Ramblings & ephemera
From Umberto Eco’s “Vegetal and mineral memory: The future of books” (Al-Ahram Weekly: 20—26 November 2003): Libraries, over the centuries, have been the most important way of keeping our collective wisdom. They were and still are a sort of universal brain where we can retrieve what we have forgotten and what we still do not […]
Posted on September 8th, 2011 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, business, history, language & literature, on writing, religion | No Comments »
From Steve Paulson’s interview with Robert Wright, “God, He’s moody” (Salon: 24 June 2009): Do you think religions share certain core principles? Not many. People in the modern world, certainly in America, think of religion as being largely about prescribing moral behavior. But religion wasn’t originally about that at all. To judge by hunter-gatherer religions, […]
Posted on November 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, history, language & literature, religion, science | No Comments »
Image via Wikipedia From Robert Darnton’s “Google & the Future of Books” (The New York Review of Books: 12 February 2009): As the Enlightenment faded in the early nineteenth century, professionalization set in. You can follow the process by comparing the Encyclopédie of Diderot, which organized knowledge into an organic whole dominated by the faculty […]
Posted on July 15th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, business, language & literature, law, politics, tech in changing society | No Comments »
I’m really proud to announce that my 5th book is now out & available for purchase: Google Apps Deciphered: Compute in the Cloud to Streamline Your Desktop. My other books include: Don’t Click on the Blue E!: Switching to Firefox Hacking Knoppix Linux Phrasebook Podcasting with Audacity: Creating a Podcast With Free Audio Software (I’ve […]
Posted on February 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, education, history, personal, social software, tech help, tech in changing society, technology | No Comments »
From Stephen E. Arnold’s The Google Legacy: How Google’s Internet Search is Transforming Application Software (Infonortics: September 2005): The figure Google’s Fusion: Hardware and Software Engineering shows that Google’s technology framework has two areas of activity. There is the software engineering effort that focuses on PageRank and other applications. Software engineering, as used here, means […]
Posted on November 28th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, history, science, security, tech in changing society, technology | No Comments »
From AP’s “Borrowed books returned to museum — 92 years later” (CNN: 6 November 2000): The Field Museum of Natural History recently returned 10 volumes to the American Museum of Natural History in New York — 92 years late. It seems a researcher from the New York museum took the books with him when he […]
Posted on June 11th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, history | Comments Off on Library book returned 92 years late
From The Invisible Library: The Invisible Library is a collection of books that only appear in other books. Within the library’s catalog you will find imaginary books, pseudobiblia, artifictions, fabled tomes, libris phantastica, and all manner of books unwritten, unread, unpublished, and unfound.
Posted on November 28th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, cool stuff, language & literature | Comments Off on A library of imaginary books
I was an undergraduate at Washington University in St. Louis from 1985-1989, and a graduate student in English Lit. from 1989-1996. During that time, I racked up my share of library fines (not hard to do when the fines were $0.10 a day, per book), a couple of times into three digits. In fact, I […]
Posted on June 29th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: true stories | Comments Off on The largest library fine … ever.
