Humanities: June 2007 Archive Page

What is it for? Why is it there? Did whoever put it up realize that if there were no sign, there would be no need to warn about it? Is this a joke from the developers? Is it a lesson in recursiveness? Is it a philosophical prop? --Bizarre Sign (Lushlush)

Does it mean "Don't forget to knock your head here?" Obviously, it would be much less painful to bang into a light sign hanging from a chain than to bang into that horizontal bar right behind it. So I guess, in a way, they do want people to bang into the sign. It's just like those "low overhead" signs hanging outside garages -- it's better if the top of your vehicle makes that sign wiggle than if your vehicle gets wedged under a support.

(I flipped the image and cropped it to emphasize the effect. Not something one would do as a journalist, but that sort of thing is frequently done in the context of design.)

Back in the projector room, five hairy men wearing nothing but overalls, hardhats, and grime were toiling away, trying to get things under control. "It's too powerful! It can't take no more!" they yell as they hopefully pull levers and turn valves. "The movie is living up to the franchise! We're going down!"

Meanwhile, in the audience, we all gasped at the disturbing site of celluloid going to pot. But, once the shock wore off, everyone began clapping and cheering. There were no qualms about what we had just witnessed: this film, in all it's sheer awesomeness, destroyed itself. --Living Free, Dying Hard, and All That Jazz (Tranquility Lost)

Mike Rubino writes about how the movie melted during the climax of the showing he was watching.

I have a weakness for the 2nd movie in the Die Hard series, because I watched it over the summer while taking a German intensive-language class, and the bad guys spoke German.

However, perhaps this is not a simple matter of cause and effect. Perhaps it?s wrong to assume that the availability of good graphics technology caused the decline of games like Zork. If "interactive fiction" has migrated to the margins of the computer gaming industry, it could be due simply to a lack of good marketing, not evidence of some inherent limitation of the genre. It's quite possible that one day, when enough gamers are at last disillusioned with the latest 128-bit smoke and mirror show, interactive fiction titles will again enjoy the lucrative rewards won by Infocom during the heyday of the Zork trilogy. After all, the treasures of Zork are still there beneath the old white house, awaiting their discovery by new generations of gamers. Zork is not obsolete; merely under appreciated. Perhaps Zork is not the past of gaming, but its future. --Matt Barton --The History Of Zork (Gamastura)

I'm convinced that some people simply don't have the gene that makes them love text-adventure games. Nevertheless, now that the rhet/comp crowd has started following James Gee into an exploration of the educational value of computer games, I think we'll see more scholarship on IF.

Barton quibbles with my claim that "Zork" began as a simulation of "Adventure," but he is right to note all of "Zork"'s technical improvements. Of course, in order to recognize the need for those improvements, the "Zork" implementors first had to be both obsessed by and annoyed at "Adventure."

Nevertheless, a good article that offers some of the close-reading that I missed in "Down From the Top of Its Game," the 2000 MIT student project that tracked the rise and fall of Infocom. Barton offers some new interviews that contextualize the available academic information for the benefit of a general readership. Maintaining accuracy while not putting the general reader asleep is not an easy task, and Barton does a good job here.

(Thanks for the e-mail, Matt, but it was already in my RSS reader, thanks to Slashdot.)

The books Amazon will offer will include many rare volumes -- some that are hundreds of years old and others that are too brittle to be handled by people day after day. With digital scanning and printing technology, such books can be reproduced for anyone who wants to buy them. --Dan Carnevale --Amazon Will Digitize Universities' Books and Sell Print-on-Demand Copies (Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription))

I wonder if they will reprint books with personal annotations -- that is, if Thomas Jefferson scribbled notes in the margins of a book, would it be possible to get your own copy of the book, with Jefferson's notes reproduced along with the book text?

The division is cleanest in communities where the predator panic hit before MySpace became popular. In much of the midwest, teens heard about Facebook and MySpace at the same time. They were told that MySpace was bad while Facebook was key for college students seeking to make friends at college. I go into schools where the school is split between the Facebook users and the MySpace users. On the coasts and in big cities, things are more murky than elsewhere. MySpace became popular through the bands and fans dynamic before the predator panic kicked in. Its popularity on the coasts and in the cities predated Facebook's launch in high schools. Many hegemonic teens are still using MySpace because of their connections to participants who joined in the early days, yet they too are switching and tend to maintain accounts on both. For the hegemonic teens in the midwest, there wasn't a MySpace to switch from so the "switch" is happening much faster. None of the teens are really switching from Facebook to MySpace, although there are some hegemonic teens who choose to check out MySpace to see what happens there even though their friends are mostly on Facebook. --danah boyd --Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace (danah.org)

I personally find boyd's use of a lowercase logo for a name to be be right up there with Prince's use of an unpronounceable symbol and the star in "Wal*Mart," but I gather it makes her seem more approachable to the young people whose online habits she observes so carefully (and analyzes so well).

