This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender.
Personal Note, January 1 2026: I have a new job: Executive Director of the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation . Here's what I wrote for PG's January Newsletter. Greetings from the new Executive Director Happy Public Domain Day! You might hear people say that books published in 1930 have "fallen" into the US Public Domain, or, that they have lost copyright "protection". This is not quite…
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…
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…
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…
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 around the world, all of us waiting for our race to start in 15 minutes. We had waited through the morning (five hours for me) as our faster friends drifted away excitedly and cannons sounded the starts of earlier waves. There was a determined silence as each of us…
Content Warning: AI My Uncle Henry was a Professor of Chemistry at NYU. He lived, for the most part, in his sister-in-law Barbara's 7-story townhouse on East 67th street in Manhattan. He acted as the caretaker of this mansion when Barbara went off living her socialite life in Paris or wherever. My family would stay in the townhouse whenever we came to New York to visit my favorite uncle. This is…
(I'm blogging my journey to the 2024 New York Marathon.) For a long time, it's been a goal of mine to live and work someplace where the language is something other than English. I've studied French in school and I've studied a bit of Mandarin and Japanese. And Swedish. But I'd never had the opportunity to live in another language, to get comfortable enough to have casual conversations and say the…
(I'm blogging my journey to the 2024 New York Marathon. ) At the end of 2020, Strava told me I had run 1362 miles over 12 months. "I hope I never do that again!" I told a running friend. It seemed appropriate that my very last running song from shuffle was Fountains of Wayne's "Stacy's Mom"; founding member Adam Schlesinger had died of Covid. For months of that pandemic year, there wasn't much to…
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…
(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 than 20 years ago. It was a 3rd generation iPod, the first version with an all-touch control. I loved that I could play my Bruce, my Courtney, my Heads and my Alanis at an appropriate volume without bothering any of my classical-music-only family. Looking back on…
(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 again 20 years ago, in 2004. It was a 10K sponsored by my town's YMCA . I had run an occasional race in grad school to join my housemates; and I continued to run a couple of miles pretty regularly to add some exercise to my mostly sitting-at-a-computer lifestyle. I…
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…
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…
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? If that sounds familiar, maybe you've heard of Unglue.it , a web site we launched 10 years ago? We asked people what book they wished was free to everyone and the number one answer was Douglas Adams' Hitchhikers…
Have only made 7 of the 25 so far this year. Bulla, 2021 Julskinka (Christmas Ham). It doesn't count unless you cure it yourself. It once came out blue. Köttbullar (Meatballs). Still working to perfect the Impossible™ version. Limpa (Christmas rye Bread). You absolutely must have this with lever pastej, but its also great with just butter. Sil (Herring). Must have Akvavit to kill the taste. A…
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…
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.…
"Kale emerging from a slush pile" (CC BY, Eric Hellman) Book publishers hate their "slush pile": books submitted for publication unsolicited, rarely with literary merit and unlikely to make money for the publisher if accepted. In contrast, book publishers love their backlist; a strong backlist is what allows a book publisher to remain consistently profitable even when most of their newly published…
Can a book be more valuable if it's free? How valuable? To whom? How do we unlock this value? I've been wrestling with these questions for over ten years now. And for each of these questions, the answer is... it depends. A truism of the bookselling business is that "Every book is different" and the same is true of the book freeing "business". Recently there's been increased interest in academic…
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! Ponte Morandi collapse - Michele…
It turns out that virality on internet platforms is a social hazard! Living in the age of the Covid pandemic, we see around us what happens when we let things grow exponentially. The reason that the novel coronavirus has changed our lives is not that it's often lethal - it's that it found a way to jump from one infected person to several others on average, leading to exponential growth. We are…
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.…
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…
It seems a friend of mine collects four-leaf clovers. When I was a kid, I loved looking for four-leaf clovers in the lawn. It was the same sort of relaxing concentration and observation you use to find a piece of a jigsaw puzzle. But one day, I found a clover plant in front of the garage that had multiple four-leaf clovers. Looking carefully, I found that not only were there four leaf clovers, but…
The first scientific paper I published was submitted to Physical Review B , the world's leading scientific journal in condensed matter physics. Mailing in the manuscript felt like sending my soul into a black hole, except not even Hawking radiation would came back. A seemingly favorable review returned a miraculous two months later: "I found this paper interesting, and I think it probably…