50 Great Ways to Celebrate Library Appreciation Day

Online College.org has a great list of super ideas to help you recognize the importance of and the wonderful services offered by your local library. From the site:

"National Library Week is April 12 this year, and this week-long celebration gives individuals a chance to truly recognize all the great things these ancient institutions have to offer. From free books to career courses, libraries are a source of information and inspiration for young minds and can be a lifesaver for those facing tough economic times. Whether you choose to honor your college library or one in your community, here are a few ways that you can use this week to promote, appreciate and praise your local cornerstones."

Worldreader: eBooks for kids in developing worlds

World reader is an innovative nonprofit program that distributes ebook readers to children in the developing world and then exposes them to a large library of donated texts from writers from across the world, as well as newspapers and other materials.


From Boing Boing

What if your favorite album was a book?

More here from Mother Jones

The Bookbinder

Found at Coudal Partners

Better Book Titles

Like this one for To Kill a Mockingbird

Caution - a few are a bit racy.

From the site:

This blog is for people who do not have thousands of hours to read book reviews or blurbs or first sentences. I will cut through all the cryptic crap, and give you the meat of the story in one condensed image. Now you can read the greatest literary works of all time in mere seconds!

Best camera ad ever...

Reblogged from Photojojo

Complete list of the 2011 National Magazine Awards Finalists

Sid Holt, Chief Executive of the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME), today announced the finalists for the 2011 National Magazine Awards. Known as the Ellies—for the Alexander Calder stabile “Elephant,” a reproduction of which is given to each award winner—the National Magazine Awards will be presented on Monday, May 9, in New York City.

“This was an extraordinary year for magazines,” said Mr. Holt. “The 2011 finalists include Michael Hastings’ ‘The Runaway General,’ which led to the resignation of Stanley McChrystal, and Jane Mayer’s ‘Covert Operations,’ on the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch—stories that made news while covering the news. With pieces on the health-care crisis, the failure of the criminal justice system, the impact of autism and conflicts around the globe, all of this year’s nominees underscore the power of magazine journalism.”

Complete list with links at the above link.

Using an iPad to film battle

From Time Magazine's Lightbox

Danfung Dennis has been documenting war for years, first with still photographs, then in motion, culminating with the award-winning documentary Hell and Back Again. Still, he found himself unsatisfied, feeling that coverage of war was becoming “mundane, almost ordinary,” he says. “Society was numb to the images of conflict.”

An idea was born: Condition ONE, an app to provide a new form of storytelling. Dennis says it combines “the power of the still image, the narrative of films and the emotional engagement of tactile experiences to create a new language that is so immersive, it will shake viewers out of their numbness to traditional media and provide them a powerful emotional experience. Instead of opening a window to glimpse another world, we are attempting to bring the viewer into that world as an active participant.”

Condition ONE, under development for the Apple iPad and other tablets, uses a custom camera system developed by Dennis that “fuses the ethics, method and aesthetics of photojournalism with the tradition of cinematic filmmaking with virtual reality,” he says. “The entire human field of view is captured on these camera systems, and the stories are edited specifically for the tablet application to create a truly immersive experience.”

Read more at the link.

The UK National Archives publishes a new film collection

From the site:

For the first time on The National Archives' website you can view complete public information films from 1945 -2006. Joining with the Central Office of Information (COI) to celebrate their 60th Anniversary, we have featured a selection some of the most memorable and influential COI public information films that cover some fasinating events from Britain’s post-war history.

Many of the films have both historic and nostalgic value. Historically, they reflect the issues of the day; nostalgically, everyone has a favourite.

Found at Coudal Partners

Help Solve an Open Murder Case

From the FBI press release:

On June 30, 1999, sheriff’s officers in St. Louis, Missouri discovered the body of 41-year-old Ricky McCormick. He had been murdered and dumped in a field. The only clues regarding the homicide were two encrypted notes found in the victim’s pants pockets.

Despite extensive work by our Cryptanalysis and Racketeering Records Unit (CRRU), as well as help from the American Cryptogram Association, the meanings of those two coded notes remain a mystery to this day, and Ricky McCormick’s murderer has yet to face justice.

“We are really good at what we do,” said CRRU chief Dan Olson, “but we could use some help with this one.”