I handed my notes over to the class and gave them directions to plan the next three weeks of class. They had to schedule one project and one exam. The project has to run five days straight, and they'll need the information from chapter seven to do the project. They had to make sure that they leave enough days to cover chapter five and prepare for the final, which is July 16.

Then I left the room.

It was a breath-holding heart-pounding moment, one where I wasn't sure if walking out was the right move. However, I'd done it before and -- truth be told -- I was stood right outside the door, shamelessly eavesdropping. Leaving was the only way I could teach this lesson in strategy and planning because, otherwise, my students would have centered the lesson on me. Is this what you want? Are we right? They would ask with their words and their eyes, watching me for nonverbal cues when I refuse to tell them what to do next. --Miki Louch --Formulating: putting the rubber to the road (Of ferocious tigers and wild strawberries)

The crash involving a tandem tractor-trailer and four passenger vehicles happened around 12:30 p.m. on the westbound lanes, several miles east of the Lebanon-Lancaster exit, state police said. --Three passengers killed in fiery turnpike crash (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)

There is a lot of bad news out there, from the disappearance of the pregnant woman in Ohio, to the girl whose feet were cut off on an amusement park ride in Kentucky. My heart goes out to the victims and their families.

This story is the latest to hit me pretty hard. Fortunately there were no vehicles involved besides our car and the truck, but two years ago, this could have been me on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. After my family walked away from that crash, few things have really bothered me at all, on any level. Every day feels like a gift.

The secret of American schooling is that it doesn't teach the way children learn, and it isn't supposed to; school was engineered to serve a concealed command economy and a deliberately re-stratified social order. It wasn't made for the benefit of kids and families as those individuals and institutions would define their own needs. School is the first impression children get of organized society; like most first impressions, it is the lasting one. Life according to school is dull and stupid, only consumption promises relief: Coke, Big Macs, fashion jeans, that's where real meaning is found, that is the classroom's lesson, however indirectly delivered.

[...]

The strongest meshes of the school net are invisible. Constant bidding for a stranger's attention creates a chemistry producing the common characteristics of modern schoolchildren: whining, dishonesty, malice, treachery, cruelty. Unceasing competition for official favor in the dramatic fish bowl of a classroom delivers cowardly children, little people sunk in chronic boredom, little people with no apparent purpose for being alive. The full significance of the classroom as a dramatic environment, as primarily a dramatic environment, has never been properly acknowledged or examined. --John Taylor Gatto --An Angry Look at Modern Schooling: An Enclosure Movement for Children (JohnTaylorGatto.com)

I'm blogging this because of Gatto's willingness to say the emperor has no clothes.

I'm not as disillusioned about public schools as Gatto seems to be, but then I've never tried to fight for reforms. We have instead quietly opted out of the factory-style education system, and we have made lifestyle choices that permit us to live modestly on one salary, in a profession that permits me to have a lot more family time during the summer, so that we can invest the time and energy doing the vitally important job of helping to prepare our children for the world.

Traditionally, many news organizations have applied the rules to only political reporters and editors. The ethic was summed up by Abe Rosenthal, the former New York Times editor, who is reported to have said, "I don't care if you sleep with elephants as long as you don't cover the circus."

But with polls showing the public losing faith in the ability of journalists to give the news straight up, some major newspapers and TV networks are clamping down. They now prohibit all political activity -- aside from voting -- no matter whether the journalist covers baseball or proofreads the obituaries. The Times in 2003 banned all donations, with editors scouring the FEC records regularly to watch for in-house donors. In 2005, The Chicago Tribune made its policy absolute. CBS did the same last fall. And The Atlantic Monthly, where a senior editor gave $500 to the Democratic Party in 2004, says it is considering banning all donations. After MSNBC.com contacted Salon.com about donations by a reporter and a former executive editor, this week Salon banned donations for all its staff.

What changed? --Bill Dedman --Journalists dole out cash to politicians (quietly) (MSNBC)

Also of interest is a long list of excuses/apologies/evasions offered by reporters and editors who made partisan donations. Several of the donors were up front about their attitude, saying that as reporters they don't give up their right to participate in the political process. But in many cases, their employees have a policy in place that stipulates exactly what a news employee must do in order to prevent the appearance of bias from affecting the public's faith in the publication's ability to present the news honestly, without bias.

This response from the copyeditor of The New Yorker is illuminating: "I've never thought of myself as working for a news organization."

Of course he would expect I was in the pay of those whose interests I advanced. Why else would I advance them? Both he and I were in a business in which such shilling was the norm. It was totally reasonable to thus expect that money explained my desire to argue with him about public policy.

I don't want to be a part of that business. And more importantly, I don't want this kind of business to be a part of public policy making. We've all been whining about the "corruption" of government forever. We all should be whining about the corruption of professions too. But rather than whining, I want to work on this problem that I've come to believe is the most important problem in making government work.

