I'm slightly embarrassed that I didn't catch this earlier. Sports Illustrated has opened up their entire back catalogue, or "vault," for free; more than 50 years of covers, articles, photos, and videos. The articles are available as searchable html or bundled up by the issue. The full issues, ad placement and all, are presented in a page-flipping online reader.
Since I've already inserted myself into twodifferent conversations about this topic today, I might as well formally blog about it here: the New York Times has a heartfelt and funny op-obit* for Dungeons & Dragons co-creator Gary Gygax, written by Wired's Adam Rogers—and an equally funny diagram of D&D's influence on the average role-playing-game aficionado, by designer Sam Potts.
Mr. Gygax's genius was to give players a way to inhabit the characters inside their games, rather than to merely command faceless hordes, as you did in, say, the board game Risk. Roll the dice and you generated a character who was quantified by personal attributes like strength or intelligence.
You also got to pick your moral alignment, like whether you were "lawful good" or "chaotic evil." And you could buy swords and fight dragons. It was cool.
Yes, I played a little. In junior high and even later. Lawful good paladin. Had a flaming sword. It did not make me popular with the ladies, or indeed with anyone. Neither did my affinity for geometry, nor my ability to recite all of "Star Wars" from memory.
Yet on the strength of those skills and others like them, I now find myself on top of the world. Not wealthy or in charge or even particularly popular, but in instead of out. The stuff I know, the geeky stuff, is the stuff you and everyone else has to know now, too.
Though we've never asked, I have to assume that former and current Dungeons & Dragons fans figure prominently among the readership of the World Almanac. And to all of you, I can only say: I'm jealous. Seriously. No one in my small circle of childhood friends had any interest in the game, so I had to content myself with rolling up characters on my own, paging wistfully through the Monster Manual, and dreaming of the day when I could be a full-fledged D&D geek, too. (Then Zorkcame along and made it all better.)
Yet here I am, a couple of decades later, still messing about with charts and statistics on a daily basis. Coincidence? I think not.
Full disclosure: I almost never watch Frontline on PBS anymore. I usually watch it online.
But the other night, however unexpectedly, I sat down and watched "Growing Up Online" on PBS. The show examined how this first generation to grow up within the MySpace/Facebook sphere socializes on and is socialized by the Internet.
"Growing Up Online" refuses to reel off cautionary tale after cautionary tale in a tone of shrill alarm, as many media profiles of this issue seem to. Rather, the filmmakers try to offer a more nuanced documentation of how children, their parents, and teachers struggle to find their appropriate levels of interaction with the limitless resources of the Internet age.
Watch "Growing Up Online" on Frontline's website, where not only are the most recent shows available, but most programs since 2001 are archived, along with some olderclassicepisodes from the show's 25-year history. If you've already seen it, there are some great topical resources on the show's site, along with some follow-up on the kids documented by the program.
It took me a few days to recover, but the CBC's Test the Nation: Trivia seemed to be a roaring success. Six teams locked horns: chefs, flight crews, cab drivers, celebrity lookalikes, backpackers, and bloggers. But in the end, there could be only one...
The bloggers dominated all three categories: highest-scoring celebrity guest (Samantha Bee with 49/60), highest-scoring individual in studio (Rick Spence of CanEntrepreneur and The National Post with 57/60) and yes, the team with the overall #1 high score (average 50/60).
You can still take the test online, and match your wits against Canada's finest bloggers and The Daily Show's Most Senior Correspondent... let us know how you did!
Image from photojunkie, operated and maintained by Rannie Turinga of "Team Blogger." Congrats!
* FTW = for the win, for those who aren't fluent in l33t-speak
Unbeknownst to me, the staff at The New York Public Library has been blogging since last August. So far the staff of nine departments are involved including sports and cooking. The blogs are technically in beta mode and aren't all updated frequently (sadly, the maps department only has 3 posts). There seem to be several posts each week, most pertaining to the library's extensive Digital Gallery, work on upcoming exhibitions, or the history of New York City.
