Culture: April 2005 Archive Page

He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it -- namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do. And this would help him to understand why constructing artificial flowers or performing on a tread-mill is work, while rolling ten-pins or climbing Mont Blanc is only amusement. --Samuel Clemens --The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

I recently mentioned playing "The Obedience Game" instead of watching TV. Mike Arnzen asked for the rules.

The game itself isn't all that complex. It's like Simon Says, without the potentially confusing part about having to say "Simon Says" first.

So, a typical session of The Obedience Game involves commands such as "sing a song," "go stand against the wall," "recite a poem," "hug your sister," "jump up and down five times," and "say three nice things about Mommy."

I might occasionally slip in some tasks such as "Practice your recital piece" or "Put away three pink toys," and healthy routines and good behavior become part of an enjoyable communal activity, not a terrible chore. (Hence the quotation from Tom Sawyer).

What really makes it fun for the kids, however, is that they get a turn to order Daddy around, too. Carolyn, who turned three this month, particularly enjoys the sense of power.

Peter is also starting to experiment with practical requests, such as last night, when it was his turn, but he was tired of the game, so his command to me was "Play hide and seek."

The game developed when Peter was a toddler out on the playground. I learned that, if I periodically called him over for no reason other than to give him a hug and tell him he was good, he was far more likely to listen to me when I needed to redirect his behavior.

When we're waiting in line in the grocery store or at the DMV, invoking The Obedience Game is usually good for about ten or fifteen minutes. Sometimes Carolyn will request it herself. I try not gloat at the expressions of strangers who marvel at how much my kids enjoy taking orders.

On the other hand, when he's feeling particularly obstreperous (a word he's known since he was three), the boy has gotten pretty good at passive resistance, minimal compliance, and various forms of psychological warfare ("I wish Mommy were in charge today.") (And yes, he actually did use the subjunctive "were" instead of "was.")

Professor Ernesto wants to talk about plagiarism in student papers. Floor open.
Questions: Is there really a problem here? (Smythe)
Professor Ernesto: What?s the percentage of student work that?s suspect? Really, that high? Why don?t we just castrate their damn laptops? That?s obviously where it?s coming from.
Professor Dale notes that the act of appropriation may sometimes be an homage.
Professor Ernesto grabs Professor Dale?s briefcase and shakes out all the papers. Yells, ?This is an act of appropriation, not an homage!?
Professor Dale threatens to deconstruct Professor Ernesto.
The chair brings the meeting to order again. Directs task force of Professors Dale and Ernesto to look jointly into student plagiarism. --David Galef --Last Week?s English Department Meeting (Inside Higher Ed)

We've got an English faculty meeting tomorrow...

PR is not dishonest. Not quite. In fact, the reason the best PR firms are so effective is precisely that they aren't dishonest. They give reporters genuinely valuable information. A good PR firm won't bug reporters just because the client tells them to; they've worked hard to build their credibility with reporters, and they don't want to destroy it by feeding them mere propaganda.

If anyone is dishonest, it's the reporters. The main reason PR firms exist is that reporters are lazy. Or, to put it more nicely, overworked. Really they ought to be out there digging up stories for themselves. But it's so tempting to sit in their offices and let PR firms bring the stories to them. After all, they know good PR firms won't lie to them.

A good flatterer doesn't lie, but tells his victim selective truths (what a nice color your eyes are). Good PR firms use the same strategy: they give reporters stories that are true, but whose truth favors their clients.

[...]

We estimated, based on some fairly informal math, that there were about 5000 stores on the Web. We got one paper to print this number, which seemed neutral enough. But once this "fact" was out there in print, we could quote it to other publications, and claim that with 1000 users we had 20% of the online store market. --Paul Graham --The Submarine (PaulGraham.com)

In the early days of the telephone, the problem of speaking level was widely noted and discussed. The technological innovation was clever: a small amount of a person's voice was fed back to the earpiece, and people then naturally adjusted the loudness of their spoken voice to produce a comfortable level of feedback in the earpiece. Numerous studies in auditory psychophysics were performed to determine the correct amount of this feedback -- sidetone was the technical term. With the advent of the mobile telephone, sidetone has disappeared, and with it, the so-necessary feedback required to maintain voice level.

