lackaff.net blog

Cut short by Cortes, Mexica philosophy did not have the chance to reach as far as Greek or Chinese philosophy. But surviving testimony intimates that it was well on its way. The stacks of Nahuatl manuscripts in Mexican archives depict the tlamatinime meeting to exchange ideas and gossip, as did the Vienna Circle and the French philosophs and the Taisho-period Kyoto school. Their musings of the tlamatinime occurred in intellectual neighborhoods frequented by philosophers from Brussels to Beijing, bu the mix was entirely the Mexica’s own. Voltaire, Locke, Rousseau, and Hobbes never had a chance to speak with these men or even know of their existence–and here, at last, we begin to appreciate the enormity of the calamity, for the disintegration of native America was a loss not just to those societies but to the human enterprise as a whole.

Having grown separately for millennia, the Americas were a boundless sea of novel ideas, dreams, stories, philosophies, religions, moralities, discoveries, and all the other products of the mind. Few things are more sublime or characteristically human than the cross-fertilization of cultures. The simple discovery by Europe of the existence of the Americas caused an intellectual ferment. How much grander would have been the tumult if Indian societies had survived in full splendor!

-Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus (2005)

Since I wrote this blurb a while back, that page has become one of the most-hit on this site. My referrer logs indicate that Google is sending people here due to their passionate interest in a search plugin for Scholar.

The quick and easy solution to searching Google Scholar from Firefox is to install the search engine plugin from the Mycroft Project site. That’s it. Just click the link, hit the “add” button on the popup, and google scholarly to your heart’s content.

There’s another Scholar search scenario that requires a tiny bit more effort. If you are affiliated with a research institution or library, you may have noticed that Scholar will automatically return links to content in your library (full-text journal articles, bibliographic records, etc.) if you using one of their computers. If you would like to get this functionality from somewhere else (such as Starbucks or your home), you need to route your Scholar search requests through an HTTP proxy at your institution. Example: my institution is the University at Buffalo, and my library provides off-campus access through a proxy at https://gate.lib.buffalo.edu/.

If your institution provides access to a proxy, it’s easy to build a Firefox search plugin that utilizes it for all your Scholar searches. Just go to the Plugin Generation page and fill out the relevant details. For my UB Scholar plugin, I just tweaked the default Scholar plugin URL from http://scholar.google.com to http://scholar.google.com.gate.lib.buffalo.edu, and changed the name from googlescholar to googlescholar_ub. The XML of my plugin is available here for reference.

Good luck and happy plugin-making. Feel free to drop me a comment if you have any questions.

I dropped by the Mass. Ave Project again this weekend to lend a hand with the strawbale greenhouse being constructed there. The plan was to compress and plaster the bale walls. While we didn’t quite get that finished, community members and friends had a lot of fun mixing the plaster with their feet. The Buffalo News stopped by, and caught me crouched on top of the framing as we worked to “cap” the bales with a wooden support structure.

It was a beautiful day — the rest of my photos are here

Just a quickie: Here is a Firefox search plugin for accessing Google Scholar via the University at Buffalo library proxy.

Google Scholar provides direct links to articles in journal databases if your IP can be authenticated as a subscribing institution’s — very convenient for on-campus users, but more of a hassle for off-campus users. This plugin automatically directs your Scholar search request through the UB library proxy. This is probably useful to no one besides me, but I thought I’d share.

Kudos to the Mycroft folks for making plugin creation so simple…

UPDATED: I’m pulling this post because it’s served its purpose (and continues to get lots of hits). In a nutshell, I raised the issue that booksellers are mining the BookMooch data feeds to pick the high-value, resellable books out of the system. I expressed a concern that this was problematic for BM’s developing social community. While I maintain this concern, it was apparently not widely held, and I defer to the judgment of BookMooch’s most-invested.