Cartoon Worth a Thousand Words

I think this Jim Morin cartoon pretty much hits the nail on the head:

White House deploys Open-Source Drupal

Whitehouse.gov is now Drupal-powered. I commented on this (and Drupal use in libraries) over at the CMS blog.

Squeezing 1TB of data onto a fingernail-size chip

See article in computerworld.com about breakthrough at NCSU: "Engineers create fingernail-size chip that holds 1TB of data", and featured today on slashdot. 

U.S. Industrial Decline (as viewed from Germany)

A thoughtful and poignant (if also left-slanted) essay from the Berliner Umschau, translated by Watching America: "American De-Industrialization Continues Unabated."

This part in particular made me wince: "When word gradually spread that Detroit automobiles were of inferior quality, all three American car manufacturers responded with attempts to inoculate their customers with doses of chauvinism: Buy American! Dealerships were festooned with American flags and banners. This took on a life of its own with auto dealers competing with one another to have the biggest flag. When the foreign journalist mentioned earlier last returned to the United States, he reported seeing a gargantuan American flag flying over a dealership on a 150-foot flagpole. Instead of flying gigantic flags, no one apparently ever came up with the idea of building better cars."

(Note: glancing at the car section of the Consumer Reports Buying Guide for 2008, it's clear the U.S. still trails Japan and Germany on quality and reliability.)

Jung's Red Book to be Published after typed drafts found at Beinecke and Elsewhere

The New York Times Magazine 9/30/09 cover story, “ The Holy Grail of the Unconscious: What the Unearthing of Carl Jung's Red Book is Doing to the Jungs and the Jungians (and maybe your Dreams)", recounts how the “most influential unpublished work in the history of psychology” is now about to be published.

Jung's complete illustrated manuscript had been locked away in a safe deposit box for many years by his heirs. Recently, though, two incomplete and un-illustrated typed drafts of the Red Book were discovered, one at the home of Jung’s transcriptionist's daughter, and the other at Yale’s Beinecke Library "in an uncataloged box of papers belonging to a well-known German publisher."

In order to prevent selective, unauthorized quotation from the typed drafts, the family decided it was time, 100 years after Jung wrote it, to allow the original mansucript to be scanned and published .

A 1,300-year-old Japanese Hotel

Hōshi Ryokan, featured today on gizmag.com, is the world's oldest hotel and its oldest continuously-operating business, owned and operated by 46 generations of the same family over 1,291 years so far. According to gizmag, it was established by a Buddhist disciple at a hot spring in Komatsu, Japan, after its location was revealed to his master in a dream.

"Nine Weirdest Things at Yale" (YDN)

Yale Daily News article suggests "The Nine Weirdest Things at Yale", two of which are in the Library: the Voynich manuscript at the Beinecke, and the Greco-Roman-Egyptian Magical amulets in the Babylonian Collection.

"1959: The Year that Changed Everything"

Just finished reading Fred Kaplan's "1959: the Year Everything Changed", and while I'm not convinced  1959 qualifies as the singular hinge year of the 20th century, I'm not sure that matters (even to Kaplan), and it's a good book in any case.

He analyzes and weaves together a wide variety of events, e.g.: Castro seizing power in Cuba; Allen Ginsberg reading poetry to rapt audiences in New York; the Lunik 1 spacecraft breaking free of Earth's orbit; William Burroughs publishing "Naked Lunch"; John Howard Griffen publishing "Black Like Me"; Miles Davis recording "Kind of Blue"; John Coltrane, "Giant Steps"; Dave Brubeck, "Time Out"; Ornette Coleman, "The Shape of Jazz to Come"; Jack Kilby introducing the integrated circuit (the microchip); IBM selling the first 'modern' computer: the model 1401;  Malcolm X traveling to Mecca; the opening of Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum;  Searl Pharmaceuticals submitting Enovid, a.k.a. the birth control pill, for FDA approval, etc., etc .

The common theme is a sense of liberation from traditional constraints (e.g., hackneyed art, pervasive racism, the 'tyranny of numbers', and an optimism (and dread) toward the emerging "new frontier" in politics, technology, and art.

"Emerging Technologies in Academic Libraries" (International Conference in Norway)

Per emtacl10 announcement: "The future success of academic libraries is dependent on in-depth understandings of the relevance of emerging technologies. Our focus must be on accessibility, interaction, intuitivity, sharing, user-driven content and other web 2.0 challenges. This is a conference for academic library workers and others with a general interest in emerging technologies and electronic information services."

Learning Languages on the Web

I'm grateful to dchud for pointing out to me these two outstanding open-access web sites: lang-8 and smart.fm . I'm particularly intrigued by the way lang-8 connects people around the world who are trying to improve their language skills. For example, it lets you keep a "journal" that native readers will review and correct for you (and you do the same for them), and might even help you make new friends along the way. You collect something like karma points for correcting other people's journal entries and doing other helpful things, which then elevates your site ranking. What I like about smart.fm are the language tutorials (along with toolkits for building your own tutorials) with digital flash cards, vocabulary quizes, example sentences, native speaker pronunciation, usage notes, and other features. I wonder if these kinds of sites will soon be putting the text book publishers out of business.

Nicholson Baker reviews Kindle 2

Nicholson Baker asks in this week's New Yorker, "Can the Kindle really improve on the book?" His answer, so far, seems to be "not yet." The Vizplex electronic paper is less legible than print, and DRM constraints are especially problematic: "Kindle books aren't transferable. You can't give them away or lend them or sell them. You can't print them. They are closed clumps of digital code that only one purchaser can own. A copy of a Kindle book dies with its possessor" (p. 27).

"Semantic Interoperability of Linked Data" (Conference)

Another potentially great conference, "Semantic Interoperability of Linked Data," is now open for registration. The program will "explore the conceptual and practical issues in breaking the constraints of data silos and connecting pieces of data, information, and knowledge. Metadata is a key to these processes supporting publishing and interlinking structured data on the Semantic Web." Takes place in Seoul, South Korea.

Code4Lib 2010

Code4Lib 2010 is Monday February 22nd through Thursday February 25th at the Renaissance Asheville Hotel in Asheville, NC (compare air fares). There's a conference planning Google Group and a wiki page for signing up as a volunteer. I volunteered to help with documentation and selecting a keynote speaker.

TouchTable geodata visualizer

My dad shared this link to a Wired Science demo of the very cool $59K Touchtable, a flat-panel, wide-format, high-resolution, touch-sensitive screen, combining satellite imagery with other data sets, navigable with iPhone-like finger movements. Danny Hillis and others at applied minds did the initial development work.

Fun with METS

See notes at CMS Web Log