gothic confession time

Pull up a portmanteau and gather your skirts.

As a teenager, I was a vociferous reader, making the library visit a weekly event. My interests were wide and varied, from English history to exotic travelogues, from Gone with the Wind to Alastair Maclaine novels.

One of my favorite genres was gothic fiction, both the old-school stuff and the newer gothic romances of the 1950s-70s.: Victoria Holt, Phyllis Whitney, Mary Stewart, Dorothy Eden. I devoured them all. They had it all: castles, women in long dresses, romance, suspense, and a hint (or more) of the supernatural.  Yummy.

So, yes, I was a Dark Shadows fangirl, too. Big time.

Dark Shadows was an American gothic daytime soap opera that ran from 1960-something to 1970-something. I was one of the teen-aged girls racing home from school to catch Dark Shadows at 4pm, especially after Jonathan Frid  joined the show as Barnabas Collins, the the world’s hunkiest vampire with baggage.

So, three things about Dark Shadows:

1. You can now watch the original series on Netflix streaming.  It’s dated and campy and the production values can be pretty poor. Yet we were enthralled, and, according to Wikipedia, Dark Shadows was the first ABC daytime show to win its timeslot.

B. Dark Shadows, the movie, another Tim Burton / Johnny Depp collaboration (bless their dark little hearts), opens May 11.

III. Both these things please me greatly.

More :

Project Gutenberg Gothic Fiction Bookshelf

knowledge is free – bring your own container

One World – One Web, originally uploaded by psd.

I love this poster. There is a high-res PDF version available if you click through, and I recommend it. Lots of wisdom here.

It particularly resonates with me as it pertains to knowledge.

Kids, remember back when….

- you were sitting on the couch, and suddenly had a hankering to know who won the World Series back in Eleventy-Twelve and who was that left-handed hitter anyway?

Barring any in-house encyclopedia, you have to wait til the library opens and search the stacks or get the reference librarian to look it up for you.

-Remember when the vast majority of the planet was far away and shrouded in mystery, and only the most intrepid of explorers braved the wilds and brought us back stories, then pictures of exotic locales.

-Remember when access to historic artifacts was limited to a chosen few in a dusty back room?

If you are “of a certain age”, you know what I’m talking about, and we are probably the last generation that will.

If you aren’t, you have no freaking CLUE what I’m talking about because you are a Child of t’Internets and you are free to know and grow. (cue hippy music).

The internet, if you are lucky enough to have access to it and a way to view it, provides 24/7 access to an unfathomable amount of knowledge, anytime, anywhere.

You can learn to write Chinese (or 224 characters of it, anyway, all of which I’ve promptly forgotten.)

You can spend an entire evening giddily skipping around the 1830s … from The First Opium War to several revolutions, not all of them in France, surprisingly. Who knew there was a Texas Revolution? Or a Belgian one?

You can learn about the relative merits of the mantle, the pardessus, and the paletot.

You can see how the polar ice caps are faring and the sun is flaring.

You can read all the classics of literature, in several languages.

You can view great works of art and learn about the artists.

Better yet, t’internets has led to the democratization of knowledge …. one person, one voice. Or rather, many more voices, many more people contributing to our collective knowledge.

Need the original schematic/wiring diagram for a 1940s desk phone? It’s out there.

Need to know why your bilateral destabilizer keeps shutting down? Someone else has probably experienced it and shared on a forum.

And here’s where I start getting all hippy-dippy, waving daisies, love and sunshine, because to me, this is just the coolest thing EVER.

Ever.

You can’t put this genie back in the bottle.

Knowledge is no longer in the hands of a privileged few to be doled out to the worthy. Knowledge is being openly shared and recorded, so that others may benefit.

Maybe access to the internet, to that vast treasure trove of knowledge, SHOULD be a basic human right.

Maybe THIS is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius?

Related reading:

The History and Philosophy of Project Guttenberg by Michael Hart

Wikipedia:About

so it has come to this

xkcd.com

Knowledge wins.

Knowledge wins. Public library books are free, originally uploaded by Boston Public Library.

I know.

I am a sad and pathetic knowledge geek.

Red Pop

Dear Santa,

Please. And thank you!

Cool Hunting: Red Pop iPhone Photo Accessory

christmas tree rocketry

What fun!

via @jtonline

WolframAlpha

Have you discovered WolframAlpha?

WolframAlpha is the first step in an ambitious, long-term project to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone. WolframAlpha uses its built-in algorithms and an ever-growing collection of data to compute the answers to your questions and calculations.

In this video, WolframAlpha creator Stephen Wolfram gives a quick introduction to the computational knowledge engine. Part 2 of his introduction can be viewed here.

For more information about WolframAlpha, please visit the website

Cool.

the Watson Trivia Challenge

Using advanced computing and emerging technology, IBM is building a natural language processing computer code-named Watson to compete in the game show Jeopardy.

You can take the Watson Trivia Challenge and test your wits against Watson. (NYTimes)

hello kitty

I have a thing for Hello Kitty.

I don’t know why.

So, check out my new iPhone Twitter client, just for fun:

Hello Kitty on Tappit

and then there’s this, which I also love:

From the artist who gave us Gummi Bear Anatomie, Jason Freeny

And yes, I realize that it is unlikely that you are a Hello Kitty fan, as most sensible people aren’t.

That’s okay. I still like you.

sparkly things!

Check out the shiny new duds the work blog is sporting these days…thanks to the brilliant Bob Leah over at developerWorks, in honor of Innovate 2010, just a few short weeks away now.

I’ll be there – yay!

I call tweet-up! Who’s in?