Humanities: August 2003 Archive Page

Hadar, whose age wasn't available, and DeCrow, 49, went into Hubbards Cave in Glenwood Canyon on the afternoon of Aug. 24 with flashlights but no food or water, said DeCrow's daughter, Ramiah DeCrow. | Their flashlight batteries died and the pair couldn't find their way out, the daughter said. --Cave-Exploring Couple Nearly Eaten by Grues (Wired (AP))

A grue, of course, is the unseen beast that will kill you if you are unlucky enough to be in a dark place when your lamp goes out in the classic text adventure Zork.

I watched my mom -- a woman with three Master's degrees, in library science, comparative literature, and management and public policy; a woman who was fluent in French and German and did her Stanford undergraduate senior thesis on Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger -- lose her mind over the course of two years. She was 58.... [S]he had noticed her spelling getting worse because MS Word's spell-checker was catching more errors in her writing. --Mike Edwards --I Dreamed about Mama Last Night (Vitia)

While MS-Word is here presented the bearer of bad tidings, read the whole blog entry to learn how Amazon.com helps give the story some closure. Very touching.

The special efforts made by schools to steer more girls into advanced math and science classes came after powerful advocacy groups embraced the problem. But Gurian and other advocates for boys say they run into resistance from educators who point to males' success in the workforce as proof that advocacy for boys is unnecessary. | In spite of the lack of research, anecdotal evidence shows that far more effective strategies are available for teaching boys than plying them with Ritalin. -- USA Today --Girls get extra school help while boys get Ritalin (USA Today Op/Ed)

And the opposing view from Jacqueline E. Woods:

The message to women and girls is clear: You are taking more than your fair share. You are too successful. You have come too far, and boys are paying the price for your accomplishments."

Sorry -- that's not the message I get when I read the coverage on the education of boys. The message I get is that the healthy behavior of normal boys (on average more rambunctious and physical, and far less verbal than the girls in their class) has been pathologized.

Topics of interest to most boys (sports, adventure stories, comic books, computer games) are sometimes seen as too competitive, too aggressive, etc. While boys from an early age outperform girls in areas like spatial relationships, which may account for why mathematics and engineering continues to be a male-dominated field, see: BusinessWeek, Christina Hoff Summers, CBS News.

With great anticipation, I contacted the project manager -- let's call him A.H. -- who would copy-edit my manuscript and, I genuinely hoped, find ways to improve it. I had no idea things could go so wrong.

as he kept the schedule.

...

For the book to be published on schedule, I would have needed to return the corrected pages no later than October 14. Clearly, we would not make that deadline.

round of copy-editing.)

--Rescuing My Manuscript (Chronicle)

To err is human... I'm amused that the online version of this article on the copy-editor from hell has been textually mangled. The fragments in the quote above are reproduced just as they appear on the website.

"I moved away bravely because I did not want to be blown up." --Peter Jerz, age 5, playing "Star Wars: X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter."

Howard Dantzler stood among a sea of people on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., 40 years ago today. | He was 29 years old then. He had been in the service. He had earned a master's degree. | But he was not free. --King speech still rings true for retired professor (Tribune-Review)

A man looks back 40 years at the day Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous "I have a dream" speech (which has been, by the way, the object of a rather protracted copyright dispute).

Like most new college students, Carabella will spend the week before the start of classes doing routine tasks that we take for granted: opening a bank account, receiving new checks, using a credit card, and shopping at a grocery store that has a "club card". She will learn how such simple activities can have major consequences for her privacy. --Carabella Goes to College (Privacy Activism)

In this game, you're a young woman during her first week of college campus life. What choices will you make, and how will they affect your privacy?

Part of me wants to compare this to grade-school pageants in honor of tooth decay prevention... but maybe this is a good way to teach this particular subject. And a good primary document to use in a study on gaming as propaganda.

