Past time for another interesting link roundup. I’m also going to add comments about recent reading/watching

Books:

I’ve been running through the massive set of the Kerry Greenwood Phryne Fisher series, both because all but the last handful were available on Oyster (which I’m still loving) and partly because the first season of the TV series (Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries) showed up on Netflix, and I wanted to reread and read the books before watching. They’re glorious fun, set in 1928/1929 Australia.

Watching:

I worked my way through the current Netflix-available seasons of Poirot for my knitting watching, then White Collar and rewatching rather a lot of Leverage plus finishing what I hadn’t seen.

Web: 

Technology: 

• Alison at Ask A Manager hosted two excellent conversations, one about how to get Excel skills and one that’s about the coolest Excel trick you know. As someone who does a lot of Excel and teaching Excel, these are awesome resources (and I learned things from there too!)
• Harassment of women online has been getting a lot of commentary recently. There’s an article from Amanda Hess about her experiences, and a four part series from Quinn Norton (first part over here) that includes strong language.
• Great sources for academic productivity ideas.
• The rise and fall of Blackberry (also an interesting meditation on the changing landscape.)
• Answers to all the tech questions your family will ask you. (Great way to brush up your skills.)
• Doug Johnson links to some fascinating materials from Martha Spear about case studies for using technology (school-focused, but generally interesting.)
• Need to improve your passwords? Here’s some good advice.

Research: 

• A nice overview of some basic research skills. 
• lolmythesis collects short summaries of people’s research. Many of them are hilarious.
• Snarky comments hidden in research paper acknowledgements.
• Discovery of an Etruscan tomb. (I worked on an Etruscan archaeological dig one summer during college: the culture is fascinating, partly because of how little we still know about a lot of how things worked for them.)
• Speaking of not knowing things, ancient Greek music is slightly less of a mystery than it used to be, and you can hear some ideas about how it sounded and discussion of how we know what we know.
• The question of copyright and academic publishers. (Short version: know what rights you’re giving up when you do that sort of thing.)
• A detailed and thorough look at the use of lobotomy with soldiers returning from WWII – including a number of historical documents and a fascinating combination of types of research. (The subject, of course, is sobering.)
• A chilling article on Nazi research and anatomy research.
• A recreation of Pudding Lane in London, just before the 1666 fire, using modern immersive gaming engines and historical documents.

Libraries and information: 

• A great post on mid-career library job hunts from Colleen Harris-Keith. One of the thing she discusses is interviewing with a disability, and having that be a known factor due to her previous blogging.  (This is a hard topic for people to talk about, and so anyone who does gets major kudos from over here.)
• David Lee King did a tour of local-to-him makerspaces, and I found the variation very interesting. (We’re talking about eventually planning for one here.)
• A fascinating article about how Netflix categories work (which is in the library section because it’s about categorising data.)
• How ereader services are tracking not just what you read but how you read it.
• I found this article about how having lots more resources is really confusing to many new college students very intriguing – it makes me think about how I’ll do instruction differently in the future.
• My sister explains the International Classification of Diseases, and highlights some odd ones, and a book of descriptions.
• Thoughts on how we need to teach privacy as part of digital literacy (Jessamyn West commenting on a research paper.)

Other topics:

• Cold’s been on my mind (as I’ve said recently, if I wanted temperatures like Maine’s had, I would still be in Minnesota) and Longform.org picked out an older piece from Outside about what freezing to death is like.
• The music mentioned in Neil Gaiman’s book American Gods.
• Astronomical clock pictures. What’s not to like?