Jeremy Clarkson opines thus in The Sunday Times: ". . . the worst word. The worst noise. The screech of Flo-Jo’s fingernails down the biggest blackboard in the world, the squeak of polystyrene on polystyrene, the cry of a baby when you’re hungover, is ‘beverage’." It’s a fun article, but I am forced to disagree:…
Found this on SearchEngineWatch.com: Hot:Real Estate Industry Uses of Satellite/Aerial Imagery. It’s a longish post with about a million hyperlinks, but it’s worth it if you have the time. The databases that are being developed in this area are huge: "The combo of online maps, satellite/aerial imagery, and real estate are a hot combo these…
Kurt Vonnegut had this to say in the Guardian this past Saturday: "The title of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 is a parody of the title of Ray Bradbury’s great science-fiction novel Fahrenheit 451. Four hundred and fifty-one degrees Fahrenheit is the combustion point, incidentally, of paper, of which books are composed. The hero of Bradbury’s…
Will Femia, author of the "Clicked" blog on MSNBC.com, declares today that: "Lessig is wrong — Lawrence Lessig is a champion of the Creative Commons movement and an advocate for loosening copyright restrictions. His current battle is over the digitization of books. Google wants to scan books into a database to make the text searchable. …
I’m honestly not sure if this is a proper reader’s advisory or not, but, it’s an awesome article: "Moving Forward–and Backward–With the English Language." This comes courtesy of the Christian Science Monitor, a newspaper I’ve been reading (online) for years without ever seeing a single article on christian science. I must be looking at the…
The December 2005 issue of TechKNOW (care of Kent State U.’s TSLibrarians listserv) is out. (It’s actually been out for a while, but the hyperlink I had only started working a short while ago–it’s fixed.) This quarter Jeanne Poole covers cataloging cleverly selected bits and pieces of the wacky (and not entirely consistent) world of…
I think "Ick!" says whatever the title doesn’t: Human Skin-Bound Books in Many Libraries Apparently this was a big thing in the 19th century. Enjoy! (or, well . . . whatever.)
Also new in 2006: it’s now a federal crime to send someone an annoying e-mail anonymously. I’d pay to hear a few FBI agents talking about how’d they go about enforcing this one. I doubt it would stand any realu judicial scritiny (or, I hope it wouldn’t) but it could just be seen as the…
Congratulate me: this is the 100th post of the Rogue Scholar. (Yea!) I started this silly thing last year as a way to help me develop how I thought about library-type work and the issues that relate to it: it gets lonely in the back office sometimes, and it pays to put pen to paper…
None of these (late again!) tidbits have anything strictly to do with library science, library management, library work, reference work, or other facets of Libraryland’s inner workings (when will I learn to be on topic with this stuff?) but they all have to do with library-related stuff that I think about from time to time.…