Improv

Under the Influence (Ellis/Di Filippo/Sterling)

2007-03-28T00:57:00.000-07:00

How little would I be surprised if Anthrax Cat from Warren Ellis's Metropolitan was a model for Ribo Zombie's Skratchy Kat in the short story "The Scab's Progress"?

The Moon Is Alive—Maybe

2006-11-09T18:02:00.000-08:00

I will accept the possibility that the Moon may be geologically active and so, according to a broad interpretation of the Gaia hypothesis, alive, as my birthday present.

It's Accessible When You Believe In It, It's Primary When You Love It, It's Trivial If You Don't

2006-07-26T21:33:00.000-07:00

No, no, no, I thought, reading Simon here. The reason no music criticism seems vivid or vivifying to you anymore is because you are old now. When you're young, things you read can strike you as new, and the things you experience all strike you as new, and the writing you do about what you experience, and the things that you love, it's all so new, so exciting, it's so alive it makes you hurt and it makes your readers, who are you in other circumstances, hurt, too.

It's completely different when you're old, as the young you probably suspected, and as you now recognize, as someone older, except when you remember how you used to be, and how much different and sometimes better it used to seem to be young.

It wasn't better, and you know that, too, but it feels as if were better, you remember it being better, but you're wrong, and those young readers and writers are wrong, too, in their ways, not in your ways, and you can't understand them anymore, and it makes you both sad, the younger reconstructed you and the older you.

But it doesn't make them sad. They don't know about you or care about you. They live differently. What's important to them too often seems trivial to you, but it isn't trivial; at least, it's no more trivial than things you used to deem important when you were young, and which, over time, you've invested effort and belief into feeling the importance of again in your mind, though it may well have been unwarranted then and now, and though none of these young people know or care about what you think or believe is important. Nor do they care whether you believe their art is unimportant or inaccessible or trivial. Their knowledge works differently. They nouse. You don't nouse. You can't. You are now too old.

And so am I.

Earth That Was?

2006-07-25T20:46:00.000-07:00

Characters in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars books realistically worry that wealthy, powerful, entrenched self-interested groups of people might disregard the damage they've done to the Earth and instead simply move away off-planet, using technologies available only to people as powerful—and as self-interested—as themselves. It's dismaying and hard to believe, but those characters' worries have become our realistic worries.

Hell, I knew Book wasn't accurate

2006-03-04T03:07:00.000-08:00

You scored as The Operative. You are dedicated to your job and very good at what you do. You've done some very bad things, but they had to be done. You don't expect to go to heaven, but that is a sacrifice you've made for a better future for all.

The Operative

63%

Simon Tam

63%

Zoe Alleyne Washburne

56%

Inara Serra

56%

Hoban 'Wash' Washburne

56%

Shepherd Derrial Book

50%

River Tam

44%

Capt. Mal Reynolds

31%

Jayne Cobb

31%

Kaylee (Kaywinnet Lee) Frye

31%

Which Serenity character are you?
created with QuizFarm.com

(I was also a tie, between Simon and the Operative, this time. I said I was good at what I did rather than that I'd do _anything_ for my family.)

Portland Society for Calligraphy

2006-03-02T22:14:00.000-08:00

I think I should do my part to inform whatever fractional segment of the public may read me here that the Portland Society for Calligraphy has a new, spiffy website, courtesy of Gretchin.

Punctual

2006-02-20T02:12:00.000-08:00

You know what I appreciate about the people who make webcomics? They're enough like me to know that if somebody says "Monday" is the time they'll have something done, there are people in the world—such as myself, say—who will expect that thing to be done at 12:01 a.m. and not a minute later. People—such as myself—who will be awake at twelve-thirty Monday morning, at loose ends, and who will surf to websites like Questionable Content or Ctrl+Alt+Del and be greeted by new material, as promised.

Figures I'd be Shepherd Book

2006-02-04T10:19:00.000-08:00

Your results:
You are Derrial Book (Shepherd)

Derrial Book (Shepherd)		60%
Dr. Simon Tam (Ship Medic)		55%
Malcolm Reynolds (Captain)		55%
Zoe Washburne (Second-in-command)		45%
Alliance		40%
Kaylee Frye (Ship Mechanic)		30%
River (Stowaway)		30%
Inara Serra (Companion)		25%
Jayne Cobb (Mercenary)		20%
Wash (Ship Pilot)		20%
A Reaver (Cannibal)		15%

Even though you are holy
you have a mysterious past.
You aren't married.
Have you taken a vow of celibacy?

Click here to take the Serenity Firefly Personality Test

Box Office Press

2005-11-28T12:12:00.000-08:00

In Slate today, Edward Jay Epstein says

Once upon a time—two generations ago—the movie business was about making movies. Nowadays, it is about creating intellectual property that can be licensed in a raft of different markets. The Hollywood studios still make movies, of course, but by 2005, only 14.2 percent of their revenues came from movie ticket sales, while 85.8 percent came from licensing or selling their products for use in the home.

If Epstein’s figures are accurate, ordinary press reports about a movie’s performance at the box office, its opening weekend grosses, etc., are radically divorced from market reality. If any given movie makes eight times more money from licensed products than from its theatrical release, its box office receipts take on a very different meaning. A movie’s box office receipts become a mere numerator.

Google Civilization

2005-10-30T18:30:00.000-08:00

Google does not intend to compete with existing publishers for existing markets.

Publishing as I understand it is, for the most part, an ordinary business like a bakery, with the caveat that many of its employees think of their industry as charitable and culturally important. Google’s publishing experiments need to be considered in light of their stated ambition to organize and make available all of the world’s information, which a few people at Google have estimated will take 300 years. The estimate makes a flashy sound bite, but I think it accurately reflects Google’s directors’ thinking. Google is one of few organizations in the world whose directors think on a scale of centuries.

Google’s ambitions are international, secular, philosophical, and historical, embodying an ethos that harks back to the European Enlightenment in its elitism and energy, with the flexibility and strength of 19C, 20C, and 21C engineering and information sciences to support their confidence.

About five thousand people work at Google, so any individual employee there is almost literally “one in a million.” Few organizations have ever leveraged the labor of five thousand people as successfully and influentially as Google has, especially in such a short time. (Google’s seventh birthday was in September 2005.)

George Dyson in an Edge essay says Google reminds him of a 14C European cathedral as it’s being built in the 12C. When I’m optimistic, it reminds me of the glory days of Attic Greece, when a confident, educated population of citizens could establish a civilization by fiat. They could make it. Civilization civilizes by example, by being more desirable than any alternatives available to people nearby.

At its most ordinary and in its most likely historical development, Google is a late-20C U.S. corporation that manages data on digital computers and sells advertising based on its management. It’s a big business. But on its better days, Google might be a harbinger for a better civilization.

Molecular images oversimplified and Bohr's gold

2005-10-21T11:16:00.000-07:00

Science textbook illustrations routinely omit what equipment and materials were required to produce them, but I just learned something odd and interesting from David S. Goodsell’s book Our Molecular Nature.

When studying a molecule, researchers typically need large supplies and must choose a source that is rich in the particular molecule. For instance, much of the work on myoglobin has been performed on the protein from sperm whale muscle, because whale muscles contain large quantities of the protein to store oxygen during their extended dives.

Fascinating, no? Pretty pictures often take liberties in their presentation of data, but sperm whale muscle and myoglobin? Who knew? (Except Dr. Goodsell, of course.)

And weblog-post part two, learned from Philip Ball’s book The Ingredients: During World War II, when two German Jewish physicists asked Niels Bohr to guard their Nobel Prize medallions, Bohr and a colleague melted the gold into a colloid suspension and kept it in unmarked jars in their laboratory, to prevent Nazis from seizing it. After the war, they recovered the gold and recast the medals.

Introducing . . . what?

2005-09-05T04:13:00.000-07:00

It is more than possible now, it has become common for people who want to possess an air of cultivation and sophistication, to browse books like those in the Rough Guide series or the For Beginners, Introducing, or Oxford's Very Short Introductions, in order to acquire enough familiarity with their subjects to converse. These same people have also learned to mine the internet at sites like Wikipedia and the All Music Guide in order to shore up their fragments into a more or less convincing façade.

Being one of these people myself, I feel ambivalent about the behavior. On one side, any effort to acquire knowledge deserves some respect. On another side, such knowledge more often resembles crib sheets than it does anything else. It's a bunch of names to check and associations to make, and further associations sort of lose their importance, once you complete your initial set.

Fitting Tiny Pieces Together

2005-08-30T17:21:00.000-07:00

No good solutions come to mind for the writing workflow problems I’ve been trying to think about. So, here’s booklog stuff at Powell’s on Hawthorne:

Hacking Matter: Levitating Chairs, Quantum Mirages, and the Infinite Weirdness of Programmable Atoms (Basic Books, 2003), Wil McCarthy

The Stuff of Life: Profiles of the Molecules that Make Us Tick (Times Books, Henry Holt, 2002), Eric P. Widmaier

These two titles and the length of the books (224 and 135 pages, respectively) jogged the thought that essay-length works concerning specific subjects are fine tools for thought. They prompted me to want to write something in the 10,000-word range concerning atoms, molecules, energy, and so forth; that is, they prompted me to want to write about chemistry, for shame.

