We thought that we would never see
A suit to compensate a tree.
A suit whose claim in tort is prest
Upon a mangled tree's behest;
A tree whose battered trunk was prest
Against a Chevy's crumpled crest;
A tree that faces each new day
With bark and limb in disarray;
A tree that may forever bear
A lasting need for tender care.
Flora lovers though we three,
We must uphold the court's decree. --J.H. Gillis, Judge --Fisher v. Lowe, 1999 (Letter of the Law)

Laws are weighed by fools like him.
He's gone too far out on this limb.

"The Little Book of Plagiarism" is inspired by several recent literary scandals, starting with the Kaavya Viswanathan affair. At 17, Viswanathan was paid a $500,000 advance for a deal that included a "chick-lit novel," but when that novel was published, attentive readers noticed that she had copied at least 13 passages from a novel by Megan McCafferty. Posner's eye also falls on Doris Kearns Goodwin, Laurence Tribe, Alan Dershowitz and Stephen Ambrose -- all celebrated scholars who have been accused of plagiarism -- as well as on J. K. Rowling and Dan Brown, whose stratospheric bestsellers were the targets of infringement claims.

But Posner also reminds us that the roster of accused plagiarists also includes William Shakespeare, Martin Luther King Jr. and Vladimir Putin. Both Jonathan Swift and Laurence Sterne, he points out, "denounced plagiarism in words plagiarized from earlier writers." Only recently has plagiarism been elevated to its current high visibility, and only because the availability of search engines such as Google and the mass digitization of books "[have] made it at once easier to commit and easier to detect." --Jonathan Kirsch --'The Little Book of Plagiarism' by Richard A. Posner: Theft or imitation? A respected judge considers the possibilities. (CalendarLive [LA Times])

I was alone and fueling my own self-destructive spiral. Now, I did have one thing which granted me solace: my MUD. For those of you who don't know, I have invested several years of my life into an online roleplaying community. Yeah, I'm a geek. I own 20 sided dice, too. Anyway, what offered me my greatest joy at that time was a collection of items I had on the MUD. These items were unique, most of them one of a kind. Each of them represented a player who had come and gone that I had known and liked or memorable events to me. Each item of this massive collection held strong sentimental value for me. One night as I was sitting on the MUD, as asshole named Horak decided to exploit a bug in the code of the game that he used to deliberately destroy, irrevocably, all the items in my collection. All my memories of people I actually connected to over the past several years of my life when there was no one I could find outside of the MUD to. And those memories were all I had left of those people, each of them gone for good from my life. Those items destroyed were what I found comfort in during times of depression. Now they were all gone and never coming back.

So let me ask everyone who said she was justified this question: when that happened, should I have found Horak and strangled him in his sleep? Would that have been my best option? Could you honestly support me if I'd've done so? If not, how the hell can you support Mrs. Wright? --John Fish --"That was not just a bunch of stuff that got destroyed, it was ME! (John Fish)

John is a student in my Intro to Literary Study class, where we discussed Susan Glaspell's Trifles. It's a one-act play about the murder of a farmer, told from the perspective of two women who unravel the crime, which the playwright presents as revenge for the death of a canary.

Most of the class thought that the death of the canary was the last straw, and that the murder of John Wright was justified.

In class, I had the students all stand up and move to one side of the room if they thought the murder was justified, and the other if they thought it was not. When I asked of the John Wright had killed a baby, would his murder have been justified? There was a huge motion from "no" to "yes." Then I asked whether the murder would be justified if, instead of killing his wife's pet canary, he had killed a cricket. And what about if he had killed his wife's pet worm? The class was far less willing to excuse Mrs. Wright for wanting to get revenge for the death of something less valuable than a canary.

John's question goes even further... what if Mr. Wright had destroyed Mrs. Wright's virtual property?

We'll have to revisit this topic in class next time...

YouTube wanted to build a large enough community before beginning to pay users for their content, he said. "We didn't want to build a system that was motivated by monetary reward. When you start giving money to people from day one-- the people you do attract will just switch to the next provider that's paying more," he said. "We feel we're at the scale now that we'll be able to do that and still have a true community around video."

The system might work such that a video creator who sets a video against music could share revenue with the record label that owns the copyright on the music. --YouTube may share revenue with users (Macworld)

I'm always cautious about citing a source that includes "may" or "might" in the headline. Thanks for the link, Karissa.

