Great moments in book cover art

Courtesy of the Awful Library Books blog

and BoingBoing

New Zealand Book Council - Going West

Eye candy for bibliophiles

If the right side of the screen is obscured, you can view it at YouTube:
New Zealand Book Council - Going West

Inter Toobz are 40 today - October 29!

Internet pops champagne on (second) 40th birthday

Lo and behold: It all began with a memory overflow...

By Cade Metz
29th October 2009 17:46 GMT

Today, the Internet celebrates its second 40th birthday.Some date the dawn of the net to September 12, 1969, when a team of engineers at the University of California, Los Angeles(UCLA) connected the first two machines on the first node of ARPAnet, the US Department of Defense–funded network that eventually morphed into the modern interwebs. But others - including Professor Leonard Kleinrock, who led that engineering team - peg the birthday to October 29, when the first message was sent between the remote nodes. "That's the day," Kleinrock tells The Reg, "the internet uttered its first words."

In the late 1960s, the DoD's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) set out to build a computer network that would let you, in the words of founding father Bob Taylor, "go anywhere you want to go." ARPA - now known as DARPA - contracted with Boston-based BBN Technologies to produce the so-called IMPs (Interface Message Processors) that would operate each node on this world-spanning network.

The first node would be UCLA, whose engineering group also included a young graduate student named Vint Cerf. And the BBN team included Bob Kahn, who would one day team with Cerf to write the internet-underpinning Transmission Control Protocol (TCP).

BBN shipped the first IMP to UCLA over the 1969 Labor Day weekend, and UCLA wasn't expecting it. "BBN had told us they were running behind, and we didn't expect them to suddenly ship air freight the IMP - and they did. Sons of bitches," Kleinrock says with a chuckle. But Kleinrock, Cerf, and Co. had things up and running on September 2, the day after Labor Day, sending bits between the IMP - a Honeywell DDP-516 mini computer with 12K of memory - and a 32-bit SDS Sigma 7 host machine.

"That's the day that the infant internet took its first breath of life," Kleinrock says. But he also says that September 2 isn't the net's birthday. The true birthday, he insists, came several weeks later, when the UCLA node had a chat with the second ARPAnet node at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), where Douglas Englebart had cooked up his seminal NLS online system. A 50kbps AT&T pipe connected the UCLA and SRI nodes, and the first message sent was the word "log" - or at least that was the idea. UCLA would send the "log" and SRI would respond with "in." But after UCLA typed the "l" and the "o," the "g" caused a memory overflow on the SRI
IMP.

October 29 is also the anniversary of another famous crash: the stock market meltdown of 1929. "So the first message was 'Lo,' as in 'Lo and Behold,'" Kleinrock says. "We couldn't have asked for a better message - and we didn't plan it."

But, he ads, the full log-in was complete within the next few hours.

Radical Militant Librarian

A lovely post and graphic from boingboing,

Radical Militant Librarian tee

Just ran into a Norwegian librarian at Internet Librarian International
in London wearing this killer tee-shirt, created in protest of the PATRIOT Act's
provision to force librarians to reveal which books their patrons were checking
out. The Latin translates as "We know what you read, and we're not saying."
We know what you
read, and we're not saying

Order it here

Scroll down the original article, the comments on the article are well worth reading too.

More Radical Librarians on the web:
Progressive Librarians Guild http://libr.org/plg/statement.php
Librarian Avengers http://librarianavengers.org/
The Progressive Librarians global network http://www.libr.org/international/
And the lovely Radical Reference project http://www.radicalreference.info/

Bayou

Bayou is an online comic, or graphic novel. I first discovered it on Nalo Hopkinson's blog, and as she says, it bloody rocks! This is not for the faint hearted.

Synopsis from Zudu comics:

South of the Mason-Dixon Line, lies a strange land of gods and monsters. Born from centuries of slavery, civil war, innocent bloodshed, hate and strife lurks a world parallel to our own. LEE WAGSTAFF is the daughter of a poor, sharecropper in a depression-era, Mississippi Delta town, called Charon. She’s an introspective, brave child and hard labor in the fields has made her sturdy and strong. One day, Lee and her father help the sheriff retrieve the body of a boy who’d been lynched and thrown into the river. Lee dives into the depths to tie a rope around the boy. While under water, she catches a glimpse of a strange world. Ever since that day, Lee hears voices in the trees and rivers. When Lee’s playmate, Lily, is snatched by BOG, an evil inhabitant of that place she saw, Lee’s father is accused of kidnapping. The worst thing a black man could do in the 30’s was harm a white child. Lee must pursue Bog into his world in order to save her friend before her father is lynched. Lee enlists the help of a benevolent, blues-singing, swamp monster called BAYOU and together they trek across a Southern Neverland in search of Lee’s friend. Along the way, they meet several colorful characters, like BR’ER RABBIT. Lee soon realizes that Bog has some sort of hold on all the inhabitants in this world and feeds off of hatred and strife in our world. As the racial tensions grow, Bog grows more powerful, so not only are Lee’s friends and father in peril, but all of Charon.

Chilling Effects and Pirate Bay

The Register reports Google has removed the Pirate Bay home page from its search results in response to a complaint under the DMCA, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. You can read more about Pirate Bay on Wikipedia, which provides a good summary. The correct url for Pirate Bay is http://thepiratebay.org/ . As of right now, in a google search for pirate bay, the results show a note at the bottom reading:

In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 4 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s) at ChillingEffects.org.

