MOVED!

Please update your links to Lagomorph Watson.

Python Coding for Kids (And Beginner Adults)

Invent Your Own Computer Games With Python is a Creative Commons-licensed free(!) book aimed at kids (and beginner adults) to help them learn the Python coding language. And make games, I suppose, but I think for me the games would be a means to the end of learning Python, not vice versa.

Technological Brain-Rot

Two articles: one on how some people think technology is making us less focused and a shorter one explaining why that's crap.

The problem lies with the person lacking focus, not in the technology itself. Are things like Twitter, Facebook, and email too distracting? Not really. They're all still there for after you, say, finish your current class. Time management is the issue.

(I can't mess with Facebook or anything when I'm in class. I know it's going to distract me if I try to read blogs and websites when I'm supposed to be listening. Or if I try to read a book, for that matter. Sometimes when I doodle, too.)

Google Wi-Fi Data

It's just been so long since I mentioned Google here. So here is a disturbing article about wi-fi data Google collected that lots of people would love to get their hands on. Privacy? What?

Google said it didn’t realize it was sniffing packets of data on unsecured Wi-Fi networks in dozens of countries for the last three years, until German privacy authorities questioned what data Google’s Street View cameras were collecting. Street View is part of Google Maps and Google Earth, and provides panoramic pictures of streets and their surroundings across the globe.

Jane Yolen's Foiled

WIRED ran a small review of Jane Yolen's Foiled. Where was all this good YA fiction when I was young? I keep seeing books I would've loved that I'm tempted to pick up even today.

Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.org

Snaked from Wired, who in turn link to the New Yorker website - No Secrets: Julian Assange’s Mission for Total Transparency.

Assange is an international trafficker, of sorts. He and his colleagues collect documents and imagery that governments and other institutions regard as confidential and publish them on a Web site called WikiLeaks.org.

I don't know about you, but I kind of feel like a secret agent just reading about it.

TED Talk: 4Chan

The virtues (and downfalls) of anonymity on the internet. Mostly I like the Dusty story.

Digital Lock Legislation

What you should know about Canada's proposed new copryright legislation.

The foundational principle of the new bill remains that anytime a digital lock is used - whether on books, movies, music, or electronic devices - the lock trumps virtually all other rights. In other words, in the battle between two sets of property rights - those of the intellectual property rights holder and those of the consumer who has purchased the tangible or intangible property - the IP rights holder always wins. This represents market intervention for a particular business model by a government supposedly committed to the free market and it means that the existing fair dealing rights (including research, private study, news reporting, criticism, and review) and the proposed new rights (parody, satire, education, time shifting, format shifting, backup copies) all cease to function effectively so long as the rights holder places a digital lock on their content or device.

Spelling Bee Protests

Four people dressed in bee costumes protested the Scripps Spelling Bee in Washington, DC.

According to literature distributed by the group, it makes more sense for 'fruit' to be spelled as 'froot'...

While I agree literacy is important, I don't think dumbing language down will help anyone. In fact, I think it might be UNGOOD. Perhaps DOUBLEPLUSUNGOOD.

Miss Manners and the Nosy Librarian

Worth a snicker: Miss Manners replies to a woman with an excessively nosy librarian.

Another time, I checked out a name book. I'm writing a novel and needed some ideas for my characters. The librarian read the titles and shrieked, "Are you pregnant?! It's too soon for you to be having another baby!" (I was holding my infant son at the time.)

Note to self: don't do this.

Harvard Libraries

Blah blah blah Harvard is working on shifting to digital.

Interesting: Harvard has seventy-three libraries including the Widener collection which is so huge it requires a forklift to navigate its fifty-foot shelves. I really want to see that. I wonder how well it's organized.

Rocket Men: Wrong, Wrong, Wrong

So this book called Rocket Men was published. Supposedly all about the history of space travel, it is factually incorrect yet receiving positive reviews from the press. Does no one fact-check these days?

I suggest authors and reviewers who get space history wrong be required to take a punch from Buzz Aldrin.

Towel Day

It always irritates me when I forget Towel Day on May 25th. It's the same day every year!

Towel Day is a tribute to the late Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a geek favourite.

An Endangered Language: Braille

In the 1950s, half of blind of Americans read Braille. Now, fewer than ten per cent know the language, most relying on audio materials. Not a big deal?

...There was a really interesting study of two groups of blind children. One group had grown up learning Braille and the other group had grown up using audio technology. And the authors of that study said that there was a significant difference in not just the way that they wrote but the way that they seemed to think. And they referenced theorist Walter Ong, who writes that the act of seeing our own words and then tweaking them and rewriting them, and in that process, rethinking, really creates a new kind of cognitive style.

So they said that the students who didn't learn Braille, it was as if they had shaken up their ideas in a container and then thrown them out on a piece of paper, and that there was really no clear organization, and it lacked the kind of complexity that they saw in the students who had learned Braille.

People who don't know Braille can't really take notes, can't edit your own writing, and you can't edit your own thoughts, and that’s a really significant part of the way that people learn to think.

That's true of visual readers and non-readers too, though, isn't it?

China Cracks Down on Writers in Tibet

Some scary stuff about Tibet, written by Kate Saunders for the Huffington Post. People disappearing, that sort of thing.

Despite opinions on how crappily written popular books can be, at least we can write them freely.

Piracy of Anti-Piracy

So Warner is getting sued by a German company for stealing anti-piracy tech. Hilarity!

Is Filtering Internet in Libraries Censorship?

Ooh, the slippery slope.

Treating the Internet as if it were a part of the printed collection does indeed have a draconian feel to it, as it disregards the general real-time nature of information in modern society. Though the ruling decides that the filtering does not constitute a form of prior restraint, it acknowledges that filter removal can, at times, take until the next day if not longer. While this may seem reasonable, should one person have less access to information than another, simply because they rely on the public library as a point of information rather than purchasing it on their own?

The Seattle Edible Book Festival

The Seattle Edible Book Festival: basically, food creations inspired by books. Silly but fun.

Forbes Interviews Tony Stark

A fictional Forbes interview with Tony Stark. It's funny!

Speaking of Iron Man 2, it was decent but definitely not as good as the first movie. Also, Black Widow was a disappointment - taking more from her background from the comics would have been much better, though sadly, Scarlett Johanssen isn't really a good choice for that sort of role... so maybe it's best the Widow just ran around in a black catsuit.

Delhi's Not So Public Libraries

Cordelia Jenkins relates her difficulties borrowing a book from public libraries in Delhi.

It’s lucky the sign was there because, if it hadn’t been, I would never have guessed this was the place I was looking for. The library in Andrews Ganj is described as a sub-branch, and visitors should take that description literally. It’s a grey concrete block set back from the road in a dusty yard. An abandoned playground, with a broken roundabout and a swing set without any swings, peeled its paint onto scrubby grass. A couple of teenage boys lolled against their bikes by the gates. Inside three middle-aged men sat at the central table reading newspapers under the draught of a listless fan. No one had a book out. I headed for the English language shelves and perused the collection of Penguin classics and the complete works of William Dalrymple.

Libraries and Communication, Communication, Communication

A short article from AndyW at LISNews on the importance of communication in libraries.

If the three L’s of buying a house are “location, location, location”, then the three C’s of librarianship should be “communication, communication, communication”. I don’t think what I’m going to list is anything revolutionary; I do think it might be a novel way to remember the basic interactions that keep the library moving forward.

Stop Thinking of Internet Privacy in Human Terms

David Hurley from Intellectual Freedom Roundtable (IFRT) writes about how liking Star Trek could hinder your chances at a job in childcare. Sort of. Hypothetically!

Rather than a person knowing discrete facts, the database allows your data to be carefully analyzed as part of the aggregate. And when you analyze such a huge pot of data, you start finding odd correlations.

'Help Me Help My Friend in DC'

Through the efforts of various posters on MetaFilter, two Russian women were possibly saved from human trafficking.

Newsweek reported on their blog and a site called Mother Jones ran an interview with the original MF poster.

This is an example of the good power of social sites.

