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source: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=123289019

Once asked to write a full story in six words, legend has it that novelist Ernest Hemingway responded: "For Sale: baby shoes, never worn."

In this spirit, Smith Magazine invited writers "famous and obscure" to distill their own life stories into exactly six words. It All Changed in an Instant is the fourth collection of very, very brief life stories from Smith. The tiny memoirs are sometimes sad, often funny — and always concise.

It All Changed in an Instant is full of well-known names — from activist Gloria Steinem ("Life is one big editorial meeting"), to author Frank McCourt ("The miserable childhood leads to royalties"), to actress Molly Ringwald ("Acting is not all I am").

Larry Smith, founding editor of Smith, and Rachel Fershleiser, Smith's memoir editor, talk to NPR's Rebecca Roberts about the fun and the challenge of capturing real-life stories in six little words.

Smith's six-word memoir? "Now I obsessively count the words." And Fershleiser's: "Bookstore to book tour in seconds."

Can you write your autobiography in one sentence?

Geek Lab

February 1, 2010 from http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=123107726&sc=emaf

Chris Boden likes to say that he hacked college: He went to classes, he lived on campus — but he never enrolled.

"I couldn't afford to," Boden says. "But I wanted to learn, and I found very quickly that if you actually have a sincere, passionate desire to learn and you don't care about the degree, that the whole world is a school."

Boden never got a degree. But he kept the passion, which led to creating The Geek Group, a consortium of people devoted to good old-fashioned scientific and technical experimentation.

The Geek Group has members all over the world, but its headquarters is in an old machine shop just north of Kalamazoo, Mich. The Geek Group has gained some attention for its series of videos on YouTube showing their experiments, but it could be more than viral entertainment: Boden thinks his vision could help transform the sputtering economy in the upper Midwest.

Inside A Lab

Boden says anyone can come to his lab and just play.

"It's like if you could go to Mythbusters and hang out," Boden says, referring to a popular television show on the Discovery Channel. "It's a real place."

Boden's lab resembles the set of Mythbusters, with crazy experiments all over the place — such as a Farnsworth–Hirsch Fusor. A vacuum chamber device that's relatively simple to build, the fusor uses accelerated ions to generate low-power nuclear fusion reactions inside a small glass container. Boden calls it "a star in a jar."

Next to that, there's a magnetics demonstration that shoots an aluminum disc straight up to the ceiling. There also is a high-voltage lab, where Boden demonstrates the "Thumper."

"It's like the finger of God," Boden says.

He sets a Mountain Dew can on a piece of metal attached to an obscene amount of electrical power. We stand back 30 feet, and Boden tells me to mash a big red button. The can is vaporized. I can still feel the thump in my chest.

This place is a geek's dream house.

Making A Company

Lis Bokt first heard about The Geek Group while surfing the Internet six years ago. She was living in Toronto at the time.

"I came here, and I saw all of the really awesome machines and toys that I knew that I had wanted to use for something, but there was no way I would ever be able to get one for myself," Bokt says.

After one visit, Bokt decided to move to Kalamazoo. She's now executive director of The Geek Group, which is a nonprofit and stays afloat largely through donations and grants.

But it also serves as a kind of research-and-development facility for small companies that can't afford their own lab. And this is what gets Boden really excited. He takes me into a room with a milling machine that anyone can use to develop prototypes.

"This machine creates jobs," Boden says. "It doesn't just make parts. It doesn't just make metal shavings and plastic shavings. This makes jobs."

That's what brought in Pat Hanna, who runs a company called One2Products. His eyes light up at all the science experiments. But he came here for a much more practical reason:

"Well, we had developed our product that we're hoping these guys can help us with, and we were looking for somebody to do some simple machining and also to keep it quiet for a little while," Hanna says.

A Farnsworth-Hirsch Fusor built by The Geek Group. The device, which is relatively simple to make, can generate low-power nuclear fusion reactions. Boden calls the device "a star in a jar."

Future Plans

The Geek Group charges for some of this work. It's one of the many ways to keep the lights on, and they do use a lot of electricity here. The insurance bills are also through the roof. But Boden has a vision to expand The Geek Group: build a 40-acre campus, but without degrees or tuition. He says it would be a place where people could do "open source" research and development.

"But I can't get economic development to care because ... we're the weird guys," Boden says. "We're the guys out on the edge of town that blow stuff up."

Boden believes The Geek Group would get more attention if it were in Silicon Valley. But Silicon Valley doesn't have the kind of unemployment that's ravaged Michigan or the manufacturing heritage.

He believes that this is a place that could use some weird people on the edge of town. This is a place that could use some real geeks.

Oxford Dictionary debuts

On this day in 1884, the first portion, or fascicle, of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), considered the most comprehensive and accurate dictionary of the English language, is published. Today, the OED is the definitive authority on the meaning, pronunciation and history of over half a million words, past and present.

Plans for the dictionary began in 1857 when members of London's Philological Society, who believed there were no up-to-date, error-free English dictionaries available, decided to produce one that would cover all vocabulary from the Anglo-Saxon period (1150 A.D.) to the present. Conceived of as a four-volume, 6,400-page work, it was estimated the project would take 10 years to finish. In fact, it took over 40 years until the 125th and final fascicle was published in April 1928 and the full dictionary was complete--at over 400,000 words and phrases in 10 volumes--and published under the title A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles.

Unlike most English dictionaries, which only list present-day common meanings, the OED provides a detailed chronological history for every word and phrase, citing quotations from a wide range of sources, including classic literature and cookbooks. The OED is famous for its lengthy cross-references and etymologies.

No sooner was the OED finished than editors began updating it. A supplement, containing new entries and revisions, was published in 1933 and [...] between 1972 and 1986, an updated 4-volume supplement was published, with new terms from the continually evolving English language plus more words and phrases from North America, Australia, the Caribbean, New Zealand, South Africa and South Asia.

Oxford Dictionary debuts. (2010). History.com. Retrieved 10:40, Feb 1, 2010, from http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history.do?action=tdihArticleCategory&id=52322.

J.D. Salinger

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