Really old pictures of travel to space. Neat!

Also, when in the future do “earthmen” get so femmey?

Lest anybody think that OCLC suing the Library Hotel is silly, keep in mind that it’s a trademark issue, and if they don’t sue, they lose the trademark. Also, the story linked above gives a mistaken impression: OCLC wasn’t looking for money from the hotel; they just needed a licensing agreement in hand to protect their trademark. Now that lawyers are involved, who knows what it will take to make it stop. I couldn’t find a link to the LJ Academic Newswire release below, so here’s the text:

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Do you want cheeseburger fries with that?
Try as I might (and those who know me know that this is exactly the sort of thing I love to eat), I can’t make it sound good. I mean, I’ll try it, of course, but right now I can’t imagine enjoying it.

In addition to Bull the Dog, the City of Pullman and the Palouse historical pictures archives has great pictures of floods. Select “Floods” from the predefined search list to see some amazing flooding, including one picture that notes that you can judge the depth by the water level coming up to the knees of a man on horseback!

More sad and not entirely surprising information about our government: government publications are being removed or “updated” to reflect administration goals rather than reality. Similar reasoning is behind the battle over what questions will and won’t be asked on the census forms.

The Dixie Chicks "don’t feel part of the country scene any longer," and "now consider ourselves part of the big Rock ‘n’ Roll family." I didn’t know it worked that way. Are they going to stop recording country music? Will anyone care? I admire them for their willingness to speak their minds, and I don’t even hate their stuff, but I had somehow imagined that you couldn’t just declare yourself a rock act.

The Loebner Prize is an anuual Turing test. The BBC tells us mostly about the only UK finalist, Jabberwacky, whose purely adaptive methodology is unique in this year’s field: "Nothing is hard-coded, nothing is fixed, and it changes slightly, on its own, every day. Jabberwacky doesn’t have just one personality, and to a reasonable degree, tends to reflect the users back to themselves." You can chat with the bot at the Jabberwacky site, though it seems to be a little busy just now. Looking for a third win is Alice, which won 2001’s event, taking home the annual bronze medal (silver and gold are one-time prizes for (respectively) text-based and audio-visual fooling of all the judges). Ella, last year’s winner, doesn’t appear to be playing this year.

I had no idea that Dewey is a commercial product.

It’s cheesy, and not as funny as I might like, but this tribute to everybody’s favorite thrilling desert experience does seem to capture the essentials.