Magpies and Octopi

Anything to Get the Shot: Photographers and War. A blog post at "Picture This: Library of Congress Prints & Photos" on 2016-02-25.

A doctor in Miami saved a baby's life after using Google Cardboard to visualize a complicated heart surgery that had never been done before.

Research suggests that some gadgets can make parents less likely to engage in meaningful give-and-take with their children.

Yoni Applebaum writes: "In 1943, in the middle of the Second World War, America's book publishers took an audacious gamble. They decided to sell the armed forces cheap paperbacks, shipped to units scattered around the globe. Instead of printing only the books soldiers and sailors actually wanted to read, though, publishers decided to send them the best they had to offer. Over the next four years, publishers gave away 122,951,031 copies of their most valuable titles."

James Gleick writes: "Of the many institutions suffering through the world’s metamorphosis from analog to digital (real to virtual, offline to online), few are as beleaguered as that bedrock of our culture, the public library. Budgets are being slashed by state and local governments. Even the best libraries are cutting staff and hours. Their information desks are seemingly superseded by Google, their encyclopedias are gathering dust. And their defining product, the one that lines their shelves, now arrives in the form of a weightless doppelgänger that doesn’t require shelves."

Alberto Manguel writes:  "But today, the principal danger facing libraries comes not from threats like these but from ill-considered changes that may cause libraries to lose their defining triple role: as preservers of the memory of our society, as providers of the accounts of our experience and the tools to navigate them — and as symbols of our identity."

In the Quora thread, “What would you do to be a little smarter every single day?”, readers shared the habits they follow to fuel their brains.Here are some simple actions that could help you become a smarter person."

Neil Gaiman might just be the most beloved fantasy author out there. He writes weird, twisted, exhilarating tales about hidden realities and the bizarre, fanciful creatures that live in them. His works, like Sandman, Fragile Things and American Gods, are pure escapism and a blast to read.

Jonathan Schifman writes: "Index cards are mostly obsolete nowadays. We use them to create flash cards, write recipes, and occasionally fold them up into cool paper airplanes. But their original purpose was nothing less than organizing and classifying every known animal, plant, and mineral in the world. Later, they formed the backbone of the library system, allowing us to index vast sums of information and inadvertently creating many of the underlying ideas that allowed the Internet to flourish."

Jackson Bliss writes: "We now skim everything it seems to find evidence for our own belief system. We read to comment on reality (Read: to prove our own belief system). Reading has become a relentless exercise in self-validation, which is why we get impatient when writers don’t come out and simply tell us what they’re arguing. 

Did you know that scientists have merged jellyfish and feline DNA to create glow-in-the-dark cats? Did you know that the average lead pencil can draw a line 35 miles long?

Teddy Wayne writes: "The increasing absence of physical books, records and photo albums in homes can negatively affect developing intellects."

From novelists to entrepreneurs, a diverse collection of people can be found in the British Library. But what are they up to? We asked some of them…

Dave Stuart writes: "The good things in our lives today tend to be the fruits of work that someone — us, or an inventor, or a former teacher, or our grandmothers — did some time before today. Future You does want you to do some stuff today, this week, this year.

But, the question is, what are those things? What does Future You want you to do?"

 

Image from geralt on paxabay.com

Lisa Nielsen writes: "I took four years of Spanish during my school years, though you wouldn’t know it if you tried having a conversation with me in Spanish. My experience is not unusual. The way language is typically taught in the United States often does not result with language acquisition at the end. I wonder if things would have been different if I was a student today in a time when technology provides such terrific ways to learn languages.

Here are five free digital resources, that can support modern learners in language acquisition."

Tom Barrett writes: "During a design thinking process we need to consider more than just the Toolset - we need to think about the Skillset and the Mindset."