Don't ask me

I have no idea why sometimes posts from back when show up again on bloglines or other RSS feed apps as "new" when I haven't touched them for two weeks or more.

[URL] midomi

midomi

Oh, my. Whither next, Web 2.0?

"Our mission is to build the most comprehensive database of searchable music. You can contribute to the database by singing in midomi's online recording studio in any language or genre. The next time anyone searches for that song, your performance might be the top result!"

Oh, my.

[a nod, I suppose, is due the Tech Chronicles at sfgate.com.]

Thanks a lot, guys.

Really!

[URL] Index of artists and architects

Index of artists and architects. Digital Imaging Project: Art historical images of European and North American architecture and sculpture from classical Greek to Post-modern.

Not just European and North American anymore. Also includes images from Vietnam and Cambodia.

Mary Ann Sullivan, Bluffton University, has pulled together more than 13,000 images. Index. Monthly featured site. More.

RIP Barbaro

I was the kid who followed the Derby, the Preakness, the Belmont.

I was the kid who read horse stories.

I was the kid who grew up to know who Russell Baze was and why I should care.

I was the kid who talked Dad, sweetheart that he was, into buying a certain brand of pipe tobacco so I could choose the best name for a Derby winner's colt or filly and win it for my very own.

(and I promised him that should I win I'd somehow be able to feed the critter, exercise it, take care of it ...)

He indulged me each year for a few months while the contest ran.

Sure, Sal. Maybe sure, you'll win the pony. I'll smoke whatever pipe tobacco I need to smoke to get the chits you need to enter the contest to get your Derby winner's foal.

I learned they'd put Barbaro down while we were out on the road today, listening to the news in the car.

I didn't burst into tears. Honest I didn't. I'm grown up now, you know.

Damn.

I didn't burst into tears until tonight when I saw Asha's clip.

Damn. OK?

Just damn. Just ... damn.

[URL] Senses of Cinema

Senses of Cinema: an online journal devoted to the serious and eclectic discussion of cinema.

Articles, festival reports, DVD reviews, book reviews, links, lists.

The great directors archive is stashed full of information, as is the annotations for films screening at the Melbourne Cinémathèque.

e.g.

Comments on David Lynch's Eraserhead by Catherine S. Cox.

Alfred Hitchcock by Ken Mogg
Hitchcockian articles in Senses



[found while I was looking for something Hitchcockian ...]

Mash-ups: Jefferson Airplane mashed with Star Trek

We had some discussion about mash-ups a while back.

Came across a good example today: Jefferson Airplane mashed with Star Trek.

Feed your head.


[repurposed from a post earlier today at sfist]

Welcome to Web 2.0

Web 2.0 List Of Web 2.0 Application Links

[URL] An elementary dictionary of the English language. By Joseph E. Worcester, LL. D.

From the Making of America collection comes a link to An elementary dictionary of the English language. By Joseph E. Worcester, LL. D. (1865).

I love old dictionaries. The actual wordstuff for this one begins at page 31, after all the frontal matter regarding pronunciation and all that.

Seeing how a word was used in 1865 gives one a glimpse at how the current day definition evolved. Some words in Worcester's dictionary have evolved beyond recognition. Some no longer exist.

e.g. p 168 (lacerable - lapful)

laconism - pithy phrase or expression
Lady-Day - 25th March. The Annunciation.
laic- a layman; -- opposed to clergyman.
lamantine - an animal; manatee or sea-cow.
lambative - a medicine taken by licking
laniate - to tear in pieces; to lacerate
lanuginous - downy; covered with soft thin hair

Some of those words are still in use today, although perhaps not in as common use as they were 142 years ago. "lanuginous" was used in the 2006 Scripps National Spelling Bee finals.

Fun stuff, words.

Ten (well, thirty) Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries

from Dr. Judith Reisman's site: Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries (31 May 2005). Reisman lifted the article whole cloth from Human Events: the national conservative weekly.

