Ploofle » librarians

Dec 22 2008

Watching the watchmen…and librarians meet zombies

Charlene @ 11:23 am

An interesting article in the NYTimes about censorship at google. The accompanying pictures are happily pixel-like art and made me laugh.

In this case, there’s not really anyone watching the de facto watchmen per se. But it’s interesting to hear about how Google censors its content. Censor may be too strong a word, though…as it sounds more like stick to the strict rules and everything is free – something like what’s in the 9th and 10th Amendments of the Constitution:

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Which, in my mind, is the way it should be. Laws and programs should be developed to protect rights and privileges, not restrict them. Hence a few very obvious disagreements with things like, oh, poll taxes, Prop 8, limiting health care rather than making health care a right for all, etc. etc.

Also, Bonnie sent me this silly “Thriller” video. This is what happens when librarians get together – a combo of book car drill teams, costume parties and…low production quality Matrix fight scenes?? Overall a compelling reason to be around librarians, I think.

Tags: google, librarians, protection not restriction, watchmen

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May 03 2007

shootings and labelmakers and bikes

Charlene @ 5:15 pm

oh my.

So, yesterday was pretty fun, as I rode to Georgia Tech from our house for the first time (about 4 1/2 miles via the coffeeshop). There was this thingy from the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture’s Digital Media…department? at Bonnie’s school and I went to it and saw people we’ve had drinks with before (Judy’s friends Manu and Will) and talked about collaborative protest quilts with mandala-like qualities. What do you think about a digital media project where you can upload sound clips or video clips or pictures that would then reassemble randomly with all other contributed content to create a continuous video/flash stream? And in order to get around liability things, as things were assembled and played it the content would be destroyed, a la Philip K Dick’s idea of the biographical video that relatives could watch after the passing.

Anyway. They had this kiosk set up where you could do onsite registration and it would immediately print a label to affix on your badge. I was delirious by the end what with all the technology flying about and reconditioned my badge at the now-unsupervised kiosk despite Bonnie’s threats. Coincidentally, using “a” as your university and “student” as your occupation was very convenient. I am very pleased with the following:

Then, that evening, as I was conferring with RR, we heard 5 distinct gunshots near our house. The dog went crazy and Heather continued to sit on the couch and said it was prolly a car backfiring. About 2 min later we hear the first sirens and see the blue lights reflecting on our white painted porch railing. Indeed there was a shooting – and actually 2 that night about 5 blocks away for each! So we’re not sure if it was this or this that was happening at that moment.

Tags: librarians, praxis

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Apr 19 2007