Thursday, July 31, 2008

How find the write rhyme















The couplet is a simple verse

For those to rhyming not averse.

The vexing part is to attach

Ending words which now do match.

Problem fixed, the answer's here

Write Rhymes makes the word so clear.

Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Department of Unread Books

One of the great things about books is that as soon as you finish one there's another one waiting to be read. A person who reads enough "good books" is said to be well-read, or, according to the Free Dictionary, "well informed or deeply versed through reading" and "having much knowledge or education."

Alas, for most of us the joy of reading is accompanied by a certain level of guilt about what we haven't gotten around to reading--great works we will presumably get around to when we find the time.

At the Ways with Words festival in Devon, England, reporters for the London Telegraph cornered famous authors and asked them to confess their guilty secret: which classic of literature had they not read? Their confessions are recorded for posterity at Great Unread Books: Which classic are you ashamed to admit you have never read?

If you, too, suffer feelings of inadequacy over the material everyone assumes you have read, but haven't, you may find comfort in the following discussions:

Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Debate: Reading Print vs. Reading Online

Yesterday, The New York Times started a new series of articles to focus upon what it means to be literate in a digital age: The Future of Reading -- Digital Versus Print. The series will explore "how the Internet and other technological and social forces are changing the way people read."

The first article--Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?--includes some interesting resources:
  • The New Readers (a graphic which illustrates the cognitive skills readers need to read online)
  • A Family of Readers (a video which explores the generation divide between readers in one family)

Monday, July 28, 2008

America's Favorite Architecture

At a web site sponsored by the American Institute of Architecture, you can view favorite works of architecture--buildings, bridges, monuments, and memorials--that were chosen through a public poll. The resulting 150 choices represent the structures that people love and some of the best of America's architectural heritage.

Once on the site, you can view each building, read more about it, post comments, read what others have written, and--if you wish--vote for your favorite five buildings. Once you've voted, you can compare your choices to the top-rated buildings selected by other internet users. You can zoom in on each building's picture for close-up views. Thanks to a partnership with Google Earth, you also can locate each building on an interactive map.

The top-rated building? The Empire State Building (New York City, 1931, William Lamb).

Friday, July 25, 2008

NASA's Landsat Art

Environmental Graffiti has posted the "30 Most Incredible Abstract Satellite Images of Earth." These images mimic abstract art but are actually photos taken by NASA from a Landsat 7 satellite 400 miles above the earth. Originally, these photos were on display at the Library of Congress in 2000, but you can view them now on Environmental Graffiti.

Pictured above, fluted underwater sand dunes from the Bahamas.

Thursday, July 24, 2008

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog


Joss Whedon presents a supervillain Internet musical: Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. Made for the internet, this new production from the creator of Buffy and Firefly is a relatively low-budget, goofy, family affair, starring faces as familiar as those of Neil Patrick Harris and Nathan Fillion.

The big news is that Whedon's effort is limited to the internet and it's been wildly successful, as the Los Angeles Times explains. Last week, Whedon made the three Acts of the first season available for free on the internet; now that window has closed, but one can still buy the episodes for a nominal fee on iTunes.

In an email interview with the LA Times, Whedon talks about how making a show for the internet differs from his previous efforts:

The first answer is obviously freedom: not just creative but structural, in terms of running time, number of episodes, presentation and (fingers crossed) monetization. Nothing is set in stone. I'm a very traditional storyteller, and I'm in no way Internet savvy, but I did appreciate the elasticity of the medium. The story was also geared toward the Internet audience -- and not just by putting "blog" in the title. The fact that Dr. Horrible does blog is part of his character, which is the guy alone in his room ranting about the world not being the way it should. We're long past the age of "everybody on the Internet watches 'Star Trek' and lives in their parents' basement," but there is a modern societal truth about the kind of guy who needs to tell the world his troubles and show off his talents. And I relate to that guy. Neil's blogs wouldn't work in the same way if they weren't coming from your computer screen. Correction: They will work brilliantly on DVD. Or at a midnight screening in your local city! Other difference in doing it without major backing: I become a whore.

Most importantly, there is the silly. The things that have hit on the Internet have almost all had that quality, from "Star Wars" kid, to "The Landlord," to 1,500 prisoners doing "Thriller." Not just the I-made-it-myself aesthetic, but the truly, transcendently goofy. The absurd (which is important to me, as an Absurdist) is part of the Internet's identity. Maybe it's just a stage, but it's an awesome one. On TV, Dr. Horrible would be greeted with a lot more skepticism than on the Internet. We knew as writers that we could bare our ridiculous souls to the point where people would suddenly, sincerely burst into song -- it took six years to achieve that kind of audience trust on "Buffy."

And finally, it does have to be said that every time a shot wasn't perfect and we had to move on, we'd just proclaim "It's an Internet musical!" and comfort ourselves with the idea that it would all be very tiny.

