Humanities: September 2005 Archive Page

Adam Jacot de Boinod first became entranced by language when he discovered 27 words for "moustache" in an Albanian dictionary - and another 27 for "eyebrows". A world of bushy machismo and stolid dignity sprang to life before his eyes. He began hanging out in second-hand bookshops, looking for foreign dictionaries and the tiny revelations contained therein. He made lists of his favourite "words with no equivalent in the English language" - like, say, tsuji-giri, a Japanese word from samurai days meaning, "to try out a new sword on a passer-by" (thanks a bunch, Toshiro), or the stoic German term Torschlusspanik, meaning "the fear of diminishing opportunities as one gets older". --John Walsh --Weird and wonderful vocabulary from around the world (The Independent)

A & L Daily did my blogging for me today.

No individual has made billions off Star Trek—although that franchise, too, has its own mountains of merchandise, including toys, video games, and hundreds of books. More impressive than its merchandise and its profits, though, is its monumental amount of screen-time. Since the first broadcast of the first episode on September 8, 1966, there have been more than 700 hour-long episodes of Star Trek incarnated in five different series—plus ten movies and an animated show that lasted for 22 episodes. With the exception of soap operas, no other product of Hollywood rivals that considerable corpus. By this measure, the Star Wars franchise seems puny: For all its popularity, its on-screen time consists of only six movies, a few obscure TV spin-offs involving Ewoks, and a truly atrocious two-hour holiday special. (It was so unbelievably wretched that it aired only once, and George Lucas is reported to have said that he wished he could “track down every copy of that program and smash it.” It was listed as the #1 item in last year’s book What Were They Thinking?: The 100 Dumbest Events in Television History.) --To Boldly Go: The End of Star Trek and Star Wars (The New Atlantis)

--MLA Citation Style (Long Island University)

It's got Star Trek.

It's got Flash Gordon.

It's in MLA style.

What could be better?

--'NY Times' Retracts John Roberts Memo Story  (Editor & Publisher)

So the paper publishes false information, in a story about a memo critiquing a court case involving a newspaper that published false information. The court case ruled that a newspaper could only be found libelous if the paper published the false information with actual malice. The New York Times said that Supreme Court nominee John Roberts authored the memo, which criticized the ruling. But now the Times has retracted the authorship claim.

That's a lot of dots. Connect them and they spell "irony."

Newspapers make mistakes all the time. Kudos to the NYT for publishing its retraction in appoximately the same location as the orignial mistake (rather than leaving it buried in a back page). And to all the editors of the world who are struggling to put all this stuff in order, without reducing it to the point where it looks like a conspiracy.

WASHINGTON, DC—Congress scrapped the open-source, open-edit, online version of the Constitution Monday, only two months after it went live. "The idea seemed to dovetail perfectly with our tradition of democratic participation," Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid said. "But when so-called 'contributors' began loading it down with profanity, pornography, ASCII art, and mandatory-assault-rifle-ownership amendments, we thought it might be best to cancel the project." Congress intends to restore the Constitution to its pre-Wiki format as soon as an unadulterated copy of the document can be found. --Congress Abandons WikiConstitution (The Onion (Satire))

That's the whole news item.

I wonder what they call it when you can't think of what to write in a weblog? Writer's Blog, weblock? --Anna-Marie --Comfortably Numb (ilex)

One of Mike Vitia's students coins a term.

Students in several of my classes are engaging in drive-by blogging, which is the flurry of entries that one posts just before the blogging portfolio is due. That's a very different issue than weblock, though it can be just as stressful.

UPDATE: At this moment, the night before the blog portfolios are due in my largest class, blogs.setonhill.edu is out. It's never out for long, but the timing couldn't be more stressful for the students. (I don't plan to do the "if you hadn't fallen behind in your blogging you wouldn't feel like it was the end of the world" routine on them. I'd rather be merciful, especially this early in the term.)

UPDATE: The blogs are back up. I can't take any credit for it -- I sent an e-mail to the site administrator and within a half hour, yippee, everything seems to be working.

The wild rumors filled the vacuum and seemed to gain credence with each retelling -- that an infant's body had been found in a trash can, that sharks from Lake Pontchartrain were swimming through the business district, that hundreds of bodies had been stacked in the Superdome basement.

"It doesn't take anything to start a rumor around here," Louisiana National Guard 2nd Lt. Lance Cagnolatti said at the height of the Superdome relief effort. "There's 20,000 people in here. Think when you were in high school. You whisper something in someone's ear. By the end of the day, everyone in school knows the rumor -- and the rumor isn't the same thing it was when you started it."

Follow-up reporting has discredited reports of a 7-year-old being raped and murdered at the Superdome, roving bands of armed gang members attacking the helpless, and dozens of bodies being shoved into a freezer at the Convention Center.

Hyperbolic reporting spread through much of the media.

Fox News, a day before the major evacuation of the Superdome began, issued an "alert" as talk show host Alan Colmes reiterated reports of "robberies, rapes, carjackings, riots and murder. Violent gangs are roaming the streets at night, hidden by the cover of darkness."

The Los Angeles Times adopted a breathless tone the next day in its lead news story, reporting that National Guard troops "took positions on rooftops, scanning for snipers and armed mobs as seething crowds of refugees milled below, desperate to flee. Gunfire crackled in the distance."

