why.  The notes I take on the journal articles that I read goes into a database using Hypercard, an ancient Apple software program which I’ve been using since it came out in 1987.   Parenthetically, taking notes containing the gist of the article rather than saving the article ‘to read later’ imposes a useful discipline on you.  Also when you’ve read extensively on a topic (amyloid, astronomy, quantum mechanics) most articles of interest usually contain only a few things you didn’t already know, so you really don’t need to save the whole article.

Hypercard is idea for this sort of thing.  It allows you to link various articles together using buttons.  This is particularly useful in biology, where widely disparate topics are actually related, e.g. narcolepsy and feeding (orexin).   This sort of thing can’t be predicted beforehand and are among the most interesting things that reading the current literature serves up.  The easy of linking together the two cards on narcolepsy and orexin by making a button and performing a few clicks is a great feature of HyperCard.

Well,  Apple stopped supporting Hypercard years ago, in the sense of updating the software so it works on the latest hardware.  Because of that, Hypercard no longer works on hardware newer than the Power PC G5.  Why? Because the newer processors manage memory differently, requiring a deep HyperCard update on its hardware interface (which they didn’t do).

So I’ve been running my HyperCard on these old machines which are no longer made, continuing to enhance my data which is extensive, 16 K+ cards with text 22 K+ cards with links 8 K glossary items.

Coming back 10 October from my wife’s 60th High School Reunion (delayed a year by COVID19) the IMac I was using for HyperCard died.  Parenthetically, one of her classmates was Jim Morrison of the Doors, and another friend turned in to Mamma Cass of the Mommas and the Poppas.

Fortunately I had another ancient computer which could run HyperCard.  When that one dies, so does all my work over the decades.  I have written software to get all the HyperCard data (and data about it — e. g. metadata) into text files.  This takes up a (mostly text) file of 100 megaBases of data.

So I began trying to transfer this data to another program — Mathematica. This is and was far from easy because Mathematica is so large with so many functions, that it is hard to find out how to do things.  Example, how to you find out how many items are in a list.  It isn’t Count [ List ], NumberOf [ List ].  It’s Length [ List ].  Just writing a simple string from one Mathematica notebook (file) to another required my to ask for help from the excellent Mathematica Stack Exchange and its excellent volunteers who work to try to help you (all free of charge).

Fortunately I was just able to buy (on eBay) another computer which can run HyperCard on, so the pressure is off somewhat, and I will be able to read the journals again, while continuing to work on the transfer.

Given the problems with Mathematica, I’m also looking at python.  If there is anyone out there with python experience to tell my how appropriate the language would be, I’d like to hear from you.