Humanities: July 2006 Archive Page

"It would have been a major oversight to ignore this portentous anniversary," said Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, whose site now boasts over 4,300,000 articles in multiple languages, over one-quarter of which are in English, including 11,000 concerning popular toys of the 1980s alone. --Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years Of American Independence: Founding Fathers, Patriots, Mr. T. Honored (The Onion (Satire))

In hiring, I look for individuals who demonstrate insatiable intellectual curiosity, critical thinking and analytical skills as well as firm control of the English language. Today, it is important for journalists also to have a sound grounding in science and business/finance. Sadly, I find that it is common to find journalism grads that lack all of these. --J Lawn --Journalism Schools, Degree Requirements and Job Prospects

This is from a comment appended to an article by David Epstein, called "The J-School Boom."

There are serious logical problems posed by any attempt to prove conclusively that a person does not (or did not) exist. No matter how many searches fail to prove the existence of someone, that failure does not negate the person's possible existence. However, when a specific person's specific occupation or background are made relevant as they are here, it is possible to disprove such a person's occupation or background, simply by the absence of official records. (For example, if someone claims to be a Navy SEAL, that claim can be verified or debunked, and there are websites devoted to doing just that.)

The burden of proof, though, normally falls on those asserting that the person exists. In the case of George Harleigh, virtually all quotations and references to him originate with Doug Thompson, a self-described journalist ["newspaperman"] who runs the Capitol Hill Blue web site. -- Eric --Where's George? And Where's Doug? (Classical Values)

I was looking in my server logs and noticed this post from Classical Values is driving some traffic to an old blog entry of mine, about Doug Thompson (of Capitol Hill Blue) admitting that he has been mistakenly publishing quotations -- for 20 years -- from a well-placed source (Terry Wilkinson) that he says turned out to be a hoax. At the time I applauded him for admitting that he made a mistake, though questioned the ethics of erasing the tainted stories (rather than leaving them up with a disclaimer, or at least a notice that says they've been edited to remove references to an unverified source).

Now it seems that another of Thompson's sources, "George Harliegh" might be a fake too. I used Google to search Capitol Hill Blue for "George Harleigh," and found scores of hits; but I clicked on a handful of those links and found no reference to Harleigh on those pages. Capitol Hill Blue's main search engine returns zero hits for "Harleigh," but a search of the Capital Hill Blue forums returns nine references to "Harleigh".

Commenters on Thompson's website report that they found no reference to a George Harleigh in academic databases.

Harleigh, who has been identified by Thomson as a retired political science professor who worked in the Nixon and Reagan administrations, has been providing quotes that are deeply critical of George W. Bush. Quotes that originally appeared on Capitol Hill Blue are reproduced all over the internet (Google returned over 30,000 quotes), but Thompson seems to be the only source for quotes by Harleigh.

Did you hear that Bush called the Constitution "just a goddamned piece of paper"? I've seen that all over the blogosphere. But the only source for that claim is Capitol Hill Blue, as Thompson notes in an article called "In the end, all we have is the truth."

One of things that make you go "hmmm..."

Update, 22 July: Doug Thompson apologizes and quits Capitol Hill Blue.

--Knights of the Round Table -- Star Trek TOS (YouTube)

Amusing. Not side-splittingly funny, like that Bush/Blair mashup that was circulating last year. But still amusing.

Thanks for the suggestion, Rosemary.

Angry mother to preteen girl: "Don't ever tell me to shut up again. That's totally disrespectful. Now go and fill your damn water."Overheard at Soccer Camp (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Although professors may hope to remove obstacles to success, innate personality and other environmental factors may influence learning more than what we are able to offer with the short number of hours we are in contact with students. Yet, there are some tactics that seem to encourage real engagement in undergraduate core classes: --Shari Wilson --Moving Past Survival (Inside Higher Ed)

The 28-year-old, identified only as D.M., took a photo of his speedometer showing 170 km (100 mph) on a back road in northern Croatia and then put it on the Web site of his local municipality.

Police found him three days later. --Hey! Who turned me in? (Reuters)

--Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Beginning Tips (Wikibooks: Blender 3D)

This is just what I was looking for.

I'm still trying to decide whether I should go for broke and introduce my "New Media Projects" students to 3D design for Half-Life 2, where the results will be stunning but the process more fragmented, or be less of a trail-blazer and take advantage of the existing EduFrag community (using Unreal Tournament 2004, which features a more advanced IDE that integrates the design tasks, thus cutting down on the number of times students will have to use little stand-alone applets to convert graphics files and such).