A description of the scoring method and a list of the people on the nominating committee are given. The top ten books are described in detail.

The books?

1. The Communist Manifesto Authors: Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels
   
2. Mein Kampf Author: Adolf Hitler
   
3. Quotations from Chairman Mao Author: Mao Zedong
   
4. The Kinsey Report Author: Alfred Kinsey
   
5. Democracy and Education Author: John Dewey
   
6. Das Kapital Author: Karl Marx
   
7. The Feminine Mystique Author: Betty Friedan
   
8. The Course of Positive Philosophy Author: Auguste Comte
   
9. Beyond Good and Evil Author: Freidrich Nietzsche
   
10. General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money Author: John Maynard Keynes
    
    Also included on the list:
    
11. The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich
    
12. What Is To Be Done by V.I. Lenin
    
13. Authoritarian Personality by Theodor Adorno
    
14. On Liberty by John Stuart Mill
    
15. Beyond Freedom and Dignity by B.F. Skinner
    
16. Reflections on Violence by Georges Sorel
    
17. The Promise of American Life by Herbert Croly
    
18. Origin of the Species by Charles Darwin
    
19. Madness and Civilization by Michel Foucault
    
20. Soviet Communism: A New Civilization by Sidney and Beatrice Webb
    
21. Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead
    
22. Unsafe at Any Speed by Ralph Nader
    
23. Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
    
24. Prison Notebooks by Antonio Gramsci
    
25. Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
    
26. Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon
    
27. Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
    
28. The Greening of America by Charles Reich
    
29. The Limits to Growth by Club of Rome
    
30. Descent of Man by Charles Darwin

Six of these titles I've never heard of: Gramsci, Webb, Croly, Sorel, Adorno, Comte. (Yes, I'm sure not knowing Comte brands me jejune. Alas, that I am.) Five I read as part of the two-year Humanities series in college: Nietzsche, Fanon, JSM, Marx and Marx & Engels. Others I read on my own, including Carson, Skinner, Ehrlich, Reich.

Of the thirty titles listed, I've read (if memory serves) twelve, maybe thirteen. Those unread? Well, doesn't this list make you want to go out and read those you've missed, and reread those you have only a hazy memory of?

I came across this list today from a mention in John Baker's blog where he adds the comment, They turn out to be books that have a point of view different to the panel of conservatives who selected them. No surprises.

If I were to list what I thought were the "most harmful" books, of course the "most harmful" books would be those written by people with a viewpoint that I find poisonous. No surprises indeed.

My list of books would differ in many respects.

I'm having a problem coming up with a list of "harmful" books. Yes, millions of copies of Mein Kampf were published in Hitler's Germany, but was the book itself the cause of Hitler's Germany? How closely did the Soviet Union apparatchiks adhere to the dictums of Marx and Engels and Lenin? Would Communist China have never existed if the little red book had not been published?

My list of harmful books would include:

• [FICTION] The Turner Diaries by Dr. William Luther Pierce (under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald). Pierce is a white supremacist. This is his ode to the fictional day in the glorious future when the white race will exterminate the vermin who are not white and will rule the world. Yippy ky yay.
  
• [FICTION] The Protocols of the Meetings of the Learned Elders of Zion -- purported to be true, btw, by not just a few folks.
  
• [FICTION] The Left Behind series by Jerry B Jenkins/Tim LaHaye
  

What books do you think are "harmful"? Besides the Tom Swift series, I mean.

[note: I wandered over to John Baker's blog from a post at This Thing Of Ours. Thanks for the headsup!]

[PODCAST] Correct Me If I'm Wrong

The Chron has added a new podcast this week: Correct Me If I'm Wrong

Almost every day, The Chronicle hears from readers (and some non-readers). Most of these comments -- voicemail, email and letters -- don't make it into our letters column. But they can be unusually passionate, irate, confounding and creative.

