Go To Hellman: Responding to Critical Reviews
The first scientific paper I published was submitted to Physical Review B , the world's leading scientific journal in condensed matter phy...| go-to-hellman.blogspot.com
This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender.| go-to-hellman.blogspot.com
In seventh grade, Miss Phillips had me memorize "Paul Revere's Ride" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. So I did. After finishing "Jabberwocky" to start off the year of run naming, it seemed obvious what my next effort would be. I calculated that I could arrange to end it on the day of the Boston Marathon, thus neatly tying the verse with the running. And to top it off, the "18th of April" cited in the poem was exactly 250 years ago on Friday.| Go To Hellman
There's a war going on on the Internet. AI companies with billions to burn are hard at work destroying the websites of libraries, archives, non-profit organizations, and scholarly publishers, anyone who is working to make quality information universally available on the internet. And the technologists defending against this broad-based attack are doing everything they can to preserve their outlets while trying to remain true to the mission of providing the digital lifeblood of science and cul...| Go To Hellman
The internet gives us new ways to express ourselves. One of the more strenuously esoteric forms of artistic expression is Strava art, in which people do runs that, when mapped, draw pictures. None of my strava art was particularly good, but my running club friends in Stockholm regularly run "elefanten". I spent a year attempting "Found Strava Art", where you just run a new route and give the run a name based on what it looks like. I ran a lot of flowers and space ships, but meh. Last year I n...| Go To Hellman
Content Warning: AI| Go To Hellman
The Internet's big lie is "we respect your privacy". Thanks to cookie banners and such things, the Internet tells us this so many times a day that we ignore all the evidence to the contrary. Sure, there are a lot of people who care about our privacy, but they're often letting others violate our privacy without even knowing it. Sometimes this just means that they are trying to be careful with our "PII". And guess what? You know those cookies you're constantly blocking or accepting? Advertisers...| Go To Hellman
Over the past 15 years or so, libraries around the world have de-emphasized cataloguing. While budgetary concerns and technological efficiencies have been factors in the decline of cataloguing, the emergence of full text search and relevance ranking as practiced by Google and others has proved to be more popular for the vast majority of users. On the open internet, subject classifications have proved to be useless in an environment rife with keyword spam and other search engine optimization t...| Go To Hellman
In days of yore, back when people were blogging, I described the way that libraries were offering ebooks as being a "Pretend It's Print" model. At the time, I felt that this model was designed to sustain and perpetuate the model that libraries and publishers had been using since prehistoric times, and that it ignored most of the possibilities inherent in the ebook. Ebooks could liberate the book from the shackles of their physical existences! | Go To Hellman
What if we get a huge bunch of people together and buy something that lets us do fun things with a book that we all love, while making it accessible as never before? Great idea, isn't it?| Go To Hellman
Have only made 7 of the 25 so far this year. | Go To Hellman
On July 4, 1971, Michael Hart made the text of the Declaration of Independence available on arpanet (which is now the Internet), using the gopher protocol (look it up). Although books in digital form certainly existed before that, many of us regard the beginning of Project Gutenberg as the birth of the ebook. There were computer-readable books on magnetic disks, punch cards and the like, but the revolutionary element of Project Gutenberg was the distribution method. Printed books, after all, ...| Go To Hellman
Libraries know that a big fraction of their book collections never circulate, even once. The flip side of this fact is that a small fraction of a library's collection accounts for most of the circulation. This is often referred to as Zipf's law; as a physicist I prefer to think of it as another manifestation of log-normal statistics resulting a preferential attachment mechanism for reading. (English translation: "word-of-mouth".)| Go To Hellman
"Kale emerging from a slush pile" | Go To Hellman
Can a book be more valuable if it's free? How valuable? To whom? How do we unlock this value?| Go To Hellman
No one is against "Investing in Infrastructure". No one wants bridges to collapse, investing is always more popular than spending, and it's even alliterative! What's more, since infrastructure is almost invisible by definition, it's politically safe to support investing in infrastructure because no one will see when you don't follow through on your commitment!| Go To Hellman
It turns out that virality on internet platforms is a social hazard! | Go To Hellman
I've been working from home full-time for over eleven years - at least partly work-from-home for 20 years. I've managed work-from-home teams, and worked with quite a few others on joint projects. So when some colleagues were sharing their work-from-home experiences, I piped up with some thoughts. When I was asked recently to repeat them, I realized it might be useful to make a list for the blog. Old-style.| Go To Hellman
Today, your identity on the Internet is essentially owned by the big email providers and social networks. Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter - chances are you use one of these services to conveniently log into other services as YOU. You don't need to remember a new password for each service, and the service providers don't have to verify your "identity". What you gain in convenience, you lose in privacy, and that's turned out really well, hasn't it?| Go To Hellman
It seems a friend of mine collects four-leaf clovers.| Go To Hellman
The first scientific paper I published was submitted to Physical Review B , the world's leading scientific journal in condensed matter phy...| go-to-hellman.blogspot.com
This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender.| go-to-hellman.blogspot.com
fresh off the bus It was 11:15AM in the pink D corral of the fifth wave, and surrounding me were runners of all shapes and sizes, from aroun...| go-to-hellman.blogspot.com
This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender.| go-to-hellman.blogspot.com
This is my third comment about the recently published NISO draft "Recommended Practice" (RP) on "Improved Access to Institutionally-Provi...| go-to-hellman.blogspot.com
As I've written , "RA21" could be a Good Thing, or it could be a disaster. The RA21 working group has released its " Recommended Practice...| go-to-hellman.blogspot.com
Hey everybody, I implemented RA21 for access to the blog! Well, that was fun. I'm contributing comment...| go-to-hellman.blogspot.com
Useful Utilities logo from 2004 When librarian (and programmer) Chris Zagar wrote a modest URL-rewriting program almost 20 years ago, ...| go-to-hellman.blogspot.com
This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender.| go-to-hellman.blogspot.com
RA21 vows to "improve access to institutionally-provided information resources". The barriers to access are primarily related to the autho...| go-to-hellman.blogspot.com
The fundamental problem with standards is captured by XKCD 927. XKCD https://xkcd.com/927/ Single sign-on systems have the same proble...| go-to-hellman.blogspot.com
(I'm blogging my journey to the 2024 New York Marathon. You can help me get there. ) For a long time, it's been a goal of mine to live and ...| go-to-hellman.blogspot.com
(I'm blogging my journey to the 2024 New York Marathon. You can help me get there. ) At the end of 2020, Strava told me I had run 1362 m...| go-to-hellman.blogspot.com
(I'm blogging my journey to the 2024 New York Marathon. ) Steve Jobs gave me back my music. Thanks Steve! I got my first iPod a bit more tha...| go-to-hellman.blogspot.com
(I'm blogging my journey to the 2024 New York Marathon. ) It wasn't the 10 seconds that made me into a runner. I started running races agai...| go-to-hellman.blogspot.com