Internet Archive Has One Million Books for the Visually Impaired

Internet Archive launched a new service today that will provide more than a million books in a specially designed format that can be read by visually impaired readers. The new service is part of the the non-profit’s Open Library project, which has been scanning and digitizing hundreds of thousands of books for the past several years and now has more than a million in its index. Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle, who funds some of the Archive’s costs through his charitable foundation, said the new service more than doubles the number of books previously available to visually impaired readers.

(They didn't do it today. This is a news story from May 6th, 2010. I've just been very lax.)

Silentale

So Silentale (and there's an ominous name) is a web service that backs up and archives all your electronic communications. All of them - Twitter, Facebook, GMail.

Well, that's just creepy. Consider the privacy issues with Twitter, Facebook, and GMail separately: there are many. Facebook is now notorious for farming personal information, slowly revealing more and more of its users over the years and never, ever deleting it even if the user deletes their account. As for GMail, people don't realize that everything they send around via Google documents becomes property of Google. It is not secure at all.

Here is a database that clumps everything together, all in one spot. At least make identity thieves and corporations work a little to get information.

'Why I Steal Movies, Even Ones I'm In'

Peter Serafinowicz - an actor, write and director - writes about why he steals movies via torrents.

Like a billion other people, I download things illegally. I'm also an actor, writer and director whose income depends on revenue from DVDs, movies and books. This leads to many conflicts in my head, in my heart, and in bars.

Smelling Books... For Science!

Seriously, book sniffing and its use in the preservation of books.

The test is based on detecting the levels of volatile organic compounds.

These are released by paper as it ages and produce the familiar "old book smell".

The international research team, led by Matija Strlic from University College London's Centre for Sustainable Heritage, describes that smell as "a combination of grassy notes with a tang of acids and a hint of vanilla over an underlying mustiness".

It all involves gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, which is not that intimidating looking a word but don't ask me exactly what it means. Since I've harped on people smelling books in two posts, it seemed only fair to link this.

50 Dangerous Things (You Should Let Your Kids Do)

Here's a scary concept: a book with dangerous activities to do with your children. Sort of.

Some of the stuff doesn't seem that dangerous. My knee-jerk reaction is to think this is a very bad idea. While the Canadian Amazon site's got one review from a disgruntled buyer, the American one has more positive feedback.

Some of the activities include climbing on the roof, breaking glass, sticking your hand out the window of a moving vehicle (the Canadian mother seemed to take offense to that one, "so basic it's insulting"), being blindfolded for an hour, and superglueing your fingers together. Which are all maybe not smart things, but things you can generally survive. And wouldn't you rather your kids climbed on the roof with you there to watch them?

I've kind of wondered what superglueing my fingers together would feel like.

I suppose if you don't approve of some of the suggestions you can veto them.

Toilet Paper Twitter

A man in need of toilet paper Twittered about it and his plea was answered.

Remember, this is PART OF THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS NOW.

Stephen Wolfram - Making All Knowledge Computational

Stephen Wolfram talks about his ideas to make all knowledge computational. I'll be honest, a lot of it goes right over my head, but it's worth watching. Stephen Wolfram designed Wolfram Alpha, a curious little search engine that provides very up to date computational facts.

Moon Language

From librarian.net: Braille isn't the only way for the blind to read. Before braille, there was Moon, which is embossed printing that gives the basic outlines of letters. It mostly makes sense in my head except for P and Q. Just a fun little bit of information.

Parameta Data

Start with meta, get your head around metadata, and then consider parameta data. I think I get it.

Bookulating Suggest-O-Meterometer

The Bookulating Suggest-O-Mometer is a mostly cute book recommendation application. It is ever so slightly annoying for extended use. Do watch the intro!

I inputted my information and came out with a book suggestion I thought sounded very interesting; choosing options that didn't reflect me turned out book suggestions I didn't particularly care for. Worth a look.

$45 000 Author Visit

Author Neil Gaiman is in the center of a library-related stink. Apparently it costs $45 000 to have Neil come to your library. He explains why in his blog post, though the answers don't satisfy everyone.

I'm not really sure where I stand on this one. Neil Gaiman is a very popular author, and one whose work I have enjoyed. He draws massive crowds, which ultimately mean people in the library, which is good. If the library can ever hold that many!

On the other hand, couldn't that forty-five thousand go elsewhere? Maybe to hire transportation and shipping of older books to needy places? Maybe not quite as big an event as having Neil Gaiman come in, but then if you advertise something like a Not-Neil fundraiser where people are asked to donate to help other libraries instead of paying to get Neil Gaiman...? I'm not sure.

Blocking Cell Phones in the Library

The Oak Creek public library in Milwaukee is thinking about blocking cell phone use due to complaints about people talking on their cell phones. Cell phone use is not allowed in within the building, but people talk anyway.

As much as I hate disembodied one-way conversations happening around me, I don't think this is practical from a safety standpoint. The City Librarian, Ross Talis, does not agree.

Asked whether a blocker could inconvenience patrons who might need to be contacted in an emergency, Talis said: "We have phones here that are always available to the public."

No, still not a great idea. Libraries have had public phones for a very long time, but there is a reason cell phones became popular. Okay, more than a few reasons, but one reason is safety. Someone might not know their friend/family member/rowing coach is at the library at any particular time, making it difficult to call the library proper.

It kind of reminds me of being in elementary or high school. The class would be rowdy, and then everyone - even quiet bookworms like myself - would get punished. I use my cell phone properly dammit!

Comic Book Legal Defense Fund

The CBLDF (Comic Book Legal Defense Fund) has a shiny new webpage.

ALA Choose Privacy Week

It's Choose Privacy Week! The American Library Association recommends teaching people, especially kids, how to control how much information they post about themselves online.

No Computers, No Patrons?

Libraries have experienced a surge of activity since they commonly acquired computers. With the advent of the iPad and other portable devices, some people wonder if anyone will come to the library anymore. The idea is that some libraries are thinking of getting rid of the desktops and loaning out iPads and netbooks to students wanting to use computers in the library. I'm not seeing this as a big concern yet. Lots of places can barely afford the rickety old desktops, much less netbooks and the like. And desktops don't fit handily inside bookbags. That's why they call them desktops and not stealmes.

The Scary World of Rare Book Libraries

Despite the great move to make libraries more fun and accessible, there are still some thoroughly intimidating places - the rare book collections.

Digital Photo Frames in Libraries

The Strange Librarian offers an alternative to those big expensive screen displays in libraries: digital photo frames. You can afford a lot more of them and place them all throughout the service areas of the library. Of course, seems like it'd be kind of easy to lose them to sticky fingers, but still - good idea!

How Much File Sharing Travels the Net?

How much file sharing travels the net? It's hard to tell because it's not public.

How Much Information is There?

How much information is there? Not counting books, just the digital information storage.

For most of us, “a crapload” is a sufficiently accurate answer. But for a few obsessive data analysts, more precision is necessary. According to a recent study by market-research company IDC, and sponsored by storage company EMC, the size of the information universe is currently 800,000 petabytes. Each petabyte is a million gigabytes, or the equivalent of 1,000 one-terabyte hard drives.

If you stored all of this data on DVDs, the study’s authors say, the stack would reach from the Earth to the moon and back.

The Book Was Better Than the Movie: The Lovely Bones

I went about The Lovely Bones in a backward sort of way - I saw a trailer for it in the movie theater, thought it looked interesting, and wound up tracking down the book to read.

I enjoyed the book very much. Maybe 'enjoyed' is the wrong word, but I felt it was a very good book. The movie? Not so much.

What had struck me about the book was how well it conveyed the sadness that coloured the murdered girl's regular family lives. The ways it changed them, like how the girl's younger sister started doing push-ups and sit-ups so she could fight off an attacker, something Susie Salmon hadn't been able to do. The little tragedy where a boy Susie liked who liked her became one of the main suspects in her disappearance.

I found the movie skipped over a lot of these mundane things. Susie's heaven in the book was portrayed as a high school; it was very ordinary. The movie wastes quite a lot of time having her travel through a CG landscape, fantastic and beautiful.

The one thing the movie did better than the book was portraying how Susie used the medium Ruth to contact her would-be boyfriend she never had a chance to be with: in the movie, they kiss. In the book... ew.

