Humanities: October 2003 Archive Page

This Vampire Killing Kit complete with a wooden stake and 10 silver bullets sold for $12,000 as part of Sotheby's sale of 19th century furniture and decorative works of art in New York, Thursday, Oct. 30, 2003. The kit, a walnut box that also contained a crucifix, a pistol, a rosary and vessels for garlic powder and various serums, was bought by an anonymous phone bidder. (AP Photo/Sotheby's)
--19thC Vampire-killing Kit (Yahoo/AP)

That doesn't look like a crucifix to me -- it should have a representation of Christ "fixed" to the cross. That's just a metal cross.

Once adopted, the credit hour became a driving force in higher education. | It presented students with a specific time frame in which they were expected to complete course work, usually one semester.... But Wellman and Ehrlich, a senior scholar with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, argue in their book that using time to measure 21st century learning is ineffective. --Steve Geigerich --Academics Make Case to End Credit Hour (AP/Newsday)

--Canstruction

Model of Independence Hall, birthplace of the American Revolution. Made out of cans. Thanks for the suggestion, Rosemary.

I know this is probably a very uncool and politically incorrect thing to say these days, but I am going to brave it anyway. | I have wondered why, with all the briliant people writing in the different group blogs, am I not toally enchanted with them? --Torill --No Personal Touch (Thinking with My Fingers)

The dynamics of group blogs are certainly complex. A colleague of mine. John Spurlock, recently noted that within the past week, the New Media Journalism @ Seton Hill group blog has been dominated by my own postings, with few if any contributions or comments from students (though this may be becuase the students recently turned in their blogging portfolios, and know they have several weeks before they are due again). WebWord, which is mostly the domain of John Rhodes but does feature a few other regular posters, has been down all this month, and John has stated that it's simply not a priority for him to finish it.

Because I am trying to participate as actively as I can on about 30 student blogs this term, I find I really have to pick and choose which posts to get involved in in GrandTextAuto or KairosNews... and last week for the first time Slashdot gave me some moderator points that I felt too virtuous to waste. While I used to blog only for myself, now part of my blogging is "work," and that has changed how I spend my blogging time. I've been conscious that I'm blogging much more than I really "want" to.

The butterfly effect has, until now, been cited only as an illustration, but Professor Jim Spanners of the Pennsylvania Institute for Making Stuff Up takes it seriously, and believes that butterflies are directly responsible for most of the world's major problems. --Butterfly (The University of the Bleeding Obvious)

--Sounds of History

From Abbot and Costello to Malcolm X -- historical audio recordings.

"Diamond retailers contend a little bling is just the thing to declare your independence this fall,'' wrote Houston Chronicle reporter Liz Embry a few weeks ago. Her story was illustrated with a photo of Ms. Sarah Jess flashing the hottest new trend in the jewelry industry: the right-hand ring. | The rings have recently been spotted on the famous right hands of Madonna and Beyonce Knowles. A national advertising campaign popped up in the September issues of Vogue, Vanity Fair and People, declaring, ``Your left hand rocks the cradle. Your right hand rules the world.'' --Celebrate Singlehood with the Gift of a Right-Hand-Ring (Tampa Tribune)

I first heard of the right-hand-ring from a post on memepool. An illuminating 1982 article from the Atlantic ("Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond") exposed the techniques the diamond industry (really a single family-owned dynasty) used to create the "tradition" of the obscenely expensive diamond engagement ring, and ways that Hollywood stars were used to associate diamonds with eternal romance. (I wonder how much "Sex and the City" was paid to put a "right hand ring" into its storyline...)

That strategy also discouraged people from selling used diamonds (since, of course, "a diamond is forever"). Since diamonds don't wear out, and since every year more diamonds are mined and put on the market, the diamond industry has to keep demand for their product high, or else supply will outpace demand and the price of rocks will drop.

In the wake of a lot of new coverage about how singlehood seems to be outpacing marriages in American life, we see the diamond industry creating a new tradition -- women purchasing diamonds for themselves, as a sign of independence. Obviously the diamond industry would prefer that women purchase a singlehood ring for themselves first and then add an engagement ring at a later date. I do find it interesting to think that they will be able to associate the same rock with two very different concepts, just by changing its location on the body. It really exposes just how artificial the "traditional" meaning of diamonds was.

And by the way, yes, I did buy a diamond engagement ring when I dropped to my knee and proposed... I made sure it was more expensive than the last computer I had bought, but at the time I had a decent job and lived like a student (in the days before student culture demanded portable phones and cable TV), so I had few real expenses.

Update: This will cheer up my wife: "Motherhood not only makes females smarter, it makes them calmer under pressure and more courageous, a U.S. researcher said on Tuesday." Of course, the test was on rats, but the researcher tells the reporter the findings probably apply to humans, too.

