Articles & Nifty Links

If you read my last post–which I think of as "yesterday’s" but is really more like "two days ago’s"–you know that some very smart, observant, and well-spoken individuals think that the Era of American Participatory Democracy is either on the ropes or gone for good, depending on your reading of their arguments.  That, if true, would suck.  At the very least we’d have to deal with the fact that we’ve sold out our collective ability to make stuff, do stuff, and solve real problems in real time for cheap toys and doodads, which break if you play too roughly with them.

But as if that were not enough, now comes this. There is a decent chance (estimated at 10%, which is significant but not something to really lose sleep over on a nightly basis) that something big enough to punch a hole in our planet will hit us some time this century. That’s not really news to people who have any interest in astronomy or geology–it’s a big planet, and the solar system is crowded, and pieces of space junk are always hitting us or coming close to hitting us. Less often and to lesser effect now than, say, 1 billion years ago, when the solar system was  getting the last kinks worked out and mountains routinely punched holes big enough swallow Ontario in the planets and their moons. Until now this has not been that big a problem.  Mostly because, well, we’ve only been here a short time, nearly all of which (until just recently) has been spent dealing with more immediate concerns like hunting, gathering, and growing food and sheltering ourselves from the elements.

Think of it this way. We at some point all do the same thing, which is sit on our beds, and watch as the sunbeams stream in through the window, illuminating every speck of dust in the air before splashing down on to the bedspread and floor.  I’m still fascinated by that.  It’s possible to stare at this display of the sheer thickness of the air just in our bedrooms–air  filled with tiny particles shed by anything and everything around us, including dust, pollen, bits of skin, hair (both from us and our pets), plaster and insulation from the ceiling–for hours. Now, these things are all tiny compared to our heads, or even our eyes, yet the space around us is filled with them, but since they don’t bother us, we don’t even think about them. Then one day, some speck of God knows what hits your eyeball at exactly the right speed and angle and you feel a shooting pain in your eye, so you blink, then you stagger, maybe you fall down, and the only thing on your mind is how the hell did that happen?

Well, it happened because your luck ran out. It’s the odds. Ten billion billion trillion specks of dust whizz past you or smack into a part of you that’s not sensitive enough to notice, but eventually, your luck runs out, then owie!!

The solar system isn’t that different. The biggest difference is that the Earth is an eyeball that’s roughly 8,000 miles wide, and the last real owie that hit is was about 65 million years ago. The result was a massive underwater crater near the Yucatan Peninsula and a change in  environment that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs.  It’s estimated that the rock which caused that was something like a mile wide which is pretty tiny compared to a lot of the stuff that’s out there now. But out there these falling rocks remain, just waiting for that ever so elusive gravity nudge that sends it on a course towards another major owie.

The thing we have going for us is that fact that we are here.  We actually have the tools and knowledge we’d need to see something like a mile-wide rock from space while it’s still far enough away to do something about it.  We aren’t doing much at the moment, which is disappointing because movies like Deep Impact and Armageddon aside,  it really is just a matter of time and  the chance of any given event happening is 100% if your time horizon is long enough.  Clearly the editors of The Atlantic though it was worth a cover story.

Anyway, read the article. Enjoy!

From WNYC’s web site:

Anna Kirkland, assistant professor of women’s studies and political science at the University of Michigan and author of Fat Rights: Dilemmas of Difference and Personhood, and  blogger Lara Frater, author of
Fat Chicks Rule!: How To Survive in a Thin-Centric World, 
look at the legal question of discrimination against the overweight.

You can listen on the radio, or you can stream the show.  Enjoy!

In the depths of my disgust at the news of the New York Public Library’s name change yesterday I completely missed this rather cool bit of news: Friday is gaming day at NYPL .

The article in the time is called "Taking Play Seriously at the Public Library With Young Video Gamers," and it begins:

And you thought libraries were supposed to be quiet. Not on Friday.

Under the Beaux-Arts arches of Astor Hall at the New York Public Library’s
flagship building on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, thumping hard-rock
beats mixed with tennis-ball thwacks and the screech of burning tires
late Friday afternoon, as the library showed off the latest addition to
its collections of books, films, music and maps: video games.