And so as I said at the top (in my "bottom line"), I have decided to shift my academic work, and soon, my activism, away from the issues that have consumed me for the last 10 years, towards a new set of issues: Namely, these. "Corruption" as I've defined it elsewhere will be the focus of my work. For at least the next 10 years, it is the problem I will try to help solve. --Larry Lessig --Required Reading: the next 10 years (lessig blog)

Lessig is an excellent communicator and an inspiring leader. It will be interesting to see what he accomplishes when he turns from copyright reform to the broader concept of corruption.

The college-educated humans, all of whom are not allergic to bee-sting venom and possess both cerebral and muscular capacities several orders of magnitude beyond that of the insect, proceeded to retreat in abject fright from its half-millimeter stinger, which, when used, causes a twinge of discomfort followed by mild irritation and kills the bee.

According to entomologists at the University of Texas at Dallas, the Apis mellifera was most likely trying to pollinate a nearby cluster of dandelions and was not, as alleged by 50-year-old attorney Georgia Sakko, who has twice endured the pain of childbirth and successfully battled breast cancer, "out to get us." --Single Bee Sends Gathering Of Humans Into Helpless Panic (The Onion (Satire))

All touching -- not only fighting or inappropriate touching -- is against the rules at Kilmer Middle School in Vienna. Hand-holding, handshakes and high-fives? Banned. The rule has been conveyed to students this way: "NO PHYSICAL CONTACT!!!!!"

[...]

It isn't as if hug police patrol the Kilmer hallways, Hernandez said. Usually an askance look from a teacher or a reminder to move along is enough to stop girls who are holding hands and giggling in a huddle or a boy who pats a buddy on the back. Students won't get busted if they high-five in class after answering a difficult math problem.

Typically, she said, only repeat offenders or those breaking other rules are reprimanded. "You have to have an absolute rule with students, and wiggle room and good judgment on behalf of the staff," Hernandez said. --Maria Glod --Va. School's No-Contact Rule Is a Touchy Subject (Washington Post (will expire))

The article features the plight of a boy who got into trouble for giving his girlfriend a hug -- but it also notes that the hug was one of two infractions: the boy also got up from his assigned seat and went over to his girlfriend without permission.

I'm not sure that I'm comfortable with the principal's statement that students need to comply with an absolute rule, but that enforcers need wiggle room. If you call the rule absolute, doesn't that just teach students to think of rules -- even so-called absolute ones -- as a means of dishing out arbitrary punishment at the whim of an authority figure? If there is wiggle room, then the rule is not absolute. It might be appropriate to say that touching itself is not a problem, but to enforce rules against such things as bullying, loitering in the halls, distracting other students, and dress code, and noting that monitors will naturally be drawn to the activities of two students who are touching one another, and that any violation of the rules that really are disruptive can lead to a harsher penalty if touching is involved. But my solution may not work for a building housing 1100 tweenagers in a space designed for 850.

The article also refers to different cultural notions of what counts as acceptable personal space.

Still, the fact that these kids even have assigned spaces in the cafeteria suggests that maintaining crowd control is more important to the administrators than teaching socialization. I understand that there are only so many hours in the day and there are probably only a small number of kids who are causing the problems, but "what about socialization" is typically the first question that homeschooling families hear from people with kids in public or private schools.

I grew up in Vienna, and I was bussed right past Joyce Kilmer to a different school. The school's namesake is best known for his poem "Trees."

I haven't the energy to write much more than "I think that I shall never see / A rule so laughably PC."

See also "Fisher v. Lowe 1999."

Jorn Barger, a Joyce enthusiast whose many creative electronic endeavors include coining the term "weblog," offers this animated map of Dublin, showing the progress of Leopold Bloom and other characters from the "Wandering Rocks" chapter of Ulysses. The chapter takes place on June 16, which has of late been celebrated as Bloomsday.


Last week was the Feast of Corpus Christi, which in the medieval town of York, England was celebrated with a huge outdoor festival that included wagons that were the sets for short religious plays that dramatized Christian history from the creation of the world to the final judgment (also know as Doomsday). This 2D animated map showing the progress of pageant wagons through the streets of York was part of my first scholarly publication, in 1997. I wish I'd thought of adapting the existing code to the Ulysses scenario.From Bloomsday to Doomsday

I designed this site to enable those of us who are having difficulty in solving Adventure / Colossal Cave to work together to solve the game.

This is not a hints site, and there is no spoiler space. Information is presented as fully as I can, though the information in the walk through tends to be less detailed and that in the object, people, and places pages to be more detailed. --afjbell --Adventure/Colossal Cave Home Page (Hypertext Walkthrough Index Page)

A useful site that breaks Adventure down into objects, places, and a walkthrough (all hyperlinked). The same site also similar treatments of Zork and a few other games.