Hand Drawn Maps

Slate has an article all about hand-drawn maps, with an inevitable comparison to Google maps.

The Worst Sci-fi/Fantasy Book Covers

Good Show Sir is a site dedicated to finding the absolute worst sci-fi/fantasy book covers. And they have succeeded. This stuff is scary.

Downfall

I've been sitting on this story for at least a week, trying to find the proper article to link here. Basically, there is a movie about Hitler called 'Downfall' and one particular scene in it is often used to create parodies by changing the subtitles so that Hitler, instead of talking about historical Hitler things, instead rants about Kanye West or his birthday being ruined. They are comedic and satirical, and they started to vanish, despite the film's director and writer/producer being flattered by the parodies and thinking they are funny. At the end of the article is an example of a Downfall parody, this time with Hitler reacting to all the Downfall parodies.

Automatic Copyright Protection and YouTube

Sometimes automatic copyright protection doesn't work so well, like when videos are banned for using the same freely-provided music in an editing program.

Even More on the League of Extraordinary Porn

More on the censorship of graphic novels:

At the recent Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo, a librarian from Jessamine County, Kentucky, spoke firsthand about dealing with calls for censorship in his library, and an expert from the American Library Association discussed how to handle challenges to graphic novels at the panel titled "Burn It, Hide It, Misshelve It, Steal It, Ban It! Dealing with Graphic Novel Censorship in Your Library."

Good ol' Jessamine County! Back in October 2009, two librarians in the county were fired for keeping 'The Black Dossier', a graphic novel by Alan Moore, off the shelves. Good to see it's still making news.

Weeding

For my introductory library science course, we visited several different libraries. At one, the very 'green', spacious, and airy, we were taken aback to discover that the librarians had to sneak books out into the trash. People tended to get upset when they saw discarded books. But there are reasons libraries have to get rid of books, and they mostly come down to time and manpower.

Kominarek said the library has used book sales in the branches in conjunction with their friends groups. The sales allow the library to send some old books to new homes and raise a few thousand dollars each year.

However, the books that don't sell become a liability, she said.

"If we kept every book for a sale until it is sold, there wouldn't be any space to keep them," Kominarek said.

Automated Book Sorter

Sorting books is boring. Let's get a machine to do it!

On one side of the machine, which is two-thirds the length of a football field and encircled by a conveyor belt, staff members place each book face-down on a separate panel of the belt. The book passes under a laser scanner, which reads the bar code on the back cover, and the sorter communicates with the library’s central computer system to determine where the book should be headed. Then, as the conveyor belt moves along, it drops the book into one of 132 bins, each associated with a branch library. It’s sort of like a baggage carousel that knows which bag is yours and deposits it at your feet.

Archie Comics Introduces First Openly Gay Character

...and it's not Jughead. His name is Kevin Keller. A step in the right direction, though I wonder if he'll be a one-shot or not.

"The introduction of Kevin is just about keeping the world of Archie Comics current and inclusive. Archie's hometown of Riverdale has always been a safe world for everyone. It just makes sense to have an openly gay character in Archie comic books," stated Archie Comics Co- CEO, Jon Goldwater.

The Forbes Fictional 15

The 15 Richest Fictional Characters according to Forbes. I tittered.

That Keith Richards Thing is Really True

Just in case you needed it, another article about Keith Richards' love of books. Worth posting about again because everyone I mention this to stares at me with disbelief. Also a good plug for his upcoming autobiography, which I believe I am now interested in reading.

Blind Date With a Book

A cute idea, blind date with a book involves wrapping books up to conceal their covers. A more random selection than most.

Sabotage Via Amazon Reviews

From The Guardian: a historian's wife wrote disparaging reviews of the books of his rivals.

Well, that's certainly... loyal.

What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Yann Martel, the guy who wrote Life of Pi, has undertaken a project. He is suggesting books for the Prime Minister to read and recording all his correspondence on a website.

Life of Pi is a very good book. I'd completely forgotten that Yann Martel is Canadian. If nothing else, the site provides a good reading list.

Mean Amazon Reviews of Classic Books

As someone who loathed Sense and Sensibility, mean Amazon comments about classic books make me laugh. Though mean-mouthing The Diary of Anne Frank seems a bit much.

Recognizing a book for its value capturing a time period or even what its being popular means is still important, but man, did I hate those S&S characters.

The Anonymity of Comments on News Sites

When news sites, after years of hanging back, embraced the idea of allowing readers to post comments, the near-universal assumption was that anyone could weigh in and remain anonymous. But now, that idea is under attack from several directions, and journalists, more than ever, are questioning whether anonymity should be a given on news sites.

That's kind of a hard thing to crack down on. An identity is just a form and a gmail address away if the name sounds real enough.

William Gibson on Twitter

So somebody asked William Gibson if his latest book would've been written faster if Twitter didn't exist. (Is this blog going to need a Twitter tag? Ugh.)

“Twitter, or the internet at large, feels to me like an automation of what I have to do, anyway, in order to write,” the Neuromancer and Spook Country novelist wrote on his official website. “Stare out window. Read a magazine. Gaze at shoe. Answer a letter. Think about something new (or newly). Access random novelty.”

That's a vote in favour of the Library of Congress keeping all tweets, right? I suppose for every person reporting on the kind of sandwich they had for lunch there's something a little more worthwhile. Or at least something I'd consider a little more worthwhile.

Downloading Stuff You Already Own

So if you download a free digital copy of a book you've bought, did you do anything wrong?

The More Things Change...

A guy named Wayne Bivens-Tatum found an article by Grace O. Kelley on the "The Democratic Function of Public Libraries".

The library, even more than other institutions, seems not to have been altogether a true part of the social process. In some way, it has been switched out of the current of social change, occupying a niche or eddy of its own. For a long time it seems to have been but slightly affected by the forces which have been changing the rest of the world. One looks in vain in histories of culture and education for studies of the modern library as an active force which is making its impress upon the social fabric. Due to the nature of its organization and of its service it has been possible for it to continue to function largely on its original indefinite ideals and, in a sense, to let the modern world go by....

Not only our knowledge of the world, but the world itself, keeps changing from day to day. "The inescapable drive of change under the accumulation of ideas and traditions, under the relentless impacts of science and invention," make a fixed regime impossible. "An industrial civilization founded on technology, science, invention, and expanding markets must of necessity change and change rapidly." Any institution which does not change too, adapt itself to the times, and become part of the onward "drive of change," will be pushed aside to be left perhaps for a time to make a harmless life of its own.

Sound familiar? It was written in 1934.

Library of Congress and Twitter

Every Tweet Will Be Preserved for History. Seriously?

I wonder what category tweets go under in the Library of Congress Classification system.

ACTA and the Internet

How ACTA Will Change the Internet, via Boing Boing.

...ACTA goes way, way beyond the TRIPS (the copyright/patent/trademark stuff in the World Trade Organization agreement), creating an entirely new realm of liability for people who provide services on the net. Since liability for service-providers determines what kind of services we get, increasing their liability for copyright infringement will make it harder to invent new tools like web-lockers, online video-hosting services, blogging services, and anything else that's capable of being used to infringe copyright.

ACTA Provisions on Injuctions and Damages, for reference.

Penny Arcade - Flight of the Ebook Readers

A Penny Arcade comic!

One deficit an electronic reader has over printed media, and this is only a factor if you've been in the air as much as we have lately, is that there are portions of the flight where you can't read. Your "book," as it were, now belongs in the same criminal class of devices which includes laptops and missile transponders. The other deficit, I suppose, is that when the device runs out of power your "book" ceases to exist. It retains the gaudy and absurd physicality so common with objects, but all the purpose has leaked out. The unbook you have left becomes a lady of impenetrable chastity.

Google Adds Suicide Prevention Hotline Result to Suicide Queries

Google has added a link to a suicide prevention hotline to results of a suicidal seeming query. I approve of this. It seems like a step toward responsible information access without censorship.

Keith Richards, Librarian

Wait, what?

Keith Richards wanted to be a librarian. And still does. Apparently he reads a lot and keeps many, many books. I had no idea.

