nichole's auxiliary storage

Cineplexity World Premiere

Woot! From Dork Tidings:

The Official World Premier Rollout of Cineplexity will be an official event at the Wisconsin Film Festival!

And if that's not official enough, there's the Festival Event Program blurb, including:

Meet the creators and play the first movie game that's more than trivial!

Meet the creators? Guess I know where I'll be April 1. Mostly because we only have 1 car. Psych! I'm so excited!

Cap Times: "Big game time"

Madison-based Out of the Box recently landed a big distribution deal with Rio Grande Games, importer of European-style board games. The Capital Times explains why this is big news, and quotes some local gamer who sounds kind of familiar:

"You don't know who the winner will be until the last couple of turns," said Madison gamer Pete Hamon. "What makes them fun to me is you can do anything but you can't do everything."

See Also: LibraryThing reverse engineering FRBR?

The FRBR-at-LibraryThing discussion is picking up a bit over at See Also. Cool!

Infosoup.org

is the name of the beautiful ILS interface (and more!) from OWLSnet, a public library system in northeastern Wisconsin.

FRBR comes to LibraryThing?!

Good Lord I need to sit down. Watching LT grow is amazing, wonderful and dizzying. In Work disambiguation and the "Ship of Theseus" Tim describes his solution to the problem of lumping what, in FRBR-speak, would be called manifestations (I hope, lest I lose lib cred):

The new system introduces a robust concept of "work." On the database side this means a special "works" database, where each work has a title (the most common title of books belonging to the work). It is the way whereby most LibraryThing books can acquire LCCNs, Deweys and other cataloging information. It will allow users to discuss books—for example, on a forum—without worrying that they were only talking to people who had the same edition they did.

Furthermore:

...it will allow ordinary people to participate in the sacred act of cataloging, combining and splitting books from works as they see fit. This has never before been done before. It's Wikipedia for book cataloging.

What are the odds?

Not always that odd.

In one ten-day span, the same six numbers won the Wisconsin Lottery's SuperCash game twice. It made the paper (and made JM late for dinner yesterday).

On the scales of unlikeliness, it would be more likely that you would flip a coin 18 times and they would all be heads.

JM did some similar debunking back when the NY Lottery drew 9-1-1 on Sept. 11, 2002.

You and I both randomly choosing the same letter of the alphabet is less likely than 9-1-1 coming up somewhere in the US on September 11.

(Maybe it's just that the amount of time you spend with mathematicians has a direct inverse realtionship to how amazing you think oddball lotto drawings are. Happy Valentine's Day, mister!)

Update: Apparently the story was Farked (and then put behind a pay wall) with the headline: Same six numbers win Wisconsin's lottery twice in 10 days. "That's unlikely," says lottery mathematician John Obvious. (Somebody has to answer the dumb questions...)

Cinnamon

My brother's birthday + my poor taste =

Thanks, petsinuniform.com - I think.

This is his Husky mutt, Cinnamon, the bane of my mom's existence (and her other dog's, too - Sheltie's still toddling around at nearly 17!) in a more natural state.

Nothing says "I love you" like...

Food Fight, a great Madison foodie blog, snapped a picture of the Artamos butcher shop's Valentine's Day ad. Those guys make me smile.

More on authorities & LibraryThing

The LibraryThing blog reports that LCCNs are now parsed, a godsend if your books tend to be older, and don't have the ISBNs that make it easy to find a record that matches exactly.

In the comments, another discussion of authority control crops up (here's the first such one I read all the way through), and Tim, the developer, opines:

When you're at a dinner party, and someone announces that Thomas Wolfe is their favorite author, do you ask "Oh, Thomas Wolfe 1900-1938 or Thomas Wolfe 1931 to present?" No, you say "Do you mean Bonfire of the Vanities Tom Wolfe?"

Which is true. Would that life were more like a dinner party.

Unique FT job opening: education director at a community farm

Via the REAP mailing list, I heard that Troy Gardens is seeking an Education Program Director. Troy Gardens is a 26-acre project on Madison's north side that

combines an urban farm, community gardens, and prairie and woodland restoration with a mixed-income affordable housing complex.