For instance, a post recently noted their newly uploaded collection of early baseball photos from A. G. Spalding (yes, the guy whose name is on your basketball). Paula Baxter, Curator of the Library's Art and Architecture Collection, has been sharing her thoughts on an upcoming exhibition on Art Deco fashion and design.
No, it's not a World Almanac editor's meeting, though we do wear remarkably similar uniforms... this is a photo pulled from a terrific new collaboration between the Library of Congress and Flickr. The LOC has placed thousands of images from two major collections on Flickr, and invites the public to browse the collections and contribute tags, notes, and comments to individual photos. User-generated data might (or might not) end up in the LOC's own database; for the time being it's just a test program, focused on three major goals:
To share photographs from the Library's collections with people who enjoy images but might not visit the Library's own Web site.
To gain a better understanding of how social tagging and community input could benefit both the Library and users of the collections.
To gain experience participating in Web communities that are interested in the kinds of materials in the Library's collections.
There's really nothing more to say except: clear a few hours from your schedule, and start browsing some fascinating photographs.
If you're reading this, chances are you're something of a trivia buff already—so why not put all that arcane knowledge to the test? Canadian viewers can tune in to CBC Television this Sunday (Jan. 20) at 8PM EST for the latest edition of Test the Nation, which is...
...a two-hour television event, with viewers playing at home as they watch our six teams of Canadians compete in our Toronto studio. By the end of the test, you'll know if you've been paying attention to the world around you, or if you've been sleepwalking through the last eight years.
The show will also reveal information about others who are playing at home and in the studio. Who will turn out to be more century savvy? The Men or the Women? Will the meat eaters devour the vegetarians? Will the coffee drinkers overpower the tea drinkers? We'll find out as Canadians give us their answers on the most technologically advanced and information saturated century the planet has ever seen!
And the most important question... will World Almanac readers crush all other test-takers? They just might: the producers of Test the Nation asked us to review the quiz, and I was pleasantly surprised to see how many questions could be answered within the pages of our book. So if you need to cram for the quiz, you could do worse than to pick up a copy of the 2008 World Almanac.
If you don't get CBC TV, you can still take the test at the Test the Nationwebsite (starting Sunday) and find out how you measure up against test-takers around the world. You can warm up this week in the "Mental Gym," or take tests from previous shows: IQ Test and Watch Your Language.
If you do tune in, watch for my smiling mug to pop up somewhere between questions 26 and 27, offering up some "expert" commentary on the test...
When new studies and demographic analyses are published, it's easy to find yourself making assumptions by interpreting the raw data. Those assumptions can lead to misleading conclusions that run contrary to what the data actually illustrates. STATS, a "non-profit, non-partisan Statistical Assessment Service (STATS)... on the use and abuse of science and statistics in the media," attempts to provide a counterbalance to quickly rendered assumptions made upon the release of studies, just published their "Dubious Data Awards." The awards are an interesting collection of the way new research and statistics have been interpreted by the media in ways that misinform or mislead.
One example:
In July, the Associated Press - and many other news organizations - reported that "Using marijuana seems to increase the chance of becoming psychotic... even infrequent use could raise the small but real risk of this serious mental illness by 40 percent." Since marijuana use rates have skyrocketed since the 1940's and 50's, going from single digit percentages of the population trying it to a peak of some 60 percent of high school seniors trying it in 1979 (stabilizing thereafter at roughly 50 percent of each high school class), we would expect to see this trend have some visible effect on the prevalence of schizophrenia and other psychoses.
Roughly one to two percent of the population has schizophrenia (and another two percent or so have other psychotic disorders), and this percentage does not vary much with the region within the U.S. Over time, diagnosis of schizophrenia has changed, making it almost impossible to evaluate whether low-level exposure to pot could increase the risk by as much as 40 percent.
Of course, the STATS analysis is not necessarily the right one every time, but the different perspective they offer is helpful.