10 Great Technologies from Science Fiction

From WIRED! Ten Great Technologies We Got From Science Fiction. Two are from Star Trek, even! And some from books and comics, naturally.

Pictish Art Might Be a Written Language

The ancestors of modern Scottish people left behind mysterious, carved stones that new research has just determined contain the written language of the Picts, an Iron Age society that existed in Scotland from 300 to 843.

The highly stylized rock engravings, found on what are known as the Pictish Stones, had once been thought to be rock art or tied to heraldry. The new study, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A, instead concludes that the engravings represent the long lost language of the Picts, a confederation of Celtic tribes that lived in modern-day eastern and northern Scotland.

Researchers Rob Lee, Philip Jonathan, and Pauline Ziman analyzed the engravings found on a few hundred Pictish stones. They used a mathematical process known as Shannon entropy and determined it is likely Pictish engravings were a form of written language.

FAQ: Google, China, and Censorship

WIRED.com has made an FAQ (a list of Frequently Asked Questions) regarding Google, China, and Censorship. It is useful!

Judging E-Books by the Cover

The downside to e-book readers not showing book covers - stuff like this doesn't happen as often:

Bindu Wiles was on a Q train in Brooklyn this month when she spotted a woman reading a book whose cover had an arresting black silhouette of a girl’s head set against a bright orange background.

Ms. Wiles noticed that the woman looked about her age, 45, and was carrying a yoga mat, so she figured that they were like-minded and leaned in to catch the title: “Little Bee,” a novel by Chris Cleave. Ms. Wiles, a graduate student in nonfiction writing at Sarah Lawrence College, tapped a note into her iPhone and bought the book later that week.

Google and Microsoft Push US Feds to Update Privacy Laws

It's only in the States, but it's worth noting: A coalition of the net’s biggest online service providers, including Google and Microsoft, are joining with the top internet rights groups to demand Congress modernize the nation’s privacy laws.

“With the emergence of location services and the transfer of a huge amount of data to the cloud and our huge reliance on cloud storage of e-mail messages, the law has become outdated and needs to be updated,” Dempsey said in the conference call.

For instance, when the law was crafted, e-mail was almost always downloaded from a central server to a user’s computer. Any messages left after 180 days were considered abandoned, so the law allows police to obtain any e-mail older than six months simply by issuing a subpoena — meaning no judge is involved. If those e-mails had been downloaded to a user’s computer and removed from the server, the police would need a search warrant, based on probable cause, to get at them.

But now that Americans store gigabytes of e-mails on Yahoo’s, Google’s and Microsoft’s servers, those different standards make no sense, and the law should be platform independent, according to Dempsey.

Old School vs. New School Libraries

From the UK Times Online: The transformation from fusty institutes to hi-tech hubs has resulted in a schism in local libraries.

...There is a clear schism between traditionalists and modernisers. For one it is about books and silence, for the other it’s about community usage, Facebook and cups of coffee or, in the words of Andrew Motion, the former Poet Laureate and now the chairman of the Museums Libraries and Archives Council, “shhh and fining or Starbucks and PCs”.

Smelling Books (Again)

In Which, Emphatically And Forever, I Decline To Care How Books Smell, Linda Holmes. I kind of want to marry this woman now.

My day-to-day experience of reading generally involves things that I am reading now, which often means relatively new books -- either new books, or newly acquired copies of old books. Now, I freely admit that if I get my nose within in inch of the paper, I can smell "book." Which, loosely defined, means "paper and ink." I cannot smell wisdom. I cannot smell memory, or the past, or people who were reading a hundred years ago and have handed down their tradition of reading by firelight.

You know when I sense wisdom? I sense wisdom from the words. For me, language contains wisdom and tradition and history, whether printed on a page, heard aloud, read on a screen, or recalled because it was meaningful.

Weird book smell people. Weird, weird, people.

How Will the End of Print Journalism Affect Old Loons Who Hoard Newspapers?

How Will The End Of Print Journalism Affect Old Loons Who Hoard Newspapers?

The Onion is not a serious news site. Except the AV Club section, that's actually not made up.

Eye Tracking Technology

Also from Wired:

The best thing about reading a book on a tablet (so far) is how closely it approximates reading a “real” book — which is why the Kindle’s screen is matte like paper rather than luminescent like a laptop. Some (not all) fear for the demise of real reading and writing, but it’s more likely we’re really at the leading edge of an innovation curve that could breathe new life into the written word.

For example: What if those written words were watching you reading them and making adjustments accordingly? Eye-tracking technology and processor-packed tablets promise to react, based on how you’re looking at text — where you pause, how you stare, where you stop reading altogether — in a friction-reducing implementation of the Observer Effect. The act of reading will change what you are reading.

This one's pretty curious. I doubt I'm going to like it too much; my dedicated reading time is before I go to sleep. As I grow more and more sleepy, my ability to focus changes. I sometimes close one eye or the other to focus better on the words. If definitions kept popping up I think I'd go crazy. On the other hand, if the technology was sensitive enough... definitions might help, particularly late at night when I don't feel like hauling myself out of bed to look something up in my gigantic dictionary.

New RFID Technology

From Wired:

Researchers from Sunchon National University in Suncheon, South Korea, and Rice University in Houston have built a radio frequency identification tag that can be printed directly onto cereal boxes and potato chip bags. The tag uses ink laced with carbon nanotubes to print electronics on paper or plastic that could instantly transmit information about a cart full of groceries.

“You could run your cart by a detector and it tells you instantly what’s in the cart,” says James M. Tour of Rice University, whose research group invented the ink. “No more lines, you just walk out with your stuff.”

RFID tags are already used widely in passports, library books and gadgets that let cars fly through tollbooths without cash. But those tags are made from silicon, which is more expensive than paper and has to be stuck onto the product as a second step.

“It’s potentially much cheaper, printing it as part of the package,” Tour says.

Cool, though I'm still weirded out by carrying around things that emit radio waves and allow people to track me. Maybe I should get some stock in tin foil.

Tiny Art Director

Bill Zeman's A Tiny Art Director is a book about Bill drawing things that his daughter Rosie requests and her reactions to the results. It looks hilarious. I must find this and read it.

Don't Block It, Take it Down

From Boing Boing, source of so many Megducation articles: Child-abuse survivors oppose EU censorwall.

A recently leaked European Council proposal seeks to create a "Great Firewall of Europe," instituted to block sites that depict the abuse of children. As with other censorwalls, it's unlikely that this will performed as intended, since paedophiles will circumvent it with proxies, or by using P2P or email or private websites to trade illegal material. But the creation of a continent-wide network censorship scheme is likely to cause new problems, inviting authorities to shoehorn ever-greater slices of the net into the "illegal" category -- this has already happened in Australia and other countries that have built Chinese-style censorship regimes.

A German organization of child-abuse survivors, MOGis e.V, opposes the proposal on the grounds that these images shouldn't just be blocked; they should be taken away comepletely. Remove them, don't just look away.

Fables

While I enjoy comic books, I find I don't have the cash to collect them. I mean to organize myself and read library collections, but I'm lazy. Anyway, the one series I do collect is Fables, a comic about fables from every time and land being chased from their homes and into modern-day New York City, where they live in a particular city block and try to stay hidden from ordinary mortals. Some manage that better than most; the ones that can't manage - the three little pigs, for example - are sent to The Farm. Snow White, Rose Red, and the Big Bad Wolf - Bigby - are prominent characters.

Cory Doctorow's review of the latest collection at Boing Boing sounds very interesting:

In Crossover, the Literals (literal embodiments of philosophical and literary ideals, such as the Pathetic Fallacy and a trio of beautiful, ass-kicking embodiments of librarianship) suck the Fables into a new kind of fight -- a fight against the Writer, himself a Literal, bent on rewriting reality and making a better one, in order to rein in the characters and situations who've run away from him.

As with previous volumes, it's whacking great fun, as well as being an education in the ways of storytelling and a philosophical rumination on the nature of belief, reality, and the power of stories. Willingham's humor and scenarios grow more meta with each installment, but somehow, it never degenerates into a mere exercise -- Fables is always, first and foremost, a wonderful story.

Time to make some early birthday and Christmas list additions. I'm so behind on the series.

