EBlogger

As follow up to yesterday’s post, it has been brought to my attention that an interview with Jade Liquid’s CTO Anthony Scotney mentions Britannica as a user of their WebRenderer Java browser, no doubt as the “Embedded HTML Viewer” that can be seen in the “Britannica’s CD/DVD Product Architecture” diagram on Sun’s site.

Mathias has stumbled across an old article on Britannica’s CD/DVD technology platform, which is based upon a great deal of open source Java technology.

Over at Joho the Blog, there’s an interesting little post on taxonomy, folksonomy and the organization of knowledge, including some insightful discussion.

Amendment XIX [1920] The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

Over at View from the library, the anonymous librarian of the North Metro Technical College writes that she was unable to find anything about the auspicious date 26 August 1920 in the EB or in the EB’s Annals of America using the GALIILEO system.

Actually the event in question is listed on Britannica’s This Day in History (admittedly, not very prominently) and the top hit for a search for “August 26 1920″ is National American Woman Suffrage Association, which includes

Ratified by Congress in June 1919 and 36 states during 1919–20, the [19th] amendment was added to the U.S. Constitution on August 26, 1920, marking an end to a 72-year struggle.

See “Nineteenth Amendment” in the EB index and the the suffrage movement section of the feminism article for more. There is additional (free!) coverage in Britannica’s Women in American History spotlight.

(Institutional subscribes will find similiar information on schoool.eb.com, search.eb.com and related sites.

Over at Impearls, Michael McNeil has posted an interesting bit about the history of the number zero.

Michael traces the concept of zero not to the Arab world (a popular misconception, no doubt related to the etymology of the word “zero”, which is derived from the Arabic sifr), but to Indian mathematicians. Britannica suggests the concept goes back, in one form or another, at least to the 3rd century BC Babylonians.

(See Topic: Zero for more on the history of the concept of zero from Britannica.)

Alex Choo’s Super Search widget searches a staggering array of sites–including Britannica, Answers.com, Wikipedia, IMDB, Google and many many more–via a single, konfabulous interface.

Electronic music pioneer Robert A. Moog died today (Monday August 22, 2005) at the age of 71 (see NY Times, BBC, and others).

Among many other things, Moog was a contributor to the Encyclopædia Britannica, contributing to the electronic instrument and musical instrument articles, as well as earning some coverage in his own right.

Rest in peace.

Over at the Gordon’s Tech blog, John has posted something of a left-handed compliment for Britannica:

Next thing you know the freight trains will sprout rocket engines. Britannica gets sexy (in a geekish sort of way) with widgets and firefox search plugins. I guess I’ll have to reenable Dashboard on my iMac.

The amazing thing, however, is that their new RSS feed has over 150 bloglines subscribers. Wow.

I’d mostly forgotten I pay Britannica each month for their service. It’s kind of been a charitable act. Maybe they’re actually thinking about how they could be useful. Or maybe Google has agreed to buy them …

See Encyclopædia Britannica Online Tools for the “sexy” tools to which he refers.

Everyone knows that these even-toed ungulates are the tallest of all land animals, but did you know that giraffes have prehensile tongues nearly one meter long?

The tenth (1902-03) edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica included a volume dedicated to maps. Britannica.com makes a selection of them available for free at Cities of the World: Maps from the 10th Edition.

(From EB’s heritage page.)