We’ll see where that desire takes me, I’m sure.

Wond'ring Aloud

2005-08-29T11:25:00.000-07:00

The philosopher Daniel Dennett considers Darwinian natural selection to be “the single best idea anyone has ever had” and wrote a book-length argument called Darwin’s Dangerous Idea to support the opinion. I’ve read the book and, while reading, find myself agreeing with Dennett throughout, but when I read other people’s arguments, I forget how to suspend the details of each set of ideas so as to consider them on their merits, and on my own terms. I am too easily swayed by rhetoric, and I am not good enough at thinking on my own to separate rhetorical quality from specific ideas.

One reason for me to write out how I think about particular subjects is to lay out the process of the way I think. If I do it well, I will find out weak areas and stronger areas, and I should be able to improve the former and reinforce the latter. Unfortunately, my aesthetic preferences tend to encourage rhetorical rather than analytical writing, and I worry about writing persuasive arguments that lack real merit.

Connected? Nah.

2005-08-21T13:42:00.000-07:00

Some science writers have a historical sensibility that focuses on earlier writers, usually 19C writers but sometimes 18C Enlightenment-era people, and connects those writers’ thoughts with contemporary science. I’m thinking of the way Philip Ball uses Walter Bagehot in Critical Mass or of how Ian Hacking’s statistics books use Leibniz and Peirce.

I’m also thinking of Warren Ellis’s “secret history” in the Planetary comics but that’s a different thing. I really gotta get a handle on things, huh?

Unsafe words

2005-08-21T12:11:00.000-07:00

My new codeword for "answers to intimate questions" is: "Joey! Usually in the mornings—with Katie Couric!"

Please continue talking amongst yourselves.

How does this "Link" thing work?

2005-08-20T16:47:00.000-07:00

Does this take you to Diesel Sweeties?

Here's one for you two!

2005-08-20T16:44:00.000-07:00

020050209 19:04:45
Had a thought about a database project. I'd like to be able to track my reading using both iCal and some sort of database, into which I'd enter each thing I read, where I read it, when I read it, and what I think about it. I'd also like to be able to update what I think about any given thing, and I'd like to be able to sort the things in any number of ways. Somebody must have written a Cocoa application that does what I want, here. So I'll look online for a bit and see what I can see.

Open in Tabs is Broken in Safari 1.3

2005-04-19T13:59:00.000-07:00

Talked about at http://discussions.info.apple.com/webx?14@586.IHqhaIg1Qin.0@.68ac46ef/ and in this long comments thread at Dave Hyatt’s Surfin’ Safari, now in Safari 1.3 when “Open in Tabs” is checked for a Bookmark, all of the subfolders inside that Bookmark folder are opened. If you organize your Bookmarks with subfolders, you’re probably already upset that you can’t get those subfolders to open their contents in tabs, but you never dreamed (“you” here is code for “I”) anybody would make all the tabs in all the subfolders open, because it’s . . . well, it’s useless to do. I have a Bookmark called Keep Up! that contains subfolders called From Time to Time and References and For Possible Purchase, et cetera, as well as containing specific bookmarked sites such as Google News, Slashdot, Gmail, and my Furl archive, which I check a few times each day. The subfolders contain several hundred sites that I tend to check monthly or less often. Now upon clicking once, several hundred tabs open, which pretty much requires that I shut down the browser to fix.

Well, actually, after shutting down the browser a couple of times, I just unchecked “Open in Tabs” and shuffled a bunch of subfolders into new places, grousing all the while, awaiting a fix from on high.

I’m posting this mostly because Dave Hyatt wants trackbacks instead of comments regarding people’s problems. (Also, Gabe’s sick of reading about ghetto mochas every frickin’ day. No comment about the punctuation situation, nosirree, not from me, huh-uh.)

Ghetto? Well, technically, no. And not really mocha, either.

2005-02-26T21:38:00.000-08:00

I am drinking what must be known forevermore as a “ghetto mocha”. Its name gives it away, but in case you lack sufficient imagination to put it together, allow me to illustrate. Okay, you begin with Swiss Miss hot chocolate mix. You could use some off-brand crappy hot chocolate mix, sure, but Swiss Miss is even less cool than those, so you go with her. Then, and this is key, you take coffee that was brewed more than several hours ago, preferably something off the shelf from a grocery store (MJB, Folgers, whatever), and you reheat it in a microwave. The next step is the genius part. You put the Swiss Miss into the now-hot coffee. You see? You see how this works? Many people feel they have invented the ghetto mocha, but clearly such a thing exists in an ideal form à la Plato; hence, no inventing this sucka, only discovery.

Have fun, and remember to stir all the gritty bits into the liquid before drinking. A crust of gritty bits on the rim indicates you have failed to perform your ghetto mocha with its deserved gravitas.

Check the arrow.

2005-02-17T20:12:00.000-08:00

Reading a reference to David Hume at InstaPundit just now prompted me to wonder about memes propagating and weblogs and all of that kind of thing. So InstaPundit is prodigiously popular in a blog kind of way, and the activities of a mostly-anonymous and self-selecting public are affected by posts posted there, right? Okay. Then here's what I want to know: Will some small proportion of readers of InstaPundit come to look up information about David Hume because of the reference there on InstaPundit? 'Course they will.

But how many? It's a flapping-butterfly-wing→storm-in-India situation, sure, but how many? Really, I want to know.

And We're In!

2005-02-02T10:19:00.000-08:00

An important thing I've learned about editing: Any time the printer or network or whatever you're trying to use to do something doesn't work correctly the first time (which means, the way you expected it to work) you will spend a minimum of ONE HOUR (did you hear that? I said a MINIMUM of ONE HOUR) making the not-working element work. If anything else goes wrong during the making-it-work phase, you will spend another MINIMUM HOUR troubleshooting. If you are unsuccessful at the two-hour mark, that is, if you have not been able to make your desired element behave as you had expected it would behave when you began, I think you had best reconsider what exactly it was you wanted to get done, and whether what you have been attempting to make work has been contributing——. . . .

Here I was cut off by the inscrutable yet implacable forces of circumstance, those buggers. Viruses? Possible eating of memory by clipboards in MS Excel running under Classic emulation in OS X 10.2.8? Scanning .doc files for possible macro viruses? Oh, yes, these things and more we will not discuss here. Also, we will not discuss contracts or collation of contracts, but we will note our approval of the first person plural mode of address.

And we will sign off on this, our first post from our own iMac in our new house and job, with the fond hope that we may continue to post new and exciting information here at the Improv in future. Go along with you, you liked it!

In résumé.

2005-01-19T16:53:00.000-08:00

Crab apples! Let a little month or two go by and whee-you, you get an earful. I am now ensconsed in Pleasantville, NY, assistant-editing my days away in beaverish fashion. This is the briefest of news in capsule form. My iMac is on the road (I think) via the USPS and will arrive (I think) presently. Once that blessed day comes to pass, I will reenter my bloggish ways in earnest (I think). 'Til then . . . well, 'til then we're stuck with this kind of thing.

Can you leave a comment here?

2004-11-29T04:12:00.000-08:00

Or not?

It's testing, testing, testing time, here at the ol' Improv. So test.

Justice is Served?

2004-11-29T03:50:00.000-08:00

The thief in the last post is gone. The only thing I can still seem to Google is the stolen Three-Toed Sloth post in a Google cache, and I kind of wonder whether my initially linking it is what preserved it at all. I'm not sure how somebody's weblog—even their fraudulent weblog—can be so utterly demolished in such a short time. Perhaps it was taken down by the poster? By Blogger? But what got it out of Google's reach? And why is it not in the Wayback Machine? I thought I would archive the cached pages for posterity but was too late somehow, I guess.

I don't know whether there's some moral being pointed here.

Plagiarism's Rules, or, Plagiarism Doesn't Rule

2004-11-25T07:13:00.000-08:00

When I was in my early twenties my little sister, then in her late teens, decided to swipe an untidy pile of digital copies of my journals, fiction, notes, letters, and suchlike late-twenties ephemera, and to appropriate said ephemera as if it were her own. She sort of aped my representation of my life. There was some measure of respect in her theft, I supposed then and suppose now, but the effrontery of the act and its bizarre existential dimensions . . . I was livid. The episode galvanized a sense in me of who I am and what about who I am must remain mine.

A few days ago I read Malcolm Gladwell's recent New Yorker piece about the way a profile he wrote for the magazine was transmogrified by a playwright into her play. The subject of the profile had also undergone somewhat wholesale incorporation into the play, and the subject was . . . livid, I guess isn't too strong a word. She felt her life had been stolen and changed and violated.