I still want to use the Half-Life 2 system for my own work, but I'm beginning to think that the less-complex UT2004 system will still teach the concepts I want to teach.

So, why do you want to study literature, knowing what you now know?" I wondered if studying a century of cynicism had altered their motives in the slightest.

They were all considering graduate school, but their answers had little to do with what I knew they would need to write in their application essays. Sitting in a circle in the grass, backed by purple hydrangeas, they offered the following motives:

• Formative experiences with reading as a child: being read to by beloved parents and siblings, discovering the world of books and solitude at a young age.
• Feelings of alienation from one's peers in adolescence, turning to books as a form of escapism and as a search for sympathetic connection to other people in other places and times.
• A love for books themselves, and libraries, as sites of memory and comfort.
• A "geeky" attraction to intricate alternate worlds such as those created by Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and George Lucas.
• Contact with inspirational teachers who recognized and affirmed one's special gifts in reading and writing, often combined with negative experiences in other subjects like math and chemistry.
• A transference of spiritual longings -- perhaps cultivated in a strict religious upbringing -- toward more secular literary forms that inspired "transcendence."
• A fascination with history or science that is not grounded in a desire for rigorous data collection or strict interpretive methodologies.
• A desire for freedom and independence from authority figures; a love for the free play of ideas. English includes everything, and all approaches are welcome, they believe.
• A recognition of mortality combined with a desire to live fully, to have multiple lives through the mediation of literary works.
• A desire to express oneself through language and, in so doing, to make a bid for immortality.
• A love for the beauty of words and ideas, often expressed in a desire to read out loud and perform the text.
• An attraction to the cultural aura of being a creative artist, sometimes linked to aristocratic and bohemian notions of the good life.
• A desire for wisdom, an understanding of the big picture rather than the details that obsess specialists.

Those answers defied everything they had been taught in my theory seminar. Nevertheless, they were all, in different degrees, the answers I would have given as an undergraduate. --Thomas H. Benton --Goodbye, Mr. Keating (Chronicle)

An interesting personal essay, that begins as a reflection on Dead Poets Society, a film that I confess I've never seen.

I blog almost every one of Benton's Chronicle essays, though sometimes he lays it on a bit thick. Still, it's not so much the elegiac tone for his idyllic undergraduate experience that attracts me, but the intensity of his self-scrutiny: "You have to spend so many years conforming that, by the time freedom presents itself, you don't know why you became an English major in the first place. You might even have contempt for your seemingly naïve students, who represent the self that you had to repress in order to be a professional."

I remember the time at my previous job where I asked each student in a small, intensive upper-level seminar to prepare a demonstration of an unusual cybertext artifact. I asked one student if she was ready to demonstrate a particular text, and she said she was. After she spent two or three minutes fumbling with the computer to get it started, it became clear she didn't know what she was doing. This was the very first time she had even looked at the text, and she was supposed to carry a class discussion for the next twenty minutes. And she just didn't care. She didn't come to me for help outside of class, she didn't send me an e-mail asking for an extension, she didn't blurt out an apology. And I felt like the bad guy for asking her to sit down.

It's not the naïve students who trouble me -- though I confess I'm glad I don't teach creative writing courses, since I've seen plenty of talented but undisciplined beginning creative writers become paralyzed when they realize just how much time and effort goes into revising, polishing, and proofreading a creative work at the college level.

If students are naïve about their own talents, and if they've complacent and puffed up by the easy As they received in high school, they can burn out and become alienated (especially when, at the same time, they realize the competition is so stiff that they get cut from the team, they don't get called back after auditioning, they run for office and lose, and so forth). So here, the quote from Mr. McAllister seems worth reflecting on -- that asking students to apsire for greatness can be risky: "When they realize they're not all Rembrandts, Shakespeares, or Mozarts, they'll hate you for it."

But underlying that warning is the notion that Rembrandt, Shakespeare and Mozart had so much talent that they didn't have to work hard like the mediocre slobs whose work they outshone. That's getting it all backwards, of course. Of course education, class, the political machinations of patronage and sponsorship, and dumb luck all combine to affect an artist's career, but few people have achieved anything of value without working hard at it. Talent isn't a ticket to easy street. We waste those talents if we don't work extra hard in the very areas where we're primed to succeed.

Dunn, now 40, grew up in suburban New Jersey where most of her friends dreamed of marrying their high-school sweethearts and settling down. She, however, was obsessed with music, and one day in 1989 walked into the offices of Rolling Stone. Despite a bad perm and a lack of street cred, her detailed knowledge of new and old bands got her a job as an editorial assistant.

