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September 30, 2007

Gender, Tech

Liz and Dorothea point toward this right-on xkcd comic, and Michelle and Shelley appear in O’Reilly’s Women In Tech site. Michelle’s essay concerns technology changing worlds; Shelley’s leans on her readers to recognize the scope and implications of the gender imbalance in world of tech. What they think matters, and what they’re talking about matters, and I’m glad that O’Reilly and xkcd and conference organizers have begun to pay attention — but there’s a long way to go, and a little attention still falls short of “a whole different culture.”

Posted by AKMA at 01:24 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 28, 2007

Last Five

OK, Michael wants to know “the last five songs I bought on iTunes,” which I will willfully redirect to “the last five songs I bought online.” Since I buy from lotsx of different online music vendors, restricting my answers to iTunes would I’ll also count only one song from the Music From the Court of Henry VIII album that I bought yesterday from Amazon, because Hey, that’s not what you want to find out about me by asking.

So, herewith:

“Helas Madame” by Trinity Baroque et al., Music From the Court of Henry VIII
"Meditation," by Booker T and the MGs, Best of. . . . (based on Scott’s recommendation)
Hmmmm. . . .
“Joe Peet Is In The Bed,” Rockin’ Sidney, My Toot Toot
“Down On Me,” Eddie Head and His Family, American Primitive Vol. 1: Raw Gospel (and the rest of this essential album)
“Make Them Dance,” Defunkt, Defunkt

also recently a few missing Kinks songs, some Lou Reed, two recent Proclaimers albums, the new Lyle Lovett, and I’m nigh onto buying the recent Rickie Lee Jones album Sermon on Exposition Boulevard. And the new Bruce Springsteen single when it was first released, since Jennifer gave tickets to the fall tour to Margaret and me for our anniversary.

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For The Record

Evidently you can't use Gift Certificates for MP3 downloads at Amazon. That's a minor nuisance for us — we buy enough books, etc., that it will easily even out. Still, a minor nuisance is still a nuisance.

Michael followed up on yesterday’s experience by noting
Greetings,

An update on my Amazon downloader experience. I ended up on the phone with Amazon late last night and was able to download the songs. Evidently, the Amazon Downloader doesn't work with proxy servers (found in most companies), so people won't be using Amazon Downloader at the office, like they do with iTunes.


BTW, I also tagged you for an internet meme: http://cruftbox.com/blog/archives/001450.html

Have a good weekend,

-Michael

(Thanks, Michael — I’ll answer the meme in the next post above)

Posted by AKMA at 09:41 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 27, 2007

Amazon Vs. iTunes Throwdown

Having blogged about the new Amazon MP3 store without actually, you know, kinda using it, I felt a pang of accountability to check it out. It took a while to find a recording that interested me enough to select it — the selection is still spotty, and it didn’t include some of my test-case obscurities such as Jools Holland and His Millionaires or the Iron City Houserockers’ Love’s So Tough — but I was drawn to a recording of Music From the Court of Henry VIII, and 27 cuts for $7.99 stood out as a good deal. I started clicking and pushing buttons, downloaded the requisite separate downloader application, agreed to the terms of service, and installed the application. During the installation process, a blank screen popped up with two buttons: “Ignore” and “Choose” (I think those were the options; it took place a couple of hours ago, so I’m no longer certain). Granted that I couldn’t tell what I was supposed to ignore or choose, I clicked on the “Ignore” button; this may turn out to be important, but at the moment it’s hard to tell.

I continued the “buy an album” process, booted up the shiny Amazon Downloader app, got to the the Make a Payment screen, gave Amazon my permission to charge me $7.99, and — Nothing happened. The shiny Amazon Downloader app had no album listed for downloading, and when checked back at the Amazon end of things, I had been charged for the album, and there was no visible option for “resume interrupted download” or “whoops, we didn’t send you the files you paid for, here they are.” Instead, Amazon’s page that reputedly tells me my download history solemnly assures me that I have indeed downloaded them.

I’ve filled out a query with Amazon’s usually-outstanding customer service department. We’ll see what happens next. Right now, I’m liking Apple’s integrated approach more than Amazon’s “our web page will hand off the downloading process to a separate application” approach.

At least one correspondent has indicated experiencing the same problem, and has not heard back from Amazon. Details when they become available.

In what is, I assume, a response to my problem, I’ve received a gift certificate from Amazon for more than the amount of the album. I’ll go try to download it and see what happens.

Lather, rinse repeat. Not only did the download not go through, the process left no evident way to pay for my purchases with the gift certificate. I followed up with Amazon’s phone support system — waiting for their callback right now.

OK, here’s the scoop: the gift certificate had nothing to do with my order; it was, by sheer coincidence, the arrival of my Amazon Associates quarterly certificate. The main Amazon call center doesn’t handle calls relative to the MP3 program; make sure, if you’re calling in a query, that you enter the order number in some field or another, so that they direct your call to the MP3 customer service.

The MP3 service rep walked me through the problem, which seems to have involved my Safari and Amazon applications not talking to one another. He remedied this by instructing me to restart Safari —after which time the Amazon downloader did indeed recognize Safari and the files that we were working with. If this happened to you, they will work with you to make sure you get the files you’ve paid for.

As for me, I can’t count this as a successful test, though the files are gradually appearing on my drive. Sometime I need a single file, I’ll drift back again to see what Amazon has to offer.

Posted by AKMA at 11:16 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Another Peter Martyr

You may recall that I have a particular devotion to St Peter of Verona, a/k/a Peter Martyr, as well as to holy cards in general; last week, I bid on and obtained (at a very reasonable price) a holy card in my favorite style depicting Peter Martyr.

Peter of Verona (Peter Martyr)

Now, this image departs from the “cleaver in the skull” stream of Verona iconography in favor of the “stab in the back” school. This example also features Peter touching his finger to his lips, perhaps in reference to his inquisitorial responsibility to silence heretics or perhaps in the silent contemplatives’ gesture requesting permission to speak (though this interpertation seems called into question by the title of Fra Angelico’s portrait, “St Peter Martyr Enjoining Silnce”). He carries a book (signifying his scholarship), and his “Credo” (allegedly written in his own blood in his dying moments) appears at his feet.

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September 26, 2007

Greetings, New Himmer!

