Humanities: February 2003 Archive Page

"It moved silently through the living[room] and drifted to the staircase. Gliding wraithlike over the staircase it then entered the bedroom where my wife and I lay sleeping peacefully....On this occasion I awoke to the sense that there was a large menacing presence approaching me silently out of the gloom, so I opened my eyes, and there it was! A LARGE SILENT MENACING PRESENCE WAS APPROACHING ME OUT OF THE GLOOM, AND IT COULD FLY!!!" Scylla --The Horror of BlimpsTeemings)

Legendary scientist James Watson advocates therapies or screening to elimiate low-intelligence people from the population. That's called eugenics, an ideology that the Nazis were happy to adopt for their own purposes. Watson also wants to breed prettier girls. Apparently, even the most brilliant scientists can say things that are not only stupid, but also racist and sexist. -- DGJ --On 50th Anniversary, Co-Discoverer of DNA Now Advocates Racial Engineering (New Scientist)

"Media mega-star Oprah Winfrey?s announcement that ?I'm back in the business of recommending books?but with a difference,? drew a standing ovation from an audience of America?s leading publishers... [T]he new book club will focus on literary classics because ?I cannot imagine a world where the great works of literature are not read.? Her hope, she said, is that ?The Oprah Winfrey Show? will ?make classic works of literature accessible to every woman and man who reads.?" --Oprah's Book Club: Back to the ClassicsPress Release)

"In this time of great sadness about Fred Rogers' death, we understand that parents may be concerned about how to approach the Mister Rogers' Neighborhood series and our Mister Rogers' Neighborhood Website with their children. We here at Family Communications have given this a great deal of thought and have talked with our colleagues in child development and mental health. We'd like to share our thoughts with you."

--PBS Kids Statement on "Mr Rogers"PBS)

We don't get good reception on the PBS channel where we live, so Peter hasn't really watched Mr. Rogers, but maybe Carolyn will when she's older. At any rate, note how the main web page for Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood acknowledges its dual audiences -- the kids who are the primary audience for the website, and parents and causual Internet surfers who may be visiting the site after hearing the news.

"Margaret Bourke-White hung out of bombers to take pictures, climbed out on a gargoyle high atop the Chrysler Building to take pictures, was the first Western photographer to go to the Soviet Union, covered the dangerous days of India's partition....Margaret Bourke-White was in love with the shapes of industrial design -- the mechanical muscle and sheen of it." Susan Stamberg reports on an exhibit of Bourke-White's extraordinary photographs of the mechanisms and infrastructure that were revolutionizing American society in the Age of the Machine. --Bourke-White's 'Photography of Design': Early Work Found the Hidden Beauty in IndustryNPR)

"The template system is also good for the audience. Apcar says that when readers come to a NYTimes.com multimedia project, it will look familiar to them -- they will know how to navigate it. That's not so for a news site that treats every multimedia project as an independent entity, not bound to existing practices or guidelines. Make it easy for the Web user to view your multimedia, he suggests, while still allowing yourself plenty of flexibility in how a package looks and what content elements are included." Steve Outing

--Breaking News Multimedia: Not an OxymoronEditor and Publisher)

In the Middle Ages, every book was a hand-crafted work of art, but the printing press led to standardization that vastly increased literacy across Europe. While the elite still enjoyed their hand-illuminated manuscripts, the populace had ready access to mass-produced versions. The current backlash against Jakob Nielsen's minimalist design aesthetic (if you can call "industrial ugly but dang efficient" an aesthetic) and the slow decline of Nielsen's once brilliant Alert Box suggests that the hypertext aesthetes are regaining some ground, but there's a lot to be said for templates, which free the individual author (whoops -- I meant "content creator") from having to master all aspects of a design system, and which is one important reason why weblogging services are bringing hypertext authorship to the masses. Thanks for the link, Mike.

"They aren't videogames, after all; except for the occasional cut scene, we almost never use video. We use images rendered on the fly--and the images are the surface of the game, the interface, the cotton candy. The meat of the game, the heart of it, is in the underlying code. These are games that run on processors, not on magnetic tape; algorithm and interactivity is what they are....Indeed, given the visual crudity of the original videogames, it's hard to believe that even non-gamers could have thought that 'video' was the single factor about those games that needed mentioning. But of course, the prevailing culture has never understood the game qua game." Greg Costikyan --Death to VideogamesGames * Design * Art * Culture)

A post from a few weeks ago, which I missed.