I probably wouldn't be writing about this now if I hadn't just seen this post at Three-Toed Sloth linking to Gladwell's essay, and commenting that another blogger had bodily stolen a post from Three-Toed Sloth and posted it as original.

Even that theft wouldn't have prompted me to say anything, probably, if I hadn't gone ahead to the front page of the malefactor's weblog and read:

"This site has never purported to be a journal or a diary, or really anything more than a public place where I chose to share some bits of my life with people who are interested in reading them. But it's all been very controlled, and I've been very aware of my audience -- from grandparents to potential bosses to strangers -- since its inception. And so most of what I think and I do goes unsaid on this site, which for the most part is OK, except that when I look back on prior entries, sometimes I wish I had a better sense of what was really happening between the lines."

This recent megnut post hit close to home: reading through my older archives, I'm struck by how different my weblog was a few years ago. I didn't really worry about whether or not everyone I'd ever met might be reading it (mostly because few people I knew actually did), and I felt pretty comfortable just yammering on about all the little things that went on in a given day or posting some miscellaneous piece of information I found interesting or useful. It was probably boring as anytthing for people who were reading it back then, but for me it's nice because I can really remember now what my life was like during any given month of it.

Reading through my archives for the past couple of years, though. . .

the substance of which, well, no, the whole of which is lifted directly from Emma Story's weblog.

Whoever this blogger called "Tristan Story" is, after a tour of the posts it's pretty clear the substance of the site is stolen. The first post—"All reset. Return."—may not be stolen, but Googling gives a fanfic post first, which is suspicious, as it turns out, since a later post dealing with fan fiction doesn't turn up on Google at all. I'm not sure where it's cribbed from. Post number two is a Henry Miller collage from Tropic of Cancer, unattributed; in fact, claimed as original ("a brief account of my life"). The Grand Theftendo post is ripped off from The Null Device, as are the election-night musings. (I think the thing about the cat sneezing is from Emma, too, although since her site's recent archives are wonky I'm not finding it: I feel I've read it before, though.) My Golden Years is ripped off from The Sneeze. The Polar Express review is stolen from Michael Schaub at Bookslut. And then we're back to Three-Toed Sloth, then Johnny Truant, apparently a character from the novel House of Leaves, but the quoted text is from a song that writer cowrote.

And we're at the current front page, stolen from Emma. "Tristan" may even have stolen Emma's name, for Chrissake!

A couple of days ago I wrote a poem that spun off from Louis Menand's line, "You cannot taste a work of prose." It opens an essay he wrote about writers' voices, and it rang true to me, and gave me a line to follow it, and I followed them and finished a brief poem. (Oh, what the hell.)

You cannot taste a work of prose.
You cannot taste a poem.
You cannot smell a question mark.
Line up your points
But do not expect answers to the questions
Except in passing
And do not let order fool you.

(Also, it's sort of funny and sort of pedantic and sort of indicative of my cast of mind, that I recognized Menand's essay's origins in an earlier review he wrote of Lynn Truss's book Eats, Shoots & Leaves for The New Yorker, then called "Bad Comma," later adapted to introduce The Best American Essays 2004.)

I do not feel at all bad about having used Louis Menand's line in a poem, but I feel affronted on behalf of everybody "Tristan Story" has gouged by way of the weblog echoing them unacknowledged. This is Google-ready stuff to let 'em know somebody cares, I guess.

I'm not sure what else it is, except pissed.

Obscure pleasures

2004-11-19T06:38:00.000-08:00

I get a weird sense of pleasure from having had somebody in my regular attention whom few other people seem to know, then seeing many other people discover them for whatever reason. The present example is Three-Toed Sloth, whose work has come to widespread public attention in the form of those awesome cartograms seen all over the net lately. Maybe this is how indie rock people feel about their out-of-the-way bands.

2004-11-15T18:55:00.000-08:00

A notion I didn't write down last night, which I was thinking I'd call «"Bleeding Media,"» in which I would note examples such as the appearance of R. Stevens' Diesel Sweeties "I Am Ten Ninjas" t-shirt in the pages of a recent G.I. Joe comic.

Like Hello World, kinda.

2004-11-01T03:24:00.000-08:00

This is an ecto-driven post. I'm trying to see how it works. It's like "Hello world," kinda.

2004-10-30T01:45:00.000-07:00

Michael Chabon is writing Snow and the Seven for Disney, a live-action martial-arts retelling of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, to be directed by Yuen Wo Ping. How insane is this, I ask? And I'm totally stuck for an answer. I have no real idea how insane this is.

2004-10-27T14:39:00.000-07:00

Hobbitses! In Indonesia! We loves it forever! (via Kottke)

2004-10-26T19:07:00.000-07:00

Okay, this is mostly for Michael Hall, as he's mentioned he doesn't like emails saying "look at this thing!" (fourth comment), so I'm propping it on the ol' blog for pull-down goodness. Joss Whedon posted at Whedonesque the other day about High Stakes 2004, held last Sunday. The comments in the thread range from inane to deeply thoughtful, and ZachsMind especially has a tone. Also interesting was the civility of exchange among members. Apologetic, considerate, respectful, temperate, even moderate discussion, even though the subject matter often touched Bushy vs. Kerry contentious hot-hot-hot issues, and even though the members seem a fairly diverse lot. I was impressed, and I spent half an hour reading more than 200 comments. Skim it, anyway. (Don't forget to read Joss's bio.)

2004-10-25T18:44:00.000-07:00

Dammit, videoblogging rigmarole on MeFi eats 15 minutes of my life! Ars Technica writer on metadata in a spatial finder eats half an hour! Stupid broadband internets at work! It's my life, here!

2004-10-23T01:46:00.000-07:00

Language Log: They are a prophet is almost darned tootin', although "perenially clueless" overstates things regarding the estimable and venerable Strunk and White. Nice to have such a clear example of standardization in action.

2004-10-17T17:26:00.000-07:00

Okay, it looks as if I owe it to myself at least to say a few things about this High Stakes 2004 thing. I read through the comments thread at Whedonesque as a lurker and noted a blank, not-recognizing-the-existence-of-self-organizing-systems sort of mentality. The organizers of this event are supposed to be ourselves; it’s up to us; if we don’t make phone calls and arrangements, set up convergent times and schedules, and hie ourselves into living rooms at appointed times, nothing much will come of the idea. We are the responsible parties in this sitch. (Nota bene: Nothing prevents a Buffy for Bush kind of organizing, either. High Stakes 2004 looks endorsed by Joss, who is supposed to participate in conference calls during the parties on the night of October 24, but the whole idea here appears to involve getting off asses and making personal efforts, which is as available an activity for Reps as for Dems of whatever stripe.)

As primers on the sort of behavior High Stakes 2004 appears to me to be trying to encourage, try browsing Howard Rheingold’s site Smart Mobs, especially the book summary and the power of the mobile many category. Wikipedia can help you understand almost anything, but for smart-mob stuff, try Smart Mobs and its relevant links, especially collective intelligence. Read through WorldChanging, especially its Means of Expression archive. High Stakes 2004 looks like a clear example of these kinds of collaborative efforts, enabled by the internets among other things, to enact a desired world. Anyone can play. Sing along. Shout at the devil. Pick your poison.

2004-10-17T16:16:00.000-07:00

Oh, snap!, as Riley Freeman once said of a Christmas present he never thought he’d receive. More Like This Weblog finally followed up on the Whedon/Election post tantalizingly linked before.

2004-10-17T15:49:00.000-07:00

Note similarity in tone and character dynamics between Buffalo ’66 (1998) and Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s 2nd episode in season 2, “Some Assembly Required” (air date 019970922).
—
When I was maybe 9 years old, I had a homework assignment to make a list of homonyms, which assignment I took more seriously than any of my classmates, eventually accounting for several hundred such words on the specific list and resulting in ongoing if intermittent additions every few weeks or months since. That assignment oddly represents one of the most influential parts of my primary schooling. Anyway, this afternoon at work, I typed the word “peaked” and happily recognized it as another whiz-bang homonym. Thus: peak, peek, pique; and their array of inflected forms: peeking, peaking, piquing; peeks, peaks, piques; and so on. Lovely, lovely homonyms.

2004-10-05T17:06:00.000-07:00

Got a writing date at Sven’s tomorrow morning. I want to write about Hours, which is the combination time-education-community idea. It has elements of «”The Time of Your Life”» essay and of the One Percent idea. It also has some of an idea about education, self-education, and mutual-education I thought about a couple of years ago, a sort of directed project, tutorials, modules, whatever.
—
Kottke links to Tom Coates’ interesting-looking site Plasticbag.org, which referred me to atomiq.org by talking about folksonomies, which apparently are ad hoc, bottom-up taxonomies of knowledge. The idea is, people tag some datum with a label, those labels are aggregated somehow for many data, and the data then become more easily searchable by way of the tags. The models are services I’m unfamiliar with as yet, such as Flickr and del.icio.us, but which seem extremely cool. Atomiq.com linked to Thomas Vander Wal’s site, and I spent a few minutes poking around. He’s using the tags and noting them at the bottom of blog entries, so Feed on This is tagged with the labels

Posted at 2:25 PM from Bethesda, MD.
Marked as :: Content Management :: Folksonomy :: IA :: InfoCloud :: Information Aggregation :: Internet :: Intranet :: Metadata :: RDF :: RSS :: Web :: Web apps :: XML :: in Essay
[perma link for: Feed On This ]

for example. I think I can get the hang of this, but does it look enough like the future to bother? Maybe it does.

