Blog

WORST ADVICE EVER

“I before E
except after C.” 

 

Oh, yeah?

 

The
feisty foreigner seized the beige reins in one vein-bulging hand and – weirdly
adorned in leis (a veil of distraction so no one would remember his face?)
feigned disinterest no more. The heist
of his neighbor’s heir’s freight had begun. 

 

What they
should have taught us: “I after C must follow E . . . but not literally.” (Not literally, because I’s
frequently follow C’s without an intervening E – city, cicada, scintillate – and sometimes even when an E follows – efficient.)

 

No wonder Johnnie can’t spell.

 

MORE FREE AUDIOBOOKS

Lynn Gongaware: “LibriVox – recorded by volunteers from the
public domain.”

I’m not usually a USA Today reader, which is why I managed to miss this article by Elizabeth Weise from December 18, 2005.  I think the title says it all: "This is the Google Side of Your Brain."  On the tiny chance that I’m not the only person on the planet who hasn’t read this yet, her main question is whether we’re outsourcing some portion of our collective memory to entities such as Google, which has a reuptation of being able to hand you the knowledge tidbit were searching for.  It’s a great read.

Xeni Jardin writes on the nature of what, in her experience at BoingBoing, gets filtered out of which websites, and why and how.  Meanwhile, Lily Pregill (NYAM’s Special Projects Librarian who works across the hall from me) points to an article in the current issue of Harvard Magazine, entitled "The People’s Epidemiologists" by Madeline Drexler.  Good stuff on both counts.

I know I’m a day late and dollar short with this, as I am with everything I write here, but it’s Wednesday and this caught my eye.

Linking to the NY Times is always problematic because of their new NY Times Select subscription package, but this makes linking to non-subbed articles a lot simpler.  In fact this tool is so darned useful that i stuck the link in the Reference Resources TypeList, so take a look at it.

And so, instead of pulling a whole story down from the Times (violating copyright in spirit if not in letter) or hoping that the link I post today is still good two weeks from now as the story gets archived behind a firewall, I can just post this link to this story about how a slightly revised Patriot Act just got passed in the Senate by a 95-4 vote. The good news is that there are new curbs on who can be spooked and under what conditions–not to mention limits on spooking library patrons–but the bad news is that the new limits aren’t all that great.

Oh, and "spooking" is "to spy on," for the three readers who didn’t already know. Enjoy!

Making Your Web Searches Smarter

By Michael Masterson

Recently, The Wall Street Journal
ran an article about "hidden features of Google and Yahoo engines" that
make research on the Web faster, easier, and more rewarding.
Neanderthal though I am with regard to technology, I was actually aware
of several of them:

• Using two or three words instead of one to get more relevant links
• Surrounding
  your search terms with quotation marks when you are looking for an
  exact name or phrase (such as "To Kill a Mockingbird")
• Combining quotes with extra words ("Kill a Mocking Bird" and Harper Lee)

 

[Read more…] about Google Search Tidbits

This bit comes from Terry Allen from In These Times, and it’s titled "Information Is Power." It begins thusly:

"Sometimes it’s the small abuses scurrying below radar that reveal how
profoundly the Bush administration has changed America in the name of
national security. Buried within the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism
Prevention Act of 2004 is a regulation that bars most public access to
birth and death certificates for 70 to 100 years. In much of the
country, these records have long been invaluable tools for activists,
lawyers, and reporters to uncover patterns of illness and pollution
that officials miss or ignore."

The rest is here.  Not to belittle the Bush White House in its efforts to promote secrecy to heights never before known to God or man, but the government’s proclivity to secrecy over unethical, amoral, or just embarassing tidbits, we need to remember, is not something that began in 2004 or even 2001.  It’s been going on a long, long time; the scope of what is considered secret and the extent to which the executive branch of government will go to to keep it so has merely become ridiculous recently.

Granted, there are some things that We The People do not need to know to function–troop movements, our elected representatives’ sexual exploits, and who the vice president has shot recently are examples that come readily to mind–I just happen to think that the fact that a few million of us have our email and phone conversations digitally recorded and evaluated by the NSA to no apparent good result is probably not among them.