Archives for posts with tag: Amazing

Walk the Moon: dancy dancin'

Today is my last day at NRC-CISTI. Neat. On Monday, I’ll be starting at the Ottawa Public Library as their newest Integrated Library Systems Librarian (It’s important because it has library in it twice!). In between, I’m going to hocking my shirts etc. at the Wolfe Island Music Festival. I’m sitting in a triangle of sweet times.

Here are my pics from this week’s library soundtrack.

Walk the Moon (I’m a sucker for schmaltzy indie-pop. No apologies)

Belle & Sebastian

The Vaccines

See you all soon from a new cube! Have a great weekend!

DIYD... the second D is for Doomsday!

Homebrew science took a little bit of a hit today.

From the Toronto Star:

A Swedish man who was arrested after trying to split atoms in his kitchen said Wednesday he was only doing it as a hobby.

Richard Handl told the Associated Press that he had the radioactive elements radium, americium and uranium in his apartment in southern Sweden when police showed up and arrested him on charges of unauthorized possession of nuclear material.

The 31-year-old Handl said he had tried for months to set up a nuclear reactor at home and kept a blog about his experiments, describing how he created a small meltdown on his stove.

Only later did he realize it might not be legal and sent a question to Sweden’s Radiation Authority, which answered by sending the police.

“I have always been interested in physics and chemistry,” Handl said, adding he just wanted to “see if it’s possible to split atoms at home.”

The police raid took place in late July, but police have refused to comment. If convicted, Handl could face fines or up to two years in prison.

Although he says police didn’t detect dangerous levels of radiation in his apartment, he now acknowledges the project wasn’t such a good idea.

“From now on, I will stick to the theory,” he said.[source]

Well… yeah.

Anyways, no library themed post this week. I’m wrapping up stuff at my old job… because… I’m starting a new job next week. Hooray! More to come on this, I suppose.

They are some frankly pretty cook kids, indeed.

This Friday, where I am, means another long weekend! I’m using the free time to make shirts for a wicked music festival next weekend. But, before the weekend comes is the work week and the work week’s musical accompaniment. Here are some highlights.

The Cool Kids

Gold Panda

Ohbijou NEW NEW NEW Yessss!

For people in a different sort of listening mood, I highly recommend Dan Carlin’s Fall of the Roman Republic – a pretty engaging 10 hour free audiobook about, obviously, the fall of the Roman Republic.

Have a great weekend, long or otherwise!

Just like Johnny Mnemonic... look at him!

People have been murmuring  that the Internet is “ruining”  our memory for a while. Ruin? I don’t know. Recent studies have shown that since the advent of the Internet our memory practices have been evolving and that this is also reversible.

Whether you think it’s a bad (Luddites!) or a good thing (non-Luddites! or normal people or “norms”), there is a change taking place in how Internet users combine their brains with the information on the web.

From Scientific American:

Led by Columbia University psychologist Betsy Sparrow, the researchers conducted a series of experiments whose results suggest that when people are faced with difficult questions, they are likely to think that the Internet will help them find the answers. In fact, those who expect to able to search for answers to difficult questions online are less likely to commit the information to memory. People tend to memorize answers if they believe that it is the only way they will have access to that information in the future. Regardless of whether they remember the facts, however, people tend to recall the Web sites that hold the answers they seek.

In this way, the Internet has become a primary form of external or “transactive” memory (a term coined by Sparrow’s one-time academic advisor, social psychologist Daniel Wegner), where information is stored collectively outside the brain. This is not so different from the pre-Internet past, when people relied on books, libraries and one another—such as using a “lifeline” on the game show Who Wants to be a Millionaire?—for information. Now, however, besides oral and printed sources of information, a lion’s share of our collective and institutional knowledge bases reside online and in data storage…

And if our gadgets were to fail due to a planet-wide electromagnetic pulse tomorrow, we would still be all right. People may rely on their mobile phones to remember friends’ and family members’ phone numbers, for example, but the part of the brain responsible for such memorization has not been atrophied, she says. “It’s not like we’ve lost the ability to do it.[source]

Neat, right? The world is catching up with librarians in this respect. We’ve been using our collections, catalogues and reference tools (digital or physical) as prosthetic memory contraptions since always. The Internet for some is a revolutionary change in how people remember and access information. For LIS professionals it’s one new step in an ongoing evolution.

