An homage in LOLcats form

Hobotopia is a webcomic that plays with the whole LOLcats idea. Recently, Hobotopia payed tribute to the cover art of one of my favorite albums, Neil Young's "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere."

Gotta love it!

You only need two

I spotted a book at the bookstore this weekend - 101 Reasons to Love the Yankees. It also came in a Red Sox flavor. So, in honor of that, here are:

Two Reasons to Love the Mets!

1. They are not the Yankees

2. They are not the Red Sox

It's like a Zen koan. Eh - what else are you gonna do?

Is a book-based meme called a beme?

I have no idea where this meme originated, but here goes:

We moved it to "types of marriage and relationships."

- David Weinberger, "Everything is Miscellaneous."

Rules:
* Get the book nearest to you. Right now.
* Go to page 56.
* Find the 5th sentence.
* Write this sentence - either here or on your blog.
* Copy these instructions as commentary of your sentence.
* Don't look for your favorite book or your coolest but really the nearest.

OK, so since I have two books with me today, here's the special bonus edition!

Ditching symbols of Belgian colonialism, Mobutu changed Congo to Zaire, Leopoldville to Kinshasa, and Joseph Mobutu to Mobutu Sese Seko Koko Ngbendu Wa Za Banga - good for him.

- Bob Harris, "Who Hates Whom"

A little library science humor (very little)

OK, my friends, which of these Dewey Decimal Classifications actually fits me the best? This little app came to my attention on Jim Del Rosso's Nascent Librarian blog.

Based on the letters of my name:

Roman Koshykar's Dewey Decimal Section:

111 Ontology

Roman Koshykar = 8531415985118 = 853+141+598+511+8 = 2111


Class:
100 Philosophy & Psychology


Contains:
Books on metaphysics, logic, ethics and philosophy.



What it says about you:
You're a careful thinker, but your life can be complicated and hard for others to understand at times. You try to explain things and strive to express yourself.

Find your Dewey Decimal Section at Spacefem.com

Based on my birth date:

Roman Koshykar's Dewey Decimal Section:

102 Miscellany

Roman Koshykar's birthday: 11/26/1976 = 1126+1976 = 3102


Class:
100 Philosophy & Psychology


Contains:
Books on metaphysics, logic, ethics and philosophy.



What it says about you:
You're a careful thinker, but your life can be complicated and hard for others to understand at times. You try to explain things and strive to express yourself.

Find your Dewey Decimal Section at Spacefem.com

Based on picking the number 5 as my favorite number, apparently:

Roman Koshykar's Dewey Decimal Section:

005 Computer programming, programs & data


Class:
000 Computer Science, Information & General Works


Contains:
Encyclopedias, magazines, journals and books with quotations.



What it says about you:
You are very informative and up to date. You're working on living in the here and now, not the past. You go through a lot of changes. When you make a decision you can be very sure of yourself, maybe even stubborn, but your friends appreciate your honesty and resolve.

Find your Dewey Decimal Section at Spacefem.com

They're all sort of accurate, in that vague, newspaper-horoscope kind of way.

The next internet celebrity?

Well, hardly.

But, lost in all that's been going on lately was this fact I forgot to inform you all of: a photo of mine was chosen for inclusion in the Schmap guide to Memphis. It's of the ornate lobby in the Peabody Hotel. Check it out here, in it's proper context (the winning photo itself is shown above).

OK, so I didn't really win anything, or even get paid. That's what happens when you deal with a Web 2.0 startup. Well, that, and I'd never in a million years pretend to be a professional photographer. They found my photo on Flickr, because I tagged it with "memphis" and "peabody." Let that stand as a lesson to tag your photos descriptively!

Why is the number 350 so important?

As in 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Recently, top climate scientists including NASA's James Hansen, set that level as a "red line" that human society should set as a target to lowering atmospheric CO2. We're already above this critical level of atmospheric CO2, indicating that the problem of climate change is not one of the future, but of the present.

I'm usually no activist, but I understand science, and I believe in the power of science to persuade people to view the world in a dramatically different way. If collective action is your thing (and maybe this is one time when it should be), check out 350.org for ways to get involved.

An interesting anniversary

Today marks the 10th anniversary of the signing into law of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. I remember being concerned at the time, but kind of unsure what it all meant. When I started paying closer attention to such issues in library school a year later, it seemed to me that the law was rushed through without enough attention paid to how content had changed and would continue to change in the digital environment. We still haven't found our way out of the morass. This is one of those issues voters have little to no interest in this election year, and in the mind of the public copyright has been eclipsed by net neutrality and/or media consolidation as the hot button communications/media issue (they are connected, though, if you think about it). Still, I can't help but wonder where the two presidential candidates stand on copyright - and if they've bothered to make any public comments about copyright, net neutrality, or media consolidation.

Still, it's fascinating to read the summary linked above. Clinton surely did have other things on his mind at the time.

Stuck in Vermont

No, not me personally - it's the brilliant title of a video blog from the newspaper Seven Days. Just recently they posted a video interview with American Elf artist and rockingest rocker ever James Kochalka! Freaking awesome.

He even wrote it into his comic, of course.

So it's come to this

The Rays are in the World Series. To quote Dave Lenahan, "it takes a bandwagon to defeat a Nation."

I like it when perennial losers win, but I still have some kind of weird, unexplainable need to cheer for the teams that stay losers. But anyways, here's to the ultimate All-Loser Series. They of 10 losing seasons in 11 seasons of existence vs. They of 10,000+ all time losses.

