Papercraft

"A gift in support of libraries, books, works, ideas... Once upon a time there was a book and in the book was a nest and in the nest was an egg and in the egg was a dragon and in the dragon was a story..."

In Scotland an unnamed artist is bequeathing paper sculptures to libraries, art cinemas, and a storytelling center. These unique gifts are made from paper and old books, and seem to have a tenuous connection to British mystery writer, Ian Rankin, and Scottish poet, Edwin Morgan, but no one has claimed (or admitted) responsibility for the pieces.

It's a wonderful little mystery, I think. Someone's whimsical, artistic way of thanking the literary world for their inspirational contributions to our daily lives. NPR reports on the story with pictures of more of the left-behind treasures.

A fairy tale sigh

As all good stories begin, once upon a time in a land far, far away there lived a girl or a boy in times simultaneously much simpler and much, much more dangerous than our own. She, or he, was born and grew up believing she--or he--was no different from anyone else. Not special, not interesting, not extraordinary. At the premise of the story she or he has almost reached that moment, the tipping point, when a neat orderly life spirals out of control into a brilliant adventure that may sometimes resemble a wild goose chase through hell with everything is existence trying to kill her--or him. But that's where the good part really starts; when the heroine is up against the wall, hungry tigers all around her with only a broken, rusted blade for protection and an unconscious prisoner who she has just dragged to freedom sprawled at her feet. There seems no possible escape, no happy ending in store, but you'd still change places with her in a heartbeat. Because you know the impossible will happen; a masked vigilante will appear on the cliffs high above or a thunderstorm will suddenly blow up and a bolt of lightning will sear through the villain's heart just as he makes the killing leap, razor-sharp blade glinting in the twilight. That's just how it happens, the unwritten law of fairy tales. And we sigh over our ordinary, mundane lives and wish we could have our own once upon a time...

Predicting the Future

The New York Times initiated an interactive collaborative prediction timeline where readers can input ideas about the future of technology. Some of my favorite ideas are "No Red Lights" in 2041 and "WiFi to the Brain" in 2071. There's even a prediction for "A.I. Government" in 2258.

What will the future be like? It's fun to predict, but in the end we'll just have to wait and see.

Last day of classes - Fall 2011

Today was the last day of classes of my first semester of library science school. Half of me is flat out refusing to believe that I'll never sit in these classes again, and half of me cannot wait to finish up my last couple finals and take a few weeks off for the holidays.

Was this semester what I was expecting? Not exactly, I'd say. I think I was anticipating more practical library instruction (which admittedly we did get in Reference), and I was pleasantly surprised by the depth (and variety) of the theoretical and ideological components of the program. I think I learned that I don't really want to be a reference librarian (which was sort of my plan going into the program) or an archivist probably, but I feel like there are a lot of new career options that I'm genuinely interested in and that I had never even really heard of before this semester. I was worried that compared to studying literature and language in undergrad, library school was going to be too "science-y." But I find that now I'm excited to explore the technical side of information science more in future semesters.

I always have a hard time letting go of classes; I will have more to say about this semester in the near future, I'm sure, but right now I feel like I'm just trying to process the last three and a half months. Trying to catch my brain up to 12-07-11.

Google Guide

A handy Google research guide from hackcollege.com

Here's a section of it:

Pyramids

When finals season is getting you down there are two sure ways to get your spirits back up. Christmas shopping! And reading Terry Pratchett! When you are a penniless grad student, the second option might sometimes be your only option. (And conveniently one of the cures for penniless grad student depression is also reading Terry Pratchett! Two birds with one book!)

 Pyramids artwork by Les Edwards (yes, that is previously pent up time energy being released from the pyramids in the form of lightning; happens every night)

In this adventure, Mr. Pratchett takes his readers to a very Old Kingdom, a land that boasts a long and repetitive succession of kings and traditions and a large collection of stone pyramids. Prince Teppic, recently returned from school in a modern foreign city, is not excited about ascending the throne and has trouble putting up with the old fashioned habits of his army of palace priests. His reign gets off to a bumpy start as the plan to build his late father the biggest pyramid ever goes slightly off schedule and sucks the entire kingdom into a rift in space and time. Terry Pratchett's parody of ancient Egypt is hilarious, and especially as someone who was fascinated with pharaohs, sphinxes, hieroglyphics, and everything Egyptian as a kid, it is an exceedingly fun romp through a fantastical alternate history.

And of course Mr. Pratchett has a random library-related factoid for his readers. On the Discworld, "the fastest insect is the .303 bookworm. It evolved in magical libraries, where it is necessary to eat extremely quickly to avoid being affected by the thaumic radiations. An adult .303 bookworm can eat through a shelf of books so fast that it ricochets off the wall." (p. 201)

Consuming literature that quickly would come in extremely handy when writing papers...

Slowing down

Thanks to Ghostery, you can see a list of the top ten culprits for website loading lag time and slow Internet browsing. These "lagtags" include widgets and analytics programs, typically add-ons webmasters are paying to have run on their sites.

Here's the list with the average number of milliseconds these products will add to your website.
Avalanchers: 3912.721751 ms
Adfunky: 2600.142857 ms
2leep: 2305.563533 ms
ShareASale: 2090.703573 ms
Brand Affinity: 1917.470961 ms
Adfusion: 1908.145773 ms
Wahoha: 1853.056856 ms
GoDaddy Site Analytics: 1793.0625 ms
Redux Media: 1663.106572 ms
Kitara Media: 1578.838889 ms

And apparently if you included all these on one webpage, it would take an extra 22 seconds just to load. (An eternity to the average user.) The coolest website in the world isn't going to get any traffic if it takes 22 seconds to load; a slow load time also adversely affects Google rankings, so a regardless of its interesting content, a slow site may be so far down the results list that no one even knows it exists.

Here's an interesting article about user perceptions and the way people form impressions of the websites they visit. Jakob Neilson says that "that new pages must display within 1 second for users to feel like they're navigating freely; any slower and they feel held back by the computer and don't click as readily... After 1 second, users get impatient and notice that they're waiting for a slow computer to respond. The longer the wait, the more this impatience grows; after about 10 seconds, the average attention span is maxed out." Honestly, I think that's being pretty generous (the article was written in 2009). I rarely stay on a webpage for ten seconds waiting for it to load. If it's been even half that time I have probably already given up and either tried to refresh the page or abandoned it entirely. It's definitely a reminder to me to be mindful of the "extras" I put into my webpages--images and videos are probably culprits just as often as adsense and analytics--and to be wary of soul-crushingly slow load times.