Science!

Ten Random Things?

2008-11-25T16:50:00.000-08:00

1. The name of one of my cats is The Communist War Machine. He's disarmingly cute.
2. I lived in Hawai'i, and no, I can't hula.
3. I really like Doritos. Like, way too much.
4. Um, I have degrees in physics and aerospace engineering?
5. This is getting hard. I have really small hands.
6. I was Dr. Girlfriend last Halloween.
7. I spent some time in Spain. Apparently I sound like a robot in Spanish. (Also, Homer Simpson is way less funny in Spanish.)
8. I watch more TV than I will admit to.
9. I am one of those people who sing random made up songs. No, you will never hear me do it.
10. My hair was once orange. And pink. And red. And purple. I think that's it.

Totally untrue!

2008-11-19T15:10:00.000-08:00

Science!'s Dewey Decimal Section:

487 Preclassical & postclassical Greek

Science! = 9395435 = 939+543+5 = 1487

Class:
400 Language

Contains:
Linguistics and language books.

What it says about you:
You value communication, even with people who are different from you. You like trying new things don't mind being exposed to unfamiliar territory. You get bored with routines that never change.

Find your Dewey Decimal Section at Spacefem.com

Last Thing

2008-11-15T12:08:00.000-08:00

Frankly, I would have done more for a free flash drive.

Overall, I am a fan of the 23 Things. I mean, a lot of the things I was familiar with already, like flickr and YouTube. What was the most useful for me personally was the things that tied in to the CML website, like MOLDI and Mango Languages. I remain unimpressed with Twitter, but then I've never been the chatty type and I think it can be useful aside from socializing.

Probably my biggest frustration with the whole Learn & Play thing was getting started. I wasn't quite sure how to track my progress and every once in a while a thing wouldn't work. But overall, it was good. I would definitely do a similar thing again.

Thing 22!

2008-11-15T08:20:00.000-08:00

Okay, I'm willing to admit that MOLDI is kind of cool. The trouble is, I keep meaning to downoad something at home so that I can really try it out, but I keep forgetting. I went through the site a bit today, and I am convinced this is the way things will be sooner or later. Possibly portable readers still need some work. I still like paper, and those handheld readers just don't cut it for me! I'm also impressed with the audio selections, as well as the ability to burn some to a CD. It's great! Especially some of the movie titles, though, seem kind of obscure, but I think that's because really popular stuff has little need of methods of distribution such as this. Why add your title to a lending library when people will still pay 29.99 for it in droves?

Also, I was a little disappointed that I had to put a hold on 1984.

Thing 21

2008-10-24T08:25:00.000-07:00

Right now I'm simply annoyed with these podcast directories. I searched for "This American Life", and I found a lot of other NPR programs, but not that one. I know it has a podcast because I used to listen to them back before my home computer bit the dust. A quick Google search turned it up in short order. So clearly these things have their limitations. Really, anybody podcasting is already going to have a website that Google can dig up. I suppose their greatest utility is in searching for podcasts by topic or genre, in which case Google might be of less help. So there's that. Mostly I'm frustrated because podfeed.net is running really slowly for some reason. So boo. Nonetheless, I ended up finding another podcast in a similar satirical bent on that site, "Extruding America", which I have added to my Bloglines account. So there you go.

Thing 20

2008-10-22T15:22:00.001-07:00

Okay, so I went to YouTube and searched for "Science!" just to see what would come up. (FYI, I heart science documentaries of all stripes.) What turned up was a BBC clip about the counter-argument to the theory that an asteroid strike killed the dinosaurs. Namely, "Where the bloody heck is it?" Not being any kind of paleontologist, I am pro-Chicxulub, but that's just because it's so elegant. Training as a physicist makes you a sucker for that kind of stuff. Anyhow, embedding was disabled, but here's the URL if you are so inclined:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYAFptyG9P4

Thing 19

2008-10-22T15:12:00.000-07:00

The CML Power Tools page looks like a whole bunch of stuff that any Internet-savvy person would know about already. I noticed some of them (like LibraryThing) we covered in Learn & Play. Nonetheless, there is the distinct need to familiarize people with this sort of thing. For me personally, I'm a big fan of Stumble Upon. Those sites that match you with new material based on your present likes and interests I think are, in general, an excellent resource, even for libraries. That tool on our website where you can put in an author and it will reccomend others has come in handy when helping customers.

