jdupuis | July 5, 2010Ok, ok, this is the last zombie post, I promise.
Here are some exmples of my favourite OTT, badass, crazy zombie fiction!
The Book of the Dead is a classic collection of short stories that's well worth reading.
Monster Island: A Zombie Novel is the first in a trilogy. It's one of those trilogies with significantly diminishing returns as it goes on, but the first book is great.
The Rising is well done and creepy.
Patient Zero: A Joe Ledger Novel by Jonathan Maberry is top notch, the best horror/sf/technothriller I've read in a long time.
Pet Sematary is one of Stephen King's best novels,…
jdupuis | July 2, 2010Noted zombie novelist Jonathan Maberry as a two part post on his blog, Why Zombies? and Why Zombies? - Part 2.
The second post, btw, has one of the classic blog sentences of all time: "When I reached out to the zombie community to ask 'WHY ZOMBIES?' I got so many terrific responses that I broke the blog into two parts." Zombie community. Only on the internet!
Anyways, I digress. Maberry's researches with the zombie community include short bits from a ton of zombie novel authors.
Here's his initial question:
We kick off our rolling series of ZOMBIE PANEL DISCUSSIONS by addressing the…
jdupuis | June 30, 2010Rather like a normal Friday Fun post, I'm going to highlight some fun stuff I've found around the web on zombies in higher education. And I'm not talking about undergrads at 9am classes either. Note that a couple of these I've highlighted before.
BTW, first I thought I'd point out a couple of pop cultural items on zombies.
The Undead and Philosophy: Chicken Soup for the Soulless
Zombies, Vampires, and Philosophy
Book of the Dead: The Complete History of Zombie Cinema
Gospel of the Living Dead: George Romero's Visions of Hell on Earth
Zombie Holocaust: How the Living Dead Devoured Pop…
jdupuis | June 29, 2010Following up on my post from a few days ago, a short appreciation of Alan Turing by noted sf author Frederik Pohl:
The close of Pride Month seems an apt time to talk about Alan Turing, inventor of the famed Turing Test for identifying independent intelligence in computers, worked for the British code breakers in World War II, and was one of the leading figures who successfully cracked the secret German messages, a feat which played a considerable part in the victory over Hitler.
Pohl is one of my all-time favourite sf authors and his blog The Way the Future Blogs is an excellent updating of…
jdupuis | June 25, 2010Sometimes it's only through humour that we can understand just how serious an issue is. This is one of those cases. Heartbreakingly sad yet somehow ringing very true, this one is from The Onion: Suffering Blue Whales Plead With Environmentalists To Let Them Go Extinct Already.
NORTH PACIFIC OCEAN--Claiming that their miserable lives had become too depressing to endure, the world's remaining blue whales surfaced Monday and desperately pleaded with environmentalists to immediately cease all conservation efforts so the species could "just be done with it and finally go extinct."
The planet's…
jdupuis | June 24, 2010First of all, the conference program is here. All the paper versions of the presentations will eventually be deposited in Queen's IR, QSpace, but don't seem to be there yet. I posted about my presentation here: Using a Blog to Engage Students in Literature Search Skills Sessions.
Now, If there can be said to be a theme to a conference which has no official theme, then the CEEA conference's theme was nicely summed up by a question from the audience during one of the sessions:
"How do you teach humbleness?"
Again and again it came up -- the challenge of teaching young, confident and…
jdupuis | June 23, 2010Nice post by Stephen Wolfram on the Wolfram|Alpha blog, Happy Birthday, Alan Turing:
He was in some respects a quintessential British amateur, dipping his intellect into different areas. He achieved a high level of competence in pure mathematics, and used that as his professional base. His contributions in traditional mathematics were certainly perfectly respectable, though not spectacular. But in every area he touched, there was a certain crispness to the ideas he developed--even if their technical implementation was sometimes shrouded in arcane notation and masses of detail.
In some ways he…
jdupuis | June 21, 2010Yes, that David Gilmour.
Anyways, there was a post on Gilmour's blog a few months ago that provoked quite a little storm: Chopping up albums.
Basically, the point Gilmour makes is that many albums are really meant to be listened to as a whole and shouldn't be split into individual tracks at record companies' whims. Read the whole thing to get the full sense of his argument, but I think the excerpt below gives a good sense:
I'll go first: Blood on the Tracks' frenetic 'Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts' by Bob Dylan. There, I said it. (Forgive me, Bob.) More often than not, it gives me an…
jdupuis | June 18, 2010From McSweeney's, a glimpse into the future perhaps...
7 Awesome Ways Barnyard Animals Are Like Communism
The 11 Stupidest Things Phonies Do To Ruin The World
8 Surprising Ways West Egg Is Exemplary Of The Hollowness Of The American Dream
And that's only the first half of them...head on over to the original link for more.
Of course, this is the kind of Friday Fun that really encourages audience participation. Let's see if we can't all take a few of our favourite books and turn them into link bait!
3 Amazing Ways to Turn Mars into an Earth-like Planet!
Want to create a plague that will kill…
jdupuis | June 17, 2010This list is usually the very, very last of the best books lists of the year. It's a good list, but since it's UK-based there are a number of books that we probably won't be seeing on North American shores for another year or so. I'll probably get around to updating my 2009 summary list later this week or next week.