Snopes

Snopes.com is actually run by a husband and wife team. I had no idea; I figured it was a bunch of people. I suppose I always envisioned them as being hipsters in their twenties with the big thick-rimmed glasses. (Which I love, and which I own and wear.) (Glasses, not hipsters. I don't wear hipsters.)

The site debunks myths; if you're not sure if a story you've heard is real, you look to Snopes.com. I got hit by the Family Scammer, though my variant was a friend. They'd gotten into his Google mail and Facebook accounts. I did not believe he was in Wales and didn't send them anything, but it's still the most plausible money-grabbing scheme I've ever been emailed. (It also didn't involve a phone call.) Far more convincing than that Nigerian guy.

The Streak

When his second daughter was in fourth grade, Jim Brozina proposed The Streak: he and his daughter Kristen would read together every night for a hundred nights without missing once. A hundred nights turned into a thousand nights, and eventually went up to 3,218 nights.

It's a cute story, going from fourth grade all the way up to Kristen's first day of college. I have to say, though, I feel a little bad for his first daughter, Kathy, who declared she would take over from her father reading to her at bedtime in fourth grade. Maybe she didn't like being read to; I can empathize. I'd rather read on my own, it's faster. And maybe she missed out on something big that her father had with her little sister. And even if she didn't want to be read to, I imagine she has at least a little regret.

E-book Sellers and the iPad

From LISNews: E-Book Sellers Face a Battle to Win iPad Customers. Wait, people bought iPads?

Zinnnnng.

Quiet Zones

More about quiet in the library - some libraries in Houston will start having 'quiet zones' where talking will be discouraged.

In mid-December, a library worker at the Robinson Westchase Neighborhood Library in the 3200 block of Wilcrest was hit, knocked to the floor and stomped by a 23-year-old patron when she asked the man to leave. Other library patrons tackled the offender, who had been singing loudly.

The attacker eventually was convicted of assault and sentenced to 140 days in jail.

Maybe all those kung fu lessons will come in handy for my chosen career.

Human-Flesh Search Engine

It's about as creepy as it sounds: the human-flesh search engine. Vigilantes in China hunt down people with unpopular opinions and find their offline identities, including addresses, details about their personal lives, where they are employed, and where they go to school. The people they have tracked down seem to be forced to make apologies or harassed by phone or by email; there are cases where people have been fired or detained by police.

In one infamous case in 2006, a woman now dubbed “the kitten killer of Hangzhou” posted a video of herself stomping a kitten to death with her stiletto heels. China’s netizens erupted with rage and hundreds of amateur sleuths traced the video to Hangzhou, a city south of Shanghai. They discovered the woman’s name and that she had recently purchased a pair of high-heeled shoes on eBay. They attacked her until she apologized on a local government website and lost her job.

I can't say I have much sympathy for the kitten-killer, but schoolkids being detained for being insensitive jerks? Too far.

The New York Times has written a longer article on this subject.

Digital Media Teen Hangout

The Harold Washington Library in South Chicago runs a successful-sounding Digital Media Space for teens to be creative and network.

"Our goal is to draw students in so that they're comfortable hanging out in the library, and then get them to engage with the workshops and technology in the space," Neal said. "We're seeing more and more students who were hanging out, participating in workshops and on the social network. It's been great to see their interests develop."

This sounds like an excellent way to help kids get more tech-savvy and provide a safe place for them to go to that encourages their creativity, though it also sounds pricey:

The Digital Space offers eight desktop computers, 96 laptops, two PlayStation 3's with a library of games, and musical keyboards and a recording studio so teenagers can create music, art and poetry, or jump online and talk with peers in the secure, password-protected YOUMedia forum.

A recording studio? Really? Huh.

Turn Your Blog Into a Book?

Having just finished another post, an ad on the 'yay you just published a post' page caught my eye:

Turn your blog into a book!
Blog2Print from SharedBook turns your blog into a soft cover or hard cover book. You pick the cover, add an optional dedication, then preview and you're done. Prices start at $14.95.

Now I'm wondering what the difference between a blog and a journal is. I could pay $14.95 (and probably more, since that's USD and I'm Canadian) and get my blog published as a book with real, actual pages I could smell. And absolutely none of the links would work, and none of the articles linked would be included, and isn't that the point of a blog? Isn't it just a journal otherwise? If you make a new word for a new thing, use that word properly and don't lump other things in with that word.

Books to Pass On

A poll commissioned to mark World Book Day asked British People what books they would like to pass on to the next generation.

Number one: the Harry Potter books. Okay, yes. Not always the best written. Number two: The DaVinci Code. I still need to read this one, but I really don't want to based on opinions I've heard (Dan Brown is a hack being the most common) and the fact that I didn't much like his book with the Illuminati. I didn't like it enough to even look up its actual title. Anyway! Number five: Twilight.

No, no, no, was my immediate thought. Twilight? Not very well written, horrible message for young girls, blah blah blah. Then I thought about other books I found annoying, like Sense and Sensibility. I have never wanted a character to die as much as I did when one of the sisters fell ill in Sense and Sensibility. I tossed it down in disgust at one point. I guess that's how things like this get started: someone passes down something that's not all that great (yes, I just said Jane Austen's book wasn't all that great and I was being kind) and then years and years later it's a 'classic'. I hope I die before Twilight is ever considered a classic. I hope I am so, so dead.

Wikipedia Collaborators and Their Roles

A paper written by a University of Arizona professor and a graduate student found that quality Wikipedia articles are the result of the work of different kinds of collaborators.

Starters, for example, create sentences but seldom engage in other actions. Content justifiers create sentences and justify them with resources and links. Copy editors contribute primarily though modifying existing sentences. Some users – the all-round contributors – perform many different functions.

So basically, really good Wikipedia articles come about by embracing the core tenet of the project: many people working together provide better information.

The paper is also available for download.

US vs. UK Book Covers

Insert clever (or not-so-clever) comment about judging a book by its cover here. This article from The Millions compares the US and UK covers of several books.

More about covers: Black vs. White Covers.

I think the US cover of Burnt Shadows looks smutty!

Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect $200

More in the battle against late fees! A teenager in Colorado has been sent to jail for an overdue DVD.

Apparently the kid borrowed House of Flying Daggers and accidentally packed it up while moving. The DVD's about $30; it cost $200 to get the kid out of jail, another $200 to get his car out of the impound lot, and $60 in court fees.

Littleton Mayor Doug Clark said the city plans to change its policy on overdue DVDs and books as a result of the case.

"We're not going to arrest people who don't return $30 DVDs," he said.

Gee, y'think?

The Misogyny of Dr. Seuss

Here's another one of those 'has a point but goes too far' articles, this time about the lack of women in Dr. Seuss' books.

Here are a few of the comments:

I remember "The Cat in the Hat" ... about a boy and a GIRL. And there also were no blacks, gays, transgenders, Chinese, Russians, Germans, Indians, or Japanese. The author of this article is trying so hard to be a victim. Why not pick actual, significant cases of sexism to write about instead of looking for a problem where one does not exist?

I have daughters, I plan to empower them by not whining and moaning about girls not being portrayed in appropriate numbers by a beloved children's author. I guess from now on, we'll need to have special screeners to make sure that each children's book has a suitable quota of girls, gays, blacks and other special groups before being allowed to be printed.

This just proves out, once again, what my mother used to tell me: If you go looking for things to be mad about, you'll sure find 'em.

The funny thing is, thinking back on all those books... I remember thinking quite a lot of the characters looked girly because of their long eyelashes. They just weren't necessarily human. I think women should be honoured, no matter what species. Otherwise that's just... humanist.

Quiet in the Library

A counterpoint to No Silence! The Effing Librarian writes about shushing in libraries in a positive manner.

Personally, I can see both sides. A quiet place that remains quiet to work and read in is pretty awesome. On the other hand, libraries being more interactive and community-based is also pretty awesome. Thankfully, may libraries still have quiet areas where shushing can happen.

Amazon's Unintended Comic Sale

This Sunday (March 7th), Amazon accidentally had a huge sale on hardcover comic book collections. Books normally selling for $62.99 USD were priced at $14.99. Some went even lower, to $8.24. Diamond Books Distributors distributes all the 'sale' titles.

