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The last blogger to the gate

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Google Books Fails With Popular Science

March 9th, 2010 · Topics Of Interest

I just mentioned that Google Books and Popular Science had published a significant portion of the Popular Science archive, online for free. I had added the caveat that it only went as far back as 1926. Turns out that’s not true at all. If you go down to the halfway point on this page, you’ll find the full listing of all Popular Science magazines, starting in May 1872.

So why does it look like it only goes as far back as 1926? If you click on the “Browse all issues” it will bring you to what appears to be a full listing of all of the issues. The only problem is that if you start clicking to navigate to other pages, you’ll find that you can go to page 33 where it stops. The earliest issue there is May 1926. Even stranger, if you trim down the URL to http://books.google.com/books/serial/ISSN:01617370, you’ll see fewer issues per page but the listings go up to 100 pages. That leaves the earliest issue in this list to be July, 1925.

For each of these, you can alter the URLs to set the start parameter to larger numbers and it will let you get to older issues. So the moral of the story is that all of the content is there, but good luck finding it. Of all organizations, I would have expected Google to be able to provide quality access to a full catalogue of material like this. Their search seems to work well which is ok, but with an archive like this, the ability to browse the whole thing is an equally valuable and should be fixed.

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Old Popular Science Online

March 5th, 2010 · Topics Of Interest

In conjunction with Google, Popular Science has put a significant chunk of its archive online. At first it looked like all of it, but as I began to browse through the first issue listed from May 1926, they were celebrating their 52nd anniversary!!!

After browsing a little, I thought I’d share a few chunks that caught my attention. Some things amazed me for the fact that they were even in existence in 1926. Ever seen one of these in a building before?

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I found it amazing that they were conducting X-rays on pets so early on. Given the state of medicine in general at that time, I find it quite something that pets would have access to such medical care.

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A novel concept for a new car body design.

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Then there were some terrifying inventions when considered from a modern context. For example the Cocain injecting dentist’s drill and using lead injections to cure cancer.

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Overall it’s a blast to go through these. I’ve only ever caught bits and pieces of old Popular Science magazines online. To have a complete archive like this is a goldmine.

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Why The Russians Aren’t Doing Well

February 22nd, 2010 · Topics Of Interest

There’s a significant story emerging from the Olympics. That is the overall poor performance of the Russians. It’s a significant story for a few reasons. Russian officials are starting to get upset with one stating that anything lower than 4th place overall would be a disgrace. Another significant issue is that the Olympics are in Russia in 4 years. They obviously want to have a good showing at home, just as we Canadians are trying to do this year. With a really poor showing in these Olympics, it does not bode well for the Russians.

The major question that’s been hanging out there is, “why aren’t the Russians doing well?” To me, it seems obvious. To ask why the Russians aren’t doing well is to ask what was going on in Russia 15-25 years ago which is when most of the athletes would have been born/young/growing up.

Here’s your answer. The collapse of the Soviet Union meant that while their future Olympic competitors were starting to learn to skate/ski/etc… many Russian children were wondering whether or not their parents would be able to find food that day. It wasn’t necessarily that bad for all Russians, but the country as a whole was devastated. With an environment like this in which to grow up, it’s no surprise to me that the Russian Olympians of 2010 are struggling against the competition.

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Olympic Fever

February 21st, 2010 · Topics Of Interest

I’ve got it. I wasn’t particularly excited for the 2010 winter Olympics heading into it, but as soon as it kicked off, I started watching and was addicted right away. I knew I would watch hockey, but didn’t really care that much about the rest of the sports.

So why the sudden interest? We’re actually good at a lot of stuff this time around. While we’re not doing as well as we had hoped, we are doing much better than any previous Olympics. Watching Canadians doing well on a global stage is always fun to see, but to see that so many Canadians are competing for medals, it’s truly inspiring.

There’s been an outbreak of national pride in Vancouver and it’s been spreading across the country.

The games did get off to a very rough start with the death of a Georgian athlete setting a somber tone to start. The follow-up included poor weather conditions and ravaged courses all around. The venues were in a world of hurt. But as the days have worn on, the athlete performances have really taken the spotlight.

The significant emerging criticism seems to be regarding the Own The Podium program. Some are suggesting that “we” have sunk all this money into our athletes and we’re not “owning the podium”. I think that’s a pretty black and white perspective on things. My response is that perhaps we’ve underestimated how much it costs to “own the podium”. Sure we’ve sunk millions of dollars into supporting our athletes, but here’s a secret that the critics might not be aware of. So is everyone else.

We’ve had some bad breaks. Two or three of our top skiers went down to injury in the months/weeks leading into the Olympics. Our best male skier is not skiing and we still placed 5th in a couple of events. You have to figure that if our best guy was out there, we’d have a couple more medals.

Trying to win the games is a daunting task. It means winning medals in sports like short track and long track speed skating which are dominated by Denmark and South Korea respectively. Unseating countries which take a national pride in a particular sport is not an easy task. Their skating is our hockey.

Honestly, from the outside looking in, it looks like the Own The Podium program has worked well. Critics seem to be assuming that winning the Olympics is simply a money issue. That if we sink in a given amount of money, we can win. It doesn’t work that way. Even if it did, the amount of money we’ve put into it isn’t enough to dominate the Olympics. It does seem to be enough to significantly improve our performance though. To me, that’s great. It might not be what we were hoping for, but you have to admit that it’s been pretty impressive so far.

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Halifamous

February 6th, 2010 · Halifax

A Grooveshark list of my favourite Halifamous music. I’ve highlighted most of these in previous posts, but I wanted to put them all together for an expat friend.

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Tinkerer’s Sunset Or Sunrise?

January 31st, 2010 · Topics Of Interest

A few days ago, I bumped into a very interesting, well written piece on the Tinkerer’s Sunset. The focus of the article is about how locked down Apple products have become and how that stifles those who would tinker with this technology and help to create some of the cool things that arise when people are free to tinker.

I certainly agree that most major companies have taken a lock-down approach to pretty much everything and tinkering in the area of computing has changed. What I don’t agree with is that this represents a tinkerer’s sunset.

The emergence of websites like Make, Instructables and Hack A Day show that the tinkering spirit is alive and well, it’s simply shifting gears.

The Arduino has emerged as a successor to the Altair 8800. For old-school people who hacked with the Altair and its immediate successors, their form of tinkering is dying off. The reason though is that people generally accept that computers now do the things that we want them to do. That’s no true of everyone by any stretch, but many of us are satisfied with computers as a tool we use to accomplish our work. The Arduino has opened the world of physical computing the way the Altair opened up the world of traditional computing. Physical computing is where a lot of us are tinkering.

For those hardcore computing people, there are still many outlets, mostly in the world of Linux. It’s all open so you can tinker to your heart’s content. The fact that Apple and a few other companies are closing their curtains and hiding everything from the public should come as no surprise. They’ve all been building towards this for a long time. The key for the old-school tinkerers who have lost their favourite platform is to do what tinkerers do best. Adapt.

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