We listen to them and read them, and we think some of the more interesting and unusual ones are worth sharing. So, today, we're starting a new feature to showcase these communications. It's called, "Correct Me If I'm Wrong."

First up: Pilotless Drone

sigh

I think that guy needs to get himself thither, over to misc.writing, where he can unleash some of his pissed-offed-ness on people other than the sorry person whose job it is to listen to these sorts of voice messages.

Check out the other podcasts at the Chron site.

[gleaned from Romenesko]

[URL] MIT OpenCourseWare

Found a link to this site from someone I know who is working through the Japanese language course and thinks highly of the experience.

MIT OpenCourseWare is

a free and open educational resource (OER) for educators, students, and self-learners around the world.

MIT OCW:

• Is a publication of MIT course materials
  
• Does not require any registration
  
• Is not a degree-granting or certificate-granting activity
  
• Does not provide access to MIT faculty

Japanese, German, Chinese (Mandarin), Spanish, French, tralala come under "Foreign Languages and Literatures" as do classes about cultures and texts written in those languages such as "A Passage to India: Introduction to Modern Indian Culture and Society," "Twentieth and Twentyfirst-Century Spanish American Literature," "East Asian Cultures: From Zen to Pop."

The Chinese I class, f'rex, includes a downloadable textbook and other study materials. The course assumes you know absolutely NOTHING about the language.

The purpose of this course is to develop:

• Basic conversational abilities (pronunciation, fundamental grammatical patterns, common vocabulary, and standard usage)
  
• Basic reading and writing skills (in both the traditional character set and the simplified)
  
• An understanding of the language learning process so that you are able to continue studying effectively on your own.

Or you could take Introduction to Aerospace Engineering and Design, Computational Cognitive Science, Urban Design Politics, or Special Seminar in Applied Probability and Stochastic Processes.

The list of Readings for Bestsellers: Detective Fiction changes each time the class is given but the Fall 2006 session uses the following books:

• Doyle, Arthur Conan. Six Great Sherlock Holmes Stories. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1992. ISBN: 0468270556.
  
• Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire. New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1999. ISBN: 0679723420.
  
• Poe, Edgar Allen. Tales of Terror and Detection. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1995. ISBN: 0486287440.
  
• Cain, James M. The Postman Always Rings Twice. New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1989. ISBN: 0679723250.
  
• Hammett, Dashiell. The Maltese Falcon. New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1989. ISBN: 0679722645.
  
• Christie, Agatha. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. New York, NY: Berkley Publishing, 2004. ISBN: 0425200477.
  
• Weber, K. J. Five Minute Mysteries. Philadelphia, PA: Running Press, 1989. ISBN: 0894716905.
  
• Sobol, D. J. Two Minute Mysteries. New York, NY: Scholastic, 1991. ISBN: 0590447874.
  
• Browning, Robert. My Last Duchess and Other Poems. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1993. ISBN: 0486277836.
  
• Sophocles. Oedipus Rex. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1991. ISBN: 0486268772.

The world is my oyster and MIT Open Courseware is a pearl.

Images ... around town

The QE2 was in town today.

I wouldn't have known if I didn't read sfist.com

His nibs said, ya, he knew. He just didn't know when she was going to arrive.

We heard the departure klaxon loud blast (who knew that Klaxon was an existing trademark?) blare at 9p and thought the QE2 was heading out of town.

Being in the midst of eating dinner, we paid it no nevermind.

The klaxon loud blast blared again at 10p and his nibs headed up to the deck to see what he could see.

He called me upstairs and I tried to take pictures. Note the long bow on this ship. Talk about retro!

 

What you don't see is the phalanx (well, not really. We're talking four boats max.) of coast guard boats blocking anyone from coming through while the QE2 backs out from her berth. I imagine there was a similar phalanx on the other side of the ship.