Wild cheering, enthusiastic encomia, heartfelt best wishes, and prayers for all concerned: as of Saturday, Sage and Steve have a new baby daughter*! Woo-hoo!

* And Checkers has a possible nemesis, possible boon companion, possible rival for attention, but definite precious, beloved family member-in-need-of-ferocious canine guarding.

Posted by AKMA at 08:52 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Amazon MP3

After several foregone-conclusion warm-up bouts against stiffs and glass-jawed losers, iTunes finally faces a contender. iTunes has the advantages of a vast established user base, integration with the music-playing application, integration with iPods, and various Apple intangibles. Amazon brings its own user base, higher-quality music files, lower prices, and no DRM.

I haven’t bought anything from the Amazon store yet, but I’ve browsed, and was impressed by the variety of selections they offer (right now, iTunes selections in stock outnumber Amazon something like 4-to-1, but a great many of the iTunes offerings are very obscure; that’s an advantage to iTunes if you’re looking for a little-known piece, but many users won’t notice the difference.

The big advantage is Amazon’s DRM-free file format. Living away from home, in a family with four other music-listeners, and having owned several different computers since the digital music revolution started, I often encounter the “Sorry, this computer is not authorized to play this track” roadblock when I want to play a selection. Amazon seems to offer a profound advantage — without DRM overhead, with superior encoding, and at a lower price, it looks to me as though they’re well-positioned to put a dent in the iTunes Wall of Imperviousness. I’ll bet Apple responds pretty quickly. That’ll be healthy for everyone involved — it tears away the illusory “necessities” to which the music industry and Apple have alluded in rationalizing their practices during the heyday of the digital-music monopoly. These should be exciting days in digital media!

Posted by AKMA at 08:40 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Cinnamon Donut Holes

Does anyone actually like them? They’re always the last kind left in any array I observe. Yesterday the Center hosted two groups to whom it served donut holes (I decline to use the commercial name for them), and this morning the leftovers were set out with the coffee: all cinnamon.

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September 25, 2007

Randy Pausch, Worth Every Second

I’m pretty jaundiced about internet memes, so when I started seeing ed-tech bloggers rhapsodize about a lecture by someone named Randy Pausch, I skipped ahead; yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever. But at a certain point I figured there might indeed be something to it, so I went over to YouTube to watch.

In this case, the meme was right.

Randy Pausch teaches Human-Computer Interface Design at Carnegie-Mellon. “Teaches,” in the sense that he has served at CMU for a number of years, and his students have taken his lessons with them and will pass them along for generations. But not “teaches” in the sense of “has a regular class schedule, since he has been told that his particularly aggressive pancreatic cancer gives him only a few more weeks to live.

He and his family moved to Virginia to be near family, but he came back to CMU to give a lecture on September 18th; this is the lecture that’s up on Google Video.

Pausch shows some blind spots, but I know I would if I were in his position; and I doubt I’d show nearly his grace and generosity.

Among my favorite moments:

“When you’re screwing up and no one’s saying anything to you any more, that’s because they’ve already given up.”

“Wait long enough, and people will surprise and impress you. If you’re really pissed off at somebody and you’re angry at them, you just haven’t given them enough time.”

“What a privilege and honor it was to teach that course for about ten years. . . . The course was all about bonding. People used to say ‘What’s going to make for a good [virtual] world?’ and I tell them ‘I can’t tell you beforehand, but right before they present it I can tell you if a world’s good just from the body language. If they’re standing close to each other, the world is good.’ ”

“Be earnest. I’ll take an earnest person over a hip person every day, because hip is short term — earnest is long term.”

“When you do the right thing, good stuff has a way of happening.”

Posted by AKMA at 01:26 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Britney + AKMA?

For those with case-hardened steel eardrums, DaveX at startlingmoniker has mashed up an example of ways the RIAA suggests polluting peer-to-peer filesharing networks. He started with Britney Spears’s new single “Gimme More” (the one she torpedoed weekend before last on the Video Music Awards show), then interwove it with — hey, that’s me! DaveX used one of my portions of the Larry Lessig Free Culture read-a-thon. He didn’t get my permission first; there’s no need, since the read-a-thon portions are covered by a Creative Commons license. But if I had known that someone might remix me with Britney, I’d have thought twice about the whole affair.

(Warning: The inspiration for DaveX’s work was a memo in which the RIAA suggests using random static, annoying squeals, varying volume levels, and other such means to destroy the value of a decoy file. My voice, and even Britney’s voice, are among the least irritating aspects of the file to which he links in Update 2 and Update 3 at the bottom of his post.)

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September 24, 2007

Duck and Cover

Last Week, David Isenberg posted a graphical clue to what the Big Providers’ dream of the internet would be like: get yer basic internet for $29.95 a month, with free access to AOL, Disney, Go.com, msn, and so on. For $39 a month, you can use Google, Wikipedia, and Yahoo! If you want to blog or watch YouTube, that’s $49 a month.

Meanwhile, Tim Bray lays out the trajectory to setting the mobile net on fire; it’s a shade counter-intuitive, it’s quite antithetical to the BigTelCo vision of net partiality, and it’s dead-on right. First, you eliminate flat-rate data billing. As Tim points out, with a flat-rate plan, the provider has no incentive to innovate on the back-end to serve more bits faster down bigger pipes. Contrariwise, the fixed-rate plan provides an incentive for the provider to discourage you from using the network, since they get the same income regardless of how much you use the system. Grampa McGillicuddy who only logs on once a day to see how the Wildcats did pays the same rate as
Cory Doctorow, who derives nutrition from the bits that he digitally assimilates by the terabyte. (By the way, is this the first online public indication that Cory’s engaged? Congratulations to you both!) If the online companies bill by the bandwidth you use, though, they have an incentive to induce you to use more bandwidth and to serve it more efficiently.

And as Tim likewise points out, if they cultivate a cooperative relationship with developers who can piggyback on their billing system, open the window, Aunt Minnie, here it comes!

Posted by AKMA at 08:57 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 23, 2007

Big Weekend

Pippa and Margaret and I rolled up to Maine for the weekend — more specifically, for Saturday — to celebrate Margaret’s mother’s birthday. Pat didn’t want a big party, so it was just family: Pat and Dick, the Princeton/Evanston delegation, and Jeanne and Gail. But Jeanne and Margaret had prepared an album of greetings from people all through Pat’s life to send greetings and memories.

