Quædam cuiusdam

Kathleen Seidel writes a blog called Neurodiversity on autism issues, and in particular opposing the scientifically-discredited idea that preservatives in vaccines have caused the recent increase in diagnosed cases of autism. She uses freely-available information sources to document the scientific case against the vaccine theory.

Recently she was the subject of a harassing subpoena from an attorney in a lawsuit against the vaccine makers. She has published the relevant court papers filed by the attorney, and marked them up with lots of links to provide context and refutations of his points. And in the course of this she has revealed the source of her secret powers: where he describes her as “a person utilizing investigative ability well in excess of that available to the mother and housewife she claims to be”, she links “investigative ability” to the Wikipedia article on Library and Information Science, and “mother and housewife” to Librarian.

I’ve never seen the act of hyperlinking look so much like stepping into a phone booth.

The program for this year’s Ticer summer school has been announced. Under the heading Digital Libraries à la Carte, it will be held the week of Aug. 25 at the University of Tilburg in the Netherlands. I was lucky enough to attend last year and found it stimulating and informative; if I had the budget I’d make it a regular stop. I see they’ve got Herbert Van de Sompel to speak about OAI-ORE this year, and Birte Christensen-Dalsgaard addressing the next-gen OPAC. Ah, to be in Tilburg in August! If you can get there, do.

Blogging about the weather is the lowest form of blogging, but it’s hard to think about anything else at the moment. It started snowing on Saturday and kept it up pretty steadily until this afternoon. All the while, a north wind has diligently moved a white wave into our carport. Off the trailing edge of the carport roof a cornice developed:

It is the mocking face of Winter, forming before our eyes. By tomorrow I expect it to have horns.