Unless our mind is playing tricks on us, we seem to remember hearing Sir Richard Burton read the phone book on The Tonight Show back in the 1960s--the white pages, no less. We remember his voice as low, intimate, seductive, urgent.
1953: Husband furious because you've missed the post? The Pitney-Bowes Postage Meter prints the stamp and seals the envelope all in one go.
Norman Mailer -- author of more than 30 works and twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize -- is dead at 84. He died Saturday, November 10, 2007, of renal failure.
The twin goals of the web game Free Rice are
Listen to Krulwich's fabulous report at NPR.
Free will. It's one of those nagging issues that's been around for a long time and which most of us do our best to ignore, although we English types tend to fret about it whenever we teach Oedipus Rex.Instead of random noise, we find a fractal order (resembling Lévy flights) in the temporal structure of spontaneous flight maneuvers in tethered Drosophila fruit flies. Lévy-like probabilistic behavior patterns are evolutionarily conserved, suggesting a general neural mechanism underlying spontaneous behavior.This set off a spate of somewhat more readable articles on the original research. It also led Scott Adams in The Dilbert Blog to observe that a more accurate title of the paper would be “Study Shows Fruit Flies Look Around Even When There’s Not Much to Look At.”
Moss Piglets. Water Bears. Tardigrades. "Boil 'em, mash 'em, stick 'em in a stew," as Sam Gamgee said in The Two Towers. It wouldn't faze them. For one thing they are small, really small, small as in smaller than the period at the end of this sentence. And that's the really big ones. For another thing they are tough. Real tough.
We have long been sensitive to the fact that one of the occupational hazards of teaching English is the regular and inexorable accumulation of books -- book creep, as it were. They gradually fill bookshelves, first in neat orderly rows, then stacked on top of those books in their neat orderly rows, and then in front of them. They fight with magazines for space on coffee tables, cluster by reading chairs, and make themselves at home on the dining room table. Cookbooks cluster in odd corners in the kitchen, wearing with pride assorted splatters and stains. Paperbacks sneak into the bedrooms, pile up on bed stands and hide under the bed. Eventually it all becomes too much, and every year or so a general roundup is conducted, followed by a brutal Darwinian culling. The rejects are boxed up and hauled off for the library fund raising sale.
A little research is a good thing, but enough is enough! Scientists simply should not go too far.
New Scientist has a fascinating and macabre story on what it's like to die in various forms--"How Does It Feel to Die?": drowning, heart attack, bleeding to death, fire, decapitation, electrocution, fall from a height, hanging, lethal injection, and explosive decompression.Beheading, if somewhat gruesome, can be one of the quickest and least painful ways to die - so long as the executioner is skilled, his blade sharp, and the condemned sits still.
The height of decapitation technology is, of course, the guillotine. Officially adopted by the French government in 1792, it was seen as more humane than other methods of execution. When the guillotine was first used in public, onlookers were reportedly aghast at the speed of death.
Quick it may be, but consciousness is nevertheless believed to continue after the spinal chord is severed. A study in rats in 1991 found that it takes 2.7 seconds for the brain to consume the oxygen from the blood in the head; the equivalent figure for humans has been calculated at 7 seconds. Some macabre historical reports from post-revolutionary France cited movements of the eyes and mouth for 15 to 30 seconds after the blade struck, although these may have been post-mortem twitches and reflexes.
How does the Serenity compare in size to the Enterprise? Or--for that matter- to the Discovery, the Nostromo, the Millennium Falcon, or the Columbia? And how do they compare to the Eiffel Tower or an American football field or the space shuttle Discovery?
The arcane yet interesting question of whether one cites weblogs in a scientific paper has been answered by the U. S. National Library of Medicine in The NLM Style Guide for Authors, Editors, and Publishers (2nd ed., 2007).
"Paris Architecture Explained" by Lisa Pasold is an "Overview with examples of the history of notable architecture in Paris. Covers the medieval period, Renaissance, French Baroque and Classicism, Rococo, Neo-Classicism and Empire, Haussmann renovations, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, and 20th century developments through the mid 1990s." (--from Librarians' Index to the Internet)
The official Agatha Christie web site is a great resource on Christie titles, protagonists, and productions (and includes downloads and games).
The University of Virginia's online exhibit--Rave Reviews: Bestselling Fiction in America--celebrates "the fiction Americans actually read-fiction we admire, fiction we love, fiction we pretend to ignore."
We are blessed to live during a time of interesting male facile hair. But darlin', we can't touch the imaginative, hirsute males of the 19th c. As evidence, we offer Mustaches of the Nineteenth Century: A Daily Celebration of The Golden Age of Upper Lip Hair.