Once again, Halloween season is upon us, and with it, the wonderful anticipation of dressing up and trick-or-treating for delicious Brach's candy. With that in mind, it's important to remember all the ways that you can make your Halloween safer and more fun. It won't put a damper on anyone's holiday spirits to wear high-visibility costumes when going from house to house, to have kids trick-or-treat with an adult, and to inspect all candy for tampering. Perhaps most importantly, keep in mind that eating just a single kernel of candy corn manufactured by a company other than Brach's Confections will give you a deadly case of full-blown AIDS. --"Patrick Carlin CEO, Brach's Confections" --Generic Candy Corn will Give You AIDS (Onion)

Another great example of The Onion's mastery of social satire.

Edgar Allan Poe's most popular poem, "The Raven," tells the story of a man who gets a late-night visit from a mysterious bird that speaks only one word: "Nevermore." | Sounds like a pretty simple story, right? | Guess again! --Knowing Poe [Annotated Version of 'The Raven']Maryland Public Television)

Once upon a Tuesday weary, while I pondered, bleak and bleary,
Over many a quaint and curious entry of unblogged lore--
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my office door.
"'Tis some advisee," I muttered, "tapping at my office door--
Only this and nothing more."

...Quoth my keyboard, "Blog some more!"

Why do so many graduate programs teach students to hate what made so many of us want to become teachers and scholars when we were undergraduates: reading literature -- old and new, from every culture -- as if it was more than symptomatic of deplorable cultural pathologies? --Thomas H. Benton --College and the Fall (Chronicle)

I can't exactly say I'm basking in the self-satisfied glow this professor projects -- especially now that midterm grades are out and students are worrying about their GPAs. On the other hand, I don't think I ever was really angry in graduate school -- or, if I was, I was angry at the fashionably alienated graduate students who surrounded me.

Workers remodeling a 19th-century rehearsal hall at the Peabody Institute have found 10 dusty jugs of moonshine in an unlocked closet, where they apparently sat for nearly 60 years. Faded labels on the bottles suggest that the hooch was the handiwork of Gustav Strube, the first conductor of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. --Heather Dewar --Maestro's moonshine found (Sunspot)

Thanks for the... *hic!* suggestion, Rosemary.

A high school freshman expelled for writing a fictional account of a student who falls asleep in class and dreams of killing a teacher can return to school Monday while officials reconsider the disciplinary action.... "It was a story about a girl who falls asleep in class, dreams she kills her math teacher, then wakes up and nothing happens," she said. --Girl expelled for writing story about killing teacher (CNN)

One of my classmates saw my wedding ring and asked if I was married. I said, yes, and she asked, "Happily?" Another student sneered, "Wow, married ... how retro-hetero-normative." Others snickered in approval. And so the seven-year assault on my values began. To avoid harassment, I learned to conceal who I was: my faith, my working-class origins, most of my core beliefs. I had to smile and nod in support of "tolerant" people who openly hated the world that produced me -- and who were abetted by the "profession" in doing so. --"Thomas H. Benton" --Leaving the Big City for Small-Town College Life (Chronicle)

"Retro-hetero-normative." That's a good one.

As a graduate student at the University of Toronto, I found things were much easier for me when I concealed my American identity. When spelling out my last name, I learned to say "Jay Eee Are Zed," which seemed to associate me with the Queen's English and upperclass culture (which translates as more or less religiously anti-American). One student, pondering why a particular Canadian author would use a particularly offensive racial epithet, noticed that this author had lived in a city near an American military base, and concluded that this author must have picked up the term from American servicemen. That was quite amusing -- and when I chose that moment to identify myself as American, I think at least some of the people in the room were embarassed by their casual anti-American bigotry.

All in all, I think I benefitted from studying American literature in an essentially anti-American culture. One student from Germany all but called me a racist when I told him that, based on the speech patterns of the characters in a particular story, I could tell which characters were white and which were black. The fact that one mother called her son "n----- boy" was a pretty strong clue, if you ask me.

Link found on The Couch, which also has an amusing comment on the lightning which recently struck the actor playing Jesus in Mel Gibson's much-talked-about religous movie.

--'The other phone's a little...' (No Media Kings)

Jim Munroe is a new media generalist -- a writer, interactive fiction designer, and video filmmaker. I enjoyed his video ">interactive," and was Googling just now for something or other, and came across this short film, with a very dry, understated punchline that made me laugh out loud. (I'm not sure what the title of the phone vid is, so I just quoted part of a line.)

And where are all the people who were screaming about the Plame leak? --Glenn Reynolds --Glenn Reynolds on Rumsfeld Memo and Plame Affair (Instapundit)

A good collection of links exploring the media spin on the Rumsfeld memo. Reynolds argues that the leaked document, in which Reynolds critiques the Bush administration's handling of the Iraq war, could have been presented (by the media) as a positive sign that Rumsefeld is sensibly and thoughtfully examining the weaknesses of the military operation. Instead, the press is presenting the memo as a sign of division within Bush's ranks.

