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.