info viz 6: global warming imagery

In light of the report from the National Academies of Science that "human activities are responsible for much of the recent warming"...

I thought it might do to post a few pretty pictures.

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(from Flood Maps by Alex Tingle and NASA)
Bye Louisiana. Bye Florida. And downtown Houston is beach-front property.

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(from NASA, 2003: "Warming of Arctic May Affect Worldwide Climate")
Icecap shrinking in the last part of the 20th Century...

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(from BBC News)
The "hockey stick" graph of global warming -- temps spike lately, huh?

Chinese pyramids

"Chinese archaeologists have discovered a group of ancient tombs shaped like pyramids, dating back at least 3,000 years, in Jiaohe City of northeast China's Jilin Province. The tombs, covering an area of 500,000 square meters (1,000 meters long and 500 meters wide), were found after water erosion exposed part of a mountain, revealing two of the tombs. Six smaller tombs had eroded away leaving no indications of their original scale and appearance, but the biggest tomb, located on the south side of the mountain, could clearly be discerned as a pyramid shape with three layers from bottom to top." (From Xinhua news service - Link; via warrenellis.com)








Part of the Jiahoe complex -- image from UNESCO.

Here's a page on other Chinese pyramids, mostly near Xi'an (link).

teaching 6

*UPDATE*

Blaming the students is not the answer.
I've got a lot to learn about teaching.

--

Got angry teaching today. Library instruction for an English Comp. class, two sections. The first section had twice as many students as the second, and by the end of the second class, I was disgusted.

The disgusting thing is, I had no tangible reason to feel that way. The students were as passive as ever -- no heckling, no real rudeness.

After nearly an hour of exploring the intricate details of database searching, library catalogs, truncation, and the use of the index, the students just aren't as illuminated with joy and curiousity as I'd hoped. I'm up there moving, talking, asking them questions, and they just kind of sit. And watch me. And listen. And it's clear that this is way, waay more information than they want -- but it's not as much information as they will need. If they only knew how much more there was to say about this stuff, they'd be dismayed -- kind of in the same way we were dismayed by the Star Wars Kid?

Hilarity with a dash of incredulous pity? Well.

Nobody wants to be the Star Wars Kid. So this feeling like I'm the butt of some unsaid joke steadily rises with each class. And my response is to get sterner, gruffer. To point my beard and shake my fist zealously as I shake the ceiling and sling sweat with old timey library science revival hymns bustin out the eardrums of those that have not the ears to hear. And I've started smirking. If they don't respond to my questions, I ask dumber questions. That's not a great direction to go in. That's not, like, real progressive or mature or anything, and I'm not proud.

It's a tricky situation. These classes are guests in my library -- I don't want to come off as smug and cocky and disdainful. I want to welcome them and teach them.

Maybe I should wear a silly hat. Devise a scavenger hunt. Toss out Tootsie Rolls. Hell.

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Reading: Jim Carroll: The Book of Nods
Reading: Arthur Edward Waite: The Book of Ceremonial Magic
Reading: Kusen by Livingston Roshi
Reading: Sterling's blog at WIRED, Beyond the Beyond
Reading: Sukdhev's World
Reading: Comics Worth Reading
Reading: Beers of the World
Listening: The Ricky Gervais Podcast
Listening: Wessex Archaeology Events
Listening: The Viking Youth Power Hour
Weather: heavy weather coming -- must remember to park the truck on high ground tonight.

note to self

The Politics of Libraries

I Historical overview

political orientations of famous figures in librarianship

II The implicit politics of 20^th Century libraries

Carnegie,

The public library, the university library, desegregation, political rebellion,

Computers for all (Gates grants)

III The implicit politics of 21^st Century libraries: where we are heading

Open-source, user-centered, tagging, cellphones, away from hierarchy

folksonomy, personomy, autonomous 'books'

information agency? ANT

IV Universal access: Beyond Democracy

Beyond representation toward democratic (atomized) individual participation

transhumanism
politics of "AI", augmented reality

teaching 5

This from reBang Blog, and I'll take the liberty of quoting the post in full:
-
"They Won’t Write The Songs

And they won’t design the products. Or author the books. Or develop significant new ideas. Not when the culture in which they’re living thinks it’s okay to copy. And that’s the cultural issue/problem being reported over on the BBC today (Link) and it’s something about which I’ve also expressed concern. From the short report:

Many of the new generation of students raised on the internet see nothing wrong with copying other people’s work, says Professor Sally Brown.

If I had to guess I’d say we’ll have a creativity peek in the short term as artists/musicians/writers/designers use the tools now available to them to do some interesting things. But after that, if there’s no change in the Copy Culture, I expect a long slide into Boring. So stock up on exciting, innovative stuff now." (Link to post)
-
This is from a designer, a techno-savvy artist who has an eye for social change -- and he seems to me, usually, to be a fairly optimistic guy. And he's expecting a "long slide into Boring" if things go on as they are in regards to the "copy culture"??

That ought to give librarians and teachers pause.

Who's to blame if our students don't understand plagiarism? You've got one guess.

I see instructors gloss over this all the time -- passing out an 'academic ethical standards agreement' and having their students sign that they 'get it' without ever explaining what the hell it means. In my library we push the importance of citing sources constantly -- but it isn't enough. If this is a 'copy-paste' cultural problem, we've got a real challenge on our hands -- even as such noble causes as Creative Commons encourages borrowing and sharing (without explicit cautions?). I heard one student tell a teacher "but it isn't like stealing, it's just words." Just words, but valueless words? How can anyone born after 1975 not understand the importance of giving props to those you sample from?

What am I missing here? I want to read the reBang post as a knee-jerk, reactionary response -- and I don't agree that we're on the long slide, ultimately, toward Boring Culture... but I do think he makes a good point. We've just gotta work harder to impress the importance of originality in arts and in scholarship.

That, or we have to be willing to let our current academic values go through a serious mutation, if not an extinction.

