Sir Arthur has passed on

Writer Arthur C Clarke dies at 90

Sir Arthur C Clarke was famous for his science fiction writing

Legendary British science fiction writer Sir Arthur C Clarke has died in Sri Lanka at the age of 90.

He came to fame when his story, 2001: A Space Odyssey, was made into a film by director Stanley Kubrick in 1968.

Once called "the first dweller in the electronic cottage", his vision captured the popular imagination.

Sir Arthur, who was born in Minehead, Somerset, and was a radar specialist for the RAF in World War II, become a full-time writer in the 1940s.

A farmer's son

Sir Arthur's vivid - and detailed - descriptions of space shuttles, super-computers and rapid communications systems were enjoyed by millions of readers around the world.

His writings are credited by many observers with giving science fiction - a genre often accused of veering towards the fantastical - a human and practical face.

A farmer's son, he was educated at Huish's Grammar School in Taunton before joining the civil service.

my week so far

pogue mahone, dear readers. or pope mahone. whatever.

spencer: right again

You need to be reading What You Already Know. Spencer is right on, here, right down to the gardening.

"Let the ISD pay for it"?!?!

I am rotfl. Really am.

---

Reading: Laurence Freeman. Quenches about like well water.
Listening: Frank Zappa (Is that a real poncho, I mean, is that a Mexican poncho or is that a Sears poncho?)

the myspace shrug

an old ghostfooting post worth not forgetting (rediscovered via Angel):

« greenfield video everyware

Terence McKenna’s lost library »

state of the library

May 15, 2007

Librarians I’ve talked with haven’t generally been pleased with ALA’s 07 State of America’s Libraries. I hear grumbling. I hear mumbling that the report is self-serving. I hear much cynical dissatisfaction that the ALA is out of touch, glancing rosily around at a future they don’t much get. Maybe that’s not fair. I mean, after all, they presumably haven’t cooked the books to get to these statistics.

Angel makes a good point:

And we still have our work cut out for us in terms of educating people about social networks. That we have a bunch of hysteria mongers trying to legislate something they don’t understand is simply disgraceful.

Truly any new big numbers of library visitors are mostly visitors to library computer labs, no? What do folks overwhelmingly do on the computers? Visit social networks, yes. The report says that public library connection speeds don’t live up to user “needs”. Ha. Haha.

Folks, we’re standing around shrugging at each other over web2.0, yet to really imagine and implement good information services that use social networking, folksonomy, or user-generated content to excellent effect. We’re mostly trying to convince our administrative overlords that we should at least have this discussion, to at leat talk about the potential benefits and pitfalls of making ourselves availabe on, like, Facebook.

And while we stand shrugging, web3.0, a more or less intelligent “semantic” web, is slowly growing its bones. What will it take to make real technological (and therefore cultural) leaders out of librarians? Maybe it’s a lost cause. We fold to “hysteria mongers” who are even more short sighted than we are.

I’m not feeling very hopeful, either, at the moment. And I am beginning to think that the real information service action is corporate. We didn’t build it, they didn’t come. Yahoo! built it. Google built it. Ask built it. MySpace built it. Our patrons don’t come to us, they just come for MySpace.

We’ve dropped the ball.

1. 

   First, thanks for the link. To be honest, by the time I posted about, I figured it would slip unseen. Anyhow, you hit it well. We need to get our overlords in the library world to at least start having the discussions. The patrons are already at the next level (well, for the most part. I don’t buy every single patron has gone 2.0 either). I would like to think that we can get librarians to that point you mention of being leaders. Unfortunately, I look around, and I hate to say this, but it may take some people just getting weeded out. I probably should quit while I am ahead (I am in a setting where certain “leaders” can do best by simply retiring and getting out of our way). It’s hard to be hopeful, but we should at least try. Best, and keep on blogging.

   by Angel May 15, 2007 at 3:01 pm
   
2. 

   Hey, I feel ya.

   If librianship as a profession doesn’t soon have a signficant attitudinal shift, it’s gonna break like an old lady’s hip.

   by woody3 May 16, 2007 at 7:28 pm

Hello world!
[The above post was done in an info literacy class to demonstrate embedding videos into blog posts in blogger. A good class -- an attentive, with-it bunch. Thanks Pennie for bringing them to the library!]

omg, scratch

Scratch!
OLPC type thing, like Squeak?
Easy to use.
Fun to use.
Uses for teaching info literacy?
Critical thinking?
Social networking aspects.
Fun to use.
Sharing tips, sharing knowledge, groups learning together (yes, social networking!)...
I like.






[found via Spencer]

French comics culture

If you look further you will see that the BD section - pronounced Bay-Day - is in fact sub-divided into several categories.

There will be classics - Asterix, Tintin, Lucky Luke, the cowboy who shoots faster than his shadow - plus many that never made it out of Franco-Belgium, like Rahan - l'enfant des ages farouches or child of the age of savagery - about a Tarzan-like figure from prehistoric times.

