Friday, May 10, 2002

I’m the sort of person who would be quite happy being locked in a good library for the rest of their days, with nothing to do except read. So when Mike Shaver pointed to CiteSeer the other day, I drooled. What Google is to the Web as a whole, CiteSeer is to academic research on the Web. Google gives pages authority by the authority of the pages linking to them; CiteSeer gives academic papers authority by the number of papers citing them. Google provides cached versions of pages; CiteSeer provides cached versions of papers. Google converts all sorts of formats to text or HTML; CiteSeer converts papers to PostScript, PDF, something called “DjVu”, and (most usefully for quick browsing) GIF. Google has a directory; so does CiteSeer. And CiteSeer’s directory has a Human Computer Interaction section! Yeehar. (P.S.: Shaver, not only does your redirect make you hard to link to generally, your lack of permalinks makes you impossible to link to specifically. Grrr.) [mpt] 6:03:50 PM    comment []

How do you design a "Keep Out!" sign to last 10,000 years?. The Department of Energy is creating a vast monument to scare future trespassers away from radioactive waste sites. Their plan: A granite Stonehenge thing with warnings in Navajo! [Salon.com] 6:03:44 PM    comment []

Bathroom breaks and golden geese. Earlier last week, I'd ranted in my LiveJournal about the head of Turner calling me a thief. Now, I'm reading what Mike James has to say about what Brad Templeton has to say about the TiVO, PVR's, and what they are gonna do. Brad offers up a few very good... [0xDECAFBAD: Because a day without caffeine is no day at all.] 6:01:16 PM    comment []