Chilling Effects is a site worth knowing about, particularly if you write anything online.

Chilling Effects Clearinghouse

A joint project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, University of San Francisco, University of Maine, George Washington School of Law, and Santa Clara University School of Law clinics.

Do you know your online rights? Have you received a letter asking you to remove information from a Web site or to stop engaging in an activity? Are you concerned about liability for information that someone else posted to your online forum? If so, this site is for you.

Chilling Effects aims to help you understand the protections that the First Amendment and intellectual property laws give to your online activities. We are excited about the new opportunities the Internet offers individuals to express their views, parody politicians, celebrate their favorite movie stars, or criticize businesses. But we've noticed that not everyone feels the same way. Anecdotal evidence suggests that some individuals and corporations are using intellectual property and other laws to silence other online users. Chilling Effects encourages respect for intellectual property law, while frowning on its misuse to "chill" legitimate activity

Chilling Effects FAQ

Meanwhile, the Australian Pirate Party sets sail

"We're here to actively change the landscape of Australian politics forever, by advocating freer copyright and protection of our civil liberties, especially against [Communications Minister Stephen] Conroy's censorship regime, which is not welcome in Australia."

In this sense, Pirate Parties in Australia and elsewhere in the world may be on to something. El Reg reported earlier today on the Power 2010 initiative in the UK, which is a direct result of an investigation into the state of UK democracy, published in February 2006.

This identified a growing gulf between governed and governing classes, with a sense that those in power do not listen, that the existing party political structures produce parties that are too similar, and the present political process excludes the voice of many ordinary voters.

A Westminster Hall debate by MPs who make up the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee in the UK Parliament provides strong support for this point of view: what astounded then was not merely the degree of ignorance displayed by parliamentarians who were supposed to be specialists in topics relating to IT and new technology, but the sheer arrogance with which they displayed it.

In Australia, this divide has been given form by ham-fisted government attempts, led by Communications Minister Stephen Conroy, to implement blocking across the whole of the internet. It is not merely the attempt to impose a single moral agenda on the whole of the Australian population that has caused uproar: it is also the sense among ordinary internet users that those in power really do not "get" the internet. They do not understand how it works technologically or, more importantly, culturally.

This Is Banned Books Week

Post pinched from BoingBoing:

Banned Books Week and "most challenged titles" of 2008!
Posted by David Pescovitz, October 1, 2009 11:52 AM permalink

This week is Banned Books Week in the United States. Sponsored by the American Library Association (ALA), American Booksellers Association, and a variety of other organizations, the week of events around the country celebrates intellectual freedom and spotlights books that have been targets of attempting bannings. According to the ALA, there were more than 500 "challenges" to specific books in schools, stores, and libraries reported to the Office of Intellectual Freedom in 2008. And probably many, many more that went unreported. And Tango Makes Three was apparently the biggest target. It's a true story about a same-sex penguin couple in New York's Central Park Zoo who were given an egg to raise. Without further ado, here are the top ten "most challenged titles" of last year. I linked to the Amazon page for each so you can collect them all or buy copies for your local library or school!

1. And Tango Makes Three, by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell
Reasons: anti-ethnic, anti-family, homosexuality, religious viewpoint, and unsuited to age group

2. His Dark Materials trilogy, by Philip Pullman
Reasons: political viewpoint, religious viewpoint, and violence

3. TTYL; TTFN; L8R, G8R (series), by Lauren Myracle
Reasons: offensive language, sexually explicit, and unsuited to age group

4. Scary Stories (series) , by Alvin Schwartz
Reasons: occult/satanism, religious viewpoint, and violence

5. Bless Me, Ultima, by Rudolfo Anaya
Reasons: occult/satanism, offensive language, religious viewpoint, sexually explicit, and violence

6. The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky
Reasons: drugs, homosexuality, nudity, offensive language, sexually explicit, suicide, and unsuited to age group

7. Gossip Girl (series), by Cecily von Ziegesar
Reasons: offensive language, sexually explicit, and unsuited to age group

8. Uncle Bobby's Wedding, by Sarah S. Brannen
Reasons: homosexuality and unsuited to age group

9. The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini
Reasons: offensive language, sexually explicit, and unsuited to age group

10. Flashcards of My Life, by Charise Mericle Harper
Reasons: sexually explicit and unsuited to age group

For more, see the
Banned Books Week site and the
ALA's Banned Books Week pages.

Leo Lionni at Fortune magazine

Leo Lionni was art director for Fortune magazine in the 1950s. He was responsible for elegant covers. He left Fortune in 1959 to become a childrens' book illustrator. See more examples here.

Just for fun

German cops impound motorised beer crate

A German biker who rather brilliantly converted a beer crate into a diminutive quad bike has been relieved of his wheels, following a police pursuit, Ananova reports.

Matthias Krankl apparently attracted the attention of law enforcement operatives by speeding on his lovingly-crafted machine. He attempted to make good his escape into woodland in Maulburg, but got bogged down in thick mud.
...
The officer added: "We were very impressed with the workmanship so we congratulated him and then we confiscated the machine."

He concluded: "It only has a tiny one cylinder engine but somehow he managed to break the speed limit. It wasn't legal so we had to confiscate it, but it looked like a lot of fun and would certainly make drink driving more risky."