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Remember when, if you needed to remember the date of the Treaty of Westphalia1 or the members of the First Triumvirate2, you had to go find a book with the information and look it up? Remember when every true fact, and a heck of a lot of false ones, were more than a click away?
Remember trying to explain Schoolhouse Rock, or Tom Lehrer, or Bagpuss, without recourse to examples?
Remember when, if you lost track of something like this, you knew you would never find it again without the most extraordinary luck?
I think I just found another piece of my sensawunda as well. How about you? What have you found lately?
Episodes of the Batman television series and the 1966 film, which I introduced to my younger son (he's twenty, and had no idea they existed). He's now taken to saying things like 'Holy sardine, Batman.'
I just had a similar experience--I idly asked if anyone on my LiveJournal friends-list knew how to do something I've been wondering about for a couple of years now, and shortly afterward someone popped up with the programs I'd need and the steps required.
I love the internet.
The internet allowed me to find my friend Yoko after a 9-year gap during which the internet was unleashed onto the the world.
When people referred to the Wayback Machine, it always sounded like a wish, or at best a euphemism for a deep Google search. I didn't realize what it actually was, and that it actually is. But very recently someone here linked to it, and I took a look, and found an old blog post I had managed to overwrite. So thanks, ML!
As a librarian, I love it. It means that the boring part of our job has mostly been automated away and we can focus on the more interesting parts.
"Information, meet You."
"You, this is Information."
A few weeks ago, there was a RASFW thread about the first SF book you ever read. I recalled some titles that I had read when I was perhaps six years old. (They were published around 1970.) Then I thought, hey, I might as well buy those.
A week later, I had all six stacked on my desk. Thank you Internet (specifically abebooks.com).
But there's another layer to this story. I had long forgotten the titles and authors of these books. I only had them recorded because I asked on rec.arts.sf-lovers in 1991. I was able to describe enough of the storylines for someone to remember the books. Thank you Internet-of-yore (specifically Steve Hoy of mdcbbs.com).
(The books were by Bamman, Odell, and Whitehead.)
Serge @3:
To the extent that People are Things, yes, I have also found long lost people on the Internet. My best friend from high school turns out to be an editor at Locus; seeing her again at Worldcon in Glasgow was six kinds of wonderful. And I'm even in touch with my very first boyfriend, thanks to the marvels of Twitter.
Tony @5:
Since I work in the field of library search engines, I know exactly how you feel.
Oh, do I ever know this. Whenever I lose my net connection (e.g. last month, when the wonders of BT lost me my net link for nearly a week) it becomes agonisingly hard to do virtually anything. Even in fields like mine (software development), where it's theoretically possible to reinvent every wheel yourself, it's really really *annoying* to not have recourse to the accumulated public knowledge of the netted world. I hit walls all the damn time, permanently slowed to the rate of one human thinking. I can't leap from problem to solution by way of some other helpful person's thought at all. It's horrible.
In fields like history and so forth, or indeed any of the historical sciences, where you have a choice of finding the information in incredibly dense and (sigh) often-badly-indexed or just plain lost books, or not getting it at *all*...
... however did we manage before search engines?
I too live in the world of university libraries, research institutions and digital databases.
Research and methods for writing history and biography are so different now.
Love, C.
However, unusually, I've performed no research today of any kind, not even one single tiny fact.
I've been grocery shopping and cooking. It's been too hot to do either for so long er'tr out of everything -- and My Person is home again!
Love, C.
I found my great-great-grandfather. We were going through some papers after my grandmother's death and discovered a medal from Gettysburg engraved with his name. An internet search led me to a number of Civil War history sites, and I found the roster of his regiment. The site also had a picture and the location of his grave. Which turned out to be within 10 miles of the house my parents have lived in for 30 years. We visited last October. It was fascinating to be able to learn so much-- so easily!-- about a side of the family that we knew nothing about.
Me, last night: "Hey, wasn't there a book a couple years ago about the CIA or the Pentagon or whoever doing experiments on weird psychic stuff during the cold war?"
Me, today: has a hold at the library on "Men Who Stare at Goats"
Yesterday I found a recording of Tammy Faye Bakker singing glurge-a-riffic songs.
I was skimming this article in the Atlantic Monthly : Is Google Making Us Stupid? -- and thought, no. It's definitely making me smarter. I have always been absent-minded. Where before a fact that fell out of my head would have stayed fallen, now I can retrieve it quickly. If a brain is like a computer, the internet brings that metaphor to reality -- I can access and load into temporary memory (the kind I use to think about something) tons of information that I never had to memorize. Then I can trust that it'll be there, retrievable, if I ever need it again, and can use my limited brainspace for more immediately important things.
I don't think the internet is making us dummy terminals, though. I don't have the incredible recall of someone like my brother. (My brother is the kind of person who can memorize, recall, and hold forth about tremendous quantities of facts. I've always envied him, because I have to rehearse things until I'm ready to scream if I want to give a talk without recourse to notes, and still usually stumble. Whereas he could give you a 30-minute lecture on, say, ethanol policy off the top of his head.) So I need the external memory of the internet more than some people. But some of those facts do stick in my head, in enough detail for my brain to put them into analysis -- so I end up synthesizing some very interesting ideas that I would never otherwise have come to. And because the detailed facts are quickly available, it's easy to refine those ideas.
Over on SmartBitchesTrashyBooks, the HABO* bits are incredible. With a minimum of description, readers are able to identify romance novels. Much like people here ID SF/F/H. Impressive as all get out.
