I did drag myself out of bed this morning for a good cause: we are printing Haitian Creole – English Medical Dictionaries for use in that country. I guess the noble impulse originated with Google, who is a partner of the company (On Demand Books) that brought us our Book Machine: five or six other EBMs across the US are being put to work for the same purpose. It's strange to think of these slim volumes--still hot from printing—arriving in the hands of nurses and doctors in a disaster-zone.
Meanwhile, I have been too much in the guts of the Machine to anthropomorphize her/it/him properly. Names proposed are The Tin Man, Ruby (after Rube Goldberg), and Bartleby the Scrivener. Privately, I keep wanting to call her/him/it Hal, despite the lack of a burning red eye and soothing, male voice reassuring us, “Everything is under control...”