I just started getting the Instructables RSS feed, and realize that I have not yet seen, “Excellent storage hack: conveniently store miscellaneous nuts and bolts in old baby food jars screwed into lids that have been nailed to a rafter in the garage!”
I suspect it is only a matter of time.
Handy tip for those wanting to Publish on the Web: get great ideas at estate auctions. Who knew the hoarders of the 1960s were such innovators?
Adventures in Ethics and Science: What (not) to do when the system is broken.:
There is something badly amiss, both in the advisor-advisee relationship, and in the oversight that the graduate program ought to have in such relationships, if a grad student can go through 19 years of a program before finding out that there is no way he’s going to get the Ph.D. he’s been working towards. Heck, it’s a problem if a student is allowed to go through 9 years of the program without a clear indication that he will be successful in earning the degree. At minimum there was some failure to communicate. Possibly, there was worse — a gleeful display of professorial power over the grad student who is, essentially, without power until he earns the Ph.D that grants him admission to the club of People Who Matter.
(Via Ernie’s 3D Pancakes.)
And because the difference between the Heaven’s Gate Cult and the Party of God is not one of kind, but only of degree, when you pledge yourself to the Republican Fraternity in the Dark Age of Dubya, your are eventually required to take sides against Reality itself.
(Via Mike the Mad Biologist.)
There is an odd little shop I know. Its windows streaked with the soot of Cleveland’s traffic and general ambiance, the interior “decorated” in the browns of mid-century maple bookcases and grays of threadbare oriental rug, and faded primary colors of book cloth left for decades in wan sunlight. You walk in the front door, and the experience is one of spelunking in a dangerous root cellar: the floor is revealed only along a number of channels among piles of books and record albums, the inevitable loss of light is blinding, the smell is that of overpowering onions and mustiness.
The owner is a man who spends his time ruminating about his wares. He cultivates technical books, like he cultivates his shocking beard, like he cultivates the nested stack of styrofoam carry-out cartons beside his 1930s desk. When old curmudgeons are not sitting there sharing pierogies and kielbasa, and discussing the history of some high-powered transmitting vacuum tubes that are mixed in among the bookshelves, or consulting the volumes nominally on sale in reference to the power differentials of 1903 steam engines, the owner is doing applied mathematics. Or so he says.
Some time after you enter and begin to poke around, and the owner and his curmudgeonly friend have watched you askance as you try to sidle close enough to the shelves to read the spines of the tomes there, you will hear a sound. A sound like locusts, or a torrent of clocks. This is the price machine. This strange object is the fruition of his applied mathematics.
The price machine has a face made from the salvaged mechanical digital clocks of the early 1970s: the numbers are not electronic, but rather composed of little half-panes that flip up and down to reveal the digits. The owner (we assume the owner—perhaps one of his curmudgeonly cronies, who all seem to be retirees from Atom Age engineering firms?) has wired these to… something. A large box, finished in a haze of polished stereophonic birchwood and brushed aluminum. A tangle of reworked telephone wire, wrapped in striped candy colors, protrudes like a bad hernia from one corner; a power cord wrapped in four places in black electrical tape is wired directly into a junction box, itself hanging by a thread from the empty hole in the wall where it used to sit. A coiled telephone cable connects the price machine to a small sheet metal box with a single metal toggle switch.
But the numbers, the clacking, flipping numbers… they always move. Until you want to buy a thing.
I asked the owner about the price machine one day, when I had tentatively identified a scarcer volume of Birch’s Introduction to Cadmium Emitter Tube Maintenance that I wanted but could not reach. Actually, that’s not strictly true: I asked the price of the book. Around a mouthful of kielbasa, he said, “Depends.” The old fellow sitting next to him drinking the Stroh’s laughed, and said, “What time is, you think? If you want book, depends what time.”
I will not transcribe the story they told me, nor the history of steel stamping techniques and the bitter feuds over patent rights and the glory days of World War II the crony told me along the way, but here is the praecís: The owner does not like to sit there selling books; it is merely what he does with all his time. He much prefers the idea of closing up his shop and going home to do more important things there. He cannot be bothered with detailed pricing, and surely it is dreadfully inefficient to pull down the books every decade or so and re-price them. Bah (he actually said, “Bah!”).
So all the books were priced at a reasonable value, when they were put on the shelf before the shop opened on May 17th 1975. All the books are marked $2. But that is not the price; the pricing machine determines the price of any given volume.
When a customer selects a volume, the single toggle switch is thrown. This freezes the display on the wall, though the underlying “calculation” continues unabated in the background. The flipping, clacking numbers, you see, represent the price differential since 1975.
Every year, the price of every book increases by $0.50. The price machine makes this change automatically at 10am on May 17th, every year.
