DELICIOUS #13

Delicious is fun to explore. I think of it as a search engine which gives me a break from Yahoo and Google.









I found '50 Fascinating Lectures All About Your Brain'. There were few comments. None of them seemed objectively or subjectively interesting. Though there were few comments, the article was saved 159 times. The only tags that seemed unusual are 'awareness' and 'brain storming'.









I went to the list of lectures. I clicked 'Music and the Mind'. When I got home on Sunday evening, I watched 'Music and the Mind' on You Tube. I liked seeing the long camera shot of the little lecturer against the huge screen.







He, Aniruddh Patel, PhD., said two things that I remember. Even though birds sound musical, they do not create music like humans do. Each generation of humans changes its cultures' music. Birds do not change their songs from generation to generation.







The second thing he said that I like relates to Parkinson's Disease. People with this illness walk better when they hear music with a beat.







As of now, I do not see how Delicious is different than a a blog.



I just went to Google and entered "lectures about the brain". Fourth on the list is '50 Fascinating Lectures All About Your Brain'.



The value of Delicious for me is in the enjoyment I get from it. It does not seem to be an unusual tool for research. One can surf the web or search blogs and find the same information.



What I like about Delicious is that one might find a tag that kindles the imagination, or find a poster or blogger or tagger one would like to read all the time.



The Walker

#12 ROLLYO

My adventure with Rollyo got off to a slow start. The podcast did not work. When I searched the linked searchrolls, only two of them interested me. At Books in a Series I typed in Hannah Arendt, but got nothing. Then I entered The Hardy Boys and was provided some links.







At Readers' Advisory I had a good experience. I entered Sacramento Public Library, then was given a list of links. The link I was impressed with is www.yelp.com/c/sacramento/libraries. A list of local libraries is provided. The searcher may rate local libraries.







When I went to Rollyo, I forgot that the user is to enter a short address for the blogs to be used in one's search engine. I found some great sites, but they have long addresses. When I entered the long addresses into Rollyo, it deleted most of the information to the right of the slash mark.







The addresses that remained did not provide links to the addresses I liked.







I chose baseball. A book I read a long time ago is at www.indiebound.org/book/0195059131. The title is Baseball: The Golden Age by Harold Seymour. It can be purchased through links at the site.





My favorite baseball site is about Curt Flood. The address is: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~class/am483_97/projects/brady/flood.html.






The Walker

A Break from 27 Things

Hi Everyone: I have been reading about the Spanish exploration and settlement of California. I'm reading translations of original documents.







A diary entry I enjoyed was written by Fray Juan Crespi while he travelled with Gaspar de Portola in 1769. Two descriptions of the same event are contained in two of Crespi's revisions to his diary. The revised descriptions can be read at http://hep.ucsb.edu/people/hnn/crespi.html.







Below is an excerpt of the description from Crespi's first revision. Following it is an excerpt from a later revision.



"We went the whole way over dark friable very level soil, very much clad with very





fine grazing and very large clumps of very tall broad grasses, burnt off in some spots



and not in others; the unburnt [grasses] were so tall that they topped us on



horseback by about a yard. All about are very large tablelands with very large tall



live oaks- I have never seen larger- and a great many sycamores as well. We have





come upon such vast quantities of rose bushes that in many spots the levels were full





of them here. We went two good leagues across this soil, which is so good it cannot be





bettered. On going the two leagues we came to this spot, so fine and pleasant a one





that it is the best of all that we have come across."





Here is the second revision: "...over the same level, all of it very dark friable soil and very





grown over with very tall broad grasses. It had been burnt off in some spots and not





so in others; the unburnt [grasses] were so tall that they topped us on horseback by





about a yard. We then started over talbelands, equally grass-grown and very much





grown over with a great many large live oaks. On the plains here are so many rose





bushes that in some spots nothing was to be seen but grass and roses. On going two





hours over level land, we came to the watering place, a populous town where there is





a large inlet that, viewed from afar, seems a lake, and has good fresh water; here we





made camp, and it was a two leagues' march."





It seems that in the first revision, Crespi writes fast and passionately. In the second revision he seems to write fast because he is in a hurry, or wants to be read quickly and easily.





The second revision lacks the poetry or sense of urgency of the first. The later revision reminds me that the Illiad is not as powerful when told in prose.





If you go to the site I entered above, do not expect to find Crespi's complete diary. One of the frustrating things about the web is that many works are only partially available.





The Walker