The New York Times repeated some of the reports of violence and unrest, but the newspaper usually was more careful to note that the information could not be verified.

The tabloid Ottawa Sun reported unverified accounts of "a man seeking help gunned down by a National Guard soldier" and "a young man run down and then shot by a New Orleans police officer."

London's Evening Standard invoked the future-world fantasy film "Mad Max" to describe the scene and threw in a "Lord of the Flies" allusion for good measure.

Televised images and photographs affirmed the widespread devastation in one of America's most celebrated cities.

"I don't think you can overstate how big of a disaster New Orleans is," said Kelly McBride, ethics group leader at the Poynter Institute, a Florida school for professional journalists. "But you can imprecisely state the nature of the disaster. -- Then you draw attention away from the real story, the magnitude of the destruction, and you kind of undermine the media's credibility." --Susannah Rosenblatt and James Rainey --Katrina Takes a Toll on Truth, News Accuracy (LA Times (registration))

The article continues with a discussion of how race may have affected what one source called "rumor-mongering".

Up to now, I've mostly read reports in which the media congratulated itself for speaking the truth to power -- that is, using the images of the destruction to contrast with what the administration was telling them.

It looks like, in some cases at any rate, the media were too quick to publish reports of chaos. The coverage I read was pretty clear that the reports were unconfirmed, but politicians started repeating those reports, and other organizations started reporting those second-hand comments.

Katrina was a ready-made TV story, with stunning images and a lingering after-story, made more tantalizing by the fact that so little news was getting out.

The tomb of Odysseus has been found, and the location of his legendary capital city of Ithaca discovered here on this large island across a one-mile channel from the bone-dry islet that modern maps call Ithaca. --Thomas Elias --Archeologists make historic discovery (Madera Tribune)

There was always a notion in the past of putting out information that people need to know. Now the entire industry is driven by providing what people want to hear and see. And that gives you more Michael Jackson than Social Security. That gives you Chandra Levy and Gary Condit, not local government. That gives you Laci Peterson and not how to fix our schools. The latter are all (more) boring, visually, than the celebrity stories, but they are infinitely more important.

But if we bore the viewer or the listener, they'll turn the dial, and so we collectively look for ways to keep them tuned in, and that means a loss of some of the ... "elite" coverage that I think is our real purpose in this business -- this business of journalism, not this business of broadcasting, which people think are the same, and are not. There are too many broadcasters -- i.e. show business -- and not enough journalists. End of diatribe. --Pat Kreitlow --Signing off, looking back: Kreitlow reflects on nearly two decades of broadcast journalism (UWEC | Leader-Telegram)

From an interview with the former local TV news anchor in Eau Claire, where I used to live.

Found via the blog of a former student, who blogs as Anniepookins.

My news writing students know I'm not too keen on TV news, but there are many good TV journalists who would love to do the community-serving, local government and solution-oriented stories that they themselves value. But if the story has no visuals, the audience doesn't stick around.

By the way, Kreitlow now has a blog. It's funny... now that I've spent some time reading his personal thoughts, even his humor blog, I find myself oddly missing the Channel 13 newscasts from Eau Claire. This guy is a good writer -- something that never really occurred to me when I watched him on TV. If he had been blogging when I was still in Eau Claire, I probably would have watched him more.

Well, here's to your post-TV career, Mr. Kreitlow, whatever that turns out to be.

Pride and Preface (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

In “Drama as Literature,” I assigned the first third or so of Oedipus the King, which always throws students for a loop.

What’s with the “strophe,” which is the part of the choral performance chanted as the performers dance from right to left, and the “antistrophe,” which is chanted as the performers dance from left to right? Who chants while they sing dance, anyway? A few students have studied the play before, and they’re laudably more interested in hearing what their peers have to say as they encounter the story for the first time. When I checked the blogs last night, I could see that those students who bravely ventured to blog their opinions on the play sounded a bit tentative.

So in class today, I tackled their estrangement head-on, with an introduction that went something like this:

I recognize that the very idea of an artistic performance that includes action, dance, music and the spoken word is unfamiliar to you. After all, it’s completely unrealistic to depict a crowd of people suddenly speaking, singing and dancing in unison, as a backdrop to dramatic action.

There’s nothing on television, especially on a familiar channel such as MTV, that involves the lyrical expression of human passions in a form that involves groups of performers speaking words that are more powerful, more beautiful, and more musical than any words that you or I speak in daily life. I understand that it is foreign to your experience, to imagine listening to an entertainment that involves people singing and speaking the way they would if language were perfect and they themselves were gods.

Once I made my point, I acknowledged that our knowledge of Greek theatre is sketchy (we don’t really know what a choral performance would have looked like) but I did draw a diagram of a Greek theater, noting that the characters on stage often announce the arrival of a new character, in part because the entrance was so far away from the center of the stage that the actor would have been visible to most of the audience long before he was in position to begin speaking. I also talked about the function of the Greek masks, which contained a small megaphone in the mouthpiece. But I also told that when my wife went to Greece as part of a drama class, her instructor had the class spread out in the theatron (seating area), then he pulled out a pin. The stage was so well-constructed that everyone heard it drop.

In the midst of all this, one of my students made an offhand reference to the fact that I’m cited in our textbook, Drama: A Pocket Anthology (3rd edition). I told him I didn’t know what he was talking about.