{{But, hey, wait a minute... Look at this post. The interpretation of this story is my own, but the links are the citations. This medium is teaching us to use props and samples, citations and references in new ways altogther -- and just because it's new doesn't mean it's not legit. 2 legit 2 quit!}}


































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By the by, check out some of Sven's (of reBang) ideas in a previous post (link).

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Weather: a moderate "5" on the UV index.

viking youth podcasts

You'll want to listen to the guys at Viking Youth Power Hour.

They're savvy, they're funny, and they're gutsy. They debate tough topics with comportment, honesty, and ease -- and their shows never lack for zeal or ferocity. Discussions range from the specifics of magickal rites to the finer uses of psychedelics, and from the unanswered questions of the 9/11 attack to intelligent critiques of pop culture icons. It's often fringe, and it's always smart.



















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Reading: The Social Life of Books
Feeling: kinda lit up.

carnival of the infosciences

I'll be hosting the Carnival on Monday, July 31. Submission info is here (link).

The theme will be "Low Tech Solutions" -- that is, what sorts of horse-sense tools and skills do you use to solve problems in the library? And how do you do it without the coolest, newest, web2.0-est gizmos?

But if you want to submit a post that's off that theme, that's fine too. I'll take a look at anything. Even jokes. I'm easy.

teaching 4

You know that John Cale song, "Fear is a Man's Best Friend"?

Standing waiting for a man to show
Wide eyed one eye fixed on the door
This waiting's killing me, it's wearing me down
Day in day out, my feet are burning holes in the ground

Darkness warmer than a bedroom floor
Want someone to hold me close forever more
I'm a sleeping dog, but you can't tell
When I'm on the prowl you'ld better run like hell
You know it makes sense, don't even think about it
Life and death are just things you do when you're bored
Say fear's a man's best friend
You add it up it brings you down

It's a good song. Teaching classes brings it to mind.

I've found two main ways to be when teaching -- two ways that I am when I teach for the library.

One is -- I project my toughness, my hard skin, my mean eyes out into the crowd. I project a slight disdain for my students. I send an armored voice out against the back walls, and it bounces around like a gunhappy-sonofabitch. A student slides in her seat, sneaks a chuckle with a pal, sighs too loud -- I grow more distant, more disgusted, ever more tired. You don't need me? Well you'd be wrong, sisters and brothers, to think I need you. I know this already, and I'm doing you a favor by being here. I'm the guy you need to talk to. I'm master-control.

Two is -- I see the humor in this situation. I breathe from my center, my belly, and I chuckle plenty. I look them each in eye, and move spontaneously, like I would in my kitchen. This is just a set of tools, and it's very far from personal. Stick with me for an hour, and let's learn how to find information. I'm a messenger. I'm nearly, actually, in the way of the message. I get over myself, quit hanging loose in the doorway, let the information about the information come through as clearly as it may. Better if you don't even notice me. So: right from the center, and with humor if at all. You've got it; you're a smart mob.

So that's the ways it is with me. I like the latter, better. The former cranks up as defensive maneuvering when I feel nervous (and I feel nervous lots when I'm up in front of a crowd). The key to calling that second attitude in is to slow down, breathe from my belly, and, as best I can, try to be centered in the here and now.

I can be the bearded alpha primate commanding attention, demanding understanding from my audience -- or I can just act from my center, be myself, accept the nervousness enough to realize that there are far more important things happening in the room. These students are learning how to use their library, and some for the first time. This is it. Here and now. The only way I can be attentive enough to meet this need is to get out of the way a little more. Play a little, if it takes that, to deflate my own fears and let these people learn.

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Watching: John Cale: Fear (Is a Man's Best Friend)
Reading: Libraryola:"Opaque to the Untrained Eye."

happy birthday: Aung San Suu Kyi

Happy Birthday to Aung San Suu Kyi. She's still under house arrest, but maybe she can have some fun today. She's worked hard for the Burmese, so let's remember her for a moment.

comics 9: Superman is real?

'About a decade ago, Alvin Schwartz, who wrote Superman comic strips in the 1940s and ‘50s, published one of the great Odd Books of our time. In An Unlikely Prophet, reissued in paperback this spring, Schwartz writes that Superman is real. He is a tulpa, a Tibetan word for a being brought to life through thought and willpower. Schwartz also says a Hawaiian kahuna told him that Superman once traveled 2,000 years back in time to keep the island chain from being destroyed by volcanic activity. Maybe it happened, maybe it didn’t, but it does sound like a job for Superman – all in a day’s work for a guy who can squeeze coal into diamonds. Schwartz then tells of his own encounter with Superman in a New York taxi, when he learned firsthand that Superman’s cape is, in fact, more than mere fabric.(From Wired: "The Myth of Superman" by Gaiman and Rogers)'

Could it be that Superman and John Constantine have more than comic books in common? Constantine's creator, Alan Moore, has claimed to have met Constantine in real life on more than one occasion. This, if it is true, goes some way to support Grant Morrison's view of comics as hyper-sigils, fictional characters as sentient.

So be kind to your comic books. And all your books. And your DVDs. And each other. Thanks.

info viz 5

Three nifty items today:

1. The Earth, it seems, has an unevenly distributed gravitational field. The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) is mapping it:



















(pic links to quicktime movie)

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2. On the lighter side, map your personality at http://www.personaldna.com/. They claim: "We've developed a new kind of personality test which is free, fun, fast and accurate. Our test has been designed by a team of professional psychologists. It employs innovative answering techniques, allowing for increased accuracy and an enjoyable process."






It's kinda neat.

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3. Finally, trade info with the people you greet with just a handshake?














Media Lab Europe is working on a system of personal, wearable, infrared transceivers for automatically trading contact information. (Via http://infosthetics.com/)

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Reading: The Practical Archaeologist by Jane McIntosh
Listening: Pulp: Common People

interview: James Hughes: Techno-social Changesurfer

Following is an interview with James Hughes, sociologist and transhumanist of note, and author of Citizen Cyborg (Westview, 2004).