Another year, another World Almanac Time Capsule, filled with ten items that represent some of the trends and events that defined the year, from politics to sports to pop culture. Disagree with our choices? Let us know in the comments.
A pouch of contaminated pet food, one of the first of many tainted consumer products yanked from store shelves in 2007.
A candle from Virginia Tech's Apr. 17 nighttime vigil in memory of the victims of the Apr. 16 shootings.
Barry Bond's 756th home run ball, purchased at auction by designer Marc
Ecko for $752,467. Ecko later sponsored an online vote which determined
that the ball should be branded with an asterisk and donated to the
Baseball Hall of Fame.
A copy of Climate Change 2007, a report by the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change, which called the global warming trend
"unequivocal" and said that human behavior was "very likely"
contributing to it.
A gallon of ethanol, which was produced in the U.S. in record amounts
in 2007--13 mil barrels in July alone, a 33% increase over July 2006.
One of the record number of foreclosure notices (nearly 250,000 in
August alone) that were served upon home buyers in 2007 in the wake of
the subprime mortgage crisis.
An iPhone, preloaded with an mp3 of Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'," in honor of the last scene in the final season of The Sopranos.
I get a Google Alert every day for new online appearances of the phrase "World Almanac," but yesterday was the first time that a link took me to YouTube. The video I landed on (at right) didn't seem to have any connection, at first, but it all became clear at the one-minute mark...
I wrote a quick note to Patrick Butler, the video's creator, to let him know that he had the dubious honor of creating the first known World Almanac fan video on YouTube—and it turns out that his connection to our little book is quite a bit deeper than I could have suspected. He gave us permission to post this brief explanation on our blog:
"I have been a World Almanac fan since 1994 and it got me into learning when I didn't like learning and turned my life around. It helped me get my GED since I was in special school and they don't give you high school diplomas. I had problems with my behavior also and it got me in trouble a lot even after I got into The World Almanac. I was in a special school because I had autism and had behavior problems. I did do better when I got my first almanac. I am from Oswego New York and I was in special schools by the Oswego County BOCES Special Education Program until I was 20."
Patrick also recorded a new video just for us, entitled "How Did I Become a World Almanac Fan?" Please do check it out, and leave the guy a few words of support if you're as touched by his story as I was.
As we wade through our own year-end top ten lists and news roundups, we'd be remiss not to mention the recent appearance of Google's 2007 "Zeitgeist" — a roundup of the search giant's top trends and terms for the past year, in several different categories. At right, a snapshot of search volume for three (in)famous young celebrities, two of whom also made it into our own Year In Pictures retrospective... and below, the top ten searches on Google News for the year. Anyone surprised by the list?
Since most of you probably can't focus, through the turkey-and-stuffing haze, to read much on the blog today, we'll keep it short, and just let you jump into today's segment from Wake Up With Whoopi—a quick run-through the origins of Thanksgiving, and a few notable modern-day Thanksgiving traditions (including football).
If you can manage to stay awake to click through a few interesting links, you can get the full Thanksgiving story on the World Almanac for Kids site, or visit the Census Bureau for a great round-up of Thanksgiving-related stats—turkey, cranberry, and sweet potato production in the U.S., number of places in the U.S. named after the holiday's main course... enjoy, and Happy Thanksgiving!
The year is winding down, which means it's time for media outlets everywhere to start summarizing 2007 with variously-themed lists. While we don't yet know who the Time "Person(s) of the Year" will be, one of my favorite lists has already been released: the Oxford Word of the Year and its runners-up. I like the Word of the Year lists because they provide an interesting perspective on what people have been talking about during the year, and how they've chosen to talk about it.
The 2007 Oxford Word of the Year is locavore, which defines the movement, becoming more popular in some regions of the country, toward committing to eating only locally grown food.
