Thursday, February 28, 2013

APOD 2/24/13 - Whirlpool Galaxy

M51: The Whirlpool Galaxy in Dust and Stars
Image Credit: N. Scoville (Caltech), T. Rector (U. Alaska, NOAO) et al., Hubble Heritage Team, NASA.
 
 
The classically beautiful spiral galaxy, M51, is famously known as the Whirlpool Galaxy. Makes you dizzy looking into
its vortex of stars, clouds, and dust!

Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Favorite Library Quotes

Library in Betliar
Library in Betliar (public domain)- Wikimedia Commons

Favorite Quotes About Libraries


"Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time."  --E.P. Whipple

"Libraries: The medicine chest of the soul."  --Library at Thebes, inscription over the door

"To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life." --W. Somerset Maugham

"If there's a book you really want to read but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it." --Toni Morrison

"There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and a tired man who wants a book to read." --G.K. Chesterton

"The Internet is the world's largest library. It's just that all the books are on the floor." --John Allen Paulos

"Libraries…house our dreams." --Nikki Giovanni

"Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life." --Mark Twain

"It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations." -- Winston Churchill

"Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true!" --Homer Simpson

"Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they are written." --Henry David Thoreau

"Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind." --Rudyard Kipling

"If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called research!" --Albert Einstein

"My alma mater was books, a good library. I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity." --Malcolm X

"The more you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go." --Dr. Seuss

"I am a part of everything that I have read." --John Kieran

"An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest." --Benjamin Franklin

"Literature is my utopia." --Helen Keller

"To read is to empower. To empower is to write. To write is to influence. To influence is to change. To change is to live." --Jane Evershed

"Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries." --Anne Herbert

"Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read." --Groucho Marx

"Once you learn to read, you will be forever free." --Frederick Douglass

"Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood." --Marie Curie

"Learning is weightless, a treasure you can always carry easily." --Chinese proverb

"Censorship reflects a society’s lack of confidence in itself." --Potter Stewart

"There is not such a cradle of democracy upon the earth as the free public library, this republic of letters, where neither rank, office, nor wealth receives the slightest consideration." --Andrew Carnegie

"Prefer knowledge to wealth, for the one is transitory, the other perpetual." --Socrates

"Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation." --Walter Cronkite

"Knowledge is power." --Francis Bacon

"A room without books is like a body without a soul." --Cicero

"We read to know we are not alone." --C. S. Lewis

"There is a wonder in reading braille that the sighted will never know. To touch the words and have
them touch you back."--Jim Fiebig

"A library is a hospital for the mind." --Anonymous

"Don’t join the book burners.  Do not think that you’re going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book." --Dwight D. Eisenhower

"There is no friend as loyal as a book." --Ernest Hemingway

"Information is the currency of democracy." --Thomas Jefferson

"Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known." --Carl Sagan

"Read in order to live." --Gustave Flaubert

"A library is not a luxury but one of the necessities of life." --Henry Ward Beecher

"A library is thought in cold storage." --Herbert Samuel

"Librarians are almost always very helpful and often almost absurdly knowledgeable." --Charles Medawar

"A truly great library contains something in it to offend everyone." --Jo Godwin

"To add a library to a house is to give that house a soul." --Cicero

"Perhaps no place in any community is so totally democratic as the town library.The only entrance requirement is interest." --Lady Bird Johnson

"The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them." -- Mark Twain

"Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it." -- Samuel Johnson

"I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library." --Jorge Luis Borges

"There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come. My idea? Love all." --Victor Hugo.

"Librarian is a service occupation. Gas station attendant of the mind." --Richard Powers

"A great library contains the diary of the human race." --George Mercer Dawson

"If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need." --Cicero

"We may sit in our library and yet be in all quarters of the earth." --John Lubbock

"Come, and take choice of all my library, and so beguile thy sorrow." --William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus

Monday, February 25, 2013

100th Birth Anniversary of Jim Backus

Forever Mr. Magoo and Thurston Howell III. He was a prolific actor and was married for 46 years before his death.

Sunday, February 24, 2013

Faking It - Before Photoshop

cat and i
How did photographers manipulate images before computers? In many clever ways, sometimes by just cutting and pasting (literally). Sometimes they employed other methods such as exposure tricks or painting. The Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection of manipulated photos is being shown at the National Gallery of Art in DC this Spring. This show is being sponsored by (surprise!) Adobe. The photos are all mesmerizing and in some cases eerie and creepy. The WP has reviewed the show and the NGA has provided a catalog of the works on display.
 

Photo at left: Wanda Wulz, Io + gatto (Cat + I), 1932, [Multiple Exposure of Woman and Cat's Face] Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Saturday, February 23, 2013

Earworms

First heard this one on the Volvo commercial.

And this one from the Citi commercial (and yes, they really did climb those rocks!).
 

