as I live a few more questions

Christmas A Century Ago: from the Children's Book Illustrators Gallery

This illustration is by Charles Robinson, from the first edition of The Child's Christmas, a book published by Blackie press in 1906, exactly a century ago.  This is one of over 2,000 images lovingly scanned and preserved online by Minh Lai, showcasing the work of classic children's book illustrators from the early  twentieth century.

To see the whole gallery, go to the nocloo.com - Children's Book Illustrators website, and click on the Gallery tab.  Be prepared to spend an hour or two browsing through the wonderful work on display, though.  You've been forewarned, now...

Two more images, these by illustrator Kay Nielsen, created for the 1913 book In Powder and Crinoline, Old Fairy Tales Retold (click on the image for a larger size view):

 

See also the images on this website, which contains larger-resolution scans of many of the books from the same collection.  There is truly some staggeringly beautiful work here.

Long Day's Journey Into Night

For a long time I had wanted to watch Long Day's Journey Into Night.  I finally had my chance when it was on Turner Classic Movies several nights ago, when I "taped" it using the PVR feature in my new desktop PC.

Wow.  I can see why Katharine Hepburn wanted to do this role so badly that she took a pay cut. 

What a haunting portrait of addiction and family dysfunction this play was.  I might actually go do a bit of reading of comment and criticism of Eugene O'Neill's work, now that I've finally seen it.  And I won't erase it from my hard drive, just yet.  I think I want to see it again.

Linux vs. Windows: Two New O'Reilly Books

I came across the perfect book for someone (like me) who wants to "kick the tires" on Linux (i.e. open source UNIX) without the hassle of installing and uninstalling the operating system on one of my Windows computers. It's called Test Driving Linux: From Windows to linux in 60 Seconds, by David Brickner (O'Reilly, 2005).

The key "sell" to this book is the CD-ROM in the back cover pocket: a self-bootable version of Mandrake Linux, which you simply stick into your CD-ROM drive and boot the computer from. Your existing Windows system is not modified or touched in any way! If you wish, you can save all your personalized Linux settings and other newly-created files to a USB drive, but even that's not necessary; you can reuse the CD any number of times, each time re-entering the set-up information.

The book, which focuses on the client side of Linux, covers such open-source goodies as the KDE shell (i.e. desktop look and feel), the Open Office suite, the GIMP image manipulation program, and much more. In the preface, the author states:

You can truly just take Linux for a spin, and when you're done, just put the CD away and go back to using Windows again. Don't count on wanting to, though. My guess is that once you take Linux for a test drive, you'll want to drive it off the lot for good.

David Brickner makes his case easily and well.

One thing I did notice right off the bat is the sharpness of the character sets on Linux compared to Windows. Hmm, maybe I need to take a look at adjusting my Windows XP some more. And that's where the second book comes in.

Windows XP Hacks, by Preston Galla, now in its second edition (O'Reilly, 2005), is one of the popular and fun series of "Hacks" books by O'Reilly. This particular book provides tips, tricks and tools for you to expand functionality and fix annoyances with your Windows XP setup. For example, one "hack" is replacing your limited Windows Clipboard with another product which allows you to cut and paste multiple items rather than just one-at-a-time. Want to save streaming music to your PC? Remove Windows Messenger from your start-up? Use that extra GMail account as 2GB of Windows storage? This is the place to turn to. All "hacks" are explained plainly and simply, and give up step-by-step instructions on what to so.

Then again, if I switch to Linux, I won't have to fix all the annoyances; I can just ditch Microsoft. hmmmm.... need to think about this some more ;-)

Both books are highly recommended to your average non-geek-level computer user.

A Universe, from Thirty Pounds of Carrots

One of things I love about being a librarian is scanning the weekly arrivals to the New Books Shelf. I found this delightful quote from The World's 20 Greatest Unsolved Problems, edited by John Vacca (Pearson Education, 2005):

Creating Universes

You need about thirty pounds of stuff to create a universe in the laboratory. What kind of stuff? Any kind: silver will do as well as coal, or carrots, or cement blocks. The important thing, and the most difficult to achieve, is that you crush this material to the super-hot and super-dense conditions thought to exist within the inferno of the Big Bang. So let the vises groan; let the fires of the laboratory beat down.

Suddenly a transformation: The thirty pounds of stuff winks out of view, amidst the brilliant light of this fireball. In its place appears a miniature black hole and within the black hole is something even more extraordinary: an expanding universe. In an enormous rush, space in this infant universe is incandescently hot and expands and fills with still more matter. This expansion cools the vapors, which eventually coalesce into stars, galaxies, and worlds upon worlds. Oceans sparkle and volcanoes belch. Across broad beaches unimaginable beings move in the light of their sun, while overhead yawn vast expanding gulfs of intergalactic space.

As for the original thirty pounds of matter, it served its function as a seed—a seed from which an entirely new universe sprung. So, you can do it again if you have another thirty pounds of stuff lying around.