*Help A Bitch Out
Lost (or merely coveted) Lego sets of the early 80s. Every book I can think of wanting, without having to remember for more than 30 seconds that I want it - long enough to order it, rather than having to remember it long enough for my next trip to a bookstore. People - occasionally, but not as often as most people seem to, perhaps because I'm a misanthropic monster. A definition of absolutely everything a mere search away - and not just a bunch of undistinguished search results, but a real article written and edited by real people and guaranteed to be on-topic, cross-referenced to information on absolutely everything else.
This subject reminds me, sort of, of a remark that goes around in geeky circles: the idea that you don't have to remember anything anymore because you can just look it up, and so that part of your brain responsible for remembering facts atrophies. Sounded plausible or at least like a good line to me, but the more I thought about it the less it seemed to be the case for me. The availability of Wikipedia and search engines has resulted in being able to remember more information because it's so easily refreshed in passing. Can't remember whether that rebellion was 16th or 17th century? Quick Wikipedia check, ah it was 16th, that fact now refreshed in my memory and ready for new connections.
Pre-Internet, well: 16th or 17th? Hmm. No idea. I guess I could look it up, but that seems like a lot of work. So I'll just keep letting that memory fade away, vaguer and vaguer.
And because of the variety of subjects I wind up covering in a typical dig through Wikipedia (and usually Google & Amazon & sometimes Flickr too, for more background or books), the amount of interconnected stuff that's been recently in memory is much larger than it would be if I had to go to the library to find a set of books on a subject, and then wind up running around in the library trying to find the connections. The interconnections are key to having some novel thoughts on the subject, and the fact that you can know those connections without great effort helps you fit your own thoughts into the pattern. It's not just a set of disconnected facts, in other words.
As I mentioned, Google plays another role in finding background information, and so does Amazon for locating relevant books (and sometimes Ebay for locating relevant physical objects), and Flickr for finding the right photos. So it's not just Wikipedia. But it sure is mostly Wikipedia.
Anyway, point is, I don't think Wikipedia or the wider Internet makes you stupider. I think it makes you much smarter. Hooray for the future.
For me, it was looking at pictures broadcast back from the Mars Rover. I had sort of gotten used to the idea of my computer being a "window on the world", but to have it suddenly be a window onto another world... that was mind-blowing.
Caroline posted at #13 while I was composing with a similar thought. In case the repetition seems odd.
I found pictures of my grandmother and her family when she was young. All we had were pictures of when she was in her sixties and seventies. And I'd never seen any pictures of her brother and sister, or of her parents, and even her grandmother. But they'd been posted by my third cousin, whom I'd never met (although I'd met his sister and played chinese checkers with his younger brother, almost fifty years ago).
Just Googling around, looking for mentions of the family in the county in which they lived. Mind you, I'd never have found them if I'd looked for the family name--my cousin had changed the spelling.
It's amazing to see how much I resembled my grandmother at a certain age, allowing for hair length and glasses.
Caroline #13: Ubu Web, that you link to, is worth its own post about the magic of the internet. That's one of the most amazing resources in the entire world, I think.
That Skywhales video is... just a tad disturbing for some reason.
abi, thanks, I think I'll just borrow your sensawunda for a while. That Skywhale thing is freaky.
Internet? Well -- I work in Puerto Rico for companies mostly in Europe, and my bank is ... somewhere now. This would only have been marginally possible pre-Internet, as I do technical translation for about 15 agencies. I got my start on Proz.com; in the pre-Proz fax days, in fifteen years, I managed two translation jobs, and neither established any more. So - I found my entire lifestyle, one I'd wanted way, way early on in life but, pre-Internet, had no idea how to achieve.
Then there was the time they had baklava at the daycare's parents' party and I ate two pieces and my wife thought she'd asked me to snarf some for her but I misunderstood. The next day, I looked up baklava, went out to Kroger for the ingredients (even I'm not so foolhardy as to try making my own filo dough), and made her an entire tray of it.
Knowing how to make bagels. Knowing how to make salad dressing. Knowing what to expect this week, as our first dog enters her first heat cycle. (Yikes!)
Downloading fresh software every time I think of it. This week, as we start a new homeschooling year (ish), I got the newest Logo; this time, it clicked, and both kids were happily doing geometry exploration, just like the articles say they're supposed to, while I piddled around for an hour and got about 40% through an implementation of Pong.
Dumber? Hell, no. The Internet makes me, in apprehension, like a God. And every year it is better.
Oh, my lord, Abi, what a gift. My father and I sat in the theater in, what, 1984? and watched Skywhales in astonished wonder. We talked about it in hushed tones for days.
Much more prosaic but also lost from my youth:
Irish Language Lab, by way of Michael Nesmith.
Bittorrent got me the entire run of Max Headroom. Also Freakazoid. I am grateful.
That's all that comes to mind off the top of my head. Unfortunately, this is because right now this minute most of my head is taken up with trying to remember this gosh-darn ghost story I read in some compilation or other many years ago. It popped back into my head and I'm going crazy trying to identify the tale. And, darn it, the Internet is not helping me!
Synopsis: There's this widow, she runs an inn [where?], she's going broke, she's going nuts trying to figure out how to put dinner on the table for her guests. The ghost of Mark Twain appears to her and says, "Serve them turnips." She's like, "what?" The ghost reiterates. In desperation, she takes its advice and serves turnips baked, roasted, mashed, sliced, etc. The guests eat it all up, complimenting the innkeeper on the tender roast pheasant and imported caviar and such. Good news for the innkeeper--until all her guests DIE OF TYPHOID!!! Or food poisoning. Or something.
