January 2007 Archive Page

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.
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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.

"The 2007 National Freshman Attitudes Report," a survey by Noel-Levitz of nearly 100,000 incoming freshmen at 292 public and private two- and four-year colleges, finds that men and women share high expectations for getting a degree, "no matter what obstacles get in my way." But male students at the same time report coming into college with far less ambitious intellectual interests and sharply lesser study habits than their female counterparts. Even so, male students in general express greater confidence in their academic abilities than do female students. --Doug Lederman --Clues About the Gender Gap (Inside Higher Ed)

Publishing a Short Story (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

A handout on my website, Short Stories: Top 10 Tips for Novice Creative Writers, is currently turning up pretty high in the Google rankings. Every so often I get an e-mail from someone asking for advice.

What advice I give depends on how serious the author is. Since I am not myself an author of short fiction, I'm not the most qualified to answer.

Someone who asks a stranger on the internet where one might publish a short story probably isn't already reading the periodicals that publish short fiction. If you aren't reading the periodicals that publish short fiction, you probably don't have a very good idea of what kind of short fiction is actually selling these days. If you don't have an idea of what kind of short fiction is selling these days, then it might be a bit premature to expect to make a sale anytime soon.

On the other hand, if being published is more important than getting paid, there are many college and community literary magazines in just about every community.

(More later... I was called away.)

Update, 16 Jan: I have spruced up the short story handout. I'll probably tweak it again after my next batch of students submits a (very) short story.

E-mail is , of course, cheaper and encourages quicker thought, and it introduces a peculiar blend of the personal and professional. The AIP historians have also detected a decline in the use of lab notebooks, finding that data are often stored directly into computer files. Finally, they have noted the influence of PowerPoint, which can stultify scientific discussion and make it less free-wheeling; information also tends to be dumbed down when scientists submit PowerPoint presentations in place of formal reports.

Generally, though, these new communications techniques are good for scientists, encouraging rapid communication and stripping out hierarchies. But for historians, they are a mixed blessing. It is not just that searching through a hard disk or database is less romantic than poring over a dusty box of old letters in an archive. Nor is it that the information in e-mails differs in kind from that in letters. Far more worrying is the question of whether e-mail and other electronic data will be preserved at all. --Robert P. Crease --The lost art of the letter (Physics Web)

When I write major projects, I typically save multiple drafts under different file names. But for routine work, like many people out there, I just save the new work over top of the old. I can see that denies future historians access to rough drafts.

While I doubt future historians will ever comb through my materials, the point is that historical methods will have to change to account for the fact that much of our writing is ephemeral and interactive, which means future historians will likely have to spend more time reading e-mail exchanges and tracking down obscure references to data that is no longer available, rather than reading stand-alone essays.

I recall reading that as people started doing more of their daily work via telephone, historians faced difficulty piecing together events that in a previous century would have left a paper trail. E-mail is at least more friendly to archivists than telephone conversations.

What's it actually like? Does it exploit the tragedy for cheap thrills? Or does it actually have artistic merit -- offering a new way to think about Columbine?

Right off the bat, Ledonne tries to put his critics off guard by delivering precisely the opposite of what you'd expect. Nobody will be able to use Super Columbine to live out explicit fantasies of gore or train themselves to shoot up a high school.

That's because it's anything but a graphically sophisticated, blood-soaked shoot-em-up. On the contrary, Super Columbine was designed to look like a clunky Nintendo game from the mid '90s, with low-rez, pixilated characters the size of sugar cubes, and cheesy MIDI music. When you kill someone, the avatar looks like a mashed red blot.

What strikes you, instead, is Ledonne's attention to narrative detail. He painstakingly researched the killers' life stories using publicly released police investigations of the pair, and the game thus includes all manner of detail I never knew. When I started off in Harris' house, I found a box of Luvox, an antidepressant he was on that prevented him getting into the Marines. When I met up with Klebold in a basement, we sat down in front of the VCR to watch the "I've seen the horror" speech from Apocalypse Now, a movie they apparently loved. --Clive Thompson --I, Columbine Killer (Wired)

I've been sick or caring for sick family members for most of the break, so I haven't had the chance to write my thoughts about "Super Columbine Massacre RPG!" -- the game, that is, rather than simply the Slamdance controversy.

