I asked for it in 2004, before YouTube, Vimeo, Viddler, or Revver appeared on the scene, and before MySpace and Facebook added video sharing as a feature. Four years later they finally added it. Neil Rickards should get credit for creating the theme of ?long photos? (Neil called them ?moving photos?). And anybody who was [...]
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November 15, 2007 – 11:30 am
The first article database I remember using was Dialog, sometime in the late 80s or early 90s. Today I found myself amused that we used to call such things ?interactive.? That is, you poked the command line interface with questions and it usually beeped a syntax error, all while they charge $4 per minute, plus [...]
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One hundred years ago the country was in the middle of a riot of library construction. Andrew Carnegie’s name is nearly synonymous with the period, largely due to his funding for over 1,500 libraries between 1883 and 1929, but architectural historian Abigail Van Slyck notes that the late 19th century was marked by widespread interest [...]
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September 12, 2006 – 5:06 pm
The original Apple press release is gone (and gone from the Wayback Machine too), but back in 1995 Apple announced a different set-top box, also called the iTV, for a six-state trial of interactive television services.
Apple’s ITV system incorporates key technologies including a subset of the MacOS, QuickDraw and QuickTime. In addition, it includes an [...]
…The time for pedantic purism is past; if we wish to communicate with the larger audience, we must use language they understand. We do not have the luxury of defining our words, their definitions are thrust upon us by usage.
I was struck by how much that sounds like something I might have said about libraries [...]
Ian Chadwick’s In Search of the Blue Agave begins:
?Tequila is Mexico,? said Carmelita Roman, widow of the late tequila producer Jesus Lopez Roman in an interview after her husband’s murder. ?It’s the only product that identifies us as a culture.?
No other drink is surrounded by as many stories, myths, legends and lore as tequila and [...]
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 [...]
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. [...]
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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 [...]
March 26, 2006 – 10:24 pm
Nearly 20 years after the initial events of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of April 26 1986, the story is still unfolding. This month’s National Geographic Magazine tells of the ?long shadow of Chernobyl? — grown children of the disaster now fear having their own children while some elderly residents return to their old homes inside the 1,000 square mile, still contaminated ?exclusion zone.? The print article seemed to offer hope, noting that even the pines of the ?red forest? — so called because they received so much radiation that it bleached the chlorophyl from them, and some say the trees actually glowed — are beginning to grow back now. But the multimedia companion materials tell a somewhat more morose tale.
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December 29, 2005 – 5:12 pm
The first license plate to remember Nevada’s history as the host of the US’s nuclear testing grounds drew criticism for featuring a mushroom cloud (see the plate on the right, above). Now it appears folks are at it again, this time with a plate that depicts the site’s area and includes the classic illustration of [...]
December 26, 2005 – 8:21 am
Here’s another story from my friend Joe Monninger. This time it’s a piece he cut from a book he’s working on, but I’m happy to take his tailings.
With the mega-release of King Kong swarming the country this week, it might be interesting to hear a true big ape story. I came across this story while [...]
November 6, 2005 – 1:20 pm
On NPR’s Weekend Edition today: an interview with Michael Segel, author of The Devil’s Horn, subtitled ?The Story of the Saxophone, from Noisy Novelty to King of Cool.?
Adolph Sax’s instrument seems to have been controversial from the start. Other manufacturers tried to assassinate him, the Pope declared the church’s opposition to the instrument, Ladies Home [...]
In a popular antebellum Arkansas story, a backwoodsman bought a 5-gallon barrel of whiskey, only to return a week later for another.
?Surely you haven’t drank that whiskey already?? inquired the astonished merchant.
?It ain’t so much,? replied the backwoodsman. ?There are six of us, counting the kids, and we have no cow.?
It’s not quite as detailed [...]
I’m entirely captivated by Mark Michaelson’s collection of mug shots on Flickr. It’s titled ?Least Wanted? and he notes with little fanfare that they’re ?Nobody famous.?
Some of the photos contain little histories, like this set from the 40s and 50s that includes conviction details — ?30 days W. H.? for ?selling obscene literature.? Another image [...]
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