Google keeps giving me Mark Twain's short story "A Ghost Story" and instructions on how to make a jack-o-lantern out of a turnip. I am not amused.
Because the internet brings us communities of people who can Name! That! Story! In five notes!, and because this thread conveniently showed up during my feverish ransacking of Google for an answer, I appeal for aid to the Fluorosphere.
> What have you found lately?
A deepening respect for and admiration of librarians, especially reference desk people, because as noted above by Tony Zbaraschuk "... the boring part of [their] job has mostly been automated away and [they] can focus on the more interesting parts."
And people like me can take on some of the boring part to an increasing extent, figuring out how to craft useful search strings, urging people to do it for themselves, and endlessly encouraging people to look it up, whatever it is, rather than relying on fallible human memory.
"It's a poor sort of memory that only works backward" (Lewis Carroll)
It's a poor sort of memory that only works, imperfectly, up to the point in the past where I last looked something up or thought hard about it.
"A memory is only as real as the last time you remembered it. The more you remember something, the less accurate the memory becomes."
http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2008/07/memory_and_addiction.php
Search engines improve on this astonishingly, by remembering anything _anyone_ indexed for search has looked up, written down, or asked about up to within the past day or so.
It ain't the future, but I can see it from here.
At work, we were sent a drawing in Visio format - one of them, anyway - which we couldn't open and when we finally got the viewer we couldn't print it correctly.
I googled 'Visio conversion' and found a downloadable program that converted it to PDF. Problem solved in less than five minutes.
Without the Internet, we couldn't have found the converter.
(For amusement, google: "Cat found" possum)
I fell in love with Quenya when I was little and now I can learn to speak it. There's my sensawunda right there.
As someone with relatively limited mobility, I love how the Internet gives me the ability to see places I couldn't get to in real life, learn things I couldn't experience directly, and keep in touch with/meet people I might never see in person.
Alex @23 - !!!!!!!!!!
I've been saying "PoTAAAto" to my kids all their lives, and now they can see why! Wow!
Melissa @28 - speaking as someone with full mobility, I have to say I agree in all respects.
Let's see. What have I found on the Internet?
My last three jobs: the first in 1991, the second in 1998, and the most recent in 2008.
Friends all over. The chance to interact with some wonderful minds. Music videos I haven't seen since 1986. The tools of my trade: editors, languages, libraries, techniques. Incredible insights into the human condition. Poetry. Matt Harding doing a goofy dance all around the world, with people joining in. Rick Astley. Places to stay, places to visit, places to just be. Beautiful words, beautiful music, beautiful photos, beautiful videos.
What have I found on the Internet in the last 10 minutes?
Another reason to be sad I can't make it to Denvention. (Sigh.) But perhaps I'll still hear back from an old friend.
I remember my grandfather hauling out a movie projector on a visit and showing a few old black-and-white cartoons, including this one. It creeped me out and stuck in my memory. I probably could have found the title by digging through some animation history books, but Betty Boop isn't exactly a hot property on DVD and I doubt I would have seen it again anytime soon if not for YouTube.
Speaking of DVD: Netflix is amazing. The VCR was an incredible thing back in the eighties--you could rent movies instead of waiting for them to show up on TV. But the available video rental places didn't have the most wide-ranging selections. They had all the latest stuff, but a haphazard mix of older films, and some movies were tantalizing mysteries--I never did find a VHS of the original Cat People, for example, and while I could occasionally buy a copy of something like Dead of Night my budget was small and I had to pick carefully. And there were plenty of movies I never heard about. Now I can see any movie that's had a DVD release. Netflix is what allowed me to become a film buff.
The internet also introduced me to my favorite insane old-time detective stories. This can be doubly laid at the feet of the internet: I first heard of Cleek: The Man of the Forty Faces from Bill Pronzini's Gun in Cheek, which I would never have had a chance to read if I hadn't ordered it off the internet. (I'm very glad waiting for lucky finds in used bookstores is no longer my only option for finding out-of-print books.) Then I recognized the title while browsing Project Gutenberg. So I downloaded the thing, and it was odder than I could have imagined.
Neil Young performing "A Day in the Life" in Madrid, with the audience singing along.
If you find something on the Internet, better bookmark it because you'll never find it again.
And half the time if you do bookmark something, when you go back it'll be 404.
I am hoping to someday find Walter Lang's 1928 silent film version of Alice Through the Looking Glass which I remember watching as a Super 8 film as a kid.
A while back I found a couple of old (well, fairly old) photos online that documented the Allen Varney Games incident; that was a real nostalgia hit for me.
The end is near! Scott Adams (of Dilbert) said that the holodeck is the last invention that mankind will produce - once we get that, we're doomed. The Internet is just the holodeck in one abstract dimension.
(Now that I've got that off chest, where can I find Magic Boy?)
The Internet is my cybernetic brain enhancement. I'm pushing 60, and running out of personal storage capacity; for any new chunk of information that goes in, it seems, a corresponding chunk must be dumped - and I don't seem to get to choose which one. Thanks to the Internet (and strong search-fu), I am able to at least appear to be as sharp as I ever was, and sometimes sharper.
The day Google comes up with an ap that jacks straight into our skulls, I'll be standing at the front of the line.
The Internet was instrumental in finding me my new job, new house and facilitated our recent move across country. Sure, we could have done it without the Internet but it would have taken ten times as long and a lot more effort.
And, now that we're on the other side of the country, the Internet helps us keep in touch with friends and relatives 3000 miles away, or further. Just the other morning, my wife was chatting with a friend in Sweden while downloading episodes of Dr. Horrible and I was looking for houses in Portland.
