Nazis, and then DDR commies, commandeer Jewish condom empire

This is an interesting book review in the Berlin Review of Books, and an opportunity for a blog post title that will appeal to search engines.

Fromms: Wie der jüdische Kondomfabrikant Julius F. unter die deutschen Räuber fiel The Great Rubber Robbery: How Julius Fromm’s Condom Empire Fell to the Nazis  

Pullman's defense of libraries makes NYT editorial!!!

Reading list on technology criticism

Critical perspectives on science and technology - a reading list.

Interactive map: American adults with college degrees

A cautionary tale for overeager weeders

A rousing defense of libraries by Philip Pullman led me (via the comments) to this post at I love Franklin Ave. blog
It may well be apocryphal, but it's a charming tale that makes a point nonetheless.

Library City

LibraryCity

Toward a universal national digital library system with public governance - blog with lots of interesting stuff! The introductory post explains what it's all about.

Vive la différence

A glossary by Schott (he of Schott's Miscellany) of "arcane national caricatures from writers curiously fascinated with difference."

Great "books on wheels" accessory

Nothing warms the heart of a librarian like an invention - however primitive - that encourages people to read more. Can also be used for writing - and notice that it does not interfere with the action of the steering wheel. Ingenious!

Internet gains on TV as main news source

from PEW

Detroit in ruins - extraordinary photographs

Detroit in ruins: the photographs of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre 

Gallery

A thing or two about N.American dialects

Philip Zimbardo on how perspectives of time affect work, health, relationships and well-being.

10 well-spent minutes:  Philip Zimbardo on how perspectives of time affect work, health, relationships and well-being.

2011 book preview

From The Millions, a month by month preview of books in the year to come. I look forward to David Bezmozgis's first novel.

Culturomics

The Google Labs N-gram Viewer is the first tool of its kind, capable of precisely and rapidly quantifying cultural trends based on massive quantities of data. It is a gateway to culturomics! The browser is designed to enable you to examine the frequency of words (banana) or phrases ('United States of America') in books over time. You'll be searching through over 5.2 million books: ~4% of all books ever published! (see users guide)

An outstanding Christmas decoration!

A truly outstanding Christmas decoration! And testimony by the anonymous prankster about the response to his lifesize yuletide ornament (read it at Traveling Librarian) inspires faith in the goodness of mankind! (I posted this in 2009 also, but the best decorations come out every year)

"A brand is like a sack on a sleigh of belief"

The Santa Brand Book elucidates the science of branding. Very clever.

Google's intergenerational tech support

http://www.teachparentstech.org/

The future of reading on the ipad

A while back, when vooks were introduced (what an outdated concept!),  I was expressing doubts about how boring old text would survive when competing with multimedia on the same reading/viewing/listening device. David Eagleman's "Why the Net Matters" is a boo... a package of information produced exclusively as an iPad app. He demonstrates it here (of course, the demonstration itself could just as well have been part of the iPad package...), and it really makes me to wonder - again - what value text adds when audio, video and text converge in the same medium. (and here is another demo without narration)

The future of the universities

Stefan Collini's review in the London Review of Books about tuition fees and the Report of the Independent Review of Higher Education Funding and Student Finance raises questions about market-driven education that should also be asked about market-driven libraries.

A more just distribution of land

I was unable to find Norway here....

A picture is worth a thousand words

What a wonderful thing the Internet is - was about to describe an earwig to a non-English speaker when I happily stumbled upon this picture

Irrational Exuberance

In LRB, a cool assessment of USG's public diplomacy 2.0 and its "irrational exuberance" about social media.

Go team

David Gewanter in the Times Higher Education supplement writes about U.S. football teams sporting their very own universities.

Web2PDF

Web2PDF accepts a url and generates a pdf file from the webpage. The pdf retains the layout of the page and also its hyperlinks. If you have access to email, say through a cell phone, but not a webbrowser, you can send the url via email to submit@web2pdfconvert.com, and Web2PDF will send you the pdf as a mail attachment. See also "10 email addresses that are useful when you have no internet access"  is an extremely useful weThe converted PDFs not only retain the layout but also the hyperlinks and thus you may fetch other internal pages as well using email itself. All this stuff courtesy of Digital Inspiration, Amit Agarwal's useful blog.

Satsifying the needs of both writers and readers

It's an often overlooked fact that writers and readers have very different language needs. The ingenious tool Plain English - created by Slate's Jeremy Singer-Vine - goes a long way toward satisfying the needs of both; just use the "start over" and "convert all" buttons to toggle between writer and reader mode. Here is an example of language - for both writers and readers - from the Fed.

The mother of multitasking...and the beginning of the end

Worldometers

Real-time world statistics that give pause.

Alexei Sayle, dancer extraordinaire

Some of the best dancing ever...Alexei Sayle in 1986 and - unbelievably - 1982!!! (below - and what a groove, who's in that band?)

Midterm election search trends

Google introduces Place Search

From the Google blog: Place Search is rolling out now and will be available globally in more than 40 languages in the next few days. During the roll-out process you can use this special link to preview the new results. Our goal is to help you feel like a local everywhere you go!