Archive for the 'Books' category

I have always a little in love with old manuscript decorations. They form a nice example of a tightly codified elegance and of a technique serving art purposes. Thanks to BibliOdyssey, we can see a very nice sample of it.

Source: Plimpton MS 296 from the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University (in Digital Scriptorium).

An excerpt from Julian May’s Orion arm (second book of the Science-Fiction Rampart Worlds series):

Dr Crystal diagnosed Matsukawa as a cretinoid coprocephalic -helpfully translating the medical terminology into its Standard English equivalent of ‘stupid shithead‘- who was lucky to be alive.

French translation: “crétinoïde orchydocéphalique“.

A masterpiece of Japanese painting is now available online since the Brooklyn Museum published brilliant reproductions of these exceptionnal prints that deeply impressed the European impressionists.

Brooklyn Museum - One hundred famous views of Edo

It is often quite difficult to know where a language idiom is coming from (it is less etymology than social history). For English, I foudn the ideal web site: phrases.org.uk.

In their own words:

The meanings and origins of over 1,200 English sayings, phrases and idioms.

Whether you want to resolve a friendly argument over how a saying or phrase originated or whether you just enjoy words, you’ll probably find something here to interest you.

Now, if you are more interested in the French language, you can get the corresponding information from the reference web site: expressio.fr. There, the phrase of today is:

The first National Punctuation Day was on September 24, 2006. OK. It seems that it was a hit in many different medias and among the US English teachers.

This is now time to prepare the next one: Only one month left to collect the examples of the worse punctuation and to find ways to improve the situation.

BibliOdyssey, as usual, presents one more impressive antique book: Ten albums of Japanese flora containing more than 700 images from the Museum at the University of Tokyo: honzo database (English home page).

Jesuits belong to a catholic church order that can be rightfully praised for its passion for spreading the word of God to all ends of the world and for science in general (and some less brilliant moments, I have to admit). Today, we learn from Antonio Spadaro in La Civilta Cattolica a Jesuit Rome-based journal, that Second Life, the simulation-based Internet game and environment , is not only a place where “the erotic dimension is very present” but “it needs to be understood… the best way to understand it is to enter it” and this must be read as a invitation to explore the possibilities of modern mission.

In a sense, it made me think about The sparrow, the excellent SciFi book of Mary Doria Russell, which is setting her story around a Jesuit sent to mission to a distant planet and into the core of human soul.

Source: Reuters.

BibliOdyssey is a web site about art in antique prints. You love books, you love quality books, you must stay tuned to BibliOdyssey.

Today, I just want to point to one single impressive post there: Drawing on the Renaissance.

Mashable published a list of Internet resources particularyl useful to photographers. The list is organised aroudn the following categories:

• Online photo Editors - Editeurs de photo en ligne
• Photo sharing - Partage de photographies
• Free photo hosting - Hébergement gratuit de photographies en ligne
• Photography blogs - Blogs photographiques
• Mashups - Combinaisons
• Mobile
• Photo mixing and slideshows - Mélange de photos et diaporamas
• Photo printing / Book creation - Impression photo / création de livres
• Photo search / Recherche de photographies
• Stock photos - Librairies de photos

An upgrade maybe painful: Vista as a fakir chair.

Source: Ctrl-Alt-Del.

For the amateur of lovely art books, the Rylands Library of Manchester University publishes on the Internet this superb copy of the Bhagavata Purana, sacred book of Hinduism.

Exceptionally nice visit of a web site that is providing excellent copies of antique books.

Source: BiblioOdyssey.

It is well known that the human brain has pattern matching capabilities much further advanced than those of the best equivalent software programs. This explains that failure rates of OCR (Optical Character Recognition) program may be as high as 1% (or even 2%) of errors, which is requiring later human proof-reading to ensure a reasonable quality for document scans. But when the document is old, badly printed, or degraded, error rates may climb further into the unusable (even more so when we address the scan of thousands of documents like is done by libraries and cultural institutions all over the world).

On another issue, the SPAM problem on the Internet became a major problem: Prorams try to make believe that they are human beings in order to insert advertisment anywhere a user can write (in the messages of a forum, in the comments of a blog, etc). For some time now, it became common that human users must identify themselves by their capacity to recognize a badly written word. Theoretically, this is a very efficient Turing test allowing to differentiate a human from a machine only by the results of their actions. Practically, the abilities of software programs have become so impressive that SPAM is slowly coming back again through those filters named CAPTCHAs (those images that you must read and copy back in order to be identified and approved for a specific action).

The problem appears to be: create CAPTCHA tremendously difficult for the automated software and, simultaneously, bring human beings to the task of checking scans of documents difficult to read by program.

The solution: reCAPTCHA.

The idea is to provide a CAPTCHA service to thousands of bloggers and forum administrators (WordPress, phpBB, etc.) Users are invited to recognize two words specifically difficult to read (profesional OCR programs failed during scans done by Carnegie Mellon University). The user must recognize them both. One is used to check that this is a human being, the other will fill a database of OCR translations that will be used to deliver even more CAPTCHAs and to improve the quality of a document scanned by Carnegie Mellon. Dual core technology: efficiently fight spammers and deliver millions of human users to improve the scan quality of thousands of ancient documents (without using slave labor).

Example of a difficult to read/scan document:

One of the key advantages is that most pro OCR programs can tell when they fail to recognize a character or a word (when they are not confident enough).