NEW RESOURCES

Wanna play with Hadron Collider data? Here ya go. (Hope you got a serious amount of storage space.) “Yesterday, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) dropped a staggering amount of raw data from the Large Hadron Collider on the internet for anyone to use: 300 terabytes worth.”

Thanks to my good buddy Esther S. who gave me a heads-up on a new collection of California trademarks. The state of California has released a collection of 19th century trademarks. “California Secretary of State Alex Padilla today announced the release of nearly 4,000 digitized California trademark images and applications filed with the Secretary of State between 1861 and 1900. These images and documents are the largest digital collection ever assembled by the State Archives, a division of the Secretary of State’s office.”

Now available: a database of judges in the United States. “Today we’re extremely proud and excited to be launching a comprehensive database of judges and the judiciary, to be linked to Courtlistener’s corpus of legal opinions authored by those judges… At launch, the database has nearly 8,500 judges from federal and state courts, all of which are available via our APIs, in bulk data, and via a new judicial search interface that we’ve created.”

A professor at North Carolina State University (NCSU) has put together a digital archive about NC HB2. “NC HB2: A Citizens’ History is an archive of materials related to North Carolina’s House Bill 2, passed by the legislature on March 23, 2016 in a special session and signed into law by Governor Pat McCrory on that same day. Please explore the site and consider contributing materials related to your experiences. You may upload your stories, photos, videos, and other items that document your involvement with the law and any events related to it.”

In development: an online database of army ants. “The Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, in partnership with the Connecticut State Museum of Natural History, will lead the effort to curate, digitize, and catalogue the Rettenmeyer Ant Guest Collection and its associated materials, which in addition to the more than two million specimens of about 114 species of army ants includes 92,000 specimens of guests representing 187 species. The specimens are preserved using a variety of scientific research methods including pinned specimens, vials, and microscope slides. They also are documented in 5,000 Kodachrome slides and about 30 hours of digital videotape.”

Now available: a database of abandoned buildings in the Czech Republic. “A group of enthusiasts have been running a website that presents empty dilapidated houses in Prague and other parts of the Czech Republic, and the unique database now describes 936 buildings and tells their stories, daily Lidove noviny (LN) writes on Wednesday.” The site is in Czech and Chrome does not offer to automatically translate, and if you translate the front page of the site, you won’t see the Google Map of buildings. I recommend you navigate the map, find a building you want to review, click on the blue button (“Profil objektu a diskuze”) and then run that URL through Google Translate.

Need a nice yoga vacation? Here ya go. “A new website is launching to help travelers find yoga retreats and yoga teacher training around the world. More than 250 yoga vacations from 34 countries are listed…” My idea of a vacation is a nice book and a long walk, but to each…

TWEAKS & UPDATES

TechCrunch has launched a bot for Facebook Messenger. I asked it to give me stories about archives and it chirpily replied, “This is the latest news about ‘archives'” and gave me stories from 2010, 2013, and 2009, respectively. It’s early days yet in bot-world. “Similar to our Telegram bot launched last month, our Messenger bot will help you stay on top of the topics and stories you care about. You can subscribe to different topics, authors or sections of the site, and the bot will send you news articles from TechCrunch about the things you are interested in the most.”

USEFUL STUFF

This is a bit more technical than I usually get, but I haven’t seen this problem addressed before. If you’re interested in the Realm mobile database, you may like this article on backing up and restoring a Realm database using the Google Drive API. If you’re interested in programming and Realm, Paolo Rotolo looks like someone to follow on Medium.

The British Library and Vodafone are celebrating Shakespeare’s legacy with “digital wallpaper”. “Shakespeare’s plays began to be printed towards the end of the 16th century in pamphlets known as quartos – pocket-sized and competitively priced for the time. …. The plays will be made available using specially designed “digital wallpaper”, in effect a virtual bookshelf at which users can point their smartphones to scan QR codes and activate their downloads.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Does Google have a new travel app in the wings? “An email went out to those at Level 2 or above in Google’s Local Guides program with an offer to answer a few survey questions in exchange for a shot at a demo version of the app for Android and iPhone.” Good morning, Internet…

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