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> 1. What's new with you?

Yikes. About fifty things a day. I feel like I'm about to be swept under by accelerating change all the time. Need to spend more time on my meditation cushion.

But some things at the top of the agenda:

- Following up on our successful Human Enhancement Technologies and Human Rights conference at Stanford, May 26-28, with a new set of priorities and programs to propose to the IEET and WTA directors
- Helping with the Transvision conference in Helsinki August 17-19
- Working on a second book called Cyborg Buddha
- Trying to pull together a book on technoprogressive social policy for the IEET
- Writing various essays and chapters
- Consulting
- Parenting
- Clearing brush from my yard and trying to fix my hot tub


> 2. What is transhumanism, and why does it matter?

Transhumanism is the merger of our oldest and deepest aspirations to transcend the limiitations of our mind and body, to be wiser, happier, healthier, longer lived and to have more capabilities, with the democratic values and scientific culture of the European Enlightenment.
We advocate for everyone's right to use safe human enhancement technologies even if we move beyond some people's limited ideas of what humans are supposed to be.


> 3. In recent e-mails, we were talking about the relationship between transhumanism and Buddhism. Can you suggest a few points of synthesis between the two? A few points of fission?

Buddhism is a faith tradition and set of spiritual practices whose core idea is that human beings can become more than human by application of mental technology and self-discipline. As such it is probably the most compatible of the older faiths with transhumanism. But it is also quite
challenging for many transhumanists in its insistence that there is no discrete, continuous ego that could be protected and perpetuated. Many of the immortalists, for instance, find that a threatening idea, but I think we will increasingly see the truth of the emptiness of the self as
we apply neurotechnologies and life extension.


> 4. If I may say so, it looks like we'll all be speaking Mandarin in 100 years. How do China's global (and extraterrestrial) ambitions impact the transhuman agenda?

One of my nightmares is an authoritarian China using coercion to achieve the full benefits of enhancement technologies for their population, and using neurotechnologies to remold their citizens into compliant workers and soldiers. The answer of course is not for the West to ban these technologies, but to make them as widely available to free people to use in freely determined ways, so that we get the even greater advantage to be had from a billion individual experimenters. China also highlights the importance of a global campaign of democratization and political globalization, to ensure human rights, democratic accountability, collective security and fair, sustainable development. Only a democratized world united around a democratic, accountable transnational authority can stand down the new forms of enhanced authoritarianism we are sure to see.


> 5. In the broadest sense of the word, will posthumans need libraries?

Yes, but electronic ones of course. Although some people will still want to read physical originals, I think books and journals will be transcended by richer, more complex and hyperlinked electronic media, engaging all the senses in ways just hinted at by virtual reality games
today.


> 6. There seems to be some really exciting academic work going on that's affiliated with or carried out by transhumanists -- looks like everything from ethnography and gerontology to nanotechnology and engineering. What are the fields that most excite you, and why?

One of the advantages of being a sociologist is that I can legitimately follow and be excited about everything. Like everybody else, my personal hopes for life extension and medical progress focus much of my attention there, and I'm trying to get more knowledgeable about cognition and neuro-physiology for my book Cyborg Buddha.


> 7. I listen to your Changesurfer Radio, and have enjoyed it for years. There's no denying that you're a science-fiction fan, is there? Who are you reading right now?

Just finishing the 1600 pages of Peter Hamilton's Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained, which projects a very plausible transhuman future and polity under serious pressure, implacable threat from hostile aliens. Precisely the kind of imagining we need for the challenges ahead. Next up is Ken MacLeod's Learning the World and Verner Vinge's Rainbow's End.


> 8. Okay. I want to ask you about military and police applications of the transhuman or posthuman vision. The notion of a world in which the world's major states have bundled the technology up and use it to control their populations and wage wars against each other is pretty scary. How can the transhumanist movement, and the technology associated with it, be made widely and democratically available without also making it available to criminals, autocrats, and terrorists?

We can't. We will have to weigh the risks and benefits of wide access to each technology. Making life extension tech widely available has low risks and wide benefits; yes bad guys will live a long time, but so what? Making neurotechnology widely available has more risks, so we will just have to punish those who use them for bad ends. Making nano-weapons widely available has low benefits and high risks, so I would restrict their possession to democratically accountable military and police. Etc.


> 9. Realistically, does the post-Singularity world look more like a Bill Joy or a Ray Kurzweil scenerio to you?

I have more of a cyberpunk future in mind - tech that breaks down and eats stuff as often as it works, government that is more transparent and accountable, but even more scary and destructive when it goes off the rails, people who are smarter, happier and healthier, but individual sociopaths who wreak havoc with unimaginable ease. I have faith we can
muddle through to a better place, but it will be wild and dangerous, and will require constant effort and attention.


> 10. What sort of positive collaborations can you see between transhumanists and librarians?

Librarians can buy lots of future-oriented literature and non-fiction for their libraries. Transhumanists can work to ensure that they don't get caught up in what Jaron Lanier calls "digital Maoism," proposing the complete replacement of expert knowledge by collective knowledge aggregation software, and thereby contribute to the denigration of the important role librarians and other knowledge experts play.


> 11. One more question: what sort of projects are you working on for the rest of the year?

Well these are more my agenda for the next couple of years, but:

1. Researching and writing Cyborg Buddha
2. Promoting a global anti-aging research program
3. Building the IEET and WTA
4. Raising my kids
5. Pursuing my quest to transcend sleep altogether

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Thanks Dr. J!

hurricane initiative

Here at the dawn of the hurricane season of 2006, I offer a new program for the elimination of these threats to our values and our way of life, these storms.

I propose we pave the Gulf. Nothing but parking lot from Belize to the Bahamas, and back up to Port Orange, Florida. We need the parking and we don't need the storms. If a hurricane were yet to come in off the Atlantic into the Gulf Parking Lot, wouldn't we rather lose asphalt than American cities? Absolutely.