I've half-remembered a science fiction game that I read in some anthology... some government agents were charged with protecting Earth from the culturally dangerous messages that might be in imported toys. The story starts off with the governmnet dudes playing a board game like Monopoly, but they are really more concerned with a game that has little robot soldiers scurrying around a play fortress of some sort. Gradually, the soldiers start disappearing, and it turns out that they insert themselves into the fortress for some reason. Anyway, the whole soldier/fortress thing turns out to be a distraction -- the offworld cartel that has produced the toys is only importing the soldier toy as a smoke screen for the strategy board game. Had the government agents read the rules to that board game, they would have learned that the game rewarded players who made bad business choices (that would, the story suggests, leave Earth open to financial take-over from the outside). I'm pretty sure I read the story during the late 80s, when Japanese technology was displacing the U.S. auto industry.

[W]ith the Mona Lisa, the Madonna was among only a handful of paintings known to be authentic Leonardo works. | The thieves arrived just before 11am. They were flamboyantly dressed, polite and personable until the moment one of them presented a knife to a woman tour guide who had led them to the Madonna. -- Jim Mcbeth
--Stolen [Leonardo Da Vinci] masterpiece rivals the Mona Lisa  (Scotsman)

Here are a couple of intersting quotes:

A getaway car, its engine idling in the expansive castle car park, moved slowly away...

Uh, if the car is idling, doesn't that usually mean the car is not moving? I suppose the engine could technically have been idling while the vehicle was in neutral and coasting downhill.

"The latest assessment indicates that criminals are likely to be responsible for most cultural property theft," said a spokesman.

As opposed to innocent people being responsible for the thefts?

At around 11 o'clock that morning Lewis departed from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with a a party of eleven men. They arrived shortly after at Bruno's Island which was a mere 3 miles from Pittsburgh. Once ashore Lewis demonstrated his airgun to the men, while citizens watched. However, one citizen accidentally caused the gun to discharge, sending the bullet through a woman's hat where it brimmed across her temple. The woman was assumed dead immediately, only to be revived moments later. Afterwards they proceeded to McKees Rock, where the water had fallen so low that they were forced to raise the boat for 30 yards. --Lewis & Clark Expedition Left Pittsburgh 31 Aug 2003 (LewisAndClark1803.com)

Since Lewis didn't meet up with Clark until later (in their famous but unsuccessful search for a water passage through what is now the northwestern United States), most historians don't start their account of the expedition with Lewis's departure from Pittsburgh.

Link goes to a summary of the diary kept during the expedition. The photo of the model is from a different site, lewis-clark.org.

Usually, the bears would come to greet him within a day or two of his arrival, sniffing his scent in the air, nuzzling his footprints and then making contact.|This year, there was nothing. But there were fierce snowstorms and he thought they might be keeping the bears away. He travelled far and wide, looking for any sign of the bears he knew. --Alanna Mitchell --Bear Slaughter Ends Wilderness Research (Globe and Mail)

The original title of this article was "Brutal tragedy ends storied tale," which I think is pretty lame. At least the Globe and Mail didn't go for any "grisly grizzly" wordplay.

"[E]excuse me, I just got my sight back last week after being totally blind for 43 years. Could you help me figure out what I am seeing?" -- Mike May --Mike's Journal (Sendero Group)

A fascinating excerpt:

I found it very distracting to look at people’s faces when I was having a conversation. I can see their lips moving, eye lashes flickering, head nodding and hands gesturing. First, I tried looking down and if it was a woman, a low cut top would be even more distracting. It was easiest to close my eyes or tune out the visual input. This was necessary often in order to pay attention to what they were saying. I am sure there will come a time when all this visual communication will mean more to me but for now it is just distracting.

May's description of the visual component of music (via a marching band), his musings on a game of catch, and his new reaction to the previously meaningless pleasantry "Nice to see you" are all quite interesting. Another fascinating passage:

When I noticed dark patches behind me, it didn’t register right away that these were my footprints. I never thought of footprints as images other than when reading about them in an old west novel. To me, they were the thump; pivot push and the texture of the sand on my foot not dark splotches following me around like a shadow.

