Random knowledge

The Observer’s literary editor Robert McCrum stood down this month after more than 10 years in the job. And what a tumultuous 10 years. When he started it was a world of ‘cigarettes, coffee and strong drink’. But that has all changed - new writers, big money, the internet, lucrative prizes and literary festivals have all helped revolutionise the books world. Here he charts the changes in 10 short chapters - and wonders if an ‘iPod moment’ is imminent.

I’m watching Aliens right now. Aliens is a 1986 science fiction/action film starring Sigourney Weaver, Michael Biehn, Lance Henriksen, and Bill Paxton. A sequel to the 1979 film Alien, Aliens is set fifty-seven years after the first film and is regarded by many film critics as a benchmark for the action and science fiction genres. In Aliens, Weaver’s character Ellen Ripley returns to the planet where she first encountered the hostile Alien; this time she is accompanied by a unit of Colonial Marines.

Directed by James Cameron, Aliens’ action/adventure tone was in stark contrast to the science fiction/horror motifs of the original Alien. Following the success of The Terminator (1984), which helped establish Cameron as a major action director, Twentieth Century Fox greenlit Aliens with a budget of approximately $18 million. It was filmed in England at Pinewood Studios, the same location used for the filming of Alien, and at a decommissioned power plant.

No posting today. Tonight I’ll be in Leuven !

The hectograph (link to early copy machines) or gelatin duplicator or jellygraph is a printing process which involves transfer of an original, prepared with special inks, to a pan of gelatin or a gelatin pad pulled tight on a metal frame.

Information is exploding so furiously around us and information technology is changing at such bewildering speed that we face a fundamental problem: How to orient ourselves in the new landscape? What, for example, will become of research libraries in the face of technological marvels such as Google? More by Robert Darnton at the NYRB.

Seems like an innocent enough question, right? Absolute zero is 0 on the Kelvin scale, or −273.15 on the Celsius (centigrade) scale. Absolute zero is also precisely equivalent to 0 °R on the Rankine scale (also a thermodynamic temperature scale), and −459.67 degrees on the Fahrenheit scale.

But is there a corresponding maximum possible temperature?

Julia Rothman has compiled a very interesting site about book covers and the like. Have a look e.g. at the sketchbook section.

Lately I have been thinking about starting a science blog. Not a blog for phd’s, but for ‘ordinary’ people. A blog with the objective of showing the beauty of science, where complicated subjects are explained in words that most people could understand. I’m not there yet : I need a name (’Science for dummies’ sounds a bit disrespectful), I need to decide if I’ll be the sole author or if I should get some other guys/girls involved, should I report ’science news/gossip’ or should I limit this blog to explaining more general subjects, etc.

I definitely need a plan !

The moon has been in plain view for all of human history, but it’s only within the past few decades that it’s been possible to travel there. And for just about as long as the moon has been within reach, people have been arguing about lunar property rights: Can astronauts claim the moon for king and country, as in the Age of Discovery? Are corporations allowed to expropriate its natural resources, and individuals to own its real estate? Glenn Harlan Reynolds at Popular Mechanics.

Property from a philosophical point of view.

Humans have used symmetrical patterns for thousands of years in both functional and decorative ways. Now, a new book (The Symmetries of Things) by three mathematicians offers both math experts and enthusiasts a new way to understand symmetry and a fresh way to see the world. More at Science Daily.

The Art of Manliness offer The Essential Man’s Library. Another list, and of course some books are missing, but still, I love such lists !

All books are also listed at Amazon. Part 1 - part 2 - part 3 - part 4.

The Great Wave off Kanagawa is a famous woodblock printing by the Japanese artist Hokusai.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s (New York) writes on “The Great Wave at Kanagawa” :

The preeminence of this print—said to have inspired both Debussy’s “La Mer” and Rilke’s “Der Berg”—can be attributed, in addition to its sheer graphic beauty, to the compelling force of the contrast between the wave and the mountain. The turbulent wave seems to tower above the viewer, whereas the tiny stable pyramid of Mount Fuji sits in the distance. The eternal mountain is envisioned in a single moment frozen in time.

Hokusai characteristically cast a traditional theme in a novel interpretation. In the traditional “meisho-e” (scene of a famous place), Mount Fuji was always the focus of the composition. Hokusai inventively inverted this formula and positioned a small Mount Fuji within the midst of a thundering seascape.

