For almost 20 years, Intel has been building technology to help Stephen Hawking communicate with the world — and now the company is making the same software the world renowned physicist uses to write books, give speeches and talk available to everybody. For free. READ MORE: The software Stephen Hawking uses to talk to the world is now free | Engadget.
Since 1989, leisure reading groups have become a full-fledged phenomenon and are now found everywhere from offices to religious communities to, increasingly, virtual platforms. Although exact numbers are hard to come by, the New York Times reports an estimated 5 million Americans belong to a book club. Even more belong to online reading groups like those housed on the popular site goodreads.com, which has 40 million members. Large-scale book clubs even have the power to influence the publishing market. When Mark Zuckerberg announced in January he was starting an online reading group humbly titled A Year of Books, his first pick shot up amazon.com’s sales list, surging overnight from 45,140 to the top 10. The public, it seems, has fully embraced book club culture.
Or, at least, a certain demographic has. The population of in-person book clubs skews heavily toward college-educated women, and a large proportion of these groups are single-sex, either by default or design. READ MORE: Women’s Groups and the Rise of the Book Club | JSTOR Daily.
As you can see in the following infographic from Cartridge Discount, fonts used for the web differ from ones designed for print. This graphic also explains the difference between serif and sans serif, and how most people have been mistakenly using the word “font” when writing online about “typefaces”. via Infographic: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Fonts | The Digital Reader.
For more information about fonts also see the infophile.ca resource Typography and Type Design.
We’re all about do-it-yourself here at Lifehacker. But just because you don’t have the skills to do something doesn’t mean you can’t learn them. In the next installment of Lifehacker’s 10th anniversary celebration, we’re revisiting some guides we’ve written on learning some highly-desired skills. Guides listed:
READ: Top 10 Highly-Desired Skills You Can Teach Yourself | LifeHacker.
(Edmonton) When you live 400 kilometres from the nearest library, getting information can be a real challenge. Professor Ali Shiri of the University of Alberta’s School of Library and Information Studies is leading a project to address this issue. Together with co-investigator Dinesh Rathi, Shiri and a team of collaborators have begun to bridge the information gap for some of Canada’s most isolated people with a project called Digital Library North.
Currently, people in the Inuvialuit Settlement Region—an area that spans 90,650 square kilometres—must travel to the Inuvialuit Cultural Resource Centre to access hard-copy information. The challenges with distance and winter above the treeline limit the access. The SSHRC-funded project will create a digital library infrastructure to address the unique information needs in Canada’s northern regions over the next three years. READ MORE: Creating the first cultural digital library in Canada’s North | University of Alberta.
May inspire other museums, libraries and archives to launch Kickstarter campaigns!
When the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum launched Reboot the Suit, a Kickstarter campaign to preserve and display Neil Armstrong’s iconic Apollo 11 spacesuit, they set a goal of $500,000. With two hours left of the campaign, they’ve raised over $715,000 from more than 9,400 backers. READ MORE: Smithsonian’s Kickstarter to show Neil Armstrong’s spacesuit blasts past goal | Mashable.
Danika’s post that asked how well we would do on the bookseller’s quiz show got me thinking about some of the best questions I was asked when I worked as a reference librarian. Anyone who knows anything about libraries knows that all patron interactions are private and that librarians never, ever share information about those who ask questions or seek advice. Anonymity is of the utmost importance.
That said, I’ve been out of libraries now for a while and feel confident enough that all of these questions are generic and rendered anonymously enough as to not be pinpointed to any individual. I thought it would be fun to compile a handful of the best, most unique, and most head-scratching questions I was asked as a reference librarian. READ MORE: Five Great Questions I Was Asked As A Reference Librarian |
BOOK RIOT.
The summer movie season is over—but the biggest films of the year are still to come. This fall’s movies include some of the most long-awaited titles in history, but also some smaller films that could become instant classics. Here are the 30 movies you need to know about in the last four months of 2015. READ: Fall Movie Guide: 30 Science Fiction and Fantasy Movies To Watch Out For | io9.
Children’s books about being raised by same-sex parents, including one about a pair of “gay” penguins bringing up a chick, are to be banned in Venice’s schools, as a new mayor stamps a more conservative mark on the World Heritage city. READ MORE: Gay parenting books to be banned from Venice schools | Telegraph.
N++, a new video game for PlayStation 4, is the culmination of over a decade of work. Created by the inventers of N and N+ — Metanet Games, the twin dynamos of Mare Sheppard and Raigan Burns who helped put Toronto’s indie game industry on the map a decade ago — N++ is not just inventive and pleasing to the senses. It also has the audacity to set itself up as a game that creative users might play for many years to come.
“The whole premise of the project was that we never want to make another one,” Burns told CBC News. “We want this to be definitive, and to last a lifetime.” Every level takes up only a single screen, but that doesn’t mean the game is short. Sheppard and Burns, along with programmer Shawn McGrath, painstakingly created 2,360 levels for N++. READ MORE: N++, the ‘perfect’ video game that took 10 years to complete | Technology & Science | CBC News.
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