The world brain.

Both the assembling and the distribution of knowledge in the world at present are extremely ineffective, and thinkers of the forward-looking type whose ideas we are now considering, are beginning to realize that the most hopeful line for the development of our racial intelligence lies rather in the direction of creating a new world organ for the collection, indexing, summarizing and release of knowledge, than in any further tinkering with the highly conservative and resistant university system, local, national and traditional in texture, which already exists.

These innovators, who may be dreamers today, but who hope to become very active organizers tomorrow, project a unified, if not a centralized, world organ to "pull the mind of the world together", which will be not so much a rival to the universities, as a supplementary and co-ordinating addition to their educational activities - on a planetary scale.

These are not my words. English writer H.G. Wells wrote them in 1937 in a piece called World Brain: The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopaedia. I think I like it even better than Vannevar Bush's As We May Think.

[Seb's Open Research] Ok Seb got me this time I truely thought this was a seb post untill he gave it away. hmmm [Blogging Alone]

I should think the term racial intelligence clued me in to an early 20th-century origin.
11:23:07 AM    

Digital pictures not good enough - need a photo printer

With a newborn now in my life I have been using my digital camera to take many pictures of her, as well as family that comes to visit her. 
...
Recently my family members started asking for "real" pictures that they could hold and show to other people.  ... A friend recommended that I look at the Canon S900 inkjet photo printer, so I did some research and decide to purchase it.  The pictures that this printer produces are outstanding - vivid in color and sharp in contrast.  This printer is also very fast  (compared to other color printers) and can output an 8 x 11 in less than a minute.  I highly recommend this printer to anyone considering purchasing a dedicated printer for color pictures.  I say dedicated because the print quality for text is average at best and will drain the dark color cartridges quickly, so you should have another printer dedicated for text. [Paresh Suthar's Radio Weblog]

My warning for printer buyers: investigate the printer to see what it uses for its processor: does it have an on-board processor, or is it stealing cycles from your CPU? Years ago a firm I was consulting at installed a small printer, but had to return it because it piggybacked on the PC's CPU and was (for some reason) sorely dependent on the length of the parallel cable. (The PC slowed to a crawl during printing, too.)

A few months ago, a friend asked me to help her install an inkjet printer at home. Again, this printer depended on the driver doing all the heavy lifting on the PC's CPU, rather than off-loading it to the printer. Because my friend's PC was a little out-of-date, I suggested she return the printer for something more expensive, but less demanding of host resources.
9:22:31 AM    

If you want to find the Web site of just about any newspaper in the world, try this Web site

It also has links for TV, Radio, Magazines, etc.
[Danny Mayer's Vanpool Rumor Service (mailing list)]
8:43:56 AM