Monthly Archives: April 2006

Frank Rich on Bush’s Last 1000 Days

April 30, 2006 – 8:09 pm

Frank Rich’s New York Times op-ed column today was full of the kind of easy one-liners that repressives conservatives usually like to use against honest people progressives. I got it from my friend Joe, but because The New York Times thinks their content is golden, they won’t let me link you to the full-text. Eh, [...]

By Casey | Posted in Politics & Controversy | Comments (3)



Kobb Labs

April 29, 2006 – 10:13 pm

Joe forwarded me a link to Kobb Labs the other day, and I’ve got to admit that the guy has a much better introduction than anything I could have written for my site:
Despite what you may have been told, I am not a mad scientist. (No, no, no, that’s all slander and lies from jealous [...]

By Casey | Posted in Books, Movies, Music, Questionable...funny. Pointless. | Comments (0)

MoBA Revisited

April 28, 2006 – 7:29 pm

I had a good opportunity to revisit the Museum of Bad Art in Dedham Mass earlier this week. Above is my buddy Corey, but I was amused to find that visitors appear to be leaving their own works for the collection.
art, art museum, bad art, dedham, dedham ma, funny, massachusetts, moba, museum, museum of bad [...]

By Casey | Posted in Photoblog, Questionable...funny. Pointless. | Comments (0)

Cupcakes?

April 28, 2006 – 12:16 pm

?I’ve never seen the inside of a rabbit’s brain before. What’s in there anyway??
?Nobody knows yet. Johnson and I are hoping it’s cupcakes.?
?Me too. Except vegan cupcakes. Because I’m a vegan. Vegans don’t eat animals or animal prod–?
?I know what vegan means, Thomas. You’ve told us.?
?Well, I was just saying, because–?
?I know what vegan means?
Thank [...]

By Casey | Posted in Questionable...funny. Pointless. | Comments (1)

Twenty Years And A Day

April 27, 2006 – 11:49 pm

Mark Nelson’s Pripyat series on flickr is full of the pictures of desolation that people seem to be looking for as we solemnly honor the twentieth anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster.
Google added high-resolution satellite photos of the area yesterday, and Pripyat.com offers both stories and photo galleries to help us remember.
It is there that I [...]

By Casey | Posted in Politics & Controversy | Comments (0)



Chernobyl and Pripyat Satellite Photos

April 26, 2006 – 11:25 pm

Today, on the twentieth anniversary of the disaster, Google has added high-resolution satellite photos of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant and the abandoned town of Pripyat.
Above is the plant; the damaged reactor is on the left. In Pripyat, the ghostly ferris wheel was easy to find, but where’s the vehicle graveyard? Update: here it is. [...]

By Casey | Posted in Photoblog, Politics & Controversy | Comments (10)

Twenty Years Ago Today

April 26, 2006 – 12:00 am

Twenty years ago today at 1:23:44, the Chernobyl NPP reactor number four exploded. Five thousand tons of lead, sand, and other materials were dropped on the resulting fire in an attempt to stop the spread of the radioactive cloud. The world learned of the accident when Western European nuclear facilities identified radiation anomalies and traced [...]

By Casey | Posted in Politics & Controversy | Comments (3)

Boolean Searching in WPopac

April 25, 2006 – 12:35 pm

WPopac takes advantage of MySQL’s indexing and relevance-ranked searching (go ahead, try it), including boolean searching (on MySQL versions > 4.x). Here are some details and examples taken wholesale from the MySQL manual:

+
A leading plus sign indicates that this word must be present in each result returned. 
-
A leading minus sign indicates that this word must [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information | Comments (1)

Shifting Borders

April 24, 2006 – 12:01 pm

My first reaction to the notion of librarians running reading groups in Second Life was a question of whether this was akin to putting a reference desk in a bar.
My second reaction was a question of how our systems will support these extra-library interactions. Can people quickly and easily trade URLs to access the library [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information | Comments (0)

Living The Life Embarrassing, Stupid Online

April 23, 2006 – 5:49 pm

Without contradicting the moral weight of social software post from last week, let’s take a moment to look at three stories from Arstechnica about MySpace and others: online video leads to teen arrests, shooting rampage avoided due to MySpace posting, and Google + Facebook + alcohol = trouble.
These are the stories we’ve come to expect: [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information, Politics & Controversy, Technology | Comments (0)

That Crazy Gnarls Barkley

April 22, 2006 – 12:49 pm

Other than the notion that I heard it on a KCRW music show, I couldn’t put my finger on the tune weaving through my head. So I listened, and listened carefully, waiting to hear it again. Eventually I learned the earworm was Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy (thanks to Molly for the mp3 download link).
The group, a [...]

By Casey | Posted in Books, Movies, Music | Comments (11)

Movie: Airport

April 21, 2006 – 12:29 pm

Iain Anderson’s animated film, Aiport, shows even the most pedestrian of designs come to life with a bit of creativity.
Elsewhere, a post at Copyfight, suggests that the availability of those symbols — their freedom from copyright and trademark restrictions — was a key factor in spurring their broad adoption, creating both the culture and the [...]

By Casey | Posted in Photoblog, Travel | Comments (2)

Bush: ?I Invented The iPod?

April 20, 2006 – 10:26 pm

President Bush, speaking in Alabama at the American Competitiveness Initiative, made a claim that would make Al Gore blush: he claimed to have invented the iPod.
After taking credit for the development of ultra-small hard drives, audio compression, and chemistry(?), he laid it out: ?it turned out that those were the key ingredients for the development [...]

By Casey | Posted in Politics & Controversy, Questionable...funny. Pointless., Technology | Comments (17)

bibliochaise

April 20, 2006 – 8:43 pm

What book lover doesn’t look twice at this bibliochaise from nobody&co?

By Casey | Posted in Blink | Comments (1)

The Wealth of Networks

April 20, 2006 – 3:44 pm

Wendy Seltzer gave a shout-out for Yochai Nenkler’s The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, describing it as…
…an economic history of information production. We’re moving from the age of industrial information production to one of social information production. Ever-faster computers on our desks let us individually produce what would have taken [...]

By Casey | Posted in Technology | Comments (0)