Just a couple of seconds ago, I was cutting some salmon and we had a bit of a quake. Very little ground shaking, but all the windows rattled pretty well. Usually, I access the finger server to get real time updates when such a thing happens, but I found out that the USGS has discontinued this old friend. Quel dommage.

Nevertheless, here’s the event as recorded on their website.

Recent Earthquakes – Info for event nc51177042

Addendum: My neighbor Sam informs me that the USGS does still have their finger server running. I was misled! Oh well. 3.7 on the Richter scale. Very close, right on the Hayward fault. But no damage.

[tags]Earthquake,Hayward Fault[/tags]

Boing Boing links to this CNN story about the Open Content Alliance: a group which is trying to scan and make available books of considerable historic and cultural value on the Internet. They are receiving a one million dollar grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to digitize collections at the Boston Public Library, the Getty Research Institute and the Metropolitan museum of art.

The deal represents a coup for Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle, a strident critic of the controls that Google has imposed on its book-scanning initiative.

“They don’t want the books to appear in anyone else’s search engine but their own, which is a little peculiar for a company that says its mission is to make information universally accessible,” Kahle said.

Cool.

[tags]Open Content Alliance,Public Domain,Google Books,Alfred P. Sloan Foundation[/tags]