Friday, February 22, 2013

"It will be very slow but noble television."

Fireplace
By Ryan Mahle from Sherman Oaks, CA, USA (Flickr.com - image description page) [CC-BY-2.0
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Firewood TV (Reuters). I totally understand the appeal of this TV show (NYT) - I could sit and watch it all day long!

Thursday, February 21, 2013

Black History Month

Recent Books of Note:

1. More Than Freedom : Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829-1889
by Kantrowitz, Stephen David, 1965
Published 2012 by Penguin Press

2. Desert Rose : the Life and Legacy of Coretta Scott King
by Bagley, Edythe Scott
Published 2012 by University of Alabama Press

3. The Longest Fight : in the Ring with Joe Gans, Boxing's First African American Champion
by Gildea, William
Published 2012 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

4. American Tapestry : the Story of the Black, White, and Multiracial Ancestors of Michelle Obama
by Swarns, Rachel L.
Published 2012 by Amistad

5. The Grey Album : on the Blackness of Blackness
by Young, Kevin
Published 2012 by Graywolf Press

6. The Color of War : How One Battle Broke Japan and Another Changed America
by Campbell, James
Published 2012 by Crown Publishers

7. Guest of honor : Booker T. Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, and the White House Dinner that Shocked a Nation
by Davis, Deborah, 1957-
Published 2011 by Atria Books

8. From Slave Ship to Harvard : Yarrow Mamout and the History of an African American Family
by Johnston, James H., 1944-
Published 2012 by Fordham University Press

9. Our Black Year : One Family's Quest to Buy Black in America's Racially Divided Economy
by Anderson, Maggie, 1971-
Published 2012 by Public Affairs

10. How to be Black
by Thurston, Baratunde
Published 2012 by Harper

11. Fraternity
by Brady, Diane
Published 2012 by Spiegel & Grau

12. Floyd Patterson : the Fighting Life of Boxing's Invisible Champion
by Stratton, W. K.
Published 2012 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

For Children:

1. I Lay My Stitches Down : Poems of American Slavery
by Grady, Cynthia
Published 2012 by Eerdmans Books for Young Readers

2. Miles to Go for Freedom: Segregation & Civil Rights in the Jim Crow Years
by Osborne, Linda Barrett, 1949-
Published 2012 by Abrams Books for Young Readers

3. It Jes' Happened : When Bill Traylor Started to Draw
by Tate, Don
Published 2012 by Lee & Low Books

4. Jazz Age Josephine
by Winter, Jonah, 1962-
Published 2012 by Atheneum Books for Young

5. Touch the Sky : Alice Coachman, Olympic High Jumper
by Malaspina, Ann, 1957-
Published 2012 by Albert Whitman

6. Words Set Me Free : the Story of Young Frederick Douglass
by Cline-Ransome, Lesa
Published 2012 by Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers

7. Crow
by Wright, Barbara, 1951-
Published 2012 by Random House

8. Ellen's Broom
by Lyons, Kelly Starling
Published 2012 by G. P. Putnam's Sons

9. Just as Good : How Larry Doby Changed America's Game
by Crowe, Chris
Published 2012 by Candlewick Press

Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Judging a Book by its Cover

book cover
Favorite Book Cover Designs of 2012 (NYT).  Have not read most of these books, (with the exception of the Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, plus all the Malcolm Gladwell titles), but all the covers are thought-provoking. At least they make you wonder what the books might be about.

Tuesday, February 19, 2013

APOD - Asteroid 2012 DA14



Right in our backyard - the asteroid that just missed us - watch it whiz by us and disappear into the void. This amazing footage was filmed by Daniel Lopez at the Teide Observatory in the Canary Islands. It was selected as the APOD for Feb. 17, 2013. Scientists believe that this asteroid was not involved in the Great Russian Meteor of 2013, seen below.

Monday, February 18, 2013

Happy Presidents Day

Air Force One flying over Mount Rushmore
Air Force One flying over Mount Rushmore - photo by US Air Force - public domain Wikimedia Commons

Sunday, February 17, 2013

The Role of Beauty

Why We Love Beautiful Things (NYT) - this article probably explains why I am drawn to Bing every day even though I don't use the search very often. I just need to look at the beautiful images.

Field of Purple Flowers
Field with purple Flowers by Pál Szinyei Merse (1845 - 1920) - public domain Wikimedia Commons

Friday, February 15, 2013

449th Birth Anniversary of Galileo Galilei

Portrait of  Galileo Galilei
Portrait of  Galileo Galilei (public domain) Wikimedia
National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London
Thought I'd jump ahead of the clamor as most of the world will celebrate Galileo Galilei's 450th in the coming year. Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker is also looking ahead and has some thoughts on Galileo's iconoclastic life and achievements. He also discusses some new books about him that are forthcoming.