2014 ultimate bike fail videos - mostly without helmets

Jeff Liebermann writes:

Libraries are a bit passe in todays computerized world. Today, it
would be the server farm, or data center at the end of the universe.
Visiting one in the UK might be a problem:
http://www.thebunker.net/about-us/facilities/
Perhaps it's time to fine a new metaphor for places where information
tends to concentrate.

Passe, maybe. Am heading to the local university library to dig up some
papers from the 70's. They are available on the web, but $50/article is
kinda steep.

--
Joe Riel

On 8/3/2014 2:38 PM, Joe Riel wrote:
Jeff Liebermann writes:

Libraries are a bit passe in todays computerized world. Today, it
would be the server farm, or data center at the end of the universe.
Visiting one in the UK might be a problem:
http://www.thebunker.net/about-us/facilities/
Perhaps it's time to fine a new metaphor for places where information
tends to concentrate.

Passe, maybe. Am heading to the local university library to dig up some
papers from the 70's. They are available on the web, but $50/article is
kinda steep.


My library is in the room next to my bedroom. Public
libraries are now so filled with Professional Librarians
that I just quit rather than extend the frustration and
anger. They are also filled with bums reeking of urine and
alcohol but then again so is my old neighborhood generally.
I'm inured to that.

Report from a customer (private college librarian and
cyclist) last week: The new director has canceled all
periodicals and removed the periodicals section to install
the new coffee shop and bakery. If you want to know how
Christian Science Monitor or IHT reported an event 30, 40,
50 years ago, have an espresso and a donut and forget about it.


--
Andrew Muzi
www.yellowjersey.org/
Open every day since 1 April, 1971

Jeff Liebermann wrote:
On Sun, 3 Aug 2014 11:32:57 -0700 (PDT), Andre Jute
wrote:

By golly, Jeff, you're the man! Nobody can beat you on the trivia quiz!

Not really. My memory isn't that great, but I'm fairly good with
doing lookups using Google.

It's not what or who you know. It's how well you are able to find
things.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/9229954/BT-puts-red-phone-boxes-up-for-sale-for-2000.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/features/9252219/Inside-the-red-phone-box-graveyard.html

Thanks but I have one already. See about three-quarters down the page at
http://coolmainpress.com/BICYCLEKilmacsimon2.html

http://coolmainpress.com/BICYCLE%20Kilmacsimon%20return%20288pix%20high/IMG_4901.JPG
Nice, but I thought that all the Tardis police boxes were blue?
https://www.google.com/search?q=tardis+police+box&tbm=isch
A white Tardis would be heresy.

Better red than well read.

Rather not. I lectured on the marketing applications of statistics in Russia
under Breshnev during the first mini-perestroika. I wasn't impressed with
the communist model. In fact, I coined the black joke that was rejuvenated
under Gorbachev's Perestroika:

Q: "What comes after perestroika?"
A: "Perestrelka."
Perestroika is, loosely, the liberty to choose. Perestrelka, in case
you've lost your Russian, is "shooting".

I hadn't heard that one. I thought perestroika was "restructuring"
which was the Communist reaction to the economy operated essentially
as a black market leaving little for the government to plunder.
Chernobyl in 1986 seemed to have inspired a "do something, even if
it's wrong" attitude, mostly due to fear of open revolt. So much for
glasnost (openness) where the government kept the incident and dangers
of Chernobyl to itself.

My Russian language skills are a lost cause. I was planning to fly to
Moscow for the 1980 Olympics. I learned a few phrases and sorta
learned to decode Cyrillic, but gave up after the US bailed out after
the Russian invasion of Afghanistan.

http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Library_on_Kar-Charrat

Mmm, I was slightly chummy with Douglas Adams, who was script editor of
the Doctor Who in its golden era (I think -- I'm not a fan of Doctor Who
and we never discussed it) and later wrote the Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galazy books, and he never mentioned a library at the end of the galaxy.