Read the rest of this entry »

Okkervil River are in your backyard, maybe.

Well… heat wave…. enough said. At least work has AC. So I’m happy to be here and cool in my cubicle. Here’s what has been in my ears this week.

Cults (easily a front runner for my Album of Summer 2011)

Okkervil River (an exciting return)

Phoenix (Album of Summer 2009)

Have a great weekend. Try and stay cool. (Hints: Visit your public library! Or get thee to the beach!)

Lousie Burns is of the forest.

Friday’s here! My workday soundtrack has been filled with a couple epic moments. For instance, my geeky prog-punk-metal heart as obliged me to attempt Coheed and Cambria’s space epic, which I didn’t not get all the way through (… it’s like 5 albums! And really cheesy…). Here are a few of my less serialized (maybe less epic) pics form this week.

EMA

Louise Burns(a great new find via the Polaris Long List.)

The Wooden Sky

Have a great weekend, everyone!

Hey Rossetta, eat up.

 

Canada Day is tomorrow, so my week is ending a day early (whereas our American neighbours are starting their next week a little late.). I’m going to  do the predictable thing and be “all Canadian”, which would be a thing if I wasn’t sort of mostly Canadian in these posts already. Anyways, here are some “all Canadian” songs that I liked and listened to this week.

Grimes

Young Galaxy

Hey Rosetta

Have a great long weekend (at some point, wherever you are)! Oh, Canada.


From the Guardian UK:

They are a long way from the iconic pop art for which he is best known but a set of illustrations for a children’s book series by Andy Warhol are set to go up for auction in New York next month.

Warhol’s pictures illustrate the story of the little red hen, a folk tale about the value of team work, and show a perky little red hen happily sowing her grains of wheat, as a lazy cat, mouse and dog – who is reading the paper – look on. They were drawn by Warhol early in his career, between 1957 and 1959, for the Doubleday Book Club’s popular series Best in Children’s Books.

The Warhol illustrations will be auctioned on 9 December as part of Bloomsbury Auctions’s sale of 365 original illustrations and books, alongside a host of pictures and letters from 19th-century fairytale illustrator Arthur Rackham, a privately printed edition of Beatrix Potter’s The Tailor of Gloucester, rare Oz books by L Frank Baum and the artistic estate of award-winning African American children’s illustrator Tom Feelings.[source]

Cool, right? I love when artists chip in for children’s lit., even if it’s just for the cover. Anyways, here’s some info on the A. Warhol kid’s book opus.

Also, I’m jealous and want to break my watercolours out!

The database I work with was down for a bit this morning, so I had little bit of time to peruse the ALA’s new Confronting the Future: Strategic Visions for the 21st Century Public Library.

I am intrigued by their notion of the Four Dimensions (see the illustration above).  Besides being awesomely impossible to graph on a  2D chart, it’s a decent representation of the winds driving library evolution right now.

It’s also about strategic decision making. There is a certain amount of push-and-pull embedded in the 4D concept. A move on one spectrum will impact a library’s a place on one of the others.  Can a “Creation” driven library also function well with an “Archive” and “Individual” focus?

The suggestion being:  public libraries must choose what they want to be good at, since they cannot be good at everything. Read the rest of this entry »

Again! A week done! Personally, I have my fingers crossed for some sun and some ribs! But right now, it means Library Sound Track day. This week, I have for you a couple new Canadian finds and a slightly older, more New Jerseyier fav.

Little Scream

Doug Paisley

Titus Andronicus

Have a great weekend!