The reflections on the site are organized the old-fashioned way -- chronologically, not reverse-chron like a weblog. I'm so used to coming into online stories in media res that I felt a bit... insulted? by the clinical introduction that tells me what I'm about to read. It's not a criticism of the site (though it is too long to read online in one sitting -- I jumped to the end after I was about a quarter through); rather, it's an observation about my own perception of the world (or at least, of online texts).

'What Some Might Call Evil'

This morning I was listening to the local National Public Radio station on the way in to work, and heard a feature filed by a reporter who is travelling with the Pittsburgh Symphony in Salzberg, Germany. The reporter interviewed a member of the orchestra -- possibly a violist, though I wasn't paying close enough attention at the time -- about his visit to Adolph Hitler's summer house, which was mostly bombed by the Allied forces during World War II, but the remnants of which are open to tourists.

What made me sit up and take notice was the musician's over-careful characterization of the former inhabitants. He referred first to all the "important figures" who had been there, and then, almost as an after-thought, he said that "some might call them figures of evil" who brought "what some might call evil" to the world.

Excuse me? He's talking about the leadership of the Nazi party and their allies. If you're writing a history book, it makes sense not to demonize the side that lost; it makes sense to present, factually and dispassionately, the military objectives of each side, their strengths and weaknesses, their successes and failures, how their propaganda portrayed themselves and their opponents, etc.

But if you're a tourist gushing over the gorgeous fireplace that Hitler and Mussolini huddled around, and marveling at the engineering feat of drilling an elevator shaft through the core of a mountain, well, I think being this kind to the memory of fascist dictators is a sign of rhetorical tone-deafness.

How two 1940s conservative Australian poets tried to mock modernism by submitting the works of fake poet Ern Malley to the Angry Penguins literary magazine. When the truth emerged, the magazine's editor was pilloried -- and the fake poet became a star. --Ern Malley: The Poet Who Never Lived but Who Lives On... (ErnMaley.com)

Here's a sample, from "Night Piece"

Among the water-lilies
A splash — white foam in the dark!
And you lay sobbing then
Upon my trembling intuitive arm.

Via Jill "txt" Walker, whose uncle was one of the perpetrators of the hoax -- that is, if Jill is to be believed :) .

We reached our intellectual adulthood with daily close-ups of the inequality in a nation that was founded on the commitment to equality for all. So we are inclined to side with the powerless rather than the powerful. If that is what makes us liberals so be it, just as long as in reporting the news we adhere to the first ideals of good journalism -- that news reports must be fair, accurate and unbiased. That clearly doesn't apply when one deserts the front page for the editorial page and the columns to which opinion should be isolated. -- Walter Kronkite --Siding with the powerless: Ideas from 60 years in journalism  (Salt Lake Tribune)

Witty, ironizing Rorty,
Fought he metaphysics grey.
Joshing gently with the haughty,
He commended Dewey's way;

Dewey who - he too the sort he
(Rorty) wrought a giant from -
Redescribed the true, for taught he
Pragmatism with aplomb.
--Roaming in Thought [after reading Rorty] (Normblog)

A selection from a larger poem (by an undisclosed author) about U.Va. philosopher Richard Rorty, whose moral relativism/pragmatism I have blogged about occasionally. Via Crooked Timber.

I am cutting the whole thing into paragraphs, using my very sharp scissors. I will read a paragraph at the time. I will read it disjointed and jumbled, and see what I can do about the argument before me, without linking it to the devastating argument over or under on the page. Doing this I am asserting my power over the criticism, which, right now, does feel like an attack. -- Torill Mortensen --Panic Attack (thinking with my fingers)

Torill is preparing for her dissertation defense, which involves responding in a very public venue to criticism written by three experts in her field.