Another student confirmed, and there in the preface I found my name, in a list of instructors who commented on the second edition. I seem to remember now that I gave some feedback on a sample table of contents, and maybe commented on the introductory material, but I had completely forgotten about it.

Okay, so it’s not the same thing as someone citing me as an authority or responding to a claim I made in published scholarship, but it was a nice little Monday-morning picker-upper. After the mock-serious lecture about the strangeness of the conventions of the Greek theatre, I got to look all humble and surprised in front of my students.

Of course as soon as class was over I walked up and down the Humanities wing, book in hand, bragging to my colleagues. Fitting, perhaps, after a discussion of a tragic hero with the fatal flaw of excessive pride.

At any rate I’m pleased to know that some of my students actually read the preface.

--Austrian national anthem 'sexist' (BBC)

Should that caption read "Austrian schoolchildren are taught the national anthem during solar eclipses"? I can't imagine why else they might be wearing those goggles.

I don't mean to make light of the subject.

I've written a handout on gender-neutral language, and in my American Lit class, we discussed the ritualistic rhetoric and nearly universal pomposity of national anthems.

But the photo choice is distracting and odd. (My sister suggests that perhaps it was the only handy photo of Austrian schoolchildren.)

Hi,
I'm a reporter with National Public Radio and I'm doing a story on the plague that's hit World of Warcraft. I'm really interested in talking to some people who play the game about the plague and what's been done about it and generally how it feels to have your virtual character done in by a plague.
Are you a player and do you know others who might speak with me? Let me know. You can email me at LSydell@npr.org or call me at 415-503-3164.
Thanks. I look forward to talking with you!
Laura --Evening Reading [World of Warcraft Plague] (Shacknews)

Sounds interesting.

Looks like a software bug infects players who've come into contact with a particular bad guy. And the infection spreads.

First noticed on kairosnews, which credits ArsTechnica.

During the 1990's, Lorin Anderson (a former student of Benjamin Bloom) led a team of cognitive psychologists in revisiting the taxonomy with the view to examining the relevance of the taxonomy as we enter the twenty-first century.

REMEMBERING

Recognise, list, describe, identify retrieve, name ?.

Can the student RECALL information?

UNDERSTANDING

Interpret, exemplify, summarise, infer, paraphrase ?..

Can the student EXPLAIN ideas or concepts?

APPLYING

Implement, carry out, use ?

Can the student USE the new knowledge in another familiar situation?

ANALYSING

Compare, attribute, organise, deconstruct ?

Can the student DIFFERENTIATE between constituent parts?

EVALUATING

Check, critique, judge hypothesise ...

Can the student JUSTIFY a decision or course of action?

CREATING

Design, construct, plan, produce ...

Can the student GENERATE new products, ideas or ways of viewing things -- --Revised Bloom's Taxonomy (oz - TeacherNet)

Via Mike Arnzen's Pedablogue.

I've heard this revision mentioned at conferences, but I've never actually tracked it down. Thanks for pointing it out, Mike.

More and more, video game-related courses are being offered in colleges around the country in response to the digital media industry's appetite for skilled workers and the tastes of a new generation of students raised on Game Boy and Xbox. --Michael Hill --More Colleges Offering Video Game Courses (AP|MyWay)

Seton Hill University
January, 2006 (3 weeks, 3 credits; online)
EL 250: Videogame Culture and Theory

Ambiguous word choices are the source of some misunderstandings. Scientists often employ colloquial terminology, which they then assign a specific meaning that is impossible to fathom without proper training. The term "relativity," for example, is intrinsically misleading. Many interpret the theory to mean that everything is relative and there are no absolutes. Yet although the measurements any observer makes depend on his coordinates and reference frame, the physical phenomena he measures have an invariant description that transcends that observer's particular coordinates. Einstein's theory of relativity is really about finding an invariant description of physical phenomena. --Lisa Randall --Dangling Particles (Edge -- The Third Culture)

Great title for an article about public confusion caused by the language of science.

Sheehan moved to New Orleans in 2004 to take a year off from the University of California at Berkeley, where administrators had temporarily suspended the stem-cell research program in which he was enrolled in hopes of helping to combat his younger sister Ruth's spinal meningitis. Friends report that his public spirit continued in the Big Easy, as he delivered meals to elderly New Orleans residents affected by recent Medicare cuts, and doggedly petitioned the Justice Department for the release of his life partner, Amin Sagheer, who has been detained without charge at Guantanamo Bay for nearly three years. --Bush Braces As Cindy Sheehan's Other Son Drowns In New Orleans (The Onion (Satire))

This is brilliant satire.

--Keybag (João Sabino)

I can hear my wife now... "Where did I put my keys?"

Leaving a comment on someone'sweblog is like walking into their living room and joining in on a conversation. As in real life, online there are some people who are a pleasure to converse with, and some who are not.

Good blog commenters add to the discussion and are known as knowledgeable, informative, friendly and engaged. Build your own online social capital and become a great blog commenter by keeping these simple guidelines in mind before you post. --Special: Lifehacker'sguide to weblog comments (Lifehacker)

Great link, courtesy of Clancy Ratliff, via the KairosNews blogs mailing list.

I am interested by "Don’t post when you’re angry, upset, drunk or emotional."

Don't post when you're emotional? Isn't that rather extreme, for those of us who aren't Vulcans, anyway? But maybe I should stop writing now, since I'm feeling a bit emotional about this.

