Monday, August 10, 2009
Outstanding mystery
On at least three occasions (18/8/2008, 8/11/2008 and 18/11/2008) I have mentioned a mystery plant. BIL, I think, might have thought that it was rice. But now, a propos of something else entirely, I came across a picture of common millet (Panicum Miliaceum L.) which looks to be the answer. Mr G. passed me onto http://chestofbooks.com/flora-plants/weeds/Fodder-Pasture-Plants/Common-Millet-Panicum-Miliaceum-L.html where the picture was even more convincing. It seems that the stuff has been grown for thousands of years, but these days, in this country, more as a fodder crop than as a food crop. The only niggle is that the leaves of a millet are said to be hairy while both the photographs and my sketch are agnostic on that point, although the sketch clearly shows the stalk to be hairy. Memory no use at all. But I think I will close this file until and unless something turns up to wobble this identification.
I should say that only niggle is not quite the whole truth. There is another niggle, namely the time it took me to track down the relevant entries in the blog. OK, so there is a search facility which I used with single words and which eventually came up with the sketch, from which I was able to page forward to find the other two entries, happily not too far away. But how could one do better, well short of the bother and bore of adding keywords to every entry? And would keywords have helped? Would one need a controlled vocabulary to make them useful?
I used to use a bulletin board product called Collabra Share (from California. Now, I think, deceased) which had a very whizzy threading capability: maybe that is the clue to a way forward: let one entry refer to another in a clickable sort of way. Then at least the three ancient millet entries would be linked together, and then, if at some point in the future I wanted to add to it, further linkage would be possible. And, maybe it would be easier to find the cluster of three entries than any one of them singly.
While we are on the subject of blogging software, while surfing blogspot, I came across something called wordpress. Said to be a big competitor to blogspot. So I take a look. Big fancy web site. And while you can clearly do all kinds of fancy things with it, including hosting serious sites for serious operations, it looked completely out of my league. Entry cost in my time far to high, while with blogspot entry cost more or less zero. So I am not quite sure why it was bracketted with blogspot. In any event, I think I shall stay put for the time being.
# posted by Jim @ 12:45 AM 