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Mon Dieu! Prêt-à-Burger


The New York Times reports that the American hamburger and cheeseburger have swept Paris this summer. That's right. It's not just in quick food places but even in restaurants run by three-star chefs. You can read the article at The Times--be sure to view the slide show, too.

Update: We've just learned that France and Europe's taste for McDonald's is on the rise, too. BusinessWeek.com reports that--thanks to an overhaul by the first non-American president of the European operations--"Europe is now McDonald's largest region by revenues, despite having roughly one-quarter the number of outlets as the U.S." Innovations in Europe have affected the menu, the facilities, and the service, all while staying true to McDonald's American roots. Reportedly, the transformations in Europe are so successful that the company is thinking about importing them to the U.S. (Thanks to Ev Koelling for this update.)

Monday, July 21, 2008

The Bottoms Up Edition

Three beverage-related snippets caught our eye last week, all three of particular interest to those who spend a deal of time in the college environment.

First, Nature News reports on studies conducted in Germany and Switzerland which demonstrate that sleep loss contributes to the formation of false memories but that caffeine helps boost the memory. Researchers had subjects memorize a list of words and then either allowed the subjects a night's sleep or kept them up all night. The next day when presented with the original list of words plus a few new ones, the sleep-deprived group did a poorer job of identifying the original words. Taking the study a step further, scientists then took two sleep-deprived groups and gave them either caffeine or a placebo one hour before their memories were tested. The caffeinated group had 10% more accurate recall.

The upshot? If you are preparing for a test or memorizing a random list of words, get a good's night sleep and have a cup of coffee.

Second, WebMD reports on a French study which shows that loud music in a bar contributes to increased drinking in young males: "When the music was loud, bar patrons ordered an average of 3.4 drinks and took less than 11.5 minutes to finish a glass of beer compared with an average of 2.6 drinks and 14.5 minutes to finish a drink when the music was at normal levels."

Previous research had established that fast music promotes fast drinking, and that the presence of music encourages people to spend more time in a bar. Now our deepest suspicion has been confirmed that loud music in a bar will make a group of young males drink more. Obviously, it's preferable when studying for a test on a random list of words that one sit quietly at home drinking beer before getting a good's night sleep followed by a roborative cup of coffee.

Finally, two posts on Omnivoracious discuss the serious pairing of books and beer. As the authors note, why should wine and food have all the fun? Omnivoracious solicited beer and book pairings from a number of authors such as T. C. Boyle, Karen Joy Fowler, Arianna Huffington, Michael Chabon, and more. You can read and view their selections in Part I and Part II.

Our conclusion? Whenever you need study for that hypothetical test while quietly sipping a quiet beer in your quiet home, make sure you are sipping the right beer for the reading material at hand, get a good night's sleep, and enjoy your morning coffee.

(Omnivoracious photo: Lauren Groff's The Monsters of Templeton paired with Brewery Ommegang's Three Philosophers, along with another Ommegang beer, and a stout.)

* Disclaimer: Please note that nHumanities cannot support irresponsible reading or drinking.

Friday, July 18, 2008

Spell Check that Tattoo


Sometimes you just wish your tattoo artist had paid more attention in Freshman English. For a few examples, check out The L Magazine, which has a collection of spelling and grammatically challenged tattoos. (There are also a couple of tattoos here which, while not exactly grammatically incorrect, do raise questions about the best way to memorialize a loved one.)

Along the same lines, there's also the story of the Chicago mechanic who wanted CHI-TOWN tattooed on his chest. He got CHI-TONW instead, a fact which vexed him enough to file suit against the Jade Dragon Tattoo and Body Piercing shop. The full story, including photos, is here.

Wednesday, July 16, 2008

If I Ran the Zoo . . .

Inspired by Dr. Seuss's If I Ran the Zoo, the editors of the National Association of Scholars have asked some of their friends and colleagues to imagine how they would change higher education if they ran "the zoo."

The responses are interesting, thoughtful, and amusing. In "If I Ran the University Zoo," Adam Kissel starts his poetic response by saying,
If I ran the university zoo,
The number of administrators would be divided by two,
And two, and two, and two, and two,
Leaving more resources available for me and for you.
Another responder, John Leo, says,
Here’s a simple suggestion
(Avoiding all fads)
I’d have some professors
Who teach undergrads
Most of the responses are in prose. Mark Bauerlein's suggestion is "one simple rule":
The rule is: every professor in English, history, philosophy, foreign languages, classics, various “studies” programs, art history, education, film, creative writing, and journalism would have to teach one section of freshman composition each year.
You can read all the solicited and unsolicited responses to NAS's challenge on the NAS web site.

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Your Guide to All Things Olympic

With the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games looming in August, Archaeology.com--a publication of the Archaeological Institute of America--has produced Archaeology's Ancient Olympics Guide.

