the weblog of robin camille davis

While sorting through city documents at the Carlsbad Dove Library, where I volunteer/intern, I came across the city multi-hazard basic emergency plan. It’s essentially a collection of checklists for city officials for when floods, fires, earthquakes, or nuclear disasters happen. What I found most interesting was the “Modified Mercalli Intensity Scale” (wiki), a less scientific [...]

What? A book creator app on Wikipedia?
With the book creator you can create a book containing wiki pages of your choice. You can export the book in different formats (for example PDF or ODF) or order a printed copy.
Apparently it’s been available on non-English Wikipedias for a while, but now it’s open to everyone. Part [...]

This is, quite likely, the greatest picture ever taken.

And sometimes nature makes art out of our arts, and we wake up to find that our sidewalks have become negative prints of what had been upon them. Here, rainstorms leave behind shadows like aftermath of autumnal atomic bombs. Fallen but not yet forgotten.

Okay, this is awkward, um… maybe nobody’s told you yet, but it seems you have forgotten to put on your pants this morning. All seventy of you. It happens to the best of us! Next time why don’t you try putting up a reminder list by the door so you see it on the way [...]

Example of how the Internet is great: It all began when I decided to change the background color of my Twitter profile. Then I was curious how “mauve” was pronounced (rhymes with grove), and I embarked upon an Adventure in Colors on Wikipedia. Five minutes later, I was searching for Charteuse recipes (because I hadn’t [...]

Perhaps the greatest of biblioklepts was Don Vincente, a friar of that Poblat convent whose library was plundered and dispersed at the pillage of the monasteries during the regency of Queen Christina in 1834. Coming to Barcelona, he established himself in a gloomy den in the book-selling quarter of the town. Here he set up [...]

Sometimes in Solana Beach, CA, we wake up to stacks & bridges of plain beach pebbles, constructed by some anonymous citizen(s) for our enjoyment. I took these photos in 2006 with a falling-apart camera. I don’t know when the last time I saw the stacks was, but I miss them. I miss the beach. I [...]

In 1930, the linguist Charles Kay Ogden published a book called Basic English: A General Introduction with Rules and Grammar. In it, he proposed a structured, simplified version of English to be used as an international language. He came up with a list of 850 core words that were enough to get by with in [...]