I did a presentation during my recent job interview, on how web 2.0 apps like Flickr and LIbraryThing can be used in an Academic Library. During the research process, i found that the Library of Congress has put hundreds of historical photos online, as has George Eastman's House.
I'm likeing the 21st century, even without my jetpack.
I rediscovered a sculptor of geometric forms, whose work entranced me 20 years ago. I'm still entranced.
Speaking of bookmarking things and having them go away... some little while back, I had bookmarked a photo of Anthony Scott Head as Frankenfurter in RHPS in London. When I went back to show it to someone later, it was no longer there. I don't suppose anyone would have a working link to a copy?
James D. Macdonald @33:
Blinklist. Works great for keeping track of bookmarks across platform and on multiple computers.
The internet gives me socialization. The doctors disagree, but what do they know? I talk and listen and make friends, some of whom I eventually meet in person, and that's what we do in real life, innit?
When I was little, we had a board game called "Mr. Bug goes to Town" . I still vividly remember the drawings of the characters. Decades later on TV I caught a snippet of old cartoon that seemed oddly familiar - it seems likely that the game came after the film, which had to be one of the earliest tie-in-marketing ploys. This thread has inspired looking it up - and BANG there it was. No one in my family remembered the movie, or how or when the game came to us.
Dr. Paisley @ #32, wow. Thank you for that. Neil Young playing that live two weeks ago in Madrid.
That right there is enough to make me love the internet. Holy smokes. Neil Young covering Lennon/McCartney.
And apparently Young has used that song as an encore before; on that YouTube list of related videos is his performance of it in Dublin.
I love how the magics of the internets let me retrace my steps to the cool thing I forgot to bookmark (see comment #33).
I can say - let's see, I know I was at Interesting News Aggregator and I think there was a link there to Thing, and then a link to Other Thing, and - yes! There's the link to Cool Thing!
Also, I'm really enjoying Read later (with handy Firefox extension action).
Finding online that over 50 years ago, when I was the first child to be born in that generation, that my beloved great-uncle had written to someone working on a family genealogy that I was "the apple of her great-uncle's eye."
Lee @ 40: Um...Anthony Stewart Head. And I found this for you, and also this (Mr. Head starts his bit at about 4:00 or a hair later.)
And I guess this counts as my sensawunda for the moment... :)
Oh, and this one, too. (Unfortunately, not really a video. But the audio rocks. Muchly. ;)
Hank #45 The memory rewriting itself into a better story effect is very real. One good reason to blog is to help curtail that effect in yourself and others, by seeing what you actually though at the time.
YouTube as a shared cultural memory repository is a fine thing too.
My great-uncle's grave, thanks to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. My father was named after him, and there are lots of faintly-remembered family stories about where he fought, but all anyone remembered about where he died was that he'd been brought back to England after he was wounded. Turns out, he was buried at a church two miles away from where my parents live; we cleared the moss off the stone, and my dad puts a wreath on the grave every Christmas.
If I may confirm to national stereotype jsut this once, I'd like to moan about some of the memory gaps of the internet. Despite all the wonderful examples in this thread a lot of information isn't available online yet, frex newspaper articles from before the mid-nineties or information on quite a lot of subjects which are neither well known nor the recipient of fannish love.
One example: some time ago I read The Pre-Raphaelite Tragedy, an art book by William Gaunt, who judging by the backcover blurb was once an important art critic. Try and find information about him online however!
I found my sister! (Half-sister, parents divorced, haven't seen her since she was 3. She's in college now.) Haven't actually gotten together with her yet, but I hope to this summer - she can meet her niece, and how cool is that?
And it makes explaining all kinds of stuff to your child SO much easier. "Who's Penn and Teller? What do you mean, Strawberry Shortcake? Who's on First?" - here, kid, let me show you. (This morning I woke up with the Ewoks cartoon theme stuck in my head. Why? I do not know. But I do know that I can show it to my daughter and prove that I'm not COMPLETELY insane.)
My favorite internet find is The Williams Trivia Contest Depository, a collection of descriptions, teams lists, scores, questions, and even essays about the 8-hour trivia contest that happens at my alma mater on the last day of each semester. It's a 40+ year tradition, and an amazing experience, and rereading all the details reminded me of that. (The prize for winning is running the contest the next semester, and I was on the teams "Cthulhu Matata" and "At 200 mph, There is No Diplomatic Immunity," in 1997 and 1998--right after I had graduated and didn't need that sleep to prepare for exams anymore. Good times.)
kouredios @ 53... "Cthulhu Matata"
Now, that's a Disney movie I'd pay to see.
The Speech Accent Archive, which I found when trying to explain to a colleague who is a non-native English speaker about what non-Midwesterners sound like.
Also nice to get a little vocal slice of home if you've moved away.
Serge @54: Because of the awesomeness that is this site, I have the exact wording of our first question of the night (the answer of which, by tradition, must be the team name):
Following in the vein of the descriptions given by travelers to the New World of the strange flora and fauna, a hybrid creature was born one fateful night last May. Like those centuries-old accounts, the components of this beast's anatomy seem disparate at best, horrifying at worst. What is this thing, which combines the body of an Elder God with the frozen, psychotic grin of an immature baby meercat?
Answer: Cthulhu Matata.
Song: "Devil Inside," by INXS
kouredios @ 56... the body of an Elder God with the frozen, psychotic grin of an immature baby meercat
That's something they'll never show on Animal Planet's show Meerkat Manor.
Today I found a moron.
Again. There are plenty who tend to forget their moronism will be all over the net in no time short.
