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Wednesday
Jul282010

Tobacco, "Grape Aerosmith (feat. Beck)" 

A wild video from one of my new favorite bands, Tobacco, aka Black Moth Super Rainbow:

Monday
Jul122010

Gruff Rhys Documentary "Separado!"

So, just after having mentioned the cameo of Gruff Rhys in the most recent Gorillaz video, I noticed that a documentary he made is being released this month at a Los Angeles film festival. For more info., see here.

Monday
Jul122010

Gorillaz "Melancholy Hill" video in HD

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Besides the extraordinary talents of Jamie Hewlett, one thing I really love about this video is the cameo by Gruff Rhys of the Super Furry Animals. The song he sings, "Superfast Jellyfish", on the new Gorlliaz album Plastic Beach is apparently slated to be the next single, later this year. Given that "Superfast Jellyfish" also features De La Soul—who also appear in cameo in the "Melancholy Hill" video (along with Snoop, et al.)—it figures to be a great video. For my part, I can't say "Melancholy Hill" is the song I would have chosen as a second single after "Stylo". My favorite tune off the album so far is "Rhinestone Eyes", slated to be the fourth single—I may even have led with that track, as good as it is.

Monday
Jul122010

Field Notes "County Fair" Regional Edition

Order them before they’re gone. Futura never looked so good.

Saturday
Jul102010

Have librarians turn pages of a book for you over the internet

This is, to me at least, quite bizarre. If you want to view a rare manuscript or book in the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, Germany, you now can, instead of going there yourself, have a librarian put the book in front of a webcam and beam the image of the manuscript right to your screen anywhere in the world. If you need to go forward or back a page, then just ask the lucky librarian to turn it for you. One presumes both of you will need bathroom breaks from time to time. Of course, I’m not sure why you wouldn’t want to go to Wolfenbüttel yourself, but perhaps this will work in a pinch if you can’t find the time or funding to make the trip. Still, more bizarre than useful in my book.

(Via Roger Pearse.)

Thursday
Jul082010

Beck's Record Club Covers INXS, "Mediate"

Friday
Jul022010

Holga D

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The new Lo-Fi digital camera of choice, designed by Saikat Biswas. Features include 1) no LCD viewfinder, 2) a cheap (if handsome) plasticky enclosure, 3) an e-ink HUD, 4) frequent vignetting, blur, and other problems, and 5) no way of telling what the heck your pictures will look like till you download them. Nevertheless, it looks awesome — no word, it seems, on when these will be available for purchase.

(Via Wired’s Gadget Lab.)

Friday
Jun252010

Google Hi-Res Ancient Greek and Latin Scans

Today, Google Books announced that it has posted a list of 500 Greek and Latin critical editions of ancient texts with links to their high-resolution scans of these books. All the editions are out of copyright (and thus somewhat dated as these things go), but I noticed several that are still the main editions of these texts (e.g. Keil’s seven-volume edition of the Grammatici Latini). This list has been available for a few weeks now at least — a colleague posted the link to a listserv — but what is made clear by the post is that Google is aware of the problems with OCRing classical (polytonic) Greek. This has been a sore point with regard to Google Books for some time: the scholarly books have a diminished value when the OCR is as poor as it often is — in fact the underlying text can be absolute gibberish, which is no help at all. All in all, this seems like a very salutary development. One change I would make would be to list the books by alphabetical order of Author or Editor, rather than by alphabetical Titles, which can of course vary widely among editions of the same ancient work.

Strangely, if you click on the link to the work, you automatically download a .zip archive full of .png and .html files. But if you click on “(read in your browser)” it takes you to the normal Google Books page for the book, from where you can download a .pdf file, or search the work via the web interface, depending on your needs. On one hand this is quite helpful since 1) the .png files are, presumably, being provided to help OCR algorithm writers develop their code and 2) it’s not always easy finding older editions of ancient texts if you don’t know the specific (often unwieldy) title of the specific edition. On the other hand, how difficult would it be to make the default download link the .pdf file, or at least the normal Google Books page? This is what most people use on their own machines — surely non-techie users are going to be baffled by a .zip file full of images and .html files?

Saturday
Jun122010

Sir Fergus

Many congratulations to a former teacher and mentor of mine at Oxford, Professor Fergus Millar, who has been awarded a Knighthood. There’s hardly a scholar I can think of in Classics who deserves this honor more than Sir Fergus.

(Via RogueClassicism.)