The best interviews I've had were with people obviously familiar with my work. A great interview with a reporter feels like a natural conversation with a friend you've never met. They'll ask you questions that you haven't answered a hundred times before, and really dive into your experiences that led to something newsworthy. A good interview will feel open ended and go wherever the conversation leads. A good reporter will send you an email when the article is posted and thank you for your time. If you notice any of these qualities, relish the opportunity because these kinds of interviews account for maybe 5% of the interviews I've ever done. --Matt Haughey --How to talk to the press (fortuito.us)

The tips added by Grant Barrett are also helpful.

I'll be teaching an entry-level journalism course this fall, and this will be a helpful way of getting my cub reporters to think about the interview from the perspective of a subject-matter expert.

--Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader? (FOX)

I had to guess on one of the history questions, but none of the others were very challenging.

I don't watch the show (we only get one station on our cable-free TV). I just hope the show doesn't make the smart kids look like freaks.

--How children lost the right to roam in four generations (Daily Mail)

Interesting article on how over the years parents are holding onto their children more and more tightly.

See also Henry Jenkins, "Complete Freedom of Movement: Video Games as Gendered Play Spaces."

The New York premiere of the film, on Wednesday, was held to support the organisation Reporters Without Borders, which defends journalists against persecution and combats censorship and laws that undermine press freedom.

But several journalists covering the premiere objected when Jolie's lawyer demanded they sign pre-interview contracts limiting exactly what they could and could not ask her. --Catherine Elsworth --Jolie accused of hypocrisy over press 'gag' (Telegraph)

Bravo to the reporters who refused to sign the contract and declined the opportunity to promote the movie.

Negotiators: Ages Nine and Five (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I have a nine-year-old and a five-year-old who love each other to death, but do occasionally bicker. I tend to be far more impatient with the older child, since he is much more capable of finding something else to entertain himself. I generally remind him that, if he wants something that his sister has, he has to offer to trade something else.

If he really, really wants it, he will work fairly hard to get her to agree to a trade. When the argument is more philosophical (such as, he wants to play Harry Potter or Spider Man, and she wants to play her own made-up game "Babies in the Woods") I will pull him aside and tell him to play the game HER way for 20 minutes, after which I will relieve him and he can go do whatever he wants. Sometimes when the 20 minutes has passed, they have found a middle ground that keeps them both happy.

Of course, now that my daughter has heard this conversation too many times, before I actually intervene, I will hear her say things like, "Daddy says you have to do it my way, because I have not yet reached the age of reason."

(See Bickering about LEGOS.)

"The words we suggest," says senior editor Steven Kleinedler, "are not meant to be exhaustive but are a benchmark against which graduates and their parents can measure themselves. If you are able to use these words correctly, you are likely to have a superior command of the language." --100 Words Every High School Graduate Should Know (Houghton Mifflin Books)

Hmm... the editors' description of the list is very different from the way it's being marketed. Simply knowing the definition of these words won't suddenly make you more intelligent.

Someone who doesn't know words like "euro" or "suffragist" probably has other important gaps in his or her education. Most citizens probably get through their days without much chance of encountering "moiety" or "ziggurat."

All these words are in my reading vocabulary, but I don't believe I have ever used "abjure" or "abrogate" in a written or spoken sentence, and I wouldn't have been able to explain the difference if I hadn't looked it up just now. Because I never took French, I would never use "gauche" in speech (even though I finally know how to pronounce it, since I just looked it up now), unless perhaps I was creating dialogue for a character who either 1) knew French well enough to be influenced by its vocabulary or 2) wanted people to think that he or she was the kind of cultured person who was used to being around people who dropped French terms. I would have described "jejune" as "immature" or "dull," rather than recognize its Latin root as meaning "meager" or "hungry," or its more technical sense as "lacking nutritious value." I sort of recognized "quotidian" as meaning something like "average" or "typical," but until just now, I never recognized the Latin roots that make its specific meaning "everyday."

In the second line of King Lear, Gloucester says:

It did always seem so to us: but now, in the
division of the kingdom, it appears not which of
the dukes he values most; for equalities are so
weighed, that curiosity in neither can make choice
of either's moiety.

That certainly gives sufficient context to guess that "moiety" means something like "division" or "share," though its more precise definition -- "half" -- is less clear. (The very first line in the play indicates the choice is between two dukes -- Albany and Cornwall.)

Publishers want to sell dictionaries, but the skill of being able to figure out a workable definition of a word based on its context is actually more important to literacy than the ability to memorize words on a list.

News emerged over the weekend that Church authorities have complained to Sony about the depiction of Manchester Cathedral in the game. Some reports have stated that the Church may pursue legal action against the company.

But according to Alex Chapman of Campbell Hooper solicitors,"The Church will have an uphill battle in a legal claim against Sony, and indeed it is likely that there is no basis for a claim." --Church will face ''uphill battle'' if suing Sony, says legal expert (Games Industry Biz)

I've been following this story about Resistance: The Fall of Man.

