On the beauty of YouTube being immeasurable II

The beauty of YouTube is immeasurable ...

“I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries.” -- Ray Bradbury

A Literary Legend Fights for a Local Library

By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
The New York Times

Published: June 19, 2009

VENTURA, Calif. — When you are pushing 90, have written scores of famous novels, short stories and screenplays, and have fulfilled the goal of taking a simulated ride to Mars, what’s left?

“Bo Derek is a really good friend of mine and I’d like to spend more time with her,” said Ray Bradbury, peering up from behind an old television tray in his den.

An unlikely answer, but Mr. Bradbury, the science fiction writer, is very specific in his eccentric list of interests, and his pursuit of them in his advancing age and state of relative immobility.

This is a lucky thing for the Ventura County Public Libraries — because among Mr. Bradbury’s passions, none burn quite as hot as his lifelong enthusiasm for halls of books. His most famous novel, “Fahrenheit 451,” which concerns book burning, was written on a pay typewriter in the basement of the University of California, Los Angeles, library; his novel “Something Wicked This Way Comes” contains a seminal library scene.

Mr. Bradbury frequently speaks at libraries across the state, and on Saturday he will make his way here for a benefit for the H. P. Wright Library, which like many others in the state’s public system is in danger of shutting its doors because of budget cuts.

“Libraries raised me,” Mr. Bradbury said. “I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don’t have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.”

Property tax dollars, which provide most of the financing for libraries in Ventura County, have fallen precipitously, putting the library system roughly $650,000 in the hole. Almost half of that amount is attributed to the H. P. Wright Library, which serves roughly two-thirds of this coastal city about 50 miles northwest of Los Angeles.

In January the branch was told that unless it came up with $280,000 it would close. The branch’s private fund-raising group, San Buenaventura Friends of the Library, has until March to reach its goal; so far it has raised $80,000.

Enter Mr. Bradbury. While at a meeting concerning the library, Berta Steele, vice president of the friends group, ran into Michael Kelly, a local artist who runs the Ray Bradbury Theater and Film Foundation, a group dedicated to arts and literacy advocacy. Mr. Kelly told Ms. Steele that he could get Mr. Bradbury up to Ventura to help the library’s cause.

On Saturday, the two organizations will host a $25-a-head discussion with Mr. Bradbury and present a screening of “The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit,” a film based on his short story of the same name.

The fund-raiser’s financial goal is not a long-term fix. That would come only if property taxes crawl back up or voters approve a proposed half-cent increase in the local sales tax in November, some of which would go to libraries.

Fiscal threats to libraries deeply unnerve Mr. Bradbury, who spends as much time as he can talking to children in libraries and encouraging them to read.

The Internet? Don’t get him started. “The Internet is a big distraction,” Mr. Bradbury barked from his perch in his house in Los Angeles, which is jammed with enormous stuffed animals, videos, DVDs, wooden toys, photographs and books, with things like the National Medal of Arts sort of tossed on a table.

“Yahoo called me eight weeks ago,” he said, voice rising. “They wanted to put a book of mine on Yahoo! You know what I told them? ‘To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet.’

“It’s distracting,” he continued. “It’s meaningless; it’s not real. It’s in the air somewhere.”
A Yahoo spokeswoman said it was impossible to verify Mr. Bradbury’s account without more details.

Mr. Bradbury has long been known for his clear memory of some of life’s events, and that remains the case, he said. “I have total recall,” he said. “I remember being born. I remember being in the womb, I remember being inside. Coming out was great.”

He also recalled watching the film “Pumping Iron,” which features Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in his body-building days, and how his personal recommendation of the film for an Academy Award helped spark Mr. Schwarzenegger’s Hollywood career. He remembers lining his four daughters’ cribs with Golden Books when they were tiny. And he remembers meeting Ms. Derek on a train in France years ago.

