Google Experimental Search features

On my commute home today I was listening to a podcast from DL.tv. They mentioned Google Experimental which I'd never heard of but their description sounded pretty intriguing.

Google has added a way to do searches and display the output on a timeline. For example, you can search for the term "civil rights" and have the matching web pages displayed on a timeline. It makes it easy to isolate just the pages which discuss civil rights in the 1950s. Check out the civil rights timeline example search via this link.

They also have a way to to display search results on a map. One of their examples is to search for past Olympic sites. Check out this link to see the results from this search query.

Last but not least, there are a number of other cool new tools at Google Labs. I was familiar with some of these but some I'd never heard of before. I guess I really ought to poke around their "more" button to see what's new at Google more often, eh? Some of these new features look pretty handy.

50 Most Significant Fantasy/SciFi Books

Tonight I was catching up on some old posts I'd missed on the blog of an old friend, Chard Nelson, when I happened upon an interesting list of the 50 Most Significant SciFi and Fantasy Books of the Last 50 Years. Following the links back from his posting, I find that everyone posting this list seems to be marking the books they've read in bold. I've also taken the liberty of marking books I really liked with italics.


The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov
Dune, Frank Herbert
Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin
Neuromancer, William Gibson
Childhood's End, Arthur C. Clarke
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras
Cities in Flight, James Blish
The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett
Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison
Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison
The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey
Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card
The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson
The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
Gateway, Frederik Pohl
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, J.K. Rowling
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
Little, Big, John Crowley
Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith
On the Beach, Nevil Shute
Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
Ringworld, Larry Niven
Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys
The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut
Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock
The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks
Timescape, Gregory Benford
To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer


I'm not sure I agree with all the books on the list. There are definitely some omissions I'd like to correct. For starters, I'd add more books by Theodore Sturgeon, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Heinlein, and Larry Niven. If I weren't constrained by the SciFi/Fantasy category, I'd add a lot more by Nevil Shute, my favorite author of any genre. Then I'd add a few favorite books from more recent authors like Spider Robinson and Rudy Rucker. Ah well, I guess no list is perfect.

Do it yourself Firefox extensions

LifeHacker has a great how-to article on building Firefox extensions. They make it sound so easy I might just have to give it a try.

Speaking of Firefox extensions, here are a few of my favorites in roughly the order of usefulness they have to me:

NoScript - allows you to choose which web sites are allowed to run scripts in your browser. Since scripts have huge potential for delivering malicious software to your computer, this is very important indeed.

Google Browser Sync - This provides an easy way to keep your browser bookmarks and settings synched up between multiple machines.

Book Burro - This plug-in senses when you're looking at a book on one of several web sites to purchase books. Once it realizes you're looking for a specific book, it presents you with the prices at several web sites so you can find the lowest price. The list of sites it checks is configurable.

Long Titles - This prevents long tooltips windows from being truncated. Since a number of the web comics I read make use of tooltips to add hidden messages, this is very handy to have.

OpenDNS

I've recently changed the DNS server setting on my WiFi router from the DNS servers run by my ISP with those from OpenDNS. OpenDNS runs large DNS caches which can speed up your address lookups. They also compare all URLs submitted with a phishing site blacklist to help keep you from falling prey to phishing schemes. They also correct common typing errors in URLs. For example if you type "google.ocm", they will change it to "google.com" to prevent a lookup error.

On a related note, you may notice occasionally that address loopups for an URL you've typed into your browser may fail. This can be a sign that the DNS cache on your local PC has a stale entry. Here's a site which shows how to flush your DNS cache. They've got procedures for flushing the DNS caches on Windows, Linux, and Mac computers.

Space DVDs

I just started watching a DVD set I recently picked up of the HBO series From the Earth to the Moon. I hadn't watched this series since it was first aired on HBO in 1998 so I'd forgotten just how great it was. It really stresses just how monumental the task of landing a man on the moon really was.

It also serves as a great companion to Ron Howard's film Apollo 13, another magnificent film for science geeks.

If you haven't seen either of these, I highly recommend both. I'm something of a space program buff so I watch any film about it which comes out. I also liked The Right Stuff (both the film and the book) a lot.

Needless to say, I'm excited about NASA's recently announced plans to return to the moon. This is the type of challenge that people like me with an engineering mindset dream about.