I have uploaded a new index page for our Frog in a Well project. It displays the new Frog in a Well logo, based on a painting by Joseph Y. Lo, who has kindly given us permission to use a modified version of it for our project.
In addition, I have prepared two buttons that you are free to use when linking to Frog in a Well:
So far looks like casualties are low, but who knows what the final number will be. Very tragic day for London.
Here is the WikiNews page collecting information on this and links to other articles:
WikiNews London Blasts
Wiki Article on the Blasts (Contents Changing rapidly)
BBC Live News Stream
Guardian News Blog on the Blasts
I’m watching a Hercule Poirot mystery (“The Incredible Theft”) and there is a great and memorable line, especially fit for historians. Poirot’s secretary explains that she wouldn’t take an anonymous caller because without a name, she wouldn’t know where to put her file. Poirot replies:
Life first, Ms. Lemon, filing second.
Some of my friends complain that my wordy weblog isn’t particularly useful to read when trying to find out what I’m doing or to figure out quickly where exactly I am in the world (I’m in Taiwan this weekend, back in Seoul next Tuesday). While for longer stays I update my address on the contact page, I have created a special page here on this weblog which keeps a running tab (including shorter trips) on exactly where I happen to be at this time:
This link will also be accessible from the list of links on the right of this blog.
At a dinner recently, I was told by a Korean friend of mine that the now famous Korean stem cell researcher Hwang Woo-suk recently claimed that the Korean metal chopsticks (which I find admittedly relatively hard to use in grabbing greasy noodles and other slippery food items) have developed the dexterity of the Korean people to such a high extent that it allows them to be better at the detailed work of science at a microscopic level.
Ah yes, I found Hwang’s quote online here :
Their secret weapon? A mastery of wielding steel chopsticks. “This work can be done much better in Oriental hands,” he says. “We can pick up very slippery corn or rice with the steel chopsticks.”
It has been mentioned many other places as well, including a Wired news article. Also, it apparently isn’t just manual dexterity, it is our very mental capacity for concentration which is at stake here in chopstick use:
To use chopsticks, the use of some 30 different joints and 50 muscles is required. The use of chopsticks thus stimulates the cerebrum far more actively than does the use of a fork. The everyday practice of using chopsticks is said to enable people to improve vital developmental functions, such as muscle control, coordination for handling small objects, and mental concentration. It is a well-known fact that practicing certain hand movements during early childhood, such as playing with string or molding clay, are helpful for developing the brain. Some have conjectured that the reason Korea was able to become a global leader in semiconductors, despite a late start of some 30 years, was because of its people’s manual dexterity, which is especially well suited for delicate work. Moreover, they claim that such manual dexterity is a product of Korea’s chopsticks-user culture. A similar interpretation is used to explain the exceptional success of Korean athletes in such sports as golf and archery.
When I did Kyûdô archery in Japan, I was told that the fact I came from Norway, which is made up of a “hunting and gathering people,” contributed to the speed of my improvement in skill. If only we used metal chopsticks in our hunting villages along the fjords.
According to a survey reported in the Asahi today including some 808 responses, some 71% respondents “can’t understand” China’s demand that Japan face the question of its historical conciousness of the war. On the other hand, 48% reported that they believed Japanese prime ministers should stop visiting the controversial Yasukuni shrine (36% say he should continue), which is a 9% increase over last November. About 51% of respondents believed that China’s own history education system was a “large influence” on China’s anti-Japanese sentiment.
In a separate brilliantly stupid move, Koizumi cited Confucius in defence of his Yasukuni shrine visits which include the Class-A war criminals, “Condemn the offense, but pity the offender.”
Maybe this is old news and I just realized it but there is a nifty service called Answers.com which is great for quick definitions. For example, try one of my favorite words, “transubstantiation” It provides definitions from various dictionaries, available translations, and also the Wikipedia entry (I wonder if this is dynamic swipe from wikipedia, or they update it regularly?). You may notice that Google, which used to give a “definition” link for its results linking to dictionary.com is now linking to answers.com instead. More on this at SearchEngineWatch.