I also found YouTube recordings of some of my favourite opera scenes played on TV ages ago, and I can't imagine to plan a journey without the net ever again. I do use the internet for research as well, but it hasn't replaced books.
And yet...
still there is nothing to tell me where I left my sunglasses.
Some newspapers have their entire archive online, and for free. The New York Times is one, which makes it a valuable primary resource for American history and other research work.
Again, the databases are invaluable, and many of them are available from your home desk via the portal of your university or public library. I can even access Lexis from my home computer!
Love, C.
Sarah S @59:
still there is nothing to tell me where I left my sunglasses.
True. Your keys, however, are another matter.
Sarah S @#59:
And yet...
still there is nothing to tell me where I left my sunglasses.
Can't help you with the current lost pair, but thanks to the Cory Doctorow story Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town (wherein The Inventory is the important idea for this post) and some other web-thing I cannot recall right now I can offer an idea for the future:
RFID tag all your stuff, and put a small web-enabled RFID scanner in your living area. If you lose the next pair of labeled sunglasses in your living area, you can web-search for them...
Heh.
I just found Cory's book again, 'cause I was looking for that Inventory reference. I have also found, in the past, archives of a number of my old Ten Page Technical Rant posts to the LCML, back when I was in or recently out of college and still had an active vehicular hobby involving a truck referenced in my current internet "handle". (Look for the Nuclear Parking Brake and you'll see my tendency to verbosely provide a plausible - if impractical - solution to a given problem/question)
I also found ML, via BoingBoing, and have stuck around.
Haven't found many old friends yet, but that's mostly because I haven't taken the time to get set up on FaceBook or similar.
Syd, #47-48: SQUEE! Thank you! (And I do know what his name is -- I claim late-night brain-fart.)
cajunfj40 @ 62... put a small web-enabled RFID scanner in your living area
How long before the scanner is misplaced?
Serge @ 64: Simple: Just RFID the RFID scanner, and you'll get an infinite loop that tells you which dimension to look in.
cajunfj40 @ #62: but don't take any of your stuff with you to the hospital.
Holy crap! Abi, I saw "Skywhales" when I was 10, once, never saw it again, but I never ever forgot the last couple of scenes. It never even occurred to me to go looking for it. Wow. Just wow. It's just like I remember.
My own contribution: Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future.
This was my favorite TV show when I was 14. No one else had ever heard of it. Then I discovered the fan site. Power on!
Carrie V @ 67.. You did know that "Captain Power and..." was produced by Michael Straczynski. Yes, the creator of Babylon 5.
It so happens that the immediately previous thing I did with my browser before reading all these comments was pull up my bookmarks/notes on the Sarajevo Haggadah. My hairdresser is Bosnian, and will be going home for a visit in August, so I timed my next haircut for the end of July. I'd mentioned the Haggadah once and she'd never heard of it, so I'm going to print out a couple of pages for her.
Meanwhile, right here, the mentions of obscure movies prompted me to search for my favorite, and found two versions of the early Douglas Fairbanks farce, Mystery Of The Leaping Fish!
I did indeed! I kept trying to explain to people that this was more than a cheesy kids show. The internet told me about Straczynski, so now I know I'm not making it all up. (The internet also got me a DVD set of episodes. Score!)
CP also shares a few writers and producers. There are hints of B-5 all over the thing.
Ginger @ 65... This reminds me of something I read in the early 1990s that poked fun at Virtual Reality - specifically Virtual Offices. He pointed out that virtual offices would be neater than real offices - at first anyway. They'd eventually look as disorganized as real offices, and the virtual office's user would then create a new virtual office within the VR. Kind of like the movie The Thirteenth Floor, with one VR within one other VR within yet another VR, ad infinitum.
Sometimes I fear for the cookbooks in my pantry. I almost never use them. The Internet is my cookbook. Whether it's a particular dish I want to cook (may I present the Holy Grail of Saag Paneer), or an overabundance of a particular ingredient I want not to waste (the CSA started harvesting turnips last week, which is probably why that dang ghost story popped into my head; and the Washington Times gave me soup), a successful evening in the kitchen is one Google or Recipezaar search away.
Uncle Jim is of course right about bookmarks and 404s. This is why the scripting demigods of the Firefox add-on community gave us Scrapbook. (It's also good for turning several pages full of blog entries and forum posts into several hours of reading for the train.)
Hey, Cajun! Who are we, chopped liver?! *g*
And that RFID idea? That will make my husband go squee. He wants to replace our car look and home door lock with rfid sensors. I am slightly nervous about this, but I don't think it will actually see implementation for years, or until he runs out of other things to do, whichever comes first.
Addendum:
When your friend tells you she hasn't yet seen Ghostbusters, and you don't want to leave the house or wait on Netflix to amend this woeful state of things, the Internet is your friend. Boy is it ever. Between bittorrent and YouTube, our friend could soon recite "When someone asks you if you're a god, you say YES!" with the best of them.
Small Mystery Solved on the Internet:
When I was a child, my dad and uncles would sing St. Anselm's Proof of God to the tune of Waltzing Matilda every time they got together. Dad's been gone twenty years, and I never got around to asking the uncles whether they made that up themselves, or where they got it. They had the kind of education which made it very possible they had made it up.
So, anyway, a few years ago I found it. Origin unknown, a piece of academic theological folklore filk.
Ginger @65: If you have to recover an RFID from another dimension, be sure to pull it out the same way it went in. Otherwise, you will have a DIFR.
mmm Saag Paneer. Just like the author, it's one of the benchmarks that I use to measure Indian restaurants. I definitely agree with the idea that the Internet is my cookbook (lime, tamarind, corn and jalapeno? Check.)
