• Surname Profiler
  “Surnames as a quantitative resource”
  (tags: geospatial surnames)
• Surnames as a Quantitative Resource
  “the geography of British and Anglophone surnames”
  (tags: geospatial surnames)

• USGS and Google Maps
  “All 2 million of the USGS datapoints are mapped out in paged results. Over 60 different types of locations including lakes, rivers, craters, glaciers for all 50 States.”
  (tags: geospatial geotagged)
• What is a Lost Word?
  phrontistery, thanks to Bryan Alexander
  (tags: language)

March

July

• geotagthings
  “a simple way to assign any web resource – anything with a url – a location in the normal, human physical world”
  (tags: geospatial geotagged tools)

In case it’s not on your regular reading menu, a recent posting from Crooked Timber tickles the risibility meters (they’re stereo…): The Holy Trinity is getting a makeover…. Puts me in mind of a favorite Pratchettism, in which I first encountered the [well known British] term “godbothering” [glossed as “fervent religious grovelling”] :

Archchancellor (of Unseen University) Mustrum Ridcully: So… how are things in the godbothering business?
Chief Priest of Blind Io: We do our humble best. How is the dangerous meddling with things man was not meant to understand?
Ridcully: Pretty fair. Pretty fair.
(incidentally, they are brothers)

(from Terry Pratchett’s Reaper Man, pg 91)

Thanks to Netflix and my own taste for the epic, I’m now entangled in Heimat II (more here). The first 11 episodes of Heimat I were certainly engrossing, but the second series is even more so because the characters are of my own age cohort. The events are mostly in Munich in the early 1960s, but they’re close enough to early 1960s Cambridge to give me a lot to think about. I’ve just watched the episode set on 22 November 1963, the day Kennedy was shot, and I was transported back to my own vivid memories of the day.

Yesterday I sprang for the 20-odd VHS tapes for both series (used, via Amazon), and today I found (via the Wikipedia page) pointers to Heimat script (German language) and The Second Heimat script (German language). This is sufficient inducement for me to attempt to retrieve/extend my college German (last seen disappearing in the rear view mirror 45 years [and several languages] ago).

I know I’ve mentioned Robyn Eckhardt’s EatingAsia blog before, but today’s posting on Rat-tail noodles is even more mouthwatering than the usual fare. It’s the photographs that make the site so remarkable, and I swear I can almost smell the dishes. I’m working on being able to taste ’em too…

First grade class 1905, detail, originally uploaded by oook.

I’m experimenting with blogging from Flickr, something I should have tried long ago. This one suggests the profound challenges faced by educators everywhere, and is just one of a vast number of images I’m trying to figure out what to do with. nsfaces.schtuff.com is my main silo, but I’m also beginning to build a collection of my own photographic past at oook.schtuff.com.

While sorting through a box of family photographs, I was brought up short by this postcard:

The two stumbling gentlemen would seem to be King Edward VII and Czar Nicholas. The ladies might represent Brazil (if color is the relevant attribute) and Spain, but I know of no early 20th century diplomatic crisis that involved those four nations. Any ideas?