I daresay that in the months since she completed her dissertation, Torill has been doing more blogging than grappling with the specific issues that formed her 400-page dissertation. So she is going to chop up her committee's comments into blog-size chunks, defamiliarizing the old-media scholarly essay, forcing it into the realm of the trackback, the ironic quip, and the fisk -- a realm where Torill feels she comfortable.

But you've already spent years preparing for this defense, Torill -- you can draw on that, along with your mastery of connection-building weblogging, to pull through. Good luck!

A New Zealander who sent millions of junk emails out every day has shut his business after his personal details were posted on the web. --Spammer ducks for cover as details published on web  (New Zealand Herald)

Spammer Shane Atkinson was outed by the Juha Saarinem of the NZ Herald. But like Pez candies lined up inside their plastic dispenser, new spammers are probably stepping forward even now. B*stards.

Usability is a quality attribute that assesses how easy user interfaces are to use. -- Jakob Nielsen --Usability 101: The What, Why and How of User-Centered Design (Alert Box)

Huh? Quality attribute? Maybe that's an important and useful technical term in information design, but I wouldn't put it in a 101 course. How about (the admittedly simplistic) "Usability is the measure of how easy things are to use."

Nielsen appears to be re-trenching; the internal links in his document point to meaty sites on the NNGroup (a research team that sells reports) -- he seems to be calling attention to work done by his associates. Jakob is possibly hoping that more people will use this "101" page as an entry point to usability studies, rather than some of his older classic works (the ones that contributed to his near-cult status).

Humboldt traveled to the cave where hundreds of the Atures were buried, weighed down his mules with some of their skeletons, then headed to a nearby village. There, the local people showed the foreigner a talking parrot that no one understood: It was the last living thing to speak the language of the Atures, the people whose bones Humboldt had collected. -- John McMurtrie reviews Spoken Here by Mark Abley --Dying cultures have the last word: A journalist documents the alarming loss of languages around the world (SF Gate)

Via SciTechDaily, which introduces the article with an "English is a killer language" meme that the author of the book in question apparently discredits.

A Picture is Worth...

Two photos... one is the mugshot of a monster who e-mailed detailed and graphic threats against his high school. The other is a snapshot of every mama's dream child whose short story was discovered on a school computer and tragically misunderstood.

"Save Brian" is a slick and impressive website designed to counter the local media's representation of Brian Derrick Robinson. (Via Wired: "Write a Story, Go to Jail.")

Am I blogging this in order to atone for the small role I played in popularizing the story of the Star Wars Kid, another chubby guy whose private creative activity was discovered by "friends" who then publicized it?

The increasing rate of litigation means that there is a far higher chance that doctors will be asked in court to explain the exact meaning of NFN (Normal for Norfolk), FLK (Funny looking kid) or GROLIES (Guardian Reader Of Low Intelligence in Ethnic Skirt). --Doctor Slang is a Dying Art (BBC)

Here's an amusing couplet, taken from one of the many medical slang lists that seem to derive from* cover the same subject as Fox's work:

• DRT - Dead Right There (patient dead at scene of accident)
• DRTTTT - Dead Right There, There, There and There (patient dead and in multiple parts at scene of accident)

* Update, 28 Aug: A reader who prefers to keep a low profile rightly questions my assumption that the other online lists derive from Fox's work. Indeed, it's plausible that Fox and the others all drew from the same sources (including ER in the US and Casualty in the UK).

"The Berenstain Bears taught me about not being greedy. I used to have the 'galloping greedy gimmies,' but not anymore." ... Delighted by the positive influence of [The Berenstain Bears] Get The Gimmies, Johnson's parents purchased their daughter 14 more books from the series. --Precocious 6-Year-Old Claims Berenstain Bears Book Changed Her Life (The Onion)

Ouch... that one hit close to home

Inspired by an article in The New York Times Magazine, the Gender Genie uses an algorithm developed by Moshe Koppel, Bar-Ilan University in Israel, and Shlomo Argamon, Illinois Institute of Technology, to predict the gender of an author. Read more about the algorithm at nature.com. --The Gender Genie (Bookblog)

Textually speaking, are you male or female? Use the Genie to find out. Via KairosNews.

