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!

Slang

Latest! Knowbodies has been flattered by a visit from the author himself, Jonathon Green. He comments:

My thanks for the mention of GDoS. Might I, as author, make two small amendments: the book is actually published by Chambers in the UK. OUP / US are distributing it in N. America.
Perhaps more important is the fact that my book deals not merely 'English' English slang, but the entire range of 500 years of anglophone slangs, including US / UK / Eire / Australia / New Zealand / Caribbean / S. Africa.

Congratulations to Jonathon Green - I wish the book every success, and hope it gets reviewed by Nicholson Baker!

J.E. Lighter's ambitious Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang foundered after 2 volumes, and was taken over by Oxford University Press in 2003 which intended to publish 2 final volumes.  We're still waiting for those.  Next month Oxford will release Jonathon Green's three-volume Green's Dictionary of Slang (English slang, that is), which by the looks of it is a worthy successor to Eric Partridge. There's a  review here that has some interesting tidbits, including the claim that there is no agreed etymology of the word "slang" itself. (I wonder if it is related to the Norwegian word "slang", which derives from English seaman's usage for "to fool or cheat", and in common parlance means filching fruit from gardens, as in "epleslang" ie. snitching apples)  I do hope this major new publication doesn't mean Oxford has given up on  completing the American dictionary...I will ask, and share the response with my myriad readers here.

Too much stuff

Like many librarians, I'm an incorrigible collector, and have to get rid of  things from time to time. I'm currently taking bids on my good as new bucket-wheel excavator.

Strange Maps blog

The post Great European Shouting Match at Frank Jacob's Strange Maps blog features maps from Yanko Tsvetkov's Mapping Stereotypes project, and ties them together with an interesting narrative. (Strange Maps is one of many interesting things at Big Think - Lea Carpenter's literature blog Think, See, Feel is another)

Tynt

That cool bit of technology I mentioned in my post about the New Yorker below is called "Tynt", and I've now implemented it on this site. Cut some text from Knowbodies and paste it somewhere else, and you'll see how it works. Neat!

On dithering and doing

Is there something you should be doing? Then I suggest you read JamesSurowiecki's fascinating article about procrastination,  Later....right now.  Many nuggets of wisdom about you and me like "we often procrastinate not by doing fun tasks but by doing jobs whose only allure is that they aren’t what we should be doing"

Incidentally, the New Yorker seems to have implemented a cool bit of technology I hadn't seen before that automatically adds a "Read more at: [URL]" to any snippet of text that you copy and paste from it, like this:

 

Some years ago, the economist George Akerlof found himself faced with a simple task: mailing a box of clothes from India, where he was living, to the United States.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2010/10/11/101011crbo_books_surowiecki?currentPage=all#ixzz14om80FfS

 

 

 

Where great ideas come from

Very cool video from Steven Johnson...and for a change, very nicely narrated (narration on so many of these instructive videos is unbearable to listen to!)

Ten Simple Rules for Editing Wikipedia

• How to edit Wikipedia: a concise guide explaining to scientists how (and why) to publish accurate information via Wikipedia, and  a useful crib-sheet for any Wikipedia author. 

Darnton on creating the digital library

Small change, net effect

Harry Campbell

Eugene Mozorov has challenged the "internet as road to democracy" truism here , and here and there, and now  Malcolm Gladwell piles on.

White House blog: Libraries: A Place Where Stories are Told, Knowledge is Gained, and Economies are Built

Agriculture Tom Vilsack has announced American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funding to assist 129 rural libraries in 30 states to create, expand, and improve the nation’s rural libraries – benefitting over 1.7 million rural residents. These investments, he writes on the White House blog,  are putting Americans back to work managing and designing the projects, constructing new facilities, and installing computer systems.

Instant filth

Following up my recent post about Google Instant's lecherous imagination, here's a list of some forbidden search terms 

Writer interviews from Paris Review

The Paris Review's enormous collection of writer interviews, alphabetically or by decade. See also BBC's collection.

All the news about new Google stuff in one place

The engine that drives web2.0

State of the Blogosphere 2010

Google 2010 election map

"Amid the many gradations of melancholy...the public library"

Profile of the Chicago public library system and Obama's newly announced Educate to Innovate campaign. The initiative includes plans to create 30 youth learning laboratories in libraries and museums nationwide. The laboratories are inspired by YOUmedia, a staple of the Harold Washington Library Center in Chicago which is the nation’s largest library.

Small is beautiful

Small is beautiful...and also hideous.  Nikon's Small World small photomicrography competition. Gerd Guenther's "Soap Film" (below) is currently in the lead....you can cast your vote here.

Google has a dirty mind

Google Instant's suggestiveness does not extend to sex. Phil Bradley discovered this when searching for (he swears) "nudge," a concept I've blogged about previously (ironically, Google Instant's auto-suggestion technology is itself an excellent example of "nudge" in action).  Evidently the filth-minded search engine was one step ahead of Phil, and was thinking "nude." Where some humans might blush, prudish Google blanches - try searching for "fuchsia", and see how Google Instant - aka. the annoying kid in the front row who always has his hand up - immediately clams up and turns white when you add "c" after "fu." Pretty funny.

Ordering pizza ACLU style

"antihuman software like Facebook"

Windmill tilting like this article by Lanier - or Socrates's alleged resistance to writing - is futile, but interesting nonetheless, and sometimes even rousing. Adam Thierer has compiled a rather thorough overview of recent technophile and -phobe writings here.

Interactive video....very clever. And futuristic, man.