“She said, ‘Mr. Bradbury.’ I said, ‘Yes.’ She said: ‘I love you! My name is Bo Derek.’ ”
Ms. Derek’s spokeswoman, Rona Menashe, said the story was true. She said her client would like to see some more of Mr. Bradbury, too.

Mr. Bradbury’s wife, Maggie, to whom he was married for over five decades, died in 2003. He turns 89 in August.

When he is not raising money for libraries, Mr. Bradbury still writes for a few hours every morning (“I can’t tell you,” is the answer to any questions on his latest book); reads George Bernard Shaw; receives visitors including reporters, filmmakers, friends and children of friends; and watches movies on his giant flat-screen television.

He can still be found regularly at the Los Angeles Public Library branch in Koreatown, which he visited often as a teenager.

“The children ask me, ‘How can I live forever, too?’ ” he said. “I tell them do what you love and love what you do. That’s the story on my life.”

Sharing the Wolfram wealth ...

From: Jeanie

Subject: Fwd: Stephen Wolfram to answer WolframAlpha questions in live webcast

Date: 3 Jun 2009

To: Paraprofessional crowd @ Any Library, Any Town, Any State 12345 USA

Hi, ya'll:

At first I was just going to send this to one of my colleagues, Linda, because I figured our resident tech guru would be interested in the webcast.

Then I thought you all who are not already tracking this might also want to follow the development of WolframAlpha.

Then I decided not to send it to anyone at all because a super griped about me having sent you all a 2MB file on my one true love, our Local Music collection.

She thought it was more information than a paraprofessional needed.

I do not subscribe to that belief. I'm all about sharing the wealth, so I am posting WolframAlpha info here and will send you all the link to this post.

How can a super complain about me sending a link?

Uh-huh. Likewise here.

I was thinking of not even sharing the link to this post until we went to that staff day workshop on Google. I thought everyone knew about the define feature and all that.

So many paraprofessionals learned something from that workshop -- how can I not share WolframAlpha?

I've been interested in WolframAlpha since I read ...

"New Search Tool Aims at Answering Tough Queries, but Not at Taking on Google"

... in the May 10, 2009, edition of The New York Times.

Says The Times writer: "The goal of creating a computer system that can answer questions has been a tantalizing but elusive pursuit for many computer scientists for more than four decades. Some veterans of the field say Mr. Wolfram may have come as close as anyone yet."

If you have not been tuned in, the skinny on WolframAlpha is that it will not "rival" Google -- it is not a search engine per se -- but will answer questions -- this from The New York Times -- "often by doing complex and new computations. WolframAlpha wants to 'make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything."

Here's more on WolframAlpha from one of The New York Times technology blogs:

Wolfram Alpha is not a search engine.

In a talk at Harvard Law School, Stephen Wolfram, a well-known mathematician, scientist and entrepreneur, gave a demonstration of his soon-to-be released Web service which promises to answer all sorts of questions. The service, called Wolfram Alpha, had technology bloggers abuzz that a rival to Google was about to hit the Web.

While search engines like Google, by and large, find things that already exist on the Internet — Web sites, photos, videos, blogs — Wolfram Alpha answers questions, often by doing complex, and new computations.

It’s hard to judge a product from a demo, but by the looks of it, Wolfram Alpha is impressive.

And this from the WolframAlpha site: "Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries."

And even more on WolframAlpha from their website is below, but check it out yourself, especially the Visual Gallery of Examples. It is really amazing and will truly be a "household term" in the same way that Google is.

About WolframAlpha Goals

WolframAlpha's long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.

WolframAlpha aims to bring expert-level knowledge and capabilities to the broadest possible range of people—spanning all professions and education levels. Our goal is to accept completely free-form input, and to serve as a knowledge engine that generates powerful results and presents them with maximum clarity.

WolframAlpha is an ambitious, long-term intellectual endeavor that we intend will deliver increasing capabilities over the years and decades to come. With a world-class team and participation from top outside experts in countless fields, our goal is to create something that will stand as a major milestone of 21st century intellectual achievement.