“More than ever before, advances in science and technology affect people's daily lives,” says WIRED Science executive producer David Axelrod. “Our goal is to keep our viewers two steps ahead of those changes - and entertain them at the same time.”Locally (NW Wyoming), WIRED Science shows on PBS channels, Wednesday nights, 7:00 p.m. You can also access episodes and content on the show's web site; and you can download free video podcasts from iTunes.Each week, WIRED Science correspondents take viewers to the frontiers of discovery across the country and around the world, spotlighting the cutting-edge innovations and research that are defining 21st-century culture, and introducing the high-tech mavericks who are making it happen.
The show isn’t limited to the airwaves. WIRED Science's online arm features Web-exclusive stories, and expands the broadcast segments with additional video, blogs, columns, and interviews. A lively discussion area and regular contests bring viewers into the action. The website also features a dynamic collection of related science activities for the classroom, developed by leading science teachers - and their students - from across the US.
THE WAR by Ken Burns inspired creation of The War Toolbox by the California Center for the Book.
Madeleine L'Engle, the woman who introduced us to a lifelong love of Science Fiction when we read A Wrinkle in Time, died on September 6th this year. The memorial service for L'Engle will be held on November 28th at The Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. That is the day before what would have been her 89th birthday.
From The Knight with His Hand on His Breast by El Greco. Original from Art Renewal Center at http://www.artrenewal.org/asp/database/image.asp?id=14299
"That's why we're giving this edition from 2004 away at no cost: there's still much that's relevant even after all the changes that Wi-Fi has gone through. (What's really out of date? There's little coverage of WPA security and nothing on 802.11n.)"
You can access a free version of the second edition of The Wireless Networking Starter Kit by following the book's link.
Two weekends ago at the Wyoming Book Festival, we enjoyed hearing Nancy Pearl speak. Nancy--and everyone calls her Nancy--is the body model for the Librarian Action Figure (picture with Nancy at left), the author of reading guides such as Book Lust, and a regular commentator on NPR's Morning Edition.
Wyoming writer, poet, journalist and non-fiction author Tom Rea has a new web site.
Yesterday after a student repeatedly fell asleep in our class (and after we had lost patience with kindly awakening him), we finally had to ask him to leave and go take a nap elsewhere. Convinced that our scintillating teaching style is not at fault, we wonder why so many students are snoozing through classes these days.Pulling an all-nighter may get a paper done, but the time-honored practice hurts students, according to two recent studies. Students who burned the midnight oil at St. Lawrence University had lower GPA’s, and night owls on the women’s basketball team at Stanford University were slower and missed more shots, USA Today reported.
But colleges are doing more to help their students rest easy, the article said. The University of California at Los Angeles and the University of Maryland at College Park are giving workshops on sleep disorders; Rice University has a campaign for a regular bedtime; and Duke University offers stressed-out students an “Oasis” with ample windows, a fountain, and a massage chair. [emphasis and links added]
According to a paper scheduled for release this week by the National Bureau of Economic Research, first-year college students who happen to be assigned roommates with video-game consoles study 40 minutes less per day, on average, than first-year students whose roommates did not bring consoles.What to do? The Chronicle reports that the researchers conclude "The important lesson of their research . . . is that colleges should encourage effort, frequently reminding their students that study time pays off."
And that reduction in study time has a sizable effect on grades: First-year students whose roommates brought video-game consoles earned grades that were 0.241 lower, on a 4-point scale, than did otherwise-equivalent students whose roommates did not have consoles.
Gerald began—but was interrupted by a piercing whistle which cost him ten percent of his hearing permanently, as it did everyone else in a ten-mile radius of the eruption, not that it mattered much because for them “permanently” meant the next ten minutes or so until buried by searing lava or suffocated by choking ash—to pee.This execrable sentence erupted from the molten mind of Jim Gleeson, the 2007 grand-prize winner of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. And he's not even an English major, but a media technician.
I was in a back alley in Fiji, fighting desperately and silently for my life, fighting desperately for oxygen, clawing at the calm and almost gentle pressure of the fabric held over my face by implacable, ebony thighs when I realized -- he was killing me softly with his sarong. (Karl Scott, Brisbane, Australia)
We've long known that education levels correlate to longevity. The New York Times notes that "one study found that people who did not graduate from high school lived an average of nine years less than graduates." Education, it seems, adds to one's health literacy, which then leads to a longer life.
I confess that one of my guilty pleasures is scanning the Weekly World News while waiting in the checkout line at the grocery store. You may remember the WWN from that great cinematic masterpiece Men in Black when Will Smith is stunned that Tommy Lee Jones refers to a copy as a "hot sheet" for keeping track of aliens on the planet.Jay: These are the hot sheets?Bat Boy Lives, "the Weekly World News guide to politics, culture, celebrities, alien abductions, and the mutant freaks that shape our world," captures the essence of the WWN. Sample headlines include:
Agent K: Best investigative reporting on the planet. But go ahead, read the New York Times if you want. They get lucky sometimes.
