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Due to the nature of voting in the U.S., there are always just two political parties that elect candidates to office in any great number, except during times of transition. Those transitions occur when neither of the two dominant parties will address an issue that a large fraction of the voters think is important.

That's how the Republicans came from essentially nowhere in the early 1850s to electing a president in 1860 and replacing the Whigs. (Having 11 states withdraw from U.S. politics for 4 years and then be banned from it for several more years certainly helped the Republicans.)

Sometimes a new party will gain enough votes (and perhaps elected officials) that one of the two dominant parties will take that party's position. (The fans of Carrie Nation gave us Al Capone.) In that case the transition is not the replacement of one of the old parties, but the adoption of a position on that former "third-rail" issue.

It's pretty hard to start a new party these days and compete on an even footing with the statutory duopoly parties, thanks to state laws that pretty much guarantee that the two dominant parties are always same two parties.

For details about this process, and what party formation and operation was like before government-approved candidates and government-approved parties, see _Why American Stopped Voting_ by Mark L. Kornbluh. http://www.worldcat.org/search...

Automate elections better. Right now, voters face a limited number of pre-selected candidates from a limited number of pre-selected political parties. Allow a broader range of candidate: all who meet the constitutional qualifications. All. Let the voter choose.

There was a time when government didn't decide which political parties were "real" and which ones weren't. The electorate did. There was a time when government didn't decide which candidates were "real" and which ones weren't. The voters did.

And voter turnout was a lot higher.

And the usual plug for _Why America Stopped Voting_, by Mark L. Kornbluh. http://www.worldcat.org/search...

>> programmed [...] in assembler
> But you do program in compiler these days, right?

You, sir, are a pedant.

It's big data, it's the hot shit. Just like census days on punch cards was the hot shit for IBM engineers 80 years ago.

...as racist. You live in an apartheid country: https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/... Learn about it. Accept it. Deal with it. Maybe one day you can find it in your heart to change and stop thinking as a racist.

FB probably consulted with so "experts" about finding more ways to expand their surveillance empire and some bright spark brought up communities of practice (CoP). I bet I even know which book they read: https://www.worldcat.org/title...

For all the wonderful ideas behind CoP and what it can offer to businesses and corporations, FB probably don't understand (and don't care about) the kind of culture change that is necessary to allow CoPs to develop, live, grow, and evolve in the workplace. It'll work at exceptional places like Valve and Ideo but 99% of the time it ain't gonna happen. They'll spend all their time and budget on setting up the software and systems and nowhere near enough time and resources to implement the part that actually makes the difference. As Bev Wenger-Trayner puts it,

"Yet again I have a client – of 5 years – who has made the technology a centre-piece of their strategy.

I cry.

It’s a technology that I suggested and helped to create. But I seem powerless to convince them that the proportion of resources they are investing in technology as opposed to building the learning network are a waste of everyone’s time.

Technology and community building are not the same thing. I get it. Funding can be easier for tech. Tech is sexy or mysterious – depending on your relationship with it. Organizations understand $$ for tech.

But it won’t build you a network. Building a network requires social artistry, persistence, understanding the community, knowledge of the domain, attention to practices, conversations, more conversations, and concern for creating value."

If your only qualifications are being a tech whizz, you are not cut out for the job.

If training people on how to use a simple technology takes up a hundred per cent of your attention, you are on the wrong track. If it takes up less than five percent of your time – in response to requests by network members – you are probably getting close.

It’s community building 101. And I have to watch as my.own.client repeats the same.old.mistake.

I cry.

Source: http://wenger-trayner.com/refl...

There was a time when it was possible for the people to create new political parties, when they found no party supported their interests or causes, or found existing parties incompetent or corrupt. That time ended when the Progressive Era election "reforms" lead to government-printed ballots with government-approved candidates from government-approved and -micromanaged political parties.

Voter engagement as a consequence declined, subjectively and objectively. Quantitative measures like election competitiveness and voter turnout declined to current levels within a few decades.