Oh, tanj.

Nowadays, the phrase, "Oh, golly!" may be considered almost comically wholesome, but it was not always so. "Golly" is a compaction of "God's body" and, thus, was once a profanity.

Yet neither biblical commandment nor the most zealous Victorian censor can elide from the human mind its hand-wringing over the unruly human body, its chronic, embarrassing demands and its sad decay. Discomfort over body functions never sleeps, Dr. Burridge said, and the need for an ever-fresh selection of euphemisms about dirty subjects has long served as an impressive engine of linguistic invention.

Once a word becomes too closely associated with a specific body function, she said, once it becomes too evocative of what should not be evoked, it starts to enter the realm of the taboo and must be replaced by a new, gauzier euphemism.

For example, the word "toilet" stems from the French word for "little towel" and was originally a pleasantly indirect way of referring to the place where the chamber pot or its equivalent resides. But toilet has since come to mean the porcelain fixture itself, and so sounds too blunt to use in polite company. --Almost Before We Spoke, We Swore (NY Times)

I don't curse much, except at my computer. The next time I do, maybe I think I'll stop and appreciate the aesthetic qualities of a good taboo word.

Just today I was thinking of my sophomore high shool religion teacher, the very buttoned-down and sensible Mr. McShirley, who told us one day that curse words are verboten because they they disrespect God or the gift of human sexuality.

Then, in the final seconds before the dismissal bell rang, he said, "But there's one word that's simply vulgar. And that word is 'shit'."

A roomful of fifteen-year-old polyester-uniformed Catholics erupted with glee. We remembered that lesson.

At the time, I was reading Larry Niven books. He invented the curse word "tanj" for "there ain't no justice." I like the way that word starts with the plosive consonant, and the "a" sound echoes a reconizable curse, but the ending is muddled.

I like a curse word with a great initial fricative consonant, where you can really work up that angry spittle. Then after a tense, short vowel there's the final explosive consonant. Front of the mouth, like "t"... back of the mouth, like "ck". It's all good.

You just can't put anger in to a final "j" sound. Look at yourself in a mirror and just try shouting "orange!" or "hedge!"

No cracking consontants. No spittle on the mirror. Nothing.

Political Cartoon Prompts Racist Accusations against Student Paper (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Exhibit A: Political cartoon, edited. Funny?
Exhibit B: Political cartoon, original version. Funny?
Exhibit C: Editorial.
Exhibit D: The controversy, in context.
Exhibit E: Debate, in situ.
Exhibit F: Your thoughts?

Proof by clever variable choice
"Let A be the number such that this proof works. . "

Proof by tessellation
"This proof is the same as the last."

Proof by divine word
"And the Lord said, 'Let it be true,' and it was true."

Proof by stubbornness
"I don't care what you say-it is true!" --36 Methods of Mathematical Proof (BlueMoon.net)

Thanks, Josh... this makes a great companion to Twenty Special Forms of Rhetoric.

Beside the fact that math professors in the movie wear ties — “never,” said Kontorovich — and “there are no blackboards,” noted Stechmann – who laughed when Hal called a proof “hip,” – the aspect of the movie the students found strangest was that it centered on an argument over whether Catherine could have done a certain bit of mathematics that she kept secret for years. Kontorovich said keeping work under wraps on the QT to stop “the hype from taking over,” is not unexpected, but as to the continued arguing, “Are you retarded?” Kontorovich asked. “It’s a proof. Go through it.” All three students agreed that mathophiles would be more focused on examining the work than debating the author. “Everyone was happy when [ Andrew Wiles] proved Fermat’s Last Theorem, even though many had labored unsuccessfully, Kontorovich said. “It was a proof for humanity.” Added Stechmann, “people said, ‘Great, we can stop working on it now.’” --David Epstein --Is Gwyneth Paltrow a Genius? (Inside Higher Ed)

The "take a bunch of experts to see a movie about their field and let them pick it apart" is interesting when the experts are grad students.

Reflection on Wojtyla's The Jeweller's Shop (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Last night, I read Karol Wojtyla The Jeweller’s Shop for the first time. I knew it was mostly a collection of monologues with little action, in part because it was written to be performed in secret, in Nazi-Communist-occupied Poland.

It is a poetic drama, in which the spoken word dominates over all other components of theater. (I’m reading it in translation, of course.) The old jeweler who figures in the lives of three couples only appears through their lines – he never appears in the play.

In the play, numerous references to “ego” and “alter ego,” which recalls the influence of Freud in the early 20th century. But even more notable is the anti-romantic stance. “I wanted to regard love as passion,” says Teresa, who lives for many years as a widow. If she expected love to sweep her away, she would have been disappointed.

Andrew dismisses “beauty accessible to the senses,” and prefers a stronger bridge between people: “beauty accessible to the mind.” It is perhaps this bridge that gives their brief marriage meaning even after his death.

I found personal meaning in the hesitation that Teresa and Andrew feel outside the jeweller’s shop window. “suddenly we were together / on both sides of the big transparent sheet / filled with glowing light.”

During my own engagement, for months I felt a horrid knot in my stomach when passing jewelry shops. Not because I didn’t want to get married or because I was worried about spending money, but because the sparkling metallic teeth of the salesbots gleamed so intensely whenever their sensors detected a young couple slowing down to take a look. (“May I help you?” “Why yes, you can BACK OFF, you gleaming metallic salesbot!”)