Queen Pat

The project would have been quite secret, except that some people sent cards and letters direct to Pat; the full scope of the project, though, wasn’t clear to her till she arrived at the celebration. A huge stack of photos, letters, memorabilia, and cards awaited her; we couldn’t get through the whole array without some summarizing and abbreviating. (Of course, if you sent a greeting, be assured that we read your message in full, with fond reminiscences and delighted commentary.)


A very special day was had by all, and I expect everyone needed a very full night’s sleep. Now we’re striking out for New Jersey, to get back, get back, get back to where we once belonged.

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Type Pointer

Yesterday I rediscovered Pia Frauss’s site that offers several blackletter and medieval-script typefaces. Her early efforts were incompatible with Macs, but despite her disclaimers, the Truetype versions of all the new fonts ought to work well with PCs or Macs.

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September 22, 2007

Wish I Were Here — Oh, I Am

It’s a lovely, foggy Maine morning; in a little while, we’ll get together with Margaret’s family to celebrate her mom’s birthday; it’s great.

Meanwhile, if you can’t enjoy the Maine fall weather and scenery, you can catch up on the Language Log (here, then here, then here, then here —) thread that exposes your Crockus, which gets more wildly entertaining with each revelation. (Short starter: evidently Margaret’s Crockus is bigger than mine. . . .) I hope Dan Hodgins responds to the next query by saying “I am Oz. . . ” or “You got trouble right here in Crockus City. . . .”

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September 21, 2007

Season Winding Down

Surely everyone who reads this blog has been waiting in polite quiet to hear how my fantasy baseball team has been doing this year, after last season’s heartbreaking last-day-of-the-season half-point loss (Frank summarized it on the league message board thusly: “In the end, AKMA came up .5 standing points short of 1st place. That’s not the whole story, however. The DDs [my team, the Cambridge Doubledomes] could have gained back the .5 points with 1 RBI, 1 SB, or 1 K. They would have passed the Swamprats with 1 more W in the pitching column. That’s about as close as it gets”).

This year the disheartened Doubledomes have lingered in the nether reaches of the league, clinging to seventh place (out of eight) or stumbling into last place for a few days. In the past couple of weeks, though, we have staged an atypical rush to the top, reaching a moderately solid fifth place thus far, and not out of reach of fourth. There’s absolutely no hope of catching Frank’s first-place Dead Sea Squirrels.

My pitching fell short in wins; despite being at or near the top of the league in ERA, WHIP, and strikeouts, my guys are struggling to avoid finishing last in wins. Go figure. [Correction: This is incorrect; I just checked, and although my team had its ups and downs, our win total is actually pretty healthy, though not as strong as the other pitching stats might lead one to expect.] I had a hot-starting reliever in Al Reyes, but he fell off the table midseason, and he was my only closer (I missed out on the “bid on a Toronto closer in the second week of the season” derby, having picked the wrong guy a week early). As a result, I used my dodgy pitchers more, and was stuck with a very disappointing, over-priced Mike Mussina.

Travis Hafner and Vlad Guerrero had good seasons, but without as many home runs as I was paying them for. If they had hit even close to what I expected, I’d be several places higher in home runs, and probably better in runs scored and RBIs too. The guys I was counting on for miscellaneous stolen bases stayed at first, and none of them scored runs or batted any in (if it weren’t for Guerrero, I’d be dead in the water). So fifth place works for me, given what these slackers did this year.

Hey, at least we’re not going to get edged out of first place by one lousy RBI or steal or strikeout or win.

In a few minutes, we’re leaving Princeton for Maine, to wish Margaret’s mother a happy birthday. I’ll catch you later.

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September 20, 2007

Progress Report

I’ve gotten the ball rolling on the technology essay; now I need to organize the subtopics, so that it flows intelligibly. But I had been seriously blocked by not knowing how the chapter would begin, and now I have a viable beginning from which to work. Once I get a little further, I may post it in google Docs, for interested parties to ruin hack make helpful suggestions.

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Two Encounters

With Michael Suarez, S. J., in which he quoted from John Vanbrugh’s The Provok’d Wife Act I, scene i:

Belinda: Drown husbands! for your’s is a provoking fellow: as he went out just now, I prayed him to tell me what time of day ’twas; and he asked me if I took him for the church clock, that was obliged to tell all the parish.

Lady Brute: He has been saying some good obliging things to me, too. In short, Belinda, he has used me so barbarously of late, that I could almost resolve to play the downright wife, and cuckold him.

Belinda: That would be downright, indeed.

Lady Brute: Why, after all, there’s more to be said for’t than you’d imagine, child. He is the first aggressor, not I.

Belinda: Ah! but, you know, we must return good for evil.

Lady Brute: That may be a mistake in the translation.

Michael suggests that this is early evidence for a common sentiment that the Bible (“return good for evil”) might be subject to divergent, erroneous translation traditions. I’m intrigued, not fully convinced, but delighted with the example anyway

And I had lunch yesterday with Nicole Engard, the Metadata Librarian in Princeton Seminary’s Special Collections. I was curious to know what PTS was up to in embracing the digital trajectory of libraries, and Nicole had encouraging words about both ehr present responsibilities and the future that Steve Crocco, head librarian, envisions.

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September 19, 2007

Pray Like A Pirate

Arrrrr Father. . . .

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Missing

I was going to celebrate the walls tumbling down on the New York Times archive by pointing to my favorite article, Henry Louis Gates’s “Authenticity, or The Lesson of Little Tree” (November 24, 1991), but for some reason it doesn’t show up in the archive. Several letters in response to the essay, but not the essay itself. So look up Kwame Anthony Appiah’s article from the Times Magazine, “The Case for Contamination.”

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La Misère Du Littéral

Margaret and I have been wincing and groaning and rolling our eyes so much over the past few weeks that someone’s liable to lock us up — honestly, though, it concerns not our psychological stability, but the many and various invidious ways that people deploy the term “literal.”

(Not “literally,” this time anyway.)

