It’s a bit late, but oh so sweet.
I found an Easter Egg in RL last month, near the Harvard Sq T-zone in Cambridge. Go all the way down the stairs, stand 5 feet to the left of the last change machine, and look up. There was a fully-inflated Valentine’s Day balloon stuck to the ceiling next to one of the lights. It remained there for well over a month…
Kudos to the Simmons grad school of library and information science, who are taking the modern connotations of their full name seriously. They have started a group blog for the school, and are thinking of a school-wide wiki…
I still find the notion of ‘librarianship’ and of libraries themeslves an unappreciated anachronism in our world culture; even among professional librarians. People who spend their lives gathering hundreds of thousands of volumes in order to allow those in the target audience who can gain physical access to them to read them for free, rarely fail to look askance at the idea that they might provide searchable databases of public information; even a database of book citation information. The OCLC still haven’t quite decided to do such a thing, despite their meta-collaborative nature [above and beyond the implicit collaborative nature of all library work].
Kudos to the Simmons grad school of library and information science, who are taking the modern connotations of their full name seriously. They have started a group blog for the school, and are thinking of a school-wide wiki…
I still find the notion of ‘librarianship’ and of libraries themeslves an unappreciated anachronism in our world culture; even among professional librarians. People who spend their lives gathering hundreds of thousands of volumes in order to allow those in the target audience who can gain physical access to them to read them for free, often look askance at the idea that they might provide searchable databases of public information; even a database of book citation information. The OCLC haven’t quite decided to do such a thing yet, despite their meta-collaborative nature [above and beyond the implicit collaborative nature of all library work].
Nevertheless, the persistence of the idea of providing free access to physical materials goes to show the power of custom and professional culture…
So I landed on a random “brushes with celebrity” page while stalking my favorite American actress, and found this charming vignette about our Prez– :
In the fall of 2004, right before his bypass surgery I was sitting around the parking lot of Central Park’s ‘Tavern on the Green’, and out walks this handsome looking guy with white hair and a suit, casually leaving the place like he was Joe Schmo.
I looked at this guy long and hard and realised that it was Bill Clinton.
Apparently, so did dozens of other people. Someone (who was apparently a Republican) heckled him about raising taxes. Now, normally when a former president encounters a loser like this, he smiles waves and gets whisked away in his limousine.
But, Bill Clinton started debating him! The secret service guys were going nuts as an entire crowd of blue-staters formed to watch the former president and this dude with a stroller arguing over economic policies.
Then he took questions from the normal people off the street that gathered around him. NYC parks officials were called down to patrol the scene. He also took pictures with tourists, mostly young and female.
Bob Zmuda, Eat your heart out.
So I landed on a random “brushes with celebrity” page while stalking my favorite American actress, and found this charming vignette about our Prez– :
In the fall of 2004, right before his bypass surgery I was sitting around the parking lot of Central Park’s ‘Tavern on the Green’, and out walks this handsome looking guy with white hair and a suit, casually leaving the place like he was Joe Schmo.
I looked at this guy long and hard and realised that it was Bill Clinton.
Apparently, so did dozens of other people. Someone (who was apparently a Republican) heckled him about raising taxes. Now, normally when a former president encounters a loser like this, he smiles waves and gets whisked away in his limousine.
But, Bill Clinton started debating him! The secret service guys were going nuts as an entire crowd of blue-staters formed to watch the former president and this dude with a stroller arguing over economic policies.
Then he took questions from the normal people off the street that gathered around him. NYC parks officials were called down to patrol the scene. He also took pictures with tourists, mostly young and female.
I was researching publication of Muhammad cartoons not long ago, to
update the main article about them on Wikipedia. They had listed
the Daily Illini
as the first US college paper to have republished some of the cartoons
last week, which sounded wrong to me (it turns out they were close
tothe first, but the Salient at least was a day earlier).
I had momentarily forgotten the best place to find such lists online,
and laughed out loud to see the reference I wanted was another
Wikipedia page.
[[List of newspapers that reprinted Jyllands-Posten’s Muhammad cartoons]]
is just what you might expect; a list, with dates and references and
hyperlinks, of all newspapers that have reprinted some or all of the
cartoons in response to the controversy. Ordered separately by
publication date and by country.
As it notes at the start, “This list is probably not complete.” Surely not. But with over 120 entries, it is a start… Two other favorite lists : [[List of interesting or unusual place names]] and the infamous [[List of lists of lists]], which has become something more and less than a list over time… see also [[Controversial newspaper caricatures]].
Everyone who feels that special need to search multiple languages and
projects at once, check this baby out. Oh, and wikiwax is back
up! Hooray…
Brian Mingus, that devilishly cognitive Colorodan, is a remarkable fellow. Besides which, he is always right. Or so it seems sometimes… for instance, LibraryThing. One look is enough to tell you that it is, in fact, the sexiest “Web 10” site around.
I yearn for the day this kind of brilliance turns into a free and globally-editable annotated citation database. Tim Spalding is my official hero of the week.