Google Books

books.google.com is a collection of millions of books, all scanned and put online for anyone to look up and read, all for free. The majority of the collection consists of books that are in the public domain, so those that either have no copyrights or whose copyrights have ended, but Google has also made some agreements with publishers to provide others types of books for free. Google books works directly with many colleges/universities, such as Harvard and Stanford, using their collections to add to Google Books. They received lawsuits from individuals claiming copyright infringement, the biggest coming in 2008. It ended with Google agreeing to pay a total of $125 million to rights holders of books and to create a Books Rights Registry.

To cover the cost of some non-public domain books, Google Books might charge a fee for some books, but most numbers show that the odds of Google Books making money is slim. Sergai Brin, co-founder of Google, said that they never expected to make any money from Google Books.


I think this is a wonderful thing, with a really great potential. I personally love to read, and most of the things I read are religious, mythology, philosophy, and history, and much of those texts have fallen into the public domain. Also, although I learned it a little late, my Differential Equations textbook, which cost me almost $200, is on Google Books for free. I think that if Google continues to get agreements with publishers of textbooks, it could really help to offset the cost of college by making the textbooks free for anyone to view.

google: digital mythology

I search "digital mythology," and came across the site http://www.paulsquire.com/mythology/mythology1.html. Paul Squire, the artist of the site, uses Photoshop, a wacom tablet and a mac as the main tools of creation to "twist and stretch new worlds into being, re-imagining classical myths and esoteric themes, which some have labelled 'The New Grotesque'" The specific images that I found are labeled after Greek and Roman gods, as well as a few other myths, such as Arachne and the battle of the Titans. While I love these pictures, the only qualm I have is the one on Apollo. Apollo was the twin brother to Artemis, son of Leto. As 'the most Greek of the Gods,' his symbols were the lute and the bow. It was even through the intervention of Apollo that Paris was was able to kill Achilles in The Iliad. The problem I have with the picture is that Apollo is standing over the sun. A popular misconception is that Apollo was the/a sun god. From a strictly mythological background, from the original texts, Apollo had nothing to do with the sun. The sun god was Helios in Greece, and Sol in Rome.

Random Wikipedia: American Conservatory of Music

For this post, I did a 'random article' in Wikipedia, and was shown the page for the American Conservatory of Music. It is located in Hammond, Indiana, but was originally in Chicago. It is one of the oldest music schools in the country, having been founded in 1886. By the 1970's, it was considered a daughter institution to Julliard.

The institution had problems in the '80's, when issues of financial mismanagement and misappropriation of endowments were called into question. In 1992, the institute asked for funding through the Illinois Board of Higher Education, to which authorities responded by trying to assert licensing control, which would cause the Conservatory to lose control over its curricula, tuition policy, and governing structure. After bankruptcy proceedings the institute in Chicago closed.

In 1998, the Conservatory moved to the new campus in Hammond, and was chartered in 1999. It officially moved there in 2000. The institute is affiliated with two campuses, one in Hammond and the other in Santa Elena, Belize. The Conservatory is now operating in awarding bachelor's, master's and doctoral courses without any federal or state accredation.

Shadow of the Colossus

Shadow of the Colossus is an adventure game developed by Sony Computer Entertainment released in 2005. In it, a man named Wander must fight and kill 16 colossi to resurrect his dead lover.

The awards it has won are numerous, from Best Game Design and Best Visual Arts, to Outstanding Acheivement in Art Direction from the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences. It also ranks in the Top 10 PS2 games in many magazine and internet lists.

But while being a fun game in and of itself, what amazed me was how I became so enveloped in the world. There are long stretches of just riding from one place to the next, not doing anything but riding, but the way its done fully immerses you in the world. It is the first game I have ever played where I have just stopped and looked around to see it as art. The lighting, the graphics, every shot from the game looks like a painting. And apart from this, the soundtrack is flawless. I even have it on my mp3 player.

This is where I think video games should strive for more often. Lately, many games have been pushed out because they have better graphics, or better enemies. This game had 16 enemies in the entire game, and the graphics weren't overly great, but the enemies were done with perfection, and the look of the game fit with what they could use. Rather than striving for more and more, Shadow of the Colossus went far less than what was normally standard, and I believe that others should follow.

Google Search: Digital Candy

Digital Candy 2.2
Digital Candy is a program that searches for files using bittorrent networks. BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing program that allow for a transference to large files. Blizzard Entertainment, the game development company, uses BitTorrent to distribute most of its World of Warcraft content, up to and including the game itself. Many big-name open source and freeware projects use, and often encourage, BitTorrent to reduce the load on their servers.
BitTorrent has had problems with legality, with most of the problems dealing with accusations of copyright infringement.
As far as Digital Candy 2.2 is concerned, it doesn’t look like the kind of thing that I would use, mostly because the last time it was updated was in April 2006. Beyond that, it only works on the Windows OS, which limits who can use it.

Info from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_%28protocol%29
http://digital-candy.findmysoft.com/

Google search: Digital Penguin

Linux’s logo is Tux the Penguin. In 1996 there was discussion on a logo for Linux, and most suggestions involved parodies of other logos, or a shark or eagle. Eventually Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux, mentioned how he liked penguins. When asked to explain, Torvalds said: So when you think "penguin", you should be imagining a slightly overweight penguin, sitting down after having gorged itself, and having just burped. It's sitting there with a beatific smile - the world is a good place to be when you have just eaten a few gallons of raw fish and you can feel another "burp" coming.

He then went on to talk about how they could then add on to the penguin, like have it leaning against the world, or playing ice-hockey against the FreeBSD demon.

Also, there is a real, live Tux the Penguin. He lives at the Bristol Zoo in England, and is a Black-Footed Penguin, which is also referred to as the Jackass Penguin, due to the donkey-like braying sound they make.

Slaughterhouse Five

I just finished re-reading Kurt Vonnegut's book Slaughterhouse Five, and again am amazed by it. Overarching-ly, it is about the Burning of Dresden in WWII, but it entails so much more than that, and yet it is hard to describe it all. There are aliens, a proof that free will is incorrect, and many other humorous things, and yet most of them you can't laugh at. This book is the definition of black humor. He somehow managed to link aliens that look like plungers with a glove on them with one of the worst days in WWII, when over 100,000 innocent civilians were fire-bombed to death. It sounds impossible, and yet he managed to do it in a way that doesn't downplay what happened on that day, it doesn't glorify war in any possible way, and yet it is still one of the best war-novels I have ever read.