Had there been those election "reforms" in place in the 1840s and '50s, the Free Soil Party and the Republican Party could not have been formed. The Whigs would not have been replaced by an anti-slavery party.

Details about those "reforms" and their consequences are in Mark L Kornbluh's book, _Why America Stopped Voting_. (Also, some quaint charming examples of what engaged voters would do to support their parties. Picnics. Barbecues. Flagpole-raising competitions.) http://www.worldcat.org/search...

The "party bosses" were a problem, true. In some places. For a time. A bigger problem than having the statutory duopoly parties we have today, shielded from competition from upstarts created by the people, and the government created by those duopolists?

Seems highly unlikely to me.

Omni-font OCR was in commercial use by CompuScan and others for a decade or more before Kurzweil's scanner. And Bell, and then later Fairchild, had been using CCD scanners (some with flatbed setups) since 1971--indeed, the Kurzweil Computer Products scanner used a Fairchild CCD scanner chip as its basis.

Kurzweil's genius was in hooking the CCD with early text-to-speech software, and realizing that he could work around limitations in the scanner memory capacity by doing on-the-fly OCR and discarding the image data rather than trying to keep vast amounts of image data in memory at once. Those are huge advances and deserve recognition, but the idea that he invented the CCD scanner or omni-font OCR is not just gilding the lily but outright wrong.

See, e.g., Herb Schantz's 1982 retrospective "The History of OCR": https://www.worldcat.org/searc...

No, the science isn't settled.

http://www.worldcat.org/title/...

But the metric being wrong means that black holes fail to satisfy conservation of energy. Assume that conservation of energy is satisfied and fix the metric -- you'll find that a cross term was dropped -- and it all works out.

there are errors in the standard equations, such that the lagrangian breaks down there, because the standard equations do not properly account for energy conservation.

http://www.worldcat.org/title/...

Fix your metric, and it comes out correctly. And black holes then do mathe|atically exist.

Though only finished and released around 1997: http://www.gardenwithinsight.c...

(Unrelated work and also two years of grad school to learn more about ecological modelling plus excessive ambition caused delays in getting it done...)

And MECC's "Lunar Greenhouse" from 1989 ran on the Apple II:
http://www.worldcat.org/title/...

This emulator did not work for me, but seemingly Lunar Greenhouse is online:
http://www.virtualapple.org/me...
http://www.virtualapple.org/J_...

But there are other text-based games like Hamurabi which goes all the way back to 1968 where you "plant" crops and harvest them. I played a variation of tha first around 1980 or so.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...

It can be played online:
http://www.hammurabigame.com/h...

I've long wanted to build a general purpose gardening (and maintenance) robot like the ones in "Silent Running". For some reason, there has been economic resistance to supporting general purpose agricultural robots. Cheap illegal labor in that sense harmed my career in robotics in the 1980s when I really, really wanted to make such things. :-(

That's one reason I've just done software, which is cheaper to do on your own than robotics. Or it was, now that robotics is getting so much cheaper for various reasons due to cheap powerful embedded computers and cheaper sensors and actuators and 3D printing and web-based design and manufacturing like via 100K garages and such.
http://www.100kgarages.com/

There were a couple times I spoke with academic roboticists about making general purpose agricultural robotics in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Both were interested in industry-fundable specific purpose robots, like for seeding transfer in greenhouses (Rutgers) or for autonomous wheat harvesting with big machines (CMU). Those were no doubt fairly practical ideas, and I may have been well served in a robotics career to have pursued such practical ideas in cooperation with those professors, but they were not the general purpose system I really wanted to work on like the Silent Running-type drones. Still, they might have been stepping stones to better systems -- but it is easy to be too ambitious and impatient when you are young.

Nowadays though, there seems to be a resurgence of interest in agricultural robotics, and I wonder if crackdowns on illegal agricultural labor may even be connected to it?
"Crackdown on illegal immigrants left crops rotting in Georgia fields, ag chief tells US lawmakers
http://blog.al.com/wire/2011/1...

