Real weirdos, wandering far off in the forest, quite distant from the American Way
Some readers may be made uncomfortable upon reading this.
Tsk. Life is pain. [Your mileage will not vary.]
Archive for August, 2005
Captions
Inspired to some degree by Square America, I’ve started rooting around in the basement and scanning images from our extensive rat’s nest pile of dead people’s things collection.
Bigger? Sharper? Should they have thumbnails and large versions for download?
Tell me three stories. Two actually, since the first two images are apparently the same lady in the same neighborhood, in the front and back yard.
That book you keep mentioning? I do not think it is as valuable as you say.
This just in from Ernie’s 3D Pancakes:
Publishers are interested in making money.
Go read, get pissed off like me.
Then again, I’m selling our old textbooks on Amazon. These stretch back to my days as an undergraduate at an institution that no longer has the same name. And I’m easily asking twice what I paid for such obsolete trash scarce old resources. So the rising tide lifts all asses, I suppose….
Why, I’m doing it right now!
Structured Procrastination, that is.
Also, getting over what appears to be food poisoning, and trying to discover why seven PDFs I saved several weeks ago are busted, broken, dead in the water [the answer involving the weird low-level error on my laptop's drive that even fsck doesn't fix], and wishing I felt well enough to go do something reasonable with the flat tire on the truck or the 250 pounds of copper and minerals in the back of it.
But instead I think I shall nap.
Which is an indirect way of making progress towards health, and the eventual completion of the preceding stuff.
It’s the little [wrong] things that count.
One of the most emailed Yahoo! News Photos today wrongly identifies…
…[a] monarch butterfly rests on a purple cone flower in Arrowsic, Maine, Thursday, Aug. 18, 2005. (AP Photo/Pat Wellenbach)
[emphasis mine]
Misidentification can get locked into place. Does the writer simply think any largish orangeish butterfly is a monarch? Will other people now see these butterflies [you figure out what it really is], and say, “Look, a monarch?” Is there a mechanism built into Yahoo to correct such a thing?
Hell, handbasket, little well-oiled wheels.
This is a teeny, tiny, inconsequential example of why collaborative, dynamically annotated content should try to make the effort to beat centrally-published fixed content to a bloody, mewling pulp.
Then again, maybe I just need more caffeine.
I’ll give a 15% off coupon to the first person to post what butterfly this really is in the comments, good for a purchase of my Amazon books, payable via PayPal transfer.
A little funny comedy video you should watch: Seymour Hersh
At onegoodmove: Sister Mary Sunshine [fromThe Daily Show]:
Holy shit, if Seymour Hersh is even half right, not only have the wheels come off, but everybody but Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh know it.
Watch. Listen. Think. Ain’t comedy grand?
So full of fun and yucks and stuff.
Done? OK. Tell me when the next congressional elections are here in the US. Of course when Hersh mentions “the elections” he means the subset of ours that are being held here, not the subset of “ours” that are being held overseas. Just need to point that out.
Because as it turns out we only get to vote in one, no matter how the money gets shifted around.
(Via PZ Myers.)
You want to know all about the naughty mad sadistic Kaiser, right? Well…
I have just this afternoon scanned this book, and uploaded it to a certain website so you can read it if you like:
[Secret Memoir, The Court of Royal Saxony, 1891-1902]: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess: From the pages of her diary, lost at the time of her elopement from Dresden with M. Andre (”Richard”) Giron by Henry W. Fischer, Author of Private Lives of William II and His Consort, Secret History of the Court of Berlin, etc., etc. [1912]
From the preface:
Un-American Folly
It’s the purpose of the present volume to show the
guilty folly of such un-American, un-republican, wholly unjustifiable,
reprehensible and altogether ridiculous King-worship,
not by argument, or a more or less fanciful story,
but by the unbiased testimony of an “insider.”Let it be considered, above all, that a member of the
proudest Imperial family in the wide, wide world demonstrates,
by inference, the absurdity of King-worship!Of course, whether or not you’ll obey the impassioned
appeal of the corner sermonizer, who, espying a number of
very decolletee ladies passing by in a carriage, cried out:
“Quand vous voyes ces tetons rebondies, qui se montrent
avec tant d’impudence, bandez! bandes! bandes! vous–les
veux!” is a matter for you to decide.Seek not for descriptions of ceremonials and festivities
in these pages; only imbeciles among kings are interested
in such wearying spectacles, intended to dazzle the multitude.
The Czar Paul, who became insane and had his head knocked
off by his own officers, appeared upon the scene vacated by
his brilliant mother, Catharine the Great, with a valise full
of petty regulations, ready drawn up, by which, every day,
every hour, every minute, he announced some foolish change,
punishment or favor, but I often saw Kaiser Wilhelm and
other kings look intensely bored and disgusted when obliged
to attend dull and superfluous court or government functions.