I watch old Dr Who movies when I need a kick in the imagination. I
don't like the newer versions, which replace imagination with computer
graphics. I've never read anything by Douglas Adams, which I guess
makes me culturally deprived. He replaced the library at the end of
the universe, with the Restaurant at the End of the Universe.
http://www.amazon.com/Restaurant-Universe-Hitchhikers-Guide-Galaxy-ebook/dp/B001ODEQCU


Or maybe the history department of the university of Maximegalon

http://hitchhikers.wikia.com/wiki/Un...of_Maximegalon

HHGTTG is worth a read. The whole 5 book trilogy.


Of course, I don't look like the sort of chap who knows where the
library is...

Libraries are a bit passe in todays computerized world. Today, it
would be the server farm, or data center at the end of the universe.
Visiting one in the UK might be a problem:
http://www.thebunker.net/about-us/facilities/
Perhaps it's time to fine a new metaphor for places where information
tends to concentrate.

Andre Jute
Why couldn't I know beautiful loose women instead?

Smart, loose, beautiful... pick any two.




--
duane

On 03/08/2014 20:26, Jeff Liebermann wrote:

Not really. My memory isn't that great, but I'm fairly good with
doing lookups using Google.

It's not what or who you know. It's how well you are able to find
things.

http://doonesbury.washingtonpost.com...ive/2014/07/27

On Sun, 03 Aug 2014 23:55:39 +0100, Clive George
wrote:

On 03/08/2014 20:26, Jeff Liebermann wrote:

Not really. My memory isn't that great, but I'm fairly good with
doing lookups using Google.

It's not what or who you know. It's how well you are able to find
things.

http://doonesbury.washingtonpost.com...ive/2014/07/27

I plead guilty as charged and proud of it.

Once upon a time, about 10 years before Al Gore invented the internet,
I had to deal with a newly minted electronics engineer. Someone along
his path to enlightenment had convinced him that it was a sign of
weakness to look anything up in a book. He took great pride in
deriving everything, his encyclopedic knowledge of device
specifications, and his amazing memory for names, phone numbers, and
addresses. He was well read, but never clipped articles from trade
journals, Xeroxed pages from books, or maintained a file cabinet full
of data sheets. Everything was committed to memory. I was the
project manager with a project deadline, which wasn't happening.

The problem was that he was taking about 10 times longer than I would
normally expect a junior engineer to design a fairly simple PLL (phase
locked loop) demodulator. Watching him at work, I noticed that he
never looked anything up in a catalog or book when someone was
watching. When I accidentally caught him reading the Motorola PLL
book, he was so horrified that he almost threw the book across the
lab.

I won't bore everyone with how I successfully convinced him of the
error of his ways. Suffice to say that I stopped short of violence.

30 years ago, engineers had to build their own index card files and
stuff boxed full of literature in order to be functional. My
collection of books, magazines, data sheets, and manuals was huge and
typical. Libraries were a waste of time because they were a year or
so out of date, which is fatal in high tech. Patent searches were
conducted by driving to the nearest patent library. If I needed
samples, prices, and availability, I had to schedule an appointment to
have the manufacturers representative drop in and give his song and
dance.

Roll forward about 30 years and the pendulum has swung the other
direction. Instead of data being difficult to find, we are
overwhelmed with too much data. Quantity is a poor substitute for
quality, and that includes online searches. It's more than using the
first few hits that Google delivers. One has to apply buzz words,
drill down, dig deep, speed read, and filter the results into
something relevant and useful.

Extracting factoids from memory is also prone to error. I hate to
admit that I'm getting old, but I'm having difficulties remembering
things accurately. While Alzheimer is a long way off, trying to
recall what year Chernobyl went boom is becoming difficult. So, I
Googled it.

(...)

I could go on forever on the topic, but the weather has cooled off
enough to make my ritual trudge up the hill survivable. Bottom line
(for me) is that I no longer try to remember everything, I no longer
collect bankers boxes full of literature, and no longer look down my
nose at "Google Experts". The object of the game is to find the
information. Nobody cares how you get it (unless you're the NSA).


--
Jeff Liebermann
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558

On 8/3/2014 4:28 PM, AMuzi wrote:


My library is in the room next to my bedroom. Public libraries are now
so filled with Professional Librarians that I just quit rather than
extend the frustration and anger. They are also filled with bums reeking
of urine and alcohol but then again so is my old neighborhood generally.
I'm inured to that.