Thompson is one of the few voices out there who actually played the game, and can thus argue that "It uses the language of games as a way to think about the massacre. Ledonne, like all creators of 'serious games,' uses gameplay as a rhetorical technique."

Even Twain scholars seem to have missed his foresight on this subject. I discovered it by accident, in browsing through the 24 volumes of his collected works in the "Author's National Edition." In an 1898 short story called "From the 'London Times' of 1904," he describes an invention called the "telelectroscope," a gadget hooked up to the phone system: "The improved 'limitless-distance' telephone was presently introduced, and the daily doings of the globe made visible to everybody, and audibly discussable too, by witnesses separated by any number of leagues." --Crawford Killian --Mark Twain, Father of the Internet (Tyee)

I enjoy teaching Forster's The Machine Stops (1909) each year, but I hadn't heard of Mark Twain's story, "From the 'London Times' of 1904."

Killian concludes:

It is all very melodramatic, but Twain clearly understood the basic concept of the Internet: effortless world travel through an electronic medium. Just past the centenary of his imagined "telelectroscope," we who surf the web should pause to thank America's greatest author -- a man ahead of his time in more ways than one.

The story is not a particularly good technological thriller, yet the story seems to be as much about Dreyfuss Affair as it is about the telelectroscope. Given that context, I think the story is worth a closer look.

The 1954 American Quarterly article "Mark Twain and the Austrian Edison" refers to Twain's interest in Jan Szczepanik. Szczepanik, the inventor whose death is blamed on the innocent Clayton, is not merely a character on Twain's story, but an historical figure, among whose many inventions was a forerunner of the television called the telelectroscope.

The term telelectroscope predated both Szczepanik's invention and Mark Twain's story. Twain himself was an early adopter of technology, perhaps most notably the typewriter; to him, an inventor was a "poet in steel." Yet, cynical as always, in this story he demonstrates that the wonders of technology do not change human nature. As new types of evidence emerge, twisted human nature will continue to distort reason in the service of old prejudices. The crime story exists merely to set up this political statement, on a topic of great concern to literary figures and intellectuals at the time.

If I had the time, I might also investigate what Twain was talking about when he mentioned a "new paragraph added to the Constitution in 1899." Was that just a plot device to get around the double-jeopardy rule in the US legal system, or would the original audience have recognized it as a reference to something that was being debated at the time, just as the original audience would have understood the "French precedent" to be a reference to the Dreyfus affair?

Recently, I tried to help a faculty member at my college submit a grant proposal to a National Institutes of Health competition. I soon discovered that one can no longer submit a grant to NIH directly. One has to submit it through Grants.gov. I estimate that it took me more than 25 hours to try to submit the grant. After 37 error messages (I have them saved, because no one would believe me without cyber evidence), I am still not sure the proposal was received.--Carol Kolmerten --Why Grants.gov Should Be Abolished (Chronicle)

This article struck terror into my once-hopeful heart.

The [Association of American Colleges and Universities] report outlines curricular goals for all colleges, but they are not of the "two semesters of science, two courses in writing" variety. Instead they are four broad "essential learning outcomes," with the idea that different kinds of institutions would assure these outcomes in different ways. Generally, the outcomes would encourage rigor of preparation, interdisciplinary and team learning, and links between experiences in and out of the classroom.

The outcomes are:

• Knowledge of human cultures and the physical and natural world, which would include study of traditional arts and sciences disciplines.
  
• Intellectual and practical skills, such as critical and creative thinking, written and oral communication, and quantitative literacy.
  
• Personal and social responsibility, such as civic knowledge and engagement, "intercultural knowledge and competence," the ability to reason about ethics, and understanding of lifelong learning.
  
• Integrative learning, including the ability to synthesize information and engage in both general and specific study.

--New Definition for Liberal Education (Inside Higher Ed)

The report is called College Learning for the New Global Century (PDF). I think SHU's educational objectives hold up pretty well against this document.

The primary focus of this conference is to explore the growing cultural importance of interactive media. All scholarship on digital interactive media, such as computer games, mixed realities and interactive fiction, as well as users, including adults and children, will be considered in one of four broad conference streams: --Interacting with Immersive Worlds (Brock University)

The CFP deadline is Feb 16, in Ontario. I won't be able to go, but it still looks interesting.

Mexican food in the united states is like the bow legged asthmatic cousin of real Mexican food. --Jonathan Stewart --Tacos, toilets and a glass of tap water! (Mexican Civilization)

I have been enjoying the blogging that is currently being posted by students of my division chair, John Spurlock.