If this program is successful, America should build parking lot buffers extending 100 miles off its coasts from Seattle to L.A., and from Maine to Miami by 2012. Sit back and watch it work.

New jobs! Happy asphalt contractors! Fewer hurricanes! More parking! Vote for me!

the DNA of literature

From The Paris Review: Interviews:

"Welcome to the DNA of literature—over 50 years of literary wisdom rolled up in 300+ Writers at Work interviews, now available online—free. Founder and former Editor George Plimpton dreamed of a day when anyone—a struggling writer in Texas, an English teacher in Amsterdam, even a subscriber in Central Asia—could easily access this vast literary resource; with the establishment of this online archive that day has finally come. Now, for the first time, you can read, search, and download any or all of these in-depth interviews with poets, novelists, playwrights, essayists, critics, musicians, and more, whose work set the compass of twentieth-century writing, and continue to do so into the twenty-first."








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Reading: Don Barthelme

fantastic in art and fiction

"The Fantastic in Art and Fiction" is a great image collection put together by the Cornell Institute for Digital Collections. These images are from the 'division of rare and manuscript collections' at the university library.

About the site: "...This image-bank provides a visual resource for the study of the Fantastic or of the supernatural in fiction and in art. While the site emerges from a comparative literature course on the topic at Skidmore College, it is also intended to open the door to consideration of some of the constant structures and patterns of fantastic literature, and the problems they raise. In this sense, the materials presented here may find a use among students in a variety of disciplines."




























The categories: Angels and Demons, Danse Macabre, Weird Science, Bestiary, the Marvelous, the Grotesque, Posession and Insanity, Fantastic Space, Freaks Monsters & Prodigies.

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Listening: Oumou Sangare

black humor, if you've got the stomach for it

Via Warren Ellis and BBC News:

'The suicides of three detainees at the US base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, amount to acts of war, the US military says.

The camp commander said... "They have no regard for life, either ours or their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us."'

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Watching: The Constant Gardener
Reading: Tarot For Dummies
Listening: Stephen Hoeller on the Tarot

Here's a new concern of a different sort over MySpace and such sites... Our government may use them to mass harvest personal information. Via IrelandOnline:

"Online snooping set to move up a gear
10/06/2006 - 11:51:40

A US government spy agency is funding research into the “mass harvesting” of information that people post about themselves on websites like MySpace, it has been claimed.

The New Scientist said the National Security Agency, under fire recently over reports it tracked millions of American citizens’ phone calls, had backed a study on how advances in internet technology could make mining such “social networking” sites more useful.

The magazine said tens of millions of users of such web spaces could be vulnerable to online snooping..."

The New Scientist article.

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And here's another from New Scientist-- an oldie -- protection of civil liberties for Britons, or another invasive attempt at a sort of 'total informatio awareness' program? -- 'DNA database "should include every citizen"':

"The inventor of DNA fingerprinting believes every citizen's genetic information should be stored on the UK national register. This would solve the problem of some individuals being listed even if they have been cleared of committing a crime.

"If we're all on the database, we're all in exactly the same boat - the issue of discrimination disappears," says Alec Jeffreys of the University of Leicester, UK...

Jeffreys says a complete national database should be controlled by an independent body and be limited to storing DNA information that only permits an identification - it should not carry DNA data that could be used to infer appearance, or susceptibility to disease."

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The DNA in the UK issue is a tad different, but it's related; the sad thing is, I think a lot of us have had the attitude for some years that "the government" or corporations are already doing this sort of information gathering and using it to make more money or to seat themselves more securely in control. "They've" got the means. Why not do it? What oversight?

Self censorship is in style again. Yee-ha.

--

Searching: For other songs by Remy Zero besides that one they used on Smallville.

comics 8

Eddie Campbell interview over at Powell's (Ink Q&A):

speculation wild on groovy viking teeth

Discovery News has an article about the recent discovery of modified teeth in young Viking men:






(pic outlinks to raa.se)


"Caroline Arcini of Sweden's National Heritage Board analyzed 557 skeletons of men, women and children from between 800 and 1050 A.D. They discovered that 22 of the men bore deep, horizontal grooves across the upper front teeth. "'The marks are traces of deliberate dental modifications ... they are so well-made that most likely they were filed by a person of great skill,' Arcini wrote in the current issue of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

"Traces of teeth mutilation have been found in all parts of the world except Europe, with the practice reaching its peak from 700 to 1400 A.D., during the height of the Viking Age."

The speculation on why they did this is still all over the place... from marks indicating "pain resistance" (and therefore ferocity!) to marks of slavery (a sort of branding), according to the article.

Here's a closer look at what you're dealing with:

Ribbed for your, um, terror.

red rain, alien strain?

From Popular Science:

"As bizarre as it may seem, the sample jars brimming with cloudy, reddish rainwater in Godfrey Louis’s laboratory in southern India may hold, well, aliens. In April, Louis, a solid-state physicist at Mahatma Gandhi University, published a paper in the prestigious peer-reviewed journal Astrophysics and Space Science in which he hypothesizes that the samples—water taken from the mysterious blood-colored showers that fell sporadically across Louis’s home state of Kerala in the summer of 2001—contain microbes from outer space."

voting like it matters

Why is H.R. 63 still in committee? Shouldn't we be making this one a priority, instead of the "gay marriage ban" amendment that's front and center in the Senate at the moment? (Excellent bit of media distraction, that has turned out to be -- nobody's very interested in why we've been paying Somalian warlords to keep out the Sharia law bunch, esepcially now that our warlords {and former enemies} have failed to hold Mogadishu??)
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From Thomas:

H.R.63
Title: To treat the Tuesday next after the first Monday in November in the same manner as any legal public holiday for purposes of Federal employment, and for other purposes.
Sponsor: Rep Conyers, John, Jr. [MI-14] (introduced 1/4/2005) Cosponsors (109)
Related Bills: S.1130
Latest Major Action: 1/4/2005 Referred to House committee. Status: Referred to the House Committee on Government Reform.

