I've been looking around for some nice data to keep redundantly on the home Terabyte which now that it is exceeding that needs a new name. It occurred to me that some stuff could be public in a non-queryable form. Give me the whole thing and let me figure out my own interface. So I'm thinking of doing some data mongering - or at least sharing some of that with all of you.
The first thing I found was looking at a check that Capital One sent me the other day. I guess I overpaid one of my credit cards and they're sending me a refund. I never use that one. So I wondered what bank Capital One uses. Since I once worked in a bank I know there are the ABA numbers but that's not where I looked. I found the IBAN numbers instead. It turns out that there are just a few. Here they are, it's a very tiny but very significant database that is kept by SWIFT. 53 records, if I remember correctly.Then there's the BIC pile of data as well. Small sets of data but very important.
Tonight my youngest daughter and I checked out the winter triangle in the southwestern sky. She then mentioned Arcturus and Antares, the biggest stars she knows. I didn't know where to look and thought about the fact that there are lots of free star map programs out there. Then I found SIMBAD which has about three million records of all sorts of astronomical objects.
Cool stuff. Not large. Wrapped up in fancy rather impermeable wrappers. That dooms them you know.
There's a great lecture about tagging that was delivered to the Long Now by Clay Shirky. You need to listen to the whole thing to understand what's so cool about redundancy.
Comments