Because the owner prefers to leave early—in every sense of the word—the price machine is crafted to offer discounts during the first portion of almost every time period:
When a customer wishes to pay for a book, the small toggle switch is thrown, and the numbers on the price machine indicate the discount or premium they must pay over this year’s base price. The total price is determined by applying each of the price modifications sequentially, in the order listed above.
It seems a reasonable assumption that the store is open every day of the year. One gets no sense of changes to the routine, and something was said when last I was there to make me think the owner has come to prefer spending time in the shop to his apartment. Something about “more space”.
So, assuming the shop opens every morning at 10am, and closes each afternoon at 4pm, it should be obvious when I will want to buy the book I want.
Or is it?
When shall I go back to Cleveland to buy my copy of the book I want, and how much will I have to pay?
Danny Yee points to a stunning example of what most of the blog commenters think is a machine (or possibly rote dictionary) translation gone awry.
I’ve written about this before: What is it about this that makes me break up? I vividly recall my fifth grade elementary school teacher introducing us to Mad Libs (or whatever they were called in the mid-70s), and finding that I was the only student in the room falling out of my seat. The rest were amused, or laughing at how hard I was laughing, but they surely didn’t have the same experience I did.
It’s a strange sensation, I suddenly realize. Like some other people with tickling, I cannot withstand these things, these wrong-word amusements. There’s something very neurophysiological-feeling about it. I am having a different experience from that of the merely funny: neither the surreal juxtaposition, nor the embarrassing gaffe, nor the comic ridicule is what I am responding to. It sends me into a different mental state from all those. Really. No better words to describe it. If I were a little more synaesthetic, I would be willing to insist it’s a different position of mood from the others. (Actually, it may be the best evidence I have that I experience some language-associated synaesthesia).
I wonder how, short of an MRI, we could explore that weird sensation.
Go read the piece in the Los Angeles Times: “It’s all in the implications”:
(Via Danny Yee.)
I understand comment and referrer spam from pr0n and enlargement sites. I get the idea of spam from all-info-about-handtools. But I confess, even as a paid futurist, that I never imagined a world in which I would get several hundred spam comments a week from what appear to be Zoroastrians.
I mean, how Cyberpunk is that, anyway?
Unless they’re young ones.
A review of Rauschenberg, with no mention of Cornell, makes me think about how criticism works. Can a critic ever be a lumper without seeming to compare and contrast; a splitter, without seeming to ignore and dismiss?
Or should I be looking instead to the curators and galleries, who strive to keep each object a facet of a disconnected miscellany?
I would visit a tagged art or history or culture museum. I’m tired of long glass cases with extracted artificial “themes”: decades, ethnic groups, geographic regions, materials, decorative vs. fine arts.
A museum should be like a Cornell box, an antique mall, a cabinet of curiosities, a Rauschenberg collage. As it stands, too many curators and critics are merely the janitors of semiotics.
(Via 3quarksdaily.)
Compare previous with “Bloggers at the Gate”:
…[N]o serious political initiative would launch today without a strategy for online fundraising, blog engagement and netroots activist recruitment. But technological advances are not inherently empowering, progressive or egalitarian. Much of the online audience is richer, more educated and less diverse than the rest of America, according to an October 2005 study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project.
Politics is, after all, played out by rich folks on one side vs. rich folks on the other. Whether or not I am rich in terms of account balances, I am rich in the head, and rich in knowledge, and rich in access. As are you.
At Pandagon, “Why national Dems are clueless about blogs”:
Many - if not most - national Democrats really are afraid of working with actual citizens, and are particularly afraid of having any involvement at all with the blogosphere. It%u2019s as though they think they need to remain above and separated from the poorly behaved, embarrassing masses. They actually have been scared away from working with the very people who they are supposedly representing and who are on their side.
Barbara has only a special-purpose blog or two. So, for the sake of continuity with the readers from the Symposium and DP, Barbara writes:
Bill has posted my notes from the symposium. If you read them, you’ll see lots of typos (though I did try to fix most of them), many sentence fragments, a few editorial comments (which I hope you can discern from the speakers’ comments), and probably lots of abbreviations that don’t quite make sense in any context, let alone in the notes of someone who is not really involved in the whole “Mass Digitization” project except as maybe a user.
Let me try to summarize.
First, let’s set the scene. The (notably well-organized) event was held in a beautiful auditorium on the campus of the University of Michigan. UM is one of the particpants in the Google digitization project. The 200-400 attendees included librarians, library scientists, administrators, academics, students, academic press publishers, and community members. The overall tone was one of enthusiasm for the project, although it was not all sweetness and light for all of the sessions.