This online feature contains a wonderful assortment of authoritative, accessible articles on numerous aspects of Olympics Games, both ancient and modern, such as
(Pictured, lighting the torch at Olympia, from Archaeology.com)

Monday, July 14, 2008

TeachingTips.com -- Not for Teachers Only

TeachingTips.com is a new weblog that seems to specialize in itemized lists of internet resources of interest to teachers and students. It posts blog entries with titles liked "50 Ways to Go Green in the Classroom" and "The Ultimate Guide to Special Needs Teaching: 100+ Resources and Links."

Two recent posts caught our eye as being potentially useful to college students:

Friday, July 11, 2008

Atlantic: Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Writing in July/August issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Nicholas Carr explores what the internet may be doing to our brains in "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" In his article, Carr argues that his ability to read and think deeply has been altered by his use of the internet.

In the article, he says,

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

Carr explains that his fear is rooted in past evolutions of the human brain when it has come in contact with new technology. When writing became more common, Socrates (in Plato's Phaedrus) fretted that people would “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And they did.

When Gutenberg’s printing press arrived in the 15th c., scholars worried that the "easy availability of books would lead to intellectual laziness, making men 'less studious' and weakening their minds." And they were right, too.

When Friedrich Nietzsche, his sight failing, started composing on a typewriter in 1882, his friends noticed that his writing style changed. Nietzsche concluded that “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.”

Even though each of this historical changes in how we communicate brought with them great, unanticipated blessings, Carr remains uneasy because the internet seems to rob us of the ability to read deeply:

The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.

You can read the entire article at Atlantic.com. For counter-argument, we refer you to the poster below:

Poster credit: parody of Despair.com's "Successories" created by Ishkur.com.

Thursday, July 10, 2008

Free Writing Course . . . and It's Good!

Several years ago, our English department spent some of its small, precious budget to buy the Annenberg Media series English Composition: Writing for an Audience. Today, you can watch it for free on Annenberg's Learner.org web site.

The interesting thing about this series is that it features conversations with and advice from writers from all fields of endeavor: authors, journalists, teachers, musicians, judges, nurses, engineers, scientists, and athletes.

For instance, author Frank McCourt (pictured, Angela's Ashes) talks about revising sentences; Emmy Award-winning scriptwriter David Mills (NYPD Blue and ER) and humorist/grammar expert Dave Barry describe how they use revision; writers and actors from the television series MAD TV outline how they write collaboratively; and humorist Tom Bodett discusses organizational techniques.

See: English Composition: Writing for an Audience (free registration required)

Wednesday, July 09, 2008

Title We Wish We'd Written

The Chronicle of Higher Education's titles don't usually catch our eye, but this one works wonders:
Wedding Bells Ring for Scholars of Genocide and Irrationality
You can read the story on the Chronicle's news blog.

Tuesday, July 08, 2008

Where the Hell Is Matt? (2008)

Matt Harding has made a career of performing a goofy dance for the camera in as many international locales as he can manage. His latest production, "Where the Hell Is Matt? (2008)" invites the local population to dance with him in 42 countries. The result is a goofy, charming exercise in good-will ambassadorship.



See the New York Times article on Matt's dancing for an analysis of what makes his videos tick: "A Private Dance? Four Million Web Fans Say No."

PS: Matt's outtakes are pretty impressive, too.

Saturday, July 05, 2008

Taking unfair advantage of your brain

One of our favorite stories by the late Kurt Vonnegut is "Harrison Bergeron," a salty little fable on the perils of equality. The story begins,
THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.

After his son Harrison is arrested by the agents of the Handicapper General for being athletic and a genius and under-handicapped, George finds it difficult to think about what just happened.
And George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains.

Taking unfair advantage of one's brain is one thing. But how about brain enhancement? Doping scandals are common in the professional sports world. But what if there were drugs which enabled you to do for the brain what performance enhancing drugs do for the body?

Well, it turns out there are. And so far, at least, there seems to be little in the way of negative side effects from their use. In a 9 March 2008 article entitled "Brain Enhancement Is Wrong, Right?" New York Times writer Benedict Carey reports
In a recent commentary in the journal Nature, two Cambridge University researchers reported that about a dozen of their colleagues had admitted to regular use of prescription drugs like Adderall, a stimulant, and Provigil, which promotes wakefulness, to improve their academic performance. The former is approved to treat attention deficit disorder, the latter narcolepsy, and both are considered more effective, and more widely available, than the drugs circulating in dorms a generation ago.
Dr. Anjan Chatterjee, of the University of Pennsylvania, argues that public attitudes towards the practice will likely follow the path of public attitudes towards cosmetic surgery. Public attitude, he says, will likely be framed this way: " ‘Look, we want smart people to be as productive as possible to make everybody’s lives better. We want people performing at the max, and if that means using these medicines, then great, then we should be free to choose what we want as long as we’re not harming someone.’ "

In the meantime, he notes, it's not like we have a culture opposed to performance enhancing substances, from antidepressants to improve mood to "high-octane cafe Americanos." The problem, he says, will come when someday an employer expects employees to take Adderall to make sure they have the necessary edge for the job.