By Patrick Sawer
Last Updated: 3:04am BST 21/04/2008
[telegraph.co.uk]

Whisper it if you dare, but the age-old Highland bagpipe - beloved of sentimental Scots and American tourists in search of their Highland roots - is in fact a recent invention.

A controversial new study has claimed that far from being the time-honoured instrument which led the clans into battle against the Auld Enemy, the bagpipe as we know it was developed in the early 1800s.

It now seems that, like the kilt and most tartans, the tradition of the great Highland bagpipe was something manufactured for the benefit of nostalgic Scottish émigrés.

[...]

[via Funky Plaid at Swirling Vortex of Verisimilitude]

Labels: history, information

   posted by Sal Towse at  10:51 AM|| |

Jimbo Wales at the Commonwealth Club

Founder, Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation and Wikia

[...]

"Come hear Wales talk about what's next on his agenda, his opinions on the politics of the Internet and his thoughts on the accuracy of Wikipedia posts."

6:00 p.m., Check-in | 6:30 p.m., Program
7:30 p.m., Wine and Hors d'oeuvres Reception

Club office, 595 Market St., 2nd Floor, San Francisco
$12 for Members
$20 for Non-Members
$7 for Students (with valid ID)

Labels: culture, information, San Francisco, web2.0, webstuff

   posted by Sal Towse at  4:46 PM|| |

Love data and mashups and obscure weird factoids and coincidences?

Check out Swivel.

For a taste of what's on-site, check out Tasty Data Goodies

Labels: information, resource, URL, webstuff

   posted by Sal Towse at  10:17 AM|| |

DRO has posted her updated "Tax Tips and Resources For Freelance Writers" over at InkyGirl.

Here's my annual updated list of useful tax resources for freelance writers. Sadly (for me, anyway, since I live in Canada), most of the info is specific to the U.S., but I did manage to find some info specific to Canada and other countries, listed below in the "international tax info" section partway down this list.

I was unable to find ANY tax-related resources of use to writers outside of North America. Suggestions welcome! [...]

Labels: information, URL, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  12:05 PM|| |

Checked and updated all links in the Business section of Internet Resources for Writers.

Before breakfast! Before coffee even!

The page includes over one hundred links classified in subsections:

• Unsorted
  
• Agents
  
• Book Publishers
  
• Copyright
  
• E-Publishing
  
• Legal, Contracts, & Taxes
  
• Marketing, Sales, Promotion, & Publicity
  
• Print-On-Demand Publishing
  
• Self-publishing
  
• Your Website

Replaced some broken links. Added a few. Commented out links to my articles on Web design and copyright that I wrote for Computer Bits, which is no more. I need to bring those articles onto either this site or internet-resources.com some day, now that the Computer Bits online archives are no more.

Labels: information, internet resources for writers, URL

   posted by Sal Towse at  10:36 AM|| |

One of the sessions I missed at AAAS was a session Sunday titled, "The Neurobiology of Chocolate: A Mind-Altering Experience?"

Harold Schmitz of Mars, Inc. co-organized the symposium. Mars, Inc. happens to be sponsoring research into why chocolate is good for you and how they can make it even better. (Heard of CocoaVia?) I'd spent time in a session a few years back covering similar and/or earlier research on the subject. This session covered recent research including a presentation by Ian MacDonald (University of Nottingham Medical School) on "The Effect of Flavanol-Rich Cocoa on the fMRI Response to a Cognitive Task in Healthy Young People."

Yee haw.

Luckily, there were science writers in the audience to suck it all up for me. CNN reports: Cocoa may improve brain blood flow

Sunday, I was elsewhere -- in an all-day seminar on Virtual Worlds which included papers like "Comparing Mental Health Applications Using Individually Administered Virtual Reality and Second Life: Conceptual and Ethical Issues" from Skip Rizzo, USC, and "Virtual Publics: Youths' Lives in Emergent Social Worlds" from Danah Boyd at UCB.

John Lester (AKA Pathfinder Linden) at Linden Labs organized the seminar. Linden Labs, just down the hill from me, is the creator (are the creators?) of Second Life, which I messed around with playing with after a panel at the Commonwealth Club that we attended last December.

I finally signed up yesterday but with my computer's hiccupy-response to requests to turn and move and change the color of my coat, my experience wasn't optimal. Problems with scaling? Problems with my computer? I'll try again later today and see if I get further.

Sorry I was to miss out on the latest scoop about cocoa, but the Virtual Worlds seminars were crack.

[Thanks for the cocoa link, Sam]

Labels: information, life, SecondLife, webstuff

   posted by Sal Towse at  7:45 AM|| |

Found the MacTutor History of Mathematics while looking for information on Johann Benedict Listing, the guy (not August Ferdinand Möbius) who actually discovered the Möbius Strip.

Labels: factoid, information, URL

   posted by Sal Towse at  2:04 PM|| |

Spent a chunk of the morning checking, updating and augmenting the collection of links in the Reference & Research section of Internet Resources for Writers.

The page includes over two hundred links classified in subsections:

• Unsorted
  
• Assorted Information
  
• Experts
  
• Maps
  
• Names & Naming
  
• News Links
  
• Online Texts
  
• Research & Reference
  
• Search Engines (including image search and video search engines)
  
• Tools
  
• Warnings & Rumors

Amazing resources out there on the Web. What a wURLd.

Labels: information, internet resources for writers, URL

   posted by Sal Towse at  1:14 PM|| |

From the Making of America collection comes a link to An elementary dictionary of the English language. By Joseph E. Worcester, LL. D. (1865).

I love old dictionaries. The actual wordstuff for this one begins at page 31, after all the frontal matter regarding pronunciation and all that.

