
Sally explains here and also tells us about Samuel Field Phillips.
Tourgee at left with a caption that reads
“Ignorance and neglect are the mainsprings of misrule.”
Accept no substitutes

Sally explains here and also tells us about Samuel Field Phillips.
Tourgee at left with a caption that reads
“Ignorance and neglect are the mainsprings of misrule.”
Time begins: “Person of the Year: You — Yes, you. You control the Information Age. Welcome to your world.”
As long as we have Net Neutrality that will be true.
And JJB points us to a Chrysler advert which gets it right by getting it wrong.
Dan Gillmor points out that the correct pronoun would be US not YOU.
NOTE to pathetic PR employees working for the anti-Net Neutrality duopoly: I won’t allow your obvious spammish links and misleading comments on this blog. In fact I’m more likely to do even more pro-Net Neutrality articles in response to your postings.
When some individuals and groups don’t like the news — particularly when the news is accurate and not so good about them — they steal papers. The recent Daily Tar Heel thefts are among those described in a recent First Amendment Center article by Melanie Bengtson.

An otherwise distinguished colleague brought his new toy into the ibiblio office today. It wasn’t very big and it easily took up residence hidden in the ibiblio cubeless cube frames. It was annoying and amusing tho.
What it was was an annoyatron.
How do you use it?
Three easy steps:
On Thursday October 26, 2006, the Health Sciences Library hosted a panel discussion, “Organizing the world’s information: Google’s vision for the 21st Century,” featuring Google’s Technology Director Craig Silverstein. You can now see and hear the talk through streaming video at the HSL site.
Tom Glocer is CEO of Reuters and he is also a blogger. Where better for him to publish an article called “Trust in the Age of Citizen Journalism” than on his blog?
The article is the text of a speech Glocer gave at “Globes Media Conference in Tel Aviv on Monday 11 December 2006.” About the talk he says: “It’s about trust in media today, taking into account the growing
popularity of blogging and all other types of citizen journalism.”
Reminds me that when I met Lobsang Wangyal, the Reuters reporter amongst exiled Tibetans, he was most interesting in talking about his newly formed Association of Tibetan Journalists. The Association’s biggest task, he told me, is preparing citizens to be journalists by educating them about strong and respected news practices — values, ethics and skills.
Glocer’s talk via Dan Gillmor and the Center for Citizen Media. Dan has his reservations about parts of the talk.
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“And no birds sang” as Keats ended his poem, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.” But in this case, the silence befell our favorite pitpreacher, Gary Birdsong as he tried to take his redemption show on the road to the general public.
Gary has been preaching hell fire and damnation at UNC and other campuses or well over a decade that I can recall. But once he started up on Raleigh’s Fayetteville Street in front of the Wake County Courthouse, he upset the gentile dinners at Yancey’s Juke Joint who called the police.
Ryan Teague Beckwith has the story on his News and Observer blog.
The people at UNC-Asheville aren’t nice to Gary either.[YouTube]
We ibiblians have some nice pictures of a slightly younger and less hairy Gary in classic poses.