A few Word of the Year runners-up:
bacn: email notifications, such as news alerts and social networking updates, that are considered more desirable than unwanted "spam" (coined at PodCamp Pittsburgh in Aug. 2007 and popularized in the blogging community)
colony collapse disorder: a still-unexplained phenomenon resulting in the widespread disappearance of honeybees from beehives, first observed in late 2006
tase (or taze): to stun with a Taser (popularized by a Sep. 2007 incident in which a University of Florida student was filmed being stunned by a Taser at a public forum)
Check out the rest of Oxford's list, which includes a nice etymology for locavore, at the link below. Or grab a copy of The World Almanac 2008, where you'll find Merriam-Webster's list of new words for 2007 on page 722.
If you're feeling a little guilty about wasting company time clicking around on the Internet, there's a new way to assuage that guilt (at least temporarily). Last month, a new website called FreeRice.com launched with two stated goals: to provide free English vocabulary and to help end world hunger. For every answer you get right on their free vocabulary quiz, 10 grains of rice are donated toward hunger relief via the United Nations World Food Program. The questions cover every imaginable vocabulary level, as the difficulty level adjusts with every right and wrong answer. And it's pretty satisfying watching the wooden bowl on the right side of the screen fill up, ten grains at a time.
The daily totals of donated grains, which you can view on the site, have grown exponentially since FreeRice's launch--from 830 grains donated on Oct. 7 to 77.1 million on Nov. 8. Over 1 billion grains have been donated so far.
Naah, not chocolate and peanut butter: baseball and coffee. If it doesn't seem like the most natural combination, you probably haven't been to Lokesh Dhakar's website, where he features two marvelous visualizations:
Coffee Drinks: I've seen charts like this before, but Dhakar's version is exceptionally tight, clean, and uncluttered. A nice guide to espresso drinks for those who find the ordering experience intimidating due to "the vast number of ordering options and new words with accented characters to pronounce."
Baseball Pitches: This is even better, for my money—"a fan's guide to identifying pitches," showing the path of the ball in twelve common pitches, from both the batter's POV and from one side. Gorgeous stuff, and quite handy for those of us who couldn't tell a changeup from a hole in the ground.
As promised, I am almost caught up with posting our backlog of World Almanac segments on Whoopi Goldberg's morning radio show. Today's posting brings us all the way up to September 13, when I stopped by to talk about:
Nasty presidential campaigns (and candidate nicknames) in U.S. history
Why you should immediately click through to the Library of Congress (as long as you have time to spare)
And a little background on the writing of the Star-Spangled Banner.
Keep checking back here for future conversations, or tune in and listen live at around 7:30 (Eastern time) every Thursday morning, online, or on the radio.
OK, I know I told you all to get library cards, but I didn't expect you to do it so quickly...
Despite the rise of broadband Internet access in homes across the country and the ability to Google just about anything from anywhere, libraries are attracting record numbers of visitors.
Nationwide, visits to and items checked out of libraries are increasing steadily. According to the American Library Association, nearly 1.3 billion library patrons checked out more than 2 billion items in fiscal year 2005, the most recent figures available. That compares with 1.15 billion visitors checking out 1.7 billion items in fiscal year 2000.
I've been lax in reporting on my visits with the Wake Up With Whoopi crew, but we are still having weekly chats about all kinds of odd and essential facts. Despite the massive deadlines looming over us, I promise to play a little catch-up this week, starting with this visit from August 23. Topics of conversation that week:
Popular sections and common uses of The World Almanac
A light scolding from Whoopi for not having the complete World Almanac available online
A quick chat about the value of Wikipedia relative to other reference sources, and what happens when you look up "Paul Cubby Bryant"
And the meaty topic of the day: a quick survey of some interesting sumptuary laws, drawing on information in this year's World Almanac for Kids. (Click here for a variation of the New Jersey law that closes the segment, plus some additional reading on sumptuary laws around the world)
The World Almanac has a ton of uses, but alas: acing an interview with Google may not be one of them. Or at least, that's the conclusion I come to after reviewing this list of Crazy Questions at Google Job Interviews. Yeah, if you spend any time online at all, you've seen lists like this before. But some of these questions were new to me. Among the highlights:
9. Every man in a village of 100 married couples has cheated on his wife. Every wife in the village instantly knows when a man other than her husband has cheated, but does not know when her own husband has. The village has a law that does not allow for adultery. Any wife who can prove that her husband is unfaithful must kill him that very day. The women of the village would never disobey this law. One day, the queen of the village visits and announces that at least one husband has been unfaithful. What happens?