Dunn says her job has evoked "equal parts self-loathing and excitement" and in her book writes with bravado about her experiences: "On rare occasions, celebs will veer from their carefully bland, publicist-approved sound bites and make a blundering comment that exposes them as vapid or foolish. If this happens, do not examine your conscience. Print their transgression..." --Melissa Whitworth --Barry, Brad, Beluga, and me (Telegraph)

The best students will learn, retain and understand the material they are taught in class no matter how it is presented. However, there are many students in the class who do not have the attention span to concentrate for the whole lesson, who get distracted or do not do the required reading because they are simply not interested. It is these students who benefit from the circus approach to teaching. --Marc Zimmer --Life in the Circus (Inside Higher Ed)

This observation of Zimmer's isn't presented as a complaint; instead, he sees the situation as an audience awareness issue, and analyzes the various ways that professors can meet the students' desire for inspiration and spectacle.

Mouse potatoes joined couch potatoes, google officially became a verb and drama queens finally found the limelight on Thursday when they crossed over from popular culture to mainstream English language. --Jill Serjeant --Mouse Potatoes and googling go mainstream (Reuters)

--Troy Sterling and the Active and Passive Verbs (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I created this with Impress, the Open Office slideshow presenter, and exported it as a Shockwave file. I'm amazed at how tiny the resulting file is. It looks like a few effects didn't make the transition, but they were just eye candy.

I designed this as a simple linear slide show, for me to present in the front of the room. In this online version, all you can do is click to advance to the next page. It should at least have multiple-choice questions, in order to ensure that a bored reader isn't just clicking through on autopilot. (At any rate, it's more entertaining than my more traditional online guide to Active and Passive Verbs.)

This is just a bit of practice, as I continue to experiment with various media production tools.

I've also downloaded Jahshaka, an open-source video editing tool, but it crashed on my little wimpy laptop. I'll try it again when I get some time at the office.

The interactive fiction concept might be spreading. Next year, HarperCollins plans to release Pretty Little Mistakes, a 600-page Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-type novel for adults by Heather McElhatton. Depending on the decisions made by the reader, the main character's options include becoming an actress, an art thief, a cult member, or a murderer. --Aman Batheja --Choose-your-own-adventure novels making a comeback (Star-Telegram)

Well, that's not how I use the term "interactive fiction," but I still enjoyed this author's take on the series.

I was a huge fan of Lucasarts' adventure games (Loom, The Monkey Islands and so on), and the fact that they were primarily word driven. There were graphics - and what graphics! - but for the most part they presented the player with an interesting dichotomy - nothing ever really happened, but you were responsible for it all. You would chat to somebody who would tell you that they wanted a compass, for example, and it was up to you to get that compass. Only, they would never just say "Get me the compass". Instead, it would be a conversation that could take up to twenty minutes, where you found out about the character's history, family, likes and dislikes, and, above all, the reason for them wanting the compass in the first place. --The Encyclopedia Frobozzica (Progression: Following Myself)

A well-done personal reflection on the graphical adventure genre.

So which is more sacred? The right to have your dog crap where it pleases? Or the right to privacy? You be the judge. --Puppy Poo Girl (Japundit)

I think we've all fantasized about somehow "getting back" at people who are rude or inconsiderate in public. Did the young woman in question lose her right to privacy because her dog had an accident on the subway, and because she didn't clean up? Did she really extend her middle finger like that, or is that a Photoshop job?

Pitchfork-wielding mobs don't stop to ask such questions.

--The Information Machine (YouTube)

A fascinating vintage piece of rhetoric. It skips a bit in the opening, but settles down quickly.

The images of room-sized computers and stacks of punch cards made me swoon. The narrator's patient voice and the final image -- of a rose fading into a heart -- show an concerted effort to make computer technology into a continuation of the human effort to make functional and beautiful order out of the world, rather than something to fear.

Note the gender-specific roles assigned to the cartoon characters -- a room full of white-coated female operators of some sort is followed by a very white, very male boardroom. We can't fault the film too much for being a product of its time, of course.

The content is visionary for 1957, the year of Sputnik, when science fiction heroes were battling giant mosters and robots that looked like walking water coolers. It's also interesting to see how computer scientists introduced the idea of mathematical simulation to the general public.

"Had you entered any village on Earth in around 3,000 B.C., the first person you would have met would probably be your ancestor," Hein marveled.

It also means that all of us have ancestors of every color and creed. Every Palestinian suicide bomber has Jews in his past. Every Sunni Muslim in
Iraq is descended from at least one Shiite. And every Klansman's family has African roots.

How can this be? --Matt Crenson --Roots of human family tree are shallow (Yahoo | AP)

Some excellent science writing.