I'm reminded of when sculptor Frederick Hart was surprised to discover that that a copy of a sculpture he had created for the National Cathedral in Washington D.C. was featured for about 20 minutes in the movie Devil's Advocate, and that the filmmakers had actually animated the sculpture to turn it into what the Anglican church leaders called a distortion of a religious sculpture.

Sony was forced to re-edit the film before they could release it on DVD and video (after agreeing to put disclaimer stickers on the copies of the movie that had already been produced).

The National Cathedral case involved a living artist, who still owned the copyright to a work that was commissioned for a religious purpose. The Manchester Cathedral case probably doesn't involve much recently-produced art, and the leaders object to the fact that the digital re-creation of the church is the setting for a gunfight.

It will be interesting to see how the mainstream media represent the Manchester case, since it involves a video game. (We've already seen that even the very edgy indie Slamdance Film Festival is not a safe place for envelope-pushing videogames.)

"There are days when I watch 'The Daily Show,' and I kind of chuckle. There are days when I laugh out loud. There are days when I stand up and point to the TV and say, 'You're damn right!'" says Brown, chair of the communications department at Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and an associate professor of broadcast journalism.

Brown, who had dismissed the faux news show as silly riffing, got hooked during the early days of the war in Iraq, when he felt most of the mainstream media were swallowing the administration's spin rather than challenging it. Not "The Daily Show," which had no qualms about second-guessing the nation's leaders. "The stock-in-trade of 'The Daily Show' is hypocrisy, exposing hypocrisy. And nobody else has the guts to do it," Brown says. "They really know how to crystallize an issue on all sides, see the silliness everywhere." --Rachel Smolkin --What the Mainstream Media Can Learn From Jon Stewart  (American Journalism Review)

Thanks for the suggestion, Mike.

"General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." --Reagan's 'tear down this wall' speech 20 years later (USA Today | AP)

I graduated from SHU this may and I took your American Literature course in Spring 2004. I just wanted to write you an e-mail because I came across my own blog while doing a search on the internet and I starting reading through them. I must admit, I HATED doing them during class because it was a lot of work, but what a final product. I was so impressed that I could have created something so technical and computer literate. I was astounded to see that people are still commenting on my entries, three years after the fact! How cool! I hope you are continuing to use blogs because it obviously gets out there and lets our thoughts at SHU be heard. I also would like to comment on my grade in the class and it being 1 of 2 Bs that I received throughout my college career. I still am confused about the grade, considering I had all As on my papers. I was unaware at the time it could have been a mistake and I did not want to challenge you. I just thought I must have failed the final miserably. O well. I enjoyed your class, even though I got a B! lol Keep up the good work!blogs [e-mail from a former student] (Jerz's LIteracy Weblog)

I got this note from a recent graduate, and have posted it here with permission. It's always a great feeling when a student says he or she worked hard, learned a lot, and enjoyed the class.

And this student is right -- entries that my students wrote as homework are still attracting attention, especially at the end of the semester as students are working on term papers. Sometimes the comments are simply requests like "This story is boring, will someone e-mail me what it's supposed to mean," but often a visitor will post a thoughtful comment that attempts to extend the discussion.

But if Colandrea's character was there to kill Tony Soprano, the actor who played him isn't saying.

"I do have an idea, but I cannot really talk," Colandrea said Monday. "I have papers signed that I can't make any comments on that."

Colandrea, who was born in Naples, auditioned for the role after a casting agent stopped for a bite at his shop. He claims to know definitely his character's intent and what happens following the episode's conclusion, but won't divulge it. (A bit of trivia: Colandrea's character wears a Member's Only jacket; the first episode of the final season was titled "Member's Only.") --Jake Coyle --`Sopranos' extras thrown into TV history (Yahoo! | AP)

I don't have cable TV, and I've never seen an episode of the show, but shouldn't that be "Members Only" (without the apostrophe)?

--(BRACKETS) - hidden camera prank on unsuspecting public. (YouTube)

Amusing.

"In recognition of his influential and distinctively American contribution to philosophy and, more widely, to humanistic studies. His work redefined knowledge 'as a matter of conversation and of social practice, rather than as an attempt to mirror nature' and thus redefined philosophy itself as an unending, democratically disciplined, social and cultural activity of inquiry, reflection, and exchange, rather than an activity governed and validated by the concept of objective, extramental truth." --Richard Rorty, 1931-2007 (Telos Press)

I had signed up for his course on American Pragmatism, for what would have been my fourth semester in the MA program at the University of Virginia. But I finished my degree after my third semester and withdrew from all my U.Va. classes in order to work full-time.

As a tender young MA student, I found Rorty's philosophy a bit hollow, and his relativism too far along the slippery slope of postmodernism. He was the respondent when Fredric Crews gave a lecture on Christian Humanism. I learned quite a bit about the profession by watching these two learned gentlemen disagree with each other intellectually, yet remain personable and even jovial throughout the evening. I signed up for his course because I thought he would either help me to take the plunge and overcome my fears of postmodernism, or help me more clearly articulate where I disagreed with it.