I still love 'em. And to me, professional librarians (at least, the
good ones) are amazing. There have been times I've searched and
searched for info (online or hardcopy would have been fine) then asked
the librarian, who came up with it in no time.

Admittedly, some library branches have unwashed clientele. But IME
that's not been a huge problem. And the university library is almost
completely free of that - excepting certain students, of course.


Report from a customer (private college librarian and cyclist) last
week: The new director has canceled all periodicals and removed the
periodicals section to install the new coffee shop and bakery. If you
want to know how Christian Science Monitor or IHT reported an event 30,
40, 50 years ago, have an espresso and a donut and forget about it.

Libraries are working on staying relevant. And for some folks,
"relevance" has something to do with caffeine, I guess.

But sometimes the old ways are better. In the university library a year
or two ago, there was a kiosk display explaining why they still maintain
microfiche documents. As they said, once something is stored digitally,
it can in principle be altered. And history is written by the winners,
who may have little compunction about making alterations. Micro
documents are much more stable as archives.

Depending who the "winners" turn out to be, I suppose they might first
shoot all the lawyers, then next, shoot all the librarians.

(I'm pleased that librarians are very much against turning over
circulation records to the government.)

--
- Frank Krygowski

with Jeff Liebermann wrote:
On Sun, 3 Aug 2014 11:32:57 -0700 (PDT), Andre Jute
wrote:

*SKIP*
Rather not. I lectured on the marketing applications of statistics in
Russia under Breshnev during the first mini-perestroika.

Oh, come on, there wasn't any "mini-perestroika".

I wasn't impressed with the communist model. In fact, I coined the
black joke that was rejuvenated under Gorbachev's Perestroika:

Q: "What comes after perestroika?"
A: "Perestrelka."
Perestroika is, loosely, the liberty to choose. Perestrelka, in case
you've lost your Russian, is "shooting".

At the moment "perestrelka" meant "execution". However, later it turned
out to be "shooting" (and it wasn't that bad; unlike the current one).
The conspirolgists' idea was that "perestroika" would have been a plan to
detect infidels. And finish them all at once.

And, honestly, that wasn't you who coined, it was The Radio of Armenia.

I hadn't heard that one. I thought perestroika was "restructuring"
which was the Communist reaction to the economy operated essentially
as a black market leaving little for the government to plunder.
Chernobyl in 1986 seemed to have inspired a "do something, even if
it's wrong" attitude, mostly due to fear of open revolt. So much for
glasnost (openness) where the government kept the incident and dangers
of Chernobyl to itself.

You don't understand one thing. At the moment, what you call "black
market" was the only market available. Everything else wasn't a market
at all. It was some huge uncomprehencible joke.

My Russian language skills are a lost cause. I was planning to fly to
Moscow for the 1980 Olympics. I learned a few phrases and sorta
learned to decode Cyrillic, but gave up after the US bailed out after
the Russian invasion of Afghanistan.

Don't feel bad about it. You haven't lost anything.

*CUT*

--
Torvalds' goal for Linux is very simple: World Domination
Stallman's goal for GNU is even simpler: Freedom

On Monday, August 4, 2014 2:02:21 AM UTC+1, Jeff Liebermann wrote:

Bottom line

(for me) is that I no longer try to remember everything, I no longer

collect bankers boxes full of literature, and no longer look down my

nose at "Google Experts". The object of the game is to find the

information. Nobody cares how you get it (unless you're the NSA).

Exactly. Even before the internet, it was always my belief and practice that a genius doesn't need to know very much, he just provides the context for what technical associates know, a framework for productive use of knowledge. Of course, I make a point of learning quite a bit when I become interested in a new field (and I have warehouses full of banker's boxes stuffed with rare and wonderful knowledge that got pushed off my bookshelves by new interests), but I don't let particular knowledge, as distinct from general principles, clutter my mind when I move on to a new field. The likelihood is that when the knowledge is required again, it will be outdated, and I will know someone I can ask for a refresher. We had an example here recently where you guys basically designed an electronic device for me, and chaps on another board prototyped the thing without me ever finding it necessary to crack a book -- well, okay, I looked up a cookbook circuit on the net after a hint from you, Jeff, that my first idea was widly outdated, which I suppose is the modern version of cracking a book.