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H.R. 63 would mean, among other things, that when you're waiting in line to vote, you're not losing wages.

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Where are our priorities?

An obvious answer is that the most powerful of our corporate-funded overlords in the legislative branch aren't really all that interested in helping more people get out to vote. But what does it matter if the voting process itself is broken?

links: rfids, tech, etc.

Note to self -- quick roundup and reminders:

Pegasus Librarian -- and a short article with links to "catalogs that are doing cool things".

Sukhdev's World

Tame the Web, of course.

LibraryCrunch -- and a plan aware of 'technolust' isn't self-defeating.

HigherEd Blog Con, much is pertinent.

"Free Range Librarian" on tech trends at last ALA

comics 7

Just got around to reading Bone Vol. 1 by Jeff Smith. I really liked it. The drawings are tight and fun and funny, and full of great little surprises. The characters have secrets which keep you interested and add depth (like, the connection between Granny Ben and the Dragon -- a connection to Rose by Smith and Charles Vess...). The story has a few gaps which leave me rubbing my chin -- not points of suspense, mind, but gaps like why are Phony Bone and Co. trying to go back to Boneville when he was exiled from town to begin with and they know that they can't go back? Maybe that's something that's answered in a later volume or something. But I liked it.

You need to read Promethea again. It's a manual for using your own imagination... tells you how you might use it better than you now do. It's a primer for magickal practice, too.

One more thing, re: Superman. Just watched all 4 of the old movies. Superman 3 and Superman 4 hurt to watch. I remembered loving them as a kid. What happened? How did we go from General Zod to Nuclear Man?

And speaking of Zod... I dearly love Ian McKellen, but I always felt that Terence Stamp would have been much better as Magneto (in the X-Men movies). Stamp would have brought that zealousy and righteousness to the role that we saw expressed in Jim Lee's Magneto. McKellen is very good, but makes a Magneto I never really believed in -- the betrayer, the petty villain. Stamp's would have been a Malcolm X figure. And while we're at it, can we just undo this last X-Men movie? Can somebody please just do it over, better? Like Bryan Singer or somebody? Thanks, if so.

no insularity

This blog is molting. Note the slight shift of subtitle.
It's not meant for anyone so much as it's offered up for anyone who wants to read it.
It's still mostly about libraries, technology, media, magick, and comics. But you won't be surprised if it strays into the decidedly off-topic (because everything's interconnected, right?).

--

Listening: Drive By Truckers: Puttin' People on the Moon
Busy: abusing my illusions.

vikings 1

Learning about Viking Age archaeology now -- just getting into it. York (or Jorvik, as it was known) yeilded a very rich site at Coppergate during the 1970s -- and that site also turned up features and artifacts dating back to the Angle's occupation (famously, the helmet), and a Roman garrison town.

But now I'm excited about the 1960s finds in Newfoundland, because a Swedish scientist has recently found a dental connection between Vikings and New World natives -- apparent ritual carving of the teeth.

This implies more than mere encounter. Some intimacy, mutual understanding, and communication may have existed between the two cultures for such a ritual act to be appropriated.

Sources to follow:

Canadian Parks historical site info for L'anse aux Meadows:
http://www.pc.gc.ca/lhn-nhs/nl/meadows/index_e.asp

Vikings in America:
http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/vinland.html

UNESCO World Heritage site for L'anse aux Meadows:
http://whc.unesco.org/pg.cfm?cid=31&id_site=4

York's Viking Age from the York Archaeological Trust:
http://www.jorvik-viking-centre.co.uk/trialsplash2.htm

Viking Age Timeline:
http://faculty.washington.edu/akn/051002_files/frame.htm

Virtual Tour of Ribblehead Farm in Yorkshire from BBC (.wrl):
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/vikings/launch_vr_viking_farm.shtml

ha!

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Listening: The Pogues
Reading: Stonehenge Complete

comics 6

I recently wrote about "what's wrong with comic shops", and how it would be better for the business of comics and the artform if the comic shops reached out to and included women.

But then again, this tireless inclusiveness smacks of, well, the wussyfication of things.

Comic shop owners and managers can run their places anyway they want to, of course. Time will tell what works best, and I still believe a shot of "Bubble Tea Culture" would do them a world of good, despite my own personal distaste for mangaesthetics. Comics shops can be as grunge and loud and smokey as they want to be -- customers shape the environment.

Some shops will be nerdy and creepy. Some shops will be icy, too cool, too distant, too corporate. Some shops will be pink, and some will be blue. Some will be red and black. Every shop ought to be a little different -- there shouldn't be just one way to run a place, because there isn't just one kind of comics-reader. That's the point: there isn't just one kind of reader.

So run your shop how you like -- your customers, eventually, will make it what it is, and it's their personalities and tastes that end up shaping "the medium" anyway. The danger is in monism -- whether powered by a desire to be just as successful as a Barnes&Nobles, or whether it comes from a need to reach out and "include" everybody (thereby making every place the same, every shop soft).

In the end, I go to lots of different comic shops because I like that each one is a little different. It's the diversity that keeps the game interesting. We don't all want to read superhero stories, and we don't all want to read manga -- it's the differences and variagation that keeps this game alive.

Librarians would do well to remember this too. Give every branch an edge, every section a personality.

comics 5

Further notes on comics (and games):

* My wife did go back to that comics shop with me. They have a really big, cool collection of all kinds of games -- she wanted something to play in the pub that afternoon. It was a a calm, quiet, Friday afternoon. Just a couple of other people in the shop (one was female, by the way) drifting through the back issues and the pewter minatures. The manager with the funny hat was still in a funny hat, but he stayed well out of our way. My wife picked "EcoFluxx", which turned out to be a fun one, and we went haunted haunting the pub for a while, playing, then went and haunted our Bubble Tea joint for a while, playing. On the way out of the shop she said, "Well, that was much better."