Also, this is a problematical statement from the point of view of a robotics engineer: "A robust agricultural guest worker program, properly designed, will not displace American workers," Black said in remarks prepared for the hearing. "As my testimony shows, in Georgia, even with current high unemployment rates, it is difficult for farmers to fill their labor needs."

That guest worker program displaces robotics engineers... Otherwise there would be a much greater demand for general purpose agricultural robots.

Instead, I worked on virtual gardening software for growing virtual plants. My wife and I also made a simpler version of the garden simulator just for breeding virtual plants (mostly her work):
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...

That said, there is little that is better for mental health for many people than

What we really need is universal representation. I just finished a brief booklet—"Reinventing Congress for the 21st Century" (1st ed., 2nd ed.)—that makes a compelling case, depsite some quaint notions about CDROMs and video cassettes.

What we really need is universal representation. I just finished a brief booklet—"Reinventing Congress for the 21st Century" (1st ed., 2nd ed.)—that makes a compelling case, depsite some quaint notions about CDROMs and video cassettes.

but even their interlibrary loan is really weak (I used to ask things like, "can you get me a book on sword metallurgy?" / "no", and eventually gave up)

That's not really how ILL works. You have to request a specific title. (Try Worldcat to find one.) My local library was able to get me anything I asked for that was in a library collection in the U.S. -- I was doing some historical research and asked for some pretty oddball texts.

If you go in with a title and the librarians won't look it up to see if it's available for ILL, they're not doing their job: send a note to your county or city library director and your councilperson.

That said, yes, if I think I might look at a book twice, I'll often just purchase a used copy from Powell's. (Certainly not from the the evil twits at Amazon.)

I found this web page discussing a similar microfiche library, the Appropriate Technology Library, which appears to be available only on CD-ROM or DVD now, which is unfortunate.

I'm not sure it's the same thing; the earliest copies in libraries seem to date only from 1986 or so.

I'm going to have to look up the original paper published by Krioukov, but what was mentioned in the article itself is not news. I imagine this is a consequence of Krioukov trying to explain his findings in laymen's terms.

What the article actually says is a pretty basic exposition of the findings of network science and complex systems theory over the past few years. For those interested in but unfamiliar with these matters, I recommend a volume written a couple of years ago by the physicist Albert-László Barabási called Linked: The New Science of Networks . It is written for a wide audience and is a very readable introduction to the subject. Barabási's based argument is that these common network patterns we see in so many environments is a consequence both growth and preferential attachment in systems. Of course, growth and preferential attachment are going to be present in biological and social systems, as well as things like computer networks, and this is at the heart of why we see similar patterns forming (esp. scale-free topologies).

As a historian, I find the findings of network science as its been applied to social systems particularly useful. It helps to explain societal changes in ways that older theories of history, whether deriving from Marxian, Annaliste, Weberian, or other schools of thought, would have difficulty. Further, the study of networks and complex systems is inherently interdisciplinary--and this in a refreshingly honest way rather than the mere "interdisciplinarity" rhetoric that's been present in the academy over the years. For those interested in the application of network science to the social sciences, there is a very nice collection of seminal articles for the field edited by Gernot Grabher and Walter Powell.

I'll add this website since there's bound to be a ton of titles listed. You search for your title and enter your region and it tells you the closest library that has the title. http://www.worldcat.org/

actually I was more along the lines of this red flood. But reds under the beds aren't to craze of the day anymore.

Darn, pressed submit too soon. I was fascinated when I first learned that lying is actually a standard part of police interview/interrogation training. "Criminal Interrogations and Confessions" by Inbau gets into the detail of how to usefully manipulate suspects, it's a very interesting read. http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/45556160 Last time I checked this was available on google books, ymmv.

I've been adding these titles to my http://www.zotero.org/ collection and searching my library's catalog. If not in there it will be on http://www.worldcat.org/

For those without e-reading devices I would recommend using http://www.worldcat.org/ to see which library closest to you has the titles in this thread. Also, I use zotero.org to gather a "to read" library. It tells you which website/library you found the book at. It's free and open source and is awesome for doing papers as it has word processing plug ins for Word and Open/Libre Office variants. (Chrome/FireFox/Safari)

1. Interlibrary loans were the original internet. The advent of http://worldcat.org/ only made them better.
2. What kind of clown still buys dead trees simply for a one-time read? (Yeah, me too...)
3. Since when are DRM files necessarily permanent? By making them time out, any need or justification for tracking who they were issued to is nullified.

