February 17, 2010
I've always been a huge vampire fan -- I watched my first Dracula movie when I was about 8-10 years old, on TV, one of the vintage Hammer films with Christopher Lee. I read the original novel when I was a teenager and was a fan of the Marvel comic versions as well. Since then, I've read a zillion…
February 16, 2010
As a follow up to my previous posts about the situation at Canada's national science library, NRC-CISTI, here, here and here, this was in the Ottawa Citizen today, NRC to lay off 86 workers in April.
The National Research Council is laying off 86 people as part of cuts announced last year to reduce…
February 12, 2010
Following up on my Onion post a few weeks back on a Frantic Steve Jobs Stays Up All Night Designing Apple Tablet I thought I'd do an update on The Onion's article Apple Finally Unveils iPad.
Here's most of what they say:
Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled Apple's new tablet computer, the iPad, during a…
February 5, 2010
Continuing my strange obsession with lists of books...
Locus Magazine is the bible of the sffh business -- both in print and online. Every year they poll their reviewers and various other industry people and come up with a pretty extensive recommended reading list for the year. Their categories…
January 29, 2010
I couldn't agree more with Bonnie Swoger's sentiment that academic librarians need to stop going to library conferences, although I perhaps might not go that far.
In any case, the last couple of weeks have been pretty fallow blogging weeks for me and I just can't seem to come up with any original…
January 29, 2010
So far, I'm pretty iPad-agnostic -- mostly curious to see if it can burst out of it's obvious niche applications and become a mass device like the iPod or iPhone.
However, The Onion's article just before the big announcement day really struck a funny bone:
Claiming that he completely forgot about…
January 27, 2010
Oddly and interestingly, Amazon.ca has a different list that the US parent.
The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity & Hope by William Kamkwamba
Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City by Greg Grandin
Wicked Plants: A Book of Botanical…
January 26, 2010
I thought I'd combine a couple lists that only have a couple of relevant items.
January Magazine
The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York by Matthew Goodman
The Bizarre and Incredible World of…
January 25, 2010
It's been a while since I did one of these fairly general entries in the "Five songs I love" series:
Forget about Me by Mem Shannon. A great blues/soul/R&B singer, Mem Shannon is terribly underrated. I love his great story-telling ability, of which Forget about Me is a great example. Live:…
January 22, 2010
Horror author Cherie Priest has a very nice post from a couple of days ago called Control. It's basically about what mass market fiction authors do and don't have control over in the book production process. Now, the mass market fiction publishing niche is hardly the main concern on this blog,…
January 22, 2010
Excellent post with a lot of great comments. Let's take a look at what Scalzi doesn't miss:
Stupidly expensive long-distance charges.
Crappy old cars.
Which cars qualify as crappy old cars? In my opinion, pretty much all of them. Pre-catalytic converter cars were shoddily-constructed, lead-…
January 20, 2010
The Reference and User Services Association of the American Library Association has released it's list of 2009 Notable Books.
The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann
The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by…
January 19, 2010
A pretty extensive list from The London Times, across multiple categories: science, stocking stuffers, biography, graphic novels and nature.
Mad Science: 100 Amazing Experiments From The History Of Science by Reto Schneider
How To Make A Tornado: The Strange And Wonderful Things That Happen When…
January 15, 2010
This one is pretty funny, from McSweeny's:
INT. UNIVERSITY FOOD COURT. SUNDAY AFTERNOON. JULY 15TH, 1945.
HANS BETHE, EDWARD TELLER, and ROBERT SERBER sit at a table. There are notebooks, laptops, and expensive coffees arranged on the table. All three wear hoodies, basketball shorts, and flip flops…
January 14, 2010
Following along in the tradition of Bora's introductions of the various attendees for the upcoming Science Online 2010 conference, I thought I'd list all the library people that are attended. I'm not going to try and introduce each of the library people, I'll leave that to Bora, but I thought it…
January 13, 2010
I was chatting with a colleague during the long commute home the other day and he noticed I was reading this book. "What's it like?" he asked.
"Clay Shirky lite," I replied.
And that's about right. In Six Pixels of Separation, Mitch Joel comes to grips with the effects of social media on…
January 12, 2010
Or not. You can also feel free to subscribe. Or not.
Yes, my library has entered the Twitter age. I'll probably be the main tweeter but hopefully a couple of the other reference staff here will chip (chirp?) in from time to time.
It took me a while to decide whether or not it's worth it to join…
January 11, 2010
Two items in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's list.
The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper and Fairer Health Care by T.R. Reid
The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution And The Birth Of America by Steven Johnson
January 11, 2010
Bravewords.com is featuring their annual top 30 hard rock & heavy metal albums of the year. It's a pretty good list from a very good year. I like their list because it mixes mainstream and extreme very nicely, with Cheap Trick & Kiss on the same list as Immortal and Napalm Death. It was…
January 8, 2010
This book is about the failure of companies to stay atop their industries when the confront certain tyupes of market and technological change. It's not about the failure of simply any company, but of good companies -- the kinds that many managers have admired and tried to emulate, the companies…
January 8, 2010
This amusing little gem from The Onion, published December 3rd, seems particularly relevant in the post-Christmas consumer orgy period.
With the holiday shopping season officially under way, millions of consumers proceeded to their nearest commercial centers this week in hopes of acquiring the…
January 7, 2010
Nice list of coffee table books, biographies and other books from Scientific American.
Galápagos: Preserving Darwin's Legacy edited by Tui de Roy
Far Out: A Space-Time Chronicle by Michael Benson
The Heart of the Great Alone: Scott, Shackleton, and Antarctic Photography
by David Hempleman-Adams,…
January 6, 2010
A nice list from the SF Chronicle:
Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer
Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer by Novella Carpenter
A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon by Neil Sheehan
Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City, by…
January 5, 2010
The New Scientist's CultureLab blog asked a whole slew of editors and contributors to name a notable 2009 book. It's quite an extensive list.
Catching Fire: How cooking made us human by Richard Wrangham
Codes of the Underworld: How criminals communicate by Diego Gambetta
The Natural History of…
January 4, 2010
The New Zealand Listener has a few good suggestions from two different categories: Science and Journalism & Essays.
The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure and Human Evolution by Denis Dutton
The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins
Innocents in the Dry Valley: An…
January 4, 2010
Burn down the library. C'mon, all the books in the world are already digitized. Burn the thing down...Stop air conditioning the books. Enough already.
-Adrian Sannier (via)
Optimism seems like a strange thing for a librarian to have at the start of the second decade of the 21st century. There's no…
January 1, 2010
Ok, I promise, this is the last Lovecraftian Friday Fun for a while. I double promise. It's also possible that I can't be trusted in this matter.
Anyways, to celebrate the the fresh possibilities of the new year, let's mosey on down to Tor.com and see how S.J. Chambers is doing -- a horror fan…
December 31, 2009
I did this last year and the year before and it seemed like an interesting and maybe even useful thing to continue this year.
Trends in my reading this year? An increase in books on social media and a bit down in terms of science and fantastic fiction. A lot of that has to do with working on the…
December 30, 2009
A nice quote from Rick Salutin's most recent Globe and Mail column, In praise of words, not books, which I actually read in a print edition of the newspaper this morning. Yes, we get two daily print newspapers, The Globe and The Toronto Star. My teenaged sons read them too.
Anyways, the point…
December 30, 2009
During my winter blogging break, I thought I'd repost of few of my "greatest hits" from my old blog, just so you all wouldn't miss me so much. This one is from September 24, 2007. This post follows up on my initial 2007 post which I reposted yesterday.
It's worth noting that the blog has evolved…