Some of the passages that I co-authored with a female student were flagged as female, and even some of the boxes that I added all by myself were tagged as female. Was I miraculously successful at emulating Jessica's writing style?

The site lets you provide feedback on whether the Genie is right or wrong. Right now, the Genie is just barely over 50% accurate. As it is now, you paste in your text, push a button, read the results, and then either push the "go back button", erase your old text and paste in new text; or, you tell the Genie whether it was right or wrong, view a popup with the results, close the popup, push "go back," erase the old text, and paste in new text.

When I give feedback to the Genie, I am committing myself to some extra (boring and unnecessary) steps. When the Genie is right, I am not particularly motivated to tell it so; when the Genie is wrong, I am more motivated to tell it. Thus, it may be the case that the feedback form is attracting more negative than positive responses.

I suggest that on the screen that displays the results, there be two buttons: one pink and one blue; the user clicks "The writer was female" or "The writer was male", and then is taken immediately to a screen that not only shows the current accuracy ratings, but also has a blank form.

As the hobbyhorse of a few crackpots, Holocaust Denial seems harmless. But retum to CODOR on the web and you may reach a different conclusion. The benign image of Brad Smith (who includes a Christmas letter each year in his newsletter) asks only that we come to the topic with open minds, and with just the slightest willingness to doubt the "official" story. And how many of us lack that small willingness to suspect that "official" versions may serve some dark interest? How many Americans have believed in Communist conspiracies (and with some justification) or in governmental coverups (with even more justification)? For someone unfamiliar with the historical literature and the primary documents on the Holocaust (and let's face it, that is most of us), the notion of the Holocaust as an "official" version may have some credibility. As the deniers quibble over some tiny piece of evidence, they may appear to know what they are talking about. -- John Spurlock --Holocaust Deniers Invade World Wide Web (National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education)

You might be surprised to learn that the outskirts of the solar system are loaded with Plutinos, Centaurs, cubewanos and EKOs. Astronomers didn't even know this a decade ago. In fact until 1992 they hadn't even invented three of the terms. | Now it seems they don't have enough of these crazy names. -- Robert Roy Britt --Crazy Names: The Solar System's Nomenclature Wars (Yahoo/Space)

Cyberslackers, egosurfing, data smog? All three terms have entered the English language, according to the compilers of the Oxford Dictionary of English, who have added 3,000 more words to the 350,000 words and phrases in modern usage. --Charles Arthur --Internet terms make entry in dictionary (The Independent)

Contemporary English still contains a host of idioms that date from the mechanical era. We "spin our wheels" or "stay on track." We might "hammer" an opponnent in a debate, or complain that "the pieces don't fit". Even some computer terms owe their origins to the mechanical age -- the "line" in "online" and "offline" referred originally to the assembly line.

Blair Hornstine, whose court battle to be her high school's sole valedictorian ended up throwing her life in turmoil, settled her differences with the Moorestown School District yesterday to the tune of $60,000 - all but $15,000 to pay her lawyers. -- Toni Callas and Joseph A. Gambardello --Valedictorian settles suit against district (Philadelphia Inquirer)

I've previously blogged about Hornstine's case.

The bomber was a father of two. A man who has children who walks down the aisle of the bus, looking at the children whose small short cheerful lives he is about to destroy, contenting himself with the knowledge that they are mere Jews - such a man has abdicated his humanity. The fact that he died in an instant and 100+ victims survived to live with the pain for the rest of your days makes you wonder which side God is on. Or it makes you certain there'sa hell. Or it just makes you not want to think about these things at all. -- James Lileks --As a Species, We're Doomed... (Bleat)

How might science engender democracy? I'd like to suggest two mechanisms: first, by changing the way people think; second, by altering the interaction among those who make up the community. The more scientifically literate people become, the more they will expect, even demand to participate in the political process, and the more effective they will be at it. Such social evolution may be slow, nonlinear and chaotic, and periodically may even reverse course, but it is probably also inexorable, as the recent history of the former Soviet Union and other Communist countries in Europe shows. -- Robert Lawrence Kuhn --Science as Democratizer (American Scientist)

Aligned against science: "individual alienation, religious fundamentalism, extreme environmentalism, and even elements of postmodern scholarship". While doctors and inventors are often romanticized, the myth of the "mad scientist" permeates the humanities.