Well, I don't know about libraries near you, but in my area (which is politically quite liberal), in public and publicly accessible libraries, there were about 500 copies of The Turner Diaries, over 4000 copies of Mein Kampf, 1800 copies of Starship Troopers, and over 4000 copies of Atlas Shrugged. That suggests that those books are widely available. (This will help you find those books in a library near where you live.)

National libraries of record already keep copies of everything published. So, for instance, the Library of Congress, the British Library and the Bodleian Library keep copies of everything published in English. So we already have a triplicated, geographically diverse, and properly environmentally controlled system, which is going to preserve the books a lot longer than a shipping container on an industrial estate.

FWIW, the Library of Congress doesn't collect everything published in the English, and the British Library and the Bodleian don't either. Those three, plus Harvard, are the biggest four libraries in the world, but there's a lot that they don't ever get, and some that they get but don't keep. Huge amounts of ephemera -- newspapers, pamphlets, zines and small run magazines, things like that -- never make it into *any* library, let alone the LOC, and much that does only does because there is some local library or special subject library that makes it its mission to collect and save as much as it can find in its region/subject area. Huge amounts of self-published work won't ever make it into a library either. I'd guess that half of the original work on Lulu won't ever be collected by anyone, and will simply cease to exist if and when Lulu's servers stop working. The requirement to send a copy of a publication to the LOC (two copies, actually) only exists if one sends something to the U.S. Copyright Office first. If you're doing a small run you'll often not worry about copyright (especially if you're publication is in the public domain, or copylefted, or published on a Creative Commons license, and so on), so you don't have to send anything to the LOC either. In which case, the LOC probably doesn't end up with a copy, and possibly no one else does either.

Then there are a lot of fairly mainstream books from the past that just never made it to a major library for some reason. I work at a large archive that among other things collects American textbooks printed before 1970, focusing heavily on the period 1830-1950. I've cataloged several thousand of them, and generally can't find a record of any library owning maybe 4% of them. I assume that half of these are in a library somewhere, but that library hasn't let WorldCat know about it (which is almost the same as not owning it, but I digress). So the remaining 2% don't seem to be in *any* library *anywhere* -- not the LOC, not Harvard, nowhere. For all I know, when I'm working on one of these things, say some book of rhetoric published in Cleveland in 1880, I'm holding the *only* copy still in existence. My organization is unusual, and this textbook project was begun merely on a whim of one of our staff members. I imagine there are a huge number of similar sorts of works that aren't being collected by anyone, because no project or institution has taken up their cause. Those items are simply winking out of existence as the last copy moulders away in some attic somewhere.

People tend to assume that the LOC and the British Library and other libraries are preserving everything, but they simply aren't. "Everything" has a huge scope, huger than almost anyone realizes. And libraries focus on use and dissemination. Preservation is part of their purpose, but it's definitely below use. Something that's not useful might never get preserved, and something that's useful might get used to death. This is controversial inside and outside of the library world, but it's important for people to understand. Everything isn't stored in triplicate, things are being lost.

Nicholson Baker's erroneous argument that libraries are gleefully destroying newspapers and other older documents has been refuted again and again.

Please see "At risk: earthquakes and tsunamis on the West Coast". You can also see the USGS site on earthquake preparation, including seeing shakemaps for your region given hypothetical megaquakes.

No, your buildings and bridges in Portland would not be destroyed, unless they're in violation of the earthquake code that went active in the 80s (with retrofits required by the 00s).

Yes, you should be prepared to survive on your own for 72 hrs, particularly with respect to food, water, and medications.

