Nerdy Needs

McKinlay, a lanky 35-year-old with tousled hair, was one of about 40 million Americans looking for romance through websites like Match.com, J-Date, and e-Harmony, and he’d been searching in vain since his last breakup nine months earlier. He’d sent dozens of cutesy introductory messages to women touted as potential matches by OkCupid’s algorithms. Most were ignored; he’d gone on a total of six first dates.

On that early morning in June 2012, his compiler crunching out machine code in one window, his forlorn dating profile sitting idle in the other, it dawned on him that he was doing it wrong. He’d been approaching online matchmaking like any other user. Instead, he realized, he should be dating like a mathematician.

Help us keep the library free for millions of people by making a tax-deductible donation today. Donors will receive an email confirmation of their donation that can be used for tax records.

Every day 3 million people use our collections.

We have archived over ten petabytes (that's 10,000,000,000,000,000 bytes!) of information, including everything ever written in Balinese. This year we also launched our groundbreaking TV News Search and Borrow service, which former FCC Chairman Newton Minow said "offers citizens exceptional opportunities" to easily do their own fact checking and "to hold powerful public institutions accountable."

Your support helps us build amazing services and keep them free
for people around the globe.

Please make a donation today.

humansofnewyork:
“ "They say that you’re supposed to stand up to bullies, but there’s not much you can do when the whole class is like that."
“Why do they make fun of you?

For less important doodles in text, the kind that go no farther than your desk or refrigerator door, the tactile pleasure of typing old school is incomparable to what you get from a de rigueur laptop. Computer keyboards make a mousy tappy tap tappy tap like ones you hear in a Starbucks — work may be getting done but it sounds cozy and small, like knitting needles creating a pair of socks. Everything you type on a typewriter sounds grand, the words forming in mini-explosions of SHOOK SHOOK SHOOK. A thank-you note resonates with the same heft as a literary masterpiece.

The sound of typing is one reason to own a vintage manual typewriter — alas, there are only three reasons, and none of them are ease or speed. In addition to sound, there is the sheer physical pleasure of typing; it feels just as good as it sounds, the muscles in your hands control the volume and cadence of the aural assault so that the room echoes with the staccato beat of your synapses.

This 24-foot long diorama created by Brickmania, depicts the WWII Battle of Peleliu, complete with a 10-foot long USS LST-325 ship, tanks, Marines, sailors, bunkers, ambulances and supply trucks.

Mathew sez,



19th Century technology meets 21st Century music over a bottle of beer in the latest extension to the Beck's Record Label project.