She singled out a campaign by Disney - "Remember the magic" - which, she claimed, was used to invoke real or imaginary childhood memories in consumers. | She reported an experiment in which people were shown an advert suggesting that children who visited Disneyland had the opportunity to shake hands with Bugs Bunny. Later, many of those who had seen the advert "remembered" meeting Bugs on childhood visits to the theme park, a feat that would have been impossible, given that the cartoon is a Warner Brothers character. Loftus said: "This brings forth ethical considerations. Is it OK for marketers to knowingly manipulate consumers' pasts?" --David Benady --Selling You a New Past (Independent)

It's poor chemistry between writer and reader (pontificator and pontificatee, in the academic version), like lack of sizzle between jaded full professor and enthusiastic asst. prof. It's failure of Interrogator A to make the noises and gestures that work for Hegemonized Reader B. It may be Defamiliarizer A's clumsy attempt to shake up the ideological/emotional/instrumental reflexes of Overly Essentialized Reader B. It may be sheer incompetence at nouns, verbs, and adjectives. --Carlin Romano --Was It as Bad for You as It Was for Me? (Chronicle)

Another fine suggestion from Jim.

Superintendent Wilfredo T. Laboy finally passed the Communication and Literacy Skills Test, reportedly with flying colors. --Lawrence schools boss passes language skills test  (Boston Herald)

It's only fair to follow up with the good news, since I've already blogged the bad.

..the most evocative and atmospheric experiences were conveyed entirely through text. Text adventures, with their terse locations, thrived on the role of objects, which were there to be discovered, smashed, used, examined and combined: you find the lamp, but now you need the oil to fill it and the match to light it. Only then will the dark room become illuminated. --In the early days of computer gaming... (Things Magazine)

I really enjoy this author's writing style. The paragraphs are a bit long as far as Internet conventions go, but numerous inline links break up the paragraphs, so that the author can cover a wide range of territory in just a few condensed sentences.

Update, 25 Oct: Torill picks up on this blog entry and offers far more thoughtful comments than I did.

A professor agrees to review a manuscript that is under consideration for publication at a journal. He has promised to keep the paper and its contents absolutely confidential. When he reads it, however, he realizes that his student's experiments will never work; the paper shows that they are futile. Does he keep mum, or does he break the confidentiality rule and tell his student what he just learned? --Ethics 101: A Course About the Pitfalls (NYT (Registration; link will expire))

Another good suggestion from Jim.

The author of one of the books I blogged wrote me an interesting reply, but sent it via e-mail. Can I place her comment in my blog comments without violating some written or unwritten code? --John SpurlockBlogging E-Mailed CommentsE-Mail)

If I were to send a letter to the editor to a newspaper, I shouldn't be surprised if it were published -- that's what a "letter to the editor" is for. If I were to send an e-mail to a website that features published e-mails, I shouldn't be surprised if that e-mail were published -- that's how the site gets its content in the first place.

John's situation is more complex. As I understand it, he has written a traditional print review of a book, but posted a longer version of that review on his blog ("The Blue Monkey Review"). The author could have commented directly on John's blog (indeed, another author has done exactly that). Instead, the author chose to send an e-mail.

I think the context is very important here.

I presume that the audience for my own blog is net savvy enough to know one shouldn't e-mail anything that one wouldn't want to become public. (Though how often we all follow that guidline is open to question.)

Since John is asking the question about an e-mail sent to him by a book author (that is, someone who makes a living by writing), and since the academic subject of their correspondence is presumably not cyberculture or online writing conventions, I'd say I wouldn't think twice about mentioning the e-mail, paraphrasing it in order to write a response, or even quoting a sections for the purpose of defending/explaining/rebutting/continuing the intelletual discourse in another blog entry. It's possible the author simply wasn't familiar with the convention of posting comments in a weblog. Since the author didn't actually type it there, I'd do what I did here -- create a separate blog entry to introduce the e-mail, and link back to the original discussion. Still, before I'd post the whole thing, I'd ask the author's permission. And I'd start blogging my rebuttal while awaiting the reply. If the author doesn't reply after a few days and a telephone follow-up (if possible), I'd paraphrase the e-mail and/or quote selective, and post my response anyway (after briefly explaining my attempts to contact the author).

(And by the way, I did ask John's permission to post his inquriy and blog my response.)

Convincing medical school faculties that a professional actor can teach empathy to doctors might sound like a losing battle. However, the directors of many residency programs are starting to acknowledge that they need help in this area. New national requirements, recently set by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME), list interpersonal and communication skills as one of six areas of core competency in which programs must educate physicians as part of their training. --Susan Okie --An Act of Empathy (WashPost (registration, will expire))

Good article focusing on the actress who created the role of Vivian Bearing, the English professor dying of cancer in Margaret Edson's moving play Wit.