In addition to names of the people themselves, can anybody recommend any good science documentaries/talks/books? I'd recommend the following:

• David Attenborough
  • Life In... series (TV shows, 1979 - 2008)
  • Planet Earth (TV show, 2006)
• J. Bronowski
  • The Ascent of Man (TV show, 1973)
• Bill Bryson
  • A short History of Nearly Everything (book and audiobook, 2003)
• Brian Cox
  • [Various documentaries] (TV shows, 2005 - present)
• Richard Dawkins
  • The Royal Institution Christmas Lectures: Growing Up in the Universe (TV show, 1991 - 1992)
  • Root of All Evil? (TV show, 2006)
  • The Enemies of Reason (TV show, 2007)
  • The Genius of Charles Darwin (TV show, 2008)
• Neil deGrasse Tyson
  • Death by Black Hole (book and audiobook, 2007)
• Michio Kaku
  • Visions of the Future AKA 2057 (TV show, 2007)
• Carl Sagan
  • Cosmos (TV show and book, 1980)
  • Pale Blue Dot (book, 1994)
  • The Demon-Haunted World (book, 1996)
• Various
  • The Amaz!ng Meeting (symposium, 2003 - current)
  • Beyond Belief (symposium, 2006 - current)

  If anyone can add to this list, I'd appreciate it. It'd be nice to seek out more science shows and related things.

  I'd also recommend the following on YouTube:

  • Neil deGrasse Tyson - Stupid Design
  • Tim Minchin - Storm
  • Dawkins vs. Tyson

  (And now I need to ramble on for ages because Slashdot's software claims I have too few characters per line... A curious requirement. Just ignore this paragraph, it contains absolutely no meaningful information at all. Seriously, though, check out the above YouTube clips if nothing else. Really, Cosmos and A Short History of Nearly Everything should be given to everyone at birth...)

In addition to names of the people themselves, can anybody recommend any good science documentaries/talks/books? I'd recommend the following:

• David Attenborough
  • Life In... series (TV shows, 1979 - 2008)
  • Planet Earth (TV show, 2006)
• J. Bronowski
  • The Ascent of Man (TV show, 1973)
• Bill Bryson
  • A short History of Nearly Everything (book and audiobook, 2003)
• Brian Cox
  • [Various documentaries] (TV shows, 2005 - present)
• Richard Dawkins
  • The Royal Institution Christmas Lectures: Growing Up in the Universe (TV show, 1991 - 1992)
  • Root of All Evil? (TV show, 2006)
  • The Enemies of Reason (TV show, 2007)
  • The Genius of Charles Darwin (TV show, 2008)
• Neil deGrasse Tyson
  • Death by Black Hole (book and audiobook, 2007)
• Michio Kaku
  • Visions of the Future AKA 2057 (TV show, 2007)
• Carl Sagan
  • Cosmos (TV show and book, 1980)
  • Pale Blue Dot (book, 1994)
  • The Demon-Haunted World (book, 1996)
• Various
  • The Amaz!ng Meeting (symposium, 2003 - current)
  • Beyond Belief (symposium, 2006 - current)

  If anyone can add to this list, I'd appreciate it. It'd be nice to seek out more science shows and related things.

  I'd also recommend the following on YouTube:

  • Neil deGrasse Tyson - Stupid Design
  • Tim Minchin - Storm
  • Dawkins vs. Tyson

  (And now I need to ramble on for ages because Slashdot's software claims I have too few characters per line... A curious requirement. Just ignore this paragraph, it contains absolutely no meaningful information at all. Seriously, though, check out the above YouTube clips if nothing else. Really, Cosmos and A Short History of Nearly Everything should be given to everyone at birth...)