"When the company receives a call from someone who's clearly lost it -- which can happen several times an hour -- [psychologist]Chessin comes on the line to help the caller rediscover their happy place. Then the engineer returns to discuss the technical problem in detail." --Psychologist Helps Victims of Data LossSFGate)

At first I thought this article was a hoax, especialy when it mentioned that Chessin used to work for a suicide hotline. But I can imagine that busy (expensive) engineers don't want to be detained by the incoherent, impotent rage of hard-luck hard-drive-deprived callers. Still, this isn't a "Teen Helpline -- We're Here Because We Care" scenario -- the data recovery bill averages $900. Still, that would be a small price to pay for some of the work I've done. Hmm. I think I'll stop blogging and start backing some stuff up now...

"It's time for a reality check. Hypertext is not, and has never been, all that. Electronic literature is a tiny field and mostly, no one cares about it, except for a handful of endlessly bickering insiders. Maybe 200 people in the world are even marginally interested in the academic arguments....From the outside, though, it looks a bit like cursing a toilet manufacturer for providing the pot you shit in. If you felt better back in the outhouse, why not simply use that instead?" Diane Greco (no permalink; 24 Feb 2003)

--Hypertext & The OuthouseDiane Greco)

I enjoyed Greco's rant. Let me note first that she means something very specific when she refers to "electronic literature" and "hypertext" -- she means what I would call "canonical literary hypertext" or "that set of commercial hypertexts that tend to be studied in graduate seminars on hypertext theory," rather than the kinds of hypertext that millions of people encounter every day on the Web. Her conclusions suggest that critics who are unhappy with the state of literary hypertext should go back to what they were doing before hypertext came along. (This is how Mark Bernstein misreads my position, BTW.) But there are other alternatives -- such as looking at other kinds of cybertext that has not been oversaturated with scholarship. I'm thinking about computer games (particularly interactive fiction) and weblogs. While Espen Aarseth's Cybertext was written before the blogging boom, it offers a very thoughtful survey of a wide variety of different kinds of creative electronic texts. I tell my students to rent Landow's Hypertext, but I make them buy Aarseth's Cybertext and Killian's Writing for the Web.

"Forty German authors are hoping to set a new world record by conceiving, writing and printing a book in 12 hours, the event's organizers said on Tuesday." --Germans to Create Book in 12 HoursCNN)

I believe the German word for the activity is zuschnellbuchermachen. Thanks for the link, Mike.

"Baseball - a slow, serene game played with a wooden bat, a cloth ball, and cowhide mitts on a broad, grassy field - surged in popularity just when the industrial revolution was taking hold, leaving masses of urban workers and shopkeepers yearning for the pastoral peace and quiet of the fabled agricultural age. They could relive this for a day by attending a baseball game. By extension, no wonder stock-car racing - a fast, furious sport contended on a paved roadway with snarling, smelly machines operated by hand - is surging in popularity at the very time the computerized information revolution is transforming our society from top to bottom." --Social Science at 190 MPH on NASCAR's Biggest SuperspeedwaysFirst Monday)

The above speculation is from an article by David Ronfelt, who credits "long-time race promoter and track owner H. A. 'Humpy' Wheeler" as quoted in Scott Huler's A Little Bit Sideways: One Week Inside a NASCAR Winston Cup Race Team. This line of reasoning also accounts for the popularity of BattleBots.

"Dear Strong Bad,|Right now I am putting off writing a paper for my English class. Can you write my Englilsh paper? I don't even care if it's good or not. I just don't want to do it." --A Well Thought-Out Englilsh [sic] Paper, by Karl "The Yellow Dart" SmithHome Star Runner)

Never underestimate how a cool nickname and a little bit of cash can affect the grade of your "Englilsh" paper.