2004-10-05T02:09:00.000-07:00

Dunno what this is, exactly, but it bears watching, dunnit? If you're a US Citizen, a fan of Buffy and Joss Whedon, and you want to help elect John Kerry as our next president, then keep the night of Monday the 18th open, okay?

2004-09-28T17:36:00.000-07:00

Okay, here’s some more goodies from browsing at work. Dooce and Blurbomat are the sites of, respectively, Heather and Jon Armstrong, parents of Leta Armstrong, and something of a team, as in married. I saw them linked from Jason Santa Maria’s website, linked from Andrei Herasimchuk’s Design by Fire, talking about personal dingbats back in May.

2004-09-24T16:21:00.000-07:00

So . . . uh . . . MetaFilter again, this time noting a mashup by The Kleptones of Queen with major hip-hop. One of the fine, fine MetaFilter folks has the album mirrored as individual MP3s, which is nice, since the first time I downloaded it I got a .zip 1 hour and 18 minutes long, one big file, and couldn’t cut it up proper-like.

2004-09-24T10:10:00.000-07:00

Where will it all end? Well. . . .

2004-09-23T06:42:00.000-07:00

A telling analogy, If America were Iraq, What would it be Like? (via Danny Yee's blog).

2004-09-23T02:18:00.000-07:00

I’m reading Judith Thurman’s New Yorker Fact piece on Teresa Heinz Kerry, and it’s fascinating. Here’s a stripped-down excerpt with some Wikipedia links:

Maria Teresa Thierstein Simões-Ferreira Heinz Kerry was born in Lourenço Marques on October 5, 1938. . . . The Simões-Ferreira family produced some of Lisbon’s most distinguished lawyers and judges (and also a poet . . . who was “crazy as a loon,” and a friend of Sartre’s), so her father’s choice of a career in medicine was . . . mildly heretical. He emigrated to Mozambique about the time Salazar seized power [in 1932 in Portugal] . . . having married a young woman from Lourenço Marques’s cliquish British colony. . . . [Heinz Kerry’s mother], Irene Thierstein, [was] a Mediterranean matriarch of the old school. . . . born in Mozambique to a couple who had immigrated from South Africa at the time of the Boer War. Her father was the scion of a Swiss-German family living on Malta, and her mother was the half-French, half-Italian daughter of an Alexandrian shipowner who traded with Russia during the Crimean War.

When Heinz Kerry’s mother was pregnant with her first child, she contracted a kidney ailment in Manjacaze and nearly died. The family returned to Europe for a few years so that she could regain her health. . . . [T]hey settled in the capital, where Simões-Ferreira opened an oncology clinic. His children had a modern urban childhood that included movies, pop music, and dating. “My life was idyllic,” Heinz Kerry says, “but more modern than Isak Dinesen’s.”

Paying no attention to anything makes me miss out on stuff like how friggin’ cosmopolitan certain aspects of the political scene have become. Is Teresa Heinz Kerry a side effect of globalization or one of the causes of globalization? Jeezum, it’s a weird world.

And, um, MetaFilter mentions this Queen-Hip-Hop mashup done by The Kleptones

2004-09-20T19:31:00.000-07:00

A Google employee says, of traveling through the San Francisco Airport, "Funny stuff: Wearing my Google T-Shirt at SFO. The bag checker said, 'Google, eh? Hmm, guess I'll have to search you.'

Comedians take note. Your new competition works in the travel sector."

2004-09-18T05:33:00.000-07:00

While not pure geekery, or unsullied geekery, such as Henry Cavendish represents, Star Wars vs Star Trek in Five Minutes will probably not fail to entertain a certain class of geek, however little lofty they may be. Wallow, then!

2004-09-18T02:52:00.000-07:00

Some 5,500+ movie reviews are now available from Roger Ebert’s new website. (Ebert loves Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, if anybody wondered, though, as John Scalzi noted, “Ebert can be as clueless about a clever film as anyone, and he’s a sucker for pretty lights and cool design.”)

2004-09-17T00:41:00.000-07:00

So Salon introduces . . . the Buffy! (Watch an ad to see the whole article.) Fairly cool, that.

2004-09-14T19:17:00.000-07:00

Emory University hosts PDF files of Melvin Konner’s book The Tangled Wing. Who knew?

—

WILLOW
(sighs)
Damn love spell. I have tried every anti-love spell spell I could find.

ANYA
Even if you find the right one, the guy would probably just do an anti-anti-love spell spell . . . spell.

WILLOW
What?
—from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 7, episode 6, “Him”

—
Wow. The top search at Google for waybeyondthepale is Buffy slash fiction. (I was looking for a domain name, thinking Tori Amos thoughts.)

2004-09-11T16:55:00.000-07:00

For Kevin, among others, a link to a PDF of the September 29, 2001 report Biological Warfare and the Buffy Paradigm. This for-real 42-page document, issued in Washington just a few weeks after the WTC attacks, makes an analogy between the constant, unpredictable threats Buffy and Co. face in show after show, and the constant, unpredictable threats posed to U.S. national security by terrorists with heavy-duty biological weapons. A (badly-written) taste:

Finding a New Paradigm: The “Buffy Syndrome”

The US must plan its Homeland defense policies and programs for a future in which there is no way to predict the weapon that will be used or the method chosen to deliver a weapon which can range from a small suicide attack by an American citizen to the covert delivery of a nuclear weapon by a foreign state. There is no reason the US should assume that some convenient Gaussian curve or standard deviation, will make small or medium level attacks a higher priority over time than more lethal forms.

Any structured intellectual approach to describing this situation—and planning for it—is so uncertain that a valid structure can only be developed as an exercise in complexity or “chaos” theory. I, however, would like you to think about the biological threat in more mundane terms. I am going to suggest that you think about biological warfare in terms of a TV show called “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” that you think about the world of biological weapons in terms of the “Buffy Paradigm,” and that you think about many of the problems in the proposed solutions as part of the “Buffy Syndrome.”

I realize that those of you who are workaholics or who are simply mature and without children or younger relatives may never have seen this show. It is, however, about a teenage vampire slayer who lives in a world of unpredictable threats where each series of crises only becomes predictable when it is over and is followed by a new and unfamiliar one.

Yes, it’s the “Buffy Paradigm” at work. You may have heard it here first. (I first heard it in Michael Adams’ book Slayer Slang. Crazy book, people. Incredible scholarly detail focused on language as employed by the Buffy writers. At Powell’s in hardcover for only US$7.98.)

Mostly a reminder for me: Drezner wrote about Buffy when the show ended a year and a half ago, with many links.

2004-09-10T18:06:00.000-07:00

Last night (this morning) just after 02:00 hours, Kristian and I finished copy-editing the index to Our Enemies in Blue. One more once-over for the single-page entries and it’ll be ready to send back to the publisher.

Sven and Gretchin are back from Burning Man; Sven sounds okay-happy-enough about it.

Anybody who reads MetaFilter or Caoine.org probably saw the AudioStreet.net member who made a cover of George W. Bush doing U2’s “Sunday, Bloody Sunday” (direct link to an MP3 at ca.lcul.us). It’s really ridiculously good.

Also, if the people who downloaded Fredo’s “Sad Song” are not already aware, and if they’re reading this (you know who you are), the guy got totally swamped with a US$4,800 bandwidth bill from his ISP because of our downloads, and really we ought to help the guy out, if we can (his account is fredo-at-aviola.com with an @ for the “at”).

2004-09-07T19:12:00.000-07:00

Numbers are crucial tools for imagination. A specific number can integrate enormous quantities of data, making an image that has almost the quality of narrative. For example, the number 58,226 seems arbitrary, but it also indicates the number of U.S. soldiers known to have been killed or gone missing in action in Vietnam. The vaguer number 6 million is an icon of the Nazi attempt to exterminate European Jewry during the Second World War. We can use 6 billion as shorthand to think of 6,391,300,000, the estimated number of all human beings alive on Earth today. Seeing 365 makes many of us think immediately of one year, and 1,001 calls to mind Scheherazade’s tales and the time of Harun al-Rashid. Calendar dates are also numbers chockablock with narrative. We hear 44 and 622 very differently if we know of Caesar’s assassination or Muhammad’s flight from Mecca, and if we can hear the pivotal zero year which Christ’s life represents in the Gregorian calendar used throughout the western world; and 1999’s millennial resonance reminds many now also of a popular 1983 song recorded by a musician formerly known as The Artist Formerly Known As Prince.