Someone or something somewhere went wrong. Of course, people are demanding they get the books at the lower price anyway. Is this honest? No. Not really.

Plenty of people who took advantage of this error are feeling entitled, with some threatening class action suits if they don’t get their discount books. How selfish. You knew the pricing was wrong, and yet you ordered anyway. If you get any books at all out of the deal, you got lucky. Saying you should get them all is pig-headed. Trying to take advantage of someone else’s error isn’t good karma (although I ordered a few books myself). Trying to profit from it, by ordering multiple copies for later resale, for instance, is just greedy.

Little Billy's Letters

In the 1990s Bill Geerhart was an unemployed, not-so aspiring screenwriter in his 30s. To pass the time, he channeled his inner child, 10-year-old Billy, and started writing letters to famous and infamous people and institutions. These letters, written in pencil on elementary school ruled paper, asked funny but relevant questions to politicians, serial killers, movie stars, lobbyists, CEOs, and celebrity lawyers.

Little Billy's Letters to Famous and Infamous People sounds like a fun book. I feel like a shill, but I enjoyed reading the excerpts published in this BoingBoing article.

Popular Science

Popular Science articles are now online and free. You can browse by issue.

There better be stuff about ROBOTS in there or I'm gonna be disappointed.

Jenny Levine on Gaming in the Library

Partly to save this for later when I can sit down and listen to it, here is a talk by Jenny Levine about gaming in the library.

The Most Amazing Libraries in the World Part Two

From the Huffington Post, more of the most amazing libraries of the world. Photos! Number one on this list is the Canadian Library of Parliament. Very nice.

World Book Day

Today is apparently World Book Day... in the UK and Ireland. I only stumbled across this article on it and immediately felt bad. World Book Day? What? I didn't know that! Some wannabe librarian I am! But it's not so much my fault, because World Book Day doesn't really happen in the rest of the world. Or something like that.

Name aside, this is still a very cool idea.

So on this World Book Day, if I have one modest wish, it is that, at least for a day, we ponder the real and spiritual poverty of a life lived without the ability to read, without the sheer joy of escaping into a good book. I can't put it half as eloquently as Julian Barnes who, explaining how books can help us steer through the tricky waters of life, said in Flaubert's Parrot: "Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't."

Yeah, Barnes put it much better.

Memory Hole

The Memory Hole is a site that keeps track of changes to official government pages and other things procured by the Freedom of Information Act, like images of the coffins of dead US soldiers from Afghanistan.

The memory hole is a reference to George Orwell's 1984:

In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices. To the right of the speakwrite, a small pneumatic tube for written messages, to the left, a larger one for newspapers; and in the side wall, within easy reach of Winston's arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating. This last was for the disposal of waste paper. Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in every room but at short intervals in every corridor. For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.

Worst Mothers in Literature

BookFinder compiled a list of the worst mothers in literature. This is by no means recent, but I only just stumbled across it.

Onion Google Article

While only the AV Club section of The Onion is an actual news site, some people get a little confused. So: this is not a real news article about Google responding to privacy concerns in an unsettlingly specific apology.

"Americans have every right to be angry at us," Google spokesperson Janet Kemper told reporters. "Though perhaps Dale Gilbert should just take a few deep breaths and go sit in his car and relax, like they tell him to do at the anger management classes he attends over at St. Francis Church every Tuesday night."

"Breathe in, breathe out," Kemper added. "We wouldn't want you to have another incident, Dale. Not when you've been doing so well."

Spycam Again

This Frontline video looks at a school improving after introducing laptops for all the students. It's called 'How Google Saved a School', but aside from using Google documents, I don't know how true that is. Right about four and a half minutes in the assistant principal shows how he can monitor the students. He can see if they're using chat programs and interrupt them to tell them to go back to work. He can also take pictures of them with the laptop's camera, which is still really creepy.

Google Execs vs. Italian Privacy Laws

Some Google executives were charged with breaking privacy laws of Italy because someone uploaded a video to YouTube in which a child with Down's Syndrome was taunted and hit by other schoolchildren.

While the executives had nothing to do with the incident, they still had charges filed against them and received suspended sentencing. One of them, David Drummond, had this to say about the verdict:

"I intend to vigorously appeal this dangerous ruling. It sets a chilling precedent. If individuals like myself and my Google colleagues who had nothing to do with the harassing incident, its filming or its uploading onto Google Video can be held criminally liable solely by virtue of our position at Google, every employee of any internet hosting service faces similar liability."

Google plans to appeal the verdict.

Why the Internet Will Fail

Back in 1995, a guy named Clifford Stoll wrote an essay about why the internet would fail.

Then there’s cyberbusiness. We’re promised instant catalog shopping–just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet–which there isn’t–the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

Goodness, we can't function without salespeople!

That's perhaps unfair. I've met plenty of helpful salespeople who have answered my questions. Still, a necessity? Not always. Sometimes the internet is better informed than a salesperson. On the other hand, I can never tell if a shirt in a shop online will look okay on me, and I definitely can't just give it to someone who will seek out the proper size for me.

Mr. Stoll has a point. Yes, teachers are important. So are librarians! But saying the entire enterprise will fail because of a few shortcomings - some of which aren't even shortcomings anymore - was just silly. I wonder what he has to say now? At least he makes really cool bottles.

Library Social Workers

The San Fransisco Public Library has hired a social worker to help it's homeless patrons.

"Public libraries are trying their best to serve their users and people who have traditionally been non-users," Alire said. "I hope that what the San Francisco Public Library has done by hiring a social worker serves as a model, because these people are educated and trained to help these patrons who have every right to use the public library system."

More libraries across the country are hiring therapists to train staff members how to handle stressful patrons. Edmond Otis, a psychotherapist, trains librarians how to talk to patrons who may be mentally ill or on drugs.

"There is a gigantic homeless population that basically 'passes' except nobody knows where they sleep," Otis said. "That population is growing. But we're looking at the mentally ill and drug addicted. And there are ways of talking to someone." That includes remaining calm, treating all patrons with respect, and setting rules and sticking to them, he said.

I hope many more libraries follow San Fransisco Public Library's example. I would definitely appreciate training on how to deal with high or mentally handicapped people. That is some scary stuff.

Google's Algorithm

It's been far too long since the Google tag has come up. Here, learn about their search algorithms.

Take, for instance, the way Google’s engine learns which words are synonyms. “We discovered a nifty thing very early on,” Singhal says. “People change words in their queries. So someone would say, ‘pictures of dogs,’ and then they’d say, ‘pictures of puppies.’ So that told us that maybe ‘dogs’ and ‘puppies’ were interchangeable. We also learned that when you boil water, it’s hot water. We were relearning semantics from humans, and that was a great advance.”

But there were obstacles. Google’s synonym system understood that a dog was similar to a puppy and that boiling water was hot. But it also concluded that a hot dog was the same as a boiling puppy. The problem was fixed in late 2002 by a breakthrough based on philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theories about how words are defined by context. As Google crawled and archived billions of documents and Web pages, it analyzed what words were close to each other. “Hot dog” would be found in searches that also contained “bread” and “mustard” and “baseball games” — not poached pooches. That helped the algorithm understand what “hot dog” — and millions of other terms — meant. “Today, if you type ‘Gandhi bio,’ we know that bio means biography,” Singhal says. “And if you type ‘bio warfare,’ it means biological.”

SciFi Symphony

The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay Symphonic Band and Wind Symphony is having a concert based on science fiction video games, books, manga, anime, and movies.

I definitely approve of their inclusion of One-Winged Angel, an awesome song used in the Final Fantasy VII video game.

“I’ve been really impressed by the intense relationship students have to this music,” Collins said. “They have known and loved these pieces for many years, and getting to perform them in public is a real kick for them.

University students who come in costume can get in free by showing their student card.

Forging Author Signatures is Bad

Forrest R. Smith III, a guy with a stately name but perhaps not the best conscience, carefully forged the signatures of famous authors in first edition books and sold them on eBay.