Whatever happened to Al Gore's TV station that was supposed to solicit contributions from the audience?

Sequatchie County High School Principal Tommy Layne said that he initially considered it a joke, but that authorities then found the ninth-graders' online MySpace pages and postings that included the word "kill."

[...]

There was no evidence that the girls had weapons or that an attack had been imminent, Huth said.

The girls, ages 14 and 15, were charged with conspiracy to commit criminal homicide late Wednesday and taken to a juvenile facility. A juvenile court detention hearing was set Friday in Dunlap, about 40 miles northwest of Chattanooga. --Girls charged with conspiring to kill classmates, Oprah (CNN)

Yet another example of a case in which the right to the freedom of speech does not include a right to escape the consequences of the choice to exercise free speech.

Of course the mainstream media will jump on this story, since it involves the internet. I certainly hope this doesn't lead to a permanent mark on the records of the girls involved, but I do think it was perfectly appropriate for the school to take some sort of action.

It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting. His particular emotions may be simple, or crude, or flat. The emotion in his poetry will be a very complex thing, but not with the complexity of the emotions of people who have very complex or unusual emotions in life. One error, in fact, of eccentricity in poetry is to seek for new human emotions to express; and in this search for novelty in the wrong place it discovers the perverse. The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.--T.S. Eliot --Tradition and the Individual Talent (Bartleby.com)

A student in one of my classes said that she had always been taught that poetry is an expression of emotion, and she's having trouble assimilating some of T.S. Eliot's claims.

One of my favorite TV shows is Babylon 5. While the creator openly calls himself an agnostic, one of the reasons I like the show is that most of the characters (humans and aliens) have religious motives. One show featured a young monk who dies under horrible circumstances, but who likens his own suffering to the suffering of Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane. Later, the monk's abbot forgives the murderer. The TV show's lead character is shocked that the abbot would be so forgiving, and sort of ashamed that he can't be that forgiving himself.

Fans of the show chatted on the internet... did this show mean that the show's creator, an agnostic, had some sort of religious conversion? Was he starting to believe in the faith he had rejected?

The creator of the show, who also wrote the episode, answered the fans... as an experienced writer, he can create characters who have faith, and he can tell a good story that hinges on that faith, without necessarily believing in that faith. He had told equally powerful stories about aliens sacrificing themselves for their own religious beliefs, but he didn't believe in the planets where those characters were supposed to come from.

Certainly, authors write from their own experience, and perhaps this guy had at one time known faith, or he was just a keen enough observer of people around him and stories that he has read that he was able to touch that segment of the audience that appreciated a moving religious story.

But I think it's a popular myth that great authors have to express their inner emotions in order to create great art, or that the greater the emotion, the greater the art.

People with terrible voices can sing "Happy Birthday" to their children, and it will be a meaningful expression of love, even if it is full of technical errors (off-key, off-tempo, the lyrics are wrong, etc.) that would drive from the room anyone else who isn't part of the family.

The same applies to poetry, or any other medium. For example, here's a singing performance, that's an expression of emotion yet is most certainly NOT good music.

Does her (decided lack) of singing ability have anything to do with her patriotism or her political competency? No. Would she ever make it as a lounge singer if she wasn't already a political celebrity? No.

It's hard to imagine what freshmen think when they wander into Professor Banzai's lecture hall. Weller reports that he loses a lot of students after the first class. "They thought they were going to get the easy A from old RoboCop," he says with a laugh. The 450-page course reader tells them otherwise. Those who stay get a view into Weller's two worlds. For example, his class at Syracuse on Hollywood and the Roman Empire requires watching toga-and-sandal epics (Ben Hur and The Last Temptation of Christ among them) and reading primary-source Roman authors in an attempt to reconcile big-screen Rome with the real thing. "The Romans were an unbelievably complex people, and we are an unbelievably complex people," Weller says. "We can learn so much about why things are the way they are by looking at what they did." He goes on to explain how the absence of the concept of zero in Greek antiquity laid the foundation for Western philosophical thought. --Mike Daisey --RoboCop, Ph.D (Wired)

Peter Weller, the actor who played RoboCop and Buckaroo Banzai is working towards a Ph.D. in classical history. Cool!

