Take it Apart

It's a famous proverbial situation in the field of library science--is it ethical to make available information on how to build or use nuclear weapons? My husband pointed out that even if a library buys books on how to build a nuclear weapon, it's extremely unlikely that anyone could afford the parts.

I have never gotten a question about this at the reference desk, but the other day I was walking by it when I heard a patron in the middle of asking about how to disassemble nuclear weapons. I didn't get a chance to hear the answer, but he would have made the mayor of Hiroshima proud.

Book Titles Weird and Monotonous

Another link courtesy of American Libraries Direct: the Weird Books Room on AbeBooks!

Some of my favorites from this selection:
Why Do I Vomit?
Soldier Bear (you have to see the cover)
What to Do When the Russians Come: A Survivor's Guide
Oedipus in Disneyland
Is Your Dog Gay?
Poop-Eaters: Dung Beetles in the Food Chain
Nuclear War: What's in It for You?
How to Survive a Robot Uprising
The Bible Cure for Irritable Bowel Syndrome

Lately I've also noticed an increasingly annoying phenomenon in trendy scholarly book titles. We're an academic library, so of course we buy a lot of academic books, and it's become obvious to me that the format Trendy Title: A Trendy Subtitle That Explains What the Trendy Title is Actually About is very popular. I would vote for an even more original trendy title that can fit in one line and can also adequately represent what the book is about. Here are some examples of what I mean from the recent batch of books that we ordered:

Guesstimation: Solving the World's Problems on the Back of a Cocktail Napkin
World Without End?: Environmental Disaster and the Collapse of Empires
The Sea Woman: Sedna in Inuit Shamanism and Art in the Eastern Arctic
The Borders Within: Encounters Between Mexico and the U.S.
Al'America: Travels Through America's Arab and Islamic Roots

There are SO many of these that whenever I see one I just want to shake the author, or the publisher, or whoever is responsible for it and say "We get it already! The trendy title is very clever! Can you just tell us what the book is about instead?"

I guess I'm stuck with book titles in this line of work, from the amusing to the downright obnoxious.

Say what?

All through the ordering process, I've been staring at this book title. If you're not an evolutionary biologist, this is one that will definitely cause you to fall on your face in confusion. I'm not sure why we ordered it for our community college library.

The title is: The Deep Structure of Biology: Is Convergence Sufficiently Ubiquitous to Give a Directional Signal? edited by Simon Conway Morris.

It could be that I'm just terribly ignorant, but I suspect that this title would elicit a "huh?" and a furrowed brow in many a learned soul.

This is your brain on Google.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,” Page said in a speech a few years back. “For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.” In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.”

Is Google Making Us Stupid? (Atlantic Monthly)

Is it just me, or is there something wrong with this?

Haven't these people read M.T. Anderson's Feed?

I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but I'm beginning to think that Google is, in fact, evil (and I'm only partially being tongue-in-cheek).

Living Library

As you can probably tell by now, I get a lot of interesting links through various sources at work. And this one intrigues me so much that it deserves a more extensive commentary.

I absolutely love the Living Library concept. Go ahead and read the article too, but the idea is that a library sets up a program in which library patrons can check out a person for a half-hour conversation just like they would check out a book. The people represent various stereotypes, in this case like Ex Gang Member, Muslim, Social Worker, and Gay Man.

Now, our cultural buzzword "diversity" irritates me. It focuses on how different we all are, not on the commonalities that make us human. If we were really able to love our fellow human beings, there would be no reason to "celebrate diversity," because the differences between us wouldn't matter. Celebrating difference only drives wedges between people--it dehumanizes the "other" and turns a person into an exotic stereotype. In essence, "diversity" is a word we use to hide how prejudiced we all are by applauding ourselves for "tolerating" difference--from a safe distance. "Tolerance" is one thing--friendship and love are another entirely.

The Living Library project tears down barriers for the brave souls who volunteer and those who check them out. By having a half-hour conversation with someone about whom one has a handful of preconceived notions, one can get to know them as an individual rather than a stereotype. In the U.S., I think it would be a bucket of water to a culture thirsty for meaningful relationships in a confrontation-phobic atmosphere.

So all in all, I love the idea. The only questions I would have are . . . how do you catalog a person, and where does the bar code go?

Odd Book Out

Well, somebody beat me to it. And they have formed quite a collection! Click and marvel at such titles as Cheese Problems Solved and Squid Recruitment Dynamics.

Odd Book Out

Okay, so once a week has turned into once a whenever-I-see-something-weird.

And now I unveil this amusing title:
Big Black Boring Rock: Essays on Northwest Geology by Stephen P. Reidel

And there ye have it.

Library Goat

I had a dream about the library last night--the library where I work decided to sell goats.

Only . . . none of the goats were selling.

It was winter, and one day the library got snowed in. I walked to work only to find out that somehow, the snowbound state had apparently made goats more popular.

We sold one goat . . . for 56 million dollars.

Odd Book Out

From time to time at the library, one comes across a title that deserves the status of . . . "huh?!"

Once a week or so I'd like to share some such title with all of you. So for this week, behold! I present to you:

Step-By-Step Brain Tanning The Sioux Way by Larry Belitz

Note: Since stumbling across this title, I've discovered that brain tanning is: "a natural method of tanning hides. After the hide has been fleshed, scraped, and abraded, a slightly cooked mixture of brains and fat from animals is rubbed into the hide."

And now you know everything you ever wanted about brain tanning.