—

Encyclopædia Britannica says its recent DVD edition comprises 54,592,999 words and costs 6,995 U.S. pennies (7,804.5 words per penny!).

2004-09-06T16:14:00.000-07:00

Today is the birthday of the nice guy from Future Dreams. His name may be Don Riordan.

—

I just realized the New Yorker link I talked about a few days ago with Kevin (whose web site apparently only works with Flash and so is un-bloggable from where I am now) was to an article by Louis Menand. Skimming doesn’t always pay, is the lesson here. Time to read.

2004-09-04T16:36:00.000-07:00

This afternoon at work I spent an hour reading the The Vice Guide to Everything. Very het, I guess, very not gay. Straight and narrowly hip (but not copping to being hip, no, no). It’s like an extreme close-up photograph of something, but it’s so close you can’t figure out what it’s of. Puzzling, off-putting, kinda funny, righteous, and probably a waste of time. Oh, well.

2004-09-03T17:00:00.000-07:00

Today I signed everything with the wrong date, except this entry (I was signing as if it were August 4—how lame is that? Wrong day, future; wrong month, past). Maybe I can plead overnight Greyhound travel lag, having left San Francisco at 20:30 yesterday and arrived in Portland this afternoon at 13:55, some hour and forty minutes later than scheduled.

Tonight in a push I will watch the final six episodes of Buffy to finish the seventh season, all that remains, after I visit the Fresh Pot for the first time in many, many days.

Tomorrow I will help Kristian complete the index to Our Enemies in Blue.
Sunday I'll upgrade to OS 10.3.4 at last.

A U.S. Bank credit card now absorbs any fees I incur from overdrawing my checking account.

My move-in date is 020041001 at the Weidler apartment.

2004-08-29T18:40:00.000-07:00

Den Beste has burned out. Filters failed him, popular nitpicking dragged at him, and now he’s . . . who knows? Some people will miss him.

2004-08-27T19:02:00.000-07:00

I just spent a couple of hours or ninety minutes or some extensive period of time looking for the Questionable Content strip where Faye says, “There is not a strong enough word to describe how wrong you are!” Also I found her in “I Want Those Posters Dammit” saying, “There are not enough adjectives in the English language to describe how wrong you are.” Googling “describe how wrong you are” I got five results, so it looks as if QC's truly indie on this. Neat.

2004-08-23T16:57:00.000-07:00

Wow, Kip’s got it worse than I do, maybe. His exegesis (“A Restless Exegesis”) really goes to extremes. I should write something like this, in reply, if nothing else.

2004-08-23T16:33:00.000-07:00

How the heck did Sven even indirectly get from my links to an upright monkey? Huh, from Wis[s]e Words, eh? And so, really, sort of, from Kip Manley at Long Story, Short Pier. Funny things, webs.

2004-08-21T18:35:00.000-07:00

Now I’m going to note this comics blog, got to by way of http://www.whiterose.org/dr.elmo/blog/, by way of the recommended links at http://www.cloggie.org/wissewords/, who I found in the Linchinography at http://www.longstoryshortpier.com/. Uh-huh. Partly I’m noting them as examples to myself of things I ought to syndicate in Shrook, to remind myself how much I need to get Shrook organized better. A comics category? (Honestly I don’t care all that much about comics, but I care enough to skim feeds, don’t I?)

2004-08-17T17:47:00.000-07:00

MPH is posting on the workflow thing, which catches my attention big-time, but the logistics, dang. What to do? How to do it? I’ve been bound in kludges! I’m a slave to the known! Sometimes it works!

Bah. People who know how to do stuff need to take time to show others how to do it. MPH is good at this, he posts in detail about what he knows, but presence would be better. Maybe some of the small community of Mac folks could sit around for an hour or two—at Sven’s?—every so often—seasonally?—and go over tips and shortcuts they’ve picked up. For example, I think MPH is OmniWebbing now, and he could talk about advantages and disadvantages and so forth. Sven’s been doing animation, I’ve seen Gretchin and Leopoldo do nifty tricks like logging on remotely to their systems from mine, and I . . . well, I know what a blind carbon copy is? I must know something, anyhow. Point is, we should designate a time to share what we know. Pronto, since other folks seem to know a whole lot I don’t, as yet.

2004-08-14T16:48:00.000-07:00

Doubtless their Columbia connections bias their scholarship somehow and I’ve been biased too, but this list still blows me away. Much of what I know about the past, about literature especially, I derived from books by these people, particularly Hadas, Trilling, Highet, and Barzun.

2004-06-05T18:28:00.000-07:00

A cursory look around www.magazineart.org, as pointed out at Boing Boing, shows standards in decorative art have not changed much in the last 150 years, which makes me wonder whether such standards have changed much at all. Does decorative art relate to popular culture, in the sense of making its effects intentionally superficial and immediately accessible?

—

The One Percent idea: phrases. It’s hyper-, supra-, infra- and metapolitical.

—

Quickly looking over Whiskey Bar’s economic analysis, it seems worth understanding; it’s an excellent focus, if nothing else. If I understood its points, I would understand the U.S. contemporary political and economic status a whole lot better. Hmm.

—

It is not enough to opt out politically, partly because it is not even possible. Instead, it is important to alter. In “Archaïscher Torso Apollos” Rilke says “Du mußt dein Leben ändern.” You must change your life.

2004-06-04T18:58:00.000-07:00

I should get a bicycle. Not only should I get a bicycle, I should learn How-Stuff-Works-style thoroughly how it works. The chainless bike at Cool Tools does look cool, but comments like these make me wary. Along with a bicycle, I should think about other efficient stuff, such as lights, and MetaFilter came through with a referral to Reactual, a meta-efficiency site.

2004-05-19T01:25:00.000-07:00

Stupid Amazon. A while back I said you could see the exact page I was talking about in David Brin’s book Earth, which turns out to be totally wrong, since Amazon’s scheme causes its Search-Inside-The-Book links to expire. Crap. If you want to see the exact page you have to pick page 285 from this link.

2004-05-18T17:35:00.000-07:00

Something made me want to read about Thomas Carlyle, maybe the Victorian Prophets intro I read last week? Whatever, both Wikipedia and Britannica have pretty good articles on him (Wikipedia: 1500 words; Britannica: 1900 words).

2004-05-10T17:09:00.001-07:00

A thought about archives. I searched a digital archive at work today and noticed its oldest documents went back to 1998 and 1999. Noticing that, I meta-noticed how old those documents seemed. Five or six years feels at once like nothing—my life has changed little in that time; my sense of the ambient culture, likewise—and somehow epochal. For example, Google did not exist at all six years ago, and “Bushies” meant “Australian outback types” or didn’t mean anything, but Massive Attack was still cool.

A well-maintained future archive may hold fifty years of documents, as well as a whole lot of other digitized stuff. The thought I had was, How old will stuff from 1999 seem in a fifty-year archive?

2004-05-10T03:50:00.000-07:00

One quick distinction between “pop” culture and “high” culture—note scare quotes and some smirking—concerns necessary effort. To appreciate that theme song from Friends in whatever way—it’s cheerful fun; it’s trite babbling; it’s not much; it’s another little piece of my heart—requires no sustained effort. Any response to it happens instantly, modified only by repetition.

—

I want to write «“The Time of Your Life”». The 3000-word idea is good; the introductory paragraph (“193 words into this essay, now 200”) is good.

The first time I figured the 60-second minutes in a 60-minute hour added up to 3,600 seconds, it was too abstract to register; as was the calculation that a 24-hour day of 3,600-second hours totaled 86,400 seconds. It was correct but unconnected to anything else and so forgotten.

The next time I considered the matter, I wanted to know how many seconds were in a year. Straightforward multiplication immediately told me the answer was 31,536,000, or thirty-odd million seconds, but the number meant almost nothing to me, which set me to wondering how I could say, “Okay, now I understand,” when plainly I did not, and then I wondered whether I understood it at all. What did a figure like thirty million really mean?

Simple counting in games such as hide-and-seek made me comfortable with 60-second minutes. Of a 60-second minute, I could say confidently, “I understand this.” Even five minutes, 300 seconds, was graspable almost immediately, but a tenfold jump to 3,000 seconds?—what was that? Fifty minutes? It was correct but made no sense. Fifty, yes. Three thousand, no. And so here was a distinct mark to consider: the jump to thousands stopped making sense. I never counted into the thousands—nobody did. It would take far too long to do. The number was too far from my direct experience to really feel in the same way I could feel the seconds in a minute, each ticking individually toward the time I could seek or somebody could seek me.

—

Essay title: «“Big Pictures, Long Runs, and Weltanshauungs”».

—

Wondered about the attribution of the “necessary to invent it if it didn’t already exist” trope; thought it was Voltaire; turned out to be Voltaire. Good one, François-Marie!