I have seen it, touched it, and played with it. The final industrial design prototype for the XO, the device that the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Initiative is going to start shipping to countries across the world this summer. AMD hosted a luncheon on Monday to give the press an update on the project, and to unveil the completed design. --James Turner --Notes From a Senior Editor: A Close Look at the OLPC (Linux Today)

This story isn't getting nearly as much attention as the iPhone, but I think OLPC will make a bigger difference to more people.

Whatever one thinks of the game's content, the game went through an extensive judging process and was deemed a finalist by a jury of game experts. To have the game pulled based on either pressure from backers or a fear of liability is to say that independent games do not deserve the same respect and conscientious protection by artistic venues as independent films. Would a difficult, perhaps controversial, film be pulled from the festival under the same circumstances? Of course not -- and it had never happened in the history of the festival. That is the point of having a festival such as Slamdance, to confront those moments when media and sensibility and culture are in conflict. To offer a place where the independent independents can be seen, appreciated, lauded or condemned -- but not hidden or refused.

[...]

[A] festival honoring a "philosophy of design" must be open to more than just beautiful independent games or independent games that make us feel good; and, that those striving to support independent game making must be ready to defend games that are difficult and provocative in terms of their content, as well as games that are challenging and innovative in their game play. We support such games and it is in that spirit that we withdraw our sponsorship. --USC Interactive Media Division Withdraws Slamdance Sponsorship (Ludicidal Tendencies)

The fallout over Slamdance's decision to pull Super Columbine Massacre RPG! continues.

You know something is seriously changing in a genre when a masked serial killer invites you to check out his "blog". Such a gesture is obviously a solicitation of interactive engagement -- a marketing scheme intended to solicit an investment of attention and to mollify a fan base, with the promise of giving a web-savvy audience member "something extra" for free online. --Michael A. Arnzen --Scary New Media (Dissections)

A little later in the article, Arnzen offers a good discussion of new media horror as an expression of anxiety over new media itself.

I don't get cable TV, and it has been so long since I have followed any TV series closely enough to consider this sort of thing. I do remember reading something about a controversy in that the cast of a particular show had agreed to air a certain number of short web-only episodes, but the studio execs refused to pay them extra for their work, so the episodes stopped.

As I understand it, YouTube has recently limited its clip lengths to 10 minutes, which is slightly longer than the average content hole in between the commercial breaks, and about the same length as the amount of film that the old movie cameras could shoot in one stretch.

This is getting off topic, but I'll push on anyway.

Just today, Steve Jobs announced that he was changing the name of Apple Computers to Apple Inc, and he unveiled a new iPhone and a TV appliance that is supposed to sync your video files across your various video appliances. Some observers are predicting that the iPod is pretty much dead, but the new iPhone also looks pretty expensive, to those who don't have executive epxense accounts to finance their toy purchases. At any rate, you can bet that we're going to see a lot of hype for hand-held video. Way back in the dark ages, families used to gather in the living room to watch the same shows. Once you had cable TV, more channels meant it was likely that different family members would watch different things.

Occasionally when our DVD player has been out, I have offered to watch a movie with my wife on my laptop computer, but she rejected the idea. To her, a computer is something you use when you are working. I don't really watch many DVDs on my computer, but I do from time to time. And I'm fortunate enough that I have a job where I can tell myself that watching Blade Runner or playing an IF game is research, which it is.

I'm still more likely to want to build a Half-Life 2 level or program an IF game for relaxation if I can find a few unbroken hours to block out for such activities. (Blogging is typically what I do when I know I'm going to be interrupted, or when I'm too sick to concentrate, which has been the case for the past week.)

To "pluto" is "to demote or devalue someone or something," much like what happened to the former planet last year when the General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union decided Pluto didn't meet its definition of a planet. --'Plutoed' chosen as '06 Word of the Year (Yahoo | AP (will expire))

The influence of newspaper and magazine critics is on the wane. People don't care to be lectured by professionals on what they should read or listen to or see. They're increasingly likely to pay attention to amateur online reviewers, bloggers and Amazon critics like Klausner. Online critics have a kind of just-plain-folks authenticity that the professionals just can't match. They're not fancy. They don't have an agenda. They just read for fun, the way you do. --Lev Gossman --Harriet Klausner (Time)

Thanks for the suggestion, Mike.