Margaret’s working on the theology of hope, which involves attention to eschatology. When writers expatiate on the future, however, they demonstrate a terrible tendency to lay claim to authoritative use of “literal.” Fred Clark has pointed to the problem with “literal” in The Worst Books Ever Written (with extra credit for invoking the Muggletonians, a favorite digression in my lectures on Revelation or on the Montanists). Margaret notices that opponents of TWBEW frequently assert contrary “literal” readings that likewise depart markedly from what “literal” ordinarily denotes. And my engagements with hermeneutics and Anglican miasma constantly encounter people who claim that the literal or plain sense of words justify their side of an argument — as though their adversaries were arguing that “pizza” should be construed as “happily” and “bless” as “second-hand tennis shoes.”

The “literal” sense, or the “plain sense,” or whatever one might call it, just doesn’t do an honest day’s work when invoked in controversy. That’s as true now as it was in 1628:

That therefore in these both curious and unhappy differences, which have for so many hundred years, in different times and places, exercised the Church of Christ, we will, that all further curious search be laid aside, and these disputes shut up in God’s promises, as they be generally set forth to us in the Holy Scriptures, and the general meaning of the Articles of the Church of England according to them. And that no man hereafter shall either print, or preach, to draw the Article aside any way, but shall submit to it in the plain and full meaning thereof: and shall not put his own sense or comment to be the meaning of the Article, but shall take it in the literal and grammatical sense.

(I know I’ve quoted that before, from The King's Declaration Prefixed to the Articles of Religion of November 1628, but it remains as true now as it did then and when I’ve quoted it before.) “Literal” doesn’t function to disprove what an interlocutor proposes; it doesn’t provide a bulwark against misinterpretation; it doesn’t unveil (apokaluptô, “reveal”) the supposed real meaning of words or phrases. There’s no there there. “Literal” always operates only within groups that already share the premise that such-and-such is a literal sense, or that have not already set down stakes for a contrary position.

Where the refernce of a word or phrased has been dispute, loud assertions about what it “literally” means have no pertinence; the meaning is what’s in question. Most claims about what something or other “literally” means should be recast as arguments that readers ought to construe such-and-such literally as X, or that a reading that proposes X as the literal sense of the text provides the best, soundest, most illuminating reading of the text. By the same token, readers who ascribe figurative, allegorical, or metaphorical sense to particular expressions have not taken flight from reality; they assert that the best, most fitting, most illuminating, most persuasive reading of the text emphasizes aspects of the text that extend beyond the literal.

The “literal” sense of these texts is hardly ever what people care about — they usually care about the tropological (ethical implications) or anagogical (implications about the shape of the future) or allegorical (doctrinal implications), which for various reasons they conflate with the literal. Alas, the literal sense isn’t equipped to fulfill their aspirations — so they whip the poor, bare, lexical-grammatical unit like Balaam’s ass, trying to force it to do what it can not. And like Balaam, they’re wrong.

We use “literal” or “plain sense” most soundly when it is trivial, when it’s not in dispute; we used it almost as soundly when we use it in grammatical or syntactical argument, where clear warrants and conventions provide a shared framework within which to work toward assent; we use the terms foolishly and ineffectually when — as is most common — we use tham as rhetorical arm-twisting (or cheer-leading) to assert that we’re uniquely correct in contexts where “literal” or “plain meaning” is precisely what’s disputed.

Posted by AKMA at 09:57 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 18, 2007

Another Resource

I no longer teach Early Church History, so I don't have students to guide toward Fred Sanders' series of posts on the ecumenical councils' Christology (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7) — but if I did, I would.

Posted by AKMA at 07:29 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 17, 2007

Eat This

A correspondent just sent me a meditation which began from with a quotation from John of Fame, a Benedictine hermit, which I must share here:

Study then, mortal, to know Christ: to learn your Saviour. His body hanging on the cross, is a book, opened before your eyes. The words of this book are Christ's actions. as well as his suffering and passion, for everything that he did serves for our instruction. His wounds are the letters or characters, the firve chief wounds being the five vowels and the others the consonants of your book. . . .
So eat this book which in your mouth and understanding shall be sweet, but which will make your belly bitter, that is to say your memory, because he that increases knowledge increases sorrow too.

I’ll be quoting this in some article or presentation, I’m sure.

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Canons To The Extraordinary

Yesterday morning Margaret and I talked over the New York Times Book Review retrospective on Allan Bloom’s dyspeptic screed in defense of Western Civilization, The Closing of the American Mind. As an advocate for classical learning, I take offense at Bloom’s scattershot demagoguery; while something has indeed been lost in an economy of knowledge wherein (according to the article) more than half of U.S. undergrads major in business, health, education, or computer science, Bloom casts blame on every figure and cause he dislikes, without making the discriminations that justify pretensions to intellectual high ground.

Margaret and I winced at the comparable figures for English and history majors: 1.6 percent and 1.3 percent, respectively. And experience suggests that even the one percent who devote the major part of their undergraduate studies to these topics have not necessarily drunk deep at the Pierian spring. “There’s a reason,” I always exhorted my undergraduate students back when I was teaching college, “that the job fair posters always say “All majors welcome.’ That means, “We’re not looking only for business majors.’ It means your future employers would rather hear you sound sharp, excited, and well-informed about a subject in which you excelled because you cared about it, than to hear you sound formulaic and predictable on the basis of business courses which you took out of a sense that you had to get a salable degree.” So far as I know, my exhortations made no difference (to students who were otherwise inclined toward a business degree; I do know that some of my students from those days took other exhortations and encouragements to heart).

Tonic for an abraded soul, then, to read the dialogue of Tom Matrullo and Phil Cubeta, two admirable souls and (I am honored to say) of my dearest online friends. The American Mind is not closing — but the particular doors and windows by which some inhabitants have gotten used to admitting fresh air may have been painted shut. Would that one of Phil’s philathropists recognized the value proposition of supporting liberal education, with an eye to such benefits as their colloquy exemplifies!

Posted by AKMA at 09:19 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 16, 2007

Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia

   Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord;
   Yes, says the Spirit, so that they may rest from their labors.

Prayers and blessings for Lula, for George, for Jeneane and Jenna, for all in Lula’s family and her friends.