"The arts and the sciences are again joining together as one culture, the third culture. Those involved in this effort?on either side of C.P. Snow's old divide?are at the center of today's intellectual action. They are the new humanists.....In too much of academia, intellectual debate tends to center on such matters as who was or was not a Stalinist in 1937, or what the sleeping arrangements were for guests at a Bloomsbury weekend in the early part of the twentieth century. This is not to suggest that studying history is a waste of time: History illuminates our origins and keeps us from reinventing the wheel. But the question arises: History of what? Do we want the center of culture to be based on a closed system, a process of text in/text out, and no empirical contact with the real world? One can only marvel at, for example, art critics who know nothing about visual perception; "social constructionist" literary critics uninterested in the human universals documented by anthropologists; opponents of genetically modified foods, additives, and pesticide residues who are ignorant of genetics and evolutionary biology." John Brockman --The New HumanistsEdge)

Here is the complete text of a message in my inbox today, from someone who signed it "freak":

"help find information about the beleives of the pilgrims in 1620"

How Not to Request Help OnlineE-Mail)

Sorry. Please do your own homework.

"When we view the computer as an interactive artifact the computer exists as our partner in the completion of important tasks. We ask the computer to do something and it, by proxy, does it for us. We should, instead, view the computer as a tool that we use to perform tasks: we use it so that we can do the important task. Calling the computer a tool may seem a simple matter of word choice but changing the view of the computer from interactive artifact to tool has a significant impact on how we think about the computer, what we expect of it, how we design for it and how we train for its use." Chris Dent --The Computer as Tool: From Interaction to AugmentationBurning Chrome)

"Of course I wanted to be popular.|But in fact I didn't, not enough. There was something else I wanted more: to be smart. Not simply to do well in school, though that counted for something, but to design marvellous rockets, or to write well, or to understand how to program computers. In general, to make great things..." Paul Graham --Why Nerds are UnpopularPaulGraham.com)

A lot of bloggers must be nerds, because the above story is currently #2 on Blogdex.

"I HAVE just ploughed through the first five books devoted to an Internet art form that fascinates me and may well be unknown to you. Where to start?|Say for the moment that the weblog - a log of the World Wide Web, as it were -can be personal publishing at its most liberating, an online guide through the thickets of the Internet, a journal or diary, easily updated and nestled in a global neighbourhood. It can be fresh and unpredictable, still something of a mystery to the American weblog pioneers of the 1990s who populate these books. " Bernard Lane --Welcome to Bloggers WorldAustrailian IT)

Good capsule summaries of books I'm going to ask my university library to carry.

"Prompted by a complaint from the Liberty Legal Institute, a group of Christian lawyers, the [Justice] department is investigating whether Michael L. Dini, an associate professor of biology at Texas Tech University here, discriminated against students on the basis of religion when he posted a demand on his Web site that students wanting a letter of recommendation for postgraduate studies 'truthfully and forthrightly affirm a scientific answer' to the question of how the human species originated." Nick Madigan

--Professor's Snub of Creationists Prompts U.S. InquiryNY Times)

Does the law require a professor to write a letter of recommendation? Regardless of the sensitive nature of the issue, shouldn't a professor be permitted to choose who does and who does not get a letter of recommendation? Isn't Dini being excruciatingly fair by explaining, up front, his recommendation policy, when he could, if he were truly devious, simply write lukewarm letters for those students who don't meet his criteria? (Thanks, Ron Zeno and Chris Worth.)

"Andy Serkis' computer-aided performance was one of the best things about 'The Two Towers.'... Is Hollywood ready to acknowledge and honor digital performances, or even human-digital hybrids? This year, the answer seems to be a resounding no." Ivan Askwith --Gollum: Dissed by the Oscars?Salon)

"[A]cademics are throwing themselves into the study of emotion with the rapturous intensity of a love affair. In a sense, emotion has always been at the core of the humanities: Without the passions, there would not be much history, and even less literature. Indeed the very word 'philosophy' begins with philos (love)." Scott McLemee --Getting EmotionalChronicle)

"Unfortunately, most will just view the team projects, class presentations, software life cycles, and ambiguous problem statements as 'hoops they have to jump through' to graduate. I recall a meeting with a student who was having trouble working with her project team in a recent class. She actually asserted with some confidence that the problem she was having with her team members...wouldn't happen in industry. She was stunned when I explained..." William Harrison --The Software Developer as Movie IconIEEE)

What Prof. Harrison says about computer programming projects can also be said about techncial writing, or about almost any project. In the real world, rarely do workers have complete project specs handed to them; rarely do they have enough time and/or resources; rarely do all the team members have all the required skills; rarely are key personnel available to consult at convenient times; etc, etc.

