Lynda Barry, author/cartoonist extraordinaire, KQED, and the Alternative Press Expo combine to provide us with a great interview and a case made for phone-book doodling…
Read the interview. You won’t be sorry.
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Category Archives: Did you Know?
“Why would you want to read that; it’s dumb,â€
Carla Cohen, owner of the Politics & Prose Bookstore in Washington DC – one of my favorite bookstores in the country – recently passed on. Before moving on…she had the following interaction with one of her customers (this anecdote is from a tribute shared on the Politics & Prose website):
Cohen sometimes responded to customers in a less-then-politic way: “Why would you want to read that; it’s dumb,†she would say to a customer asking for a book of which she disapproved. “You would enjoy this a lot more — and it’s a far better book.â€
Now that is a bookseller, par excellence: she knew her stuff (books) and her customers.
Farewell Carla, I appreciate all that you have taught me (Adam) from afar.
Wikipedia, Scientists and Biomedical Information
An article in the Sept 2010 issue of PLoS Computational Biology pleads with scientists to use Wikipedia to engage with the public:
For better or worse, people are guided to Wikipedia when searching the Web for biomedical information. So there is an increasing need for the scientific community to engage with Wikipedia to ensure that the information it contains is accurate and current…
For scientists, contributing to Wikipedia is an excellent way of fulfilling public engagement responsibilities and sharing expertise…
In order to help the average scientist to engage Wikipedia, the authors rec’d Ten Simple Rules for Editing Wikipedia. These are good and appropriate rules for all of us.
2010 Nobel Prize in literature: Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa
Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa has won the 2010 Nobel Prize in literature.
The Swedish Academy said it’s honoring the 74-year-old author “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt and defeat.”
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Book Suggestion of the Day: Where good ideas come from
Cory Doctorow, of BoingBoing, recommends Steven Johnson’s new book Where good ideas come from
For Johnson, the secret lies in the “thin air” — the unplumbed space we credit for the “sparks of brilliance” and “happy accidents” that create new connections, strategies and thoughts. And for Johnson, this thin air is anything but: rather, it is a relatively predictable outcome arising from certain pre-conditions.
…Johnson makes a convincing case that innovation is fractal.
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