Links for 2009-12-01

"Mention the word "slush" to anyone who's worked in publishing for longer than five minutes, and you're likely to get an expression of sheer horror. Slush pile is a term used to refer to the collective mass of unsolicited manuscripts and query letters--novel or nonfiction synopses with a few sample pages attached--that daily deluges the offices of agents and editors throughout the industry. Occasional hits emerge from the morass: Twilight began as an unsolicited query. But far, far more often, the slush pile's contents are a cross section of the staggeringly mediocre and the truly deranged, the balance of humdrum-to-nutball shifting depending on the week, the season, and (I swear) the phases of the moon. As an assistant to a literary agent, my job is to act as a human spam filter, picking out the rare promising tidbit to pass on to my boss and deflecting the rest with a polite but firm form rejection."

Home movies of the 1927 Solvay Conference, one of the great events in the history of quantum mechanics, shot by Irwin Langmuir.

"Over Thanksgiving weekend, I had a great search experience that I think is worth laying out here, because it captures three of the key dimensions of digital search:

1. Moving from one resource to another, what I sometimes analogize to a sailboat tacking back and forth in the wind
2. How and when you have to know something in order to find anything
3. When you've hit the end of what's knowable online and need to move outside of digital search to know anything more"

"What I find curious is that much of what Shirky suggests as the future of bookstores is actually the past, the present and the future of libraries. Pretty well everything he suggests from cafes to hosting community events to providing relaxed social spaces are already what libraries do in their communities, whether those communities are towns and cities or academic institutions. Libraries already provide content (such as books, magazines/journals and music) to their communities at no direct cost to their patrons."

"I read once that philosophers never really settle a question; over time, they change the subject. That's how I see conscious cultural change working. (Unconscious cultural change is another matter altogether. That's the kind that sneaks up on you as a result of changed circumstances. It takes longer, but it tends to have staying power.)

Changing the subject will come across as rude, impertinent, and arrogant, at first. The people who have prospered under the old culture will often defend it beyond reason. Though dogmatic, they won't see the dogmatism in themselves; they'll think of themselves as open to any reasonable answer to the questions they consider important. Cultural change means considering different questions important."

Physics professors are such liars...

What sort of chart to use for various types of data