There will be the latest best-sellers. Top of the book lists this month - beating Harry Potter and the latest on President Nicolas Sarkozy's love life - has been the last in a long-running adventure series called Thirteen about a man trying to rediscover his identity after losing his memory.

There will be the American comics section, the Japanese Manga section - this one getting bigger and bigger because they are getting more and more popular.

There will also be the adult section, with works of quite astonishing vividness.

And then, pride of place, the section for what the French call "les Auteurs".

Here, the most highly regarded authors are catalogued by name.

This is the art-house end of the market.

An album in this section may sell only a few hundred copies - compared to half a million for the latest hit - but the true connoisseurs will know all about it.

Here, experimentation and the avant-garde allow the Bay-Day fan to see him or herself as more than just a consumer, rather as a cultured devotee of a thriving art form.

[BBC story: link]

Thanks, Heavy D.

band names 9

The Norman, Oklahoma Blood Quantum & Bling City Review

nighty, night for WikiLeaks

If you bothered to get excited about the implications of WikiLeaks, you can stop.

It's killed.

Unless:

SUPPORT OUR FIRST AMENDMENT CASE TO APPEAL BUSH APPOINTEE JUSTICE WHITE'S ORDER TO CENSOR WIKILEAKS.ORG!
Back our defense fund by emailing supporters@sunshinepress.org with your pledge!

george dyson's mad infoskillz

Anthropotek has this video [link] of George Dyson at TED. I'm really dumbstruck by the man's infoskillz... he found so much on Project Orion that NASA ends up buying thousands of pages from him. Now that's a helluva historian. NASA, he says, continues funding a small contingent to work on this emergency evacuation of the planet contingency... Amazing.

Oh, here's his book on the subject [link].








{also: Long Now lectures}

word has it

Woody don't twitter.

band names 8

The Real Goods

lecturing the choir

Do folks (besides librarians) really want to sit around in seat-spots pretending to be good while some expert whinges on and on about the terrible state of gender inequity in virtual economies? Or what? When folks can fly, wouldn't they rather be flying and maybe catch the lecture on their virtual headphones? Or what? I mean, is that what we really reckon our patrons want to do... when they could be flying?

institutional license?

Wonder if libraries could get some kind of a 4 or 5 device unlimited access variation agreement going? Use the keitai to push and pull info with patrons' keitai. Kaywa tag bookclub selections to discussion forums, a webliography... build and push mobile catalog search widgets... that kind of thing.

second skin

Unfair, maybe, to bring it up based only on two minutes of trailer for the film... but what about ethnicity?



Looks good. Hope to see it.

fbi to create biometric database w/ tattoo mapping

...scar imaging, retinal and fingerprint scans, all of it [link].
Bioinformatic dominance in the name of security.
[via BoingBoing]



"Papers please! Paperless persons are illegals. Now you wear your papers. Your tattoos are taken under immanent domain as intellectual property of the state!"

Imagine librarians freelancing, nights, as pattern snoopers in a database of body smells.

info tools at AFCEA

Just noting the 'products, services, and solutions' for battlefield and support at AFCAE West this year includes:

• Battle Damage Assessment
• Biotechnology
• Bandwidth Compression and Synchronization
• Collaboration & Collaborative Tools
• Combat ID Perimeter Security
• Common Operating Picture (COP)
• Data Architecture
• Data Encryption
• Data Manipulation and Analytical Tools
• Data Mining & Warehousing
• E-Commerce & E-Business
• Electronic Warfare Equipment
• Electronically Enhanced Education
• Enterprise Architecture
• Global Positioning Systems
• Information and Intelligence Fusion
• Information Operations, Assurance and Security
• Interoperability – Joint and Coalition
• Knowledge Enabled Logistics
• Knowledge Management & Leadership Decision Making
• Nanotechnology
• Network Centric Warfare
• Shared Intel Databases at Multiple Security Levels
• Simulations & Modeling
• Streaming Video
• Visualization Technologies
• Voice over IP
• VTC – C2 System
• Wireless Solutions, Networking and Security

and several other info-heavy tool suites...

Of course, STAR-TIDES is there representing. Much respeck.

library interaction GOLD

info layout

Thinking about info architecture, but down real basic-like.

Take the page. Most folks on the Earth can deal with a page -- they've got some kind of cultural place for the page, even if not for print or for books. We can sort a page out -- right-to-left, left-to-right, up or downwise, lots of us have context for markings on a page.

Web browsers are new, computers are new, and as common as they seem to us in the bizzness, plenty of folks yet have zero context for making sense of the computer. The mouse? Keyboards, more common. Web browsers? Web pages?

Folks'll be thinking "Where is this page, like? On web-what?" Does it go forward-back, back-forward, front-to-back? Which way am I moving through it? How do I get to where I began, and how do I know where to go next?

Old territory for some of you. Usability stuff back to Nielsen. Peter Morville and info-structures.

But let's look at this anthropologically, culturally. How do grammars affect layouts? How do kinship models affect category trees?

band names 7

False Flag