Another bookseller noticed that someone was buying first-edition books and a short time later those same books were being put up for sale, but as signed copies of a book whose author was dead, he said. - Boing Boing article

I can forge my brother's signature pretty well. I don't think he's going to become a famous author, though. Maybe he should work on that.

School Spycams

A school in Pennsylvania has a security feature on the laptops it lends out to students that allows them to snap photos of the students in their own homes. The system has been disabled due to a lawsuit. How very, very creepy.

Howtoons

Snagged from BoingBoing! Sort of. Howtoons are fun instructions for crafts with educational value. Or at least the one for goggles has some information about the human eye on it.

Howtoons has just finished a project in collaboration with Lemelson-MIT InvenTeams called Seeing the Future: A Visual Communication Guide. It's a drawing/inventing guide that teaches kids or adults how to get big ideas on paper.

Seven Books Lost to History

From Cracked: 7 Books We Lost to History That Would Have Changed the World. I have more trust in Cracked's skill at humour than I do at research, but it's still a good read. I like Ab urbe condita libri and the rare books section of the Grand Library of Baghdad, which was 'the Library of Congress of its time' according to this article.

This page is not entirely safe for reading at work (NSFW).

Stolen Book Sparks Love Affair

Here is a touching story about how stealing a library book sparked a romance.

Library and Archives Canada Displays Olympic Exhibits

Library and Archives Canada (LAC) has put together two displays of Olympic portraits in Vancouver and Ottawa respectively. These include drawings, paintings, and photographs of Canadian Olympic medalists.

Happy Grover Appreciation Day

In a cheap move, today's post is to wish everyone a happy Grover Appreciation Day.

It is very vaguely topical because it leads to the discussion of the popular children's book, The Monster at the End of This Book. Sadly, the twist ending does not translate well to online format. Eat that, ebooks!

Harry Potter, Freedom of Speech, and Failure

JK Rowling gave a commencement speech at Harvard University about the fringe benefits of failure. You can also watch it here:

J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement from Harvard Magazine on Vimeo.

I thought one of the most interesting parts was when Rowling spoke of the time she worked at Amnesty International's headquarters in London:

Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard, and read.

And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before.

Amnesty mobilises thousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have. The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet. My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.

Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s places.

Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.

The CLDF and People's Icky Rights

A manga collector in the United States has been sentenced to six months of jail time after pleading guilty to charges of obscenity. The obscene works? Manga books with illustrations involving child sex and bestiality.

My immediate reaction is 'ew'. It's a reaction a lot people have, from what I've read on sites, but it's possibly knee-jerk. There are a few reasons this is not a fair ruling, one of which has been 'how do they determine which cartoon characters are eighteen, anyway?' The CLDF - the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund - supports cases like this. A lot about comic books is still misunderstood. Neil Gaiman, a strong supporter of the CLDF, has written a long argument as to why people should defend the 'icky' rights of others in response to a letter he received.

You ask, What makes it worth defending? and the only answer I can give is this: Freedom to write, freedom to read, freedom to own material that you believe is worth defending means you're going to have to stand up for stuff you don't believe is worth defending, even stuff you find actively distasteful, because laws are big blunt instruments that do not differentiate between what you like and what you don't, because prosecutors are humans and bear grudges and fight for re-election, because one person's obscenity is another person's art.

Because if you don't stand up for the stuff you don't like, when they come for the stuff you do like, you've already lost.

Save the Newspaper YouTube Video

Mystery Book

There's a mysterious book at the Reading Public Library in Pennsylvania. With a flowered cover and orange lettering that looks kind of like Hindi but isn't. Very odd.

No Silence

Mark Kerr wrote an editorial for the EMC, a newspaper in Kingston, Ontario, about how glad he is that libraries are not silent.

On the first night of my introduction to library sciences course, the instructor asked how many people wanted to be librarians because they 'liked quiet'. She looked at those of us who raised our hands with amusement. "Boy," she said, "Are you in for a surprise."

As it turned out, I was not really up to date on what libraries were like. I had the common misconception that they were still quiet areas, places you could only speak in a whisper. The picture my instructor painted for me over the course of the... well, the course, was a far livelier and colourful place. And in the end, it was this new sort of library that made me decide I wanted to be a librarian. It was far less boring than I'd worried.

First African American Librarian in Clearwater Writes a Book

Christine Wigfall Morris, the first black librarian in Clearwater, Florida, is writing her memoirs. I bet that's going to be an interesting read. The article relates one of her recollections from the 1960s:

"A little white girl walked in the library and she said to me, she says, 'Is this the library for me too?,'" Morris said. "I said, 'Yes, it's for all races.' I said, 'Come and join us.'"

Newspaper Website Subscriptions

So this one newspaper decided to put it's website up behind a 'pay wall' - people need to pay a subscription fee to read the articles - and there were only 35 people who signed up for it.

I'll admit I kind of giggled. I think what the newspaper failed to realize was that it's not the only news source out there. If I follow a link to the New York Times website and it turns out to be broken (they don't allow permanent access without paying for it), I will just look it up on a search engine.

I find that New York Times thing really annoying, by the way. Some articles are still interesting months later, and not allowing people to share them past an expiry date is irritating... particularly when people can look up newspaper archives in libraries for free anyway.

Mean Cold Lady

I found this letter to the editor in which a woman with a cane claims she got to the library five minutes early on a cold day and the library wouldn't open despite the people waiting outside. I was sympathetic; poor woman, handicapped, c'mon, just five minutes, people! Then I started reading the comments.

It turns out this woman knows exactly when the library opens and could have waited in her car until the proper time; it seems people often want to get there first so they can get to the computers. The comments from other library goers indicate this woman is unpleasant to deal with and prone to complaints. My sympathy waned.

Then, of course, there were the comments about how handicapped spaces should be moved further away from the doors because 'many peoples' only handicap is being fat and lazy'. Ouch.

I believe libraries should be accessible to people with disabilities. I also believe having a disability doesn't mean a person can use it as an excuse to be a jerk.

Taking Books Personally

This NYTimes article by Mokoto Rich discusses how some readers like to keep books to themselves; they don't enjoy discussing them or feel a sort of ownership of the ones they love to the point where they're disappointed if others like them ('that's mine!'). Interesting, I think.

Personally, I'd rather talk about a book. Preferably with someone I know and like, but I love hearing other people's impressions.

With Enough Libraries, All Content is Free

From Jessamyn West:

“With enough libraries, all content is free.” That is to say… if the world was one big library and we all had interlibrary loan at that library, we could lend anything to anyone. The funding structures of libraries currently mean that in many cases we’re duplicating [and paying for] content that we could be sharing. This is at the heart of a lot of the copyright battles of today and, to my mind, what’s really behind the EBSCO/Gale/vendors. Time Magazine is losing money and not having a good plan for keeping their income level up, decides to offer exclusive contracts to vendors and allows them to bid. EBSCO wins, Gale loses. Any library not using EBSCO loses. Patrons lose and don’t even know they’ve lost.

Black vs. White Covers

Author Justine Balestier writes about the ARC* cover of her book, 'Liar', misrepresenting her protagonist. Justine's main character is black, but the US cover showed a white girl**.

This post is about a lot of things: how much say authors get regarding the covers of their books (not much), how common a problem 'white-washing' book covers is, how unwelcoming it is for young black readers to walk into a YA section and only find white faces on covers.



* ARC stands for 'Advance Reader Copy'.
** There is a new cover now.

The Amazon/Macmillan Thing

I wanted a good place to read up on the kerfuffle about Amazon unlisting books from Macmillan and I think I found one: All The Many Ways Amazon So Very Failed the Weekend from John Scalzi's blog.

Five Lessons Learned From an E-Book Experiment

Shane Richmond decided to read only e-books from October 2009 to January 2010.

Five lessons he learned:

1. The weight is a nice advantage
2. Page turning is less irritating than you’d think
3. Being able to search a book is very useful
4. Text formatting can be annoyingly sloppy
5. Availability of titles is the biggest problem

Read the article for explanations of these five points. I was sort of surprised by number two, but it made sense; you get used to pressing the button to turn a page before you finish reading the last words on the page.

