Books split in pieces and homepage re-organized

I have used more than month to the updating of books and homepage. This is not rocket science but gives a feeling of doing something useful when ideas do not flow.

I decided to divide 7 books into two pieces since their page number was around thousand and quite too high for any reader. The number of shortened books is now 24, the magic number of mathematics and mathematical physics. Amusingly, also my name day happens to be February 24! I decided to keep also the full books so that reader can choose. Besides this there are 7 longer versions giving 31 books: 31 is Mersenne prime and one in the Combinatorial Hierarchy. Seems that I cannot write books anymore!

The updating required rewriting the introductions. This led to critical questions and new understanding about old problems. Returning repeatedly to old writings can be painful but is also extremely powerful manner to generate ideas. Recommended. As a result, I have written some blogposts and articles, and also added contributions to books, so that even this period was not totally devoid of ideas. As a consequence, I can claim that classical TGD is now very well understood. I also threw out eternal ugly duclings. Most importantly, I try to remember the chapters, which make me blush and require critical re-reading.

I decided to reorganize the homepage: there is multiple storage of the same data and the addition of new information could be much simpler and less time-consuming. These changes are not actually visible for a visitor who just searches fo an article or book chapter using a link given in some publication.

It turned out that quite many links to old file names did not work although they should have worked. I found that a change of the filename helped and decided to make changes as a mass operation using Python. I knew from experience that Python really deserves its name. Using it to a mass operation for files is suicidical. Files disappear and their contents change: file can be replaced with its older version.

The reason is probably that Python is a memory thief. It steals memory resources reserved for addresses of files. The operating system has addresses to several copies of files and when this happens an older file effectively replaces the file or effectively disappears. This caused a real nightmare. Now I know it for the rest of my life: do never-ever use Python for a mass operation unless it is at separate computer.

You can look the re-organized homepage at here. There are some links which still fail but I hope that they begin to function within few days.

For a summary of earlier postings see Latest progress in TGD.

Articles and other material related to TGD.