Where was I?

Teresa and Andrew are equal in height, still choosing their fate before the window, which has become a mirror.

The involvement of the chorus in the wedding scene reminded me of the abstract depiction of the wedding in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, which was written about 20 years earlier, though Wilder was toying with minimalism for its aesthetic effect, not out of theatrical necessity. At any rate, the wine-cheered crowd is present for the wedding, which is public, and follows the couple part of the way. But at some point the crowd will drop out of the picture.

The rush and fun of the wedding will be over, and the hard work of the marriage will begin. Teresa sees it as “The will of Teresa being Andrew, / the will of Andrew being Teresa.”

Wojtyla, who would eventually become a priest, bishop, and John Paul II, knew suffering. His own mother died when he was about nine, his elder brother died a few years later, and his father died when Wojtyla was in college. While the play speaks highly of married love, unlike a traditional comedy (which ends with a wedding), this play includes that staple of country music, “old love on the rocks.”

Echoing Teresa’s formula for married love, Anna laments, “It was as if Stefan had ceased to be in me. / Did I cease to be in him too? / Or was it simply that I felt / I now existed only in myself?” (32)

Ibsen represents a similar discovery as a liberating, dollhouse-shattering force in Nora’s life, but Ibsen was more an individualist than anything else (including feminist). Wojtyla presents the ego as empty deadness, and points out the futility of Anna’s self-absorbed attempts to lash out: “So I fought for Stefan’s love, / ready to retreat at any time, / if he did not realize the sense / of the battle.”

Wojtyla has to convey to the audience a deeper understanding of Anna’s character than Anna herself possesses. “I thought the guilt was Stefan’s -- / I could find no guilt in myself.” (34) But she and Stefan are both guilty of sins of cold hearts. (This affects their daughter, Monica, whom the passionate Anna finds strange and reserved.)

The play’s final section focuses on Christopher (the son of Teresa and the late Andrew, who died when Christopher was a baby) and Monica (the daughter of Anna and Stefan, who are still together).

The line that struck me the most powerfully is Monica’s: “I want so much to be yours, and there is only one thing constantly in my way – that I am myself” (57).

As the play was wrapping up, we see the mature Teresa’s discussion of the effect on her son of the mysterious Adam, and we see the mature Anna’s recognition that a chance encounter with the same Adam did some work to heal the rift between her and Stefan. I thought the play was going to end on a realistic note, but suddenly we have a final redeeming reflection from Stefan (who hasn’t spoken at all during this time).

Finally, don't even think about applying to a small college unless you love teaching. Students will eat you up. Their need for your time and your energy could overwhelm you, and if you don't love the idea of the enthusiastic undergraduate student just sitting in your office, sipping coffee with you, while you talk about voice in Faulkner or imagery in Toni Morrison when all your papers are just sitting on your desk waiting to be graded -- then the small college is not the place for you. --Carol Kolmerten --What Small Colleges Really Want (Chronicle)

Friday afternoons are my "get through this stack of papers so I don't have to bring them home" slot.
Some days I will pick up my stacks of papers and sneak off to a remote corner of the library. But on Thursday and Friday, a steady stream of students dropped by in order to drop off papers, and I found myself waving them in, one after the other.

Have a seat, how's your semester going, what's on your mind?

When I was just starting grad school, I used to worry that I wouldn't know what to write in order to get published. I used to worry that my conference proposals would be turned down. Now I've got a forthcoming book chapter that I'm expecting back from the editors any time now. A few weeks ago, an encyclopedia editor asked me to write an article, and seemed interested in having me write two more articles I suggested. I've been accepted and given funding for to more conferences than my wife will permit me to attend.

There are times when it hits me -- I won't have time to write up and publish all my ideas.

But you know what? Right now, I'm okay with that.

An Australian man built up a 40,000-volt charge of static electricity in his clothes as he walked, leaving a trail of scorched carpet and molten plastic and forcing firefighters to evacuate a building.

Frank Clewer, who was wearing a woolen shirt and a synthetic nylon jacket, was oblivious to the growing electrical current that was building up as his clothes rubbed together. --Power-dressing man leaves trail of destruction (Reuters|My Way)

Behold the power of friction.

# Proof by Name Dropping
A: What do you think about objection X?
B: Well, BigNamei, BigNamej, and BigNamek agree with me. LittleNamei might agree with you, if only they were that silly.

# Proof by Absentee Belittlement
A: What do you think about objection X?
B: Person C, who is not here to defend themselves, thinks that. They are silly. You are silly.

# Proof by Humility
A: What do you think about objection X?
B: You state that so forcefully. I could be wrong. You seem so sure of yourself. That is silly.

# Proof by Humiliation
A: What do you think about objection X?
B: Have you read Book Z, or Book Y, even Book W?
A: Well, no.
B: That explains why you asked such a question. Sit down silly person. --Twenty Special Forms of Rhetoric (Speculative Grammarian)

That is silly.

Discovering that the static that came through our phone could bring the dead, tv-looking thing on our table to life was one of the most fascinating moments of my youth and young manhood. Sadly, that tone is almost gone from our world now, as dial-up disappears in favor of broadband connections (and rightly so). But even better was discovering what kind of life lay in wait on the other end of the line.

[...]