2004-05-09T18:25:00.000-07:00

Today is Mother’s Day, and I’ve done nothing; no call, no card, no email, nada. I am the big suck. Still, at least I didn’t die on Mother’s Day, as Alan King did. ’Course, he died at 76, so his mother’s probably not around.

—

Yesterday while talking with Andrew I made a synecdoche between all the conventional social behavior I dislike and “prom”; that is, “prom” stands for everything in contemporary “normal” activity that I, well, hate’s probably not too strong a word for it. As a plus, “prom” actively sounds bad to me; it’s ugly just as a word, with some of the same ring as “pompous” or “dumb” or “lame.”

Usage: Balancing a checkbook is so prom. Yuck.

—

The thing to write is still «”The Time of Your Life.”»

In the time of your life live—so that in that good time there shall be no ugliness or death for yourself or for any life your life touches. Seek goodness everywhere, and when it is found, bring it out of its hiding-place and let it be free and unashamed. Place in matter and in flesh the least of the values, for these are the things that hold death and must pass away. Discover in all things that which shines and is beyond corruption. Encourage virtue in whatever heart it may have been driven into secrecy and sorrow by the shame and terror of the world. Ignore the obvious, for it is unworthy of the clear eye and the kindly heart. Be the inferior to no man, nor of any man be the superior. Remember that every man is a variation of yourself. No man’s guilt is not yours, nor is any man’s innocence a thing apart. Despise evil and ungodliness, but not men of ungodliness or evil. These, understand. Have no shame in being kindly and gentle, but if the time comes in the time of your life to kill, kill and have no regret. In the time of your life, live—so that in that wondrous time you shall not add to the misery and sorrow of the world, but shall smile to the infinite delight and mystery of it.

And a nonsexist rewrite:

In the time of your life live—so that in that good time there shall be no ugliness or death for yourself or for any life your life touches. Seek goodness everywhere, and when it is found, bring it out of its hiding-place and let it be free and unashamed. Place in matter and in flesh the least of the values, for these are the things that hold death and must pass away. Discover in all things that which shines and is beyond corruption. Encourage virtue in whatever heart it may have been driven into secrecy and sorrow by the shame and terror of the world. Ignore the obvious, for it is unworthy of the clear eye and the kindly heart. Be the inferior to no one, nor of any one be the superior. Remember that every one is a variation of yourself. No one’s guilt is not yours, nor is any one’s innocence a thing apart. Despise evil and ungodliness, but not folk of ungodliness or evil. These, understand. Have no shame in being kindly and gentle, but if the time comes in the time of your life to kill, kill and have no regret. In the time of your life, live—so that in that wondrous time you shall not add to the misery and sorrow of the world, but shall smile to the infinite delight and mystery of it.

William Saroyan wrote this paragraph as a preface to his 1939 play The Time of Your Life, which Seattle Repertory Theatre put on 020040212-0307. Saroyan also wrote the short story “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze,” which sounded too catchy to have been his own title, and is not; it’s from an 1867 British music-hall song.

2004-05-07T17:36:00.000-07:00

In the late 1980s David Brin wrote a book called Earth, published in 1990, which I eventually read last fall. It’s a pretty good book, and today I remembered a scene in it where a main character, a biologist-cum-mother-figure, instructs a filter program to randomize part of her news to prevent herself from imposing too much order on her awareness. Amazon, bless ’em, along with Brin’s publisher I guess, had the text available and searchable, so I found the exact passage I’d remembered in pretty short order. The remarkable thing, though, is that I found it while the book itself is some thousands of meters away in my room, while I'm here busily at work . . . well . . . you know.

2004-05-03T18:56:00.000-07:00

Finished John Seely Brown’s Storytelling interview with Seth Kahan. In it, he talks about mutually contradictory assumptions as underliers (he doesn’t say that, exactly). Does Brown know the work of Isaiah Berlin? And as far as the question “What is the pond the ripple is on?” . . . my goodness.

Speaking of Berlin, here’s a facsimile of a typed letter to Edmund Wilson 019591130 with a note about Pasternak’s Zhivago. I wonder whether Wilson replied; I can check at home later.

2004-05-03T17:53:00.000-07:00

Somehow (3 2 1) I stumbled into John Seely Brown’s site and am slightly hooked. Reminds me a little of Rich Gold (link to WorldChanging; richgold.org is currently "experiencing difficulties").

2004-05-03T17:28:00.000-07:00

Usage note: replace the damnably wrong phrase “is comprised of” with the slim, smart-sounding word “comprises” and not only will you look smart—anybody who says “is comprised of” instead of “is composed of” must hope to look smart, is my reading—you will be right, which is nice, too.

2004-04-27T23:59:00.000-07:00

Something about D&D being thirty years old—my age—seems somehow sad as hell to me. Call it a mood disorder. Call it whatever you want. It’s worth remarking.

2004-04-02T15:49:00.000-08:00

Here is normal text. Here are SMALL CAPITALS.
Here is normal text. Here are REGULAR CAPITALS.
Here is normal text. Here are SMALL CAPITALS with leading caps.

A few folks—myself regrettably included—excoriated Drew Barrymore for misusing the word excoriate on The Late Show with David Letterman, 020040308, when in fact her usage was a good deal more fluent and cool than mere excoriation as usually employed by journalists and other fancy-pants, reflex-driven page-fillers. Damn. To excoriate, it turns out, means “to tear or wear off the skin of; abrade”; Drew said talking about some things “excoriated the meaning” from them; it tears the skin off them, it makes them weaker. That’s perfect usage, better than any mere synonym for “pouring scorn on,” the ordinary journalist’s usage—“Captain Knucklehead excoriated the present administration for its attempted shmuh”—by a fair distance. Sorry, Drew. (And hey, Harry, you oughta apologize, too.)

2004-04-01T04:32:00.000-08:00

020040401

Read through John Gruber’s interesting ideas concerning his Markdown and SmartyPants projects, via mph's blogmarks. Keep it in consideration; though it does sound technically more advanced than, well, I am.

2004-03-30T18:36:00.000-08:00

Emerson’s always-two-parties, party-of-the-past, party-of-the-future comment did not include Wired’s attributed phrases “the Establishment and the Movement,” according to the published text.

2004-03-30T18:08:00.000-08:00

Compare this image of Bob Denver with this image of James Caviezel, or hell, these images of Caviezel. You tell me.

2004-03-29T18:45:00.000-08:00

Kevin may be able to help me set up a good-lookin' page for the blogging effort. Check with him.
—
One of the old Anodyne writers—Emily Gertz—is now an editor at WorldChanging whose personal blog looks cool, too.

2004-03-29T17:43:00.000-08:00

Pat Crow, Sam Crow's father (Sam Crow who played harmonica at Reed, who was Argie's boyfriend for a time), was an editor at The New Yorker; I've seen him thanked in A. Alvarez's front matter for . . . maybe The Savage God? Night? One of those. Here he is—via Googling—interviewed after retirement (an HTML Google cache of a PDF), and here's a 2001-era AOL email address (ccrow95544@aol.com).

2004-03-29T02:00:00.000-08:00

Improv

20040328

I need to use my 15-minute bus commute more wisely. It comes to mind to devote it to poetry. In 15 minutes, according to Isaac Asimov’s estimate in Measure of the Universe, an averagely educated adult can read 4500 words. Suppose it takes three times as long to read poetry—1500 words, then. Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn runs under 400 words and would make a fine afternoon’s or evening’s accomplishment as a reading. So might many of Mark Wood’s selections.

—

Here’s somebody talking about e-books read aloud at 400 wpm.

- posted by Carl @ 19:09

Holy crap. Via Esther Dyson’s blog comes a zoom-able, click-able map interface for the whole U.S. (here’s Portland, Oregon).

- posted by Carl @ 18:39

020040328

To get: New earphone pieces, keyboard/workstation cleaning supplies.

—

In HTML format, using MS Word as my email editor, em dashes import recognizably into TextEdit. Hallelujah.

—

Think about energy flows; seriously, spend some time, some measured time in hours, thinking about how much energy is needed to do certain amounts of work, such as to keep a human body going in good condition for a day, as compared with, say, the amount of energy required to power a 100-watt light bulb for a day. Think about where that power must come from. This is an effort of comparisons, an effort that can take the form of a short essay.

—

Among other things, a simple Google search on Noel Perrin’s Giving Up the Gun, which from its copyright page I knew had been printed in The New Yorker in 1965, yielded box 603 of manuscripts “run & killed” by The New Yorker between 1959 and 1966, as archived at the New York Public Library.

- posted by Carl @ 16:35

20040327

I’m reading a little book by James Elkins called What Happened to Art Criticism? It’s orienting me in a world almost totally unfamiliar to me, though it’d be even more helpful if its references were hyperlinked. A Globe and Mail review (Google cache) of the publisher behind Elkins’ book—Prickly Paradigm Press—notes the existence of blogs as comparable with the series, and the Creative Commons folks, and Cory Doctorow’s and Larry Lessig’s early examples, give me hope for a convergence phenomenon, where stuff of limited appeal can widen its appeal by being freely available in an ephemeral, less-produced format, such as MP3 or phosphor dots or LED, but also available in permanent, library-friendly, printed pages between tough covers.