-- IMDB
It's obvious, from this list, that the WWN is one of the heaviest users of exclamation marks in the known universe. In a 1993 Smithsonian article entitled "Rare glimpse inside tabloid world reveals editor is mad dog!" Sue Hubble wroteSalaries for established reporters are $75,000 and more. A recent hire, with no tabloid experience, has started at $53,000, and editors make salaries well into the comfortable six figures. In an unguarded moment, Eddie, himself a tenth-grade dropout and former wire editor at the St. Petersburg Times and the Evening Independent, once confessed, "We have to pay them a lot because we are, in effect, asking them to end their careers. . . . We're the French Foreign Legion of journalism."Unfortunately, it appears the WWN has fallen on hard times. The 25 February 2006 edition of The Economist noted that American Media, the WWN's publisher
continues to sell millions of copies, but the numbers are contracting. The National Enquirer lost more than 20% of its circulation between 2003 and the middle of last year. . . . a possible conclusion is that the industry now faces the consequences of its own genius. Half-a-dozen publications now use exclamation marks on their covers to describe the divorces, pregnancies, affairs, eating disorders and assorted depravities of the same small group of celebrities. . .We wish the Weekly World News the best. After all, few other publications have the courage to report that George Bush tried to enroll in the Electoral College.
Sure, everyone knows what an IED is. But how about a POG or a PUC or a TCP? Every war generates its own slang, and Austin Bay, a retired Colonel who served in Iraq, has complied a little guide entitled "Embrace the Suck": A Pocket Guide to Milspeak.
Alexis Lloyd created The Ad Generator as part of his MFA thesis at Parsons The New School for Design. The generator mixes random phrases from corporate slogans with random images pulled from Flickr. Lloyd writes,By remixing corporate slogans, I intend to show how the language of advertising is both deeply meaningful, in that it represents real cultural values and desires, and yet utterly meaningless in that these ideas have no relationship to the products being sold. In using the Flickr images, the piece explores the relationship between language and image, and how meaning is constructed by the juxtaposition of the two.The results are fascinating, thought provoking, and disquieting by turns.
Discover Magazine runs a nice series entitled "20 Things You Didn't Know About . . ." -- a list of twenty bits of often fascinating trivia about a wide range of subjects.
*For students and faculty, that is.
When handwritten essays were introduced on the SAT exams for the class of 2006, just 15 percent of the almost 1.5 million students wrote their answers in cursive. The rest? They printed. Block letters.According to the Post, the problem is not just the proliferation of keyboards in our lives. Schools have significantly reduced the time spent on cursive, which was practiced as much as two hours a week in the 1940s and 50s. Susan Bowen points out in "Handwriting: A Key to Literacy" that
For years, colleges of education have largely ignored methodology of handwriting instruction. When more than 200 primary school teachers were asked if they felt prepared to teach handwriting, 90 percent responded that they did not. Very few, if any, colleges of education offer courses in the teaching of handwriting.The concern from a number of educators is that the ability to write in cursive offers more benefits than simply producing legible handwriting. The Post notes,
The loss of handwriting also may be a cognitive opportunity missed. The neurological process that directs thought, through fingers, into written symbols is a highly sophisticated one. Several academic studies have found that good handwriting skills at a young age can help children express their thoughts better -- a lifelong benefit.Perhaps not all is lost, however. The Guardian notes Patricia Lovett, fellow of the Calligraphy and Lettering Arts Society, says the death of handwriting has been "greatly exaggerated." Maybe so. Britain is now running a National Handwriting Competition.
Before you head off to your next cocktail party, take a look at Top 12 Movies in History That Were Ahead of Their Time to stock up on talking points. This highly debatable list from Alex Billington at FirstShowing.net identifies 12 movies "as being ahead of their time primarily because of their technical and visual effects achievements. Most of these became the staple for referencing great visual effects after they came out."
nHumanities is the web log of the Humanities Division at Northwest College (Powell, Wyoming).
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ms.dsk is reading Résistance: Memoirs of Occupied France, by Agnès Humbert (trans. Barbara Mellor)
Rob Koelling is reading Anathem, by Neal Stephenson
S. Renee Dechert is reading Storey's Guide to Raising Turkeys: Breeds, Care, Health, by Leonard S. Mercia
Mary Ellen Ibarra-Robinson is reading The Memory of Water, by Karen White
Bill Hoagland is reading Trash Fish: A Life, by Greg Keeler
Jennifer Sheridan is reading The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, by Steven Pinker
Robyn Glasscock is reading poetry by Marianne Moore
Susan Watkins is reading Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith, by Jon Krakauer