Thanks to Google’s Edvard Munch celebration yesterday and to the historic WebMuseum hosted on ibiblio, we handled over 24 million requests yesterday — about 10 million of those for images of Munch’s paintings.
Our Cogent link to Atlanta managed the extra requests easily without going over our limit (in the 500 mbs range). And thanks to Squid caching, our servers easily handled the load.
Overall, a great test of our new datacenter and networking arrangement with NCREN and a big success there for all of us.
Thanks to Nicholas Pioch of Netscape-AOL France for maintaining the Web Museum for almost 15 years and to Mark Harden for his contributions to the Munch area.
I’ll be off the net all day today (Wednesday), but I do have unrelated news. I have a poem upcoming in the News and Observer’s Sunday Journal. Not sure which Sunday as I write this. I can’t put the poem here since it needs to appear in the Sunday Journal first, but I can give you the 99 words of the introduction to the poem:
I heard a voice in the night saying “Joy is here” then after a pause “It might be insincere.” I noticed that the lines created a perfect triplet of three lines of three syllables with rhyme. Of course they should occur three times in a poem. But the poem’s length? The most magical number would be ninety nine; the sum of the sums of divisors of the first eleven integers. Incidental to this mathematical epiphany, I suddenly recalled William Wordsworth‘s wonderful poem “The Tables Turned.” The birds sang as the sun rose. I wrote this poem. Hope you enjoy.
A young and hairy topped James Boyle argues against the claim that Edward de Vere Earl of Oxford wrote the works credited to William Shakespeare – in front of a selection of Supremes. Boyle’s verbal sparring with Justice Stevens is a lesson in legal wit.
See also Jamie’s novel, The Shakespeare Chronicles.
ae alerts us to an exhibit and a series of events called “I Raised my Hand to Volunteer: Students Protest in 1960s Chapel Hill” beginning on January 23 with all but the ultimate event in Wilson Library — that last event will be at the Sonja Hayes Stone Center for Black Culture and History, Seminar Room.
Scheduled events include:
Ken is hoping that he’s been a good boy so that Santa will bring him the blender featured on Don’t Try This @ Home at the WillItBlend site.
I can think of many more things to blend now that I’ve been watching these amazing videos.
A is for Aerotropolis — or at least that newish word is the first entry in this year’s Ideas edition of the New York Times Magazine. UNC’s John Karsarda big idea (as well described here in a recent Fast Company article) that airports are the future of cities. Desirable and economic engines of the future that should be the center of our development; not noisy dangerous annoyances best placed on the distance edges and treated like a warehouse district.
As described here earlier, Adam Galinsky gets well deserved credit for discovering a secret of auction success – starting low price leads to selling at a high price in the same issue of the Magazine under the title (the titles are in alphabetical order) “Low Starting Prices Lead to High Auction Sales”.
Overall a great collection of ideas and a good read.
Jaron Lanier crabs about mobocracy in wikipedia calling it an example of Digital Maoism and warning about collectivism in the market place of ideas — no Hayakian, he.

Robin Dunbar proposed and some say proved that there is a physical limit to the number of individuals with whom any single person can have a stable relationship.
That number is 150 (actually 147.8). But wait there’s more.
Looking at behavior of chimps, Dumbar noticed that the “chimps belong to social groups comprising about 50 individuals, but they have only two or three grooming partners.”
Then using the same neocortex measurements and ratios on humans, Dunbar calculated the magic numbers for humans.
“The results were… ~150 for social group size, and ~12 for the more intimate clique size” [or grooming size].
So much for Top 8.
Can online social networks extend the monkeysphere in the same way writing as expanded memory?
That is, do online networks allow an individual to manage and groom relationships of a greater order?
How is this accomplished?
the Social Software Symposium wiki is being updated and annotated by a bunch of UNC folks and David Weinberger has been blogging on his blog here, here and here.
The guy who coined the term “folksonomy” Thomas Vander Wal is speaking now. His blogs are Personal Infocloud and Off the Top (at vanderwal.net).
Are tags always nouns or adjectives?
Yesterday at the great talk by David Weinberger yesterday; it’ll be online as at the ibiblio speakers page soon. Now at the Social Software Symposium and later out to NCREN for their Community Day.
Dave W’s introductory remarks at the SSS are here on his blog.
Err. Make that Native Americans. Specifically the Seminole tribe of Florida (the only tribe/nation not officially at peace with the USA).
At any rate, the wars continue. The unconquered and unconquerable Seminoles, who are very big in gambling, have bought the Hard Rock Cafe chain (reports BBC). This purchase puts the Seminole footprint in over 45 other nations (ones that have HRCs).
BBC has a feature on Dr. James Anderson’s solution to the dividing by zero problem in math. The story is one of definitions in large part, but the number of comments engendered by the story and the debate contained in those comments is a story in itself. Yes, Anderson participates too.
Great read. Especially if you don’t stop at the story but get into the comments.
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