- posted by Carl @ 18:21

020040327

The important things in the world may well not be the useful things; the distinction may be hell to make; but I feel an urge to do so. The important things may be history; it’s difficult to say, but they may be. History packs the world and unpacks it. History—the stories we tell ourselves—makes whatever sense of the world we can make. Distinctions are history’s job, its raison d’être.

The important things may be the useful things. There may be no distinguishing between them. If you can use it maybe it must be useful; if it’s useful, maybe it must be important.

History’s no help but its stories are all we have except imagining and even then we only imagine other history, tell other stories.

- posted by Carl @ 16:31

20040326

Michael McDonough’s “The Top 10 Things They Never Taught Me In Design School” from Design Observer.

—

I’ve decided more or less to get over the extra space around the em dash section-separators. More important, I need my paragraphs to be less than “the width of two alphabets” or “10 to 12 words per line”. That’s the next tiny project to tackle at Improv.

- posted by Carl @ 18:23

020040326

Part of the plan—and it’s admittedly half-assed—now involves writing these Outlook Musings in a Textile-convertible format, so words I emphasize get before-and-after single-space underlines, as “emphasize” just did; special characters such as the currency symbol (¤) or the multiplication sign (×) appear thus, using Microsoft Word as my email editor, since Outlook on its own refuses to countenance such high-tech tomfoolery; and superscripts (1.4 × 10¹⁵) or subscripts (H₂O) do likewise.

—

My section divider (see above) is an em dash on its own line; it may morph into the more traditional §, should a need arise.

I’ve abandoned tabbed indents for individual paragraphs, as Textile and HTML more generally seem not to understand them, going with blank lines as separators for some reason, perhaps web-based readability? Dunno.

—

David Pescovitz is one of the digerati, or at least among the folks who comprise that terrific entity, the blogosphere, and he writes about some stuff that interests me, such as memory habits passively monitored.

- posted by Carl @ 17:28

2004-03-28T19:09:00.000-08:00

2004-03-28T18:39:00.000-08:00

Holy crap. Via Esther Dyson’s blog comes a zoom-able, click-able map interface for the whole U.S. (here’s Portland, Oregon).

2004-03-28T16:35:00.000-08:00

2004-03-27T18:21:00.000-08:00

2004-03-27T16:31:00.000-08:00

2004-03-26T18:23:00.000-08:00

2004-03-26T17:28:00.000-08:00

2004-03-23T18:54:00.000-08:00

020040323 – 4

Now I’m looking—in Outlook—at the phrase “in Outlook” between two em dashes, which is as it should be. What I want to know is, will Mail recognize them as em dashes? If Mail won’t, I’ll need to figure out some way to indicate em dashes as I write that will still convert into actual HTML em dashes using Textile, as well as be readable pre-conversion to Diurnalis on the iMac. (A couple of other things I need to learn: type one space at the end of sentences and before full colons. It’s a typographic standard. Fixed-width fonts on old typewriters were the bugbear that caused the double-space post-sentence phenomenon, no longer necessary, and needing to be unlearned. And another thing: how am I going to get that currency symbol (¤) to show up? Voodoo? What about the multiplication sign (×) or scientifically notated numbers (e.g., 1.657 × 10^-24) with exponents intact?

This stuff is all displaying correctly in Outlook.

2004-03-23T17:58:00.000-08:00

020040323 – 3

On the #20 to work, I reread Guy Davenport’s essay “Prehistoric Eyes.” Something related in no way—or only the most tenuous way—to it: the cover image of Cory Doctorow’s Eastern Standard Tribe is of a coffee mug with the Earth reflected in the joe! I’ve looked at that image dozens of times in half a dozen different contexts and not realized it until this moment.

Shockingly, it looks as if the formatting is more or less correct for most of the stuff I just posted, this not excepted.

2004-03-23T17:50:00.000-08:00

020000206

Education is a process that does not regress. One may forget details and facts, but the breadth and depth of all learned processes must leave traces in the mind. Only actual physical damage can blot the effects of education on the mind; other circumstances will themselves be aspects of education and its traces. Once I have read widely in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, for example, the information may fade in specific, but in general, that reading will affect all subsequent reading that I do, forever. Similarly, though I may not recall each specific datum in Isaiah Berlin’s The Proper Study of Mankind, its central theses, even imperfectly remembered as they are, will color all my life and thought.

—

Precision works differently in life and conversation than in text; it means different things. In conversation, to be precise mostly means to be clear, and strict, verifiable accuracy is of less importance than general clarity. In a text, precision involves clarity, but also very plainly requires accuracy, since one may check and recheck facts without interrupting the circumstances of life that often govern even technical conversations.

020000213 (from 000206)

Reading Madame Bovary, I find that I no longer take for granted my ability to read properly. This recognition started earlier, usually in connection with more sophisticated literature, especially fiction, but Bovary is the sharpest instance of it so far.

In the first chapter of After Babel, George Steiner described some of the knowledge needed to understand a passage from Cymbeline then showed an extent of underlying substance in a passage from Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, and gave context for a section from a play by Noel Coward. Each series of examples ranged widely enough to daunt any serious reader, if considered thoroughly, yet all seem required in order to understand properly the works at hand, as he described them. His specific and deeply critical analyses embody a method of reading that I cannot—out of ignorance—manage and cannot—since it seems to me absolutely correct—disregard.

Knowledge of convention and knowledge of allusion are central to Steiner’s method of reading and I lack these sorts of knowledge in dire, gross ways. My awareness of this lack stems from comparison to writers like George Steiner, Margaret Anne Doody, Edmund Wilson, Ellen Moers, Erich Auerbach, Virginia Woolf, Mary McCarthy, William McNeill, Rebecca West, John Clute, John Updike, Vladimir Nabokov, Susan Sontag, Peter Gay, Elias Canetti, Isaiah Berlin, Bernard Knox, Elizabeth Hardwick, Jacques Barzun, and Guy Davenport.

—

Somewhere I wrote that to understand the nineteenth or eighteenth century while living in the late twentieth and twenty-first was impossible, but it might be possible to do if one lived as if in the nineteenth or eighteenth or even the early twentieth. George Steiner argues in In Bluebeard’s Castle that a common heritage of Western European cultural continuity from Greek and Roman antiquity through the early twentieth century was broken sometime around the First World War, broken in ways that cannot be mended, and can only be described. He tries to leave no room for useless nostalgia, but his personal intimacy with the continuity he insists is broken must—for it is so much of himself that is lost—sound mournful in tone, as though it were a parent who had died and orphaned him. Steiner, though born in 1929, somehow contrived to live a gentleman’s life, with a gentleman’s education that might have come straight from the nineteenth-century European Continent, in strict accord with the European classical tradition. That tradition was built on a widely recognized Latin and Greek canon combined with a profound awareness of Christian cultural dogma, defined in English largely by the Book of Common Prayer and King James Bible, and in Western Europe by schisms in Catholicism and the Protestant denominations, with dozens of clearly drawn lines that, if inspected, blurred into borders, and dissolved into a morass of real and deeply imaginary conflicts. Western unity could be found by comparison with its construction of a monolithic East, where mysteries were thought to breathe in a serene Oriental haze, free from the scrutiny and detail of fact that choked the West’s own divided nations and states. The West could define itself as Christendom—as the Kingdom of God—against the infidel Moors and Turks, the empire of Islam, which might blend at times into the Orient that included China and Japan, through Western ignorance and projection: all were alike in their failure to be Christians.

020000214

Does standard materialism as a doctrine break down when faced with phenomena such as consciousness? Daniel Dennett supposes not. He believes the material interaction of very large numbers of nonconscious elements can and does give rise to the experiences and phenomena we call consciousness. A proof of his belief could be found in Alan Turing’s thought-experiment now known as a “Turing test”. Turing’s test ignores theories of consciousness in favor of empirical evaluation.

If someone at a computer console interacts with somebody else by means of text displayed on a screen, neither person is likely to suspect the other of being anything except human and conscious. Turing’s test would use this normative trust as a way to determine whether nonhuman creatures might be taken to have similarly “unexceptionable” consciousness.

020000227

Something about Shakespeare in Steiner’s work: something about a phrase, a Sprächshopfer?, what Steiner calls a “word-smith”, à la Joyce’s and Lear’s portmanteau constructions, but also in analogy to astrophysics a “singularity” and thereby an absolute enigma. Consummate Shakespeare. “Shakespeare and no end.” Was that Goethe?

Consider the origins—the historical sites—of classical music. Consider the nature of that classicism.

000311

He gave up playing the flute because it stimulated his imagination to indulge in sentimental reveries – for every middle-class young man thinks, some time or other, in the heat of adolescence, if only for a day, if only for a minute, that he is cut out for the rôle of lover or of hero. —from Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857; tr. Gerard Hopkins)

Cf. Neal Stephenson’s description of “bad motherfuckerdom” in Snow Crash.

