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01/04/2005 Archived Entry: "Humor and Google News"

Cartoons: Stuart Carlson has another good commentary on the advent of 2005 "The Bright Side"; and, Mike Keefe's self-explanatory "The Idiot's Guide to Missile Defense".

Plaudits to the Wonkette for the best quote of the day gleaned from the New York Times. She comments on an article about upcoming Presidential Balls, "The NYT Magazine interviews Jeanne L. Phillips, chairwoman of the Presidential Inaugural Committee: I hear one of the balls will be reserved for troops who have served in Iraq or Afghanistan. Yes, the Commander-in-Chief Ball. That is new. It will be about 2,000 servicemen and their guests. And that should be a really fun event for them." [Brad says the quote is difficult to appreciate without clicking on the Wonkette item itself.]

Interesting developments at Google...

The San Francisco Chronicle reports, "Google Inc. has partnered with five of the world's leading libraries, including those at Stanford and Harvard, to digitally scan their collections so that the books can be searched, and in many cases read, online free of charge." Books published before 1923 -- which, thankfully, are the books in which I am most interested -- will be out of copyright but books published thereafter are likely to be online only in part...perhaps a chapter or two to induce a reader to buy the book itself. Google is also offering a new search engine: Google Scholar that searches scholarly literature. It looks like Google has decided to "try harder" before it becomes #2.