Thing 18

2008-10-17T08:38:00.000-07:00

It was fun to look through all the different Web 2.0 sites. However, I found that many of them either didn't work or were under construction. So, like Twitter, they disappoint. Of the ones that worked properly, though, I was especially impressed with Mango languages. I know that's one of our online premium resources, and I like it. There aren't that many languages, but there are the big ones like Spanish and French. I also like that there is English for Spanish speakers. I know that's a growing demographic around here.

Thing 16

2008-10-15T10:29:00.000-07:00

Wiki wiki.

(That's very wiki.)

They're all right I guess. I mean, I clearly see the utility. I don't much use them for fun, though. I just don't care what people think about popular tv shows or whatever. Plus I don't like having to get permission; it takes away the instant gratification that one gets everywhere else on the web! That classroom example in the tutorial was cool, though. I remember we had something simlar in college and grad school that was administered by the university with content added by the professor. Often, though, the professor didn't care enough to do it. With a wiki you could have something student-run if they cared and the professor didn't. It would be easy to share notes and syllabi and such.

Thing 17

2008-10-09T10:22:00.001-07:00

Yes, I skipped one, but Google Docs is so cool I couldn't help myself. I'd fiddled with it before, but never in any depth because I have Microsoft Office on my computer. It's really neat. I mean, the spreadsheet doesn't have all the sophisticated features of Excel, but it's pretty good and coming along. Pretty much anything I did in undergrad would have been well served this way. But Google Docs didn't exist then! I thought I was hot stuff when I got in on the beta of Gmail.

That said, I am even more convinced now that Google is going to take over the world. What is Microsoft going to do when web-based apps take all its Office users (at least all the casual ones)? I know there have been freeware word processors and spreadsheet programs compatible with those common .doc & .xls files, but in my experience they weren't that great and they certainly weren't as accessible. I mean, you don't even have to know how to install a program to use these things. The sharing aspect is also pretty sweet. In the absence of a shared drive, it's far better to share this way than with endless emailed versions. And you can publish as a pdf! I'm sold.

Thing 15

2008-10-08T10:24:00.000-07:00

Wiki!

Here's another fun Hawai'ian word for you: humuhumunukunukuapua'a. It's my favorite word, and a very pretty fish besides.

I have been a big fan of Wikipedia for years, even though my teachers wouldn't let me cite it as a source for reports and stuff. Of course they had a good reason why, and that is that anybody can edit it, and this anybody might just be full of it. Nonetheless, I use it a lot, either to get a head start on a more reliable source or to figure out what that inscrutable pop culture reference was.

Library wikis? Also very good, especially from within a restriced set of users. I would say it is a faster way to get web-based reference sources on things like reading lists and best practices to the people who need it, rather than waiting for updates from the powers that be. (CMLsi, I'm looking at you.)

That one site that had the ability for users to add their reviews to the catalog was really cool. I think our customers would really appreciate something like that. It could be like where a blogger has to okay the comments before they're posted, just to make sure no one adds anything inappropriate to one of our public tools.

Thing 14

2008-10-02T11:19:00.000-07:00

Library 2.0.

Why is it that we keep putting edition numbers to a thing which by its very nature rejects the concept of fixed editions and updates? Well, I think that's kind of funny.

It's Library 3.0 et al. ad infinitum that scare me. I mean, being a denizen of the Internet age, I can conceptualize this participatory, customer-serving information source kind of thing. We've been inching towards it for years. All that virtual storefront stuff kind of scares me, though. I mean, what is a library without books? I would contend that physical books are one of the modern library's main draws (the other being Internet access). The two things complement each other.

More later.

Thing #13

2008-09-30T09:14:00.000-07:00

This del.icio.us thing is more my speed. Is it just me or did they keep misspelling it in that tutorial video?

Anyway, the categorization via tagging is awesome. It is a very good way to get and share relevant links. Plus, it's portable! That could be handy if you tend to not stay in the same place a lot. I think this whole folksonomy thing is really what Web 2.0 is getting at. Part of me kind of mourns the old way, since that's how I learned it way back in the early 90's, but I know better. I mean, the fact that you can google any random thing (especially pop culture things) that you want to know about and a bunch of other people's information about it pops up is a testament to the ever-growing participatory nature of the Internet.

Thing 12

2008-09-19T09:09:00.000-07:00

Twitter... is for twits? (Ha, ha, just kidding.)