Why was sidetone eliminated from mobile phones? Two possible answers come to mind, and my suspicion is that both are correct. One is that modern telephonic engineers have no sense of history, and so they lack all the experience and knowledge that led to the early development of sidetone feedback. The second answer is that sidetone poses more difficult problems in the out-of-doors environment of the mobile phone, where wind noise on the microphone and relatively high-levels of ambient noise pose technical limitations on sidetone. --Don Norman --Minimizing the Annoyance of the Mobile Phone (JND.org)

I was recently lined up in the boarding tunnel at the airport. A woman behind me called up her local library to try to renew a book. She put her portable phone on speaker mode, and kept the librarian on the line while she rummaged through her carry-ons looking for the book.

It was the most annoying telephone experience I've had.

When the librarian finally said, "No, I can't renew your book," the feeling of satisfaction in the tunnel was palpable. I would have sworn I heard scattered applause.

In the interests of teaching kids not to be gluttons, CTW has transformed Cookie Monster into just another monster who happens to like cookies. His trademark song, "C is for Cookie" has been changed to "A Cookie Is a Sometimes Food." And this is a complete and total reversal of Cookie Monster's ontology, his telos, his raison d'etre, his essential Cookie-Monster-ness.

If the Cookie Monster is no longer a cookie monster, what is he? Why didn't they just name him "Phil: The Monster Who Sometimes Likes to Eat a Cookie"? --Jonah Goldberg --Let Cookie Monster be Cookie Monster (Townhall.com)

Tradition has it that William Shakespeare was born on 23rd April, three days prior to his baptism recorded at Holy Trinity Church in 1564. The 23rd April is also the date of his death in Stratford aged 52. Shakespeare�s birthday was first celebrated in 1824 with a procession through the streets to Holy Trinity Church, a dinner and a few speeches. Over the years the tradition has grown to include many of the unique features that are still integral to the celebrations today. --Shakespeare's Birthday Celebrations (shakespeare.org.uk)

OTBs, or "Outside The Boxers," as they call themselves, are unconventional thinkers who believe "there are no stupid ideas," Lessjo says. "We really just wanted to know what would happen if Civil War soldiers fought the crew from 'Star Trek.' You never see that in the movies or TV reruns." --Tim Chitwood --A battle outside the box (Leger-Enquirer)

What happened? The unspoken hierarchy of obsessive-compulsive subcultures was laid bare for all to see.

First the Confederates said they wouldn't associate with "Trekkies," and the Star Trek fans said they preferred "Trekkers." The Confederates all laughed, and "that right there got things off on the wrong foot," Lessjo says.

(Make sure you read the fine print at the end of the article.)

Although the English word weblog is known in other languages, this has not prevented translations to appear. In Spanish, for example, weblog in general has apparently been translated using the journal-style kind of definition. In effect, in Spanish, weblogs are more commonly referred to as bitácoras, even though the word weblogs is well known. The word bitácora refers in the first place to the journals kept by captains of the old vessels that sailed across oceans, for example the ones used by Spaniards and Portuguese to arrive to the American continent in 1500. A bitácora is clearly different form a personal diary or diario íntimo in Spanish because it implies a trip. It is the account of events that happen during a long journey or physical movement from one place to another. This metaphor of movement in the Spanish language does not exist as clearly in English. Nevertheless, the word journal is used to call those weblogs that have a more personal or intimate tone. --Virginia Melián --Weblogs: nodes of participation in a global context? Non-expert publishing in many languagesDigital Divide and the Media: Challenges for Communication and Democracy)

This seems to be a paper delivered at a conference called Digital Divide and the Media: Challenges for Communication and Democracy.

I really hate PDFs... using Firefox, I can't copy and paste more than one line at a time from the HTML document that Google generated from the PDF original, so the process of posting an excerpt from a PDF is a royal pain.

He escaped Hitler's Germany and devoted the rest of his life to humanitarian and pacifist causes with an authority unmatched by any scientist today, or even most politicians and religious leaders.

He used his celebrity to speak out against fascism, racial prejudice and the McCarthy hearings. His FBI file ran 1,400 pages.

His letters reveal a tumultuous personal life - married twice and indifferent toward his children while obsessed with physics. Yet he charmed lovers and admirers with poetry and sailboat outings. Friends and neighbors fiercely protected his privacy.