I just couldn't get a good, un-jiggled picture. My Coolpix 5600 is a way good camera, but it's not set up for certain things. For this picture I used the "museum" special setting. The "night" setting just didn't cut it.

Also seen about town, a night or three ago, a very sharp car (Tennessee Highway Patrol in that STAR on the door) down at the bottom of the Montgomery Steps at Green.

 

Earthquakes? Aliens? Or something else?

We've had a couple shakes recently including a 4.4 off the coast in far north California, along the Mendocino fault.

I thought I felt another one. So I clicked on my handydandy USGS map and nada.

I pulled up the larger look and ... What's that over there in Nevada? A 4.1? Followed by a flurry of aftershocks? Those are good shakes for an area where nothing ever happens, in an area where the nearest fault (the Furnace Creek Fault) is twenty-five miles or so away.

"Look at that," I said. "Weird."

His nibs looked over my shoulder.

"How close is that to Area 51?" he asked.

... or the Tonopah Test Range, for that matter.

Pull up the earthquake-Nevada map side by side with the Area 51 map.

Line them up. See what I see?

Those earthquakes (a 4.1, 3.2, 2.9, 2.6 &c., all clocking in at approximately 4 miles underground) are clustered off Hwy 95 between Goldfield and Scotty's Junction.

Close enough to spit on the end of the Nellis Air Force Range in Nye County, NV.

What's going on?

Art Bell and George Noory need a headsup, wouldn't you say?

Updated business/submission links at Internet Resources for Writers

News from Internet Resources for Writers:

Checked and updated all links on Business/Submissions.

The page includes subsections:

• Grants, Prizes, & Contests - lists
  
• Markets - market listing resources on the Web
  
• Scams - known scams and how to avoid them
  
• Submitting - information on manuscript formats, queries, writing a synopsis and more.

I also added a separate header for our Miss Snark's blog.

Occurs to me that at some point I need to port all the content over to a CSS-driven revamped site.

sigh

Not today.

[URL] Making of America - 19th c primary sources

Making of America -- 19th c primary sources (and some 20th c too)

Making of America (MoA) is a digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction. The collection is particularly strong in the subject areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology. The collection currently contains approximately 10,000 books and 50,000 journal articles with 19th century imprints. For more details about the project, see About MoA.

Amazing collection of stuff.

I was wandering around today trying to see if I could find some written context for "The man who doesn't read books has no advantage over the man who can't read them" (and variations), attributed to Mark Twain -- a discussion that popped up yesterday on Project Wombat (formerly, the Stumpers list).

I never did find confirmation or attribution for the alleged Twain quote, but I did find an essay -- patronizing to say the least -- explaining to the dear little women what sorts of books they should be asking for their husband's permission to buy and read: a six-page article titled, "Reading," by L.L. Hamline, found in "The Ladies' repository: a monthly periodical, devoted to literature, arts, and religion."

Whoo boy.

With the thousands of books and thousands of articles the MOA folks have scanned and continued to scan, you could spend a long while in these archives.

Maneuverability is good. The search is FAST and can be simple, Boolean, &c. MOA pulls up matches giving title &c. and number of pages your search terms are on. You can wend through the pages of a given work or ask for those specific pages within the work that have your search term(s).

The app doesn't highlight the found word on the page, which is unfortunate when you have a dense page filled with tiny print.

Interesting stuff. A peek into where we've come from.

RIP Barbara Seranella (1956-2007)

Received a note from my SinCNorCal cohort with word that Barbara Seranella died Sunday while awaiting a liver transplant.

Sad news for those who'd known her.

More information at her site.

Life's too short for some. This is, as one of her titles said, an unacceptable death.

Less than three weeks ago, I blogged that her New Year's message showed such spirit.

We all had hoped ...

Racism? Or Jealousy and Envy? Or Just Showmanship?

For those who aren't living under a rock (hey, even I know about this and I haven't had the TV on since ... oh, about October), there's a brou going on over at Celebrity Big Brother (over 38K protests already logged) about the interactions between some of the other contestants and Shilpa Shetty, a Bollywood movie star.