My lame jokes notwithstanding, I don't really find Twitter all that useful. For one thing, at the moment it is "over capacity" and isn't working at all. More than that, though, I don't really want to tell people where I am or what I'm doing most of the time, or knowing that of them. I enjoy falling off the face of the earth on a regular basis. Like that time I didn't have a telephone for several months. My mom made me get one after that because she said it made her nervous that I kept calling her from payphones. If you're a chat room junkie, though, I bet you'll love it. Once they get the kinks out.

Or say at a university library, you could let your student populace know when the public computers are down or busy or whatever. That could have been useful back in the day. But for me, no thanks; I like to stay a little unplugged.

I'm sciencey, so look me up! I won't be doing much.

I found the anti-Learn&Play!

2008-09-18T14:44:00.000-07:00

It's a book called The Cult of the Amateur.

I just shelved it, and I think that's funny.

Thing 11

2008-09-12T09:37:00.000-07:00

Library Thing!
It's cool to share books. I had an account with a similar book-sharing site. I forget what it was. Oh yeah, Goodreads. I keep getting email updates that I ignore. Really, all this Internet-based sharing and socializing is great, especially if you need to know what's hot, but I'm too busy for it. TMI.

BTW, here's my meager collection (http://www.librarything.com/catalog/ddcrbb).

Thing 10

2008-09-12T09:22:00.000-07:00

This is my Swedish furniture name, straight from http://generatorblog.blogspot.com/ .

It is my favorite.

Thing 8

2008-09-12T09:13:00.000-07:00

I created a Bloglines account ( http://www.bloglines.com/public/Sciencey , yo) and I already don't like it. I mean, feeds are all nice and stuff, but if I really wanted to keep track of them I would use Google since I use that anyway.

I don't really care about RSS feeds.

2008-09-10T10:56:00.001-07:00

I'm being honest. I made a conscious decision a few years ago not to use them because I simply don't want all that information bombarding me. I have a few sites I look at for important stuff, and that's it. That's not to say I don't think it's good for some people, so here's what I think about the requisite means if I did like RSS feeds.

The tool on Bloglines is easy and nice, but it's not by any means exhaustive. I had some sites in mind like sciam.com and elpais.com, and they weren't on there, so I just went there and got that there.

Thing #7

2008-09-09T17:55:00.000-07:00

Blog about technology. I can do that.

How about for starters, it blows my mind that there are humans of working/driving age who cannot remember a time before email and the Internet? I mean, I use it for everything, sure, but I do remember a time when you had to actually, say, have a yellow pages on hand.

Speaking from a physics and engineering point of view, the vast increase in computational power has made a world of difference. No exact solution to your equations? No problem! We'll just run this nice algorithm for a numerical solution and your nasty structure/flow/multiple-body gravitational system is done. Not completely accurately, but basically with as much precision as you have the time and money for.

So that's nice.

Thing #6

2008-09-09T17:48:00.001-07:00

image_1
Originally uploaded by ddcrbb

Look, I watermarked some Chinese space program propaganda for you. I used picmarkr.com, even though I could have done something really cool with Photoshop.

Not flickr, but...

2008-09-09T17:26:00.000-07:00

Here's a slideshow I made on photobucket from some old art of mine. Enjoy!

Flickr

2008-09-02T11:32:00.000-07:00

I found my galaxy!

I just searched up NGC 6946. It's not really mine; I just did some research on it. This was an Astronomy Picture of the Day about three years ago. So fun!

If you weren't satisfied with that, here's the URL for a picture of a cute kitten. Who doesn't like kittens?

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1158/543444689_6fecef5415_b.jpg

7 1/2 Habit of Highly Successful Lifelong Learners

2008-09-02T11:18:00.000-07:00

Probably the hardest of the things is with my confidence as a learner. Teachers: screaming is not an effective tactic for making children remember skills or facts. All it does is make them remember you screaming.

I'm going to say the easiest has been taking control of my own learning. Ever since I've been a little kid I've wandered into math and foreign languages in an equally enthusiastic fashion. Nobody told me to. Heck, I went to public school. If you don't take charge of your own education there, I'd say you're in trouble. (Just one kid's opinion.)

I get paid to do this?

2008-08-19T10:35:00.000-07:00

Learning and playing is fun. This blog looks much nicer than any of the others I've had. (Take that, DeadJournal!)