5 kirkyan timesuits

Seems there's new action on the kirkyan front. Sven's been writing about kirkyan weaponry, picking up on a thread from some of Warren Ellis' work in Second Life and putting a proper kirkyan face on the matter. Seems his post may even be garnering interest from our military-industrial overlords. Don't ask how I know that.

It's bombs, then, not books. And this is gung-ho, buddy, gung-ho. Forget "kirkyan timesuits for books".

The notion of the kirkyan is now picking up weight and heft from deep pockets. And publishers, monied as they are, are squabbling with writers are squabbling with readers are squabbling with libraries about what the future of the book is going to be -- the debate has no direction, no coherent vision for the future. Meanwhile, the kirkyan has predictably taken on a much less benign demeanor. And it may now be that it has means to become actionable.

Show somebody how to educate more people and not much happens. Show somebody how to blow more people up, and the princes perk up and take notes. I still say let's have books, not bombs. I hope to remain so naive and idealistic until the end.

But here's an insider's tip, for free: The money? The smart money is on the viridian kirkyan that, for one thing, cleans up your oil spills.

Sven's notion has traction. It's a solid notion and it's going to grow and become increasingly useful. Librarians are ahead of the curve on this matter, though, because we already truck in kirkyans daily. The e-book is but a crude example of what's to come. You guys know that.

But to give the notion a name and talk about its attributes is helpful. Kirkyan books. What can a kirkyan book do that an e-book, a cell phone, a page of paper, a radio signal, a stack of html on a server can't?

Can libraries save the world? This question has something to do with whether or not we can co-opt the kirkyan for the good of all and build autopoietic networks of goopy, clinging, smart (well, at least as smart as a retarded dog) books, that kind of crawl in and out of our nervous systems, onto and off of our shelves, into and out of our phones, and swarm all the hell over Africa and rural China.

Let's get cracking. Most of you "next-gen" bastards are already off to a walloping good start.

orderly global economies

"Protecting intellectual property from piracy is a cornerstone of an orderly global economy" (O'Connor 381).

Is this neccessarily so? Why or why not? I'm trying to sort it out.
Comments welcome.

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O'Connor, David E. Encyclopedia of the Global Economy. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006.
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Reading: about the antipopes
Feeling: overworked, underutilized.

10 teaching: b.i. platform

Today our library classroom got enlisted for a somewhat unusual endeavor.

A biology prof wants to use our classroom and laptops to demonstrate a cellular animation website and have the class do an assignment based on it -- in the library. We do frequently get profs bringing down their classes for instruction in library databases and use of the catalog, etc. But this will be the first time they've come to use our classroom as their own.

I'll take 10 or 20 minutes to demonstrate finding good biology resources in our databases and reference collection, but then it's out of my hands!

I think it's just delicious that they see us as a platform for their own uses. Maybe it's our smartboard...

Steve Irwin, rest in peace

He pulled the stingray's barb out of his heart before he died.
Thanks for the enthusiasm, Steve. Rest in peace.