And, yes, he was eccentric. With hair like that, how could he not be? --Joseph B. Verrengia --Einstein's Legacy Keeps on Expanding (AP|MyWay)

How hard is this to hack? The first observation is that the system is entirely manual, making it immune to the sorts of technological attacks that make modern voting systems so risky. The second observation is that the small group of voters -- all of whom know each other -- makes it impossible for an outsider to affect the voting in any way. The chapel is cleared and locked before voting. No one is going to dress up as a cardinal and sneak into the Sistine Chapel. In effect, the voter verification process is about as perfect as you're ever going to find. --Bruce Schneir --Hacking the Papal Election (Schneier on Security)

I don?t believe that the internet is a leveller of genders. In fact, in many cases, it seems to be the opposite.

I spend a lot of time on IRC (internet relay chat), where my IRC nick is not gender-neutral. On many occasions I have joined IRC channels to ask technical questions, and have encountered people who say things like, ?Oh, I don?t know the answer to your question, but you can talk to me anyway because you?re a girl.? or ?Are you really a girl?? and then after checking my ?real name? exclaiming ?Yesssss!? and suchlike.

If one outright pretends to be a man (for instance, by assuming a male IRC nick) then perhaps one could naively see internet-based communication as a leveller of genders, but only in as much as it?s level because no one realises that you are a woman?that?s about hiding gender, not levelling it! --questions (join-the-dots)

Hannah makes some excellent, thoughtful responses to a pre-interview survey. She seems a bit frustrated by commonly held notions about women in computing, noting, quite diplomatically, "a bit of an implied assumption" in a question that suggests that she, as a woman, might faces personal challenges that form personal challenges for her. "For example," she notes, "consider fathers who’d prefer to work part time or from home, but are discouraged from doing so due to societal pressures."

Heh. I'm usually discouraged from working at home by the sound of screaming kids, but I'm on my own for another week until the wife and kids get back from visiting my in-laws.

First of all there are two categories of blogs. One is the traditional web-log where a web surfer shares his online discoveries. And the second is the web diary where person shares his or her thoughts of the day. --John C. Dvorak --Understanding and Reading a Blog (for Newcomers) (Dvorak.org)

Interesting... Dvorak uses the masculine pronoun to describe "the traditional web-log," but uses both masculine and feminine pronouns to describe "the web diary." (See my handout on gender-neutral language.)

Young women and mothers with the distinctive headscarves share the pedestrian areas with blond girls in leather jackets and jeans. Sometimes you see girlfriends walking arm in arm, one demurely wearing the headscarf and the other letting her hair go free to drive men wild with passion. Rebecca West wrote in the 1930s of the ?tranquil sensuality? of Sarajevans. Headscarves in Sarajevo tend to be very stylish or colorful. I noticed, also, that young men took less care to conceal their appraisal of passing young women than they do in Montenegro.

Yet in spite of the city?s exoticism, I never felt easy there. I was tired from the drive and felt uncomfortably claustrophobic in the city. Clouds and fog had backed into the gorge where the city sits by the time we arrived, so we had to walk around in mist or drizzle or dreary rain. The city makes no effort to tuck away its cemeteries with white stone spikes marking graves, all the same age, all more or less new. In the gray, misty weather these seemed to stand out all the more. --John Spurlock --Bosnia and Herzegovina (The Blue Monkey Review)

A beautiful passage from a travellog posted by my truant division chair.

Okay, so he has a Fulbright, so he's not AWOL or anything.

"Just think about it," I would tell them with as straight a face as I could muster, "next Tuesday the Royal Shakespeare Company will be on campus to give their rendition of King Lear." I left time for that news to sink in, and then added: "I'm told that their production is absolutely world class." Then I would thicken the plot by adding that this is not the only cultural event scheduled for next Tuesday. "It turns out, on the same evening, there also will be a performance by a man who, I am told, can fart the 'Star Spangled Banner.'"

This announcement would invariably get the attention from a students sitting in the back row and wearing his baseball cap backwards: "He can really fart 'The Star Spangled Banner'?"

"That's what I'm told," I would earnestly reply.

"Wow, I sure don't want to miss that! And I'm going to bring my fraternity brothers too!"

"I'm quite sure you are," I would say, taking careful note of those students who were in on the joke (they would invariably get A's ten weeks later; and, those yahoos who nodded their agreement would invariably get C's and D's). --Sanford Pinsker --I Know How Much it Costs to Hear the Caged Bird Sing (The Irascible Professor)

A sad anecdote from the celebrity author scene:

Not surprisingly, Ms. Angelou packed the hall, but she made it clear that she was not about to meet with English classes before her reading nor would she attend a reception held in her honor by the Black Students Union after it. As a member of her entourage put it, neither event was stipulated in the contract.