* I'm watching the old Superman movies again at home (I didn't realize that I was doing it in preparation for the new movie due out soon, but I am!). My wife noted how excited she gets, watching them. Me too. I remember how cool they were when I was a boy -- and, be damned!, they're still cool. The new movie has a lot of work to do if it's going to compare. Superman 1 really set the Kryptonian aesthetics perfectly -- the complex, jagged, crystalline structure of everything (that would later get folded into a robust, knotty, almost-tangled look under John Byrne's pencils in the comics) ...there was a kind of "smart stuff" or early "everyware" aspect to the way [Kryptonian] things looked in both the movie and with Byrne's take. It highlights their technological acheivements, and that heightens the tragedy of their doom. Awesome.

* Back to games for a minute. Comics and games seem to go together, somehow. What is it about them? In gaming you can become like the characters you read about in comics (of any genre). Games are a way to "do something" about unsolvable problems, too, in a way. More important than that, in my mind, is the transformative and "magickal" power of gaming -- to look squarely at a usually-hidden aspect of yourself in the context of a cooperative fictional environment and make that "self" do whatever you Will within the bounds of the agreed upon rules. I don't think magick is a big or important part of gaming culture, however... and maybe it's more effective as magick if the magick remains mostly hidden. Anyway.

* Games aren't gender-divvied, are they? Seems like I see throngs of both girls and boys playing the Yu Gi Oh or the Pokemon in the bookstores on the weekends. And everybody loves Scrabble and Monopoly and Poker, right? What about table-top RPGs? Still the domain of men? It's just interesting to me that games drew my wife back to a comic shop she swore off of. Looking for a game -- a cool game, not just Connect Four or something, but an unusual, under-the-radar, bottom-shelf, small press, game. She was looking for something obscure, see, and the best place to browse for off-beat games? You know. The comics shop. Now how does this play in the the bigger conversation about comics shops? Will games be (or are they already, or have they already been) a factor in getting more women into comics shops? And if they come seeking games, why not just go to a "game shop"? Comics and games seem to go together, somehow.

* For librarians... I again must stress the importance of collecting and promoting this stuff. Gaming books and graphic novels are hot, hot, hot, and it's not a passing fad. This has had and will continue to have staying-power. Design your programs (for any age groups) around these materials and watch a loyal community grow up around you. Go read PopGoesTheLibrary -- they know what's up. And, by the way, this isn't any kind of acquiescence to "low brow" media. Comics are full of advanced vocabulary and complex plots. Comics and games are good for kids (and grownups). You know that, don't you?

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Weather: Finally cloudy.
Shushing: My insurance company.

obit: Ian Copeland of IRS Records

Here's an obituary for Ian Copeland from Surviving The Golden Age:

"Today is a sad day for many in the London and Georgia music scene. IRS co-founder and Georgian concert promoter, Ian Copeland has passed away from Melanoma at the age of 57. Ian is accredited with launching the careers of bands such as the Police, R.E.M., the B-52s, and Squeeze.

Ian's brother Miles Copeland founded IRS records and enlisted Ian to bring Squeeze to the states. Ian made Squeeze a hit in the states by booking them a long tour schedule of smaller night clubs. Ian later brought his younger brother's band, The Police to the states. Ian created what is now referred to as the "club circuit".

Later Ian started Frontier Booking International (F.B.I.) which booked for bands like R.E.M., The Bangles, Adam Ant, Nine Inch Nails, and the Dead Kennedys..."

*

At the post, there's a live R.E.M. set from 1982 in .mp3 files.

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Listening: 1,000,000

info viz 4

A couple of info viz notes:

See a map of Amazon's books:












Weird. Fun.

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Text represented as "binary signs" for the spaces you move around in:









This one puts me in mind of Semacode again, and makes me wonder about the possibilites of using ambient machine-readable markers in our spaces to link our machines with information. Kind of like a "magic eye" for computers that whisks the patron away to rich info resources.

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Both found via http://infosthetics.com.

mls, mlis, certification

|UPDATE, Sep 07|

My thinking on this continues to evolve. What I wrote below was in part motivated by long years of observing dedicated library employees with very professional attitudes and great knowledge of sources and technique being treated sub-professionally. But the degree itself needs to be worth something and it should mean something -- it should be a qualifier without disqualifying those who work hard without it.

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The graduate "library science" or "information and library science" degree is a funny thing. I worked in libraries for almost 10 years before I got the MLIS, and I think my experience taught me far more about how libraries should operate than the degree did.

The degree is a kind of initiation into "professionalism", and for all the great instruction (and independent research and practicums -- and I mean in no way to deny the value of what gets taught), the culture of the title "librarian" seems often to be more important than the practice to too many of my peers, these days.

The degree, too, is a period of intense thinking about and writing about libraries -- and that was utterly useful to me. It changed my life. But it's not the only way to go.

See, I hate this word "paraprofessional". It's demeaning. It means something to the effect of "on the side of" or "with" in the old Greek. The non-degreed librarians that I know (and have known) daily take the lead on matters of policy and customer service, and in the operational smoothness of our libraries -- while the "professionals" are in the background shaking hands with deans or city council members, brainstorming on programs, ordering books and doing other (very essential but usually less immediate) work. In reality, it's librarians who are alongside them, and not the other way round.

I think there should be a certification program for librarians, to grant "librarianship" after a period of practical experience, a few short (short!) courses, and test of some kind. A full-on "postgraduate degree" isn't necessary, especially when you consider the fact that this really is a sort of professional (as in more-professional-than-academic, as in more focused on the career or the profession of librarianship than it is on advancing the general body of knowledge related to information science... c'mon) and beuracratic hurtle. The degree is in most cases just a gate guard for administrators.

Librarians and libraries shouldn't be about that. 15 years of practical know-how should be worth far more than 4 semesters of online classes, a couple of field trips, and a piece of parchment. "Librarianship" shouldn't be so zealously guarded by the bean-counters when there are so many bright and able people who deserve advancement and would be considerable boons to our libraries. Some kind of certification program would solve these problems and get more people in the gate.