On the surface, it is hard to tell that the story labeled "Study: Fellatio may significantly decrease the risk of breast cancer in women," isn't real. The original Web version has the CNN.com banner along the top of the page, the stock CNN medical graphic along the right side of the article and credits N.C. State University with the study. --Michelle DeCamp --Student fools international newspapers with spoof story (Technician Online)

I recall seeing the "fellatio reduces breast cancer" story on blog lists, but figured it was a (rather stupid) adolescent joke, and didn't know it was a CNN spoof until now. Although the above article (from a student newspaper) claims that legitimate news organizations were fooled by this story, that claim is weakly researched -- the reporter is relying only on the word of the author of the hoax article, and does not offer independent confirmation of his claims about newspapers in Croatia and Chile. This story about a hoax is itself something of a non-story.

On a similar note, Forbes is running 'Is Sex Necessary?,' an article that begins by introducing "one of the most credible studies correlating overall health with sexual frequency" but immediately follows it with a bulleted list of items taken from "Other studies (some rigorous, some less so)." Buried in the article is the observation that some of the connection are associative, rather than causal. For instance, people who are sick in the hospital probably don't have much opportunity to meet sexual partners; thus, healthy people will tend to have more sex than sick people. Older people whose life-long partners have died will probably have less sex than younger people whose parters are still around; and those older people are also probably likely to have more health problems than the younger ones. Did the more frequent sex cause the health in the younger people? Of course not. (A good scientific study would, of course, account for age differenes, and would try to compare two groups that are as similar as possible.)

You have now entered the Stephen Kings' home page... a place for the many of us whose daily lives are defined by who we are not. --Oh the Horror! Being Stephen King

From Mike Arnzen's Goreletter.

[A]ttractive professors consistently outscore their less comely colleagues by a significant margin on student evaluations of teaching. --Gabriela Montell --Do Good Looks Equal Good Evaluations? (Chronicle)

Thanks for the suggestion, Jim. I mentioned about this article couple days ago in a comment I added to a post about ' bad genes,' but it's worth repeating as a separate entry.

Over the next few weeks I will be reading Right to Exist: A Moral Defense of Israel'sWars by Yaacov Lozowick. This book was published last year in Israel and this year, by Doubleday, in the U.S. My plan is to provide not exactly a review of the book but a reflection on it as I read. | But before I begin, I have to say a few things about myself. Like any historian, like any good scholar, I strive to recognize my own prejudices and preconceptions, my own point of view (p.o.v.). This book, dealing with the Zionist movement and the struggle for survival of the state of Israel, draws on my own long connection, in imagination at least, with Israel and Judaism, and it also makes me confront my ideas and ideals about the world I live in. --John Spurlock --Right to Exist (Review) (Blue Monkey Review)

John is chair of the Humanities Division here at Seton Hill University.

[W]hen the results of his DNA test came back, he found himself staggered by the idea that though he still qualified as a person of color, it was not the color he was raised to think he was, one with a distinct culture and definitive place in the American struggle for social equality that he'd taken for granted. Here was the unexpected and rather unwelcome truth: Joseph was 57 percent Indo-European, 39 percent Native American, 4 percent East Asian -- and zero percent African. After a lifetime of assuming blackness, he was now being told that he lacked even a single drop of black blood to qualify. --Erin Aubry Kaplan --Black Like I Thought I Was (Alternet)

At a panel on DNA and ethics the other day I mentioned the concept of "passing," which features so strongly in the racial consciousness in the American south. This fascinating article gives the same set of cultural questions a contemporary scientific twist.

Feeling Cheated by Rule Changes in Final Level of 'Neverwinter Nights'Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Grrr. I've spent several hours trying to get past the final stage of Neverwinter Nights. On every level of the game besides what I presume to be the final level, the game features a way to teleport from wherever you are fighting, back to a central area where you can rest, buy new supplies, and rearrange your equipment in safety. Then you can teleport right back into the thick of the battle.

I don't mind a difficult battle, since an easy game is no fun. But on the final level, the teleportation stone doesn't work. Likewise, on every other level, you can rest to restore your hit points and spells -- but not on the final level. The designers made no attempt to provide an in-game explanation for the change in the game rules.

It wouldn't have been hard at all to provide that in-game explanation. The game had already established that the chief villain is a lizard queen who can speak to people, and eventually possess them, through their dreams. So, if, when I tried to sleep on the final level, a cut scene played in which the lizard queen comes and possesses me, then I'd blame the queen, not the game designers. And if some event within the game disabled the stone, I would easily accept it if the game made me feel like I sacrificed that ability for a higher good. For example, if I traded the stone for a key that would get me into the final battle.

I have been a good citizen of this virtual world -- I've painstakingly learned the rules, willingly suspended my disbelief. Again, I don't expect the final battle to be easy, but I don't expect the difficulty of that final battle to arise from a change in the rules at this late stage in the game. Yes, the designers are in charge of their world and ought to be able to do whatever they want. And yes, I suppose I could go online and look for cheat codes and hacks, but that wouldn't help my desire to suspend my disbelief and enter into a story.