Status

That it should be possible to build WolframAlpha as it exists today in the first decade of the 21st century was far from obvious. And yet there is much more to come.

As of now, WolframAlpha contains 10+ trillion of pieces of data, 50,000+ types of algorithms and models, and linguistic capabilities for 1000+ domains. Built with Mathematica—which is itself the result of more than 20 years of development at Wolfram Research—WolframAlpha's core code base now exceeds 5 million lines of symbolic Mathematica code. Running on supercomputer-class compute clusters, WolframAlpha makes extensive use of the latest generation of web and parallel computing technologies, including webMathematica and gridMathematica.

WolframAlpha's knowledge base and capabilities already span a great many domains, and its underlying framework has the power and flexibility to support ready extension to essentially any domain that is based on systematic knowledge. …

The universe of potentially computable knowledge is, however, almost endless, and in creating WolframAlpha as it is today, we needed to start somewhere. Our approach so far has been to emphasize domains where computation has traditionally had a more significant role. As we have developed WolframAlpha, we have in effect been systematically covering the content areas of reference libraries and handbooks. In going forward, we plan broader and deeper coverage, both of traditionally scientific, technical, economic, and otherwise quantitative knowledge, and of more everyday, popular, and cultural knowledge.

WolframAlpha's ability to understand free-form input is based on algorithms that are informed by our analysis of linguistic usage in large volumes of material on the web and elsewhere. As the usage of WolframAlpha grows, we will capture a whole new level of linguistic data, which will allow us to greatly enhance WolframAlpha's linguistic capabilities.

Today's WolframAlpha is just the beginning. We have ambitious plans, for data, for computation, for linguistics, for presentation, and more. As we go forward, we'll be discussing what we're doing on the WolframAlpha Blog, and we encourage suggestions and participation, especially through the WolframAlpha Community.

Thanks from Jeanie

"Never accept images that have been created for you by someone else." -- Malcolm X
________________________________________

--- the forwarded message follows ---

From: WolframAlpha Team

Sender: WolframAlpha Team

Subject: Stephen Wolfram to answer WolframAlpha questions in live webcast

Date: 3 June 2009

To: (Jeanie)

Our team is hard at work going through the tens of thousands of comments, suggestions, and questions coming in about WolframAlpha.

We thought you'd enjoy hearing Stephen Wolfram respond to some of this feedback directly.

We invite you to join us for a live webcast on Thursday, June 4, at 4pm U.S. CDT (GMT -5 hours), as Stephen responds to some of the questions you've sent in.

Details about the live webcast and how you can participate are available in today's WolframAlpha blog post:

http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2009/06/02/stephen-wolfram-to-answer-wolframalpha-questions-in-live-webcast/

Best regards,

The WolframAlpha Team
http://www.wolframalpha.com

You received this email because you signed up on our WolframAlpha preview page. ...

This message was sent to by Wolfram Research, Inc.
Mailing address: 100 Trade Center Dr., Champaign, IL 61820, USA

Blabbing on about New Urbanism 'cuz Westword made me ...

OK. Sometimes you just have more to say that Twitter is designed to allow.

And, Westword, I am your No. 1 fan. I'm your fan-club prez.

But as a Boulder native living in an authentic Denver neighborhood, I have to say that New Urbanism, although old -- as far as “urban” and your point in this not-so-new-urbanism blog series, New Urbanist developments get my vote every time -- even if they are just skating close to the ideal.

Even if the development doesn't hit every point on the checklist and is plopped down on the edge of Longmont only to be ridiculed by bloggers who think Fordist planning is, well, God's will.

Even if there are chain restaurants. Let's not forget that's chain restaurants and front porches -- at least you've got the front porches.

At least you are achieving a little density.

Well-planned density equals open space elsewhere.

As far as monoculture, gentrification -- on and on -- well, yes. You have hit on something there.

As far as “urban”: According to New Urbanism Charter: “Metropolitan regions are … made of multiple centers that are cities, towns, and villages, each with its own identifiable center and edges.”