13. Four people need to cross a rickety rope bridge to get back to their camp at night. Unfortunately, they only have one flashlight and it only has enough light left for seventeen minutes. The bridge is too dangerous to cross without a flashlight, and it's only strong enough to support two people at any given time. Each of the campers walks at a different speed. One can cross the bridge in 1 minute, another in 2 minutes, the third in 5 minutes, and the slow poke takes 10 minutes to cross. How do the campers make it across in 17 minutes?
17. You have five pirates, ranked from 5 to 1 in descending order. The top pirate has the right to propose how 100 gold coins should be divided among them. But the others get to vote on his plan, and if fewer than half agree with him, he gets killed. How should he allocate the gold in order to maximize his share but live to enjoy it? (Hint: One pirate ends up with 98 percent of the gold.)
Hmmm... we will (I kid you not) have some new information about notorious pirates and other outlaws in the 2008 Almanac, but I don't think we have room to cover Rules of Booty Distribution. So, yes: you're on your own. But maybe in the 2009 edition...
Yahoo just rolled out a very cool new beta product called MapMixer, which lets you upload your own maps and overlay them on Yahoo's interactive world maps—even if your map doesn't have just the right proportions or perspective.
There are already some great examples online, including the historical lower Manhattan overlay at right. Make sure you zoom out and play with the overlay opacity. Oh, what a little landfill can do...
If you want to play around with MapMixer but don't have your own personal stash of maps, I suggest you click on over to the Library of Congress, which has some great historical maps its American Memory collection.
But my main reason for visiting GBS this morning wasn't to troll for references to our book—it was to check out a new feature that lets you add any books in Google's system to your own personal online "Library." Then you can add ratings, reviews, and tags, share your collection with others, or even let other folks subscribe to an RSS feed of any changes or additions to your library.
You can find more full-featured "My Library"-type features at Amazon and other online retailers, but Google's new tool is simple, quick, and uncluttered. I could see this being a really useful tool for people who have big home libraries, or who just read a lot of books—it's nice to be able to create a smaller subset of books you've actually read, so you don't have to search the whole, gigantic Google database every time you need to track down a particular volume, or a specific phrase.
I'll be interested to see how it (along with the rest of Google Book Search) develops.
P.S.: How many pigs did we (OK, the USDA's National Agriculture Statistics Service) tally in 2006? The preliminary figure for the U.S. alone was 61,197,000 hogs and pigs. That's a lotta bacon.
Twenty-four year old researcher Virgil Griffith has developed a database that traces the IP addresses of anonymous contributors to Wikipedia, the free online, user-written encyclopedia.
Among his reasons for doing so were the desire "to create a cornucopia of minor public relations disasters for companies and organizations I dislike" and the fact that "every time I hear about a new security vulnerability, I look to see if it can be done on a massive scale and indexed."
With his WikiScanner, Griffith was able to find several cases where unfavorable information was anonymously deleted from the entries of certain corporations; he was able to trace the digital footprint left by these anonymous users to IP addresses reserved for those very corporations.
As promised last week, here's my second World Almanac for Kids visit with the Wake Up With Whoopi crew. We did this on August 2, but it makes sense to post it today because today is the anniversary of an event I mentioned on-air.
Yup, August 16 is the day that Capt. Joe Kittinger set a particularly astonishing set of records in 1960. And in my excitement to talk about inventors, parachutes, and insanely high-altitude free-falls, I mixed up a few key details. Most notably: Kittinger didn't jump from 18,000 feet, that was the height at which his main parachute opened; he actually jumped—out of a balloon dubbed Excelsior III—from an altitude of more than 100,000 feet. In the process, he set records for highest balloon ascent and highest parachute jump, and also set the record for fastest speed attained by a human without the assistance of an engine.