In an optical or physical sense, the capabilities of modern day computers have really put "reality" immersion within reach. Yet, this aspect of immersion--the "wow it looks so real" factor--has become a crutch and the only pillar of the immersion experience for which most games aim. Maybe it's easier to sell or produce en masse. It seems like a distraction or an eventually empty substitute for what was once the key tenet of the "immersion" experience--the ability to "do anything" in a game.

When it comes down to it, there are only a few things you can do in a modern game--shoot, jump, manoeuvre, open doors, push switches, select weapons, and pick up ammo. Even other games, like strategy and simulation, limit you to a small set of actions. While some games allow you to carry conversations, it is only within a narrow script in which your only real choice is in what order you read what the character has to say. Though a lot of time is spent giving the impression of vast worlds and endless corridors, you really can't just do anything. --Leopold McGinnis --Keyboard power (Adventure Classic Gaming)

I really like this site.

There are no lithe leaps, perfect pirouettes or pointed toes here. Most girls cannot walk or stand, much less make a shallow curtsy. Their crutches and walkers lie nearby and their customized ballet slippers are stretched over leg braces. --Corey KilGannon --Given a Chance to Be Little Ballerinas, and Smiling Right Down to Their Toes (NY Times)

Born with a rare syndrome that left him profoundly autistic, seven-year-old Luke was trapped in his own body. But then his dad took him surfing. --Paul Solotaroff --About a boy (Guardian)

I'm sick with a virus, and I can't do much but read. Oh, and try to find out why my division chair can't log into his weblog from Mexico. This was a pleasant diversion.

I never understood why the dead were painted and made to look alive, but now I see that'snot really the purpose. Watching Joe at work, I see that he restores bodies to a restful state, rather than an unnatural one. They don't look like they?re going to sit up in the casket and say howdy, they look dead. But they look readied for a journey; dressed up, cleaned, and arranged just so. He creates an environment that helps people say goodbye.

I suppose what my brother in law does for a living gives a lot of people the creeps, and sure, there are some creepy aspects to it. It'snot a career for everyone. But when I picture the great web of people he has influenced, whose tears have soaked the shoulder of his suit jackets, whose loved ones? bodies he prepared for their last reunion, I am incredibly proud to know him. --Kicking buckets and whistling in the dark (All & Sundry)

How did I get here? I have no idea, but I was captivated by this story. Had to skip a few paragraphs, but this was beautifully done.

The vast majority of teens who use social networking sites say they use the sites to maintain their current friendships, while half report using the sites to make new friends. Teens say they use social networking sites to stay in touch with friends they see a lot (91% of social networking teens report this), but also to maintain contact with those friends they rarely see in person (82%). Just half of all social networking teens report using the sites to make new friends. --Amanda Lenhart and Mary Madden --Social Networking Websites and Teens: An Overview (Pew Internet & Americal Life Project)

A good source of fresh statistics. I had already noticed that my freshmen are arriving on campus with their online networks already in place, so I'm no longer seeing the intense blog-based bonding that happened at SHU in the fall of 2003 and 2004, when I gave campus blogs to large numbers of freshmen who mostly had no previous online presence. I don't see this as a problem -- the academic blogs are still useful, but fewer students are continuing to blog on their own in between classes. I gather that they are doing their online networking in the commercial spaces rather than at SHU.

Until literature departments take into account that humans are not just cultural or textual phenomena but something more complex, English and related disciplines will continue to be the laughingstock of the academic world that they have been for years because of their obscurantist dogmatism and their coddled and preening pseudo-radicalism. Until they listen to searching criticism of their doctrine, rather than dismissing it as the language of the devil, literature will continue to be betrayed in academe, and academic literary departments will continue to lose students and to isolate themselves from the intellectual advances of our time.

Not everything in human lives is culture. There is also biology. Human senses, emotions, and thought existed before language, and as a consequence of biological evolution. Though deeply inflected by language, they are not the product of language. Language, on the contrary, is a product of them: if creatures had not evolved to sense, feel, and think, none would ever have evolved to speak. --Brian Boyd --Getting It All Wrong: Bioculture critiques Cultural Critique (The American Scholar)

Excess is possible in any discipline. A nuclear scientist who ignores ethics can do far more damage to the world than a literary theorist who is overly fond of semiotics. Perhaps there is a good reason why Boyd chose the invective tone for this essay, but I would have rather read an attempt to synthesize and seek common ground, or to seek out particular schools of literary criticism (Marxism? gender studies? ecocriticism?) that deal specifically with the nature of humanity in its environment. Any assertion that human behavior has a biological foundation is an ideologically charged claim, a rejection of the assertion in gender studies that gender is socially, so perhaps choosing this particular tone is Boyd's way of bracing himself against a likely backlash.