I have said that Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. In this mood successful composition generally begins, and in a mood similar to this it is carried on; but the emotion, of whatever kind and in whatever degree, from various causes is qualified by various pleasures, so that in describing any passions whatsoever, which are voluntarily described, the mind will upon the whole be in a state of enjoyment. Now, if Nature be thus cautious in preserving in a state of enjoyment a being thus employed, the Poet ought to profit by the lesson thus held forth to him, and ought especially to take care, that whatever passions he communicates to his Reader, those passions, if his Reader's mind be sound and vigorous, should always be accompanied with an overbalance of pleasure. --William Wordsworth --Preface to Lyrical Ballads (Bartleby.com)

I'm taking a break from responding to an essay written by an "Intro to Literary Study" student who expressed frustration that a composition instructor (not me) who picked apart an essay about the death of the student's grandmother. When students are too close to the emotions that inspire them to write, they don't always see the value in thinking of the poem as a tool in which to re-create those same emotions in the reader.

My partner once worked at a college in South Carolina. Her chair was from the Northeast, and when she had first arrived on campus, she was very concerned about fitting into the Southern culture of politeness and manners. When the first student came to her to explain that her grandmother had died, and that she could not make the midterm because of the funeral, this professor contacted the student affairs office, got the student'shome address, and sent a condolence card to the family.

Guess what? The grandmother wasn't dead. I bet Thanksgiving was a real hoot for that family, that year.

Ever since, the professor makes a point of sending cards to the families when she hears of a death or severe illness. -- Maruice Milieur in a comment responding to the article by Terry Caesar --The Time of Dead Grandmothers (Inside Higher Ed)

That's brilliant. Just brilliant.

I was taking a break from marking papers and idly Googled to see whether any rhet/comp folks had written about freshman comp papers dealing with the death of grandparents. Students who expect to be praised for writing a moving tribute to a loved one can be shocked when the instructor moves quickly from a brief expression of sympathy to a list of grammar and organization suggestions.

Students who write "I'll never forget how I felt when I heard the news" are still reeling from the emotion, which feels very present to them; but if they just list the kinds of things they used to do with their grandmother, they are not communicating effectively to a reader who does not already love the person whose life they wish to commemorate. If they make technical errors like describing their own facial expressions as if a TV camera is on their face, forcing the reader to use an external point of view to guess at the emotional state of a first-person limited narrator, then we're not doing our jobs if we just say "I can tell you miss our grandmother" and give them an A for being a loving grandchild.

We can, and should, do our jobs with tact and kindness. I have read so many "How Much I Miss My Dead Grandparent" or "My Scary Car Crash" or "My Harrowing Illness" or "My Big Game" essays in which students make the exact same mistakes, but there is always a person on the other end of the story, for whom these experiences are powerful and personal, and who has carefully chosen this particular story as the one he or she wants to tell for the personal essay assignment.

While plenty of professors have complained about the lack of accuracy or completeness of entries, and some have discouraged or tried to bar students from using it, the history department at Middlebury College is trying to take a stronger, collective stand. It voted this month to bar students from citing the Web site as a source in papers or other academic work. --Scott Jaschik --A Stand Against Wikipedia (Inside Higher Ed)

A commenter makes the point I wanted to make: "Why is this even an article about Wikipedia? Citing 'World Book [Encyclopedia]' would be twice as bad."

Well, maybe not twice as bad, but the problem is that any encyclopedia collects knowledge distilled from other sources. An academic research paper should use those direct sources, not summaries pulled together by encyclopedia writers (whether those writers be experienced professionals or amateurs).

Administrators at the Louisiana public university directed editors of the weekly student newspaper, the Gramblinite, to suspend publication this month, citing a range of reasons. Grambling officials said that the newspaper was rife with errors and misspellings and that advertisers and local groups had complained about its lack of professionalism, and they cited a sports article that was plagiarized in large part from a local newspaper.

[...]

But late Thursday, administrators reportedly lifted their suspension of the publication, after reaching an agreement with the students that will require the newspaper's adviser to edit each article for grammar and style before it appears. --Scrutiny for the Student Press? (Inside Higher Ed)

It's stories like this that make me really, really, really appreciate the students who run -- and edit! -- our paper (for which I am the adviser).