Book Reading as Racial Harassment

In 2007 a student working his way through college was found guilty of racial harassment for reading a book in public. Some of his co-workers had been offended by the book’s cover, which included pictures of men in white robes and peaked hoods along with the tome’s title, Notre Dame vs. the Klan. The student desperately explained that it was an ordinary history book, not a racist tract, and that it in fact celebrated the defeat of the Klan in a 1924 street fight. Nonetheless, the school, without even bothering to hold a hearing, found the student guilty of “openly reading [a] book related to a historically and racially abhorrent subject.”

An article about political correstness on campuses and how it's changed. It quickly becomes centered on the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), but fair enough.

Censoring a Version of Anne Frank's Diary

The Washington Post has published an article about schools in a county in Virginia not teaching a version of Anne Frank's diary. Which sounds pretty awful. But! They're still teaching an older version, the one her father arranged which left out entries Culpeper County schools found 'sexually explicit'. So they're still using the older one, just not the one with the bits about her sexuality or unflattering things about her mother and other people. The recent version will remain available in the library but the old version will be used in class.

Are the kids old enough to understand that? Would it help if they could identify more with Anne - someone who writes things that aren't nice, someone who was just starting to figure out her sexuality - or is the original version still good despite the censorship? Is it even censorship? Does the new version contain everything she ever wrote in the diary, or are there still parts missing?

This is hardly the first time censorship has come up with the Diary of Anne Frank:

The ALA has documented only six challenges to "The Diary of Anne Frank" since it began monitoring formal written complaints to remove or restrict books in 1990... One record dating to 1983 from an Alabama textbook committee said the book was "a real downer" and called for its rejection from schools.

See, now that reason's just stupid.

123 Hack Me

A New York Times article reveals many people are still using simple, easily-guessed passwords.

Back at the dawn of the Web, the most popular account password was “12345.” Today, it’s one digit longer but hardly safer: “123456.”

This list comes from a list of 32 million passwords a hacker posted from a company that makes software used by social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. It was only briefly posted, but it was downloaded and examined by hackers and security specialists alike. What a great resource!

According to the article, here are the top 32 passwords:

• 123456
• 12345
• 123456789
• password
• iloveyou
• princess
• rockyou
• 1234567
• 12345678
• abc123
• nicole
• daniel
• babygirl
• monkey
• jessica
• lovely
• michael
• ashley
• 654321
• qwerty
• iloveu
• michelle
• 111111
• 0
• tigger
• password1
• sunshine
• chocolate
• anthony
• angel
• FRIENDS
• soccer

I knew this guy in high school with a PDA. I was intrigued by it; he let me play with it. I remember asking him what the password was and he would say, "It's a secret." After a sadly long time, I clued in that the password was 'itsasecret'.

Confessions of a Book Pirate

An article from The Millions about everything you wanted to know about book piracy. Maybe not everything, but still quite a bit. The Millions, an online literary magazine, interviewed a book pirate who goes by the name 'The Real Caterpillar'.

Just because someone downloads a file, it does not mean they would have bought the product I think this is the key fact that many people in the music industry ignore – a download does not translate to a lost sale. I own hundreds of paper copies of books I have e-copies of, many of which were bought after downloading the e-copy. In other cases I have downloaded books I would never have purchased, simply because they were recommended or sounded interesting.

For the Love of Culture, Google, Copyright and our Future

I can't really package this any better than the site I got it from, BoingBoing. This is one of those links that's also a placeholder for me so I can go back and read later; this one is long: For the Love of Culture, Google, Copyright and our Future. I'm so cheap I'm even grabbing the same quote BoingBoing did:

Whatever your view of it, notice first just how different this future promises to be. In real libraries, in real space, access is not metered at the level of the page (or the image on the page). Access is metered at the level of books (or magazines, or CDs, or DVDs). You get to browse through the whole of the library, for free. You get to check out the books you want to read, for free. The real-space library is a den protected from the metering of the market. It is of course created within a market; but like kids in a playroom, we let the life inside the library ignore the market outside.

This freedom gave us something real. It gave us the freedom to research, regardless of our wealth; the freedom to read, widely and technically, beyond our means. It was a way to assure that all of our culture was available and reachable--not just that part that happens to be profitable to stock. It is a guarantee that we have the opportunity to learn about our past, even if we lack the will to do so. The architecture of access that we have in real space created an important and valuable balance between the part of culture that is effectively and meaningfully regulated by copyright and the part of culture that is not. The world of our real-space past was a world in which copyright intruded only rarely, and when it did, its relationship to the objectives of copyright was relatively clear.

We forget all this today.

Ancient Books

Archaeologists have dug up some rare bamboo writings in a tomb in China.

There is a possibility the strips contain an introduction written by the owner of the tomb, "Like a letter of recommendation the deceased would carry with them to the underworld to give Yanluo, the god of death", Shen said.

No word on whether they have unearthed any unspeakable ancient evils.

Ban the Dictionary!

Some southern California schools have removed Merriam Webster's 10th Edition dictionary from their classrooms due to a 'sexually graphic' definition for oral sex: "oral stimulation of the genitals".

A district spokeswoman, Betti Cadmus, said: "It's hard to sit and read the dictionary, but we'll be looking to find other things of a graphic nature."

The best part of this is that a priest chimed in against the ban:

"It is not such a bad thing for a kid to have the wherewithal to go and look up a word he may have even heard on the playground," father Jason Rogers told local press. "You have to draw the line somewhere. What are they going to do next, pull encyclopaedias because they list parts of the human anatomy like the penis and vagina?"

There are also diagrams in encyclopaedias. That is some dirty, dirty stuff.


UPDATE: It's back! But you can choose whether your child uses it or another version.

Haiti People Finder

Alright, it may not have anything to do with libraries, but this is the Haiti people finder project. It does feature working with databases, which is a librarian thing, and also helping people - also a librarian thing. If you have time and can follow instructions, you can help.

Librarian fail: I neglected to notice where I got this link from.

The Princess Problem

Patricia Coppard has written an article about the 'Princess Problem'. She writes about how her daughter is influenced by the books and movies she reads and sees about princesses:

There's a princess in my house. I know she's a princess, because she wears a purple fun-fur-and-silver-glitter tiara, changes her clothes five times a day, and issues regular commands in an imperious voice.

I'm not sure if that's the fault of the media the kid's exposed to or more a sign of parenting; I wish I knew if she ever told her daughter not to speak to people in that tone, for example.

I am slowly but surely trying to instill my feminist values into her -- to absolutely no effect.

One day, she's poring over the Toys R Us flyer when she spots two Barbie-type dolls, one with long blond hair and wearing a bikini, the other dressed like a ballerina with brown hair in a bun. "I like this one and this one," she says, pointing to the dolls. "Do you like them, Mommy?" "I like the ballerina, but not the other one," I say. "Why not?" "Because she's a bimbo." "Well, I like the ballerina AND the bimbo, Mommy."

Okay, say what? Why is a girl in a bikini automatically a bimbo? Do ballerinas never go to the beach? While I understand the need to instill positive values in kids today, I don't think it should come at the cost of looking down at any sort of girl. Bikinis are not inherently bad. It's not like the daughter wasn't interested in the ballerina; she just liked the bikini doll, too.

This is not coming from a bimbo girl. When I was growing up, I had Barbies, sure. I also had She-Ra, Princess of Power, who ran around with a sword beating bad guys up, and I played with Battle Beasts, anthropomorphic animals in armor with weapons. I had Lego, too. I think girls can do anything they put their minds to - being scientists, mathematicians, and ballerinas. They can still go to the beach.

The article gets better when Patricia lists off books that she feels are 'Anti-Princess' such as 'Princess Pigsty' by Cornelia Funke, 'Princesses Aren't Quitters' by Kate Lum, 'The Princess and the Packet of Frozen Peas' by Tony Wilson, 'Sleeping Bobby' by Will and Mary Pope Osborne, and 'Princess Smartypants' by Babette Cole. Of course she mentions Robert Munsch's 'The Paper Bag Princess', too.

I probably would have loved those books as a kid. I did love Paper Bag Princess and continue to think it's a great book. I just don't think little girls should be taught to be disdainful of others. I like the ballerina doll better because I admire ballerinas; there's no need to include name-calling.