Death by Cuteness

It’s good to be back. (School came first. There’s always excuses.)

But now that I’m back, I thought I’d give you something special for Christmas….It’s two websites! Hooray!!!! Don’t say I never give you anything.

I found some websites during my school procrastination that maybe will add to seasonal cheer. Just for fun. The first is IWriteLike.com. You copy and paste a section of your own writing, and the site analyzes it and tells you what famous writer’s style your writing is similar to. It’s cool! I don’t know how scientific or accurate it is, but fun. Apparently I write like Charles Dickens, J. K. Rowling, and a new favorite writer, David Foster Wallace.

The second site is sort of a cute-factor motivation. It’s called Written? Kitten! at writtenkitten.net. It’s for those people who see pictures of kittens and fall wildly, madly in love with the picture, suddenly losing all muscle ability and/or consciousness to do anything beyond weeping for cuteness… You know who you are. These kinds of people scare me, mostly because I’ve never been that struck by pictures of baby cats, and also because whenever I try to pet cute, clawed things, I come away bleeding. Not exactly the reinforcement we’re going for. But if you like that sort of thing, this website gives you a fresh kitten every hundred words. 

Say it with me: Awwww…

Merry Christmas, everyone!

 

kitten photo credit to fuelyourwriting.com.

Hey Look! A New Book! of Dr. Seuss Tales

American author and illustrator Dr Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel, 1904 - 1991) sits at his drafting table in his home office with a copy of his book, 'The Cat in the Hat', La Jolla, California, April 25, 1957. (Photo by Gene Lester/Getty Images, courtesy of newsfeed.time.com)

Random House has uncovered seven Seuss stories that were published in magazines in the 1950s but have never appeared as books. Acceptable reactions include “Happy as a clam, I am!” and “Oh, the fun words I’ll get to say!”

Read more: http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/04/11/hey-look-its-a-new-book-lost-dr-seuss-stories-to-be-published/#ixzz1JMvHBn7Q

I found this article, crawling the web. I thought about how at some point, every author was an unknown and un-famous person who had to scrub their own dishes and drive a fairly boring car to the grocery store to eat normal food… and then a few do become famous, and they still have to scrub their own dishes and drive boring cars to normal food places! Presumably. Famous people are still people, which is refreshing.

Every famous writer has a beginning. Dr. Seuss’s happened to be with prose stories, before he developed his unique rhyming style. I’m really interested to see what these stories are like, and how Dr. Seuss might have changed. My introduction to Dr. Seuss was through an actual doctor, my family’s real-life children’s doctor, who would quote The Cat in the Hat in its entirety (say Aah!) while poking things down your throat. It was great.

Here’s my question for the day: Do you ever meet people who quote pieces of literature to you in completely irrelevant situations?

An App for Librarians?

Have you ever lost a library book inside the library? I don’t recommend it; it makes the librarians crabby. But now, technology might prevent all that–check this out!

Awesome Augmented Reality App Could Save Librarians Hours
By Audrey Watters / March 27, 2011 6:30 PM / 14 Comments

If you’ve ever worked in a library, you’re familiar with the drudgery of shelf reading. That’s the process of verifying that all the books on a shelf are in the right order, based on their call numbers. Books get out of order fairly easily, when they’re taken off the shelf and examined, for example, or when they’re just stuck in the wrong place.

Miami University’s Augmented Reality Research Group (MU ARRG! – that exclamation point, I confess, is my addition), led by Professor Bo Brinkman, has developed an Android app that could save librarians a lot of time and hassle. Using the Android’s camera, the app “reads” a bookshelf, and with an AR overlay, quickly flags those books that are misplaced. It will also point to the correct place on the bookshelf so the book can easily be re-shelved correctly.

→Click here to read the rest of the short article:  Awesome Augmented Reality App Could Save Librarians Hours. (There’s also a brief video, because showing is better than telling.)

I found this fascinating. An app that reads the book spines for you?  Nothing technological should surprise me anymore, because clearly computers are about to become conscious and take over the world, but I’m still amazed by the beautiful, useful things people create.

The Black Hole: Where lost library books go.

Now the next step is to put a tracking device on all the books in the library. I’ve always thought that librarians should be able to track books with a GPS-like button. They could look on their little screen and trace the blinking dot right to Mrs. Pemble’s house, who stole that library book 37 years ago and never gave it back, the scum. Wouldn’t that be useful?

For that matter, I think these homing devices should be readily available to the average homeowner, billpayer, and otherwise contributing citizen, inasmuch as I voted last semester. I would promptly catalog and locate all the lost things in my life (such as textbooks, my wallet, and ALL the spoons). Of course, then I’d lose the device, or the app would self-destruct, or it’d get stuck in a blender for a YouTube video…(“Don’t try this at home.” Oh, but people do. They really do.)

If you’ve worked in a library (or ever lost anything whatsoever) do you see any usefulness in this app?