It’s been a busy week & I haven’t had much time to post here. So to keep you, My Beloved Audience entertained, let me post something that I’ve been meaning to post for a while now: an OPAC where you can actually search by the color of a book’s cover. The New England School of Law‘s Color Index. I especially like the filename: well_its_red.html. Truly, genius.
4-track
Ron Bergquist visited me in my office earlier today & gave me a 4-track player & a tape. The player is the very one in the photo here (was there ever more than one model of 4-track player manufactured?); the tape is Otis Redding The Dock of the Bay. Why did he give this to me? Probably to get the damn thing out of his house. Also because I seem.. Read More
Ig Nobel Prizes
The Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded yesterday — last night, in fact, as we here in SILS were holding our Louis Round Wilson Academy shindig. Coincidence? Some of the more amusing prizes, in my opinion were: Physics, for a seriously longitudinal study. Literature, for spam as a short narrative form. Peace, for making a a locust watch Star Wars. What I want to know is, how can you tell if.. Read More
The New Republic of Letters
The Blogosphere as a Carnival of Ideas, from the Chronicle It’s all about carnivals for me recently, for some reason. Anyway, it’s gratifying to finally see some positive treatment of blogging in academia. Academic blogs offer the kind of intellectual excitement and engagement that attracted many scholars to the academic life in the first place, but which often get lost in the hustle to secure positions, grants, and disciplinary recognition… Read More
Carnival of the Infosciences
A pleasant surprise from the blogsphere today: yesterday’s post was selected as one of the Ringmaster’s Choices for the Carnival of the Infosciences #9. See the comments for that post. That’s cool, but what the heck does it mean? From my brief investigations, the Carnivals of the Infosciences seem to be a floating, more or less weekly compilation of interesting things in the library blogsphere. Floating in the sense that.. Read More
Open Content Alliance
Yahoo Works With 2 Academic Libraries and Other Archives on Project to Digitize Collections, from the Chronicle Another search engine company has joined with academic libraries to digitize large collections of books to make them easily searchable online. Yahoo Inc. has teamed up with the University of California, the University of Toronto, and several archives and technology companies on a project that could potentially bring the complete texts of millions.. Read More
Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town
I’m reading Cory Doctorow‘s latest novel, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town. Actually I’m reading it on my Palm: I downloaded the plain text, used DropBook to convert it to Palm Reader format, & synched it up with my Palm. I’m reading it on the bus, mostly. And it’s amazing to me how little reading I can actually get done on the bus, because people keep asking me what.. Read More
The beer car
Don’t like parking? Try Pivo This is really only funny if you know that pivo is the Croatian word for beer. Gives new meaning to “don’t drink and drive.” This photo is one of those previously unpublished from the Croatia vacation this past summer (the one on the left, I mean… click for the full-size version). These LaÅ¡ko Pivo umbrellas were absolutely everywhere, at practically every outdoor café. And there.. Read More
Giant squid
Giant squid snapped in the deep, from Nature News This is the first ever photograph of a giant squid in the wild. Japanese researchers snapped the eight-metre monster as it attacked their bait in the inky blackness almost a kilometre below the waves. The photographs were taken by zoologist Tsunemi Kubodera of the National Science Museum, and Kyoichi Mori of the Ogasawara Whale Watching Association, both based in Tokyo. They.. Read More
Size matters
How Many Pages in Google? Take a Guess, from NY Times [Google] said yesterday that it had phased in a larger index over the last four weeks. But rather than directly proclaiming that it had surpassed its archrival Yahoo, which last month claimed index supremacy, Google said it would ask Web surfers to decide for themselves. Google’s chief executive, Eric E. Schmidt, said the company would remove the current number.. Read More