Jesica Santillam, 17, suffers from a heart deformity...|After a three-year wait, she received a transplant on February 7 with organs flown from Boston to the Duke University Hospital in Durham, North Carolina....The organs were sent with paperwork correctly listing the donor's blood type, says Sean Fitzpatrick of the New England Organ Bank.|But somehow, no one identified the donor had type-A blood while Jesica is O-positive. --Girl gravely ill in US after receiving organs with wrong blood typeAnanova)

While this sort of thing happens extremely rarely, it shows that proofreading can save lives... or take them.

"In the autumn of their careers, they are in a mood to dispense the wisdom that comes of decades of slugging it out with editors, critics, other writers and, roughest of all, their own restless egos....Let us summon in spirit some of these authors of literary guides and memoirs and hear what they have to say. Aspiring writers pay attention." Philip Marchand --Write This Way, Gentle ReaderToronto Star)

Thanks for the link, Jim.

"We use music as a vehicle to engage, inspire and reinforce the magic of literature and the power of reading. We have launched an awareness and outreach campaign for one of this country's most critical problems: adults who cannot read or write."

From the Chapter One benefit CD for "Artists for Literacy":

• Bruce Springsteen - "The Ghost of Tom Joad" Inspired by John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath
• David LaMotte - "Dark and Deep" Inspired by Robert Frost's poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"
• Suzanne Vega - "Calypso" Inspired by Homer's epic poem "The Odyssey"
• Ray Manzarek - "He Can't Come Today" Inspired by Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot

Songs Inspired by LiteratureSIBL)

We all know that technology makes it easier for some students who are tempted by academic dishonesty. I just recently used a little-known feature of MS-Word to cast doubt on a fairly standard -- and fairly lame -- student excuse.

Fifteen minutes before an assignment is due, I get an e-mail from a student who says he is too sick to make it to class. This happens all the time, but this particular message is a little fishy: instead of simply e-mailing the paper as an attachment and apologizing, the student lauches into excuses: he won't be able to get a doctor's note, he says, because he doesn't have insurance. As for the paper itself, the student says he'll give it to his roommate, who is "un-reliable at best." I suspect that the paper hasn't yet been written, and that "The Tale of the Unreliable Roommate" is intended to explain why the paper will not appear in my box until Monday. And, of course, his message indicates that he expects me to send him a personal e-mail that summarizes the material that he missed in class (see: "I Was Absent -- Did I Miss Anything Important?").

Unfortunately for the student (who probably thinks he's free to start his weekend now), I reply within seconds: "If you can e-mail it now & get me a hard copy ASAP that will be acceptable." The document arrives three hours later.

Another misfortune for the student: MS-Word has a feature (File | Properties | Statistics) that will display when a document was created and how long the author has worked on it. The screen capture suggests that the student started the paper at 12:30, just a half hour before it was due. The e-mail arrived 14 minutes later, apparently after he realised he wouldn't make the deadline. Despite the sudden illness, he managed to work on the paper for another 70 minutes over the next few hours.

It really ticks me off to be disrespected in this manner. I consulted with several faculty members, each of whom said I had no choice but to refuse the late paper. Fortunately, this assignment is only worth 5 points, and the student, who has otherwise been perfectly fine, will have plenty of time to redeem himself.