This "librarian" thing isn't a Sunday garden club, you know. Let's look at our assets -- at our dedicated "paraprofessionals", and let's train them up and certify them and put them where so many of them belong -- in leadership roles. Librarians could stand a bit of a de-high-horsing, and "paraprofessionals" could really stand to be looked at anew for what they are: professional.

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Watching: Emmanuel's Gift
Listening: Squarepusher: Big Loada
Surfing: UFO crash: Aurora, TX, 1897

Via Lisnews.org:
"The Australian Federal Government may ban the sale of "hate books" and outlaw the glorification of terrorism. Islamic books that support violent jihad can be sold because sedition and incitement laws do not specifically ban them, according to legal advice to the Australian Federal Police.

Well this does go some way toward the concerns expressed in an earlier post. And this post (link), which deals with banned books in the U.K.

I really feel that this is coming our way, folks... It won't be long before the U.S. follows suit and starts outlawing books. Or, to be more accurate, outlaws the manifestation of ideas that are deemed dangerous to the state, whether in book form or whether spoken aloud in lectures.

da vinci code debate

I haven't read The DaVinci Code yet... I might get around to it some day, but I'm more interested (and have been for years) in what Stephen Hoeller has to say about church origins than I am in what Dan Brown says about it. I don't mean to knock Mr. Brown -- I haven't read any of his novels. But if we're arguing about doctrine and history, let's go to the historians and theologians, no? Instead of the novelists? It's like, you know, entertainment and education aren't exactly the same thing.

There's a metaphor now loose, though, and what ever mean-eyed arguments may continue erupting around the novel (and now the movie), it will be very dangerous to lots of Christian faithful -- the metaphor is something like "Christ is in us & he always was". Something like that.

Will believers go to their libraries and look deeper than the pro and con shout-down-books? Will they read the Nag Hammadi scriptures, and decide for themselves? Our patrons are better off (that is: better enabled to dig deeper and empower their own arguments for or against the "code") if we dig a little deeper too... Pull out the Margaret Starbird alongside The DaVinci Deception... Put out the Bethany House stuff alongside the Disinformation guides...

For my part, the fact that so many people have called for the movie to be censored pretty much guarantees that I'll go watch it. Are they trying to get me to see it? I don't cotton well to being told what information I shouldn't have access to... and if I like the movie, I might just read the book after all.

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Watching: Ask A Ninja: "Net Neutrality"

image problem?

LISNews.org reports on a couple of famous authors (Rowling, Rushdie) getting out to support public libraries. It seems that libraries in the U.K. have an image problem?

In the Guardian Unlimited article that the story's drawn from, Alain de Botton is quoted: "It's in walking into a library that most people first get the sense of how little they know... Surrounded by so many books, we are liable to feel how great our ignorance is, next to all the accumulated wisdom and insight of others."

Huh. Don't quite know how to respond to that... except to say that I hope that's not the cause of Britons' avoidance of libraries. I don't agree with it -- I lived in England, and I never got the impression that folks were scared of their books, or intimidated by the insights of others. If that is the problem, they've got bigger worries than dwindling library circulation. Anybody know more about this issue?

"ideological exclusion"

Via The Kept-Up Academic Librarian:

"Since passage of the USA Patriot Act after Sept. 11, 2001, a number of academics have been denied visas or had them revoked. Universities and scholarly associations have written letters to the government to no avail."

So foreign scholars are being kept out of the U.S. seemingly because some in the government are worried about what they might say (link to Christian Science Monitor story) to us Americans. The DHS claims that these academics are kept out because the Patriot Act's section 411 gives the government the power to exclude anyone who espouses or endorses terrorism.

How long before we librarians are given a list of illegal books -- books that are said to espouse or endorse the viewpoints of terrorists? And since the t-word has such a broad definition, I reckon we'll all have lots and lots of weeding to do.

See also: Patriot Act in the U.K.

meta / universal library

In a previous post, I went daydreaming about a sort of universal library. Kevin Kelly's "Scan This Book!" just over at New York Times Magazine is a good overview of the dream of a "universal library", a library collecting all information in all media (across all time). Of course such a thing is impossible, despite the apparent optimism in Kelly's article -- and I think he makes the complexities of implementation abundantly clear. See also The Gypsy Librarian for more good questions about this subject. Angel is right to point out the obvious hitch in these bold dreams: not many of us, on balance, have computers.

I don't think it's possible to detangle the politics from the question of universal access. Kelly doesn't get into it, but there is a reason (besides the obvious technical and litigious barriers) that such a universal library doesn't exist. There's a reason that such a library will probably never exist. Simply put, it's not in the interest of the powerful to allow universal access to the world's information.

Not until the nature of "power" and leadership is radically altered will true empowerment for all people be seen as a good by the world's governors. It would take a true democracy, at least (if not an even more radically distributive and open system), in which "all" the people who have an interest in access are able to legislate and execute such access for themselves -- in other words, a system where every person actually has meaningful self-governing powers.

We're lucky that we can even have such conversations about the possibilities of universal access -- most aren't so lucky. And Google as the great enabler? Google censors searches in China to keep cozy with those in power. As long as it makes better political/business sense to keep people and information apart, this "universal library" won't be possible.

Who benefits from a universal library? Who takes a hit when we get the information to the people with impunity, or when people get the information to themselves? File "universal libraries" under post-Singularity daydreaming.

But that doesn't mean we have to give up.

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Watching: Harold Bloom on BookTV
Feeling: churlish as hell
Surfing: swish-e.org

homework, librarians

Basic information literacy skills: for any book, website, lecture, film, e-mail, or conversation, you've got to be able to determine if it's accurate, authoratative authoritative, current, objective, and what the scope of it is. At least that's what we like to teach our patrons around here: think critically about your sources.

