EBlogger

I have a couple of search ‘bots that track the use of “Britannica” and related keywords in the blogosphere. These frequently find “spam blogs” created by a robot to target specific ad-sense or YPN keywords. These fake blogs will crib content from other sites that seem to be related to their keywords, in hopes of drawing context-sensitive text ads that offer high rate of return. Since Britannica covers a broad set of topics, they frequently copy content from EB’s site.

Today I stumbled across one of these spam blogs that targets, of all things, the keyword “ping pong” (yes, as in “table tennis“). A search on google for “ping pong” currently shows nine “Sponsored Links”, so perhaps that is not such a funny idea after all. (I’m not going to link to it, as I don’t want to reward the behavior.)

This particular entry cribbed from an interesting article from the Britannica Student Encyclopedia on Ping-Pong diplomacy: “an episode that occurred in 1971, as the United States was just beginning to restore normal relations with the People’s Republic of China after more than 20 years. As a thaw in relations between the two countries was becoming evident, the Chinese government invited the United States table tennis team […] to visit Beijing and play in exhibition matches. […] The American team lost its exhibition matches […] but the Chinese team was invited to visit the United States. China’s government also allowed American and Canadian newspaper and television reporters into the country to cover the event. Within a year, Nixon himself visited China, and normal diplomatic relations were restored within the decade.”

American puppeteer Jim Henson, born this day in 1936, was the creator of the Muppets (a meld of “marionettes” and “puppets”), whose characters included Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy, Big Bird, and the Cookie Monster.

[via This Day in History - 24 September

Also see EB’s index entries for Sesame Street, marionette, or string puppet, puppetry, and various entries on muppet.

The Britannica Store is offering a replica of the first edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica for $145 (down from $195).

Among the amusing things about the first edition is that it was published in three volumes: A-B, C-L and M-Z. There’s a lesson in that, somewhere.

Rosa Guy, author of many novels and cofounder of the Harlem Writers’ Guild was born on this day in the late 1920s (specific year unknown) in Trinidad.

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.

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.

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.)

Author and columnist for The Nation Eric Alterman writes:

“One thing journalists can learn in reading Caro—or Balzac for that matter—is that almost everything that is reported at the time turns out to be bullshit when the truth is finally known. So much of what we call “news” is a fiction we tell ourselves for comfort. That’s what history teaches anyway, but people keep falling for it because they need the illusion to keep going.”

Thirty six years ago today, on August 15, 1969, the Woodstock Music and Art Fair opened on a farm property in Bethel, New York. Performers included Jimi Hendrix, Sly and the Family Stone, the Who, the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, Ravi Shankar, and Country Joe and the Fish.

Sixty years ago today, on August 6, 1945, under instruction from President Harry Truman, a United States B-29 “Superfortress” bomber dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. “The combined heat and blast pulverized everything in the explosion’s immediate vicinity, generated spontaneous fires that devastated almost 11.4 square km (4.4 square miles), and killed between 70,000 and 80,000 people, as well as injuring more than 70,000 others.”

In his statement to the American people Truman said:

“With this bomb we have now added a new and revolutionary increase in destruction to supplement the growing power of our armed forces. In their present form these bombs are now in production, and even more powerful forms are in development.

“It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.

(and intriguingly, also “Atomic energy may in the future supplement the power that now comes from coal, oil, and falling water, but at present it cannot be produced on a basis to compete with them commercially. Before that comes there must be a long period of intensive research.”)

Three days later, another bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. The second blast “killed 39,000 people outright and injured 25,000.”

Imagine, more than 100,000 killed, another 100,000 injured by just two bombs.

This week’s The Weekly Standard has an excellent article on “Why Truman Dropped the Bomb”. Britannica has additional coverage in “The Atomic Decision (from International Relations)”, “The Decision to use the Atomic Bomb” and elsewhere.

[via Britannica’s This Day in History and Arts & Letters Daily.]