Saturday
Jun122010

What is Resolution Anyway?

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An interesting article on whether the new iPhone4 "Retina Display" is false marketing, by one of the designers of the Hubble Space Telescope and author of the blog Bad Astronomy.

(Via Daring Fireball.)

Friday
Jun112010

Yet another brilliant Adobe dialog box

 

For some general context, see here and here, and also here (which is longer). Admittedly, this is not a crash, but it’s just a hilarious bit of visual miscommunication.

Monday
May102010

Self-Publish on the iBookstore

According to their blog, the book publisher and distributor Lulu.com is now a "certified aggregator" for Apple's iPad iBookstore (also available for the iPhone this summer, apparently). You can convert your own book to the ePub format, upload it to the iBookstore, and reap 80% of the revenue as people download it to their iPads, via the iBooks app. Lulu assigns your book an ISBN number (as required by Apple) and guarantees that your book will pass Apple's ePub validation process if you let them convert it for you. For a limited time, this service is free, though you have to have an account with Lulu. If you already have an ebook on Lulu's site, this does not happen automatically: you must "opt-in" to Lulu's Apple/iBookstore distribution channel.

Monday
May102010

NPR on Manuscript Digitization

More on the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library: The NPR/APM show "Speaking of Faith with Krista Tippett" has a whole webpage of materials devoted to the project, including an edited piece they aired as well as unedited interviews with Columba Stewart and Getatchew Haile.

Saturday
May082010

Ethiopic Psalter Gets Returned

Good article from The Oregonian about the return of a Ge'ez Psalter to Ethiopia.

Delamarter is used to handling rare manuscripts. Those he works with are often well-worn religious volumes, handwritten in Ge'ez, the ancient liturgical language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. He's examined many Psalters, books of Psalms and other texts used for prayer. But this one was different. Buried inside was a rare marker that Delamarter had seen only once before. In a kind of handmade reverse, a line of white letters stood out against a line of red ink. He ran his index finger under the words as he translated aloud: "This book belongs to the king of kings, Menilek."

Dr. Getatchew Haile, Regents Professor of Medieval Studies and Cataloguer of Oriental Manuscripts at the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library of St. John's University in Minnesota, identified the manuscript. The HMML, under the direction of Father Columba Stewart, recently received a Mellon Grant for their digitization projects, and Dr. Haile recently participated in a Getty Seminar on a sixteenth-century Gospel book acquired by the museum.

Saturday
May082010

Soul Talk

Interesting article in The Chronicle of Higher Education about how philosophy professors and students consider (differently) the concept of "the soul" today. The opening paragraph:

No self-respecting professor of philosophy wants to discuss the soul in class. It reeks of old-time theology, or, worse, New Age quantum treacle. The soul has been a dead end in philosophy ever since the positivists unmasked its empty referential center. Scientific philosophy has shown us that there's no there there.

But make no mistake, our students are very interested in the soul.

(Hat tip to Professor Kyle Harper, Ph.D., M.A., B.A., Esq., etc., etc.)

Tuesday
May042010

MarsEdit 3 is out

For bloggers out there who use a Mac, I can't recommend MarsEdit highly enough. MarsEdit 3 was released today. The new version adds Rich Text formatting, and I've noticed that the Squarespace support is much improved. There's very few apps out there as intrinsically valuable as this. Now for the iPhone/iPad MarsEdit...

Tuesday
May042010

LEGO iPad Unboxing

So awesome:

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(Via TUAW.)

Tuesday
May042010

New Adobe Fonts in Creative Suite 5

Helpful details here on the fonts included in the imminent Adobe CS5. Interestingly, new Arabic and Hebrew font-families are part of the standard package. See here for a breakdown of what fonts are installed in the basic and supplemental sets.

(Via John Nack.)

Monday
Apr262010

Jonathan Edwards and Byzantine Architecture

Great post, excerpted from Princeton’s museum magazine, by my friend Matthew Milliner.

Wednesday
Apr212010

Greek and Hebrew Paradigm Charts

For those biblical studies nerds out there, Logos has produced a hi-res pdf of basic Greek and Hebrew paradigms. Quite handy and good quality. I haven’t checked the accuracy of the paradigms yet, so beware, and let me know if you find any errors. The dashes in the Greek chart which show the syllables of the verbs are a bit off-putting to my taste, but the typography seems good. I think they’re using Gentium for the Greek and SBL Hebrew (or is that Gentium too?) for the Hebrew.