Now that I have taught courses in aesthetics and critical theory, I wish I had taken that class. Advanced scholars have had far more opportunity to understand and account for their own personal biases than tender young MA students. I have learned that researching critical theory isn't terribly useful when I was only grazing through the literature looking for quotes to support the argument I had already formed even before I started writing the paper.

That is, of course, why I didn't like pragmatism -- it argued that there is no universal truth, there are only useful conventions that society clings to as long as the conventions fulfill a need. That's the kind of statement that shakes one's bedrock beliefs, but in later years I've realized it also clears the way for a fascinating examination of the humanist approach to morality, which is very important when you are asking students from diverse cultural backgrounds to assess issues of morality and universality in a text -- and, by extension, in the real world.

Last year I was a Sunday-school teacher for fourth graders, and I found myself prefacing every doctrinal statement with "The Catholic Church teaches..." and trying to encourage discussions, rather than simply giving them a list of received truths to memorize. I covered the material, of course, and from an orthodox perspective, often asking them to talk with their parents when they brought up touchy subjects like the fate of babies who die before baptism and how seriously they should take artistic representations of heaven and hell. I've never told my own children that they will go to hell if they are disobedient, for example; I have told my five-year-old that until she reaches the age of reason, it's Mommy and Daddy's job to help her listen to her conscience, and that includes punishing her when she gives into temptation. My nine-year-old knows that we have greater expectations for his ability to reason, so that if he and Carolyn make the same mistake in judgment, the consequences for him are more severe.

I might get faster responses from my children if they feared that demons would drag them away if they were disobedient, but that kind of obedience doesn't build character or develop moral intelligence.

On the last day of Sunday School, I was hoping to encourage their desire to learn more about the world, so after I said goodbye, I told them "Never stop asking questions!" Most of them kind of stared at me blankly. When one kid asked, "Why?" they all froze in their seats waiting for me to explain myself. I didn't.

While my wife and I are raising our children in the traditions of our Catholic faith, we are working hard to avoid the "Because I say so" and "Don't ask questions" approach to authority. My son has internalized the Socratic method so much that when he wants to get mouthy and talk back, he does so with rhetorical questions, thus drawing me into a conversation that (he hopes) will buy him time to figure out a way to avoid doing whatever he doesn't want to do. It's not exactly disobedience, but he is testing limits, making me supply good reasons for why he should obey.

Pragmatic? In the short term, it can be stressful and annoying. But I hope that always maintaining a close association between reason, authority, and morality will benefit my children in the long run.

--IF Comic (David Garcia's Blog)

So far there are three installments of a new interactive fiction comic. I'll be watching this site.

I am an animator and concept artist by trade. However, I don't think my art is really so great that it deserves a "how to". My devotion to my live steam hobby however, lends my steampunk designs a level of authenticity that often lacks in steampunk art. Therefore, this is just a quick explanation of parts, and how to draw and design a machine that "looks" convincing.

Please keep in mind that these are super simple explanations of different components of live steam, and steam buffs will probably will tear these descriptions to pieces :) I feel that it is important to get the basic idea without having to go into dry and boring detail. By no means am I an expert in steam engines. This info is taken from my personal experience working on small scale live-steam engines. Most of the examples below are found on model engines, which works off of the same basic principle as the big ones. This is also just a guide. There are no set rules for concept art. You just make whatever appeals to you. In other words.... this is steam for artists, not really to educate you in details of steam power! :) However, it is important to understand some fundamentals of steam power, in order to make your drawings look believable, as something that could have been built in Victorian times.

First you have to understand steam, and how it works by looking at each part of the machine. --How to Draw SteamPunk Machines (www.crabfu.com)

I love the site -- it's got some really cool artwork and photos of steam engines (toy-sized, but real).

Some day when I have time, I want to re-design my whole website with a steam punk theme.

BioShock will be Ken Levine's magnum opus. It will be his career defining game. It's ambitious, unusual and aggressive, mixing the high polish expected of a "next generation" shooter, with equal parts storytelling, politics, and philosophy, all wrapped up in a bloody, underwater, 1940's bow.

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The most prominent character in BioShock -- Andrew Ryan, Rapture's founder -- is an embodiment of a self-centered, free-will political ideology called Objectivism. Objectivism is the brainchild of 1960s author Ayn (rhymes with mine) Rand. She defined it thus: "Man as a Heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity and reason his only absolute." Put more simply, an Objectivist says "the world is what it is, my place in it is important, the only way to know anything is to use your own head, and the best political system is one that leaves me the hell alone. "Andrew Ryan is Ayn Rand meets Howard Hughes," explains Levine.