Dennis G. Jerz
Technology Catches Student in a FibLiteracy Weblog)

"'The Internet allows us to do all kinds of things quickly and efficiently, and that includes hoaxing,' Jerz says.|Jerz, an assistant professor of English at UW-Eau Claire, learned of the Olsen hoax when a skeptical student emailed him the fake CNN story....News hoaxes aren't the only ones that spread by e-mail, says Jerz, who often sees financial scams, false computer virus warnings and tales of fictional missing children. All of these are examples of 'memes,' the intellectual equivalent of genes, ideas that reproduce themselves by jumping from brain to brain, Jerz says. Many vanish quickly, but others spread swiftly." Tom Giffey --Gotcha! Olsen Twins Hoax Had 'em Fooled (Leader Telegram)

This local news story from the Eau Claire paper offers a good summary and reflection on the Mary Kate & Ashley Olsen hoax that was spreading across the Internet about two weeks ago.

"Once you've got her, the next step is keeping her. To do this, just remember that your geek girl has a few special things about her that distinguish her from other women. All women like gifts, but the geek girl's tastes are different. The average woman likes flowers, but the geek girl is not average, and would probably rather not be bothered with something so transient. A Star Trek mousepad would last much longer. Thinking of getting her a necklace? Why not a new sound card instead?" --Guy's Guide to Geek GirlsLisa Michaud)

Via Slashdot.

"All the scenester dudes are either dating a series of interchangeable high-school riot grrrls in baby doll dresses and an overdose of manic panic, or permanently shacked up with some bitter old lady who pays all the bills. Which will it be, a wifely prison or a humiliating one night stand? Into this void of potential mates comes a man you may not have considered before, a man of substance, quietude and stability, a cerebral creature with a culture all his own. In short, a geek." --Girl's Guide to Geek GuysMikki Halpin and Victoria Maat)

Via Slashdot.

"Your task is to write the first line of an imaginary novel. Your goal is to make it hilariously bad.... Maximum sentence length: 25 words." (Deadline: 14 April 2003) --Jennifer Stood There, Quietly OvulatingAdam Cadre)

Adam Cadre, who started the Lyttle Lytton contest as a reaction against what he sees as the increasingly lengthy and unfunny entries in the more famous Bulwer-Lytton contest, is also the author of several top-notch works of interactive fiction, including the touching "Photopia" and the single-gimmick "9:05".

"Cool-2B-Real is about real girls like you! Whether you're in school, playing sports or just having fun, strive to be the best you can be! Real girls are 'keepin' it real' by building strong bodies and strong minds... and they're feeling great about themselves!"

Brought to real girls everywhere by the award-winning experts in girl culture, the Cattlemen's Beef Board and the National Cattlemen's Beef Association. (I am not making this up.)

P.S. Eat beef, little girls... eat beef!

--Cool 2B Real Home PageAmerica's Beef Producers)

Concerned parents of beef-swilling girls everywhere will be happy to hear that the site is brought to us by kidscom.com. But if you go to kidscom.com, all you will get is the following message, with no links: "Come on kids, join the fun! KidsCom has plenty of games, message boards, kids chat, video game cheats, contests and prizes. This is a site for kids! KidsCom is a safe kid site, focusing on fun and Internet safety. Check back for new games, kids chat, prizes and tons of fun!"

"I want to invent a word which describes the experience of following all those links on the sidebar of someone's blog. Yeah, I know blogrolling exists. But that's just for making the links. When I visit DFWblogs or Grumpy Girl , I get hooked on all these fascinating blog names (ethnic lounge, not so girlie, bathtub gin, sqeeshee) and want to check out every site. Blurging? Blurfing? Nameadexing? Linkalogging? Gimmee a second to think of something...though I do like the toyish sound of Linkalogging." Jrice --What Do Ya Call ItKairosNews)

"Game importers and Internet cafés remain vulnerable. Police are cracking down on players of Counter-Strike, Age of Empires, and digital backgammon and chess. More than 50 people have been arrested and face up to three months in prison and 5,000-euro fines." --More Fallout Over Greek Game BanWired)

"By the time school opened, I was thrilled to start molding the brains of my children. My optimism and naiveté evaporated within hours.... Raynard had told [his mother] that I had violently shoved him in the chest out the door of my classroom, injuring his head and back. His mother had dialed 911 and summoned the cops and the fire department. Two months later, Raynard?s mother filed a $20 million lawsuit against the school district, Ms. Savoy, and myself?and the D.C. police charged me with a misdemeanor count of simple assault against my former student. Thus ended my first and last year as a public school teacher." Joshnua Kaplowitz --How I Joined Teach for America and Got Sued for $20 MillionCity Journal)

This story just made me sick.

