Go To Hellman

Personal Note, January 1 2026: I have a new job: Executive Director of the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.

In seventh grade, Miss Phillips had me memorize "Paul Revere's Ride" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

There's a war going on on the Internet.

The internet gives us new ways to express ourselves.

fresh off the bus It was 11:15AM in the pink D corral of the fifth wave, and surrounding me were runners of all shapes and sizes, from around the world, all of us waiting for our race to start in 15 minutes.

Content Warning: AI My Uncle Henry was a Professor of Chemistry at NYU.

(I'm blogging my journey to the 2024 New York Marathon.)

(I'm blogging my journey to the 2024 New York Marathon. ) At the end of 2020, Strava told me I had run 1362 miles over 12 months.

The Internet's big lie is "we respect your privacy".

(I'm blogging my journey to the 2024 New York Marathon. ) Steve Jobs gave me back my music.

(I'm blogging my journey to the 2024 New York Marathon. ) It wasn't the 10 seconds that made me into a runner.

Over the past 15 years or so, libraries around the world have de-emphasized cataloguing.

In days of yore, back when people were blogging, I described the way that libraries were offering ebooks as being a "Pretend It's Print" model.

What if we get a huge bunch of people together and buy something that lets us do fun things with a book that we all love, while making it accessible as never before?

Have only made 7 of the 25 so far this year.

On July 4, 1971, Michael Hart made the text of the Declaration of Independence available on arpanet (which is now the Internet), using the gopher protocol (look it up).

Libraries know that a big fraction of their book collections never circulate, even once.

"Kale emerging from a slush pile" (CC BY, Eric Hellman) Book publishers hate their "slush pile": books submitted for publication unsolicited, rarely with literary merit and unlikely to make money for the publisher if accepted.

Can a book be more valuable if it's free?

No one is against "Investing in Infrastructure".

It turns out that virality on internet platforms is a social hazard!

I've been working from home full-time for over eleven years - at least partly work-from-home for 20 years.

Today, your identity on the Internet is essentially owned by the big email providers and social networks.

It seems a friend of mine collects four-leaf clovers.

The first scientific paper I published was submitted to Physical Review B, the world's leading scientific journal in condensed matter physics.