Pennant race

I love a good pennant race. Or wild card race. Divisional title race. Whatever the heck we are to call them in this era of baseball. It's great that my team is in the thick of it, but their relievers currently look like minor leaguers. Bah. I never thought the Mets were going to be more than a second place team this season. Perhaps the Phillies have been the disappointing ones, since they don't have a commanding lead. What do you think about that, sports pundits world? Also, the prospect of a Cubs/Phillies NLCS fills me with dread for the actual end of civilization. That is a vortex of suck that no one will be able to pull out of.

The baseball world will be saying goodbye to two more parks soon, one beloved and historic, one utilitarian and hard to love. I've been to Shea Stadium twice and Yankee Stadium once. Newer ballparks have a lot over them both, honestly. My only visit to Yankee Stadium was, I believe, in 1990, which is also the last season when the Yankees finished in last place. Perhaps this is not a coincidence.

Politics = Many ticks, or, Get 'em off me!

As I've passively watched it unfold while CNN is on in the background, buzzing along like an annoying gnat, I've been trying to think of a single word to describe the Republican convention and campaign for president this year, but I haven't been able to narrow it down to just one all-encompassing term. Suggestions are welcome. I'll get you started:

desperate
deplorable
shameful
outmoded
craven

The Corn Blog has no problem whatsoever endorsing Barack Obama, though we wish that he had considered raising Orville Redenbacher from the dead as his running mate.

Yellin' about technology, or, maybe I picked the right profession after all

I've been thinking a lot lately about technology, information, and learning. Because that's what I do. When I decided a number of years ago to pursue a career in academic librarianship, I signed myself up to muse about how people find information and learn from the published record.

There has been a backlash recently against digital culture and the Web, in such books as "The Dumbest Generation," which I read recently and made reference to here . Only I'm not sure if it really is a backlash against the Web itself. Check out this clear-eyed assessment from Wired magazine to see what I mean.

To make a corny metaphor, libraries have always been a beacon of enlightenment in a sea of ignorance. The Web is a larger, more ubiquitous version of the same kind of beacon - but there's an undeniable down side. The Web is itself largely a sea of trash. Still, it's only a tool created by humans. We can use tools to serve many purposes, but a fascination with tools (which leads to a belief in salvation by technology) can only get you so far. It's always been about what you do with the tools at your disposal.

It is a little worrisome that many people automatically assume the Information Age will be an across-the-board improvement from whatever age preceded it (the Industrial Age? the Age of Killing Each Other In Big Wars?). There is never a shortage of problems to solve, and no one technology can solve all problems. I think that the techno-critics are largely responding to this attitude, whether it's a prevalent one or not. And, it seems, the defenders of technology (like David Wolman, author of the Wired article) are still able to find good justifications for digital culture. What worries me, and most people in my profession, is that instead of being a cumulative thing, as human advances have been all along, the rise of the Web will be used by some as an excuse to discard all old information technologies, regardless of whether or not they can still serve some purpose. If you believe, as I do, that it's the sum total of human knowledge that matters, there will always be a place for non-digital information alongside the burgeoning world of digital information built upon it. There will always be a need to learn about what didn't work, as well as what does work and what might work to solve those ever-present human problems.

Sweet Delta sound

Feeling blue? Check out these great rare clips of Mississippi John Hurt plying his trade.

Insert obligatory "time warp" pun

Oh blog, how I've neglected you lately.

From the "that's just sad" file, it seems that a remake of the Rocky Horror Picture Show is in the works. I've never been a huge fan of Rocky, but seriously, doesn't this just make you feel like even happy accidents are calculated moves these days?

Straddling reality and imagination

This is brilliant - Tom Waits interviews himself.

Perhaps I was a bit too hasty

It appears that libraries will endure - even when Earth is evacuated due to some vaguely malicious but not really dangerous alien threat:



Give this video a minute - the quality is really bad at the start.

So, aside from the valuable lessons learned about the nature of library organization and the Dewey Decimal System, what have we learned? We've learned that libraries preserve the information generated by humanity, and that will never change, even if no one bothers to read it.

But, you know, we shouldn't worry, the Internet will last forever.

Right?

Did I pick the wrong profession?

Currently, I'm reading a book titled "The Dumbest Generation." OK, I know what you're thinking - this is some grouchy old shriv's take on those darn kids. Well, not quite. The author draws his arguments from a wide range of surveys and studies, one of which indicates that one in four college freshmen and one in five college seniors read exactly zero books "for personal enjoyment or academic enrichment" each year.

I hear plumbers make decent money...

Oh great, another meme

From the people who brought you LOLCATS, there's a new site out there where Americans can simultaneously satisfy their desire to make fun of celebrities and look at funny pictures on the Web.

I bring this up for no reason other than I really kind of like the Bob Dylan/Snidely Whiplash juxtaposition.

Woody Guthrie, copyright cowboy?

One of my personal heroes, Woody Guthrie, was apparently the Lawrence Lessig of his day. Guess that's what folk music is all about. That, or he wanted to defend himself from any accusations of plagiarism.

Foxy

I am up and running with Firefox version 3. Lots of new features - but it keeps more information on your browsing. The default is to save your browsing history for 90 days! It knows what you're doing.

Firefox has always been extensible, but the new version should work with more third party applications. However, some existing Firefox 2 add-ons are incompatible. The del.icio.us add-on I had installed on my office computer was one such legacy application. But, not to worry, Firefox 3 automatically disabled it upon installation! It's smarter than we are.

I installed the new del.icio.us add-on, and it automatically sucked up all of my bookmarks. Which is ok, I guess - except that I had been using del.icio.us only to share research-related bookmarks with students. Like this list I put together for patent searching tools. But now it's got all of my bookmarks in there. It's become self-aware...