As I discussed this type of stuff with a self-fashioned hedge fund manager friend, he determined to sink a more sizable amount into testing the Second Life market. After all, talk about uncorrelated returns. He'd read about Second Life in increasingly more sophisticated business and financial press. The Economist, The Financial Times, etc. All of which touted the large and exponentially growing size of the SL "economy". So a mere $10,000 USD shouldn't be but a drop in the bucket, given the fact SL was supposedly producing virtual millionaires.

Once we started playing with real money in SL, however, the truth about the supposed economy therein quickly came to light:

• You can earn a lot of Linden dollars in SL, in fact fairly rapidly sometimes, but...
  
• If you can actually collect your SLLs from your counterparty - which turns out to be an enormous problem - you can't cash them out for USD easily or profitably.

It turns out that inside the game, counterparty risk is tremendous. In fact, entire banks will suddenly disappear. --Virtual world's supposed economy is 'a pyramid scheme' (Valleywag)

I don't know what any of this means, but I wouldn't have considered investing any money in SL anyway. I really haven't the time to play subscription-based games. Still, I had been a bit surprised by all the mainstream press that SL has been getting.

The search for better spies led the NCS to set up shop on Facebook, which is used primarily by college students. Every Facebook user has her or his own page, and users can choose to join Facebook "groups," which can be created by individuals or sponsored by companies as paid promotions. The NCS-sponsored Facebook group was launched on Dec. 19, 2006 and will stay active for two months. The group currently has over 2,100 members, up from around 200 one week after its debut. --Chaddus Bruce --CIA Gets in Your Face(book) (Wired)

Thanks for the link, Karissa.

--[Hand-made Star Wars] (YouTube)

Very dorky, but in a totally awesome, very cool way.

All those who post unauthorized advertisements, trackback links or pingback links for the purpose of advertising or search engine result position placement benefits, hereby grant to Edward Mitchell and Common Sense Technology a royalty free license to all intellectual property contained on the web site to which you have linked beginning from the date your first such unauthorized comment was posted for a period of 75 years. In consideration of the free Internet ad space that you would have otherwise stolen from me, you agree to compensate me by granting a license to use all material on the linked web site without attribution or credit given to you. --ATTENTION UNAUTHORIZED ADVERTISERS... (Common Sense Technology)

Well, that's one way to deal with comment and trackback spam.

BEIJING (Reuters) - A Chinese thief has returned a mobile phone and thousands of yuan he stole from a woman after she sent him 21 touching text messages, Xinhua news agency said on Monday.
ADVERTISEMENT

Pan Aiying, a teacher in the eastern province of Shandong, had her bag containing her mobile phone, bank cards and 4,900 yuan ($630) snatched by a man riding a motorcycle as she cycled home on Friday, Xinhua said, citing the Qilu Evening News.

Pan first thought of calling the police but she decided to try to persuade the young man to return her bag.

She called her lost phone with her colleague's cell phone but was disconnected. Then she began sending text messages.

"I'm Pan Aiying, a teacher from Wutou Middle School. You must be going through a difficult time. If so, I will not blame you," wrote Pan in her first text message which did not get a response.

"Keep the 4,900 yuan if you really need it, but please return the other things to me. You are still young. To err is human. Correcting your mistakes is more important than anything," Pan wrote.

She gave up hope of seeing her possessions again after sending 21 text messages without a reply.

But on her way out on Sunday morning, she stumbled over a package that had been left in her courtyard only to discover it was her stolen bag. Nothing had been taken.

"Dear Pan: I'm sorry. I made a mistake. Please forgive me," a letter inside said.

"You are so tolerant even though I stole from you. I'll correct my ways and be an upright person." --China phone thief repents after 21 text messages (Yahoo! | Reuters (will expire))

An uplifting human-interest story.

Han and Luke get medals but Chewie doesn't. Actually, Leia offers him one but Chewie turns it down. He got one of those things from Yoda about 20 years ago, but there's no way he can tell her that. --A New Sith, or Revenge of the Hope (Mornignstar)

A great little detail that really helps this fan re-interpretation of the first Star Wars trilogy, in what we learned about the backstory during the second trilogy.

A good dose of Occam's Razor would wipe out much of this essay, but it was still fun to read.

Even something as seemingly straightforward as asking for the salt involves thinking and communicating at two levels, which is why we utter such convoluted requests as, "If you think you could pass the salt, that would be great."