Please don't interpret the following comment as my attempt to brand Kuhn a mad scientist (he's clearly not)... but Kuhn' s earnest vision of the heroic scientist stands in the way of social chaos -- is the germ of truth behind the "mad scientist" mythology.

To his great credit, Kuhn addresses this issue in the following passage: "When citizens can distinguish among proof, likelihood, opinion and hope—and get into the habit of so doing—democracy cannot long be kept from them."

Amen.

Update: 22 Aug. I should have used Frank J. Tipler as an example of a scientist whose rhetoric doesn't need much exaggeration to be seen shaking his fist and shouting, "Fools! I shall crush them all!"

While we might take the phrase "bright lights, big city" for granted, the fact is that for most of recorded history, nocturnal urban darkness was the norm, not the exception. --Jeet Heer --Cultural history of the night (National Post)

By the way... the oft-repeated story about "blackout babies" born nine months after a major power outage or blizzard is an urban legend.

Here's a gem from a 1970 study: "It is evidently pleasing to many people to fantasize that when people are trapped by some immobilizing event which deprives them of their usual activities, most will turn to copulation." (cited by Newsday)

This is Dan Rather's profile. Expanded to the nth degree. Taken to infinity. Overlayed on the back of Patrick Stewart's head. It's recombinant phrenology. The elements of phrenology recombined in ways that follow the rules of irrational logic, a rigorous methodology that follows nonrational rules. It is a structure for following your intuition and your obsessions. It is the hyperfocused scribblings of the mad and the gifted. -- David Byrne
--Learning to Love PowerPoint (Wired)

Byrne uses PowerPoint as his medium. His commentary on Dolly the genetically engineered sheep is also very good.

"Art and technology mean essentially the same thing,? says Montfort," explaining that, contrary to his interviewer's suggestion, poetry and computer science do go together. "Go back to the Latin ars and the Greek tekhne -- both refer to ways of doing things that aren't in nature already. In new media, the computer is being employed as a means for creating arts. So art and technology are not opposing threads. When you study a poem, do you consider sound or sense? Well, you consider both. It's not a question of there being one of those elements that's not important. It's the ways in which they work together." --Creative Computing: Where poetry and programming make a new art (Boston University Alumni Web)

Bari Walsh offers a nice write-up of Nick Montfort, a Ph.D. student whose scholarly and creative work I admire. I look forward to reading his Twisty Little Passages. Meanwhile, The Exhaustion of Libraries was a pleasant alphabetical treat.

I do wish the sharp-eyed designer who created BU alumni magazine's website didn't rely upon fixed-pitch type -- those letters are just too small for me to read.

Baby books have gotten way weird. Today's bookstore shelves spill over with tot-oriented "toybooks" shaped like cats, dogs, hens, horses, lions, elephants, insects and other things... --Linton Weeks --Touchable and Teachable, Toybooks are Big Business (Washington Post (registration; will expire))

Can't be a toy... can't be a book. Must be... a toybook! (Thanks for the suggestion, Rosemary.)

