Alas
The first-ever web page. They still had a bit of work to do on formatting punctuation.
Every river is a story.
Such a wonderful voice.
The winners of this year's Grammar Day Tweeted Haiku Contest. My favorite is the second-place finisher:
A man eating fish
was saved by a hyphen from
a man-eating fish
.
Black Prairie, Nowhere, Massachusetts
Patrick Watson, Blackwind
Charles Simic: "The attentive eye makes the world interesting. A good photograph, like a good poem, is a self-contained little universe inexhaustible to scrutiny."
"Data is entirely a collection of externalities; it can collect and sort millions of user preferences and similarities, but it can never move beyond the what to the why." And this is the crux as well of why StumbleUpon gets its recommendations so very wrong sometimes.
Amherst College has made its Emily Dickinson collection available for browsing online.
It's a wonder books ever came out with all of their pages in the right order.
The Missouri Botanical Garden's conservation program works in 38 countries to preserve and protect potentially invaluable plant life. More than 25 percent of our modern drugs derive from plants, and yet fewer than 2 percent of all plants have been tested for medical applications. Whenever a species becomes extinct, we might be losing a desperately needed cure, yet nearly half of the world's plant species may be extinct by the end of the century.
"As many publishing houses--not least university presses--scramble to adapt to the demand for digital, online, and free content, one college's decision to start a publishing enterprise that focuses on printed books by no-name authors might seem counterintuitive.
"But that's what Vermont's Champlain College is doing with its Champlain College Publishing Initiative, a project that publishes student work and, in addition to selling it, collects it in anthologies to use as classroom texts for the college's professional writing program."
Amazon: "We do not require people to have experienced the product in order to review."
Anyone who has the ability to individually clean each one of their books once a year either doesn't have very many books or can afford to hire someone to do that work for them.
"Rather than finding a way to turn their most dedicated users into content creators for the larger masses of users, they just took their tools away, alienating a group that had 'loved' their product."
"They" here is Google, but this could apply equally to StumbleUpon, which has managed to alienate so many users in exactly the same way.
Documenting achievements in architecture, engineering, and landscape design in the United States and its territories through a comprehensive range of building types, engineering technologies, and landscapes, the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) and the Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) collections at the Library of Congress comprise more than 556,900 measured drawings, large-format photographs, and written histories for more than 38,600 historic structures and sites dating from Pre-Columbian times to the twentieth century.
Riberboat Dave's Paddlewheeler site. Everything you want to know about those old river boats. Includes alphabetical links to boats, boat captains, boat owners, and steamboat companies.
R.E.M. with Patti Smith, "Blue"
"Cinderella Boy, you lost your shoe"
The perfect pot for twig tea.