My god, he's right

30 Rock is based on The Muppet Show.


This is not a conspiracy theory, people.

A World Wide Web of data

The video above is a TED talk featuring Tim Berners-Lee presenting the idea of linked data. It's a tremendous idea, though I wonder if Sir Tim has sort of given up on his push for the Semantic Web and gone about it sideways with linked data. Data can give documents on the web semantic meaning, but it can also exist all on its own - kind of Sir Tim's point.

Also, how cool is it that he can just say "that World Wide Web thing? Yeah, I made that."

So this hasn't died on the vine?

Wow, I've been away a long time. Things are going well - I'm wrapping up the first college course I've taken in eight and a half years, I'm involved in a library leadership institute once a month for most of this year, and so on and so forth.

But that's not why I'm posting. I'm posting to ask everyone a very important question: what is your web culture quotient?

More madness

My former employer's Binghamton Bearcats have qualified for their first ever NCAA men's basketball tournament. Too bad it's been done under a cloud of allegations.

Big Red repeat

For the second year in a row, Cornell's mens' basketball team has won the Ivy League championship. That means an automatic invitation to the NCAA tournament and a likely first-round drubbing against some big name ball team. Maybe I'll actually get to watch the game this year - I had to work during last year's tournament game.

Does anyone care about the FCC?

I think Barack Obama finally does.

This is an encouraging thing, after the wilderness of the Michael Powell/Kevin Martin years.

It's a winning combination

Hey, it's Groundhog Day again, my favorite useless holiday!

This Groundhog Day, I'm most looking forward to the new film "Coraline." Here's a brief snippet featuring a little ditty by They Might Be Giants' John Linnell:



This movie has it all - kooky stop-motion animated puppets, a creepy story by Neil Gaiman, silly music, and John Hodgman. It is apparently marketed to strange, antisocial preteen girls who rarely leave their rooms... and me.

Be prepared - with chains

Invisibility cloaks still years of fruitless, tedious research away? You can always make the best of this bad situation by taking the advice posed in "five tips for surviving the worldwide economic crisis learned from watching The Road Warrior."



Just walk away? Yeah, right.

Want to jumpstart the economy?

Then invest in the development on invisibility cloaks and other amazing technologies. Let's get cracking on the hovercar too!

It's 2009 - last of the double zero years

Happy New Year everybody! My New Years' Day was very enjoyable. I had too many entertainment options at my disposal - a Monk marathon, a Mythbusters marathon, and classic Looney Tunes (not to mention football).

So this is the future...

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.