Says Pinker: "It's become so common that we don't even notice that it is a philosophical rumination rather than a direct imperative. It's a bit of a social dilemma. On the one hand, you do want the salt. On the other hand, you don't want to boss people around lightly.

"So you split the difference by saying something that literally makes no sense while also conveying the message that you're not treating them like some kind of flunky." --Peter Calamai --Of thought and metaphor (Toronto Star)

--New Model 500 height adjustable workstation: ideal for standing, seated or supine work positions. (Office Organix)

Strap me down, slap an IV in my arm, and I'll get all my work done -- all of it!

Even now, the thought of going on the academic job market seems so spiritually suicidal that I would rather abandon my career altogether than submit to the scrutiny of another semihostile search committee. As far as I can tell, the hiring process in English favors psychopaths with ice water in their veins, which explains a lot about the changing climate of the profession.

Mind you, I am not bashing the leadership of the MLA -- which is, of course, full of well-meaning mandarins (God bless them, every one) -- so much as I am lamenting the unstoppable transformation of a gentle, harmless occupation into a cannibalistic nightmare straight out of Goya. --Thomas Benton --A Christmas Present from the MLA (Chronicle)

This is the most cynical, bleakest essay I've seen from Benton. Perhaps he feels he's doing his duty by scaring away more would-be graduate students. I regularly share Benton's "Conference Man" reflections with students who are thinking about graduate school, but I think this essay goes well beyond unpleasant realism.

Benton refers to a 4/4 teaching load in a list of the "just about anything" that successful job seekers will have to face on the road to tenure.

That's my load.

There are times when it drives me crazy. Fortunately, I haven't been getting any pressure to publish a second book; I've been getting lots of positive feedback from my chair and my dean, I can't think of a single colleague whom I dislike; we have an active support staff that takes a lot of the pressure off of me when it comes to dealing with students who have bad attitudes. I've taught some students four, six, or eight times, which means I get to watch them develop from doe-eyed freshmen to intellectually mature adults; I've taught certain courses enough times that I have the luxury of tweaking my teaching materials to optimize them, rather than scrambling to figure out what to do each week. I've got the opportunity to propose new courses in areas that interest me. My dean hasn't turned down a travel funidng request yet. (In fact, the limiting factor on my conference travel is not travel support from the dean, but the amount of time my wife is willing to let me spend away from home.)

Quite frankly, a 3/3 load would make a huge difference in my productivity. Last semester, my dean asked me to take an overload, so a normal load will feel like a break. But when a January course that I had planned was canceled, I asked not to be assigned a replacement course. So this term, I'll get a taste of what a 3/3 load would really be like.

As a grad student, I never imagined that the biggest barrier to getting published would be time -- as in, at any moment there are a half dozen CFPs that are jumping up and down screaming my name, and one by one the deadlines whoosh by.

This term, I have a MWF class, and then a class that meets only on Tuesday, and another class that meets only on Thursday. Of course, with committee work and office hours and such, the day fills up pretty quickly. Also, because my wife is now teaching an evening course, I have to leave work early in the afternoon order to watch the kids while she prepares her lecture.

Last term, I was so tightly scheduled that I only had one four-hour block of unscheduled time -- that was the only spot where I could hope to get any serious reading or writing done. This term I'll have several such blocks. And I plan to use them.

"I was going to do gift bags, but I was going to do them right," Zwicky recalled. The party had a train theme, so she got sticks and bandannas and made "hobo packs" that included animal crackers and bubble solution.

Zwicky said that party was a turning point for her. She helped found Birthdays Without Pressure. --Parents turn against birthdays gone wild (Yahoo | AP (will expire))

Moms get sucked into planning and organizing overly complex birthday parties.

They get fed up with the competition among moms.

Moms get sucked into planning and organizing a movement to abolish overly complex birthday parties.

They get fed up with the competition among movements organized by moms who are fed up with competition among the organizations devoted to abolishing organizations that are competitive movements.

Moms get sucked into planning and organizing a movement against moms being sucked into planning and organizing movements devoted to... um... oh, forget it.

Six students, led by Engineering junior Tal Raviv, began a ceremonious walk outside Huntsman Hall at noon and processed east toward College Green, where they chanted phrases like "No more protests!" and "Down with activism!" -- Daily Pennsylvanian, "A Rally to End All Rallies

Because of the popularity of audio books, Lowe commissioned Bill Uden, a performing-arts student at Carmarthenshire College in Wales, to record readings from her book in his college's studio. Lowe, who found Uden through a "blogging friend," began releasing the podcasts along with her regular posts this month.