I don't know how Boyd's English department is doing, but English is the only non-vocational major that's still in the top 10 (according to the Princeton Review). Last semester my own English department had a huge influx of majors -- about as many new freshmen as there already were in our sophomore, junior, and senior classes.

I would like to see more English majors minoring in science, or vice-versa. But I've always tried to bridge that chasm. During my high school production of My Fair Lady, the cast bought T-shirts that were one color, and the crew bought T-shirts that were a different color. I asked my mom to do a sleeve transplant, so I could show my allegiance to both cast and crew. That sort of thinking served me very well as I worked on my Ph.D. thesis, which looked at technology as a theme and as a staging component in American drama from 1920-1950.

And while, as I stated earlier, it is possible to get overly fond of any theory, cultural studies that deal with robots, aliens, cyborgs, mutants, zombies, vampires are full of references to the biological. In the last few years, as the World Wide Web has become mainstream in the humanities, we have seen much less breathless gushing about the endless (but vague) possibilities in hypertext (see a rather snarky review I wrote a few years ago, critiquing the navigational hoops through which readers were forced to jump when they attempted to use an issue of the journal Kairos). While undergraduates rarely get much exposure to it, a close ally of the study of literature is the study of books themselves, or more generally the technical, social, and economic forces that influence what gets distributed as "literature". (I'm looking forward to Matt Kirschenbaum's forthcoming book, Mechanisms, but Nick Montfort's conference presentation on the role of continuous paper in early computer history is a great introduction to the subject.) Montfort and Ian Bogost have announced a series of computer game platforms. See also Shelly Jackson, Sherry Turkle, the body of existing scholarship on the study of MUDs, and the emerging scholarship on multiplayer games. While these studies are multidisciplinary rather than purely English, they are firmly rooted in the humanities. And while they don't focus primarily on biology, their emphasis on the materiality of the texts reminds us always of the embodied nature of the act of reading.

While this short list is not likely enough to redeem the excesses of all English departments everywhere, it does offer one possible direction that may avoid the obstacles Boyd sees in the path of traditional literary theory.

Humans communicate with each other through voice inflection, timing, and gesture. "Those capabilities are hard-wired into humans," Pausch explains. "You wouldn't put up with a person who makes you learn how to type commands to him; why should you have to talk to computers that way? Ultimately, we'd like to be able to read facial expressions."

But in the meanwhile, Pausch suggests, we have a lot to learn about the medium itself. "The first movies were made by Thomas Edison and other engineers -- and those movies were really bad. In the same way, the field of virtual reality research is in its infancy. This is the first truly three-dimensional electronic medium, and we have absolutely no idea how to use it." --Virtual Reality for Five Dollars a Day (University of Virginia Computer Science)

This is from a newsletter article I wrote as a employee of the U.Va. engineering school's fund-raising foundation, in 1992. That quote about engineers being the first movie-makers has lodged deep in my brain.

I love you very much. You're so cute. I like the way you talk. You're very very nice to me sometimes. And sometimes you don't talk to me at all. You're my best guy in the whole world. You are loving all the time, and you are so sweet.

I think you are in the desert. I think it's sandy. The desert is a lot like me. I am thirsty. My hair is the color of sand. My sandbox is very fun to play with. You are very lovely, soldier, I like the way you save our world.

Love, Carolyn (age 4 1/2, Greensburg PA)Dear Soldier (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

We sometimes get the kids to send letters and pictures via anysoldier.com. This is the latest.

It's one school frog,
   writing on his blog,
Two school bees,
   writing on their blog,
Three purple snakes,
   writing on their blog,
Four bunnies that are green,
   writing on their blog,
Five pink monkeys,
   writing on their blog.

