Modding: September 2008 Archive Page

When I first introduced my Seton Hill students to blogging in 2003, before Facebook had mainstreamed social networking into a neatly wrapped package, my students posted a mixture of personal and academic material.  Now that even my committed bloggers do most of their social networking elsewhere, I have started pitching the academic blogs as a more professional practice for real-world writing.  But my student Andy LoNigro just posted a thoughtful reflection on the weblog taxonomy promoted by Crawford Kilian in Writing for the Web 3.0.  Andy pushes back a little, in a way that makes me think that perhaps the reports of the death of social blogging have been greatly exaggerated.

I began to think about what categories our blogs for Dr. Jerz would fall into? I first thought about a category called Academic Blogs but what we write isn't always for academics. We have the opportunity to express our freedom and creative abilities. The more I looked into it and thought about it I realized that my blog here at SHU has an aspect of each of the categories that Kilian talks about in this section, thus creating a blend of all of them spawning the name: Blender Blog. It's like taking all of the cateogories and throwing them in a blender. -- Andy LoNigro

So, will "blender blogging" catch on?  My colleague Mike Arnzen coined the term "pedablogue," I use "xenoblogging" in my blogging rubrics, and my former student Evan Reynolds coined the wonderful term "drive-by blogging" (to describe the sudden bursts of not-too-terribly-focused blogging energy necessary to catch up when a blogging portfolio is fast approaching).

As it happens, in another class I teach a design tool called Blender 3D, and there are plenty of hits for "blender blog" in that sense.

This is from the robots category of Paleo-Future, which also has categories devoted to picturephones, jetpacks, and each decade's collected futurism (that is, see what our future looked like to people writing in the 1880s, the 1930s, or the 1980s).

Try as it might the robot could not make its desired turn. Its little broken wheel jerked and jumped, but to no avail. Malorie then started crying uncontrollably, quietly pleading, "Why won't someone help that robot! All he wants to do is pick up the ball and put it in the middle so that he can get some points!"

This may be an extreme example, but it illustrates our ability to anthropomorphize robots.

Renowned scientist Stephen Hawking is going to unveil a remarkable clock that has no hands and shows time with the help of light. Known as the Corpus Clock, the machine has been invented by and designed by Dr John Taylor for Corpus Christi College Cambridge for the exterior of the college's new library building. The Clock will be unveiled on 19th September by Stephen Hawking, cosmologist and author of the global bestseller, A Brief History of Time. Dr Taylor, an inventor and horologist, has put 500,000 pounds of his own money and seven years into developing the clock, which has been inspired from a design by a clock made by the legendary John Harrison, the pioneer of longitude. Of John Harrison's many innovations, he came up with the 'grasshopper escapement, explained Dr Taylor, referring to the device used by Harrison to turn rotational motion into a pendulum motion for timekeeping. No one knows how a grasshopper escapement works, so I decided to turn the clock inside out and, instead of making the escapement 35 mm across, it is 1.5 m across, he said.

Good editing skills and random, candid video = 2 minutes of awesomeness. This is why I love the internet.

Takes just a tad too long to get started -- give it about 45 seconds before you decide to bail out. You'll be hooked by the second time you see the flip-flops. Via.

"Ah-ah-ah ooh, ah-ah, ah-ah-ah-ah ooh!"  I'll be humming it all week.

At the beginning of last semester, when I called roll in a class that included a student with the last name "Gearhart," I have been telling steampunk bedtime stories to my kids (Peter, 10; and Carolyn, 6). 

Each night, after my daughter has finished the tooth-brushing and prayer-saying, in total darkness I try to advance the plot for about ten minutes, then give the kids some "interactive time," where they role-play various characters.

Tonight, Captain Rod Gearhart, having been prodded by his older brother, the banking tycooon Maximillian Gearhart, finally decided he will declare his love for Miss de Meaner, the science officer from a rival blimpship (the Dark Blimpship of Count Catastrophe). After a quick visit to his quarters to freshen up, he strides down to sickbay, where Miss de Meaner is recovering from an injury received in a pirate attack. She is asleep, so he sits on the edge of her bed and declares his love for her (in an appropriately stiff-upper-lip, stuffed-shirt, all-work-and-no-play kind of way).  When he finishes, the figure in the bed sits up -- it is not Miss de Meaner after all, but one of her biobot crew members (artificial humans, picked up in an earlier adventure).  The biobot says that the devious Solomonder told him to load Miss de Meaner into an escape pod and then lie down in her bed and pretend to be her.

I heard the children gasp, and Carolyn -- who loves the romantic subplots as much as Peter loves the etherpunk technology -- fumbled for my hand in the darkness.  All week I was planning that twist, even having Solomonder snicker under his breath "Heh, heh heh!" after he requested permission to leave the ship, and establishing that one of the biobot crew members is missing.

A wonderfully expressive, almost wordless essay on language, problem-solving, and code.
The Synonym Problem  (See also Jono DiCarlo's "These Things I Believe" -- a humanist manifesto about computer code.)

Groklaw has a good analysis of the recent Harry Potter Lexicon smackdown. Fair use good, too much verbatim copying bad.

The fact is, Rowling and her editor led the defendant on with praise of his website work, such that there was a suggestion by him that he might be the editor of the official encyclopedia, a suggestion that was turned down. Her prior praise of his fan site weighed against her. But she did tell him he had no role as her editor, and he went ahead with his own book anyway, with some marketing that the judge found misleading. So the question was, is it fair use? It certainly could have been, since a copyright owner can't control transformative derivative works totally, but where the defendant failed was in the how of it, how he went about it.

The impression I get from the Order is that if he'd been less of a fan and copied less and written more of his own words instead, it would have worked out better for him. The court, despite finding against fair use, found the defendant at the time had a reasonable belief that it was fair, and that shows me how close the call was, but in analyzing the four factors courts use for fair use determinations case by case, this judge decided it didn't pass ultimately.

But he managed to do so without, in my view, damaging the field for transformative fair use works. Let me show you what I mean. You'll see how carefully the judge annotates his ruling with prior case law, and if you wish to understand his decision, you really would have to read all the citations, because that is where the judge tells you why he decided each element.

Most gamers have never heard of Braunstein. Sad but true. In the hierarchy of self-awareness you'll find the circle of gamers who know what D&D is (a very, very large circle), then inside of that is the circle of gamers who know what Greyhawk is (large but smaller), and inside that the circle who knows what Blackmoor is (smaller still). And then in the very center, vanishingly small, are the people who've heard of Braunstein. Which is a pity, because Braunstein is the granddaddy of them all. (Metafilter)