brainwagon

Cory Doctorow over at boingboing drew my attention to the classic Hand Shadows by Henry Bursill. Does your kid want a new Playstation 2 to keep himself amused? Hand him this book instead.

For reasons which escape me, I have a half-dozen books on knots and splices. It is one of the odd curiousities of life that you can always find a book on knots in the bargain bin at Border’s, and even odder still that I eventually seem to buy them. Now, Project Gutenberg has published Verill’s […]

Project Gutenberg just released Tesla’s Experiments with Alternate Currents of High Potential and High Frequency, with illustrations and everything. If you are interested in tons of links about Tesla coils, you could do worse than starting with Bill Beaty’s collection of Tesla links.

Project Gutenberg has also begun to publish music in many formats. Try Project Gutenberg – String Quartet No. 12 in E flat major Opus 127 by Ludwig van Beethoven, which is available in PDF, Sibelius, MIDI and XML forms. I used timidity to convert the MIDI to this (rather strange sounding) mp3 file.

Today’s Gutenberg Gem is Albert Einstein’s Relativity : the Special and General Theory. The author himself describes it thusly in the Preface: The present book is intended, as far as possible, to give an exact insight into the theory of Relativity to those readers who, from a general scientific and philosophical point of view, are […]

Today’s Gutenberg Gem is The Project Gutenberg eBook of Scientific American Supplement, May 23, 1891. It includes some nice illustrations of an unusual equatorial telescope, various dogs, moths, and some mathematical illustrations on the conic sections. I’m always on the lookout for illustrations of telescopes, so I thought it was pretty cool. The telescope was […]

Today’s gem is Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, which is not only interesting because of the subject matter, but also because it has a number of really nice bird prints like the black tailed paroquet reproduced on the right. It’s really great that Project Gutenberg is reproducing more and more illustrated books […]

Project Gutenberg just released The Vision of Hell, by Dante Alighieri, translated by Rev. Carey and illustrated by Gustave Doré. If Doré’s Bible I posted about earlier wasn’t to your liking, perhaps this will do better. It’s been quite some time since I read Inferno, perhaps I’ll have to set some time aside to do […]

Project Gutenberg just released The Night Before Christmas and Other Popular Stories For Children which includes nice stories (mostly of a Christmas theme) and some cute clip art. It even includes the much less well known The Night After Christmas, which gave me a chuckle. Come the holiday season, expect to see some of these […]

Project Gutenberg recently completed scanning the Bible Illustrations of Gustav Dore. While I prefer illustrations of crazy scientists and proto-hominid skeletons, you might find something of interest here, although his Last Supper lacks some of the panache of Da Vinci’s.

Another bit of clip art from the lads at Project Gutenberg. This one comes from the same issue of Punch that I mentioned earlier. Just a nutty little cartoon that I thought I’d immortalize here.

Project Gutenberg has been digitizing various periodicals from the 19th century, and some of them have included some very nice line art which I thought might be recycled. While scanning a recently completed issue of Punch, I encountered the political cartoon at the right. It carried the caption: AMERICAN “COPYRIGHT BILL” IN A NEW PART […]

The Making of Arguments By, J.H. Gardiner is a fresh release from Project Gutenberg and the Distributed Proofreading Project which explains how to write arguments. Of course the utility of such a book should be obvious to anyone who posts on USENET.

Look at this nifty collection of cover art for various publications of War of the Worlds that span over a century. You can, of course, get the text of H.G. Wells’ classic tale from Project Gutenberg.

Today’s Gutenberg Gem is Edward Lasker, a rather colorful individual in the history of chess. He won the championship of Paris in 1912, in London in 1914, the New York City championship in 1915 and the Chicago championship in 1916, and then went on to become an International Master at the age of 75. He […]