--Carolyn Jerz, age 4 One School Frog Writing on His Blog (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Here, Bullet

If a body is what you want,
then here is bone and gristle and flesh.
Here is the clavicle-snapped wish,
the aorta's opened valves, the leap
thought makes at the synaptic gap.
[...] --The horror, the horror of Iraq, in poetry (SF Gate.com)

Fascinating reading.

Slamdance finalist Super Columbine Massacre RPG has been officially kicked from the festival due to mounting pressure from protesters and the loss of sponsorship, the game's creator told Kotaku Thursday night.

This is the first time in the Slamdance Festival's 13-year history that a game or film has been removed from the festival due to criticism or outside pressure. --Exclusive: Columbine Game Kicked From Competition (Kotaku)

I cited this game as an example in a paper I gave at the National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education in November. My point was that the young audience that Holocaust educators want to reach has a different set of moral and aesthetic responses to games than the adults who don't have much to say beyond dropping their jaws. The Holocaust deniers and other promoters of hate and violence already have their issue-oriented games out there. While I think it's exaggerating to suggest that a Jew-bashing game is going to have much impact (those games, like the Christian-themed evangelical games typically have poor production values and won't really attract the interest of someone who doesn't already share the world view that the game is trying to promote). There is enough social commentary embedded within this particular RPG that I think it moves beyond cynical exploitation, and really attempts to use a popular medium in an effective way.

The designer, Danny Ledonne, speaks eloquently and thoughtfully about his creation (in this article and elsewhere on Kotaku).

Update, Jan 6: Ian Bogost offers a good overview of the Slandance controversy. It looks like it wasn't external pressure from advertisers after all, but one person's concern about what MIGHT happen if the game were to be part of the show.

I teach plenty of safe classics, but I also teach books that contain disturbing and threatening ideas. I find it amazingly hypocritical that Slamdance (an indie film festival, founded to protest commercialism at Sundance) would override the artistic decisions of the panel that agreed to let the Columbine game into the competition.

In Galway, I went out busking on the streets, singing the filthiest, most debauched lyrics I could think of to see if anyone would understand. No one did - old women smiled, tapping their feet merrily, as I serenaded them with filth. In Killarney, I stood outside a bank promising passers-by huge sums of money if they helped me rob it, but again no one understood. --Manchán Magan --Cá Bhfuil Na Gaeilg eoirí? (Where are all the Gaelic speakers?) (Guardian)

Speaking Irish in Ireland leads to some very interesting encounters. A fascinating slice of post-colonial life.

The reality is that readers have never enjoyed a bigger market for books. Shoppers can buy everything from hot-off-the-press titles in mint condition to out-of-print rarities from secondhand dealers. They can even download audiobooks to their MP3 players and listen to them while jogging or driving to work. Companies such as Google and Microsoft are promising to make enormous amounts of out-of-copyright material available to anyone with a computer and a browser.

The bottom line is that it has never been easier or cheaper to read a book, and the costs of reading probably will do nothing but drop further.

If public libraries attempt to compete in this environment, they will increasingly be seen for what Fairfax County apparently envisions them to be: welfare programs for middle-class readers who would rather borrow Nelson DeMille's newest potboiler than spend a few dollars for it at their local Wal-Mart. --John J. Miller --Checked Out: A Washington-area library tosses out the classics (Opinion Journal)

Harsh, but insightful.

I grew up in Fairfax County. When my mother dropped my older brother and sister off at their piano lesson, she would take me to the library. I vividly remember the day I wandered out of the juvenile section into the adult shelves, and found a whole set of astronomy books I hadn't already checked out six times each.

Comments are Back Up

.... just in case anyone was wondering.

--Vintage Mobile Phones

I'd love to see one with a rotary dial... how cool would that be?

Hammer Dream (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

This morning, I heard my daughter stirring in the next room, and I fell back asleep, knowing I only had a few minutes before I had to start getting her ready for preschool.

In those few minutes, I had a dream.

I was showing my daughter a hammer. It had a squarish head, like a metalworker's square hammer. It had a foam padded handle, that was decorated with a realistic-looking woodgrain pattern. I was trying to amuse my daughter by poking dents in the foam padding, pretending that I was strong enough to make the wood handle squish.

When my daughter realized the trick, I pulled off the foam sheath, revealing the real wood of the hammer under the woodgrain-printed foam covering. I did so in a dramatic fashion, expecting my daughter to laugh, which she did.

