Love fresh fruit? Can’t get enough tubers just yanked right out of the earth? (Washed off, of course.) Love cheap food that hasn’t been transported halfway across this oblate spheroid hurtling in space, but was grown just a stone’s throw away? Boy oh boy, you could really use a nice data table listing every farmers market in the United States. Here you go:

Wait…is there one missing? No problem there. You can put it in and update the table. For this is an open source data service, open to anybody who knows some data and wants to put it in a table. It’s the Wikipedia for tables. It’s Factual. It’s genius. And believe us. It will catch on. Watch this video and learn more.

Factual is another project coming out of Israel, founded by Gil Elbaz in 2007. He’s also the founder of AdSense. He’s also got some ex-Googlers on his team, so we shall see what he comes up with.

Factual can serve as anything from fun, pop culture information, to tour guides on restaurants and sites to see, all the way to the academic and highly researched. Depending on who’s uploading and/or updating the table, no doubt you can even go so far as serious state of the art cutting edge quantum mechanics tables or some such thing. Like a table of elementary particles like muons and quarks and leptons and pions and such. And their properties. Someone may even reconcile Quantum Mechanics with General Relativity and make the Grand Unifying Table of Tables. Maybe I’m going too far on this one, but the point is this:

Wikipedia is a great thing. However, data is not visually organized. It requires reading. Reading requires time. Language is a jumble. Tables are much more useful for research purposes and seeing how data is laid out. Talk about humanity getting one more energy drink. This will speed things up even more, as if they weren’t moving fast enough already.

Here’s something quirky, at least in the perspective of those not involved in the sort of thing I’m about to report. I found a table that cross-references Talmudic law with all its reincarnations in different sources throughout the centuries. So I can see where it’s quoted, and what its source is. Granted, the table I found was very small because few people have worked on it. So yes, I can add. And I will. And someday soon it will be ginormous. Then everyone will have access to information that once only the elite could get their hands on. We will all become dilettantes.

What’s that saying? The dilettante knows less and less about more and more. Pretty soon, he knows everything about nothing.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 26th, 2009 at 3:57 pm and is filed under Alts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.