The long time sponsor, Carphone Warehouse, has canceled their sponsorship. Tempers run high, and so do the viewer stats.

I finally clicked over to YouTube this morning to check out some clips of what's been happening.

The Economist has what I think is probably the right take on the situation.

The crap these people are throwing at Shilpa Shetty is less about racism (although the bullies do pick on Shetty's Indian face and clothes and cooking and what-all because they think that's where she's vulnerable) and more about the fact that Shetty is beautiful, poised, well-spoken, well-off and in all ways a success, a celebrity in her own right.

The contrast between her circumstances and those of her bulliers is striking.

They're jealous. They're eaten up with envy. They are showing the world less what is wrong with Shetty and her Indian background and more about what is inherently wrong with them. The more they beat up on Shetty and the more grace she shows, the less she breaks down because of the verbal battering, the more infuriated they become.

What a bunch of jerks.

Shetty is grace under pressure, a lot of pressure. She'll come out of this with her halo intact, nay even polished. Perhaps her grace is a form of passive aggression, perhaps she's classy because she knows it drives them nuts.

Maybe so, but the others? They simply come across as jealous lusers. Bullies. Cretins. Crap.

My take.

Or is it all just theater? The Age comes through with a different slant.

As feminist Germaine Greer, who appeared in a previous Big Brother, argued in The Guardian, Shetty is "a very good actress". "Everything about (Shetty) is infuriating," Greer said. "Everyone hates her because she wants them to. The problem is that most of the housemates are too dim to convey what a pain in the arse Shilpa is without appearing to persecute her."

Some papers are calling Greer's commentary a defense of Shetty.

You think? I don't. I don't think Germaine Greer much likes Shetty either.

Hm.

We now return you to things that matter.

RIP Robert Anton Wilson

RIP Robert Anton Wilson

[via pnh at Making Light]

[BLOG] This Thing of Ours and THE TOP TEN: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books

For those of you who don't read This Thing of Ours, you should! you should! The blog is subtitled: The reading community is small, despised by all, and ever threatened with extinction. New members always welcome!

A post today begins,

What do you get when 125 of today's writers are asked to nominate their best books of all time? The answer is, something like the unwieldy 544-title list included in The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books, on sale now.

I took a stab at my Top Ten and came up with

ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT = Erich Maria Remarque
REBECCA = Daphne DuMaurier
THE BIG SLEEP and/or THE LONG GOODBYE = Raymond Chandler
TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD = Harper Lee
SCARAMOUCHE = Rafael Sabatini
CATCH-22 = Joseph Heller
DARKNESS VISIBLE = William Styron
SIDDHARTHA = Hermann Hesse
THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY = Thornton Wilder
ETHAN FROME = Edith Wharton

... and then I had to stop because I ran out of slots. But what about PRIDE AND PREJUDICE or COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO? JANE EYRE? WUTHERING HEIGHTS? THE PRINCESS AND THE GOBLIN/THE PRINCESS AND CURDIE? BLACK BEAUTY? (the first "real" book I ever read, so dear to my heart.) some Wodehouse, some Ngaio Marsh, some Josephine Tey (DAUGHTER OF TIME would make the list.)

There's a bit more to the comments I left there, but that's enough for here and now.

Important stuff! Where was the burger born?

Burger Brawl: Texas Rep Claims Burger Birthplace: Was the burger born in Athens, TX, or New Haven, CT?

New Haven weighs in.

Another paper weighs in.

DeStefano notes that New Haven has been a cradle of creativity, as the birthplace of the cotton gin, the first rubber tires, the corkscrew, the Frisbee, lollipops, Erector Sets and pizza.

Methinks it's time to check those bonafides.

The Frisbee? Lollipops? Hard to believe.

(Someone invented the hamburger? That's hard to believe too.)