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Dogs and Cats, Living Together

If the discovery several weeks ago of the vast spiderweb in Texas had not already suggested to you that we are living in the end-times, consider that entomologists now think that twelve different families of spiders — “families” in the taxonomic sense, not the “household” sense — cooperated to construct the giant web. Bill Poser at Language Log compared this to a cooperative effort among humans and eleven other primate species, such as Lar Gibbons

But it gets even spookier than that, since in a follow-up post he notes that the spiders’ arthropod species are a great deal more diverse than are mammalian species — so a fairer metaphor might enlist humans cooperating with marsupials. So now, imagine a complex engineering endeavor in which humans, gibbons, chimpanzees, gorillas, lemurs, baboons, kangaroos, wombats, opossums, Tasmanian devils, bandicoots, and koalas participate together (too bad, for this exercise alone the Thylacosmilus became extinct!).

That funny taste at the back of your throat may be adrenaline.

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September 15, 2007

Employmental Observations

We’re keeping our eyes on the theological job market as Margaret moves along toward her own job search. It’s not a great year for entry-level openings in theology; almost all of them stipulate additional specialties or focused work (“Catholic systematic theology” or “systematic theology — must sign our Statement of Faith” or “systematic theology with an emphasis on Native American heritage”).

On the other hand, if you’re an Islamist, you’re in a seller’s market (as it were), as was the case last year.

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Right

Some colleges and universities have noticed that Web 2.0 affects them. Hunh — who anticipated that?

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September 14, 2007

Writer's Hurdles

I’m trying to get started on the actual composition of the technology and religion article, which estimable goal has been obstructed not only by the usual blank-page syndrome, but also by two particular problems specific to this task.

On one hand, I want to treat the questions in terms concrete enough to keep most readers engaged. I’m writing not only for those first-year college students whom I can count on staying with a highly-abstract meditation on technology, but also for less patient readers. Still, the concrete examples of technology about which I write today may strike readers two years hence (when the published book actually “drops”) as lame, if not utterly outmoded. Academic treatments of digitally-mediated interaction frequently emphasize MUDs — as though Usenet, email, instant messaging, online RPGs, and so on (I’m being fair, and not expecting academicians to have anticipated the expansion of MMRPGs or online environments such as Second Life) — whereas very few of my students, even the older ones, have the slightest experience with good ol’ MUDs. So impediment Number One involves attaining an effective degree and quality of particular examples.

Impediment Number Two involves the opening, which (as my Writing Group colleagues will affirm) triggers such strong expectations from a reader that a good first paragraph or two can determine how carefully and sympathetically the audience considers the rest of the essay. I expect to use some narrative examples in the body of the chapter, but I’m leery of opening with an anecdote (especially an anecdote with a startling twist! at the end). So I’m fretting about how to sucker a wide range of college-level readers to pay attention to some challenging provocation in the pages that follow. Plus, of course, I must without question use my opening paragraph or two to prepare the audience for the direction and conclusion that the chapter will take.

Now, back to actually trying to do it, rather than simply blogging about it.

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Comparisons Are Odious, But

Before I get so accustomed to Princeton that I lose the sense of unfamiliarity that accommodates close attention:

Evanston has a big edge in bookstores, for the time being; Micawber’s couldn’t stay open. There’s a Barnes & Noble at a Route One shopping center and a small used book store in Princeton, but for the time being downtown book browsers have to content themselves with the U-Store. And so far we haven’t found a restaurant that suits us as well as Cozy Noodle, or Chipotle, or Blind Faith.

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September 13, 2007

Magenta Alert!

The backlog of linkable tabs in my browser and newsreader (I’ve converted to Vienna, which works very nicely, thank you very much, and is free-as-in-beer) obliges me to point of several of these by title.

First, we’re enjoying a Get Smart retrospective around Templeton Palace, and I noticed a few days ago that the Chief and Max outdo the Bush regime by invoking a magenta alert. Since the present Executive Branch seems committed to repeating history as farce, we ought probably all to acquaint ourselves with the significance of a Magenta Alert, and other sooper-hi-security designations.

Second, Jeff Sandquist narrated a way to synchronize your Twitter and Facebook status messages. I don’t know if this still works, but I’m about to try it.

Third, Fred Sanders points to the connection of Homer’s orality (or not) to bluegrass music.

Fourth, Judith pointed me to a one-page survey of semiotics.

Fifth, Jay Rosen summarizes Charlie Savage’s reporting on the expansion of executive power under the Bush regime.

Sixth, Boing Boing points to a display of postcards from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France illustrating in 1910 what the artist thought the year 2000 would be like.

And this actually is important — Bob Carlton urges everyone to make a real contribution toward bringing slavery to an end.

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September 12, 2007

More Prize Type

This year’s Type Director’s Club prize-winning faces have been announced. I admire them all as artistic achievements, but none captivates me. My favorites here include Darden’s Corundum and his Untitled face. Carl Crossgrove’s Beorcana impresses me, too. I’d be more delighted at seeing Greek glyphs in the winning typeface Arno if I actually liked the letters (the debacle with the typeface for UBS4 — I’m not acquainted with anyone who likes the type in UBS4 as much as in previous or alternate Greek Testaments; one Amazon reviewer describes it as “a repellently ugly font that has not much resemblance to any font with which a quality edition of a Greek text has ever been published before”) heightened my sensitivity to unsatisfactory Greek type). Palatino Sans works well as sibling to its serif antecedent.

But how long before Peanut follows Papyrus down the precipitous road to overuse and abuse?

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Vexing

My Bluetooth cordless mouse has started hyperactively sending a double-click signal to my MacBook Pro whenever I single-click with the left button. Does this sound familiar/intelligible to anyone? I tried adjusting the sensitivity of the control panel, but that didn’t help. . . .

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September 11, 2007

She's Onto Something

If only in our dreams.

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Not For Everyone

The Not Safe For Delicate Viewers story that follows is not for everyone — in fact, if you aren’t positively motivated to click there right away when I describe the story, you should probably avoid it — but the saga of Jason Mewes getting clean from addictions to heroin, oxycontin, alcohol, cocaine, and practically any other substance you can imagine occupies the following nine links (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9). We can’t say, “finally getting clean”; he hasn’t lived that long yet. But at least it seems as though he’s not addicted right now, and that’s a big deal. If it doesn’t sound as though he’s attained the moral stature of a saint, at least he looks pretty good.

It’s repulsive and repetitive: that’s a large part of the point of telling about addiction.

