Pirates!

Shiver Me Timbers if the Archive ARRRn’t going to celebrate International Talk Like a Pirate Day:

Film

• The Black Pirate (1926)
• Clothes Make the Pirate (1925) movie trailer
• Captain Kidd (1945)

Animation

• Felix the Cat: The Goose that Laid the Golden Egg (1936)
• Peg-Leg Pedro (193 Chevrolet Advertisement

Audio

• A Ballad of John Silver 2006
• Buccaneers and Pirates of Our Coasts (189 non-fiction

Books

• The Voyages and Adventures of Edward Teach, Commonly Called Black Beard, the Notorious Pirate : with an Account of the Origin and Progress of the Roman, Algerine and West India Pirates (1805)
• The Buccaneers and Marooners of America. Being an Account of the Famous Adventures and Daring Deeds of Certain Notorious Freebooters of the Spanish Main (1891)
• The Book of Buried Treasure; Being a True History of the Gold, Jewels, and Plate of Pirates, Galleons, Etc., which are Sought for to This Day (1922)

– Renata

Math Class Then and Now

• Maintaining Classroom Discipline (1947): Mr. Grimes is the math teacher from hell: watch him berate his students and their small rebellions. Happily, the wise fatherly narrator suggests a better teaching mode and Mr. Grimes magically transforms.
• Inertia (2004): This math teacher may be more nightmarish than Mr. Grimes but his students’ challenge (and magically transform!) him through dance.
• Cheating (1952) John gets his friend Mary to help him cheat to pass an algebra test. Soon he’s a cheating addict and poor Mary is his accomplice.
• Bikini Calculus (2004) This bikini-clad woman won’t help you cheat, but she might help you learn some calculus. In this short teaser for the How-to-Do Girls’ commercial videos, the teacher claims, This isn’t mindless misogynistic fun! Hmmm…
• If you’re serious about learning math, check out the Archive’s Advanced Placement Calculus courses (levels AB & BC), or video lectures from MIT’s popular course on Differential Equations, or any of the college-level math video lectures from MSRI (Mathematical Sciences Research Institute).

– Renata

Exploring Prison

Documentaries:

• Women in Prison Part 1 and Part 2
• AIDS in Prison, Part 1 and Part 2

Audio programs:

• Life After Prison (KXJZ Radio)
• Childhood Matters: When A Parent Is In Prison

Books:

• Drops of Blood: Prison Verse (1911) writen by Royall Douglass, a prisoner in San Quentin
• Famous Adventures And Prison Escapes of the Civil War (1913)
• Prison Life of Jefferson Davis (1866)
• Woman in prison (1869)

On the lighter side:

• Learn to make Prison Wine
• The Prison Gourmet (potatoes au gratin and prison ramen)
• Prison Mutiny (1943), also known as “You Can’t Beat the Law”

– Alexis

What is Plone?

That’s a good question, and you can use the Internet Archive to answer it!

Plone is an open source Content Management System (CMS) that you can use to create and run a web site. Among other things, it’s got a nice, graphical interface so that people adding content to the site don’t have to know html or have any other technical skills to contribute.

If you’re interested in learning more about it, just do a search for videos about Plone on archive.org and you’ll find about 30 instructional movies to help you get started creating your own Plone web site.

Here are a few good ones to get you started:

• Introducing Plone
• Top 20 Plone Pitfalls — And HowTo Avoid Them
• Getting Your Feet Wet with Plone
• Multimedia and Podcasting With Plone

If you’re interested in learning about other computer-oriented topics, check out the ArsDigita and Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs courses, which contain computer science lectures from MIT professors.

– Alexis

Paper Models

If you’re looking for a little project to do with the kids (older kids - these are a little complicated!), try making a paper model. We’ve got a few really cool ones on the archive to try out (all in pdf):

• French satellite A-1 nicknamed Asterix (instructions | model sheet)
• V-2 rocket (instructions | model sheet)
• Thor-Able Launch Vehicle for Pioneer 1 (instructions | model sheet | display stand)

– Alexis

The BEAR-able Lightness of Being Archive.org

As hibernation season sets in for bears of the Northern Hemisphere, it seems appropriate to blog about our favorite furry friends. While real life bears snore away the dark days of winter, there are plenty of teddy bears, gummy bears, animated bears, bear costumes, bear songs, and Cinnamon Bears on Archive.org to lighten our hours. Besides, it’s Friday and we can BEAR-ly contain ourselves!

• Teddy’s eye view of San Francisco, plus kidnapping!
  A teddy bear’s adventure in San Francisco
• Bear at a Tokyo Shop: Shibuya Apple & Bear
• Lusty Bear (quaint old song): I’m a Bear in a Lady’s Boudoir
  
• Teddy Bear CPR (A Collection Team favorite we will feature again and again and): Teddy Rescue
• Star-Crossed Gummy Bears (perhaps this is a little on the heavy side): Letters to Patrick
• Silly song w/ lots of bear photos: Bobo The Bear
• Old-time Radio Show: The Cinnamon Bear
• Real-life bears! Polar Bear and Cubs

– Renata

Map of Booger Canyon, Arizona and 58,713 other USGS DRG Maps

If you’ve been nosing around the Web looking for free maps, the Archive’s new collection of nearly sixty thousand digital raster graphic (DRG) maps from the USGS is nothing to sneeze at. These maps are in the public domain, but getting access to them usually costs money. The Archive provides them for free thanks to the work of Jared Benedict of the Libre Map Project and donations from over 100 map liberators. For best results, the maps should be viewed with global positioning software or a map viewer.

A few examples:

Nose Rock, New Mexico
Roman Nose, Idaho
Blue Nose Peak, Nevada
The Nose East, Wyoming
Devils Nose, California

– Renata