"We are a powerful race, but we are not a violent one. The wars you wage on your planet are an outdated notion to us, as we prefer more intellectual pursuits. We also enjoy jogging, hiking, basketball, and golf, so we will accept nothing but the best in athletic footwear from Adidas, Reebok, and Converse. The citizens of our planet are in need of all manner of sport shoes, from cross trainers to hiking boots.|Bring them now, humans!" --People of Earth: We Come in Search of Quality Name-Brand Footware at Reasonable PricesThe Onion)

My freshman composition students are about to submit a paper in which an imaginary stranger from a completely different culture examines the items that they are wearing or carrying with them. My "Stranger Essay" assignment is in many ways the opposite of the Onion's footwear article.

"MMRPGs are pervasive virtual environments populated by human-controlled digital people from around the globe. | Players develop characters, work towards goals, solve puzzles and engage in social fluttery. They're the visual marriage of text-based adventures and chat rooms, and women are flocking." Alex Krotoski --Online Role-Playing Fits the BillGuardian)

Interesting... while Slashdot just posted a thread savaging The Sims Online, the article above praises it (but it apparently hasn't been released in the UK yet).

"[T]the bulk of the nineteen page document was copied from three different articles - one written by a graduate student." --Britain's Official Dossier on Saddam Plagiarized?Channel4.com)

"That people are gravitating from the television to the Internet, especially for information, is, of course, extremely good news--at least for us. But while they are coming more, they are believing less: Last year the UCLA survey indicated that 58% of Internet users believed that most of what they read online was 'reliable and accurate.'" Dan Ackman

--For 53% Reliable Information, Click Here Forbes)

Unlike many journalists summarizing (and dumbing down) academic articles, Ackman offers an unusually close examination of the original academic study. I like it when news summaries of academic articles acknowledge when the journalists are moving beyond the gaurded conclusions offered by the academics, and into the kind of headline material that attracts readers (and undergraduates doing research online).

"The social structure of the Network Age is already evident, and we can potentially anticipate a great deal about the next few decades of our lives by examining the essence of the network, both in its literal and figurative manifestations. But understanding the order of the coming age of distributed culture requires us first to examine our most recent eras, Modernism and Postmodernism, because it is within this longer context that the next age begins to make sense." --Postmodernism is Dead: Now What? Distributed Culture and the Rise of the Network AgeIntelligent Agent)

See also "Cybertext Killed the Hypertext Star", Nick Montfort's insightful review of Aarseth's Cybertext. Thanks for the link, Mike.

"[R]esearchers had seen a precipitous drop in the use of books and an equally steep rise in the use of Web sites. Books composed 30 percent of cited sources in 1996, compared with 16 percent in 1999, with continued declines in the following year. Web sites, meanwhile, grew from about 8 percent of cited sources in 1996 to more than 20 percent in 1999. Most of those Web citations, around 40 percent, came from commercial sites." Scott Carlson previews a forthcoming article by Cornell librarian Phillip M. Davis --Web-Loving Students Can Be Prodded to Cite Peer-Reviewed Works in Term Papers, Study SuggestsChronicle)

The headline seems to contrast web resources with peer-reviewed sources, ignoring the fact that researching online does not automatically exclude peer-reviewed sources. Students who cite library databases often access those databases via a webpage interface, so they are both using the web and finding good sources. (The full article does not seem to be readily linkable.)

