The 573 love letters of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning record the progression of their romance starting from the first letter sent by Browning in admiration of Barrett’s poetry. The collected letters have been housed at Wellesley College since 1930. On Tuesday, Valentine’s Day, the college made the letters available online, scanned and indexed for searching.  Even the envelopes are in there. The letters were digitized in collaboration with Baylor University, home of another significant Browning collection. Along with the letters, Wellesley has the box and case used by Browning and Barrett to store the letters they exchanged and the door from the Barrett house with the mail slot through which Browning’s letters were delivered. According to college lore, the slot was screwed shut years ago to prevent Wellesley students from slipping in their own hopeful letters.

I’ve pulled together all my old Oscar gift basket posts into one page. When we moved this site off old Blogger to WordPress I made the difficult decision to convert my old static archive pages, losing all the valuable search engine indexing and incoming links. The search hasn’t recovered with how my archives are set up and I never took the time to cook up an incoming link convertor or other solution.  My most popular posts were about the crazy-stuffed gift baskets the Academy Awards gave to their presenters.  So I decided to catalog those and add a “Best of” link on the sidebar. It was a nice trip down memory lane.

My Laura Ashley (not custom) Bookplates

Davidson Galleries in Seattle is running an exhibition of bookplates both contemporary and antique. Over 200 of these labels of book ownership are on display including those of well-known bookplate artists (yes, they exist!) who were, not surprisingly, usually printmakers. Bookplate subjects are as varied as their owners, though of course reading-related illustrations are common. My bookplates aren’t custom but they’re Laura Ashley (how luxe!) and I’ve only used them on a few very special books. Etsy is a good place to find bookplates to match your personality. I’ve written about bookplates twice before so here are some links I’ve gathered: Confessions of a Bookplate Junkie (still going strong after 5 years), The American Society of Bookplate Collectors & Designers, The Bookplate Society,  University of Notre Dame’s Bookplate Registry project, and Stanford’s online Bookplates Exhibit. There are many more bookplate resources out there and collections at many universities.

It’s old news that American shoe manufacturing has moved overseas, mostly to China. One of the few companies still making shoes in the USA wants to tip the balance the other way by marketing its shoes to the Chinese. Allen Edmonds, a privately held manufacturer of men’s shoes in Wisconsin, is opening a store in Shanghai this year. They’re hoping that “Made in the USA” will be as distinctive in China as it has become back home. If the approach succeeds, they have plans to expand into Hong Kong and Macau, but they won’t move production to Asia like so many others have. Allen Edmonds shoes were worn by Presidents Reagan, Clinton, and the Bushes for their inaugurations.

The U.S. Geological Survey started creating topographic maps in 1884. They don’t even know how many maps they’ve produced since then but they’re estimating it at 200,000. It’s such a fascinating endeavor and they’ve written papers on its history. Their National Geospatial Program is scanning all of the old topographic maps into electronic format and making them available for free download. 90,000 are available already. You can also order a reasonably priced print, the same paper format many of us are familiar with for modern USGS topographic maps (available at stores that cater to hikers like REI). The maps are in GeoPDF format, viewable in Adobe Reader and you get even more functionality with the TerraGo Toolbar extension. I downloaded Mount St Helens from 1919. Yup, it’s a lot different now. And back then the maps were all done by people hiking around taking measurements. (Here’s more geeky detail on Mount St Helens topography if you’re interested.)

It’s been 8 years since I started researching the origins of the Rockefeller Christmas Tree and this is the fifth year I’ve located it with aerial photos in online maps. Unfortunately this is the fuzziest online map view I’ve had in those years. I usually find a pretty nice photo of the tree in its original location, but this year’s tree, hailing from Mifflinville, Pennsylvania, hasn’t had a good photo op and so we must admire it instead in its decorated glory.  Instead I took a screenshot illustrating its proximity to Interstate 80 where a Rockefeller Christmas Tree scout, driving along, spotted it in March. The owner, Nancy Keller’s late husband had wanted to cut the tree down when they first moved there 30 years ago.  Now Mrs. Keller gets to fulfill his old wish and also donate it to a very public and worthy cause.  After the holiday season ends the Norway Spruce will be milled into lumber for Habitat for Humanity.

Julie Andrews’ scarred vocal cords robbed us of  her lovely soprano. Other people with cancer, intubation scars, vocal strain, or other throat conditions suffer even more loss of their speaking and singing abilities.  When Andrews went to Dr. Steven Zeitels, a Harvard professor specializing in laryngeal surgery, she learned of the project he and Robert Langer, a MIT professor in chemical engineering, had been working on to simulate vocal cords with a polymer gel. Langer’s lab started with polyethylene glycol, used in numerous medical and other applications. They’ve altered the arrangement of the molecules so that the gel vibrates the same way as vocal cords do when air passes by. When injected into scarred vocal cords, the gel can restore the behavior of the patient’s vocal cords, hopefully restoring their voice. The team hopes to start human trials next year. The Institute of Laryngology and Voice Restoration, which brought Julie Andrews in as honorary chairwoman and counts rock musicians Roger Daltrey and Steven Tyler among its supporters, helped to fund the research. Below is a short video of the gel compared to human vocal cords.

I wish had an interesting John McCarthy story but mine is hum drum. I was at a talk at MIT circa 1990.  It was most likely about software patents but I don’t recall the topic exactly. Someone a few rows over stood up to ask a question (actually he made a statement, a good one) and a revered hush spread across the room as we collectively recognized the father of Lisp. He said his piece, sat down and that was that. Since I was actually a Cognitive Science major (who realized I only needed a few more courses for a resume-burnishing Computer Science major) the artificial intelligence topics were especially interesting. I spent a lot of time in LISP and Scheme during college and while I’ve never used them in my career, I’ve always strived for that elegance of expression.

Corning Inc. has ably survived into the computer age with its glass a necessity for electronic displays both small and large. In 2008 it shed its money-losing luxury glass division, selling Steuben to Schottenstein Stores, a holding company of various retailers. Steuben is the last manufacturer of luxury lead crystal in the United States. It continued to lose money and in August of this year Schottenstein announced that the 108 year old company will close in November. The flagship Steuben store on Fifth Avenue in New York will close after 77 years of business. Buyers of wedding gifts, commemorative glass pieces, and mementos for heads of state and royalty will have to find something else. The Corning Glass Museum has replaced its Steuben store with works of local glass artists. Steuben’s online store has marked down the merchandise so for some time you can still get an animal hand cooler without having to turn to eBay. Corning has bought back the brand name so perhaps one day when we tire of buying each other gift cards and electronic devices Steuben can shine again.

Above is my copy of “K & R”. It’s actually my dad’s. In college we were first taught Pascal. When I found out nobody actually used Pascal in the real world, I used this to try to learn C one summer and then borrowed it when I went back to college. I still have it. My favorite part is the opening for “Pointers and Arrays”:

Pointers have been lumped with the goto statement as a marvelous way to create impossible-to-understand programs. This is certainly true when they are used carelessly, and it is easy to create pointers that point somewhere unexpected. With discipline, however, pointers can also be used to achieve clarity and simplicity.

Rest in Peace, Dennis Ritchie.