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September 10, 2007

Not Without Tears

I woke up this morning, stretched, twisted my arms around a wee bit, checked to make sure that everything was pretty much in working order. (It seems so to be.) I don’t take that for granted; whereas for a long time, I treated my body rather the way I treat cars (fill it with fuel when it needs it, take it in for repairs when it doesn’t want to go, figure that as long as it’s rolling forward it’s in fine condition), I’ve grown more acutely aware of the value of preventative maintenance. Not, however, without some rips and tears and creaks and sparks. But that’s to be expected: today I’m fifty years old.

That’s more than a great many people are afforded, even in the medically-advanced cultures of Europe and North America. Each day is a gift, but every morning that gift becomes a more rare and precious — and weighty — responsibility. Over the decades I’ve gotten some things right, many things wrong, and fallen far short of what a more disciplined, focused person might have done with my resources. Alas, the insight of fifty years can’t ensure that I’ll bear down harder and focus more intently with the days still afforded me.

So when a flock of generous and dear friends, most of whom have never shared physical proximity to me, wish me a happy birthday and say kind things about me, I shuffle my digital feet and gaze off into space, I blink my eyes a bit and squeeze them closed; I give thanks for all the good news they’ve shared with me, and I ache for the hard times they’ve trusted me to go through beside them, and I hope and pray for better days all around. Though much of what I’ve been mulling over with regard to digital technology and religion has struck a cautious note, I most nonetheless recognize that these friendships have begun and grown and borne significant fruit in the digital medium (with apologies to Doc, who (I think) disapproves of using “medium” to characterize digital communication technologies). My mom and dad, my sister and Margaret’s family and Si and some of my oldest, closest friends all emailed birthday greetings. I’ve met Frank and Jeneane and Gary and Joey and David in physical space (not yet Tom or Mike or Euan), but who we are together derives much more from the colorful page designs and compelling, or casual, or comical, or cutting, or comforting, or critical, or sometimes even contemptuous words by means of which we communicate.

Their affection and generosity demonstrate so much of what’s exquisite about this risky business of reaching out into the digitally-potentiated dimension of our lives: sometimes we touch.

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September 09, 2007

In Case You Missed It

I can’t really believe that anyone who’s acquainted with Lord of the Rings, and has role-played a fantasy adventure — as, for example, Dungeons and Dragons — hasn’t already seen “The DM of the Rings,” a comic made from stills of the LoTR movie series, with dialogue based on the conceit that these are players in an RPG. In case I’m wrong, though, I invite you to look it over; it certainly brings back memories of my days playing, and DM-ing, fantasy RPG campaigns.

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September 08, 2007

To Another Dimension

Yesterday I broke the news to Margaret that Madeleine L’Engle had died. We had read many of her novels (Margaret more than I), and we had been part of her receiving an honorary degree from Berkeley Divinity School at Yale, where Margaret was working as the Dean’s secretary (back in the days that was called “secretary” and not one of the precisely descriptive titles now in use) (or perhaps, “secretary” accurately described that work once upon a time, before that title evolved to connote “stenographer” or “attractive living ornament for executive’s antechamber”).

When Ms. L’Engle came to Berkeley to receive the degree, she generously autographed Margaret’s worn copy of A Wrinkle In Time, inscribing it to Margaret and “to the one within,” indicating Nate (the unlinkable) who at that time was making his presence in utero increasingly obvious. Nate has returned the favor by reading L’Engle’s books repeatedly, most recently this past summer.

We give thanks for this extraordinarily alert and articulate story-teller, for her love and faith, for her wit and grace, and we pray for her and for her family. Ora pro nobis, Sancta Magdalena.

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Two Letters

First, Pippa rediscovered the William Steig book C D B at the library yesterday.

And I discovered (through Typophile.com) this Italian cartoon, apparently from 1958, in which the animated speaker’s mouth forms the letters of the word he is speaking.

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September 07, 2007

Questions Concerning Technology (And Religion)

I’m turning now to writing a chapter for a college-level introductory textbook on religion. My chapter raises issues pertaining to “Technology and Religion.” I’m working with a swarm of ideas; I raise the topic here since readers of this blog include some who know more than I about both topics and many who know more than I about one or the other — I’m very interested in feedback.

I plan to point out that the present pace of technological innovation heightens our awareness of technology’s role in life — hence all the more acutely, its role in religious life, which genreally tends toward the traditional or the timeless — cultures have been dealing with technological change all along. Religions have been evaluating technologies for their spiritual implications for ages, and have simultaneously been devising specifically religious technologies. (Two cases in point: question of musical instruments in Christian worship, and role of prayer wheels in Tibetan Buddhism. More examples would vastly enrich the chapter, which will otherwise follow my idiosyncratic tendency to drift toward abstraction and theory.)

Other points I’ll try to work in:

I’m sure there’s more that ’s not occurring to me at the moment, and I don’t know how the chapter will flow, but these are the points that press on my authorial awareness this morning.

(Yes, I’ll make some bibliographic suggestions, including Heidegger’s “Question Concerning Technology,” Ray Kurzweil’s Age of Spiritual Machines, Albert Borgmann’s Power Failure. . . . Others?)

Mark says:

I’ve been thinking about some of this... Quentin Schultze asks some good questions: [in] Hasbits of the High-Tech Heart: Living Virtuously in the Information Age

I also like Jacques Ellul’s "76 Reasonable Questions to ask about any technology."


Mark

[Thanks, Mark! I’ll point to Ellul, for sure, and will look at Schulze (I have a vague recollection of having seen it, perhaps in proofs, but I haven’t read it carefully).]

Michael said:

Good afternoon,

I saw your post and thought I'd drop a short comment.

My idea is this; most people have more faith in technology than they do in God.

People take it on faith that planes won't fall out of the sky with them in it, or that the x-ray won't kill them, or that the devices a doctor uses to keep them alive during an operation will work. They don't research wing lift and engine forces and completely understand the equations of flight, they simply BELIEVE it will work. They trust technology with with their lives in a way that very, very few trust God to protect them.

Some have this kind of blind and complete faith in religion, but most don't. When faced with hard choices, many turn to technology rather than God to solve their problems.

To me, this is often missed in the science vs. religion discussions that surround teaching evolution. Deeply religious people can have complete faith in the scientific method in 99% of what it produces, but in the 1% that comes into conflict with their worldview, they side with religion.

Perhaps I am looking for logic in belief, which is likely a fool's errand, but it a question that I can't seem to resolve in my mind. How do 'true believers' balance their faith in God with their faith in science and choose which path to follow.