Here was something big, bigger than school and sports and whatever synagogue I never showed up at for my rite of passage into manhood, and we were involved. My father was part of this thing that was happening, this thing that was cooler than men walking on the moon because it was right there in front of you and you could do it too. And I was doing it, and it was more than just pushing buttons. My own little 12-year-old's text-based programming adventures didn't come anywhere near what was happening in Adventure, but that wasn't the point. The point was that what was coming back to me in little green letters or smudged black ink was something I had brought into being, my contribution to the world. For me, listening to the static song of the modem carrier signal or sitting in front of that clunky, clacketing teletype meant that I was charged, for however many minutes I could get, with the responsibility of creating something cool. And there's no better drug for a pre-teen nerd than that, no more solemn burden to shoulder.

I never did make it to my Bar Mitzvah. But I'm pretty sure I learned some of the same lessons, thanks to dad and DEC and the big machines that did turn out to spark a revolution after all. --Mark Wallace --The History of My Adventure (Walkerings)

As much as I love both technology and games, I can't help but think of Henry Adams contemplating the dynamo.

But I'm not one to point a finger. I enjoyed Wallace's soulful, geeky hymn to the power of technology -- as mediated by text-adventure games.

O professor deve deixar claro o que espera. Não traduzi por falta de tempo, mas é uma proposta muito estruturada e, em parte, inspirada pelo fato dos alunos terem uma preocupação maior com o como serão avaliados do que com o que vão aprender. --Refletindo sobre blogs (Projetos Colaborativos)

With help from faculty colleagues and Babelfish, I got the following:

A professor should be very clear about what he expects. I did not translate due to time, but it is a proposal very structuralized, in part inspired by students who were worried about how they will be evaluated.

One of my linguistically gifted colleagues translated "deixar" as a comparative "more," rather than the intensifier "very". But a modern language specialist said the context of the link to my work is positive.

I'd like to think that my blogging rubric is pretty clear, but I don't foist it on the students all at once, and in different classes, I expect different levels of close reading, personal reflection, current events, and peer interaction.

It's the third week of classes, so students have had more than enough time to come to me for help if they have difficulty getting their blogs to work. Now that I can assume everyone's got a basic level of blogging comfort, I'm starting to adjust my expectations in the lit classes from "blog something" to "quote a passage from the assigned readings and blog about it" to "practice the skill of advancing a thesis, engaging opposing and alternative viewpoints, and using textual evidence to back up your claims."

I haven't yet introduced my full-fledged blogging rubric in any of my classes, but I'll need to post some version of it soon.

She listens to her 12-year-old son and his friends as they discuss the novels that their teachers have told them to read over the summer. The boys don't like them. They seem, in fact, to hate them.

The books that her son, Alex, and his friends are compelled to read are highly regarded by teachers and professors of education. Many come decorated with Newbery medals and endorsements by the American Library Association. They are books known in the field of children's literature as Young Adult (YA) literature. All are highly realistic, written in a confessional tone, usually in the first-person voice of an angry or alienated teenager. The protagonist deals with traumatic experiences: murder, suicide, the death of a parent or friend, incest, sexual abuse, rape, drugs, abortion, kidnapping, abandonment. Friendly or protective adults are virtually nonexistent; the main character's mother, writes Feinberg, is dead, missing, or nonfunctional. Children in these novels almost never play. Often they feel guilty for whatever catastrophe befalls them. The books are uniformly humorless, earnest, and depressing. Their message, to the extent that they have one: the world is a nasty and brutish place, and you can depend only on yourself.

What is missing from YA books, says Feinberg, is any recognition of the role that imagination and fantasy play in children's ways of experiencing life. Instead, the books seem dedicated to shocking children, destroying their fantasies, and giving them a mean dose of reality. --Diane Ravitch reviews the book by Barbara Feinberg --Welcome to Lizard Motel: Children, Stories, and the Mystery of Making Things Up [Review] (Education Next)

Found amongst a good collection of links on This Week in Education.

Exhibit A:

vegetable (adj.)
c.1400, "living and growing as a plant," from O.Fr. vegetable "living, fit to live," from M.L. vegetabilis "growing, flourishing," from L.L. vegetabilis "animating, enlivening," from L. vegetare "to enliven," from vegetus "vigorous, active," from vegere "to be alive, active, to quicken," from PIE *weg- "be strong, lively," related to watch (v.), vigor, velocity

Exhibit B:

veg·e·ta·ble P Pronunciation Key (vjt-bl, vj-t-)
n.


2. Offensive Slang. One who is severely impaired mentally and physically, as by brain injury or disease.
3. One who is regarded as dull, passive, or unresponsive.

So my happy, active, vegetable (A) life might be ended by a tragic car crash, rendering me a vegetable (B).

To resolve this problem, I shall now go and eat a carrot. Goodnight.

--English. Confusing. Hilf! (Supermaxwell)

Thanks for the chuckle, on a morning when I would otherwise have felt (3).

An infant born last month to a severely brain-damaged woman has died after emergency surgery to repair a perforated intestine, the family said Monday. --Matthew Barakat --Baby Born to Brain-Dead Va. Woman Dies (AP|MyWay)

Very sad.

ALGERNON Do you really keep a diary? I'd give anything to look at it. May I?

