This is big: Library of Alexandria discovered.
Archaeologists have found what they believe to be the site of the Library of Alexandria, often described as the world’s first major seat of learning.
A Polish-Egyptian team has excavated parts of the Bruchion region of the Mediterranean city and discovered what look like lecture halls or auditoria.
One of the greatest losses of antiquity. For more background, Wikipedia has a really good entry on the Library of Alexandria.
So, what’s even geekier than meeting up with a bunch of fellow bloggers? Well, blogging about it, of course! So, here’s my summary of our Bend Bloggers meetup tonight.
Nine of us showed up, which was pretty impressive. In no particular order, they were: me; Shannon of There’s Always Something; Jake of UtterlyBoring; Jesse of Bring Back the 80’s!; Barney of Bend.com; Roger of High Desert Skeptic; Simone of On the Bright Side…; Dane of Brainside Out; and Kerry of Bend Buzz.
I had a good time; it was cool to put the faces to the sites. Though I gotta say, I was nervous enough at first and was sitting in just enough sun to warm up and start sweating like a pig for a while, which, you know, is just great for impressing people you meet for the first time. Yikes. Sorry, guys.
When someone asked how everyone got into blogging, I gave the entirely lame (but mostly true) answer of, “It sort of just happened.” Which is true, but sucks as an answer and could definitely be fleshed out. Sometime soon I’ll give a whole history, both to how I got started blogging and where “Chuggnutt” comes from.
And as to a couple of conversations that got left unfinished:
Shannon: McMenamins is known for buying up older, historic sites and turning them into brewpubs, bed-and-breakfasts, restaurants, etc. The Kennedy School in Portland is a good example, which has a brewpub (or two), a restaurant, bed-and-breakfast (old classrooms are the rooms), a cigar bar, a liquor bar, a movie theater, and more I think. The Edgefield is similar. And they’re buying (have bought?) the Old St. Francis School here in Bend and are supposed to be opening it up this fall (although they’ve said that the past 3 years).
Roger: Now that I’ve thought about it, it seems like I recognize you from somewhere as well. Hmmm…
Dane: Well, no actual unfinished conversation that I recall. I just had to say, Damn! You are animated, dude.
Reminder: the first Bend Blogger meetup is tonight, May 12, at 7:30pm at the Bend Brewing Company downtown. If you’re a blogger and in Bend tonight, come on by.
BBC’s address:
1019 NW Brooks St.
Bend, OR 97701
And here’s the map to Bend Brewing.
My wife finished packing up nearly all the books today, in preparation for the move next month. I only kept a few out, on-hand; in the spirit of useless lists, here’s what’s left on my shelf:
And a couple of books on cheese I borrowed from my mother.
Amusingly, at the library today I picked up Beer for Dummies. Not because I need to learn more about beer (well, not entirely; beer is one of the few topics I have some in-depth knowledge on), but because I like the “Dummies” books and want to see how well the topic of beer is treated. A quick survey of the contents reveals a decent spread:
Should be an interesting read.
Since I subscribed to Reuter’s Oddly Enough RSS feed the other day, I’ve noticed that about a sixth of the odd news involved biting in some way. Weird? Yeah. Creepy weird.
I found this passage from Frontier Doctor to be particularly interesting:
When I came to eastern Oregon in 1905, all of the beautiful pine timber was an open park-like forest, without any underbrush, where game could be seen for a long distance. Each summer there were many forest fires, the vast majority of which were caused by lightning. As there was no underbrush, these fires consumed nothing but the dead pine needles, cones and twigs that had been blown to the ground by the winds. The little blaze, only a few inches high, crept slowly over the ground and cleaned the floor of the forest of all debris, killing the pine beetles on the ground, but did no damage whatever to the green trees. There were a few dead trees scattered through the forest that had been killed by the pine beetles. These dead trees almost invariable took fire and burned up and the beetles with them. It was these annual fires which had existed for centuries that had produced the beautiful open forests free from dangerous underbrush, and killed so many of the pine beetles that they were held in check. The tiny blaze of these fires was not hot enough to injure the pine seed. When the timber was cut off and the sun was allowed to strike the ground, these little pine seeds began to germinate and a new second growth of trees immediately sprang up.
No one tried to put these annual fires out, as they were known to be a benefit to the timber. When the big lumber companies began to buy the timber, their representatives in the field saw to it that their holding were burned over every year. If the lightning did not start enough fires, the timber men started more of them.