Have a good week,

-Michael

[Thanks, Michael, great to hear from you! I hadn’t factored in the sense of the word “faith” or “belief” — I’ll have to think this over more.]

My helpful mother-in-law Pat adds,

Does "time" enter into this?
Quoting M. L'Engle from the ELO story today:
In November 2000, she told an interviewer for Religion and Ethics Newsweekly that suffering and grief are a part of life.
"In times when we are not particularly suffering, we do not have enough time for God," she said. "We are too busy with other things. And then the intense suffering comes, and we can not be busy with other things. And then God comes into the equation. Help. And we should never be afraid of crying out, ‘Help!' I need all the help I can get."

My personal feeling about playing the violin is that the violin and bow are not any form of technology in my hands. It feels as if the violin and I are one, involved with God in creating music that flows with a life of its own. I can practice and put energy into the preparation but at that mystical moment when all fits together, the music comes from somewhere beyond me. It's awesome and humbling and certainly a religious experience in my book.

Playing piano or organ has some of the same elements but somehow the violin is a stronger image (and feel) to me.

with love
Pat : )
[Lovely points, Pat! With regard to the first, time is absolutely pertinent to the topic — since technology in so many respects serves to “save time” (also, of course, to “pass time” or more darkly to “kill time”). Technology amplifies the differences in time among different cultural settings; where farms are cultivated through manual labor, “time” carries a different cast from places where traders make electronic transactions around the clock. So technology and time interact powerfully, with significant religious ramifications.

Madeleine L’Engle touches on another aspect of the topic, for technology tends to minimize our reliance on outside agency (as long as the technology is working): thanks to my refrigerator, (time-saving) microwave, telephone, internet-connected computer, and various delivery technologies, I could remain secluded in my quarters for days at a time. Of course, all this technological power simply masks our increased neediness, since now we’re relying not only on farmers and merchants, but on technology providers and maintainers, and on the technology on which all of them rely. As a subsistence farmer, the technology I’m counting on may all be manually constructed and maintained; but if I were a network sysadmin, my whole way of life would depend on technologies that I could only partly construct or maintain; technology conceals, but does not obviate, our need for help.

And for the last, the violin still remains a technological artifact; it’s a made thing, not a musical mushroom or resonant stone (and I’d argue that even found objects deployed for music-making partake of the technological, but that’s a separable issue). But yes, the interaction of musician and violin gives the impression of becoming an extension of the musician’s own being. And an accomplished musician is surely not stopping to deliberate and make choices about which notes to strike, which fingers to move where. At what point does the technology effectively become part of the human operator’s own identity?

To which point, Mary reminds me:

I'm having lots of thoughts about your post concerning the textbook chapter, but not much time to comment today (and when I went to the site, I have managed -- ONCE AGAIN! -- to lose my typekey registration [Not using it, just entering comments manually, sorry]). Anyway, before I forgot, I wanted to note that in terms of questions about where the body ends and machines begin (something implied in some of your musings), I have always really liked John Hockenberry's essay in Wired, back in 2001.

blessings,
Mary
[Thanks, Mary! And I heard Dan Gottlieb touch on some of these matters in an August broadcast of “Voices In The Family” about “virtual worlds,” too. I didn’t say anything in the post about “virtual,” since I don’t believe it’s a helpful category — but I expect that I need to spell that out in the chapter (which seems to be getting longer and longer as my friends leave helpful comments).]

Finally, for now, Matthew offered:

You asked for examples of specifically religious technologies. I immediately thought of orthopraxy and the precision newer technologies can offer. This might not fit, its more a religious use of existing tech, but I used to work with a Muslim who set his watch alarm to remind him when it was time for the daily prayers. A quick google turned up a version that plays the entire call to prayer (the link tries to play audio without asking):

Other random thoughts that I haven't even googled: surgical tools and techniques for Jewish circumcision rites, astrological tools to measure/predict events in the sky (Stonehenge = early religious technology?), and printing technology - from Gutenberg to tomorrow's leaflets.

[All quite apposite, all quite helpful. Stonehenge will almost certainly make its way into the chapter, as itself a technology and as (presumably) technologically-afforded; the builders got the stones there somehow, arranged them somehow, which “how” presumably entails some technological application or another.]

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September 06, 2007

Between the (Product) Lines

There are important topics rumbling around Blogaria — nuclear missile surprises, terrorist arrests, Tim Burke’s post “Angry at Academe” (with The Little Professor’s codicil about “Immobility”) — but let’s descend to the muck of consumer indulgence: what about the new iPods?

By and large, Apple seems to be developing the product lines in telligible ways. I don’t recoil in horror at the wide-body Nanos, since they come with video capability. $200 for 8GB and the capacity to watch The Office (oops, no NBC series) LOST on a two-inch screen seems fair, though a mild bump in storage would have been nice. The storage/screen combination for the iPod Classic sound plausible. The lure of a portable 160 GB, or even an 80GB hard drive that plays tunes and video will be hard for some folks to resist. Lower-priced iPhones make sense to me, and should accelerate the market for that device. Heck, I’m doing the math on our Princeton landline and wondering whether we might not be better off in the long run if we got an iPhone and a pay-as-you-go option from the traitor-to-civil-rights AT&T. At the end of a year with a landline we’re out $300 plus miscellaneous per-call charges, with nothing else to show for it; after a year with an iPhone, we’d be out $400 plus miscellaneous per-call charges, but we’d have a portable wifi-enabled phone/camera/video/audio player.

The spotlight gadget yesterday, though, was the iPod Touch, the iPhone without phone that we had been wondering about since the iPhone was introduced. Only it’s not exactly iPhone sans-a-phone; it’s iPhone sans phone, camera, Bluetooth, and various other bells and whistles (which only add $100, plus activation and call charges, to the “iPod Touch” price). It’s clearly the hottest item in the line, but it’s harder for me to get excited about it without either the non-phone extras or more storage (either would have amped up the value proposition for this device).

They’re all impressive gadgets for entertainment, and my 2G iPod is beginning to show signs of age, so I’m keeping a close eye on them. But no single contender separated itself from the pack this time.

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September 05, 2007

To The Naughty Step!

Tom Coates gets Andrew Keen just right.