Foundering among the great waves are three boats thought to be barges conveying fish from the southern islands of Edo (modern Tokyo). Thus a scene of everyday labor is grafted onto the seascape view of the mountain.

The Turing test (another good article at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) is a proposal for a test of a machine’s capability to demonstrate intelligence. Described by Alan Turing in the 1950 paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” it proceeds as follows: a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with one human and one machine, each of which try to appear human; if the judge cannot reliably tell which is which, then the machine is said to pass the test.

I understand that CAPTCHAS (= Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) are reverse Turing tests (because it is administered by a machine and targeted to a human, in contrast to the standard Turing test that is typically administered by a human and targeted to a machine). Before being allowed to do some action on a website, the user is presented with a alphanumerical characters in a distorted graphic image and asked to recognise it. This is intended to prevent automated systems from abusing the site. The assumption is that software sufficiently sophisticated to read the distorted image accurately does not exist (or is not available to the average user), so any system able to do so must be a human being.

Like so many people I’m addicted to notebooks, small, large, extra-large, ruled, squared, plain, you name it, I’ll have it. The ones I love most and that I use on a daily basis are Moleskine notebooks. What type are you using ?

Joan Acocella looks through at the phenomenon of the hangover. We learn, for example that:

Some words for hangover, like ours, refer prosaically to the cause: the Egyptians say they are “still drunk,” the Japanese “two days drunk,” the Chinese “drunk overnight.” The Swedes get “smacked from behind.” But it is in languages that describe the effects rather than the cause that we begin to see real poetic power. Salvadorans wake up “made of rubber,” the French with a “wooden mouth” or a “hair ache.” The Germans and the Dutch say they have a “tomcat,” presumably wailing. The Poles, reportedly, experience a “howling of kittens.” My favorites are the Danes, who get “carpenters in the forehead.” In keeping with the saying about the Eskimos’ nine words for snow, the Ukrainians have several words for hangover. And, in keeping with the Jews-don’t-drink rule, Hebrew didn’t even have one word until recently. Then the experts at the Academy of the Hebrew Language, in Tel Aviv, decided that such a term was needed, so they made one up: hamarmoret, derived from the word for fermentation. (Hamarmoret echoes a usage of Jeremiah’s, in Lamentations 1:20, which the King James Bible translates as “My bowels are troubled.”) There is a biochemical basis for Jewish abstinence. Many Jews—fifty per cent, in one estimate—carry a variant gene for alcohol dehydrogenase. Therefore, they, like the East Asians, have a low tolerance for alcohol.

Yesterday I spend the day on the island of Sal, which is part of the northern group of islands (Barlavento) which is the main tourist destination with beautiful white sandy beaches.

Today I am staying in Praia, which is the capital of Cape Verde and located on Santiago, the largest island and part of the southern group of islands (sotavento)

In the streets drums are adding their exciting beat to the atmosphere. Cape Verde is known internationally for morna, a form of folk music usually sung in the Cape Verdean Creole, accompanied by clarinet, violin, guitar and cavaquinho (a kind of small guitar). The islands also boast funaná and batuque music.

People seem to be happy all the time. What do you want if the sun is always shining ? No doubt I’ll be back.

I am leaving for Cape Verde. Posting might be difficult, but I’ll try.

Cape Verde is also home to one of my favourite singers, Cesaria Evora, a morna singer.

The Origins of Cybex Space about Gustav Zander’s amazing gymnastic devices

Rawls vs. Nozick: the standoff between these two thinkers is central to political philosophy today. More on Rawls and also more on Nozick.

The Nerve of Frida Kahlo in the NYRB. Links I posted last year about Frida.

Images can be found just about everywhere on the mighty internet. Below you’ll find some interesting gateways to larger image collections. Some are for free, some ask for hard bucks. Some are copyrighted, others are not or even others have a Creative Commons license. If you have located an image somewhere in the digital chaos of the world wide web, always check the conditions of use. Don’t say I didn’t warn you…

The easiest way to search images is to use search engines :

Ask image search
Google advanced image search
Yahoo image search

Next you can search Creative Commons images,

Creative Commons Web site, Creative Commons explained and portal
Creative Commons image search
Google Creative Commons search (yes try using the advanced search features of Google iso of the ususal simple search bar)
Yahoo Creative Commons search
everystockphoto.com is a search engine for creative commons photos, located in Vancouver

and free stock image collections (always nice if it’s for free, but read the fine print of some of these…) :