Here’s what I think the threads of discussion were:
- What is the role of the library (and by extension, librarians), if every book catalogued in OCLC were digitized? Consider not only the document delivery aspect, but the curation of a collection. What does the term collection mean? Is a library a collection of content, or of artifacts?
- What risks do we take by having our cultural heritage documented by a commercial service? How can we be sure that what the user gets is what the author wrote? How can we be sure that if that commercial service goes away we can still get at the content?
- What is the real purpose of the Google project in particular? The common view is that Google is scanning all of these books, and then they’ll be available online. However, Google insists that they are scanning all of the books and only the public domain ones are available online — one page at a time. However, they are using their indexing algorithms to index the books, and for non-public domain works will show only enough information for the searcher to determine if that is a book they may be interested in acquiring either from their library or a bookseller. But that’s what they say now. What about ten years from now?
- The economics of producing and distributing written (scholarly) works is going to change and we can’t predict exactly how. Most agree that there is still plenty of money to be made, but business models are likely to require significant readjustment.
- Are we in a rush to digitize all of this content? Shouldn’t there be some planning? Some standards? Are we just going about willy-nilly, wasting resources in duplications of effort?
- The largest issue, the one that is really at the heart of the oppostion to the project, is the issue surrounding copyright and fair use. In the US, copyright was originally an “opt-in” system — one had to claim copyright and mark the work as claimed. It was possible to renew one’s rights once. In the 1970’s copyright became a default state for new works, whether they were claimed or not. In fact, it is apparently quite difficult to disclaim copyright.
The application of copyright law and the fair use statute is becoming more complex with the easy ability of users to “mix and match” content into new forms. One of the points of fair use is the transforming nature of the end result. At what point does remixing become a new work, and not an infringement of another’s copyright? Some point to Creative Commons, which works within the bounds of copyright to allow for remixes. Related to this is contract law that can affect a copyright holder’s ability to benefit from owning the rights to the work. This seems to be conflated with the idea of using licensing bodies (such as ASCAP or BMI in music) to extract fees from end users. How do we ensure that rightsholder’s perogatives aren’t violated? [This conflation of ideas was pointed out succinctly by James Hilton (I paraphrase): “Some publishers think of fair use under the terms of license. They view copyright as though it were a license and would like it to be a license, but it isn’t.
Through the whole event, I had a difficult time reminding myself that we were talking primarily about academic issues, about scholarship, and how large-scale digitization could affect the nature of scholarly work. Topics kept coming up that seemed more suited to a fiction-writer’s conference, because as is fairly well-known, most academic authors do not make money directly from the sale their books. So the points about ensuring proper remuneration to authors are a bit misleading. On the other hand, a few academic publishers mentioned that they make hard copy books only because authors demand it. An author may not need many, just a few copies “to show to their mother and to their tenure committee.” (This is a topic better suited to a conference on the future of the university.)
I was reminded that there are three types of books: those in the Public Domain, those which are copyrighted and still in print, and those which are copyrighted and out-of-print (the so-called orphan works). Public domain works are ostensibly easy to handle, because, well, they’re in the public domain. Pre-1923 books, as we know, easily fall into this category. However, there are many books, as we also know, that have “risen into the public domain” (possibly) through lack of attention on the copyright holder’s part. Finding these are time consuming and can be expensive. However, as Clifford Lynch remarked, “just because I have a copy of something in the public domain, doesn’t mean I have to give you a copy of it.”
How pleased I am that the people who support Distributed Proofreaders and Project Gutenberg don’t feel quite the same way. I do get frustrated with reprinters that take PG works and make money off our our volunteer efforts. However, I am positive that the greater good is being served by our work.
All in all it was an extremely interesting, though tiring, day and a half. I don’t know that I know any more about how Google Books might affect DP, but I am convinced that there is room for us, even to the point of our Content Providers still providing scans made with our own hands. In fact, I am more enthusiastic about DP and PG than ever. Our role as a source for Project Gutenberg means that our efforts go to providing freely available etexts to anyone at anytime. That is not Google’s goal, nor is it the goal of University Libraries. We would do well to remind ourselves of it from time to time.
Now, for the DP-related bits:
- When Adam Smith (the man in charge of the Google Project) gave his remarks Friday afternoon (and my battery was dead), he mentioned that people are already using the information created by the project in new ways. One he highlighted (on a slide) was titled “Bruce Albrecht’s List.” I recognized that name — a veteran DPer.
- Bill asked Mr Smith if it would be possible for individuals (like us) to contribute our scans to the effort. Also mentioned was the idea of errata. As we’ve found, sometimes the scans are, well, lacking, and Google needs a mechanism for reporting and fixing them. Smith seemed amenable to both ideas.
Pontification without all the gritty gravitas
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