The net is definitely my offboard brain, so the idea the whole concept of serendipitous discovery is no longer unusual but a norm, at least for me. I've been excited to watch my eldest (12 yrs) grow up with this as a core element of her environment - it should be very interesting as she enters her academically intense years.
The absolutely best thing I've ever found on the Internet is my partner. We met in a Usenet newsgroup, and come December we'll have been together for 10 years.
About the original post: I never had that problem with Tom Lehrer, even Back In The Day. I had memorized many of his songs (my parents were and are big fans) and would sing them at the drop of a hat.
I doubt this won him fans, but they did understand what I was talking about.
One thing I really like about the internet is something that WFMU's Beware of the Blog pointed out recently--there's almost no such thing as obscurity anymore, at least not in the sense of hard-to-find. I read about some exciting forgotten album in a magazine or in someone's blog, and I no longer have to think "man, I wish I could hear that," because I probably can with a quick torrent or blog search. Similarly, if I come across a record that it seems even the internet has forgotten, I can rip it and post it myself, and others can find it (I need to start doing this).
Of course, on the other hand, the easy accessibility of formerly obscure music means I now have a very overwhelming folder on my desktop with several hundred albums I absolutely need to listen to right away.
James D. Macdonald #33: "And half the time if you do bookmark something, when you go back it'll be 404."
Oddly enough, I've been criticized for urging people not to contribute to that problem, which is to say, for urging them not to break links when it's avoidable.
This thread eloquently demonstrates that web resources often have value that is completely invisible to, and unexpected by, the owner/hoster of the resource.
Since I was given an iPhone as a gift, the internet can be my brain extension everywhere. At the Fourth of July symphony & fireworks celebration, they played the Armed Forces songs, as they do every year. And as she does every year, my mother wondered aloud what the words to the Coast Guard song were (her father was in the Coast Guard but never sang the song). I was able to look it up for her in the middle of the picnic -- and found both the WWII lyrics and the original (1927) lyrics. The WWII lyrics are better, in my humble opinion: how can you argue with the line "The Axis feels our might" ?
I never thought of myself as the kind of person who would use a smartphone. Weren't those for corporate workaholic types? But I end up using it much more for looking up interesting facts (and useful facts, like where the nearest Subway is) than for doing anything work-related. It makes me really happy to be able to find things out quickly.
On the other hand, I'm looking for an SSH iPhone app so that I can run simulations from my cell phone. I joked about this with the grad students when I did an internship at a nuclear lab a few years ago -- running your experiment from your cell phone while lying on the beach. My lab experiments can't be run remotely (unless I invent quite a system of waldoes first), but simulations and data processing could...
Lee #77: I'll second you on that one, wrt my spouse.
Found: my spouse.
Lost: a short posting by a techie describing a boss who'd read about domain-name spoofing, and who, whenever something strange was going on, would suggest "Maybe we're being domain-name spoofed." The techies told the boss there was another attack called "goofballing", and, sure enough, the boss started suggesting "Maybe we're being goofballed." (I must be wrong about the name being "goofballing" or this would be easier to find.)
Half sesawunda, half "this is our life":
Searching the present:
I couldn't do my job without google. Last week we found a bug in the application I work on, that resulted from installing a new version of the content editor we use. It took me a few minutes of search to confirm that it was in fact a bug in the editor, already known to users, and a few more to discover that it had been fixed, and new version posted the day before. I downloaded the new version, installed it, and the bug was gone. Prior to the internet, this process would have take several weeks and a lot of phone calls.
Searching the past:
I have a lot of old books on film and animation, including textbooks and histories with stills from old movies. There are a couple of stills from a paper cutout silouette animation called "The Adventures of Prince Achmed" made in the 1920's. I searched the net, but could not found any copies except films that cost hundreds of dollars to purchase, and couldn't be rented except locally. Then one day I tried again, and found a small VHS tape sales company run by a retired couple in Arizona who had tapes made from the best available print at the time, for only $15, and a week later I was able to watch the film, which was as beautiful as I'd hoped.
Searching for people: I'm still not sure how I feel about this, but I got a letter from my mother a couple of weeks ago. We've been estranged for more than 20 years, and she found me by googling me and finding my blog. On the other hand, a couple of years ago I googled for my best friend in elementary and high school and found his website: he's a professional jazz musician, just as he'd wanted to be.
Caroline @81: I'm looking for an SSH iPhone app
You can have all the OpenSSH goodness you want from your iPhone if you don't mind jailbreaking it. Don't worry, it's pretty easy and fairly stable. Lifehacker has a great tutorial here.
Mary Dell @ 39
Thank you, thank you for that link. I love mathematical sculpture, and I don't think I've seen that one. In return, one you may have seen before, but is always worth looking at, Bathsheba Grossman's mathematical sculpture, much of it made on a rapid prototype machine (aka "3D printer").
Lance Weber @ 85, I am actually thinking of writing my own and trying to get into the app store with it, unless someone else already has. The 2.0 jailbreak seems to still be very much in beta, so I'd prefer to wait until it works stably, since that's my only phone and I really can't afford to have it bricked.
Also, the OpenSSH iPhone app looks like it's meant to allow you to SSH from a machine into your phone (to transfer files to your phone, or use the EDGE connection on your computer), rather than SSHing from your phone to another machine (which is what I want to do). Am I missing something?
Ok, I'm a sappy sentimental sort, and I encountered this for the first time today:
And I cried.
Serge @68: You did know that "Captain Power and..." was produced by Michael Straczynski. Yes, the creator of Babylon 5.
