Looks like LibraryThing and Shelfari just got served – Google Book Search now allows you to tag titles that you own and assemble an online catalog of your precious book collection. I liked the look of LibraryThing, but the idea of having to pay to catalog more than a few hundred titles was a deal breaker for me. Yet another business model trounced by the ubiquitous giants of search …
On the subject of libraries, the place where I work has a lot of old manuscripts which are, tricky to read – at least for anyone unaccustomed to 19th Century copperplate handwriting. So if the technical types who’ve developed the new ‘Blurred Shape Model’ optical character recognition system need someone to beta test it, we’d be more than happy to help. [Image by GeneralWesc]
Totally pointless, and more an art project than anything else, these Russian-made goggles filter the real world electronically and make it look like some crude digital simulacrum … or the worst acid trip anyone ever had. They’d have cleaned up if they’d been renting these out at Burning Man. [William Gibson] [Image by Don_Gato]
Already a widely published man in his chosen field, Stephen Hawking is branching out into authordom of a different kind. In partnership with his daughter and a French scientist who wrote a thesis on his ideas, Hawking has written George’s Secret Key To The Universe – a space adventure story for children that explains the physics of the universe while (presumably) entertaining younger readers at the same time. I think we can safely assume that’s one science fiction story whose physics will never be questioned by hard sf purists … well, at least for a good few decades. [Image from Random House]
Well, this is just plain weird, but it appears to be genuine. The German town of Dessau, birthplace of the Bauhaus art movement, is home to a group of entrepreneurs who intend on using concrete blocks containing the ashes of dead people to build an immense pyramid. Reserve your block now! Whether or not the business model is even vaguely plausible, you’ve got to give them kudos for sheer ambition. What kind of bizarre legacy for future civilizations would that be? [BLDGBLOG]
This should kill more than a few hours, be you a writer, reader, television obsessive or movie buff, rabid fan, or some combination thereof – the TV Tropes wiki is a user-contributed archive of tropes and plot ideas from literature, film and television, computer games … pretty much any form of entertainment media you can think of. Plus lots of amusing commentary on the nature of fandom, and the wiki’s community itself. Funny, informative and lo-fi – a winning combination, in my book. Discovered via Dinosaur Comics, which is a source of great jollity in its own right if you’ve got the right sense of humour.
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