We Need To Talk About Kelvin: What everyday things tell us about the universe by Marcus Chown
Why Does E=mc2? (And Why Should We Care?) By Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw
Why Evolution is True by Jerry A. Coyne
In Search of the Multiverse by John Gribbin
Everyday Practice of Science…
jdupuis | June 16, 2010Last week I was at the Canadian Engineering Education Association Inaugural Conference in Kingston. It was a great conference and a very auspicious beginning for this very new organization. I have a summary post in the works which I hope to have up fairly soon.
I presented the above titled paper on Monday afternoon, June 7th. It went pretty well -- I was part of a session with a couple of other librarian presentations so it was mostly just us librarians. However, there were several faculty members present and I did get a couple of nice comments about the presentation later on in the…
jdupuis | June 13, 2010And that's Nature as in Nature Publishing Group rather than the narrative strategy.
I missed the story when it broke earlier this week in The Chronicle -- I was attending the absolutely fantastic Canadian Engineering Education Association conference in Kingston from Monday to Wednesday. And when I got back, Thursday and Friday weren't the types of days that were conducive to blogging. I'm still feeling a bit behind on the whole issue so doing this post is helping to feel a bit more up-to-speed.
The story, from the Chronicle article that more-or-less started it all, U. of California Tries…
jdupuis | June 11, 2010Priceless, just priceless.
PALO ALTO, CA--All 1,472 employees of Facebook, Inc. reportedly burst out in uncontrollable laughter Wednesday following Albuquerque resident Jason Herrick's attempts to protect his personal information from exploitation on the social-networking site. "Look, he's clicking 'Friends Only' for his e-mail address. Like that's going to make a difference!" howled infrastructure manager Evan Hollingsworth, tears streaming down his face, to several of his doubled-over coworkers. "Oh, sure, by all means, Jason, 'delete' that photo. Man, this is so rich." According to…
jdupuis | June 4, 2010What can I say, The Cronk is my new Internet crush. I think I might be stalking them. But in a good way.
In any case, check this out: Students Blame Innovative Incentive Program for Tricking Them into Learning
Psychology professor Edgar Stevens is a popular topic of conversation at Farmington College today as he has become the center of an unusual campus debate. Stevens, a recent recipient of the Farmington Innovative Teaching Citation, inspired heated conversation at the recent Student Government Association (SGA) meeting as a result of an assignment in his second-tier psychology course.…
jdupuis | June 3, 2010A cautionary tale from Cory Doctorow in his most recent Locus column, Persistence Pays Parasites.
My friend Katherine Myronuk once told me, "All complex ecosystems have parasites." She was talking about spam and malware (these days they're often the same thing) and other undesirable critters on the net. It's one of the smartest things anyone's ever said to me about the net - and about the world. If there's a niche, a parasite will fill it. There's a reason the cells of the organisms that live in your body outnumber your own by 100 to one. And every complex system has unfilled niches. The only…
jdupuis | May 31, 2010For your reading and collection development pleasure:
137: Jung, Pauli, and the Pursuit of a Scientific Obsession by Arthur I. Miller
"The history is fascinating, as are the insights into the personalities of these great thinkers."--New Scientist Is there a number at the root of the universe? A primal number that everything in the world hinges on? This question exercised many great minds of the twentieth century, among them the groundbreaking physicist Wolfgang Pauli and the famous psychoanalyst Carl Jung. Their obsession with the power of certain numbers--including 137, which describes the…
jdupuis | May 28, 2010I've been slowly dipping my toes into the manga universe, trying to expand my comics/graphic novel horizon. Moyasimon, for example -- the 1st volume was very good. Beyond that, I've only read a couple of titles here and there.
Of course, like any good librarian I've been looking for lists to help me in my explorations.
Here's a nice list from Robin Brenner via Jeff Vandermeer:
Antique Bakery by Fumi Yoshinaga
Clover by CLAMP
Death Note by Takeshi Obata and Tsugumi Ohba
Lone Wolf and Cub by Kazuo Koike
Monster by Naoki Urasawa
Paradise Kiss by Ai Yazawa
Planetes by Makoto Yukimura
Yotsuba…
jdupuis | May 27, 2010As I mentioned the other day, the most recent issue of ISTL is full of very fine articles.
The one that really caught my eye is the Viewpoints article Are A & I Services in a Death Spiral? by Valerie Tucci. It echoes a lot of the themes that I first wrote about way back in December 2006 -- that the traditional A&I services will have a lot of problems competing with services such as Google Scholar which are free to the user.
Here's some of what Tucci has to say:
Given all the changes what will the future bring for these services and how will it affect libraries, librarians, and users…
jdupuis | May 25, 2010Another terrific issue. I'm going to list everything but the book & database reviews & reports so as not to clutter the post too much.
Five Voices, Two Perspectives: Integrating Student Librarians into a Science and Engineering Library by Eugene Barsky, Aleteia Greenwood, Samantha Sinanan, Lindsay Tripp, and Lindsay Willson, University of British Columbia
Collection Assessment in Response to Changing Curricula: An Analysis of the Biotechnology Resources at the University of Colorado at Boulder by Gabrielle Wiersma, University of Colorado at Boulder
Browsing of E-Journals by…
jdupuis | May 21, 2010Funniest. Onion. Article. Ever.
New Social Networking Site Changing The Way Oh, Christ, Forget It: Let Someone Else Report On This Bullshit
Virtually every line is laugh-out-loud funny.
According to sources we feel really, really sorry for, Foursquare works by allowing users to "check in" from their present location, whether it be a bar, restaurant, nearby magazine stand, or man, this piece would be perfect to hand over to that schmuck Dan Fletcher at Time magazine right about now.
By "checking in," users can earn tangible, real-world rewards. For instance, the Foursquare user with the most…