In addition to names of the people themselves, can anybody recommend any good science documentaries/talks/books? I'd recommend the following:

• David Attenborough
  • Life In... series (TV shows, 1979 - 2008)
  • Planet Earth (TV show, 2006)
• J. Bronowski
  • The Ascent of Man (TV show, 1973)
• Bill Bryson
  • A short History of Nearly Everything (book and audiobook, 2003)
• Brian Cox
  • [Various documentaries] (TV shows, 2005 - present)
• Richard Dawkins
  • The Royal Institution Christmas Lectures: Growing Up in the Universe (TV show, 1991 - 1992)
  • Root of All Evil? (TV show, 2006)
  • The Enemies of Reason (TV show, 2007)
  • The Genius of Charles Darwin (TV show, 2008)
• Neil deGrasse Tyson
  • Death by Black Hole (book and audiobook, 2007)
• Michio Kaku
  • Visions of the Future AKA 2057 (TV show, 2007)
• Carl Sagan
  • Cosmos (TV show and book, 1980)
  • Pale Blue Dot (book, 1994)
  • The Demon-Haunted World (book, 1996)
• Various
  • The Amaz!ng Meeting (symposium, 2003 - current)
  • Beyond Belief (symposium, 2006 - current)

  If anyone can add to this list, I'd appreciate it. It'd be nice to seek out more science shows and related things.

  I'd also recommend the following on YouTube:

  • Neil deGrasse Tyson - Stupid Design
  • Tim Minchin - Storm
  • Dawkins vs. Tyson

  (And now I need to ramble on for ages because Slashdot's software claims I have too few characters per line... A curious requirement. Just ignore this paragraph, it contains absolutely no meaningful information at all. Seriously, though, check out the above YouTube clips if nothing else. Really, Cosmos and A Short History of Nearly Everything should be given to everyone at birth...)

In addition to names of the people themselves, can anybody recommend any good science documentaries/talks/books? I'd recommend the following:

• David Attenborough
  • Life In... series (TV shows, 1979 - 2008)
  • Planet Earth (TV show, 2006)
• J. Bronowski
  • The Ascent of Man (TV show, 1973)
• Bill Bryson
  • A short History of Nearly Everything (book and audiobook, 2003)
• Brian Cox
  • [Various documentaries] (TV shows, 2005 - present)
• Richard Dawkins
  • The Royal Institution Christmas Lectures: Growing Up in the Universe (TV show, 1991 - 1992)
  • Root of All Evil? (TV show, 2006)
  • The Enemies of Reason (TV show, 2007)
  • The Genius of Charles Darwin (TV show, 2008)
• Neil deGrasse Tyson
  • Death by Black Hole (book and audiobook, 2007)
• Michio Kaku
  • Visions of the Future AKA 2057 (TV show, 2007)
• Carl Sagan
  • Cosmos (TV show and book, 1980)
  • Pale Blue Dot (book, 1994)
  • The Demon-Haunted World (book, 1996)
• Various
  • The Amaz!ng Meeting (symposium, 2003 - current)
  • Beyond Belief (symposium, 2006 - current)

  If anyone can add to this list, I'd appreciate it. It'd be nice to seek out more science shows and related things.

  I'd also recommend the following on YouTube:

  • Neil deGrasse Tyson - Stupid Design
  • Tim Minchin - Storm
  • Dawkins vs. Tyson

  (And now I need to ramble on for ages because Slashdot's software claims I have too few characters per line... A curious requirement. Just ignore this paragraph, it contains absolutely no meaningful information at all. Seriously, though, check out the above YouTube clips if nothing else. Really, Cosmos and A Short History of Nearly Everything should be given to everyone at birth...)

Working on your power of concentration can help your memory and recall.

There are some helpful exercises described in the book Concentration by Ernest Wood (originally published in 1949). http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1443076&referer=brief_results

Once you try a few of these, it's easy to incorporate them in your daily life.

For example, next time you find yourself in a long, rambling conversation that jumps from topic to topic, try to trace the conversation backwards to the beginning topic with your conversation partner.

Another helpful practice is, when you're faced with something you want to remember, try to remember as many contextual details about it as you can: where you are, who you're with, what the weather is like, what you're wearing, what it smells like, what background noises there are, etc. If you notice these things, you have a better chance at building the kinds of associations that help build strong memories.

Hi c0d3r, Try WorldCat http://www.worldcat.org/ for any library stuff like that - here's just one location of the manual http://tinyurl.com/yqqkl9 - you might have to have the physical copy snail-mailed as an inter-library loan to you. Want to buy your own copy? Go here for most out of print stuff - http://www.bookfinder.com/ - here's your truck manual - http://tinyurl.com/3x7q2y That took 5min :) thank god for Librari(an)s eh?