Here's a spot of homework, then... does the following video (embedded from Google Video -- 9/11 Loose Change - 2nd Edition) meet these criteria?

the singularity summit at stanford

If you're in the neighborhood on May 13th (that's this Saturday!), check out the Singularity Summit at Stanford. What's the singularity? "In futures studies, the singularity represents an "event horizon" in the predictability of human technological development past which present models of the future cease to give reliable or accurate answers, following the creation of strong AI or the enhancement of human intelligence. Many futurists predict that after the singularity, humans as they exist presently won't be the driving force in scientific and technological progress, eclipsed cognitively by posthumans, AI, or both, with all models of change based on past trends in human behavior becoming obsolete," say they.

I'd go if I could. Click image below to read about the speakers.

thinglink: more toward spimes

You've heard of Thinglink? It's one clever way to help realize that "ultimate geek dream of knowing where all your stuff is", to paraphrase Bruce Sterling quoting Warren Ellis. And it looks like a lot of fun. It taps the Make crowd, and they're a fun lot, for sure.

Does this stuff mean that all librarians are to become archivists of a kind? And are all physical objects (realia, in the parlance of catalogers) to become informational? Metadata for every pen and shoe and coffee cup and knitted pillow case on the planet? Or can we just skip the prentense and let librarians go the way of last-century's secretaries? (I don't think so.) More on this later.

Here's the video of Ulla-Maaria Mutanen talking about Thinglink, how it works, and a little about what it may mean. ...Every book/thing its reader. (And let's have a round of applause for ANT, while we're at it... it's high time it got a little more play.)





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Feeling: very, very distracted

info viz 3

via Sukhdev's World, we find the InfoVis Wiki:

"The InfoVis:Wiki project is intended to provide a community platform and forum integrating recent developments and news on all areas and aspects of Information Visualization.

Using editable–by–anyone Wiki technology turned out to be the only way of keeping the presented information up to date and knowledge exchange vivid."

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Listening: Alan Moore (et al) The Highbury Working
Next is: Angel Passage

comics 4

I made the mistake of taking my wife to a comics shop. I should have known better.

It was "Free Comic Book Day" this last Saturday, and I went in the afternoon to surf around for a new book, and, you know, support the medium. I found Shaolin Cowboy by Geof Darrow, and was mighty pleased. I also noticed some little wind-up robots (Kikkerland gadgetry!) on the way out, and they got to bugging me to the point that I decided to go back and buy one on the way to get groceries with my lady.

She hates comics. I've suggested Blankets, Ghost World, Orbiter, A Distant Soil, others, but she just can't get into them. Part of it, she admits, is a prejudice toward the key memes of the medium -- the capes and tights and muscles-for-justice. Part of it is that she thinks women are overly sexualized in comics... We debate this point (including the traditional oversexing of men in comics) about once a month or so. The sad thing is, she mostly right, because most comics still insistently truck in such dreck (so the brilliant stories get obfuscated by what's marketed to 13-year-old-30-year-olds).

So we go into the comics shop and I pick up my robot (okay, yes, my toy), and we're waiting quietly in line to buy the thing when the manager dons a black and purple belled jester's cap and addresses her, like, "Heeey! This is free comics day!! You can't have your hands in your pockets in a comic shop! Don't you wantafreecomic??!!" and starts jangling his cap, like he's talking to a 4 year old. All the folks turn to look at my wife.

She holds her own, says "No thanks. I don't even like comics." But the guy keeps blathering on and on. I butt-in and cut him off, saying that I've already got too many comics, yada yada, that I've already been in once today, yada yada, and that deflects attention from her. Cool.

Then when I actually check out, the cashier makes some kind of allusion/joke-thing about "Stargate: SG-1" and I don't follow the show, and my wife doesn't follow the show (we don't get channels, even, we just rent DVDs), so we're lost, but he's cracking up. Here's the money, thanks, bye, you've managed to out-nerd me. Congrats.

We step out to the sidewalk and she immediately says "I'm never going in there again."

Alright. Pause. Take a breath.

Librarians, notice!

This is the part where you think: "Gee. Most of the patrons who check out graphic novels from my library are teenage girls. Granted, they're almost exclusively taking out the manga love stories and teeny romance tales, maybe with just a dash of The Sandman or somesuch sometimes... But he's right. Comics shops are usually male-only domains. Why don't girls feel comfortable in comics shops, but very comfortable getting comics from my library?"

And this is the part where comic shop managers should take notice.

Most new readers are female, and most are young. That means that if you get your act together, wipe your noses, and make your stores inviting to the young woman demographic, you might just garner yourselves some lifelong customers. And you might just be doing your part to rescue the medium from itself.

Others have been writing about this for some time (see Warren Ellis' Come in Alone for a very good example), but I'm yet to see much change. Comics are absolutely going to suffocate in their own excrement of control fantasies and sexual fetishism unless alternative kinds of stories, styles, values, and aesthetics come to be celebrated, and come to be the touchstone in what we mean when we say "comics" -- and this needs to happen soon.

Now what can comic shops learn from librarians about cultivating a strong comics customer base?

• Libraries aren't dingy, musty, dusty, and dark.
• Libraries don't encourage groups of grown men to hang around cuss the %@#$ out of each other over the subtler points of orcish armor in D&D 3rd ed.
• Libraries offer lots of kinds of stories in lots of formats -- not just superheros and hentai.
• (and here's the main point) Libraries aren't creepy -- they're not the kinds of places where everyone leers when a girl (OH MY GOD, A girl...) walks in.

Obviously, not all comic shops are so bad. And superhero stories can be fun, for sure. I don't mean to throw it all out.

But a little sunlight and and a little cool music and a little bit of Bubble Tea culture would go a long way towards encouraging girls and women to pay a visit to the shop. A little less uber-nerdlingness and a little more of a "your you're cool, we're not creepy, please enjoy your visit" attitude in the shops would go a long, long way too.

It would have made all the difference to my wife on this last Saturday.

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Listening: Paulo Conte