WORTH HEARING – Studio 360 Friday, August 09, 2013 BIG DATA AND CULTUROMICS
WORTH USING – Google Ngram Viewer
WORTH READING – Uncharted: Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture Erez Aiden (Author), Jean-Baptiste Michel (Author)
WORTH READING NYT OP-ED COLUMNIST DAVID BROOKS What Our Words Tell Us May 20, 2013
WORTH WATCHING – TED TALKS Jean-Baptiste Michel + Erez Lieberman Aiden: What we learned from 5 million books
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I have written a lot of posts this week… in my head… the census job put me on the road on the nice days…the days we have had with excessive heat, i did the sensible thing, i hid in the house. no a/c in the truck and the radio is also gone bye bye… so i have started filling my kindle fire with audiobooks…actually besides podcasts i only keep one audiobook at a time in the Kindle… but I have been ripping cds from the library to my 2 TB External Harddrive like a maniac. I don’t want to be caught short…if i don’t have something playing i get into loud arguments with the GPS..damn bitch tries to send me to places like schoolyards.
The books I can’t get from the library, I buy ON CD… i really can’t rationalize buying a digital file from audible.com that’s just a very expensive rental service. i want the CD to hold in my hand in case i corrupt that digital file and want to reinstall it. Granted storing all the ones I already own is a pain in the ass, but i only have a two small boxes at this point. My rule of thumb is to only buy and keep ones that i will bother relistening to. Which is a surprising number…. i have relistened to a LOT of my audiobooks, books that i would never have reread on paper. Of course it all depends on the reader…a good reader makes all the difference.
Same thing with podcasts – the really good interviews are worth a rehearing… Marc Maron’s interviews with Louise C.K., Aisha Tyler with practically anybody, Greg Proops with himself etc…Alton Brown Now has a podcast on the Nerdist channel, that’s shaping up nicely.
I need to renew my carbonite back up/cloud storage subscription so i can access that Harddrive from WIFI …i loved it when i had it…but the external drive costs extra. But its on my to do list. Right up there with getting a larger hard drive.
worth hearing • from NPR’s on the media – November 27, 2009
Special: The past, present and future of the book.
worth hearing • This American Life did this great episode on the Book that Changed your Life, oh yeah..WHY I enjoyed this…it makes mention of Bill Reese.
site to see • Binder Richard Minsky has a new blog well worth reading Art of American Book Covers…if there was such a thing as BiblioPorn this is it.
worth reading • Bon Appetit magazine’s feature on Portland, Maine makes mention of Rabelais Books “…has become the town square for Portland’s food community.” Rabelais must have missed a meeting, because last I checked all independent bookstores were coughing up blood. They certainly aren’t supposed to become any sort of foodie Mecca…what the hell goes on in Portland..don’t they know we decided to kill the book trade! we voted on it! sheesh.
worth hearing • NPR’s On Point has the author of Finding OZ, the new book on Frank L Baum, Evan Zchwartz.
well worth reading • from the Consumerist Textbooks Publishers Using “Packets” To Fight Used Book Market, as much as I understand publishing and the pressures on the industry, the costs, and the difficulties..like everyone else – I left college with a serious distaste in my mouth for text book publishers and they have never done anything to make me think anything better of them. They are greedy corporations who should be ashamed of themselves.
Like there aren’t enough news items that make me crazy, now people are sending them into me, assumedly to watch my head explode into a hundred million pieces.
stupid human tricks – A small town near Milwaukee has been rending and wailing about teenagers having access to books about homosexuality, you know – the naughty kind, the kind that say “it’s okay to be gay and your parents will still love you”. Apparently this nonsense issue brouhaha has blown up into a good old fashioned book burning. How come groups labeled Christian Civil Liberties Unions, are never civil nor Christian and against anything that smacks of liberty.
worth hearing – Lizzie Skurnick guest’s on NPR’s Talk of the Nation regarding about her new book: Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading. – .between V.C. Andrews and Are you There God it’s Me Margaret that little town in Michigan’s gonna pull out the pitch forks and torches, lynch the librarian and burn down the entire library.
I dunno about anyone else in New England but I started building an ark. My mom is doing good thanks for asking, she’ll be in ICU for a while. I have the urge to ask them to let me pull up an empty bed and some sedation for myself.
It seems everything tends to crash and burn at the same time…my dvd player died, my laptop took ill and still hasn’t recovered – no one has bought anything from sicpress in a week and I can’t even remember the last time I sold a book. The torrents of raining turning my basement into a damp cave is just over the top. Did I mention that the apt above me leaks into my kitchen and I have been blaming my poor dog?
In the meantime, I am listing books I haven’t listed before, delisting items I am tired of seeing. Trading in DVDs for actual cashy money. Taking stuff off Craigslist and Bonanzle and throwing it out on Freecycle: extra printers, tools, bicycles, even a bloody great dollhouse. The only frustrating part of selling to locals is getting them to show up, you are always afraid to say, “sorry I’m offering it to the next person”. Because then you get the old “i don’t have a car, i need to get a ride from my ex” yatta yatta yatta…way too much information. If you want something come get it, otherwise I have a nice big blue dumpster that takes away all my sins.
worth hearing • I spent many decades listening to comedy albums of some very observent people…and instead of experiencing deja vu, I experience moments when I hear voices in my head – Either it’s Bill Cosby trying to get the definition of a cubit to build an ark, or George Carlin – talking about ‘stuff’, the acquisition and the storing of same. But I can’t remember any funny rifts about divesting.
worth reading • Luckily the barter system is alive and well in the US Barter Economy: 14 Great Places to Trade Stuff Online
worth reading • from Small Living Journal, Radical Downsizing Techniques
worth reading • Marty Weil has an interview with A Journey Round My Skull blogger – Will Schofield is a Philadelphia-based editor and book collector.
worth hearing • from NPR Did Shakespeare Want To Suppress His Sonnets? by Lynn Neary
worth hearing – from NPR, Grove Press’s Barney Rosset
worth seeing, i hope – i was shocked and amazed to see someone dig up an old Joseph C Lincoln novel and film it. I may actually GO to see a movie.
worth seeing – President Barack Obama reading Maurice Sendak’s “Where The Wild Things Are” on the South Lawn of the White House.
site to see • the American Library Association has made it easier for you to petition your Congressman to sign the revision to The Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008. Go there send it to your Senator and Representatives and then send it to everyone in your address book and have them do it too. This is just to silly for words people.
well worth reading • from the NYT someone is finally challenging Google’s celebrity adoption of ‘orphan’ books. Who does Google think it is? Madonna?
worth hearing • NPR’s On the Media has a piece on the Texas Board of Education’s most recent capitulation to religious fanatacism regarding evolution in textbooks.
worth reading • Karin Bergsagel @ BookThink News has given us the headsup on the USPS price increase coming May 11th.