I personally like a fast-moving endgame that wraps up a lot of plot threads, showing you the consequences of your earlier actions. But Neverwinter Nights is a monster-bashing role-playing game -- the story is grafted onto the basic "move around, kill things and find stuff" scenario. Of course, it's a very good monster-bashing role-playing game -- but since its strength was the RPG part, the final change in gameplay pretty much kills my desire to finish.

Knowing that the story is pretty much over at this point means I know I won't be rewarded with more context as the battle continues to rage. Oh, well. Having a family and a demanding job (I always bring work home with me, whether it is grading, reading, or planning for next term) means that my game-playing time is limited. I got my money's worth out of this game, but bleah -- I feel that after investing so much time to learn the intricacies of this game world and its interface, I shouldn't be expected to finish the game in a completely different environment.

Now that I think about it, there are a few doors that I passed on the way to the lizard queen's lair, and someone gave me an artifact that I haven't yet figured out how to use (I think I have to advance another level yet). But quite frankly the change in rules, without even the slightest attempt to use the storyline to explain the change, has really sapped my interest in seeing this story to its resolution.

1.) The weblog comes out of the gift economy, whereas most (not all) of today’s journalism comes out of the market economy.

4.) In the weblog world every reader is actually a writer, and you write not so much for “the reader” but for other writers. So every reader is a writer, yes, but every writer is also a reader of other weblog writers—or better be.

--Jay Rosen --Ten Things Radical about the Weblog Form in Journalism (PressThink)

The "gift economy" thing is something I often find myself explaining to my old-media colleagues. While I do wonder, sometimes, why I spend so much time blogging, the truth is, I enjoy it immensely.

Still, here I am, giving away my thoughts "for free," instead of carefully hoarding them and compressing them into a conference paper that I intend to read out loud to an audience of ten or twenty people, at a cost to my university of up to $1000 (for conference fees, airfare, hotel), and a cost to my family of two or three days of my absence.

I'm grading student blogging portfolios. The students were asked to include about four of their best blog entries, and samples of comments that they made on other students' weblogs. Some students reported feeling disappointed that their best blog entries didn't generate a lot of comments from readers. They can "gift" each other by posting comments on each others blogs, of course. But since it's probably fair to say that even the most enthusiastic bloggers are blogging more than they really want to (since I do give "forced blogging" topics), their experience as student bloggers doesn't really mesh too well with the gift economy.

From 1860 to 1940, Earth's surface warmed about 0.4ºC. Then Earth's surface cooled about 0.1ºC in the first four decades after 1940 and warmed about 0.3ºC in the next two. For those two most recent decades, temperature measurements of the atmosphere have also been available, and, while these measurements are subject to significant uncertainty, they indicate that the atmosphere's temperature has remained essentially unchanged. Thus, the actual temperature record does not support the claims widely found in environmental literature and the media that Earth has been steadily warming over the past century. --Jack M. Hollander --Rushing to Judgment [The Media and Global Warming] (Wilson Quarterly)

A thoughtful assessment of the gap between what science can prove and what environmentalists and journalists say (and therefore what most people believe) about the Earth's climate. Thoughtful... but dry. That opening paragraph is over 200 words long -- a modest size for an academic paper, but hard to slog through on a computer screen.

But of particular interest to me is the debate carried out in the comments appended to the article. One reader posts a full-length opposing paper into his comment; I guess that's one way to be published... but answering one block of text with another block of text is not terribly efficient. Fisking (copying great chunks from another soure and adding your own contrarian comments in between the lines) would be a more efficient way to challenge premises, critique evidence, and offer alternative conclusions.

Update: "Warmest September on Record, Experts Say." This AP story presents the facts, but downplays the global warming scenario, only making a brief reference in the final paragraph. Kudos to AP writer Randolph E. Schmid, who doesn't conjure up a scary disaster scenario in order to make his story more interesting. Those who doubt the global warming scenario don't deny that certain measurements of temperatures are rising, but they do question the hasty assumption that the rising temperature is the result of human activity.

Increased security on airlines has been a significant issue since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. In those attacks, 19 terrorists are believed to have snuck box cutters onto four commerical airplanes. --Feds Searching All Commercial Airplanes (FOX News)

I'm telling myself that I'm not blogging this because in a few days my family will fly home from visiting grandparents in Texas. I'm telling myself that I'm blogging this story because of the use of the non-standard "snuck" as the past tense inflection of "sneak" (instead of the more common "sneaked"). That's what I'm telling myself.

Update: I was also amused by this paragraph from the story:

U.S. officials told Fox News that the note said that while the TSA was doing a "great" job, security was still not "tight" enough. The word "great" was underlined.

Here's a hint if you ever want to be quoted by a journalist -- it's fine to use bold to emphasize key words on your own web pages, for the convenience of the reader. But if the meaning of your writing depends upon playing with fonts, it's harder to quote your words (and easier to quote them out of context).