Illuminated Manuscripts: Le Moyen âge en lumière

I've come across a gorgeous website about mediaeval illuminated manuscripts (a love of mine for quite some time).  Check it out:

Le Moyen âge en lumière: les trésors des bibliothèques de France
The Illuminated Middle Ages: Mediaeval Treasures from French Libraries

"I'm a prophet, not a saint"

Rather sad interview with M. Scott Peck, best-selling author of the self-help book The Road Less Traveled: a man who has strained relationships with most of his family, whose wife alked out on him, who chain-smokes like a chimney:

The paradox of this colossally self-deluded man is that he is, on his better pages, a font, or conduit, of clear-headed advice.

What better proof that even people who dispense good advice are often not able to follow it themselves.

How to Make an Illuminated Manuscript

An illuminating article (pun intended) on the making of mediaeval manuscripts:

St. Lawrence is depicted in works of art carrying a gridiron for roasting meat. The grill is intended for him: according to tradition, he was executed by roasting in August of the year 258 C.E. Lawrence, who was the "keeper of the treasures of the church" in the third century C.E., when Christians were still being persecuted by the Romans, became the patron saint of Christian librarians. Those who cherished his memory would mark the anniversary of his death by eating meat, cold or roasted.

Librarians needed a patron saint in the Middle Ages, or at least someone to symbolize their rising position. Most of Christian society's books were held in monastery libraries. Only the ruler of the land, the officials of the church and the very wealthy could own books in those days. A rich man's library would consist of no more than three or four books; the collection of an average monastery library usually did not exceed 50-100; and the largest, most important libraries in Europe boasted about 500 volumes apiece. (Source: Rapp, David. 'The initial phase', Haaretz.com, August 23, 2004)

Found this via the blog LISNews.com (Library and Information Science News).

Book Review: Linked

A highly recommended read is the book Linked: The New Science of Networks, by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi. I just finished reading this book and I can recommend it highly. It's a book on the relatively new science of network theory, written by one of the pioneering researchers in the field, but geared to the layperson who has an interest in networks (everything from the Internet to fashion fads to virus transmission). To give you a flavour, here's an extract comparing a power law to a bell curve:

If you are not a physicist or mathematician, most likely you have never heard of power laws. That is because most quantities in nature follow a bell curve...For example, if you were to measure tha height of all your adult male acquaintances and prepare a histogram counting how many of them are four, five, six, or seven feet tall, you will find that most people in your sample are between five and six feet tall. Your histogram wil have a peak around those values. Indeed, unless you hang out with a lot of basketball players, you will have very few seven or eight-foot people in your sample. The same is true for shorter people: Three or four-foot tall individuals are rather rare...

In the past few decades scientists have recognized that on occasion nature generates quantities that follow a power law distribution instead of a bell curve. Power laws are very different from the bell curves describing our heights. First, a power law distribution does not have a peak. Rather, a histogram folowing a power law is a continuously decreasing curve, implying that many small events coexist with a few lare events. If the heights of an imaginary planet's individuals followed a power law distribution, most creatures would be really short. But nobody would be really surprised to see occasionally a hundred-foot monster walking down the streest. In fact, among six billion inhabitants there would be at least one over 8,000 feet tall. (p. 67)

The power law theorem applies to Web sites on the Internet: the majority of Web sites are pointed to by only a small number of other Web sites, but a small handful of sites (e.g. eBay, Yahoo!, Google) are pointed to by hundreds of thousands, even millions of Web sites.

Later on in the book the author also describes the HIV infection epidemic as yet another curve following a power law: a lot of men have a small-to-medium number of sexual partners, but a small number of men have an extremely high number of sexual partners, and can therefore potentially transmit the HIV virus to a lot of people (e.g. Ga�tan Dugas, the promiscuous Montr�al airline attendant who worked for Air Canada who had previously been considered by some epidemiologists as "Patient Zero" in the AIDS epidemic, based on a 1984 study published in The American Journal of Medicine (that theory has since been disputed and discredited by many other epidemiologists).

What's very surprising to me is that most of the theory behind networks has only been developed within the past decade, with the Internet providing a prime "laboratory" for researchers to study.

Life of Pi

I finally finished this novel by Yann Martel (2 Yanns in 2 days, hmmm...) and the ending left me feeling disquieted and dissatisfied. I don't want to spoil the book for anyone who has yet to read it, so I can't go into much detail. It's just that I dislike reading all the way through the book and then, at the end, it's not really clear exactly what happened to Pi during his adventure.

I would still recommend the novel; it just didn't have the sort of impact I expected on me. Oh well.

Segway Polo, Anyone?

Housecleaning day, puttering around the place in my bathrobe. Throwing out old computer magazines, when I came across an old issue of Shift, a Canadian magazine.

Subtitled "Where Technology and Culture Collide", Shift was struggling to create a niche for itself in a market where Wired reigned supreme: introducing and explaining trends at the bleeding edge of technology to the layman. (Frankly, I thought Shift was a brilliant name for such a magazine: shift key on keyboard + shift in society)

Well, the print version of Shift is no longer, but I was very pleased to find out that the Shift Web site still exists, with occasional new features and a regularly-updated blog called Filter: Digital Culture Distilled (check out the recent post on Segway polo).

There's also full-text access to back issues of Shift, well worth a browse if you've already vacuumed through your latest Wired and your inner geek is hungering for more. The Shiftlist was a regular feature providing links to little-known, edgy, funky, alternative, or just plain cool Web sites: Killing the Buddha, Turbulence, Becoming Human, Men Who Look Like Kenny Rogers, etc. ...