CECILY Oh no. [Puts her hand over it.] You see, it is simply a very young girl's record of her own thoughts and impressions, and consequently meant for publication. When it appears in volume form I hope you will order a copy. --Oscar WildeDo you really keep a diary? (The Importance of Being Earnest)

When Cecily and Gwendolyn whip out their diaries in order to determine which of the two of them is really engaged to Earnest, I can't help imagining them typing "proposal" into a weblog search engine.

Also worth noting about The Importance of Being Earnest

[T]he theme of child abuse is picked up and parodied in Earnest. This theme was considered especially heartbreaking by the Victorians, and Wilde himself uses it at times to wring our hearts a bit, but in Earnest, even the abused child is manipulated to create an atmosphere of hilarity as Wilde has a good laugh at his earlier works.

Nassaar, Christopher. "Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest." Explicator, Vol. 60 Issue 2 (2002). 78-80.

I appreciated Naassar's comparison between this play and Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, which I teach for my Media Aesthetics course. Yet I think it's a bit dismissive to conclude, as Nassaar does, "all is laughable nonsense, even Wilde himself." As actors say, good comedy is hard to do. Wilde has created not just a work of nonsense, but a linguistically complex, layered set of puns and witticisms that spoof social class comedies in general and the well-made-play in particular.

In Drama as Literature, we have just read A Doll's House, and students predictably spent more time considering Nora's character and Torvald's motives than they spent examining the importance of Krogstad's letters or the backstory that makes Nora a forger and liar even before the story begins.

Earnest brings the "incriminating papers" prop to another level, where in fact the hero as a baby is mistakenly exchanged with the manuscript of a three-volume novel. Algernon and Jack play-act the role of Earnest, while Gwendolyn and Cecily write in their journals (though Cecily's work is more exaggerated and fictional than Gwendolyn, given the fact that Gwendolyn has been courted by a man calling himself Earnest, and Cecily has never met any such man).

Infidelity is genetic, say scientists. Electricity allergy real, says researcher. I've been collecting "scientists have found the formula for" stories since last summer, carefully pinning them into glass specimen cases, in preparation for my debut paper on the subject. So far I have captured the formulae for: the perfect way to eat ice cream (AxTpxTm/FtxAt +VxLTxSpxW/Tt=3d20), the perfect TV sitcom (C=3d[(RxD)+V]xF/A+S), the perfect boiled egg, love, the perfect joke, the most depressing day of the year ([W+(D-d)]xTQ MxNA), and so many more. Enough! Every paper - including this one - covers them: and before anyone bleats excuses on their behalf, these stories are invariably written by the science correspondents, and hotly followed, to universal jubilation, with comment pieces, by humanities graduates, on how bonkers and irrelevant scientists are.

[...]

So how do the media work around their inability to deliver scientific evidence? They use authority figures, the very antithesis of what science is about, as if they were priests, or politicians, or parent figures. "Scientists today said ... scientists revealed ... scientists warned." And if they want balance, you'll get two scientists disagreeing, although with no explanation of why (an approach at its most dangerous with the myth that scientists were "divided" over the safety of MMR). One scientist will "reveal" something, and then another will "challenge" it. A bit like Jedi knights. --Ben Goldacre --Don't dumb me down  (Guardian)

Because Katrina scattered Tulane students across the nation like dandelion spores, Whiteside hopes that interest might grow near colleges from New York to California that have taken in Tulane students. ?We might ask some of our students in other places to visit high schools with us,? he said.

He also hopes that from the wreckage, Tulane can present an unprecedented educational opportunity to students. ?If you want to study hydrology, restorative work, social work, engineering, reestablishing public health and educational systems, there will by no place like New Orleans over the next decade,? Whiteside said. ?We?re going to rebuild a city in very short order. There are few places in the world where someone can watch that as a laboratory unfolding before them.? --David Epstein --Homeless Recruiters (Inside Higher Ed)

Life goes on... it's amazing to see how quickly Tulane's PR folks have come up with this pitch.

Rami Chami, a graduate student entering Tulane University, was among those who sought refuge in the Superdome. Chami was formerly an editor at the Indiana Daily Student, and has written a three-part series for the paper about the experience.
"The field before us, which would have been ideal to lay down on was empty, but off bounds. The field was manned by National Guardsmen who would not allow people on it. I was told by those around me that it was a multi-million dollar field which the stadium management did not want ruined."
"Our first choices for a bed that evening were: a wet floor, damp chair or in the reeking but dry hallway."
"The atmosphere in the dome had gotten incredibly tense and the soldiers were walking around with shotguns, which I assumed was an ideal weapon for close quarter combat." --Rami Chami's Indiana Daily Student Superdome Reports (Metafilter)

If the Indiana Daily Student had an index page with links to all three articles, I'd send you directly to it. But instead, I'll send you to Metafilter's entry.

Together, the articles tell a gripping story.

Flush with the necessities, we offered food and water to passing families and individuals. Many decided to stay and join us. Our encampment grew to 80 or 90 people.

From a woman with a battery powered radio we learned that the media was talking about us. Up in full view on the freeway, every relief and news organizations saw us on their way into the City. Officials were being asked what they were going to do about all those families living up on the freeway? The officials responded they were going to take care of us. Some of us got a sinking feeling. "Taking care of us" had an ominous tone to it.