And there exist at least 2 UTA-TxDOT research projects (2001-02 and 2003-04) on the exact same topic.

Just as a sidenote, the article for this book was deleted from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/The_Creature_from_Jekyll_Island as non-notable conspiracycruft. WorldCat http://worldcat.org/oclc/50567478 shows it in 350 libraries, which
isn't that bad for a "fringe" book first published in 1994.

Hey wow, the VHS version was produced with the help of the John Birch Society. Hmmmm..... :-)

OCLC provides a service which can give you a list of "related" ISBNs. This can be all the different editions, audio versions, etc. It may help you find a version of the book you're after. Here's an example, obviously replace the ISBN with yours. http://xisbn.worldcat.org/webservices/xid/isbn/0596002815?method=getEditions&format=xml

>>My dream would be the Library of Congress becoming the online resource with ... links to where you can buy OR borrow them

WorldCat provides this, at least for the borrowing part. If you want to shop for a book you find there, you can copy the ISBN number from WorldCat's record to Amazon.com or your favored online bookseller (or Google Books, for that matter).

>>searching on "Ogorkiewicz" in IPL yielded no hits, while OL gave me several

Worldcat yielded 80 hits, which could be refined by author and included works in which Ogorkiewicz' work is cited.

>>a free library system today

Personally, I find it depressing that so many people don't know that there are free libraries operating. They are generally called "public" libraries. Publishers don't sue them out of existence because libraries buy the copies of the books they circulate, and the publishers make money from that.

Go to worldcat, look up a book you like, and then type your zip code or city and state into the localization box - you'll probably find there's a copy near you that you can pick up at your local library for the price of filling out a form to get a library card. And if there isn't a copy of what you want in their collection, they'll get it for you from someone who has it, very likely for free.

>>the central clearing house for access to book information

Good luck to them, though they have an uphill climb ahead.

Putting aside LibraryThing for the moment, there already exists a central worldwide clearing house for access to book information: WorldCat, operated by OCLC.

OCLC is a pretty sharp bunch, and very tied in to Google as well as Google Books. They have already done the collective cataloguing of more than 1 billion items (and that includes audio books, music, videos, etc., as well as books), and their data warehouse grows with every book added to any of their 10,000 member libraries. LibraryThing, which is probably the leading contender for real competition to this project, has 16 million books.

Granted, the quality of the data in WorldCat is only as good as that provided to OCLC by those 10,000 libraries - but librarians are generally pretty picky about the quality of their data. And WorldCat can give more than the book information - it can give you you fast, free access to the actual book, in your hands, via your local public or academic library. As for virtual books, Google is working hard to corner that market.

Which isn't to say that this is not a worthwhile undertaking, just that they need to be aware of everything that's operating in the universe they want to be a part of.

...I urge you to check into whether or not your library accepts requests if you haven't already.

Also, many academic libraries are open to the public. I actually have a colleague that works in your local library system, If I can find her email address I'll bring this to her attention.

If not that, find out if your library offers interlibrary loan services or check out if there is anything available at open WorldCat. [worldcat.org] Perhaps someplace within reasonable driving distance will have it. (I realize this all assumes you will go to the same lengths I will to not spend a buck)

This sounds like the old scam. Pick 1000 people. On day 1, send 500 of them a prediction that stock A will go up and send the other half a prediction that the stock will go down.

On day 2, the stock either went up or down. Either way, you made a correct prediction to 500 people. Split the 500 and send two more predictions on an all new stock.

Keep repeating this. On the fifth day, you'll have 75 people who have seen you make 5 perfect predictions in a row. Now ask each of them for $10,000 to invest in your next prediction...

Just because one person happens to have hit the mean each time doesn't mean he's got "the knack". Statistically, there's sure to be someone whose guesses approach the mean. But that doesn't mean that their next prediction is any more likely to be accurate.

Stick with the aggregated mass knowledge.