BibliOdyssey captures the soul of the Americas.
Scott Carney drops in on the world’s last handwritten newspaper.
gmtPlus9(-15) visits the Museum of Japanese Anesthesia.
Moon River discovers scratch atlases for a proposed 1977 Atlas of North American Cultures.
Radical Cartography points to a map of all the ships in the ocean.
The American Newspaper Repository implores you to dance in [...]

Former Y-blogger Neal Ungerleider has a piece in this month’s Wired about boozy science nights at American bars.
I would like a drink with entomologist Justin O. Schmidt, creator of the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, courtesy of That’s How It Happened:

1.0 Sweat bee: Light, ephemeral, almost fruity. A tiny spark has singed a single hair [...]

Joe Lamantia is onto something with his idea for “cloud notes”—text-cloud versions of new books for use as preparation for cocktail-party conversation. He knows how to sell them:
[...] text clouds are the common executive summary on steroids and acid simultaneously; assembled with muscular syntactical and semantic processing, and fed to reading-fatigued post-literates as swirling blobs [...]

We’re on a history kick at the 92nd Street Y today. It’s all because of Shorpy.

Research Room panorama. Full version.
The New York Public Library as we know it today began with the merging of three private collections, those of James Lenox, John Jacob Astor and Samuel J. Tilden (hence the library’s official name: The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations). Since then many other fabulously wealthy [...]

The latest 92nd Street Y podcast is well worth a download, particularly if you have an inventor-grandfather.

From Petrus Apianus’ Astronomicum Caesareum (1540)
In case you missed it Friday, Maud Newton has the Metafiltered link of the day for rare-book fetishists and BibliOdyssey subscribers: The Rare Book Room offers hundreds of rare books in digital form via high-res photography. Octavo is the company behind the scanning. Almost anything in the religion category is [...]

We launched a much-needed redesign at the 92nd Street Y tonight. Embedded Flash, rollovers and RSS badges rule the day, and the content’s been lured away from the upper left-hand corner of the screen. Send us feedback and tweets on your new navigational experiences.

Once upon a time, before my time, text files were the most interesting thing on the internet. You could learn how to program computers, blow things up, pick up girls, obtain free phone calls, survive nuclear war, pirate TV signals, perform witchcraft and conquer Zork in one short evening without leaving your bedroom. You could [...]

When Ning relaunched with their “Create Your Own Social Network for Anything” tagline, I joked that someone should use Ning to create a social network for social networks. LibraryThing creator Tim Spalding was ahead of the game as usual and went and did exactly that: SocialCatalogers is a social network for people who make or [...]