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Second the Motion

Good coverage of the economics of digital music files in C-ville and the New York Times Magazine’s portrait of Rick Rubin. Rubin is wrong about subscriptions — I don’t want to pay for someone else’s selection of what I might like, thank you very much — but at least he understands that the industry as it has known itself has passed its sell-by date.

Message: changing the economics away from the corporate industrial model doesn’t mean abolishing music (any more than adopting the corporate industrial model meant inventing music).

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September 04, 2007

Looking It Over

I’m checking out Colorate, the donationware application for suggesting color schemes. Since I’m already equipped with Pippaware, I probably wouldn’t rely on a digital color generator, but it may be useful in circumstances when Pippa’s not available (as, for example, to some of you).

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Failed Me

Yesterday Pippa and I walked to Princeton from our sub-boro-ban home, three miles up and down some mild hills. The temperature fell on the warm side of “lovely,” and the company was nonpareil. It’s a good walk, long enough to extend your patience but not interminable.

The difficulty arose when we needed to get back home — the same three miles, only in warmer afternoon sun, with sorer feet. We concur that at least for now, it’s a one-way walk. Next time, we may just opt to take the bus one direction.

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September 03, 2007

The Unsinkable Allofmp3.com

Back when I wrote an article about what theoloogical educators should learn from Napster, I noted the music oligopolists’ efforts to suppress the file-sharing network. Even back then (while the original Napster was still going strong) it seemed clear that if someone shut down Napster, other modes of file-sharing would supplant it. First was Napster; after that we got Kazaa; now we have torrents; if someone suppresses torrents, coders will write something else.

The same applies mutatis mutandis to online music sales. The captains of industry have deployed their masterminds against iTunes (“We don’t need you, Steve!”) and their phalanxes of lawyers against grey-market Russian online music store Allofmp3.com. At their behest, various online payment agencies have refused to transfer payments to Allofmp3, so that would-be users have to work out arcane contortions to buy music from the Russian source (if it can be done at all). At the insistence of music inndustriallists, Russian entry into the G8 was contingent (in part) on the Moscow government shutting down Allofmp3.com. Sure enough, the music service was declared illegal, Russia joined the free market, and everyone but Allofmp3 subscribers were happy.

Allofmp3 kept up their fight, but apparently transferred all their assets (site design, tracks, user accounts) to a new address, mp3sparks.com. The address is different, but the essential look-and-feel are the same. I reckon the RIAA and their pals are working to shut down Sparks, too. Meanwhile, though, the Russian courts have shown a degree of independence from their trade negotiators and ruled that Allofmp3 complies with all relevant Russian laws, so the original site has announced that it will resume operations — assuming customers can figure out some way to pay them.

All this time, of course, P2P networks and torrents have been going strong.

What of it? Several things. First, the fact that people will persist in trying to get through to Allofmp3 demonstrates that a great market segment would rather pay for music downloads than seek them from the dark net. iTunes overcharges; P2P involves some infection risks and general nuisances. The Allofmp3 business model actually works, offering users reasonably-priced downloads in their choice of quality, without DRM. And instead of learning from and emulating the operation of the free market, the music industry allots its resources to criminalizing potential (and actual) customers, lobbying policy-makers, and concocting outlandish advertisements to dissuade impressionable youth from downloading from any questionable source.

What if, instead of this losing effort to keep the tide of technology from rising and falling, the industry cooperated with Allofmp3, treating it as a sort of marketing lab?

This is on my mind because we left our CDs — the digital recordings we wanted most and bought first — back in Illinois, and I didn’t spend hours ripping every one of them, of course, so now when I think it would be great to listen to “Born to Run,” I remember that it’s back home and I don’t have access to it. If digital downloads were intelligently priced, I might just say “Oh, forget it,” and buy downloads of selections I miss. It’s a different business model, but time will show that it’s a viable model. In the meantime, the Princeton Public Library has a large collection of CDs; and the record companies don’t profit a cent when I borrow them.

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September 02, 2007

Keeper

Tim Bray, on an oversimplified analysis of differences between men and women:

Statistics are useful; essential, even, to understanding. But everybody is an exception, in at least one statistical minority, and the human mind is so prone to overaggressive pattern-matching.

I know I’ll use the phrase “prone to overaggressive pattern-matching” sometime, so I want to quote Tim here now, so I’ll be able to find the source anon.

In the age of the proto-semantic Web, here’s a question for mark-up mavens: If somebody writes such-and-such a thing on their web page, and I quote them on mine — am I obligated to replicate their mark-up as well as the visual appearance of their prose? Tim used 〈em〉 tags on his “useful” (no surprise that he’s conscientious about mark-up), but a casual reader might quote him with just 〈i〉 tags. Or a casual blogger might set a title in italics through a blogging engine that defaults to 〈em〉 tags; should I follow their imprecision for the sake of precise quotation? Do we need a 〈sic〉 tag?

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Novel to Sink Your Teeth Into

Margaret prodded me into reading Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts this latesummer, and it serves as a wonderful reminder of how well she knows me. Raw Shark mingles romance, semiotics, conspiracy, and conceptual ichthyology in an engrossing plot that oscillates from supernatural adventure to elegiac descent into madness, and back, and from there to genre-challenging reflection on meaning, identity, and narrative closure — all with so deftly light a hand that it never succumbs to ponderous self-importance. No Matrix here, though it touches some of the points that the Wachowskis skimmed from the surface of Baudrillard; no self-congratulatory deconstruction of the novel; no elaborate joke at the reader’s expense, and although the ending remains open in certain regards, it offers knit-things-up conclusion to satisfy a reader who simply will not tolerate loose ends.

The gentleness with which Hall evokes the various dimensions of this meditative adventure remind me of Mark Tansey or René Magritte more than Derrida or Keanu Reeves. Hall demonstrates alert awareness of the visual, aural, and emotional coloration of “knowing” — and, arguably, intimates a sense of the spiritual and parabolic as well.

I recommend the novel highly, but particularly emphatically for readers with interests that touch on the topics I’ve sketched in Beautiful Theology and in some of the essays in Faithful Interpretation and in “Poaching on Zion.” While it’s always a mistake to judge one work by the standard of all that it might be, The Raw Shark Texts attains distinction in so many different ways that it would be curmudgeonly (even for me!) to scold it for not reaching all the way to transcendence.

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