Long string to short ID

[Michael P.]

On Fri, 13 Aug 2021 15:44:29 -0400
"Lloyd R. Prentice" <lloyd@REDACTED> wrote:

> What might be a nifty way to turn a long book title with spaces into a short human-readable ID?

Two observations:

Anything too nifty will, sooner or later, put a hole in one's foot.

Keeping the beginning helps evoke a context in one's mind in which
a following, nifty brixngnaxl may be meaningfully interpreted.

Examples:

    $ ls
    verse.tex    verseses.tex

I do not remember what I meant "verseses" to mean. (sounds Gollumic ...)
Here I have obviously niftied myself in the foot.

    $ ls fertig
    aquestionofmust.tex    hinterdg.tex

Simple omission of space (and no capitals).
+ kept head and acronymic tail: hinterdg -> Hinter den Grenzen

But it all depends on what ID means here
and what is considered "human-readable".
And why the title is no human-readable ID,
and why a human needs to read any other ID,
why the machine cannot map any kind of ID
to the title for the human.


>  focus on two most significant words in the title

Significance depends on context even in a single human being;
and context depends on time and all the rest of the "situation".
See the foot-holing example above.

Automating "significance" might require one to wait until
androids do not dream of electric sheep anymore ...


~M

--

Curiosity killed the cat --
by simply using up its time.