"Some see it as part of the same cultural continuum of reality TV programming. Others see a broader trend in which digital technologies are allowing everyone to participate more directly in media experiences. Under this scenario, an era of decentralized media is fast approaching in which the idea of "consumers" of mass-market media will become obsolete, because people will be making, not consuming, culture." Leslie Walker discusses the mainstreaming of blogs. --New Kids on the BlogWashPost)

"The BWCA is a pristine wilderness and a canoeist's paradise in north-eastern Minnesota. It has over 1,500 miles of canoe routes and more than 1,000 lakes and streams. It has been largely unaltered by human hands since the 1930's, and is today an official wilderness. You can plan a canoe route to "get away from it all" and never see another group for most of your trip, or you can take an easier trip and simply enjoy being away from civilization. Maybe even go fishing. Whatever you do, you will see beautiful wilderness, breathe in clean fresh air, and enjoy some of the cleanest water in the world." Will Gayther --Boundary Waters Canoe Area (Minnesota, USA) (BWCA info)

"The kicker for economists is that these virtual economic relationships have broken into the real U.S. economy. When players found EverQuest's bartering rules inadequate, they started exchanging the armor, spells, and other Norrathian objects of value at real-world auction sites. These transactions are conducted not in Norrathian PP but in U.S. dollars and then completed between avatars inside the game. (You pay in dollars at a real-world site, then the seller's avatar gives your avatar the goods in Norrath.) You can even buy another player's avatar, complete with its accumulated skills and assets. Sony tried to stop all these transactions and persuaded eBay and Yahoo! Auctions to bar them on the grounds that they involve Sony's intellectual property. But this kind of protectionism is hard to enforce whether the goods are real or virtual: Trade in Norrathian goods and services simply migrated to other sites." Robert Shapiro --Fantasy EconomicsSlate)

"Students expect, from their high school experience, to be told exactly what is required to receive a particular grade. They expect to be given 'study guides' before exams that lead them by the hand through the material that is likely to appear on the exam. And they expect tests and courses to be graded by 'rubrics' that assign a fixed number of points for the completion of each item assigned. Woe to the poor professor who sets exam questions that might require a smidgen of original thought or insight on the part of the student. He or she is likely to hear about that in spades when it's time to fill out those teaching evaluation forms." Mark H. Shapiro --The Lake Wobegon Effect - All Our High School Graduates are "Above Average". Irascible Professor)

"There: that red coal burning on the horizon. We?re going. And we?re not sending smart toys on our behalf - we?re sending human beings, and one of them will put his boot on the sand and bring the number of worlds we?ve visited to three. And when he plants the flag he will use flesh and sinew and blood and bone to drive it into the ground." James Lileks --Lileks on Space Exploration: Mars and BeyondLileks (The Bleat))

What looks like an unrelated introduction about a kid's mylar balloon actually fits perfectly with the essay's main theme.

"The grieving are calling out to Jesus--and God and HaShem and Krishna. They are chanting passages from the New Testament, the Torah, Unitarian readings, and the Vedas.| The crew of Columbia represents an extraordinary variety of faith traditions:

• Kalpana Chawla - Hindu
• William McCool - Roman Catholic
• Ilan Ramon - Jewish
• Rick Husband - Charismatic
• Laurel Clark - Unitarian
• David Brown - Episcopalian
• Michael Anderson - Baptist

"This is just the way America is right now. Seek the best and the brightest, and you'll invariably scoop up a great assortment of faiths."

--Seven Heroes, Seven FaithsBeliefNet)

I wish I had the time to delve into this excellent compilation of brief bios, commentaries on the funeral/memorial services associated with each faith, and links to off-site resources on the religious traditions of each astronaut.

"Hello from above our magnificent planet Earth.|The perspective is truly awe-inspiring. This is a terrific mission and we are very busy doing science round the clock.|Just getting a moment to type e-mail is precious so this will be short, and distributed to many who I know and love.|I have seen some incredible sights: lightning spreading over the Pacific, the Aurora Australis lighting up the entire visible horizon with the cityglow of Australia below, the crescent moon setting over the limb of the Earth, the vast plains of Africa and the dunes on Cape Horn, rivers breaking through tall mountain passes..." Laurel Clark, astronaut. Sent from Columbia, the day before she and the other six astronauts were killed. --Astronaut's Touching MailBBC)

"As students, they were members of free-speech movements; now that they've earned tenure, they have become advocates of speech codes. Radicals when they were on the bottom, they've become censors when they're on top. And they see no discrepancy in their actions." Daphne Patai --The Great Tattling Scare on CampusesChronicle)

I recently had a very interesting conversation about the use of offensive racial language in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Since Samuel Clemens wanted to depict a society that included racists, it makes sense that his story includes characters who use racist language to make racist statements. It's too simplistic to say that everyone, therefore, who uses that same racist language should automatically be "the bad guy," since literature is full of protagoinists who sin in all kinds of ways, yet who can still teach us something about humanity. That means we have to be open to the possibility that a character who uses racist language might be "good". This is thin ice upon which to tread, but if we can't tread this ice in college, what's the point of teaching morals and ethics to students?