He was that rarity among physicists, one who could write in a clear, persuasive and entertaining way. His "Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems," in which three noblemen, Salviati, Sagredo and Simplicio, meet in Venice to argue over the relative merits of Ptolemy's ancient Earth-centered cosmos and the newer Sun-centered Copernicanism, may be the first great piece of popular science writing. | The book was also his downfall. It was Galileo the writer, not Galileo the scientist, who got himself into trouble. Like so many people who are good with words, he succumbed to the temptation of making his opponents seem not just wrong, but also stupid. -- George Johnson --Contrarian's Contrarian: Galileo's Science Polemics (NY Times)

Reviews of two new books on Galileo, both of which challenge a belief long held and promultaged by the Protestant academics who wrote the history books.

This is really nothing new... but it's good to see the idea getting coverage in the mainstream press.

I have stage-fright. Teaching starts today, you see. I have stage-fright far worse than when I present a paper in front of a few hundred people at a conference, even though I taught all last semester, and loved it, and the stuff I'm planning on doing today is based on a recipe I've used three or four times before with various groups of students. I'm convinced that only two students will turn up and this will prove the basic untenability of my future career in academia.

I'm all aglow. Teaching starts today, you see. I feel that same excitement that I feel at conferences, that thrill at meeting new thoughts and approaches to the world. I taught all last semester, and loved it, and the stuff I'm planning on doing today has worked well before and I love the texts we'll be talking about. Do you know, I've been astounded at how I enjoy teaching. I like research too, but teaching is for me a real reason to stay in academia.

-- Jill Walker --Stage Fright/Glow (jill/txt)

I don't start teaching for a week yet, but Jill's comments perfectly mirror my own.

With a bachelor's in chemistry, a Ph.D. in history (with a concentration in the history of science) and publications in hand, I applied for the job. The director never interviewed me. He hired a 22-year-old communications major but promised me work as a landscaper and all-purpose cipher as long as I wanted it. | He reinforced an important lesson I learned long ago: Class trumps everything else. I was not part of the middle class and never would be. -- Chris Cumo --Blue Collar Ph.D. (Chronicle)

Alas, the searches prove fairly elusive. But boynton found Sylvia Plath Engineering so intriguing and poetic a concept that she thought the only thing for it was a Googlepoem. Here are some edited couplets freshly compiled:

plath sylvia plath on engineering
engineering, accounting, working

Nonfiction Technical Romance Sports
the engineering part poets

own sketches the: Cognitive
by Sylvia Plath. - - "You leave

to express deep emotions toward
Lilacs Last in the Dooryard

engineering. A Marriage of True
and as scaffolds for tissue
--Sylvia Plath Engineering (boynton)

"Many had wondered beforehand if there would be any foul play involved in the rematch. But Pirates first baseman Randall Simon, who made national headlines on July 9 after hitting the Italian Sausage in the head with his bat during a race at Miller Park, promised Friday afternoon not to get involved with the race." --Smoked Sausage: Pierogies Prevail (Pirates)

Since I've just moved from Wisconsin to Pennsylvania, news of the perogie's victory over the sausages is particularly welcome.

"In solitude, he continued his mathematical and physical studies, but also embraced alchemy and esoteric biblical scholarship. He felt himself to be seeking ancient knowledge that had been lost or hidden in the dark centuries of the more recent past. Today's scientists tend to be embarrassed by Newton's religious and alchemical studies, but Newton was looking for deeper, unifying truths than the superficial speculations of the secular empiricists of London." Chet Raymo --And God said: 'Let there be Newton' (Globe and Mail)

--I Feel Faint (Weblogg-Ed)

Will Richardson finds a third NYT article on blogging, and a whole page in Technology and Learning magazine. Now we have more dead trees to hand to faculty members who shift uncomfortably and ask, "What is this 'weblog ' of which you speak?"

"I always wanted my work to be read by someone else, someone out there who would grade me seriously, a regular person," [10-year-old Raya Allen] said. "With a teacher, it's their job. When someone else is reading it, they are doing it on their own free will." --A Young Writers' Round Table, via the Web (NY Times)

Interesting article about the effort to incite enthusiasm for writing by letting kids read each other's work online. Via KairosNews, where EMason also suggested the NYT article "Can Johnny Blog," which offers a good overview of blogs in education.