I created a little Javascript bookmarklet you can search it directly from your bookmark toolbar, save this “address” into your favorite:
javascript:x=escape
(prompt(‘Enter%20a%20term%20to%20look%20up:’,”));
window.location=’http://answers.com/main/ntquery?s=’+x+’&gwp=8′;
Note: This should all be one line. When you click it, it will ask you what to search for and open up the appropriate page on answers.com.
UPDATE: Answers.com considerably simplified its URL construction, ignore the code above. The correct Javascript should now be:
javascript:x=escape
(prompt(‘Enter%20a%20term%20to%20look%20up:’,”));
window.location=’http://answers.com/main/’+x;
Testing Footnote.1
UPDATE: As some of you may have noticed, I have been playing around with something funny here on a post which appears and disappears as I play with it. Here is the thing: I want to include footnotes/endnotes in some blog postings (like the many footnotes in my last posting). I hate having to scroll down to read each endnote, and I really don’t care much for the little anchor links you can click because this means that you still have to scroll up again. Well, after trying half a dozen different CSS and/or Javascript solutions, I think I have hit on one which works in Safari, Opera, and Mozilla-based browsers like Firefox (to hell with Internet Explorer—why are you people still using it?—but this may work on it too).
I wanted, and I believe I have succeeded in finding, a way to have a little popup box show footnote text when you hover the mouse above the footnote’s number. Thanks to Cheah Chu Yeow and Dunstan Orchard postings on “nice titles” which I think does the trick nicely.
How to get it work:
1. Upload this Javascript to your server.
2. In the blog template (index.php on WordPress) or web page you wish to use footnotes add the following line of code within the <head> tag:
<script type=”text/javascript”
src=”http://yoursite/location/of/nicetitle.js”></script>
3. Add the following CSS code to your css file (in the case of WordPress it is wp-layout.css) file. I have commented out some code which gives the footnote reference rounded corners in some browsers.
Ok, that is all you need to do to get it set up. Then whenever you post something to your blog or that web page and want to add a footnote to some text, create a link going nowhere with a “title” attribute containing the text of your footnote:
<a href=”#” title=”Footnote Text”>1</a>
Notes
1. I need to somehow modify the script to accept some kind of pseudo-HTML to pass on the bolding of book titles, as it is now, you can’t put book titles in italics by just adding an “em” tag. I could perhaps modify the code to translate [em]Book Title[/em] or something like it into HTML equivalent. UPDATE: I tried to do this with a simple search and replace command inserted in the javascript and it doesn’t work, the tags aren’t interpreted. It would take more scripting than I had imagined.
2. My version of nicetitle.js has deleted the code which produces a 2nd line with the link it is going to. Just uncomment that code if you want to show the link URL to an Amazon page with the book or something like that within the popup.
3. Whenever you want to use quotations in the footnote reference you need to put " instead of quotations marks or it won’t work.
4. Of course, now if any links on your page have a “title” attribute they are going to be showing this in a pop up window.
5. If some of you are wondering how I make the font small and superscripted:
<sup><span style=”font-size: small”>1</span></sup>
My sister just passed on to me a scathing critique of the new project to digitize some or all of the contents of several major research libraries by Google (my own posting on this here). Rory Litwin‘s article, entitled “On Google’s Monetization of Libraries” has almost nothing positive to say about the project and fears that this will spell doom for librarians and the enterprise of truth and knowledge. I found the article completely unconvincing, even if it seems to be motivated by a healthy progressive librarian’s skepticism for mammoth corporations like Google and the darker side of capitalist markets. I address some of his specific points in this entry, but the article’s biggest weakness comes from an assumption that the libraries have sold their books and souls to Google and that this demonic internet giant can now proceed with the destruction of mankind’s common quest for truth.