Then I noticed that the woodgrain of the hammer was actually a cheap vinyl covering, like you find on cheap office furniture (or the furniture I see all round me here in my basement study). When I peeled off some of that covering, I saw that the handle was actually made of that wood chips-and-sawdust amalgam that makes up the core of plywood.

I wondered how useful a hammer could be if its handle was made up of this stuff. But when I looked even closer, I saw that instead of wood chips, the handle was composed of intricate and detailed little decorative boxes, stacked like Russian dolls. As I watched, the boxes started unfolding, spilling out into geometric patterns like an Escher print. So much wood was involved that I couldn't imagine how it could have all fit into the space occupied by the handle.

The last thing I remember before I woke up was how I could somehow reproduce this event for the benefit of my students.

It was only an hour or so later, after I had driven my daughter to preschool (and was helping her write a page of letters) that it finally hit me... My daughter had given me a hammer for Christmas, and duh, Hammer is the name of one of the 3D design tools I've been using.

Tonight if I have a dream about geometric shapes pouring out of a blender, I'll let you know.

Designing Cabinets in Blender3D -- Experiments (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I designed these simple 3D cabinets in Blender3D, with the idea that I would use this model, which is mostly right angles and cubes with a woodgrain texture and a marble texture, as a simple test when I try bringing custom models into Hammer.

Classes start in about three weeks, and I'll start going back to the office later this week, so I'm getting in a lot of power hacking time while I can still do so. I won't be teaching any courses that use 3D design for some time, but I do hope to make some progress on a few educational games that I've been thinking about. But I've gotta crawl before I can walk, so I'm working on my skills while they're still fresh.

I also got the idea to use the same model to generate a flat 2D texture that I could paint on the walls of my latest Hammer level. If I want to create a room that I want the player to be able to open cabinets and search for stuff, then I would want to use a working model. If the player is just chasing someone past these cabinets, I could paint the texture onto a flat wall, and use the texture itself as a guide for pulling cubes out of the wall, so that the cabinets look more realistic. Since the texture already comes with a flat picture that represents the beveled edges and curved handles that you can see in the 3D version, that would save a lot of computer power. If the player will never go into the room, but might only glimpse it through the window of a car, then it can be completely flat with fake shadows.

I initially thought I would just quickly rough something out, but then I started experimenting with lights (there's one bright overhead spot, another dimmer spot that's at about 45 degrees, and then a very dim area light that gives a bluish light to the shadows). And I spent a whole naptime getting the accordion fold hatchway to work realistically.

The whole idea behind designing cabinets is that I learned from experience that if you design an open bookcase or shelves, then you have to design stuff to go on the shelves, or else the room looks vacant. And that's time consuming. If I design cabinets, and perhaps add post-it notes or other flat objects in different configurations, the spaces may look more lived in.


While I love adventure games, and enjoy hunting for clues through every nook and cranny of a richly realized world, that sort of thing would be very time consuming and wouldn't really be very useful for the particular educational goals I have in mind. (But, darn it, it's also just plain fun... I do this instead of watching TV.)


Update, Jan 3: Yesterday, Susan Gibb quoted part of this entry, and observed, "And all he was doing was designing cabinets! Just goes to show you how addictive this stuff can get. There's some amazing tools (toys!) out there."

The Carnegie Museum of Art's Volcanic Magma: Lava It or Leave It (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Recently the family attended the Tiffany exhibit at the Carnegie Museum of Art. My wife went on ahead with our preschooler, while I let Peter take in the exhibit at his own pace. I had him read all the display copy out loud. Some of it was unnecessarily flowery and complex, so I supplied him with a simultaneous real-time translation from museum-copy-speak to bright-but-short-attention-span-gradeschool-speak.

I initially noticed this particular passage because of the redundancy of "volcanic magma." Was it really necessary to use the adjective "volcanic"? Perhaps the curators felt that the public wouldn't recognize the word "magma" by itself, but then why not just use "lava"? But then another thought occurred to me.

"Peter," I said. "What's the difference between 'magma' and 'lava'?"

"Magma is volcanic rock beneath the surface. Lava is magma that has burst through to the surface," he says.

"Which is more likely? that Mr. Tiffany saw lava, or that he saw magma?"

"Lava, definitely," says Peter. Then his imagination takes off. "Unless he had some kind of volcanic scuba gear with goggles that lets him see molten rock beneath a volcano. It could have diamond lenses and a super-strong titanium hull!"