"But however it may be in the art gallery, in moral issues we often cannot agree to differ. Agreeing to differ with Genghis is in effect agreeing to tolerate fox-hunting, and my whole stance was against that. Moral issues are frequently ones where we want to coordinate, and where we are finding what to forbid and what to allow. Naturally, the burden falls on those who want to forbid: in liberal societies, freedom is the default. But this cannot be a carte blanche for any kind of behaviour, however sickening or distressful or damaging. It is just not true that anything goes. So conversation has to go on about what to allow and what to forbid." Simon Blackburn --Relatively SpeakingButterflies and Wheels)

I built a bloated icebox made to store
my ripe ingredients. Its shelves are crammed
with shrunken tentacles, and scalps are jammed
beside the vats of larva, pulp, and gore.
The handle's slick. It's hard to shut the door
against the swelling mold. It must be slammed.
This foul refrigerator of the damned
will always stretch to hold a little more.

The fearful call this fridge a gate to Hell,
the brave can't wait to stick their heads inside,
my neighbors can't endure the rancid smell
and wonder what the sticky magnets hide.
But now it's time to bid you, friends, farewell,
and save the nutrients your skins provide.
Jacie Ragan

--The HoardGorelets: Refrigerator of the Damned)

"The Refrigerator of the Dammed" lets you play with virtual tiles (refrigerator magnets) on a horror theme. Part of Gorelets.

"Horror is the genre of the jolt, the shock, the spark. The horror story's conflict is always a matter of life and death, but death -- even to an undead creature -- always comes as a surprise. The climax of a horror tale is almost unilaterally a killing blow, catching someone or something unaware. Death almost always comes too soon -- that's why we fear it. Life is always too short. Never long enough." Michael Arnzen --Knife Wounds: Horror and MinimalismGorelets)

"[I]ndividuals randomly assigned to write about emotional topics evidence improved physical health compared with those who write about superficial topics.... [F]lexibility in the use of common words -- particularly personal pronouns -- when writing about traumatic memories was related to positive health outcomes." R. Sherlock Campbell and James W. Pennebaker --The Secret Life of Pronouns: Flexibility in Writing Style and Physical Health.pdf; Psychological Science)

In other words, people who varied their personal pronouns -- sometimes writing about "I, my" and sometimes writing about "you, your," were demonstrably healthier than those who did not vary their point of view when writing. Thanks, pahiel, for pointing me to this small WashPost item.

"The year is around 1952, the dead of winter in Chicago. I'm 18 years old, bucking the fierce winds off Lake Michigan and the below-zero temperature as I head across the parking lot to attend classes at the University of Illinois at Navy Pier. I wait freezing while a Cadillac approaches, a yellow convertible with the top down. The driver is immense with a lion's mane of hair blowing in the wind. He wears no coat, jacket, or sweater. Just a loud Hawaiian print, short sleeve shirt. His massive forearms almost obscure the steering wheel. I immediately recognize Yukon Eric. He is out for a spin along Chicago's Outer Drive. His car passes. Somehow it does not seem as cold as before." George Jerz

Memory of Wrestler E-Mail)

My father tried sending the above reminiscence to a Yukon Eric memorial page, but the e-mail got bounced back. I'm happy to publish it here instead.

"It baffles me that so many people would believe that the page is true, enough to be on TV 13, TV 18, I-94, and the Carp. I thought that in college we are supposed to learn to question what we see and read, and this page have proved to me that we don't." Benjamin Williams About the "Olsen Twins Attending UWEC" Hoax E-Mail)

I hardly watch the local TV news -- just the last few minutes before my four-year-old's favorite show, "Wheel of Fortune," comes on. But if the local TV news reporters fell for this hoax, as Benjamin says they did, I wouldn't be surprised at all.