Beneath
the engraved names of august benefactors like John Jacob Astor and
Simon Guggenheim, several hundred children, young adults and the people
who love them virtually jumped, drove, battled and rocked out as the
library celebrated its burgeoning “Game On @ the Library!” initiative.

      Good news, for sure. But the best quotes are a bit further down:

“What we’re seeing is that in addition to simply helping bring kids
into the library in the first place, games are having a broader effect
on players, and they have the potential to be a great teaching tool,”
Mr. Martin said. “If a kid takes a test and fails, that’s it. But in a
game, if you fail you get to take what you’ve learned and try again.

“In
a lot of these games you have to understand the rules, you have to
understand the game’s world, its story. For some games you have to
understand its history and the characters in order to play effectively.”

You betcha! That last paragraph applies to life as well as gaming, if metaphorically. (For anyone who doesn’t believe it, I have one word: "Iraq.")

(A great big thank you to Karen Munro, E-Learning Librarian and iLibrarian for nabbing this.)

Now that the weekend is upon us, I present you with some reading material.  No introduction for this article, except to say that if you are (or have been, or plan to be) heavily invested in "the market"–by which phrase we generally mean the financial institutions in which we park our life’s savings in hope of retiring wealthier than we are now–you should probably read it.  Heck, even if you remain a card-carrying socialist and think that markets are the worst things ever, read it anyway.

As always with the material I link to, I don’t agree with everything he says (although being the founder and CEO of Overstock.com, I’d expect he knows what he’s talking about), but I agree this subject is something to think about very carefully. (Very carefully.  I mean, this is your life’s savings here!)

"Deep Capture," by Patrick Byrne.

Enjoy!

It’s been years since I edited anything more complex than a typed website column, but this article in Slate about documentary editors–meaning the folks who prepare original hand written manuscripts for the press rather than film makers–made for fascinating reading.  Definitely worth a look if you have time today (or any day).

And if the subject of original manuscripts editing for historical projects really interests you and you have some time regularly on your hands, the Distributed Proofreaders project is definitely worth checking.  Call it a wiki devoted to deciphering freshly scanned material from elderly tomes.  That’s not a great description, since by strict definition, it’s not a wiki–there’s a strict hierarchy of who can contribute what–but it’s still worth a look.

Enjoy!

I know, I know, I owe you a discussion on how some knowledge of cataloging can help you refine your OPAC/web search strategies.  The article was begun and then put aside as the Art Institute donated 4 boxes of new books that need to be cataloged, processed and moved to the library. That will take some time, and no, I’m not suggesting that the entire job must be completed before I get back to work on the article. But it will take a bit of time to get something worthwhile written and posted.

In the meantime, I did spy two very nifty posts on the differences between daily life in 2008 and, say 1948. The first by Charles Hugh-Smith is titled "A Great Depression, or Simply a Return to Normal Life," and the second by "Protagoras" is called "How Our Parents Shopped."  Both are excellently written and  a bit of an eye-opener for those of us who don’t remember a time when "getting out of the house" and "going to the mall" weren’t considered synonymous.

Enjoy!

I read something like this and I honestly don’t know whether to laugh or cry:

LOS ANGELES – The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum
can’t locate or account for tens of thousands of valuable mementos of
Reagan’s White House years, according to a published report.

An audit by the National Archives inspector general concluded that the library in Simi Valley
was unable to properly account for more than 80,000 objects out of its
collection of some 100,000 artifacts, the Los Angeles Times reported on
its Web site Wednesday night.

The audit was connected to an investigation into allegations that a
former employee stole from the Reagans’ collection of gifts from
foreign leaders and other dignitaries, but sloppy record-keeping has
hindered the probe, Inspector General Paul Brachfeld said

"We have been told by sources that a person who had access capability
removed holdings," Brachfeld told the Times. "But we can’t lock in as
to what those may be."

Part of the problem has to do with a lack of supervision and a "near
universal" security breakdown that may have left the mementos
vulnerable to pilfering, "the scope of which will likely never be
known," the audit found.

Considering that The Great Communicator was something of a prototype of the Dear Leader status the current government has been giving our presidents of late, you would think that they’d keep better watch over his stuff.  You know that when George W. Bush’s library is finally built, it’ll probably have watch towarers, land mines, electric fences and a platoon or two of Blackwater security goons watching the joint from a solar dome on a platform in space.  I’m not suggesting that we  necessarily need to turn  libraries into Fort Knox but would having consistent, measurable, and proven security systems for them hurt?