The initial plot of BioShock -- the founding of this utopia -- mirrors the plot (albeit through a glass darkly) of Rand's 1960's epic book "Atlas Shrugged." In "Atlas Shrugged" the worlds elite -- the "atlases" -- stage a minor rebellion and remove themselves to a better place: a valley where they can be free of the eye and hand of the world's governments and those who would leech off their talents. While the rhetoric of Rapture's founder, Andrew Ryan (an anagram of Ayn Rand with an extra "rew" thrown in for obfuscation) sounds like a Randian polemic, his nemesis is ambiguously named "Atlas." To figure out which one is really the good guy or the bad guy, we'll all have to play the game.

BioShock's story -- for those who wish to stop blowing things up to delve into it -- is about translating this Objectivist ideology into the real world. "One of the things that's very appealing about Rand to me, and about Rapture, is at least in the beginning they're driven by reason." Indeed, this is what attracts most people to Objectivism: it's based on rationality above all else. By both highlighting and skewering Objectivism, Levine's on the warpath against zealots. "I'm trying to write about what happens when real people try to do things," he explains. "The characters in Ayn Rand's books are paragons." But paragons aren't real people, and Levine has written his characters to be as real as possible. They may be drawn in broad strokes, but they're human. "Real people aren't perfect. That's the problem with ideologies. Real people carry out ideologies. So even the best of intentions gets screwed up."

To attempt to do this in a game -- not a college art project, but an actual commercial blockbuster game -- is phenomenally ambitious. "You don't elevate the discussion by saying 'listen to me!'" says Levine. "You get it by saying 'look this is awesome, oh and by the way we're also talking about being a human being. We're also talking about power.'" --BioShock (Gamers with Jobs)

With all the gratuitous use of Shakespeare language and imagery in the series (including its four spin-offs, a successful franchise of feature films and a short-lived animated series), is there an underlying reason to the use of the Bard's works? Does the combination of classic literature and pop-culture sci-fi result in something greater than the sum of its parts? According to Stephen M. Buhler, the use of Shakespeare in the Star Trek universe, specifically the film Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, serves to define which characters are the villains. (Buhler 18) In general, he says the contemporary popular film use of characters who have the ability to quote Shakespeare is used as a device to establish moral ambiguity and to symbolize personal viciousness. (Buhler 18) Here he relies on the many quotes of the villain of the film, General Chang (Christopher Plummer) and the chameleon shapeshifter Martia (supermodel Iman). (Buhler 22)

However, not every Shakespeare-spewing character is evil and Mary Buhl Dutta argues that, instead, the use of Shakespeare in the original Star Trek series served as endorsement for the male-centric, Americanized ideal of a typical Shakespeare hero. (Dutta 38) Within the progress of the series, the lead character of Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner) "becomes" Macbeth, Hamlet, Ferdinand, and Petruchio. Always the hero, he has the ability to defeat the villain, even when his Shakespearean counterpart could not. For example, Dutta points out that in the episode "Catspaw", Kirk is essentially Macbeth (Dutta 40), yet here he has the ability to resist the evil pressure of the Lady Macbeth figure of Sylvia, unlike the original Macbeth.

Marc Houlahan furthers this theory by arguing that the use of Shakespeare in Star Trek is not only an endorsement but rather a continuation of America's attempts to Americanize Shakespeare. (Houlahan 29) As the financing of BBC's official versions of Shakespeare, by four major American corporations (Time-Life, Exxon, Metropolitan Life Insurance and the Morgan Guarantee Trust Company) and the creation of the Folger's Shakespeare Library (located between the Supreme Court and the Library of Congress in Washington DC) serve to show America's attempt to claim Shakespeare as their own, so does Star Trek's use of the Bard's materials. (Houlahan 29) Thus he uses again the film Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country to illustrate the assumption the Captain Kirk and the system of government that he works for, the United Federation of Planets, is a representation of the United States of America. Thus, Kirk's use of Shakespeare, as well as General Chang's serve as an attempt to mainstream Shakespeare for a primarily American audience. (Houlahan 30)

Going in a totally different direction, Emily Hegarty argues that the use of Shakespeare in Star Trek: The Next Generation serves as a symbol of high culture. (Hegarty 55) She writes, "It [the series] uses Shakespearean allusion to underwrite repressive and elitist ideological gestures within its populist format." (Hegarty 55) She uses the example of a Next Generation episode "The Perfect Mate", in which Captain Picard uses Shakespeare sonnets to express desire, confirming the ideology that Shakespeare is the quintessential symbol of love poetry in our culture. (Hegarty 56)

With all the use of Shakespeare in Star Trek, one might think that the symbolism would be lost and eventually become stale and, in fact, it arguably has. Fewer references to Shakespeare are found in the last three series spin-offs, Deep Space Nine, Voyager and Enterprise. However, within the framework of the original series, The Next Generation and the (at least early) films, Shakespeare has become an integral part of the universe that the show inhabits. It uses Shakespeare as a springboard to discuss new ideas and to maintain a connection with the future and the past. --Shakespare and Star Trek (Memory Alpha)

If I recall correctly, wasn't there an episode in which Picard had to pretend he was in love with a woman, possibly as part of a bluff? I seem to recall that he started off giving a very vague, unconvincing declaration of love, and then when he shifted into poetry, he started hamming it up. The subtext to the audience was clear -- he didn't love her at all, he was just drawing on his knowledge of Shakespeare to simulate love, and part of the point was that the aliens involved (the Ferengi -- depicted in The Next Generation as greedy and rather stupid caricatures, if it's possible to caricature a fictional race) weren't expected to recognize Shakespeare. I wonder if Hegarty takes that into account. (I just looked it up... the episode was Ménage à Troi.)