He was also the head writer for the early episodes of 'The Real Ghostbusters'. I recall watching that regularly; it was syndicated here M-F with two episodes back-to-back starting at 7 am. Unlike Carrie V., I don't have the excuse that I was 14 at the time.
Caroline @87: You get both the client and server openssh tools/libs, then use MobileTerminal for your outbound. And good luck with getting an ssh app approved by Apple, perhaps you can succeed where others have been told the app falls outside their acceptable terms of use. I know I'd certainly prefer an official app.
Ooh! I loved the Real Ghostbusters. My daughter was 4 years old and we watched it together.
Re. "lost" stories/books, I managed to find a book which I'd read from our school library nearly three decades ago by describing the plot on a forum on abebooks - someone came up with title and author within 24 hours - fantastic!
Xopher @ 78
"and would sing them at the drop of a hat."
No "At The Drop of a Hat" was Flanders & Swann...
James D. Macdonald @ 33
"If you find something on the Internet, better bookmark it because you'll never find it again.
And half the time if you do bookmark something, when you go back it'll be 404."
I really hate it particularly when "official" websites go and re-organise and stuff gets lost (e.g. when NOAA re-organised and all their really useful oil spill documents moved. Luckily I'd already downloaded them (and had them referenced with date of downloading and url at the time of downloading).
In my job (writing/editing a large electronic encyclopaedia on wild animal health) the stuff it's possible to find on the web is amazing and saves me huge amounts of time heaving large, heavy bound volumes of journals around and standing over photocopiers.
Still, if you don't know how and where to look, you can waste a lot of time - good librarians or others who do know how/where to look are a huge (and often underappreciated) asset.
Lee @ 77, Fragano @82: Me too. :-)
I found out about Twelf. That's what has me gobsmacked, at the moment. Thanks for asking.
p.s. I have a metatheorem prover, and I'm not afraid to use it.
Things have gone so far that I'm always a little impressed when a search term turns up no results.
Writing this comment has been a bit odd. For years I'd tried to remember a book from my high school library. No luck until, long story short, I found a trace of it on Loganberry Books' "Stump the Bookseller" feature. The book is Lillian Lieber's Infinity (just reprinted, squee!). Amazon's front page showed me ... corn stickers. They're stalking me across threads.
Bruce Cohen (StM) @84, finding people is definitely a mixed blessing. I found my father's obituary online. Basically, I'm estranged from his side of the family, which was active on their part (for reasons I have literally no clue about), more or less passive on mine. And still, despite minimal contact over a period of around 40 years, I did feel hurt that neither I (3d daughter) nor my mother (2d wife) were so much as mentioned. (I exist anyway. Ha!)
#89 and #91. My favorite bit of dialog from "The Real Ghostbusters:"
Venkman: Cthulhu? What's Cthulhu?
Spengler: Cthulhu makes Gozer look like Little Mary Sunshine.
Once again, YouTube comes through with the episode, "Collect Call of Cthulhu." The villain is Clark Ashton. Teehee. I totally didn't get that when I was 14.
Lee @ #77, Fragano @#82, Zed Lopez @#83 & Clifton Royston @#93:
(smacks head)
Me too!
OBjustification
Now, if the post had asked what was the most important thing I'd found on the Internet...
/OBjustification
Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little @#72:
Hey, Cajun! Who are we, chopped liver?! *g*
*ahem* See above, y'all aren't anymore chopped liver than my spouse is...
And that RFID idea? That will make my husband go squee. He wants to replace our car look and home door lock with rfid sensors. I am slightly nervous about this, but I don't think it will actually see implementation for years, or until he runs out of other things to do, whichever comes first.
Heh, he sounds like me! Too many ideas, not enough time/money/tools/workspace to implement them faster than they pile up... RFID can be worrisome (read Cory Doctorow's Little Brother for some info, or just Google the Instructables from that book, or look for RFID US Passport issues), the problems can be mitigated. Any convenience can introduce new potential points of failure, but it doesn't have to.
Thanks for the RFID pointers, cajun! ...and glad to know that none of us are diced organ meat. Hee.
Just wanted to report back, FWIW, that I finally found that dang ghost story. It was on Page 291 of Gumbo Ya-Ya, a compendium of New Orleans folklore. (Happened to notice it on the shelf and have a lightbulb go on in the brain.) Apparently it was raw turnips, not baked/fried/etc., and the guests died one by one... of a surfeit of raw turnips. How does that kill, I wonder, if not simple through malnutrition? And how exactly does "having eaten a great quantity of raw turnips" feel, that one of the guests should be able to report that feeling at the hospital?
But I suppose that these are questions that *can* actually be answered by The Internets. And if The Internets can point me in the direction of articles from the New Orleans Item Tribune from 1925 through 1930, which Gumbo Ya-Ya says actually reported the deaths and the story, then the Internets will deserve a fresh batch of cookies.
Another random Betty Boop here...
I found the only recording of my grandfather -besides the reel-to-reel he sent my mom when I was a baby, singing "aint she sweet" to me - here (warning: early 30's era racism, weirdness). He's got the pretty Samoan Tenor voice - Bimbo's singing voice, among others.
I also found god - well, the church I go to and sing at - on the web. I thought I was only looking for Christmas music, but my subconscious apparantly had other ideas. I suppose I could have just looked in the phone book under Episcopal Churches, but that wouldn't have told me which parish had the most funny hats and incense.
I'm able to carry on a slang and acronym punctuated conversation with a friend in Englad without constantly having to ask "what? what?"
I've never had a good memory, which is why one of the few things I ever memorized was large chunks of the Dewey Decimal System. I rarely knew details of something, but I always knew where to look it up. Now, my fingers do the looking.