After Peter describes Louis Comfort Tiffany putting together an expedition to the volcanic underworld so seek inspiration for stained glass designs (I've got to introduce this boy to steampunk, or at least Jules Verne), I stop a tour guide ask Peter to explain the problem with the sign. She is impressed, and stays to chat for a while.

I enjoyed that so much that I find another employee, and ask Peter a question that sets him off.

"Well, Patrick," Peter begins, reading the employee's nametag, and launching into a very animated (and accurate) description of what's wrong with the sign. He even remembers to say some nice things about the sign first, before offering his suggestions for improvement.

"Good job, Peter," I say.

"You're the one who noticed it," says Peter.

"Yes, but you answered correctly when I asked you about it."

Peter gestures dramatically, his wide-eyed grin conjuring up the image of a cartoon light bulb above his head."Ah! The Socratic method!"

Patrick looks at me, with that "is he for real" expression that I just love to see.

I affect nonchalance. "He's home-schooled."

(See also "Living Room Physics.")

Living Room Physics (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I've blogged before about my eight-year-old son's interest in science. His knowledge at this point is mostly made up of isolated facts, which he strings together in a stream of consciousness that often does not require much input.

A few weeks ago, when he told his four-year-old sister that a feather and a rock would fall at the same speed on the moon, she peppered him with questions that showed he wasn't quite sure why that was so significant.

My wife was sitting with the children on the couch, and she started explaining the concept of atmospheric resistance, but I could tell Peter wasn't getting it.

So I came in from the kitchen with a piece of paper and a cardboard box, and we re-created Galileo's falling body experiment. But when I asked Peter some questions about what he saw, I could tell that he thought the cardboard box fell faster because it weighed more than the piece of paper.

So I held up two pieces of paper. "Which weighs more?" I asked.

"Neither."

"Which will hit the ground first?"

"They'll both hit at the same time."

Then I dropped the papers to confirm his hypothesis.

Then, I balled one of them up. "Which weighs more now?"

"Neither."

"Which will ht the ground first?"

"They'll both hit at the same time."

Then I dropped both, and the balled-up one hit the ground first.

Peter's eyes grew wide. "Why did that happen?"

"Good question," I said. "Now lie down on the ground, face up."

I held the uncrumpled piece of paper over his face, at my shoulder height, and told him he should try to blow it aside when I dropped it. He was able to do that easily. Then I scrunched the paper into an even tighter ball, and did the same thing. The ball hit him on his nose. (We had to pause here because my four-year-old wanted to have things dropped on her own head, but that was fine because Peter got to watch it all again from a different angle.)

While my wife explained the concept of surface area, I folded the piece of paper into a paper airplane, and pointed out the tiny amount of surface area that the plane presents to the air in its path.

All this took five times longer than it would have taken simply to tell him about atmospheric resistance. But working through it this way got everyone in the family involved, and it was a lot of fun.

Back when I thought Peter's interest in atoms might just have been the latest phase after bugs and dinosaurs, I got him some library books on the elements -- Nitrogen, Oxygen and so forth. For some reason, I felt like I was being too pushy by expecting my boy to read through the whole series of eight books, so I left one on the shelf. Later that week, the boy read the list of other books in the series, double-checked the stacks of books on the floor of his room, and blurted, "Where's Magnesium?" So I went back and got it.


Our latest bedtime book is The Mystery of the Periodic Table. He has a periodic table of the elements taped up over his bed, and he spends hours exploring it. One of the games he likes playing goes something like, "Which is heavier, californium or yttrium? What do carbon and silicon have in common?"

Recently I was with the family at a story time sponsored by our university library. I introduced him to our new science professor. He told one of his favorite jokes: Two atoms walk down the street. One of them stops and says, "I just lost an electron." The other says, "Are you sure?" And the first says, "Yes, I'm positive!" And he described his theories for building a kind of magnet that would aid in nuclear fission. The professor looked at me with that "Is he for real?" expression. "You should send him to the Jay Leno show," she said.

Here was my chance to ramp things up a bit. "Peter, what's the atomic weight of boron?"

Peter turns to me with a finger in the air. "Actually, Daddy, that's the atomic number"

I felt pretty much like I did the first time he trounced me in chess -- which is not a bad thing, at all.

(See also "The Carnegie Museum of Art's Volcanic Magma: Lava It or Leave It".)