Bradbury has decided to make news about the writing of his iconographic work and what he really meant. Fahrenheit 451 is not, he says firmly, a story about government censorship. Nor was it a response to Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose investigations had already instilled fear and stifled the creativity of thousands.

This, despite the fact that reviews, critiques and essays over the decades say that is precisely what it is all about. Even Bradbury's authorized biographer, Sam Weller, in The Bradbury Chronicles, refers to Fahrenheit 451 as a book about censorship.

Bradbury, a man living in the creative and industrial center of reality TV and one-hour dramas, says it is, in fact, a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature.

"Television gives you the dates of Napoleon, but not who he was," Bradbury says, summarizing TV's content with a single word that he spits out as an epithet: "factoids." He says this while sitting in a room dominated by a gigantic flat-panel television broadcasting the Fox News Channel, muted, factoids crawling across the bottom of the screen.

His fear in 1953 that television would kill books has, he says, been partially confirmed by television's effect on substance in the news. --Amy E. Boyle Johnston --Ray Bradbury: Farehheit 451 Misinterpreted (LA Weekly)

I've never taught this book, but I've been thinking about it, and this is actually the approach I would have taken -- that it was a storyteller's response to the rise of storywatching.

Cutler has spent much of her time fending off a lawsuit by ex- boyfriend and fellow DeWine staffer Robert Steinbuch, who claims Cutler's blog publicly humiliated him. He is seeking more than $20 million in damages.

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The lawsuit is being closely watched by online privacy groups and bloggers because the case could help establish whether people who keep online diaries are obligated to protect the privacy of the people they interact with offline. --Sex Blogger Files for Bankruptcy (Breitbart | AP)

This is a great find. I'm a student (with a full time job), who uses the web a lot in my research. I've found that there are many insightful comments out there, but failed to use them due to 1) fear of not properly citing them 2) fear that they will be rejected as credible sources. It wasn't until yesterday that I realized that my current paper really needs to cite a few comments in order to make some points. Thanks again![Submitted Comment] (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

The above is the text of a comment that someone submitted to an old blog entry about how to cite weblog comments in MLA style.

I didn't publish it, because the URL supplied by the poster was the home page of a company that offers search-engine optimization services. In the space where the name was supposed to be, the poster added some Google-friendly keywords.

A hand-made personalized commercial message may not fit the strict definition of spam, but it's still an unwelcome submission.

So I pour myself a glass of red wine, settle in with a fresh pair of flannel pajamas and start channeling my inner geek with glee. Primetime or not, I love the Bee. I love it. I love the celebration of intelligence, the championing of nerd-ship, of the brotherhood of brainiac. This is why the Bee should be on primetime network television. So that the Steve Jobs in all of us gets some real screen time. So that the incredible freakiness of spelling into your hand has an audience. A chance to shine. A chance to let every kid who spends his evenings rocking back and forth in his bedroom dreading the misery of junior high see that it is going to be okay. That geekiness has a freaking point! The Bee is a nerd manifesto! WHOO-HOO! --West Coast Bee Call (Throwing Things)

Detailed commentary on last night's spelling bee championship, which I watched with the family.

A screenwriter couldn't possibly have come up with the victory interview, in which the winner says he prefers math and music to spelling because spelling is "just memorization." After the reporter invites him to give his opinion of the bee now, the kid pauses for a long, long time and says, "Does that mean I'm supposed to like it more now?"

Way to put a serrefine on that post-competition enthusiasm.

You may or may not be familiar with V-Tech Rampage, a flash game created by Ryan Lambourn. True to its title, the game allows the player to take on the role of Cho Seung-Hui and re-enact the fateful school shooting of April 16th. The game drew hatred from the mainstream media and gamers alike; many feel the game to have no ultimate purpose other than allowing players to kill simply for the sake of killing.

Similar complaints have been lodged against Super Columbine Massacre RPG!, created by Danny Ledonne. Like V-Tech Rampage, SCMRPG allows the player to take the roles of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold on the day they massacred twelve of their peers.

In an effort to get Lambourn's side of the story and answer some nagging questions I had for Ledonne, I interviewed these two frequently despised, often applauded game creators about the possible importance of their games. --Virtual school shooings: interviewing two of the most hated game creators alive (Destructoid)

Ryan Lambourn, the creator of V-Tech Rampage, sounds defensive and juvenile. I haven't played his game yet, so I'm just filing this for later.

Same with I'm O.K. - A Murder Simulator