If you have hours and hours to kill, then check out Chronicling America, a site dedicated to old newspapers and the stories they print. At the moment, you can view papers from 1880 to 1922 (from California, DC, Florida, Hawaii, Kentucky, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New York, Texas, Utah, and Virginia). Search, print, save, zoom in […]
Archive | Net and Tech
Math and Computation
If that subject makes you want to run for the hills, then you and I can hang out. Another way to look at it is that we need people like Stephen Wolfram around. Here’s his latest project. Plug in stuff and get stuff back. [Link found on boingboing]
Evolution Doesn't Have a Brain
I’ve been listening to some of the podcasts of the US Library of Congress (gorgeous “Reading Room” shown above). They have a series on “Music and the Brain,” which has been pretty interesting. Since it HAS been interesting, I really hate to ding it, but they needled one of my many and varied sore points. […]
Kindle for Kollege Kids
It’s almost $500, but I could totally see highly-endowed universities handing them out to freshmen. The new, textbook-sized, Kindle. If someone else was paying for them, and if students don’t decide that Kindles are lame, then this really should take off at school. It’s a lot better than carrying around 5 books and forgetting one […]
Get Educated
If you have some spare time on your hands, how about taking a graduate-level course on Intellectual Property & Information Law from the University of Michigan? Or maybe Anthropology 101 from UC Berkeley? How about Physics III (Vibrations and Waves) from MIT? These courses, and hundreds more, are online and FREE. Free! You can get […]
They Take the Vex out of Vexillology
The Internet’s largest site devoted to the study of flags. It may sound like trainspotting, but I’ve been sucked in a bit by the precision of the facts. For example, the US flag isn’t just Red, White, and Blue. It’s: Cable No. 70180 Old Glory Red Cable No. 70001 White Cable No. 70075 Old Glory […]
Backlash!
Within the last couple of days, I’ve read (some of) an article hating Facebook, and I’ve chatted with several people hating eBooks (like Kindle or Sony’s Reader). I don’t really get it. Facebook is fun, if you like that kind of thing, and eReaders are great for certain purposes. It’s that simple. Young people don’t […]
Kayaking to Oz
A couple of friends from Australia visited for the weekend, and we all had a grand ol’ time. Today, out of idle curiosity, I asked my iPhone for directions from my house to theirs, in Brisbane, Australia. The directions send me to Seattle for some reason, then tell me to kayak across the Pacific to […]
The News
My aunt sent me this link to the Newseum, an interactive view of the latest newspaper front pages from around the world. Hover to see the image to the right (helpful, if you’re looking for a particular language), then click to see the full view. It’s only the front page, as I mentioned, but you […]
In Encyclopedia News
Or is it “encyclopaedia”? Encyclopaedia Britannica becomes more like Wikipedia. Wikipedia may become more like Encyclopedia Britannica. Will they merge and become Wikipaedia Britannica?