In fact, Ricky McCormick’s encrypted notes are one of CRRU’s top unsolved cases. “Breaking the code,” said Olson, “could reveal the victim’s whereabouts before his death and could lead to the solution of a homicide. Not every cipher we get arrives at our door under those circumstances.”

More details and contact info at the link. And they offer these tips:

Breaking any code involves four basic steps:

1. determining the language used;
2. determining the system used;
3. reconstructing the key; and
4. reconstructing the plaintext.

Consider this cipher: Nffu nf bu uif qbsl bu oppo.

Now apply the four steps:

1. Determining the language allows you to compare the cipher text to the suspected language. Our cryptanalysts usually start with English.

2. Determining the system: Is this cipher using rearranged words, replaced words, or perhaps letter substitution? In this case, it’s letter substitution.

3. Reconstructing the key: This step answers the question of how the code maker changed the letters. In our example, every character shifted one letter to the right in the alphabet.

4. Reconstructing the plaintext: By applying the key from the previous step, you now have a solution: Meet me at the park at noon.

FounderLY - For those who dare.

Did you ever wonder what what it would have been like to watch raw video footage of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and other tech founders during their formative years, or when Larry and Sergey were building Google?

FounderLY launched today as a way to capture stories behind entrepreneurs’ startups in a single, central "library" in the form of short video interviews conducted by fellow entrepreneurs. Below is a sample on Rick Marini who is guiding BranchOut to become leading professional networking service on Facebook so users can unlock new job opportunities. Several more at the link.

360 degree, hi-res panorama of the tsunami devastation

Found at Boing Boing

Nature by the Numbers

A movie inspired by numbers, geometry and nature, by Cristóbal Vila.

Life Magazine salutes the typewriter

Lots more here

NOAA animation of the Honshu Japan tsunami

This animation showing the propagation of the March 11, 2011 Honshu, Japan tsunami and maximum amplitude plot was computed with the NOAA forecast method using MOST model with the tsunami source inferred from DART® data.

Find the Future at NYPL: The Game

New York Public Library is putting together a really cool scavenger hunt for the night of May 20th. Lucky participants will come together to find and explore 100 inspiring items from throughout history. The winner of the scavenger hunt will get to write a book based on his or her experience, which will then be housed at the NYPL indefinitely. To enter, one has to answer one seemingly simple question:

Just imagine who you are ten years from now. What do you want for the world? What extraordinary goal do you want to achieve? When you have a vivid picture of your future, just fill in the blanks:

“In the year 2021, I will become the first person to
_________________________.”

This looks like a very cool idea, and I"ll be intrigued to see the final product from the winner. More information here.

"Casey at the Bat" read by James Earl Jones

In honor of opening day

Open Library - 1.7 million free eBooks and an ambitious goal!

Open Library offers over 1.7 million public domain books in PDF, ePub, Daisy, DjVu and ASCII text through its affiliation with the Internet Archive.

At its heart, Open Library is a catalog. The project began in November 2007 and has been inhaling catalog records from some of the biggest libraries in the world ever since. They have well over 20 million edition records online, provide access to 1.7 million scanned versions of books.

In & Out with Dick and Jane

Found at Boing Boing

World Backup Day 2011

Making regular backups is one of the most important and, at the same time one of the most neglected aspects of computer ownership. Backing up your data should be at the top of your computer maintenance list, right next to virus protection. Without data backup or virus protection, you are running the risk of losing your data. And it will happen, don’t think that you don’t have to worry about it.

Three months ago my iMac began behaving erratically. After much experimentation the cause became quite clear as my internal hard drive physically crashed rendering it all but useless and unrecoverable. All my work, my photos, 10000+ music files, bookmarks, feeds - everything was gone. The iMac was still under Applecare so replacing the drive was no problem and took about a day. They even upgraded me from 350gb to 500gb at no additional charge. Yay, Apple!

In an uncharacteristic stroke of brilliance I had installed Time Machine about a year ago and literally within minutes I had restored my new hard drive to the exact state it was in the day before the crash - losing no data at all. Learn from this.

On my desktop iMac, I use Apple's proprietary Time Machine software to back up to a LaCie d2 Quadra drive. On my Macbook Air I back up to the cloud using Backblaze.