What does one do when the book is wrong? Should the book's authority outweigh the professor's? In the mind of the student, the book is usually the "law" of the class, in many ways, and the teacher the lawyer. Obviously, I can't hold the student accountable for missing a question when the book mislead her -- and I did later give her full credit for her answer -- but now I see another way in which grading is revision... not of the test, but of the textbook! --Mike Arnzen --When the Book is Wrong (PEDABLOGUE)

Would today's tykes tolerate the classic games you grew up with? Kids do say the darndest things... --Kids Play (EGM)

The premise: force a bunch of tweens to play the games my generation grew up with. Just how badly do yesterday's games suck... and how badly to today's kids suck while playing them?

The article is annoyingly laid out without a table of contents, so you have to click blindly through chaining "next" links... so...

• Pong
• Donkey Kong, Football, Tetris
• Super Mario Bros, E.T., Space Invaders

Found on MetaFilter.

In the generic new remake of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," five kids -- two girls, three boys -- hop into a '70s-era van and head to Dallas for a Lynyrd Skynyrd show. On the way, they stop to pick up a traumatized stranger, who promptly shoots herself in the head. With time still to make the show, the kids try to find a telephone so they can alert the authorities, only to wind up running (although jogging is what it looks like) for their lives from a houseful of maniac hillbillies. As the eviscerations ensue, the truth becomes undeniable: This is easily the most gruesome, most pointless, episode of "Scooby Doo" ever. --Wesley Morris --This new 'Chainsaw' doesn't cut it (Boston Globe)

To be a Christian doesn't mean to be cuddly. This is not a cuddly pope, either. What he says and writes -- though always elegantly -- has been irking millions. He, who was instrumental in toppling socialism, is an inveterate preacher of justice and peace, and a critic of the modern "Me First" variety of capitalism -- but his admonitions are not rooted in Marxism-Leninism; they are based in the Gospel. Thus he is only doing his job as supreme pontiff. --Uwe Siemon-Netto --Commentary: Everybody's pope UPI)

In this essay, a Lutheran celebrates the 25th anniversary of John Paul II's papacy.

Is there such a thing as 'bad genes'?

(The fifth of five questions I may be asked tomorrow as part of a panel on DNA and ethics.)

If there are bad genes, then there must also be good genes. It is perhaps unfair to bring up Nazi Germany's aryan supremacy theories every time such a question comes up, but if we want to talk about good and bad genes, we have to talk about who decides which genes are good and which are bad. In the 1947 Arthur Miller play "All My Sons," a character who lost a son in WWII ponders idly that a doctor who invented a way to bring baby boys into the world without trigger fingers would be a millionaire; parents who did not want their sons to be drafted to fight in wars could rest assured that their boys wouldn't be physically capable of firing a rifle.

James Watson, of the famous duo Watson and Crick credited with the discovery of DNA (though let's not forget Barbara McClintock, upon whose early work Watson and Crick built), recently gave a BBC interview in which he says people who score in the lower 10% of achievement tests probably have a gentic disease, and that he feels it is society's duty to screen for stupidity. He downplays the impact of poverty (an environmental concern). He also advocates breeding women to be prettier.

Watson says that low intelligence is an inherited disorder and that molecular biologists have a duty to devise gene therapies or screening tests to tackle stupidity.

"If you are really stupid, I would call that a disease," says Watson, now president of the Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory, New York. "The lower 10 per cent who really have difficulty, even in elementary school, what's the cause of it? A lot of people would like to say, 'Well, poverty, things like that.' It probably isn't. So I'd like to get rid of that, to help the lower 10 per cent."

Watson, no stranger to controversy, also suggests that genes influencing beauty could also be engineered. "People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great."

(From "Stupidity should be cured, says DNA discoverer.")

I didn't see the interview in question so I can't comment on the context -- maybe Watson was joking when he talked about scientifically breeding women to look pretty. But the dark side of that is, who decides? Because Watson is talking about "helping" that lower 10%, I presume he means coming up with some way to fix their genetic problem, rather than, for instance, sterilizing all people who fail a certain test, or using abortion or contraception to "breed a race of thoroughbreds" -- which was at one point the slogan of Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood).

Side note: Sanger is on record as stating that the woman, not the state, should make decisions about childbearing, but and many of her contemporaries did support programs that encouraged the sterilization of illiterates, the "feebleminded", etc. A 1927 Supreme Court case upheld the forced sterilization of certain classes of people, so her eugenic beliefs were not that far from the mainstream at the time. Naturally, pro-life activists want to play up Sanger's involvement in the eugenics movement, and pro-choice activists want to distance themselves from Sanger's more controversial statements.

Jurassic Park was a cautionary tale about genetic manipulation. Could that actually happen? Why or why not?

(The fourth of five questions I may be asked tomorrow as part of a panel on DNA and ethics.)

