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!