Whimsy and Wit

thegloballibrarian:

thepinakes:

libraryjournal:

Set your calendars. Tell your friends. Reblog for your followers. Library Journal and Tumblr are joining forces, with the help of Togather, to host an ALA meetup to end all meetups.
Important facts:
Free wine & beer.
Raffle! Prizes includes signed advance copies of Richard Dawkins’s An Appetite for Wonder (Harper, Oct.) and LIBBANANAS.
Right before & at the same location as the Librarian Wardrobe/EveryLibrary party.
Official hashtag is #laserfingers. Make tumblarians known across platforms: tweet, tumbl, and Instagram the event.
So excited to see you all then!

Set phasers to #laserfingers.

This is so beautiful.

thepinakes:

libraryjournal:

Set your calendars. Tell your friends. Reblog for your followers. Library Journal and Tumblr are joining forces, with the help of Togather, to host an ALA meetup to end all meetups.

Important facts:

Free wine & beer.

Raffle! Prizes includes signed advance copies of Richard Dawkins’s An Appetite for Wonder (Harper, Oct.) and LIBBANANAS.

Right before & at the same location as the Librarian Wardrobe/EveryLibrary party.

Official hashtag is #laserfingers. Make tumblarians known across platforms: tweet, tumbl, and Instagram the event.

So excited to see you all then!

Set phasers to #laserfingers.

This is so beautiful.

I just wish that we could talk about books as if they are for use, not as symbols of enduring knowledge that must be preserved against the ravages of digital barbarians or as emblems of obdurate and blinkered resistance to inevitable change.

Throwing the Books at Each Other | Inside Higher Ed (via infoneer-pulse)

(via infoneer-pulse)

amprog:

The numbers don’t lie; The U.S. is lagging behind the rest of the developed world on pre-K education. For an interactive map on the stats, click HERE

Consider that you can see less than 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum and hear less than 1% of the acoustic spectrum. As you read this, you are traveling at 220 km/sec across the galaxy. 90% of the cells in your body carry their own microbial DNA and are not “you.” The atoms in your body are 99.9999999999999999% empty space and none of them are the ones you were born with, but they all originated in the belly of a star. Human beings have 46 chromosomes, 2 less than the common potato.

The existence of the rainbow depends on the conical photoreceptors in your eyes; to animals without cones, the rainbow does not exist. So you don’t just look at a rainbow, you create it. This is pretty amazing, especially considering that all the beautiful colors you see represent less than 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum.

We Originated in the Belly of a Star, NASA Lunar Science Institute, 2012. (via billowy)

(Source: thinksquad, via bonesthatrattle)

latimes:

The story behind Sriracha

With a distinctive bottle and taste, Sriracha has gone from an unpronounceable challenge to a staple sauce for many Americans. In the U.S. alone, $60 million worth of the sauce was sold last year alone.

But it wasn’t always such a prevalent item on store shelves. David Tran, the man responsible for popularizing the hot sauce, had a long journey beforehand:

When North Vietnam’s communists took power in South Vietnam, Tran, a major in the South Vietnamese army, fled with his family to the U.S. After settling in Los Angeles, Tran couldn’t find a job — or a hot sauce to his liking.

So he made his own by hand in a bucket, bottled it and drove it to customers in a van. He named his company Huy Fong Foods after the Taiwanese freighter that carried him out of Vietnam.

Read more via our profile of Tran, and his beloved hot sauce.

Photos: Gina Ferazzi, Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times

(via fuckyeahcondiments)

(Source: vulgarlovers, via organizationxiii)

foreignaffairsmagazine:

Why American Education Fails

Since the end of the industrial age, Americans have worried about improving their education system. But the country has never been able to make much progress. Other nations do it better, and the United States must learn from their examples if it hopes to catch up.

Today, Google is arguably one of the most influential nonstate actors in international affairs… It tracks the global arms trade, spends millions creating crisis-alert tools to inform the public about looming natural disasters, monitors the spread of the flu, and acts as a global censor to protect American interests abroad. Google has even intervened into land disputes, one of the most fraught and universal security issues facing states today, siding with an indigenous group in the Brazilian Amazon to help the tribe document and post evidence about intrusions on its land through Google Earth.

In a new form of digital statecraft, Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt has traveled to North Korea against State Department wishes.

New Digital Age: How Google took on jobs that used to be reserved for government. - Slate Magazine (via interestingsnippets)

(via infoneer-pulse)

jhameia:

thearcanetheory:

comaniddy:

How Microorganisms Move

This week’s episode of Coma Niddy University is a science parody to How Animals Eat Their Food. Watch me make a fool of myself imitating how different microbes move around.

[Watch the Video]

this is adorable

It’s the accompanying sound effects that really make the skit.

(Source: comaniddy, via feminist-fury)

oinonio:

We May Be Wrong, But At Least We Were First | Rob Tomoe

(via cognitivedissonance)