I've only seen the first two movies, so I can't really comment on the technical details as presented in the books (where I imagine they are presented in more detail). I hope I don't get asked this question. But a few minutes with Google yields the following:

• According to the BBC, a grove of plants that are survivors from the Jurassic age was found in Australia about 10 years ago, and cuttings from those plants will be marketed to gardners in 2005. But those plants weren't re-constructed -- they simply happened to survive all that time.
• Dolly the sheep was in fact cloned from a parent, but she started off as a living cell. And she was recently put to sleep because she aged prematurely -- suggesting that science has to progress a lot further to make a successful cloning even with live tissue.
• IN 2002, Japanese scientists announced a plan to clone a mammoth from frozen tissue samples. Somebody thinks this is possible, or they wouldn't be trying it. But the mammoth sample is about 25,000 years old. Success with a 25,000 year-old mammoth wouldn't necessarily indicate progress towards cloning an animal extinct for 65-million-years.
• I gather that fossilization is a lot more destructive than freezing. I don't know much about the digestion of prehistoric mosquitos, but I don't imagine that being in the stomach of an insect would be the best environment to preserve a blood sample.

Will the human genome diminish humanity by taking the mystery out of life?

(The third of five questions I may be asked tomorrow as part of a panel on DNA and ethics.)

We've had the human genome all along; its been here all along, just like gravity existed before Newton. What's new is the Human Genome Project -- is a vast scientific effort to identify and catalogue all 3 billion DNA subunits that describe our genetic blueprint. Techniques for creating "designer babies," if legal, will be available only for the rich and the elite.

The ancients who were curious about the stars and the planets but couldn't comprehend them resorted to their imagination, telling each other stories about gods. Science has more recently turned those heavenly bodies into planets and solar systems, but we still managed to tell each other science-fiction stories about aliens and computers and robots. Now that computers and robots are part of our daily lives, and now that immigration and global communication has brought us into increasigly close contact with "alien" cultures in other parts of the world, our science-fiction has in recent decates been filled with stories of cyberspace and robot-human hybrids. Because I wear glasses and have a filled tooth, I am in some sense part machine; I am a cyborg. In very recent years, we've seen a rise in fantasy/mythology -- a return to magic and a retreat from technology. Are we going full circle? Probably not.

My point is that we are soo good at imagining that I don't think we will run out of unexplainable things that bother us. Case in point -- the rise in conspiracy theories, or reports of crop circles, alien abductions, tabloid sightings of Elvis and JFK, auctions of Beatles memorabilia, people who collect PEZ or structure their whole life around Disney theme parks.

The worst-case scenarious that have long been part of the science-fiction scene will increasingly penetrate to philosophers, who will write densely footnoted tomes, and somebody will write an incomprehensible postmodern epic interpreting the genome, which will be the subject of countless academic conferences and English Lit dissertations. But for the rest of us, making babies the old fashioned way will still be fun, and the information gained from the sequencing project will probably help more of those babies lead long and healthy lives.

What are the potential injustices or misuses of DNA information?

(The second of five questions I may be asked tomorrow as part of a panel on DNA and ethics.)

According to the Human Genome Project's website on genetic legislation, no laws have yet been passed regarding the use of genetic information in healthcare, employment, and so forth.

Already, insurance companies collect all sorts of statistical data about life expectancy and risky lifestyles. A smoker who gets a lot of speeding tickets and is a member of a skydiving club is a bad insurance risk -- but all of those risks are rootted in chosen behavior. Is it ethical for an insurance company to charge higher rates to a person whose genes might indicate an increased risk for, say, heart disease, or sickle-cell anemia? As it happens, heart disease and sickle-cell anemia are both conditions that affect people of African descent at a higher rate than other populations -- so if you permit companies to set different rates based on genetic information, that opens up a can of worms. Who determines which genes are desireable, and which are not? (My answer to this one spills over into my answer for "Are there such a thing as 'bad genes'?")

Is our fate in our genes or in our stars?

(The first of five questions I may be asked as part of a panel on DNA and ethics.)

I'll take "in our stars" as a metaphor for something like "determined by the cosmos," rather than a literal reference to astrology.

I don't think the average person has any real understanding of what genes do or how they affect us; Richard Dawkins in "The Selfish Gene" notes that the function of a gene is to replicate itself, and goes so far as to say that our bodies are simply machines that our genes use to replicate ourselves. My genes don't really care whether I personally live or die -- they don't have a will of their own, of course, but they spread when they happen to inhabit machines whose behavior leads to the production of a lot of genes; this offers a genetic explanation of why I personally work hard to support my family, and why I wouldn't hesitate to hurl my body in front of an oncoming car if I thought that doing so would save my children, or to kill with my bare hands, if necessary, order to protect my children. Doing so wouldn't be an act of free will on my part -- it would be instinctive.

Since genes are part of the cosmos (that is, they are part of the physical reality in which we live), a choice between "genes" and "stars" is a bit of a tautology.