As penance for my fact-flubbing, I offer this video of his jump, which is far more interesting than listening to me talk. But you can still click here to listen to the show and catch up on some other facts (accurate ones!) about the first Census, National Inventors' Month, and how some of those off-the-wall "National [Something-Very-Strange] Month" holidays come about in the first place.
Yeah, that's right: #3. I don't have a clip of our second installment yet, but it'll be more relevant next week, anyway. Come back then to find out why...
Anyway, I had another fun visit with the incredibly warm and friendly Wake Up With Whoopi crew yesterday. In this week's free-for-all:
In honor of the anniversary of Nixon's resignation (announced Aug. 8, 1974, but in effect at noon on Aug. 9), some selections from our list of Embarrassing Presidential Moments. Some bonus links: President Ford's 1942 Cosmo cover appearance (not an embarrassing moment, just an interesting one), and Pres. Carter's official report on his UFO sighting.
And at the very end, a quick hello from the next guest: Abby Cadabby, Sesame Street's newest resident. Even at my age, it was a truly great, geeky thrill to meet a Muppet.
Right now I'm reviewing the Astronomy chapter for the upcoming 2008 World Almanac—so it was a nice coincidence to run across this link. Haha.nu runs down a list of "The Top Five Virtual Sky Simulators," each of them catering to slightly different levels of interest and expertise.
Need some help making sense of the nighttime sky? Click through and get some fast (and free) electronic assistance.
(That's One Laptop Per Child, on Your Personal Computer.) In the latest edition of the World Almanac for Kids, we gave a big shout-out to the XO computer, created by the One Laptop Per Child organization. Now it looks like curious geeks (and other parties interested in creating software for the innovative laptops) can play around with the XO's unique SUGAR operating system.
This is not for the faint-of-heart (or limited-of-disk-space), however: you'll need virtualization software like VMWare or Parallels, plus a disk image of the OLPC OS... altogether, at least 300MB of downloads. But if you're infatuated with the XO, this is the closest you're going to get to it for a while.
I remember way back when, using Amazon's A9 maps to scope out different blocks in my neighborhood. I was apartment hunting and thought I'd save myself some trouble by pulling up A9's photos of certain streets—what did the building look like? Was the block it was on seedy or going through gentrification? Was there a bodega (as corner stores are called in New York) on the same block?
If my above description of A9 sounds familiar, it might be because you've heard of the Street View feature in Google Maps.
The feature has opened up a new dimension of interactivity, beyond what I was capable of with A9. Privacy issues aside--see "Google Maps Is Spying on My Cat" for one discussion--there is something very Internet-age about browsing street photos for peculiar scenes, posting them on a Web site, and inviting readers to contribute humorous captions.
Street View is currently only available for Denver, Las Vegas, Miami, New York City, and the San Francisco Bay area. The San Francisco photos are of a higher resolution, making it possible to play Where's Waldo? with real life.
New from our friends at Swivel: the ability to overlay data on maps of the world. The implementation is still a little wonky at times (Swivel's "brain" didn't seem to recognize the abbreviation for the state of Louisiana) but overall, a step in the right direction. Click on the image at right to explore some state population data from the 2000 Census, or check out the Swivel Geography announcement for more details and examples.
I'm slightly embarrassed that I didn't catch this earlier. Sports Illustrated has opened up their entire back catalogue, or "vault," for free; more than 50 years of covers, articles, photos, and videos. The articles are available as searchable html or bundled up by the issue. The full issues, ad placement and all, are presented in a page-flipping online reader.
My new favorite World Almanac-related quote:
Yeah, that's right: #3. I don't have a clip of our second installment yet, but it'll be more relevant next week, anyway. Come back then to find out why...
Right now I'm reviewing the Astronomy chapter for the upcoming 2008 World Almanac—so it was a nice coincidence to run across this link. 
(That's One Laptop Per Child, on Your Personal Computer.) In the latest edition of the 