And like many writers who publish their work online, Lowe isn't just angling for a book contract.

"It would be disingenuous for me to say I don't want to be read, so I'd be perfectly amenable to paper and ink, though I'd be adamant about releasing my work online at the same time," Lowe wrote. "At the center of my work is a strong conviction in open culture, freely available to all. --Katie Haegele --The word on technology: A new column on online literature (Philly.com)

The first installment of a bi-weekly column on digital literature.

The ubiquity of the cell phone camera means that every moment in our lives is photographable. One consequence of this is an altered perception of the gravity of our day-to-day routines. We are now more aware of ourselves as observers of "history." When a van catches fire in front of our house, we and our neighbors are now out on the lawn recording. We e-mail this to our friends, who testify to the enormity of the event, and then we all await the next sensation. This impulse can be positive, but it also fuels the increasingly destructive American habit of oversharing. The snapshot speaks with a small voice: I'm alive and I saw this. The cell phone camera picture or video is a shout from the rooftop: Check out this crazy thing that happened to me. --Michael Agger --The Camera Phone: The Gadget that Perverts, Vigilantes, and Celebrity Stalkers Can All Agree On (Slate)

--toxickaty --Pac-Man Bathroom (Flickr | toxickaty)

Awesome.

The encouragement of wisdom requires a special kind of education. It requires first of all recognition of one's own intellectual limits and fallibilities--in a word, humility. This is perhaps the most conspicuously missing part of today's education of the gifted. Many high-IQ students, especially those who avoid serious science and math, go from kindergarten through an advanced degree without ever having a teacher who is dissatisfied with their best work and without ever taking a course that forces them to say to themselves, "I can't do this." Humility requires that the gifted learn what it feels like to hit an intellectual wall, just as all of their less talented peers do, and that can come only from a curriculum and pedagogy designed especially for them. That level of demand cannot fairly be imposed on a classroom that includes children who do not have the ability to respond. The gifted need to have some classes with each other not to be coddled, but because that is the only setting in which their feet can be held to the fire.

The encouragement of wisdom requires mastery of analytical building blocks. The gifted must assimilate the details of grammar and syntax and the details of logical fallacies not because they will need them to communicate in daily life, but because these are indispensable for precise thinking at an advanced level.

The encouragement of wisdom requires being steeped in the study of ethics, starting with Aristotle and Confucius. It is not enough that gifted children learn to be nice. They must know what it means to be good. --Charles Murray --Aztecs vs. Greeks: Those with superior intelligence need to learn to be wise. (Opinion Journal)

Wow, some challenging, exciting stuff. I'm taking a break from polishing my syllabi, and I'm glad I came across this.

When I was preparing for my dissertation defense, I knew in advance that my evaluators had every intention of pushing me until I broke. I don't mean that I thought they were out to get me, just that their goal was explicitly to see how well-prepared I was to be a fully-fledged member of the community of scholars. If it had been a job interview, I could have imagined a scenario in which I gave the "right answer" to every question, such that the evaluators would stop asking questions once I satisfied their concerns one way or the other.

Not so with the Ph.D defense. My goal there was to delay the point where I cracked, so that it was as near the end of the hour as possible. In order to support a minor point in my analysis of A Streetcar Named Desire, I mentioned Blanche's reference to Edgar Allan Poe. I know I looked it up when I originally wrote that chapter, but years later when my reader asked me to comment further on it, I drew a blank. I said "I could speculate if you like, but I'd feel more comfortable looking that up."

That was when I saw my professors clicking their pens shut and sitting back in their chairs. Even though I didn't answer the question, I was comfortable enough to admit my limitations.

Am I wise yet? Can I really teach wisdom if I still make stupid mistakes? It's a challenging task.

I'd like to think I've gotten better at teaching students rather than teaching a subject. I'd like to think that my students are learning ethics and other intellectual virtues, along with where the punctuation marks go.

The nefarious enemy of all that is good, the right paddle, has performed an act of agression against our sovereign right side by hitting the ball back in our direction.
If we act fast, we may be able to intercept the ball. It is aimed for directly above our paddle!

Move the great paddle up!
Hold the paddle steady!
Lower the paddle!