Down to the point: New Urbanism can be good and at its worst is probably better than the alternative, which is the poorly planned, unchecked development of Douglas County.

New Urbanism focuses on infill, redevelopment, multimodal transit -- with special emphasis on pedestrian-oriented and mass-transit-oriented planning -- mixed-use zoning (live-work structures as well as residential spaces above commercial offices, etc.) to reduce commuting and all that is associated -- from gridlock to environmental devastation to, hello, yes, WAR and the existence of oil company executives and their children.

New Urbanism is an answer to sprawl, to mass-produced housing that leaves you wondering how folks find their way home every night.

New Urbanist developments should offer diverse housing types -- yes, for diverse populations -- and maximize green spaces or open spaces, especially through regional planning to get the most open space possible.

This is all pretty much the opposite of Fordist urban planning.

The opposite of mass-produced suburban tract housing of Levittown.

The focus is on community: front porches instead of garages that swallow you until the next morning.

The focus is on context-appropriate and pedestrian-scale architecture (no monolithic commercial or public structures like the Broomfield arts building but very much like Denver Public Library Central building where it is broken up into chunks.)

Other neat stuff / features:

• Affordability and/or a mix of affordable housing and market-rate units.
• Historic preservation. Reuse.
• Infill.
• Sustainability.
• Not just “green” construction but extreme-green* construction. Down to reuse of graywater and the use of photovotaics to the extent that the power company owes you money.
  
• Setbacks, hidden parking.
• On and on.

You guys should run around Boulder for a couple weeks. Talk to the architects there.

Good quote summing up all this from the New Urbanism Charter: “We advocate the restructuring of public policy and development practices to support the following principles: neighborhoods should be diverse in use and population; communities should be designed for the pedestrian and transit as well as the car; cities and towns should be shaped by physically defined and universally accessible public spaces and community institutions; urban places should be framed by architecture and landscape design that celebrate local history, climate, ecology, and building practice.”

Enough said.

* An example from a listing for a condo in Prospect: Designed for passive solar heating via southern exposure to winter sun, radiant floor heating, solar hot water, eco-friendly hardwood bamboo floors, eco-friendly wood interior doors & cabinets, low-e windows, SS appliances, granite counters, zero-VOC paints, nontoxic glues ...

An open letter to homeless people

Hi there. You must be homeless if you are reading this. If you are, please note that the logo has nothing to do with my open letter to you. I just think it is a KICK-ASS logo.

Here is what I want to say this evening in my open letter to you, oh sleepers of the alley behind my building:

I realize you have it worse than I do. After all, you are homeless, and here I sit writing this blog entry.

THAT SAID, I have to remind you that stuff sucks all over more than usual right now. Don't assume anything about anyone.

That great new car I'm driving? Um, it is a rental. Say it with me: RENTAL. I am driving it because my car is dead and I have to get to work or else. There is no mass transit to the sprawl village where I am employed.

Just because I am driving a rental doesn't mean I can afford it.

Again, you have things worse, I do understand. But I'm not listing everything that is going on in my life for the world to see, so just assume there is other stuff going on that prompted me to write this open letter to you.

Please know that I was a bleeding heart liberal up until about last year.

And I still believe you should not be homeless.

I'm just saying things are not as they seem right now for anyone. Including me.

So FUCKING BUG OFF! Don't ask me for SHIT right now! Cuz I'll BITE YOUR HEAD OFF AND SPIT IT BACK AT YOU!!!!

Whew. Feeling better now. Please know that I will still call the cops when you get beat up. And I will still bring my ferret down to comfort you. And I will still let you talk me out of my food. I was just upset there for a minute because one of your buddies talked me out of my food and I thought it was for you. So ... let's resume our friendship now. The BITE YOUR HEAD OFF was really for that other homeless man who says he is your friend. I only want to bite his head off because he talked me out of my food. Not yours. I would never do that!

Peace out.

Jeanie