Amazon Book Search

I think that Amazon has finally come through with the next on-line bookstore killer app. They’ve extended their book searching to include a “Search Inside the Book” feature which returns books which contain your search phrase somewhere in the text, along with a page image of the page in question and two pages on either side of that page. They only provide the service for selected books who have approved this useage, but it’s a great idea. They’ve been trying to give browsers “flip through the book” capabilities by giving excerpt pages, but for non-fiction, this is the type of … Continue reading Amazon Book Search

Old-Time Games

Electronic Gaming got a bunch of pre-teens together, made them play classic 70’s and 80’s video games, and shared what they had to say about the games with us. They were really big fans of Pong: John: […] By the way, is this supposed to be tennis or Ping-Pong? Becky: Ping-Pong. Gordon: It doesn’t even go over the net. It goes through it. I don’t even think that thing in the middle is a net. Tim: My line is so beating the heck out of your stupid line. Fear my pink line. You have no chance. I am the undisputed … Continue reading Old-Time Games

10000 Free Books

Yesterday, Project Gutenberg posted its 10,000th freely-available book onto the internet, reaching its longtime goal! I’ve been following their progress for a couple of years, and this past year finally got involved as a Distributed Proofreader, using their simple web interface to proofread OCR’d texts. The On-line Books Page (a portal indexing free books on the internet from a variety of sources including but not limited to PG) has a small article about this on their site. I love this project, and with over thirty years of history, I think they have a good change of reaching a million titles … Continue reading 10000 Free Books

Community Annotation

On the one hand, this is just a story of another researcher using a web game to obtain data – in this case, the ESP Game, which anonymously pairs two users, shows them the same images, and asks them to enter descriptive words until they get a match. But there’s both some good and some bad computer science that seems to be going on here. On the good side, there’s definite value in finding ways to use people for data collection in places computers fall down, and this program seems engineered to do it well. Asking people to agree on … Continue reading Community Annotation

Chickens Prefer Beautiful Humans

Always amusing, the 2003 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded yesterday. Physics, as always, has one of the best winners, with the prize going to a number of Australian researchers for their paper An Analysis of the Forces Required to Drag Sheep over Various Surfaces, though the interdisciplinary report on Chickens Prefer Beautiful Humans would some in a close second. If you haven’t been before, take time to browse the rest of the Annals of Improbable Research website – there’s really funny stuff tucked away in there.

Perfect Ithaca Weekend

If you’re local, or near-local, to Ithaca, this is perhaps the best weekend of the year around these parts, so get out and enjoy yourself. The Ithaca Apple Harvest Festival, Craft Show and Sale starts today and runs through Sunday on the Commons. At the least, go pick up a peck of local apples and bake some pies this weekend. Then, on Saturday, get over to the opening day of the fall Friends of the Library Book Sale, the 3rd largest used book sale in the country. The prices drop each day, so remember to go back next week, and … Continue reading Perfect Ithaca Weekend

Crash

Speaking of computer games – I do enjoy the “on-line and free” variety, and recently I’ve been playing Shockwave.com’s recent offering: Crash. Navigate cars and trucks through increasingly congested intersections without letting them crash into each other. But, since smashing hapless vehicles into each other is actually the appealing part of the game, when you get a black car with a sckull on the hood, smash it into someone for bonus points! I love those little black cars….

Ghost Master

I’m not a huge video game player, and I don’t enjoy horror movies, but this review of Ghost Master makes me want to go buy a copy and spend the weekend curled up on my sofa with my laptop. It sounds like a more goal-oriented, and silly, version of the Sims… with ghosts. I could rent Ghostbusters and while I played and pretend I was back in high school.