April comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers

For reasons both trivial and indiscreet I can't really elaborate why this struck me as particularly funny:

At Language Log, Mark Liberman comments,

In 1989, shortly before I left the industrial research job that I had held for the previous 15 years, corporate headquarters appointed me to a committee to decide on a procedure for evaluating methodologies for prioritizing follow-up actions in the wake of a "technology portfolio fair" where researchers had explained new technologies to heads of product development in various branches of the company.

We weren't authorized to decide what to do, nor even to suggest priorities for alternative actions, nor yet to suggest a methodology for assigning priorities to alternative actions, nor for that matter to evaluate alternative methodologies for assigning priorities to alternative actions. Instead, we were tasked with designing a procedure for evaluating methodologies for assigning priorities to possible decisions. From a certain perspective, the mere ability to conceive and communicate such a task was a triumph of the human intellect.

LOL. Oh, the human capacity for abstract thought, you are beautiful and occasionally terrifying. And sometimes just absurdly funny.

Posting this in a third social networking venue, hah, because I think it's just that interesting. From the linguistic blog Language Log's Geoff Pullum Nunberg: Google Books: A Metadata Train Wreck. If you're interesting in the Google Book Project, Google, scholarship, librarianship, digital libraries, cataloging, metadata, or even bookselling, this is a captivating read. Read the comments! A lot of them are kind of dumb and hand-wavy ("Don't be mean to poor little Google! I dun need no stinking accurate metadata."), but there's some very smart stuff in there, and a long response from the fellow in charge of Metadata at the project, which Nunberg annotates, as the OPs often do at LL. Great stuff. Librarians and catalogers start showing up at the bottom. (It's a linguistics blog, not a librarianship blog, so I think at some point, the link must have gotten passed around some cataloging listservs.)

There's a short follow-up post here, but it's mainly just a comment on the literary ranking errors.

Most interesting non-fiction thing I've read all week, since my class readings are the introductory ones. I was supposed to be working on Library Automation stuff, but since I want to be a cataloger and I'm taking a metadata class this semester, this barely even qualifies as slacking...


[edit: Nunberg, not Pullum. Geoffrey Pullum is a DIFFERENT linguist at LL. My bad.]

Link via sink_or_swim: cidercupcakes is running an event called Home Team to highlight favorite female fictional characters; she'll be accepting nominations until the end of Sunday July 21st. I strongly recommend you check it out, whether it's to nominate your own, to support another nomination (you can do so by replying to a nomination; all replies to nominations are counted as support votes for nominations, so don't bother reply to anything unless you're trying to show support for a nom. You cannot make a negative vote). If you do want to nominate someone, please check first to make sure the character hasn't already been nominated--characters should only be nominated once, although you can nominate as many unique characters as you'd like. More detailed rules are of course listed at her LJ entry, linked above.

Even if you don't want to nominate or support a nomination, the comments are totally worth a look-see, because people are encouraged to say a little bit about why they're nominated the character, which means it's 7 8 pages and counting of people saying positive things about female characters that they love. (Last time I checked, there were over 700 900 comments to the entry, and there must be a few hundred unique character noms by this point). It's been a long time since I saw a bunch of people being so enthusiastic about so many female characters, and it's filling my heart with warm fuzzies--I haven't seen a single person violate the spirit of the event with character bashing yet. It's such a brilliant fucking idea, and it's working so well. I'm just amazed.

So far, I've nominated Katara (Avatar the Last Airbender), Vala Mal Doran (Stargate SG-1) and Demona (Gargoyles), and of course supported a metric ton of other noms. So go weigh in! Nominate! Support noms! Refresh your soul by watching fandom do something positive and cheerful for once!