Librarian of Fortune

The real London Underground

I go to London a couple of times a year, and often take the Tube to get around. The feature and the bug of the Tube map is that it's highly stylized -- great for calculating transfer points, but what you don't realize is two points a block apart may appear to be much farther apart when viewed on the map. Now I have The Real (London) Underground map -- a clever tool that morphs the stylized map into one that reflects the actual layout.

Stuff I saw while in Australia

I've been collecting notes of strange / interesting / unusual stuff I see while I'm on the road. Here are a few things I saw the last time I was in Australia.

• We hired a car to drive from Melbourne to Canberra -- a nice drive if you've got the time. The rental car has a little coffee cup icon that lights up on the dashboard if the engine hasn't been turned off for 2 hours. There are also signs every 5 or 10 miles along the highway, reminding people to stop and rest.

• One night we went to the Gurkhas at Carlton - a Nepalese restaurant in Melbourne. The menu "main courses -- vegetarian" and "main courses -- meatatarian" Now I know what to call my omnivore friends.

Google offers patent search

Cool... Google now offers a search tool to search USPTO patents. Google Patents.  From my initial look, I really like it. Click the Advanced Patent Search link to get to the good stuff -- search by assignee, title word, etc.

The search results page has title, patent number and date, sometimes the patent assignee, and snippets. If you click on any of the titles, you get a really nicely organized summary of the patent -- abstract and basic citation info, list of patents citing this patent, a search-within-the-patent optino, all the claims, links to all the drawings, and a link to images of each page.

Here's a strange glitch -- if you search for Xerox as the patent assignee, you don't see this summary page; you go directly to an image of the patent. I can't replicate this with any other search. I assume this is a temporary bug.

This isn't a tool for serious patent searchers, but it's a nice alternative to the USPTO's end-user search.

Here goes...

Primarily upon the urging of a few people I've subjected to my amusing anecdotes of life on the road, I'm starting to share my own peculiar perspective of the world with the world. I'm not sure where it will lead.