This exciting and historically important work, scarce and long out of print, can be yours to read for free, at your leisure. It contains tales — first-person, in the very [translated] voice of Countess Louise of Saxony — of: Scandal! Death by Royal Sadism! Adultery galore! Appalling debauchery among Europe’s ruling classes! Romantic love triumphs, in the end, over the rigidity of royal social norms! Whores! Countesses! Countesses called whores, and vice versa! And Archduke Ferdinand!
Now, “Hang on!” I hear you saying. Go ahead. Say it. Good. There were errors in that extract up there. Bad French, at least! “What kind of a rip off is this, Tozier?” You said that, right? Good.
Alas, you are correct. My automated OCR is imperfect, just like anybody’s. And yet I promise you, my friend, my confidante — who would know the secrets of the Royal family in great detail — that this book will be yours.
See, I know who you are. You’re a learned, bookish, indeed rather magpie-ish person. You like to read odd things. Blogs are like that. But old books will do, too.
So what you need to do to read this book for free is: go and sign up as a volunteer at the Disributed Proofreading Project in time for this project to be released there. Then you can (a) help fix the very very minor problems with spelling and such, and thus play a real and meaningful role in its eventual publication, and (b) read it before anybody else gets their mitts on it. Well, except me, I suppose.
Without your effort (which will surely entertain and enlighten you as well), the Distributed Proofreading project cannot succeed. Two minutes a day is all it takes (on average) to proofread one page of one book. You can choose your own favorite book from hundreds of ongoing projects, or pick at random! There’s fiction, nonfiction, science, mathematics, religious stuff, magazines, Shakespeare — all you could ask for, being the bookish magpie you are. And if by some weird quirk you dislike all the currently available pages in the queue, well you can turn them back in and start again after other volunteers have moved them forward!
Personally, I try to proofread about ten pages every day. I skip around a lot, and proofread one or two from a half-dozen works, ranging from easy old romance novels to treatises on the Menominee language. It takes me no more than 10–20 minutes (and more if I get caught up in something).
Come on. I know you want to read about how a famous member of Austrian royalty killed his poor mistress in a sadistic sexual excess. Or how the Shah of Persia so shockingly conducted himself during his visit to the royal seat of Saxony.
And it’s all in here. And will all be out there, in the world, free.
If you but help. It’s a volunteer kind of thing. It’s free. It’s computery. It’s old books you will never, ever have imagined would be this interesting.
So you just go on over there, and in a little while — a few days, maybe a couple of weeks, The Story of Louise will be yours. As soon as the queue of things waiting before it clears out a bit.
Also, Dear Leader’s Daily Thought
You can tell I’m catching up slowly here. Another link worth noting:
Dear Leader’s Daily Thought, titled with actual really spoken quotes, and illustrated with actual illustrations:
hi… well it is finaly time for my well erned vacation… they are tellin me i am settin records with all the vacation i take well that is good be cause i erned it by bein the greatest president ever… i work hard and i play hard…
it is real hard making all the rite desisions all the time… and any thing that went wrong is somebody elses falt not mine. like with the wmd that was the cias fault. and sadams, he was actin like he had wmd. and when we pull out of iraq next spring it will be the iraqis fault if things go bad be cause they dont want to stand up for there own fredom.
(Via The Poor Man Cafe.)
Librarian Avengers
Some hints at he truth from Librarian Avengers:
People become librarians because they know too much. Their knowledge extends beyond mere categories. They cannot be confined to disciplines. Librarians are all-knowing and all-seeing. They bring order to chaos. They bring wisdom and culture to the masses. They preserve every aspect of human knowledge. Librarians rule. And they will kick the crap out of anyone who says otherwise.
Not a new blog; just a new link in the ’sphere.
(Via Sivacracy.net.)
Back
We’re back from the Upper Peninsula, and a week of running around like maniacs in an all-too-large place with far too few things in it. It was fun, but life in the UP is pretty… well, dilute.
Images and text to follow.
Two comments on Google Print
(1) A fascinating article called GOOGLE LIBRARY: BEYOND FAIR USE?.
¶33 Even an analysis of the four fair use factors fails to predict a ruling on Google’s library digitization project with any certainty. With no factor strongly supporting Google and the last factor, which is usually the most important, weighing against the project, the commercial motive, market usurpation and extensive scope of the project would likely outweigh the public benefits and push a court’s analysis over into a finding of unfair use. However, it is possible that if a court battle were to ensue over this project, that it could be deemed a fair use. Past decisions dealing with fair use in hotly contested situations involving equally innovative technology have come down on the side of expanding the rights of the public over those of the copyright holders. In Sony, even though the copyright holders were painting a doom and gloom picture of the future, as the right holders would be apt to do here, the court was able to see past their vision and recognize the benefits of allowing the potential infringement of the VTR. The copyright holders quickly came to realize that what the court had done was in their best interests, as well.
[Emphasis mine]
and (2) an excellent point made over at Infothought.
(both via Sivacracy.net.)
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