Category Archives: Wisdom

FTRW 2012 – Oscar Censorship

No, not the seven-second delay when the documentary picture winner said “fuck” – that’s nothing. Yesterday, I wrote about censorship from a more broad perspective than the usual FTRW topics of censorship of books (and DVD’s and graphic novels and so on.)  Today, I’d like to continue talking about bigger picture (er, no pun intended) […]

FTRW 2012 – Censoring Your Democratic Right to Vote

Censorship doesn’t just happen with books and videos, it happens in a variety of ways when people in positions of power and authority attempt to control, influence and manipulate your behaviour. Perhaps the most insidious way that they do this is when powerful people attempt to eliminate our fundamental democratic rights.  Right now, a major […]

The Fireplace Delusion: An Insight Into Theism for Atheists

Well-known atheist, Sam Harris, recently posted “The Fireplace Delusion” as an analogy to help atheists understand how theists see the world (and especially how they feel when their beliefs are criticized). The point he makes is that a wood fire – in a home hearth or around a campfire – with its strong associations of […]

Kids Say The Damndest Things (In the Library)

The idea behind this site is pretty good but I think it’d work better if it was opened up so anyone could contribute so the person running it would have lots of content. For example, you can check out the ThingsMyKidSaid sub-reddit for lots of great submissions. At this point, I should probably add something […]

What Do Atheists Think When They Read The Bible/Is Religion Dying?

A couple religion related things I’ve come across recently… On Quora, someone asks what non-believers who have read the entire Bible think when they read it? Is religion declining worldwide?  That is definitely the trend and a recent discussion with a co-worker left us wondering whether religion as we know it would cease to exist […]

Saturday Snap – Freedom to Read Week Display (And Other Memorable RPL Moments)

Freedom to Read Week is coming up from February 26 to March 3 and I volunteered to create the relevant display at Central for the next few weeks leading up to FTRW.  (One co-worker was impressed and said “Don’t do too good of a job or they’ll make you do all the displays!”) Anyhow, that […]

You Will Never Kill Piracy and Piracy Will Never Kill You

Following yesterday’s post about “No Copyright Intended”, here’s another relevant article from Forbes.com (via MetaFilter where, come to think of it, I may have originally got the “No Copyright Intended” link as well.)

No Copyright Intended

A good article on the changing understanding of copyright in a non-commercial, remix-focused culture. I mean, when I made my Hawaii montage video, I thought nothing of using a couple songs (a surf tune by the Ventures and a Beach Boys medley) to backdrop my video. I don’t expect to make any money from my […]

Quora Questions Qaptured

I’ve mentioned Quora a couple times before.  It’s a community-based Q&A site built by two ex-Facebook employees that some project will be bigger than Twitter and Wikipedia. The site lets you follow different topics as well as individual questions.  This approach gives you a pretty high degree of personalization and the weekly e-mail digest of […]

Ken Haycock: “Should We Reconsider the Paramilitary Library?”

Noted library leader, Ken Haycock, has a regular e-newsletter which contains columns on a wide variety of library and related topics.  I don’t always agree with these columns (I’m still percolating a response to one he sent out in recently about why public libraries should be open on Christmas Day) but do find them thought-provoking […]