DeviantART
FreeFoto.com
Free Images.co.uk
Imageafter
MorgueFile (The term “morgue file” is popular in the newspaper business to describe the file that holds past issues flats)
OpenPhoto.Net
Stock.xchng

Media resources are great for finding recent images :

AFP (Agence France-Presse)
BBC Photo Library (sometimes there seems to be a problem with this site - I’m trying to figure it out)
Empics (Press Association)
Nettizen Online Newspaper Directory
News Directory, a guide to all online English-language media (worldwide), over 3,600 newspapers, 4,800 magazines, hundreds of television stations plus colleges, visitor bureaus, governmental agencies, travel links, and comics ; more than 14,500 links in all
NI (News International) Syndication
Reuters

Or you could check dedicated photojournalist resources :

Association of Photographers
EPUK (Editorial Photographers United Kingdom & Ireland)
NPPA (National Press Photographers Association)
NUJ (National Union of Journalists)
World Press Photo

Some commercial image collection can be found at (read : you have to pay, subscribe, have credit,…) :

About the Image blog
BAPLA (British Association of Picture Libraries and Agencies)
BigStockPhoto
Big White Box
Clipart.com
Corbis
Getty Images
Fotolia
iStockPhoto
Jupiterimages Unlimited
PACA (Picture Archive Council of America)
Stockxpert

Or if you are desperately seeking historical images, have a look here :

UNESCO’s Archival Portal, an enormous portal to archives around the world, a bit overwhelming.
UK Public Libraries Page, access to images available at local libraries in the UK
UK Higher Education and Research Libraries, access via these libraries to large image collections, but will take time to search
Sensitive Map, similar as the previous but using a clickable map to direct you to an institution
Libweb, a portal to 7500 libraries in 135 countries which contain of course images
24hourmuseum, a virtual UK museum
Cornucopia, an online database of information about more than 6,000 collections in the UK’s museums, galleries, archives and libraries
Virtual Library Museums Pages, a distributed directory of on-line museums
EIG (Education Image Gallery), nice resource for schools
EnrichUK, a searchable portal linking 150 websites that have been supported with Lottery good causes money from the UK
BBC History
PBS History, some pictures, but mainly movies ; still a nice portal with lots of material including teacher resources (PBS, headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, is a non–profit media enterprise owned and operated by the nation’s 348 public television stations)
Scran, part of the Scran Trust - a registered charity - whose aim is to provide educational access to digital materials representing our material culture and history
British History Online
Best of History Web Sites
Voice of the Shuttle, another overwhelming source of information, I need 48-hour-days

Ok, if you didn’t yet find the right image you need, try some of the following specialist sources :

Directories of museums and art galleries

24hourmuseum (also mentioned as a source for historical images)
Art Guide, the comprehensive internet guide to the art collections of Great Britain and Ireland
Art Museum Network, up-to-date information about the news and activities of more than 200 leading museums around the world including news about the exhibitions, acquisitions, and programs of institutions, and links to all members ; so indirect access to image collections worldwide (well most are American, but other countries are represented as well)
Cornucopia, also mentioned as a source for historical images
Virtual Library Museums Pages, and this one as well

Directories of contemporary art galleries

Artnet.com, actually a place to buy, sell and research fine art online, with over 1,200 galleries in over 250 cities worldwide, more than 100,000 works by over 25,000 artists from around the globe represented on this site ; so lots of art images
AskArt, a comprehensive source for information on contemporary American artists
Gallery Channel, a nice site with information on 8,400 exhibition venues, 21,400 exhibitions and 25,600 artists worldwide - all available for public view, a nice site, easy to access

Other museums with significant online collections

British Museum
Hermitage, a famous museum along the embankment of the River Neva, right in the heart of St Petersburg, Russia
Louvre, situated in Paris as you surely know
Metropolitan Museum of Art, near Central Park, New York
Museum of Modern Art, also in New York between 5th and 6th street
National Gallery in London
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Tate holds the national collection of British art from 1500 and of international modern art. All works can be found on this site.
Victoria and Albert Museum

Or perhaps you are looking for builidings or other architectural images ?