I'd personally rather address the question that this prompt begs -- namely, what role does fate play in human lives? Christian theology positions God outside of time -- all our decisions and actions are known beforehand by God. But Christian theology also places a premium on the value of free will -- God's foreknowledge does not affect our free will; without free will, we deserve neither a reward or punishment for our actions. If God does know how our lives will turn out, it is because he knows in advance all the effects of each of our free-will choices will be. Even if all the actions in my life will take me to a single pre-determined end, every action that I take to get there is, from my perspective, free.

Genes certainly determine some important things... I was tall at an early age, and my build is such that I might have made a fair basketball player. My genes probably had very little to do with the fact that I preferred reading to athletics, had little patience for practicing free-throws, and basically never bothered to learn the rules of the game -- so while I have a physical frame that might have made me athletic, I didn't have the will.

There are enough studies that suggest that identical twins, when separated, differ from each other sufficiently that genetics alone do not account for all or even most of our personality and identity. I recall reading even that the spots that form on cloned animals are different from their parent; so even genetically identical individuals don't follow the same physical path.

Weather forecasting involves such complex mathematics that, for all practical purposes, it is impossible to gather enough data to usefully predict beyond a few days, what a given weather pattern will do. Over the years, however, we have gotten so much better at forecasting weather that where used to predict just a few days in advance, now we can predict a week or so in advance; and with more accurate satellite data and better computer models, we can remove much of the guesswork and increase the accuracy of our forecasts.

My guess is that as our technology develops, we will be able to isolate more and more genetic influences on our behavior, but unless some future totalitarian state (or maybe an HMO) starts using genetic information to control the environment of certain individuals, genes won't have nearly as much influence over our lives as the scary sci-fi scenarios suggest.

I have translated into rough Latin an extensive fragment of a much longer popular song. While providing a literal interlinear translation back into English for the benefit of Latin-less readers, I have, regrettably, made no attempt at rhyme or meter; alert readers will also notice that by avoiding translating the entire song, I have not only allowed myself more time for other work, but I have also neatly skipped several lines in the second half which are not easily susceptible to translation....

o consortes (quid est?) o consortes (quid est?)
(O colleagues [What is it?] O colleagues [What is it?])
habent amicae vestrae magnas clunes? (certe habent!)
(Do your girlfriends have large buttocks? [They certainly have!])
hortamini igitur ut eas quatiant (ut quatiant!)
(Encourage them therefore to shake them! [To shake them!])
ut quatiant! (ut quatiant!)
(To shake them! [To shake them!)
ut quatiant illas clunes sanas!
(To shake those healthy buttocks!)
--Quislibet (and "Mixaloti Equitis") --De clunibus magnis amandis oratio (Quislibet)

O, beloved high school teachers Fr. Clements and Sister Marie Lawrence, you who taught me the tongue of Caesar, forgive me, I beseech you, but this text has moved me to laughter.

Now soliciting proposals for projected philosophical anthology on any aspect of The Onion, America's leading satirical newspaper. Brief, informal proposals are welcome at this stage. Submit to Graham Harman at toolbeing@yahoo.com (deadline for initial proposals is October 31, 2003) --Philosophy and The Onion (APA)

ARRGH! I have way too much to do... way, way too much to do. Back away from the keyboard, Dennis! Stop!

Via Crooked Timber, which offers it under a title Mike Arnzen won't want to miss: "God is Undead."

Some 1,500 PEZ dispensers, all nestled in creative landscapes, fill the museum. | Disney PEZ sit in a 10-foot-high castle. Halloween-themed PEZ are displayed in a haunted house. And psychedelic PEZ are set beside a real Volkswagen Beetle that appears to be crashing through the wall. --PEZ museum pops up in Pennsylvania (CNN/AP)

Just as a shark must swim to breathe, a hard drive must be in motion to receive or return data. This air bearing technology, as it is called (pioneered at IBM in the 1950s), explains why dust and other contaminants must be kept out of the drive casing at all costs. If the heads touch the surface of the drive while it is in motion the result is what is known as a head crash: the head, which it must be remembered is moving at speeds upward of one hundred miles per hour, will plow a furrow across the platter, and data is almost impossible to recover. Thus, a key aspect of the hard drive'smateriality as an agent of digital inscription is quite literally created out of thin air. --Matthew G. Kirschenbaum --An Excerpt from Mechanisms: Grammatology of the Hard Drive (MGK)

Kirshenbaum is publishing excerpts from his forthcoming book, which examines the hard drive as an inscription machine. Here's part of a somewhat rambling comment I posted on his site:

I was at a zoo today and suddenly realized that the term "fledgling" has an orinthological origin -- it's not a metaphor to apply the term to birds. It's amazing that I've been using that word for decades and it never occurred to me. Thanks for similarly making me understand the term "hard drive crash".

A post on netwoman reads:

Dale Spender and Helen Fallon (1998) also assert that terminology such as 'abort', 'chaining', 'thrashing', 'execute', 'head crash', and 'kill' portray negative images of sex and violence to women, creating an uncomfortable and unfamiliar terrain. http://www.netwomen.ca/Blog/