Kickass Librarian

600 Pounds of Joy!

The Late Great Solomon Burke

Librarians as Seen by the Media

Keith Richards wanted to be a Librarian!

After decades partying in a haze of alcohol and drugs, Richards will tell in his coming autobiography, entitled Life, that he has been quietly nurturing his inner bookworm.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/arts/bookworm-just-waitin-to-bust-out/story-e6frg8n6-1225849594245

As a child growing up in the post-war austerity of 1950s London, he found refuge in books before he discovered the blues.

He has declared: "When you are growing up there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully: the church, which belongs to God, and the public library, which belongs to you. The public library is a great equaliser."

Thanks to Vicki, a great librarian, for this.

RIP Pete Quaife

Pete Quaife bassist with the Kinks

Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder: it seems the brains of men and women respond differently to beautiful landscapes. This may stem from the varied evolutionary pressures on the two sexes in our hunter-gatherer ancestors.

A team led by Camilio Cela-Conde at the university of Balearic Islands in Palma, Majorca, Spain, asked males and females whether photographs of natural and urban landscapes were beautiful of not.

When they looked at a scene they deemed beautiful, both men and women had greater electrical activity in the parietal region, near the top of the brain. In women this activation occurred in both halves of the brain, but in men it was restricted to the right hemisphere (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0900304106).

This might explain evolutionary differences, the team suggest. In early humans, they say, men were hunters who needed mental maps of the distance and direction, while women gathered plants for food and oriented themselves using landmarks.

This fits with data that the left brain handles ‘categorical’ spatial relations, such as landmarks, while the right handles ‘coordinate’ data, such as distance and direction. The team say that what we find beautiful may have evolved from what our ancestors looked for in a habitat.
Ref: New Scientist 28 February 2009.