Seeing how a word was used in 1865 gives one a glimpse at how the current day definition evolved. Some words in Worcester's dictionary have evolved beyond recognition. Some no longer exist.

e.g. p 168 (lacerable - lapful)

laconism - pithy phrase or expression
Lady-Day - 25th March. The Annunciation.
laic- a layman; -- opposed to clergyman.
lamantine - an animal; manatee or sea-cow.
lambative - a medicine taken by licking
laniate - to tear in pieces; to lacerate
lanuginous - downy; covered with soft thin hair

Some of those words are still in use today, although perhaps not in as common use as they were 142 years ago. "lanuginous" was used in the 2006 Scripps National Spelling Bee finals.

Fun stuff, words.

Labels: books, history, information, URL, wordstuff

   posted by Sal Towse at  2:20 PM|| |

Found a link to this site from someone I know who is working through the Japanese language course and thinks highly of the experience.

MIT OpenCourseWare is

a free and open educational resource (OER) for educators, students, and self-learners around the world.

MIT OCW:

• Is a publication of MIT course materials
  
• Does not require any registration
  
• Is not a degree-granting or certificate-granting activity
  
• Does not provide access to MIT faculty

Japanese, German, Chinese (Mandarin), Spanish, French, tralala come under "Foreign Languages and Literatures" as do classes about cultures and texts written in those languages such as "A Passage to India: Introduction to Modern Indian Culture and Society," "Twentieth and Twentyfirst-Century Spanish American Literature," "East Asian Cultures: From Zen to Pop."

The Chinese I class, f'rex, includes a downloadable textbook and other study materials. The course assumes you know absolutely NOTHING about the language.

The purpose of this course is to develop:

• Basic conversational abilities (pronunciation, fundamental grammatical patterns, common vocabulary, and standard usage)
  
• Basic reading and writing skills (in both the traditional character set and the simplified)
  
• An understanding of the language learning process so that you are able to continue studying effectively on your own.

Or you could take Introduction to Aerospace Engineering and Design, Computational Cognitive Science, Urban Design Politics, or Special Seminar in Applied Probability and Stochastic Processes.

The list of Readings for Bestsellers: Detective Fiction changes each time the class is given but the Fall 2006 session uses the following books:

• Doyle, Arthur Conan. Six Great Sherlock Holmes Stories. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1992. ISBN: 0468270556.
  
• Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire. New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1999. ISBN: 0679723420.
  
• Poe, Edgar Allen. Tales of Terror and Detection. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1995. ISBN: 0486287440.
  
• Cain, James M. The Postman Always Rings Twice. New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1989. ISBN: 0679723250.
  
• Hammett, Dashiell. The Maltese Falcon. New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1989. ISBN: 0679722645.
  
• Christie, Agatha. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. New York, NY: Berkley Publishing, 2004. ISBN: 0425200477.
  
• Weber, K. J. Five Minute Mysteries. Philadelphia, PA: Running Press, 1989. ISBN: 0894716905.
  
• Sobol, D. J. Two Minute Mysteries. New York, NY: Scholastic, 1991. ISBN: 0590447874.
  
• Browning, Robert. My Last Duchess and Other Poems. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1993. ISBN: 0486277836.
  
• Sophocles. Oedipus Rex. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1991. ISBN: 0486268772.

The world is my oyster and MIT Open Courseware is a pearl.

Labels: information, URL

   posted by Sal Towse at  4:02 PM|| |

Making of America -- 19th c primary sources (and some 20th c too)

Making of America (MoA) is a digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction. The collection is particularly strong in the subject areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology. The collection currently contains approximately 10,000 books and 50,000 journal articles with 19th century imprints. For more details about the project, see About MoA.

Amazing collection of stuff.

I was wandering around today trying to see if I could find some written context for "The man who doesn't read books has no advantage over the man who can't read them" (and variations), attributed to Mark Twain -- a discussion that popped up yesterday on Project Wombat (formerly, the Stumpers list).

I never did find confirmation or attribution for the alleged Twain quote, but I did find an essay -- patronizing to say the least -- explaining to the dear little women what sorts of books they should be asking for their husband's permission to buy and read: a six-page article titled, "Reading," by L.L. Hamline, found in "The Ladies' repository: a monthly periodical, devoted to literature, arts, and religion."

Whoo boy.

With the thousands of books and thousands of articles the MOA folks have scanned and continued to scan, you could spend a long while in these archives.

Maneuverability is good. The search is FAST and can be simple, Boolean, &c. MOA pulls up matches giving title &c. and number of pages your search terms are on. You can wend through the pages of a given work or ask for those specific pages within the work that have your search term(s).

The app doesn't highlight the found word on the page, which is unfortunate when you have a dense page filled with tiny print.

Interesting stuff. A peek into where we've come from.

Labels: books, history, information, URL

   posted by Sal Towse at  12:52 PM|| |

From WSU, the archived coursework and resources for the university freshman-level World Cultures class.

Texts, maps, &c. Ignore the "available for distance learning registation" [sic] notices and the links to discussion areas. This site is archival only.

Want to read up on Bhagavad-Gita? You'll find yourself here. Click "contents" and you'll get to an online text (a downloadable version is also available) or click "resources" and you'll get a list of hyperlinks to other online texts, essays, commentaries and such like.

While away the afternoon.

No search functionality, alas.

(Found when searching for the etymology of "no retreat, no surrender" -- the title of DeLay's new book-- which drew me toward Sparta, which brought me here. Could any of the erudite readers reading this tell me whether there was a Spartan rule which translated as "no retreat, no surrender"? Thanks much.)

Labels: information, URL

   posted by Sal Towse at  11:57 AM|| |