Also on Thursday Evening, April 21st. The 7th annual Favorite Poem evening. In past years this community event was held in the Council chambers, but because of the construction it will be held in the Library this year, at 7:30.
Participants are members of the community who have each volunteered to share a favorite poem and a few words telling why it is special. This has always been a warm and complex experience.
For those of you not going out to Goddard - stay in town and bring your friends and neighbors. Refreshments will be provided by the Friends of the Takoma Park Maryland Library and co-sponsor Columbia Union College.
Thursday, April 21st, 7 PM at the NASA Goddard Visitor Center Auditorium, Takoma Park physicist Theodore A. Jacobson will give a public lecture on Einstein's concepts of time and space. (abstract) Think about it - time depends on the motion and location of the clock, gravity is a warping of time and space, light bends .......
Prefer to go by public transportation? Shuttle bus service will be available from the College Park Metro Station. Times are probably not relative to your motion. You may wish to check with Goddard.
Please RSVP and note - for high school students who love science and/or science fiction - you can earn community service hours and supper if you help set up.
Ted Jacobson's love of Einstein's ideas began with fiction - specifically with Heinlein's story "And He Built a Crooked House". You can discover, or rediscover, Heinlein yourself at the library. You might also enjoy Einstein's Dreams by Alan P Lightman (fiction).
In non-fiction look for 616.07 PATERNI Driving Mr. Albert : a trip across America with Einstein's brain by Michael Paterniti; 523.1 ACZEL God's equation : Einstein, relativity, and the expanding universe by Amir D. Aczel; 529 GALISON Einstein's clocks and Poincare's maps : empires of time by Peter Galison ... and many others.
The 31st annual House and Garden Tour will be Sunday, May 1st, from 1 to 5. Tickets can be purchased in advance at local merchants, including the Co-op and Finewares.
The tour begins at the Co-op. Pick up your brochure there and buy tickets if you haven't done so in advance.
This year the houses are on Woodland, Ethan Allen and Elm. Five to six gardens are included, including an amazing roof garden.
Remember the annual flower shows?
Please check out our large collection of gardening books, several of which were gifts from the Takoma Horticultural Club. The magic Dewey number is 635.
We now have blossoms everywhere on everything from cherries to chinaberries. Want to walk?
This weekend Cultural Tourism DC is offering free walking tours all over the DC area. Two of these will be in Takoma Park.
A tour of Old Takoma Park starts Saturday, April 16th at 1 PM at the Takoma Metro station.
Meet Sunday, April 17th, 1 PM, at the Co-0p, intersection of Carroll Avenue, Grant and Ethan Allan Avenues, for a tour of the Dinky Line Trolley route.
Both tours are sponsored by Historic Takoma.
Today Google made the use of the Keyhole satellite image system available for free. The Keyhole client had cost about $30 to download, but was a great deal of fun. Now you can look around at no charge. Here is the library area, in the days before the construction next door. This worked quite well in Firefox, but we haven't tried other browsers.
Just go to maps.google.com and, when you have the map you want, click on the little satellite link. We have good resolution here, but for many areas of the country you will find poor resolution or no pictures at all.
Camera vans have been roaming around taking surface level photos of business areas and the like. Presumably these images will be added to one of the big search engines. Yahoo?
Ready to try some new search engines? The following were discussed at the recent Computers in Libraries conference (which is where reference librarians go to catch up). Experiment.
You might also enjoy trying Clusty, which does a meta search.
THE LIBRARY IS A DEPARTMENT OF THE CITY OF TAKOMA PARK