Unfortunately, our sinking feeling (along with the sinking City) was correct. Just as dusk set in, a Gretna Sheriff showed up, jumped out of his patrol vehicle, aimed his gun at our faces, screaming, "Get off the fucking freeway". A helicopter arrived and used the wind from its blades to blow away our flimsy structures. As we retreated, the sheriff loaded up his truck with our food and water. --Bradshaw and Slonsky --Hurricane Katrina -- Our Experience (EMS Network.org)

This makes me furious.

The faculty members contend that buildings that have been erected on campus over the last two decades have done a disservice to the Jeffersonian style — Thomas Jefferson founded the university in 1819 and designed the original campus – by attempting to make look-alikes and by paying too little attention to the use of buildings. --David Epstein --Jeffersonian Tradition or Shoddy Imitation? (Inside Higher Ed)

The grounds of Seton Hill University are nice, but nothing -- nothing compares with the central grounds of the University of Virginia. But once you get out beyond the old campus, the charm fades rapidly. I think the engineering school complex has character, and so do the older clusters of freshman dorms. While I haven't been to the campus since the remodeling of Cabell Hall, and I'm sure there are other changes I don't know about.

The Rotunda (which used to house the library) is the heart of the school. It's based on the design of the Pantheon, a Roman temple which became a church.

When I was in Rome, with a group of students from U.Va. in about 1989, we were standing in front of the Pantheon, and I said, in my best American Tourist voice, "Very Jeffersonian."

A guy next to me flinched and almost punched me. I have no idea who he was. It was rather amusing.

I can't write about my work.
Why?
Because it is coming out in tomorrow's edition.

I can't write about my personal life.
Why?
Because I've already given away -way- too much.

I can't give my opinion about current events.
Why?
Because I'm supposed to be this objective journalist.

I've reached a point in my blogger career where I'm not sure what to write about anymore. I'm either treading on my personal or professional life, either now or in the future. --Amanda Cochran --I'm blogging that....maybe not. (Girl Meets World)

The statistical tests for uncovering job discrimination assume that men are not innately different from women, blacks from whites, older people from younger people, homosexuals from heterosexuals, Latinos from Anglos, in ways that can legitimately affect employment decisions. Title IX of the Educational Amendments of 1972 assumes that women are no different from men in their attraction to sports. Affirmative action in all its forms assumes there are no innate differences between any of the groups it seeks to help and everyone else. The assumption of no innate differences among groups suffuses American social policy. That assumption is wrong. --Charles Murray --The Inequality Taboo (Commentary)

Murray is one of the authors of The Bell Curve. I found this essay fascinating, especially this caveat: "[T]he members of just about every group can so easily conclude that they are God’s chosen people. All of us use the weighting system that favors our group’s strengths."

The whole essay's over 16,000 words -- I had to start skimming.

From the conclusion:

Let us start talking about group differences openly—all sorts of group differences, from the visuospatial skills of men and women to the vivaciousness of Italians and Scots. Let us talk about the nature of the manly versus the womanly virtues. About differences between Russians and Chinese that might affect their adoption of capitalism. About differences between Arabs and Europeans that might affect the assimilation of Arab immigrants into European democracies. About differences between the poor and non-poor that could inform policy for reducing poverty.

A culture that values diversity seems to insist that people aren't the same. Historically, when those in power have identified difference, what happens next is that tribalism and selfishness tends to isolate, to exclude, to denigrate. Is Murray's language a fancy way of saying "celebrate long-standing stereotypes"? I don't think it really helps anyone to anyone to award points for "high self esteem" in a spelling test or a bar exam or a military training exercise, so it doesn't seem to make much sense to me to give pity points beyond elementary school.

Still... it seems so very convenient that his scientific evidence supports the status quo so well. On the other hand, is that any reason to dismiss the evidence? My "Drama as Lit" students have read several plays in which a woman wants to do something that is compassionate and just, but which happens to be against the law. The women in "Trifles" hide evidence that would convict a farm wife of murder; a grieving mother in "Heart in the Ground" wants to bury a child on her farm, despite a local regulation prohibiting it; and Nora in A Doll House sees nothing wrong with forging a signature if it will save her husband's life. In the world of fiction, where motives are simplified, and characters carefully drawn, the answers are more clear-cut, or at least the audience has been conditioned to be satisfied with a well-posed question, and with the ensuing opportunity for self-reflection and study.

Being a scientist, however, Murray demands an answer -- consequences be damned. He is careful to note that he is usually talking about very minor differences, which manifest themselves in such a way that environment and socialization are insufficient explanations. After controlling for those factors, he still sees difference, tied closely to an evolutionary advantage associated with that difference. Men had to track game and throw spears; women had to gather edible mushrooms and berries, leave the poisonous ones alone, keep track of children, and build social networks through gossip.

Is it bad to say such things? Well, if you're the president of Harvard, it's risky. And if you don't respond to the outrage in the blogosphere by immediately releasing a full transcript of the event, so that bloggers could see the context for themselves, then its even more risky.

I think most telling is Murray's argument that, in the specific areas of mathematical cognition that are required for visionary genius skills, women are clustered in the middle of the scale, while men are more likely to have widely differing skills. This means, I presume, that in the particular subset of mathematical skills required for higher mathematics, men are more likely to be geniuses, and more likely to be idiots, than women. The idiots didn't bring home the bison or win Nobel Prizes, but the geniuses did. The idiot men aren't any competition for the genius women; the genius men are serious competition.

Which brings us back to the bell curve.