Even if I were not already a hard core fan of the Economist, I’d think this was a Great Idea:

More than 160 years of articles from the Economist are set to become
available online with the launch of The Economist Historical Archive
1843-2003.

The archive will contain more than 600,000 pages of the weekly magazine’s reporting and analysis.

It is a joint project between Gale – part of Cengage Learning – and the Economist.

"The Economist Historical Archive is more than a database – it is a
remarkable record of the most significant world events over the past
160 years through the unbiased, probing eyes of the Economist," said
John Micklethwait, the magazine’s editor-in-chief.

The rest of the article can be read here. Enjoy!

If you enjoy the kind of non-partisan research on politics that Factcheck.org provides, you might want to take a good look at a new competitor, Politifact.com. They have a top notch research staff and a very accessible style of presentation. We’ll see how they evolve over time. In the mean time I’ll post the link in the sidebar as well.

In the interest of making genuine news available to anyone who wants it, I came across this article a short time ago and have decided to link it here.  It’s not so much that I believe every word that Putin says, so much as I despise censorship and I haven’t seen this stuff anywhere locally.

The upshot: the nuclear arms race between the U.S. and Russia is accelerating and the prospects for reducing it are grim.  The transcript of Valdamir Putin’s interview is there, and it hasn’t appeared anywhere in the main stream media that I can determine (though a couple of nifty articles about how Russia is "planning to aim nuclear missiles at Europe" have been widely distributed.)  I’m not here to analyze the contents, but you should read it and decide for yourself how close we are to actually seeing WWIII (in the now-oldskool MAD sense) in the next few years (maybe months, who the heck knows anymore?)  Matt Savinar did post a fair analysis of his own here, and while he may sound alarmist to some, I don’t think alarm is unwarranted.

When I was a kid, maybe 9 years old, I sat and watched a movie with my parents one summer night. The name of the movie was "On the Beach," which was more or less based on the book of the same name written by Nevil Shute.  The premise is grim: a full frontal nuclear exchange between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. wipes out the northern hemisphere and the fallout from all the weapons used wipes out all life on the planet.  The book takes place in Australia and while everyone there is going about their daily lives, they’re really just waiting to die as the fallout clouds travel south.

Shute’s weapons were juiced up for the book, laced with cobalt to produce higher-than usual  fallout content, which doesn’t work in real life.   The point was that WWIII = the Death of Planet Earth.  Even if the science was wrong, the image worked to communicate the message behind the words.  And it was an image that most people involved in the arms  race between us the the Russian subscribed to or at least had in the back of their minds when their words "nuclear war" came to mind.  God knows that’s how we civvies thought of it.

Clearly that image is gone from the minds of those who hold the power these days.  At any rate they are gone from the minds of those Americans currently running the show.  And to my mind, that can’t be good for anyone, because if twentieth century history tell us anything it tells us that you can’t bully Russia.  Stalin purged 30 million of his own people to satisfy his paranoid fantasies of assassination and later, his visions of an imminent invasion by Japan.  Putin, an ex-KGB guy, has eradicated entire towns in Chechnya in the name of counter-terrorism.  In the past we could trade with them, bribe them, and refuse to help at all if we thought we had nothing to gain, but we never actually bullied them.  (I realize that putting our defenses on high alert after they’d done the same is something else.)  The Russians are   the ones who absorbed the bulk of battlefield deaths in WWII and kept on going despite shortages of literally everything, including hope.  They are obstinate, observant, and fatalistic.  Point a knife at one and he’ll laugh at you because he knows that even if you kill him, a half dozen of his friends will find you and kill you in return.  Point 3,000 nuclear missiles at them and they’ll do whatever they think they have to just to make sure you don’t get to go the funeral.  (I admit being married into a Russian family by way of my sister-in-law might be coloring my views.)

Anyway, read the transcript, maybe spare a few minutes to wonder what comes next, and perhaps take a few precautions and make a few plans.  (I did.)

But if the world does not blow up in the near future, I’ll be starting as the new Tech Services Librarian at Metropolitan College of NY on Monday.  Wish me luck!