A letter has been sent to a woman who died three years ago ordering her to tidy up her own memorial plaque. Leeds City Council mistakenly gave Moira Thoms 14 days to remove two vases, each containing a single white rose, from around the plaque at Lawnswood Cemetery where her ashes are scattered. --Dead Woman Told to Tidy Grave (BBC)

Is this part of some twisted government project designed to identify those who can manipulate objects after death?

"What we need is a C-SPAN for science: a cable science network (CSN). This network would carry live lectures by knowledgeable scientists on topics ranging from climate change to biological warfare, as well as debates on issues from the biological basis of aggression to missile defense." Terrence J. Sejnowski --Tap into Science 24-7 (Science)

"Too many ?studies? and ?reports,? with tables of data in small print appended, have purported to reveal truths about welfare or policing or sex education but in fact have revealed nothing but the initial prejudices of the ?investigators.? For me, the epiphany came when I interviewed the nation'sleading climatologists for a magazine article on acid rain (about which I knew nothing) and discovered mostly ideology, not knowledge?among scientists. When I also learned some years ago that academic paleontologists at that time couldn't hope to get tenure if they questioned the theory that a giant meteor explosion had caused the extinction of the dinosaurs?thus providing a model of what a so-called nuclear winter would produce?my own skepticism took on a certain wryness." Myron Magnet --What Use Is Literature? (City Journal)

Most of the article simply praises literature, "the accumulated wisdom of the race, the sum of our reflections on our own existence. It begins with observation, with reporting, rendering the facts of our inner and outer reality with acuity sharpened by imagination." But I was drawn to the above swipe at science, which is supposedly above the ideological baggage that burdens humanities scholarhip.

--Bikini Model Photos, Before and After Retouching (Greg's Digital Portfolio)

Yes, this is a link to an attractive woman wearing a bikini -- but it shows the unretouched, "before" pictures, too. A great set of photos for a gender studies class: marketers make big bucks forcing women to compare themselves to models whose bodies don't exist.

The bags under her eyes are gone... smoother skin... a tighter, smaller navel... bigger you-know-whats.

I can easily see how fake the "after" photo is when I compare it with the "before" -- but then I look away and look back, and the fake seems real.

"I have concluded that AOL's brand would benefit from being removed from the corporate name..." AOL executive Jon Miller --AOL Time Warner (Internal Memos)

Yup, just like it's good for the diseased limb if you cut if off from the rest of the body.

This is an amusing attempt at corporate spin. He even tries to beat the critics to the punch: "there is no question this will provide the media yet another opportunity to write negatively about the merger of AOL and Time Warner." You can't blame the guy for trying.

"Yes, the game business is increasingly reliant on movie licenses and sequels. It is less willing to take big risks, particularly in themes or audiences. But that risk aversion reflects an industry that largely is making fewer, bigger titles with absorbing, often branching narratives, well-written dialogue and much larger budgets -- as much as $10 million or more -- for audiences of growing maturity and sophistication.|Combine that with the increasing technological proficiency of the current set of gaming consoles and more capable PCs, and what players are getting are games that technically and artistically are starting to realize the true power of an industry Holy Grail -- the interactive movie." Suneel Ratan --Games Close In on Citizen Kane  (Wired)

I think it's sadly limiting to discuss computer games in terms of how well they emulate cinema. We have to pull our terminology from somewhere, of course.

This preoccupation with holding on to pre-college relationships would often get in the way of students forming new relationships in college. Female students seemed to fear that new friendships formed in college would lack the depth and intimacy of those friendships that took root in their growing-up years. --'Friendsickness' affects freshman female college students (EurekAlert)

As an aside, note how much of the above press release made it into the following Local 6 news report, which is marked "Copyright 2003 by Local6.com". No reference to the fact that the quotes mentioned in the story were taken from the press release. That's what's known in the trade as "rip and read" -- take the press release into the studio and read great chunks of it verbatim.