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An interesting model of our solar system’s path as it travels through space in the Milky Way.
Certainly a departure from usual models that show the Sun as a static object, which it certainly isn’t
I have been waiting for this picture to come back around for so long to show it to someone.
This is blowing my mind.
A very interesting astronomy model.
One of my favorite Fruitless Feminist Tirades* to go on is how magazines are organized according to gender at newsstands. There’s almost always a “women’s interest” section which includes magazines like Women’s Health, MORE Magazine, Cosmopolitan, etc. Which, fine. I can deal with that.
What I cannot deal with is when computer, outdoor, and sports magazines are assigned to the “men’s interest” section, as is the case with Zinio, a digital magazine app.
Apparently if you’re a woman then you can only be interested in celebrities, bridal, parenting, and romance (soap opera mags, by the by). I am interested in NONE OF THESE THINGS.
*This is a real thing that I do. Ask my dad about my beer-laced rants about the media coverage of Hillary Clinton’s pantsuits for most of 2007.
I can’t call this a pet peeve, because it’s not a small thing. It’s infuriating sexism about what kind of information we take in. It makes me actively avoid magazine sections in large bookstores.
"
In the prescriptivist camp falls Lynne Truss, The “blog” of “unnecessary” quotation marks, and your high school English teacher. Prescriptivists aim to help us use the English language properly. The intention is noble: if we all speak the same language, we can communicate much more effectively. But it’s a bit Quixotic: if language was static, we’d all still write like Chaucer.
The descriptivist camp, on the other hand, simply aims describe how the language is used today. This camp is perhaps best embodied by the Urban Dictionary, a lexicon open to input from anyone. Unfortunately, this purely descriptive approach to language implies that language doesn’t matter as long as intent can be communicated; generations of poets would beg to differ.
Neither camp is “right” — both parties are needed to keep language moving forward at the right speed. Think of it as like a nuclear reactor: too much descriptivism and the language will melt down into a radioactive mess; too much prescriptivism and the lights go out.
"I think it will come as a surprise to no one that I’m deeply sympathetic to the descriptivist position. Much to the chagrin of my managing editor.
Your mission: stop the Robot Apocalypse.
Brothers and sisters, it’s time to scorch the skies /
Time to scorch the Earth can’t let those robots have it
many years ago, I wrote a song about the Robot Apocalypse called “Last Orders, Full Stop.” The song has only the one line, above. Trying to add any other lyrics felt like it was just diluting the message.
It made for a hell of a closing number.
I’ve excerpted it here (the whole mp3 meanders a bit), and I may start posting other old songs that I wrote in my past life. I even wrote a song about librarians once, long before I went to library school.
Also!
My former bandmate @nedrick is a writer, and recently wrote a short film loosely inspired by the post-apocalyptic rock&roll vision of “Last Orders, Full Stop”! So, if you’re feeling flush this Friday, help Ned out and toss a dollar his way if you want to see the boy-meets-girl-defending-against-the-robot-apocalypse love story of our time.
Image credit: destroy hu-mans! by Erik Johnson
Attribution License
"More than 40 countries with over one-third of the world’s population have fair use or fair dealing provisions in their copyright laws."
The Fair Use/Fair Dealing Handbook collects every known fair use or fair dealing statute in the world. Prepared by Jonathan Band and Jonathan Gerafi. (via arlpolicynotes)
(via arlpolicynotes)
"Today the US Supreme Court announced its much-anticipated decision in Kirtsaeng v. Wiley, a lawsuit regarding the bedrock principle of the “first sale doctrine.” The 6-3 opinion is a total victory for libraries and our users. It vindicates the foundational principle of the first sale doctrine—if you bought it, you own it. All who believe in that principle, and the certainty it provides to libraries and many other parts of our culture and economy, should join us in applauding the Court for correcting the legal ambiguity that led to this case in the first place. It is especially gratifying that Justice Breyer’s majority opinion focused on the considerable harm that the Second Circuit’s opinion would have caused libraries."
Association of Research Libraries (ARL®) :: Library Copyright Alliance Statement on Supreme Court Decision in Kirtsaeng v… (via arlpolicynotes)
(via arlpolicynotes)
ARL Policy Notes: Notes from Register Pallante’s “The Next Great Copyright Act”
By Greg Cram, Rights Clearance Analyst, The New York Public Library On March 4, 2013, Maria Pallante, the 12th United States Register of Copyrights, delivered “The Next Great Copyright Act” at Columbia Law School. In the lecture, Register Pallante reflected on the history of other major…
"Xoxglub-7, Chief Scientist of the Martian Aeronautics and Space Administration (“MASA”), announced today that he is “99% certain” that the constant barrage of radio-controlled space-cars landing on Mars is evidence that Earth is annoying."
— By the the quidnunc kid at 11:42 on March 15
Happy to see this project come to fruition (background on her original campaign and the harassment it sparked).
Damsel in Distress: Part 1 - Tropes vs Women in Video Games (by feministfrequency)
That’s the most tentative chair-sitting I think I’ve ever seen.
DRM CHAIR (by thibault brevet)
Via @wawoodworth
I think it’s a company. My home address is on mailing lists.
Well, at least we’ve now tied together #libbanana and #libbanksy!
Libraries of the Future by tom gauld on Flickr.
Where do I sign up to be a nanolibrarian explorer
(via libraryadvocates)
What people call carbonated drinks, county by county.
Here’s the source website! Even more maps!
You guys, it’s totally pop.
This map is the reason why I never completely felt like a Midwesterner even during the 10 years I spent growing up just outside of Chicago.
It’ll be soda until the day I die.
Library Journal has been #libbanana-ed. Which is to say, myself and Executive Editor Josh Hadro have been anonymously sent Hutzler Banana Slicers (safe for children!). It seems to have begun on or around February 13, when librarians across the country received unmarked packages from Amazon containing only the aforementioned banana slicer. The packages have continued to arrive since then.
It’s unclear (so far) whether there is a pattern. Initially the first round of recipients were only men, but has since gone co-ed. Both Ben Bizzle and I, nonlibrarians, have also been included among the libbanana-ed.
There is one informal list of recipients, this Twitter list I’m now compiling, as well as a Branch discussion tracking this mystery’s progress. There’s also always the Twitter hashtag for the most recent updates. If you have ANY leads, details, information, or theories, do not hesitate to contact me at mmcardle@mediasourceinc.com.
That’s my “I have no idea what’s going on here” face.
But yeah — what Molly said! We will get to the bottom of this! Or give up trying!