Great Buildings Online, with integrated Google maps ; nice try but too many adds and needs a complete design overhaul ; still nice idea.
Index of Art Historical Sites, no adds, but needs redesigning, although lots of architectural images
RIBApix, another one, better, but search facilities not always optimal

Other aggregated art image collections (some commercial) :

AHDS Visual Arts
American Memory, part of the Library of Congress
Art Resource
ARTstor, aimed at Canadian and American institutions
Bridgeman Education, also aimed at institutions
David Rumsey Visual Collections, both free and subscription based collections
Courtauld Art and Architecture collection
Grove Art, free trial but subscription required later on
OAIster, with Firefox plugin (!)
RLG Camio, for institutions mainly
RLG Cultural Materials
Scholars Resource, lots of teacher resources
Art History Resources on the Web
AICT, Art Images for College Teaching
Artcyclopedia
Smithsonian Art and Design
UCLA Arts Library Sources, interesting portal
ULAN, Union List of Artist Names, search using structured vocabularies (Part of Getty Museum website)
WorldArt Web Kiosk, access the Californian University image database

Not all of us are into history and art. Some might want scientific images :

Via RDN (Resource Discovery Network) : a wealth of information including texts, images, maps, etc.

BIOME (Life Sciences, Health and Medicine)
EEVL (Engineering, Mathematics and Computing)
Gesource (Geography and Environment) -
PSIgate (Physical Sciences) -
(In the future RDN is to be found at Intute)

General scientific image databases :

Science and Society Picture Library (UK based)
Science Photo Library
ScienceImage
Science.gov (USA government)
US Government Resources for Science Images
USA Centres for Disease Control (CDC) Public Health Image Library
Hubble Space Telescope
NASA
NOAA, US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
USDA, US Department of Agriculture
USDoD, US Department of Defense
USDOE, US Department of Energy
USFWS, US Fish and Wildlife Service

Medical images

Anatline, a web-based interface for viewing high resolution anatomical images (very nice !)
Bristol Biomed Image Archive, only for Athens member institutions (if your institution is not a member, you can apply via the website)
Images from the History of Medicine, website of the US National Library of Medicine (NLM)
Karolinska Institutet, images provided by Sweden’s largest medical university
Medical Images on the Web, overview of medical image databases provided by the University of Nebraska
MPL Medical Photographic Library
TDR Image Library with a focus on tropical diseases
Viperlib Visual Perception Images, images related to visual perception (obviously…)
Weill Cornell Medical Library directory

Enough about humans ? What about other species ?

Arkive,the Noah’s Ark for the Internet era - a unique global initiative, gathering together into one centralised digital library, films, photographs and audio recordings of the world’s species
Agripicture picture library, a select diverse collection of generic farming images
Biodidac, Biological Images
Canon Photo Gallery, part World Wildlife Fund (WWF)
ImageBank, Higher Education Academy, Centre for Bioscience, UK
Botanical Society of America, online image collection drawings actually

Earth is also a topmodel as we can see in these images :

American Geological Institute Earth Science World Image Bank
Geo-Images Project maintained at Berkeley University by G. Donald Bain, Director of the Geography Computing Facility
Picture Library of the famous Geological Society of London
National (UK) Archive of Geological Photographs

And finally I wanted to include some resources for maps :

Bodleian Library’s Map Room, and that’s exactly what it is, a ‘room’ full of links
Odden’s Bookmarks, enough links to fill a lifetime
National Geographic Maps, always beautifully made
Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection from the University of Texas
David Rumsey Map Collection if you like historical maps
DEMIS World Map Server, a software program to generate maps (not for free…)
Online Map Creation (OMC) Tool, a software package to create high-quality postscript maps in various projections (free)
Timemap TMJava is a novel mapping applet which generates complete interactive maps with a few simple lines of html, and… an open source project of the University of Sydney ; I need to test this as it seems like an awesome application. Anyone tried this already ?
Earthbrowser, software application allowing you to browse the surface of our blue planet (free trial, rated at 23.95$ with updates), including webcams, satellite updates, etc.
Atlas of Cyberspace, an atlas of maps and graphic representations of the geographies of the new electronic territories of the Internet, the World-Wide Web and other emerging Cyberspaces, interesting site
And last but not least Google earth

This list is not intended to be exhaustive. If you know of other resources we should include, please put a comment. Thank you.

Albrecht Dürer (May 21, 1471 – April 6, 1528 ) was a German painter and printmaker from Nuremberg, Germany. His engravings include Knight, Death, and the Devil (1513),

Saint Jerome in his Study (1514)

and Melencolia I (1514).