Weibel Lines

Annals of Air Travel

By ohhh, so many measures, air travel is a dreadful affair these days.  Put aside for a moment the truly miraculous fact that its possible to be on the other side of the world in a day, the commoditized version of getting there is not a glamorous process. The only worse thing is perhaps not having the opportunity to do it.  So, as I pack my bags in preparation for a journey from the cold rain of Seattle to the dry heat of a Melbourne summer, there are few colleagues from whom I might elicit the least sympathy, short of playing the illness-on-the-road card.  That card came to the top of the deck yesterday, as my second bout of flu-like-symptoms of 2008 settles in.

My thoughts turned immediately to Andrew Speaker, last year's most unpopular fellow-traveler and TB's poster child of 2007.  After the dust settled, it seemed improbable that Mr. Speaker was likely to be a serious danger to his fellow travelers, but the specter of resistant TB infection is dark indeed, and so the world clucked its collective tongue at his irresponsible behavior.  As that story was in full swing, I couldn't help but think back to my own role as Typhoid Mary, also a trip to Australia, that marked the only time in my life that I considered seriously the possibility that I might succumb to a Jim-Henson-like malady.   Lying in bed in a motel on the perimeter of Kosciusko National Park in New South Wales, I felt quite vulnerable indeed.  I wanted nothing so much as to be home, and that desire overwhelmed what certainly was a more sensible course of action -- to turn myself into the health authorities.  So, a day or so later, I got on a plane, undoubtedly leaving a collection of fellow infectees in my wake.  My colleague and traveling companion, Carl Lagoze, was repaid for his care and ministrations by catching it, and  anecdotal reports suggest a number of other conferees from DC-4 also got the bug.

We generally don't stay home when we catch a cold, and even less so when major efforts and expense have been expended to send us somewhere... people count on us to suck it up and get the job done.  Just a cold, right?  Interesting, though, that Mr. Speaker sparked a global controversy with his decision to join the flying public against doctors' orders, but most every flight has its share of disease vectors, one of whom will someday spark the next pandemic.  Hope I'm not part of it.

PS:  Risk is relative, no?  Don't miss the New York Times story about the risk that all you Superbowl fans will be taking on at the communal guacamole bowl.

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Same sunset ferry trip from Bainbridge to Seattle on a beautiful January evening.

The answer is... Why don't we get it?

My esteemed Facebook colleague, Nicole Engaard, posted a short blog post entitled:

The Answer is: "What are Libraries"

Nicole seemed a bit aghast that someone would ask:

"is there any kind of like…video rental store but for books? would make things a lot cheaper, plus once one person has read one the next person can get enjoyment from it etc"

It is a bit ironic that the title of the post is patterned after the familiar Jeopardy show, as it in fact reveals a kind of jeopardy that we in the Library community should be feeling (and which motivates Nicole's incredulity, I suspect?).

The more salient comparison has not so much to do with video-rental stores-cum-bookstore, I think, but rather with Netflix, whose success, in my estimation has little to do with the cost model and everything to do with the convenience model.  They have taken Ranganathan more seriously than we have... remember the laws?  Isn't  one of them "Save the User's time"? 

I don't want to go to the library when I want stuff to read... blasphemy?  Maybe. But its a convenience issue.  I would like to have a queue that I add to asynchronously as I get recommendations or read reviews.  And I'd like to have them sent to me, the same way Netflix sends DVDs.   And  shouldn't this all be tied into the Web-scale cache of book surrogates (WorldCat would be my choice.... duh), so the usage patterns and reviews, and  other social aspects of book use are captured on behalf of the community?   Eric and Victoria Miller brought this notion to my attention a while back, and Eric notes that there are in fact exemplars (Bookins.com being one).   

Lets get back in that loop.

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I took this picture on the ferry returning to Seattle from Bainbridge Island last week during Marguerite's visit to Seattle.  Her visit coincided with the (I am told) annual late-January respite from rain -- it was a stunning weather week, and I had an inkling that this particular ferry crossing would be a winner.  The image marks my first entry into Flickr's daily Interestingness set, a set of 500 images uploaded each day that a tightly-guarded algorithm declares as most interesting.  This one made page 14  of the January 26 set.  My major contribution to its interestingness was the foresight to be on that ferry (I did plan it that way) and the good fortune to own an image-stabilized Canon EOS 70-300 telephoto lens.

Where was I?

I've forgotten how to do this. Holiday travel, the too-common cold, meeting an absurd grant writing deadline, and mental sloth are my excuses.  Until I get the hang of it again, a few notes on things I've read that I would like to share:

Self epitaph, via David Weinberger's Blog.  A role model for those of us who have always wanted to be the featured speaker at their own funeral.

Long term data preservation, via the Stoa Consortium (News, projects, and links for digital classicists everywhere).  As one of the many supplicants for the NSF DataNet solicitation, its all-data-all-the-time now.

Comparison of "extract, transform, and load" with federation, Lorcan Dempsey's recapitulation, through a lens-bibliographic, of Mike Stonebreaker's post on uber data management strategies (see?).

Pew Report on Digital Identity, via Fred Stutzman's Unit Structures

Pew Report on Teens and Social Media, also  via Fred Stutzman's Unit Structures.  Fred notes that 1 of 3 teenagers is blogging or journaling online.  David Weinberger also quoted some nice stat-bites in his piece on the same report.  There is an ongoing lament at the Allegro Cafe where I spend my Saturday mornings most weeks, about the decline in culture, and particularly the reading and writing of poetry and literature.  On the other hand, reading among teens is up sharply (another stat-bite from a Pew report, I think, but I can't find it) and the widely reported bit-stream-of-consciousness that overflows the webservers of the world confirms that creativity will out.  Human consciousness is compelled to create, and while we may not find the next Ulysses on YouTube, somehow we'll be surprised... and pleasantly... about what evolves from the modern idioms of self expression that are erupting everywhere.

A concise view of why Facebook is losing a lot of people's interest, also via Fred Stutzman's Unit Structures.

A lesson on Identity from Chris Messina's Factory City blogpost on L'affair Scobelizer-scrapes-Facebook.

Scrivener, via DChud, a tool which promises to increase productivity in large writing projects -- I'm definitely going to give it a whirl.

Another post by DChud on the Semantic Web, and whether it has reached the tipping point.

If it looks from this post that I've rediscovered my RSS reader, its because I have.  Its on my iPhone in a form sufficiently palatable (or maybe just novel) to draw me to it when i don't really want to get out of bed but can't sleep, either.  Keeping up with RSS feeds is approaching email on the onerous task scale, and doing so in the interstices of the day  seems like a useful life hack.
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The mouth of Kinsale harbor at dusk, taken while on vacation a few years ago.