Nearly one hundred years later, I’ve never known these forests not to be thick with underbrush, and the “normal” forest fire is a raging inferno that destroys everything it touches.
What happened? Ignorance. As usual.
For a while now I’d been watching the previews for “Van Helsing” and wondering just why that movie had been made. Sure, sure, summer blockbuster and all that, but I mean what’s the point? Taking characters out of classic literature, going all League of Extraordinary Gentlemen on them, and making a movie that really has nothing to do with Dracula or Van Helsing other than names—is it really so hard to come up with something original? (Or are they hoping to cash in on that key demographic of English lit majors who also happen to like early twentieth-century monster movies?) It really sounded like something John Carpenter would come up with, and I was wondering about Hugh Jackman‘s choice of movie roles.
Well, we went and saw the movie tonight, and… I’m still wondering why it was made. Oh, it wasn’t out and out terrible—I’ve seen much worse—but I’m still left scratching my head over it. Otherwise, it had big action, the effects were good, the CGI morphing sequences well done, the actors had a good time camping and vamping it up. Some scenes were creative, some were almost painful to watch. And, could someone please explain to me, at about halfway through the movie why Van Helsing pulled out a bottle of what looked like green Scope mouthwash to drink?
Ah, well. It’ll probably be the number one movie in America after this weekend. And you just know they left it open for sequels. They’re aching for sequels. And if they’re going to be pillaging literature again for villains—or even using classic movie monsters—it’s amusing to speculate as to who they would be. The Invisible Man? The Creature from the Black Lagoon? The Blob?
Here’s an interesting site I stumbled upon today: The Degree Confluence Project. From their homepage:
The goal of the project is to visit each of the latitude and longitude integer degree intersections in the world, and to take pictures at each location. The pictures and stories will then be posted here.
Sort of like a blog post for every latitude and longitude intersection on Earth (well, every one on land, anyway). Cool idea. Here’s the nearest confluence to Bend.
This reminds me of another idea I had along these lines after reading an article in Discover Magazine: geographically-based Web browsing. It’s not a new idea, I can’t claim it, but here’s the gist: You have a portable device that’s connected wirelessly to the internet (laptop, PDA, whatever) and is GPS-enabled, so you have realtime GPS coordinates for wherever you are and a live net connection. Then, you browse pages that aren’t accessible via a Web address, but accessible instead based on your current location—tagged by the latitude and longitude fed via the GPS. These “pages” can be like standard Web pages—ads, for instance, for stores that might be close by—or they can be more interactive—forms for users to enter notes tagged to that location that can be read by others. Virtual graphitti.
So, there would pages and content that you could only access while sitting at a certain bench in the park, and totally different stuff that could only be accessed in front of the shoestore downtown, etc. etc. Sort of a cybergeek way to “map” the Web onto the real, 3D world. To find pages you’d have to navigate to the corresponding real-world location. I like the user interaction part of it, too, the thought being that anyone could leave those “notes” for others. That’s pretty key. The term I had at the time for all this was “geosurfing.”
Imagine some of the cultural weirdness this could engender: most content would be tagged to “people-safe” areas like sidewalks, parks, buildings, etc., but there would always be daredevils who would tag a geosite corresponding to the middle of a busy city street or freeway, accessible only to those brave or stupid enough to try. Or horny teenagers (or porn entrepreneurs) would have cached geosites of porn in secret or obscure places (creepy thought: like the end of the pew third row from the back of the local church), or in bars to help enforce adult-only sites. Geosites near movie theaters could have user-posted reviews of what’s showing, or spoilers, and restaurant sites might have similar notes—need to figure out a good wine or recommended dish when on a date? Check the local notes discreetly. It goes on.
The main drawback? No ubiquitous WiFi. So while this might be a cool application to build (the data model and concepts are sketched out pretty well in my head), and might work in a large, well-wired city like San Francisco or New York, it really wouldn’t work at all here in Bend, and that’s obviously where I’d most like to use it. So, filed away for the future.
Well, it’s official, there’s gonna be a Bend blogger meetup on Wednesday, May 12, at 7:30pm at the Bend Brewing Company. Jake blogged it here, and there’s even a Bend.com press release on it here. All are welcome, the more the merrier.
The funny thing about this is, my wife saw the press release on Bend.com and knew about it before I did. Aren’t I supposed the one who’s plugged into this stuff?