Score:

You: 0
Him: 0 --Pong: The Text-Based Game (Karber.net)

If you checked out the Newsweek article that I mentioned last time, you were subjected to the above image, with multiple Oscar-winning actor Tom Hanks all dolled up in hi-tech mo-cap gear. Here is where Warner Bros' marketing was really banking on the prestige of Hanks getting all dirty, showing that he's willing to go the extra mile to give us, the audience, something worth watching. But, unfortunately, we are given the actual image from the movie from where this performance was captured. A "before and after" scenario, I guess. It's all too telling, if you ask me. Do you see what's happened from Point A to Point B? Somehow they spent millions of dollars to literally take the soul out of an Oscar-winning actor's performance. That's quite a feat!

I sat there just staring at this image, trying to figure out what happened. What exactly is going on here? Why does the image on the top look so engaging, so vibrant, so full of life, but the image on the bottom - which is supposed to be the exact same performance of the actor "captured" by the computer - look so dead and puppet-like? --Ward Jenkins --The Polar Express: A Virtual Train Wreck (conclusion) (Ward O Matic)

An animator re-touches images from The Polar Express, to show how to bring life back into the 3D characters who looked like automatons in the finished film.

The science fiction drug is available everywhere to kids, in superhero comics, on TV, in the movies, in books and magazines. It is impossible to avoid exposure, to avoid the least hint of excitement at Marvel Comics superheroes and Star Trek reruns and Star Wars, impossible not to become habituated even before kindergarten to the language, clichés, basic concepts of science fiction. Children's culture in the contemporary US is a supersaturated SF environment. By the time a kid can read comic books and attend a movie unaccompanied by an adult, his mind is a fertile environment for the harder stuff. Even the cardboard monsters of TV reruns feed the excitement. The science fiction habit is established early.

In some cases, accompanied by the hosannas of proud parents, a bright kid focuses his excitement on the science part and goes on to construct winning exhibits in school science fairs, avoid being arrested for computer hacking, obtain scholarships, and support proud parents in their old age with his honorable gains as a career corporate technologist. Most often, a kid freezes at the gosh-wow TV/comics/movies stage and carries an infatuation with fantastic and absurd adventure into later life. But sometimes, usually by the age of twelve, a kid progresses to reading science fiction in paperback, in magazines, book club editions-wherever he can find it, because written SF offers more concentrated excitement. This is the beginning of addiction; he buys, borrows, even steals all the science fiction he can get his hands on and reads omnivorously for months or even years, sometimes until the end of high school years, sometimes a book or more a day. But the classic symptom is intense immersion in written SF for at least six months around age twelve. --David G. Hartwell --Age of Wonders

I was 12 in 1980. I had finished all the Lester Del Ray classics that were in my local library, and I was getting into Larry Niven (particularly the Ringworld series). There were also a handful of Star Trek paperbacks -- and the publication pace was picking up, since the Star Trek movies had just started coming out. My brother was into the Foundation and Dune epics, but for some reason I never followed him there.

I found a reference to this essay on Machina Memorialis, and thought I'd see what Google would turn up.

The researchers found that the games can provide opportunities for achievement, freedom and even a connection to other players. Those benefits trumped a shallow sense of fun, which doesn't keep gamers as interested. Players reported feeling the best when the games produced positive experiences and challenges that connected to what they knew in the real world.

"It's our contention that the psychological 'pull' of games is largely due to their capacity to engender feelings of autonomy, competence and relatedness," said Ryan. He believes that video games not only motivate further play but "also can be experienced as enhancing psychological wellness, at least short-term." --Why Video Games May Be Hard to Give Up (Yahoo! | Health Day News (will probably expire))

The actual academic article doesn't appear to be online, but this report cites the the January issue of Motivation and Emotion.

Diamond Age, based on Neal Stephenson's best-selling novel The Diamond Age: Or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, is a six-hour miniseries from Clooney and fellow executive producer Grant Heslov of Smokehouse Productions.

When a prominent member of society concludes that the futuristic civilization in which he lives is stifling creativity, he commissions an interactive book for his daughter that serves as a guide through a surreal alternate world. Stephenson will adapt his novel for the miniseries, the first time the Hugo and Nebula award winner has written for TV. --Clooney, Others Develop SCI FI Shows (SciFi.com)

Hot diggity damn!

I just hope it doesn't suck.