I believe he is wrong on almost every count, although a final verdict on my own response will have to await more details about the specific agreements between the major research libraries involved and Google. He fails to fully recognize the fact that Google has not muscled its way into the stacks of Harvard, U Michigan, and others to rob them of their treasures – even if, as he says, Google’s “back-room deal” was “not worked out in cooperation with the [broader] library community”. It wasn’t, but it was worked out with a select number of huge libraries who are extremely protective of their holdings. These libraries are powerful agents in this discussion, and at least in Harvard’s case, hardly paragons of democratic virtue. Their key future role in this project are not sufficiently addressed by Litwin.
Overall, I think the article represents the last gasp of a bitter and dying breed of specialists who are either unwilling or unable to adapt to both the technological changes of our time, and on the theoretical level, the problematization of the Enlightenment project of progress and knowledge production. I’m sure that many others in the library community, or more broadly information and knowledge specialists, are more willing to recognize their own failure to enlist the massive public support and financial resources needed to digitize their holdings and confront the significant changes to their profession that a digital information world entails.
What gets lost in Litwin’s article, in which the shadow of a deeply commercialized and inequitable world of knowledge hangs over the pursuit of “truth”, is the fact that we already have a deeply inequitable world of knowledge. As a student at Harvard, but a former student of Columbia, Western Washington University and frequent visitor to Stavanger and Bartlesville libraries I can personally attest to the huge gap in access to resources, both digital and traditional. Harvard’s libraries have exceeded all of my expectations but I am only a very temporary guest at the table of its highly restricted library system. I feel a deep sadness that these resources are not available to everyone. I am delighted that Harvard and other similar institutions are opening up, and if it takes a massive corporation to help them take the first step, then I welcome it with open arms.
I seriously doubt that Harvard and the other libraries have signed away control to the eventual digital collections that result, and that we will likely see competition between commercial companies to provide access under some sort of licensing agreement, and potentially, a non-commercial public-supported alternative once the extremely expensive process of digitizing is complete. I believe that hosting such resources is less expensive than the massive investment of digitizing them, and it will be easier for the library community to mobilize behind a more modest public solution to the former (for public domain materials), than the latter. There will then continue to be room for commercial services which add additional features, for-pay access to copyrighted materials, and so on, as well as room for libraries to continue providing free access to those copyrighted materials they cannot legally host online.
As a side note, my own radical opposition to the current regime of intellectual property law also gives me hope that this will advance the revolutionary cause of copyright reform or, should that fail, at least the rise of a massive underground P2P market for huge databases of books and archives.
The appropriate response to the Google project is not a luddite call to arms, but reflection on why the library community could not launch a huge project like this themselves, followed by serious debate about how librarians can ensure that their considerable skills and knowledge will help guide the future use of these new digital resources, in whatever form they take.
Librarians have won incredibly important legal battles to protect equal and public access to (public library and archive) collections. Though some may not see it in these terms, they are in fact the guardians of a deeply socialist conception of knowledge as a public good. The sooner we get all of them on board for the next generation’s war to implant these values in the digital world and establish the legal foundations to protect them, the less likely that the commercialization of most human knowledge will become a real threat.
Since this posting has already grown a bit long, I’ll address specific points by Litwin in a future update to this posting.
I just read a beautiful Japanese war poem. I don’t know who it is by. It was in an collection of essays by the scholar 田中正俊 called 『戦中戦後』
敗戦の祖国へ君にはほかにどんな帰り方もなかったのだ。
−海峡の底を歩いて帰る以外。To the motherland that lost the war
For you there was no way to return,
Except to walk the channel’s deep.
(As always feel free to email me suggestions to improve the translation) I discussed this poem with Sayaka, I kind of feel like there is an interesting potential ambiguity in the title here which changes the answer of “Who is the you?” Reading this I picture the dead soldiers returning home, but if the you is the motherland this poem is then about Japan itself.