My mother recently got an internet connection, and she's really excited about Recent Earthquakes for southern California.
EnglaNd
*sigh* spell check not so much
Echoing #77, #82, and #83: Yes, I first met my spouse in a newsgroup (with a vibe similar in some ways to this forum), met her "IRL" 16 years ago this month, and we'll have been married 13 years this October.
For me, no other online find will ever top that.
In highschool, I found friends who encouraged me to write instead of die. After college, I found my fiancee.
I also found great videos of squid.
The internet's kind of great.
...a friend in Englad...
I've just found the name for my superhero sidekick on the internet*!
Last thing I found before that: not only is there an extensive Crime Traveller fan site, but that there's a petition to bring it back 10 years after it finished.
Lost not found: Some years ago I read something that suggested that Vandals liked to dress in and paint their faces and shields black, while Goths preferred greens and blues, but i can't find anything on this. I'm beginning to suspect i made it up.
* although I will be writing it Eng-Lad
Neil 104: Point of information: 'Eng' means 'tight' in German. Make of this what you will.
A note about finding things in your household via RFID: See Cory's Themepunks.
That's the story that made me realize he, too, was a plausible New Heinlein, which is related to why Cory is such a shit magnet (which I don't mean as a bad thing, except toward the shits).
I've met a large number of good friends through the internet - many of them in the early/mid nineties, when most of my classmates didn't know what the internet was.
I recently reconnected with the one classmate who did know what the internet was - it turns out he had worked with one of my LinkedIn contacts.
I like finding old video games I played as a kid, too. Some old stuff that I played on our Commodore 64, and newer stuff (relatively) from our first IBM compatible PC's.
Another thing I've found on the interweb: Making Light, the first community either online or in RL that I've been in for a number of years, mostly due to health problems, layoffs, and several years of clinical depression. I was coming out of the depression when I first started lurking here, but being here has helped me get through some things since that otherwise would have been much harder to deal with.
Shorter me: thank you, more than I can say.
After Abi mentioned introducing her 7-year-old to Calvin and Hobbes, we got three volumes for my 7-year-old Mythbusters fan. He loves it, seems to tap into the frustrations of aspergers in a way that is just right, right now. I thought I remembered them so well, there was no need to buy them; lost indeed. So thanks. (it's also kind of scary that with Calvin being nominally six, even dear sprog is reading as an older person.)
Speaking of wondrous events, how could I forget the mind-boggling experience that Teresa and I shared, learning that we were suddenly related by marriage?
Lee @ #77, Fragano @ #82, Zed Lopez @ #83, Clifton Royston @ #93, cajunfj40 @ #97 and John Mark Ockerbloom @ #102, if you can count the old Commodore user dial-up community called Q-link, then "me too" - my husband (of 3 years) and I met 17 years ago playing Trivia games and hanging out in "Bonnie's Bar" between sets.
Nicole @98, I find myself wondering how much of the history of New Orleans may have been lost because it never made it out of the city onto the Internet.
I spend a lot of time poking around on YouTube, because it yields amazing things. Want to see Public Image Ltd.'s appearance on American Bandstand? (Yes. You do.) It's there. Sonic Youth singing "I Wanna Be Your Dog" with David Sanborn on sax? Sure. Wire performing on German TV. Pink Floyd playing "Astronomy Domine" on English TV. The Pixies unplugged. Richard Thompson singing "Vincent Black Lightning 1952." Tindersticks' astonishing "Talk to Me" performed on Jools Holland's show. The Big Friendly Jazz Orchestra (Japanese girls' high school's jazz band) ripping through Miles Davis's "Haitian Fight Song" and, also, "Sing Sing Sing." Fiona Apple singing Elvis Costello's "I Want You." (Brrrr.) Buddy Rich playing drums with the Muppets. John Cage's appearance on "What's My Line?" Quasi, getting me crushed-out on Janet Weiss all over again. "Five Golden Sections" from _The Catherine Wheel_. D.Boon alive and well and screaming "what the hell is the United States doing in Central America, I don't fucking know!"
Google Books continues to be a never ending source of ...um fun 'in the geek degree' for me. Especially when I can find full preview copies of anything made of awesomeness. For example: Records of Salem Witchcraft: Copied from the Original Documents.
Oh my giddy aunt!
I don't know how parents managed to keep babies alive before the internet...I look up something beby-related almost every day now. Of course, a lot of the advice is potentially wrong, but that's true of the call-your-mother method too. And with the internet there is always plenty of counter-advice.
Rob Rusick @ 113:
Want to see Public Image Ltd.'s appearance on American Bandstand? (Yes. You do.) It's there.
Oh, yes, yes I do, but I cannot find it! Help me! Help me!
My sons (8 and 10) just assume that they can ask me anything at all and I will have the answer for them in a minute or two. No matter where or when now that I have the Blackberry with the unlimited data plan. They do read, a lot, but one of them explained that he likes his shark book because "it loads pictures faster".
A new future every day.
John A Arkansawyer @116: Oh, yes, yes I do, but I cannot find it! Help me! Help me!
You'll have to ask Bob Rossney...
Manny @117 - I think kids have always assumed their parents had all the answers. It's just that now we actually can, and don't always have to resort to Making Stuff Up. (See: Calvin's Dad.)
(Actually, we make stuff up anyway, because life's more entertaining that way. It's gotten to the point where our daughter won't believe any "strange-but-true" stories we tell her without calling Grammy to confirm. But that's good! Don't just trust people because they say something's true, even if they are your parents.)
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