Diurnalis — Spring, 2000

(000319, 23:35 PST— 000620, 17:48 PST)

020000325

All happy families are like one another; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. —from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1877; 1961 tr. David Magarshack)

Is this statement true or merely lyrical?

020000326

Fictional figures as currency, as a medium of exchange used in common between writers, readers, and other cultural members. Imaginary economy.

Another thing: In Holy Fire, someone at a party offers Mia water from the moon, which had been ice and would be thawed to serve; this is in a time when people preserve their health fiercely, because their places in society depend heavily on their state of health, and also because the possibility of greatly extended life exists and is widely realized. As an incident, this is quite “dense” with imaginary effort—a great deal needs to be known in order to make the situation sensible. I don’t remember George Steiner’s (was it Steiner?) term for the background material needed to understand a passage of fiction, but it applies in force with science fiction.

—

In Jacques Barzun’s essay “In Search of Roots” he says something about 25,000 volumes having been got under one’s belt in the course of forty or fifty years of reading, numbers which apply to himself and his friends Auden and Trilling—does he say “under one’s belt”?—and J.A. Cuddon comments in his Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory that he has read “many thousands” of volumes in his lifetime. Kenneth Rexroth’s two little books, Classics Revisited and More Classics Revisited, are more concise accounts, noting only world-class literature and not the whole of his reading; still, he notes hundreds of books in their short compass. Margaret Anne Doody read for ten years through the whole of world literature to write The True Story of the Novel: she probably read more in those years than most professors do in their whole lives. Clifton Fadiman, as a reviewer, had read some few hundreds of books and manuscripts each year for many years in his youth, and I doubt whether he slowed much if at all as he grew older.

The limits of human efforts at reading are manifest and absolute: selection is necessary: one must choose one’s way. I know this. I know also that the overlap between Doody’s reading and, say, Peter Gay’s, would be great, though Doody is a literary critic whose focus is the traditions of the novel and Gay a historian mainly of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe. It is unlikely that either of them would be totally unfamiliar with the work of Proust, or Tolstoy, or Goethe, or Shakespeare, or Augustine, or Aeschylus. It is more likely, actually, that both of them have read essentially all of every one of these writers’ works, and a swath through the secondary and in many cases further literatures related to them. Their knowledge of Homer and the Bible would not match a serious scholar’s, but would very much outmatch any average professor of literature.

The thing for me though is that both of them got their broad education in the course of another project—in Doody’s case, her history of the novel as it developed based on ancient models and including the romance as a species of novel; in Gay’s, first an interpretation of the European Enlightenment as a newly vital effort of the pagan world-view of antiquity, and then the comprehensive history of the European bourgeoisie seen in the light of modern psychology. (Gay is the more productive of them but this probably has more to do with a difference in work habits than with any major difference in their actual knowledge bases.) To earn a comparable education, I need to establish for myself a project that will demand an intellectually comparable course.

020000327

Found a unit called a “dalton” after John Dalton (1766-1844), defined in Dorland’s as “an arbitrary unit of mass, being 1/12 the mass of the nuclide of carbon-12, equivalent to 1.657 × 10^-24 g. Symbol D or Da. Called also atomic mass unit.” Used to measure the mass of molecules?

2004-03-22T18:20:00.000-08:00

This appears to work somewhat. I copied the text from Word into the HTML converter at Textile, and it dutifully turned it into bloggable stuff, which I copied and pasted into Blogger, then posted and published. Now I’m trying the same thing from within Outlook, using Outlook’s text, formatted as a Musing from work, the usual ur-form of a Diurnalis entry proper. Now I need a link of some kind (I’m using the Underwood casemod from Boing Boing) to test. Once again!

2004-03-22T18:07:00.000-08:00

020040322

Well, I posted an entry from the end of February, an entry mostly designed to test whether I could properly format URLs, and now I’m testing some conversion stuff using Textile, “A Humane Web Text Generator.” Here goes.

2004-02-25T05:32:00.000-08:00

040131

At first the principles of “Leave No Trace” (“pack it in, pack it out,” etc.; hikers’ jargon) seemed to fit well with the “cradle to cradle” design principles, but after I thought about it a little, I realized “cradle to cradle” actually works more like natural selection. “Leave No Trace” is impossible in any larger context, such as civilization. A backpacker may be able to carry out everything that was carried in, doing no damage and making no changes in the area traveled through, but no civilization has those options. Civilizations immediately affect their environments, and they are shaped by their environments. A civilization is much more deeply involved in its environment than any hiker, any caver, diver, or other adventurer. A civilization—and we come closer to having just One Big One all the time—is an ecosystem. A hiker is a person with appropriate shoes.
—
Cory Doctorow considers Boing Boing to be an outside-his-head collection of what’s in his head.

Philip Dhingra thinks Cory’s part of an in-crowd set nestled at the center of the blogosphere.

Links helpfully point out the other stars. Joining is easy; becoming one of the players . . . well, it takes some doing. How do people know Instapundit is as celebrated as bloggers get?
—
A related question: Were E. M. Cioran, Georg Lichtenberg, Nietzsche, or Elias Canetti to be writing today, would they blog?
—
040202

In the past I’ve noticed I treat my body’s need for food differently than other people—in particular Cecilia Nguyen, Jeanette Ward, Laura Grant, and Jenny Doyle—seem to do. Where hunger dramatically overwhelms some people, I get hungry but can and do forestall eating more or less indefinitely with few ill effects. Twenty-four hours fasting hardly affects me.

The question here is, how long would it take to figure out the mechanics behind my stoic (?) hunger, as compared to Jenny’s “tapeworm” hunger? Would it be worth the time? It’s nutritional science, I guess. There’s some anatomy, some physiology, some organic chemistry, and some basic physics. If I could write it in a few pages . . . would that be worth doing?

Encyclopædia Britannica’s nutrition article looks like a good place to start. Bringing nutritional thinking “into line with other branches of science and using joules as the unit of energy” instead of kilocalories (Calories) is a good frickin’ idea, enabling easier conversions between all areas of knowledge and integrating ourselves into the natural sciences, where we ought to have been all along.

We can gain an effective sense of how much energy the body uses to maintain itself by comparing that amount with something we find more familiar, such as a 100-watt light bulb. Spend an hour or so tonight working out the conversions.
—
Marshall Brain may not be a mathematician, but he can certainly do the math. His quick analyses of human nutritional requirements and perfect food, U.S. per-capita tiger distribution, prescription drug costs and the U.S. return-on-investment for the Iraqi reconstruction effort all rely on nothing more complicated than basic arithmetic, and all of them say interesting things besides.

2004-02-21T18:26:00.000-08:00

Now for the dates. Apparently I can't get a leading zero for the 10,000-year rollover, so the date reads, left to right, 2004 (the Gregorian year) 02 (the numeric month, in this case, February) 21 (the numeric day). That leading zero is important, so the date should read 020040221, but none of the template-designers at Blogger believe the current civilization's bloggers will last 8,000 more years, so they've skimped on the digit. Y10K'll catch 'em with their pants down, fo' sho'. The Long Now leading zero came to my attention via Bruce Sterling and the Viridian folks, but it's not catching on very quickly, which I guess goes along with its whole way of thinking, really.

Oddly, Wood's Lot came to my attention because it's one of the only sites Google returns in a search for "long now" and "five digit year"; at Wood's Lot, you have to scroll down quite a bit to see the brief entry (or Find "long now" on the page), just a link to Long Now, but Wood's Lot's worth checking out on its own.

2004-02-21T17:57:00.000-08:00

Screwed that up, I guess. Another try. Here's Wood's Lot, which has impressed me lately. Now post.

2003-10-01T23:52:00.000-07:00

It's amazing the kinds of connections formed in one's "random" reading. I read in Neil Gaiman's blog that Great Pan was dead, and thought I might have remembered it differently than he quoted it, so surfed a bit and found George Steiner -- whose book Grammars of Creation I currently am reading -- addressing Boston University in 1999 on the subject of the passage in question. There is no very close connection between Gaiman and Steiner, not as there is between, say Gaiman and Dave McKean; so there really is not much reason I should find them so close-by in "search-space" on this subject, except that my interests automatically place them there.

2003-08-11T00:56:00.000-07:00

So I'm reading Alexander Theroux's essay entitled "Black," originally published in Conjunctions in 1994, and thinking, "Jesus, this guy's pretty verbose," but it gets better, and I start to think, "Jesus, verbosity can really get you somewhere, if you pick the right words."

2003-08-06T05:08:00.000-07:00

I'm still not sure what I'm doing, so this blog still sucks. It will continue to suck for quite some time yet. Do not hold your breath. Do not bookmark this site. Yet.

2003-08-04T02:50:00.000-07:00

This is the turtle from The Neverending Story. It's named Morla.