Month: July 2007

Stephen Downes asks the right question: Would Canadians swap their health-care system for ours? No. And I’ll tell you what — that’s not because single-payer advocates are pouring millions of dollars into pressure advertising.

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Jenny was blogging the 2007 Games, Society, and Learning Conference (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8). I envy her and everyone else who has a rationale for being there; that’s an area into which I’d love to extend my involvement. These papers look terrific —the ones I agree with, I’d want to follow up on, and the ones I disagree with, I’d want to learn from the speaker about the grounds for disagreement.

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Raph Levien has reached a stable point in the development of Museum, the Bruce Rogers typeface Centaur, and has released it under the SIL Open Font license, for which many users will thank him. In a more nearly perfect world, the faces would have complete alphabets.

[In case somebody came here from Amardeep Singh’s page, the post to which he was pointing is at this page]

I don’t recall any of our kids being frightened by Sesame Street, but Nate was absolutely petrified by Reader Rabbit.

The five of us (Margaret, Pippa, Si, Laura and I) went to see Harry Potter on opening night (not at 12:01 “opening morning” — we can’t stay awake that late). We had heard the polarized reviews that described Order of the Phoenix as the best of the series, or as a sign of the series’ exhaustion. I was uneasy; the book had struck me as largely stage-setting for the big climax in Half-Blood Prince and Deadly Hallows; the plot hadn’t left much of an impression on me when I read it. That suggested that the movie might be flat, since several of the directors have relied on a break-neck rush from one event to another to their dramatic conclusions; without a propulsive plot, though, we might encounter characters who stand around being puzzled or over-emoting (I’m looking at you, Ron). Add the fact that Margaret hadn’t read the book, and so couldn’t count on background knowledge to fill in the gaps left by the transition from mammoth book to two-hour movie, and the possible booby-traps gave cause to take the nay-sayers seriously.

On the contrary — all five of us were delighted with this entry. The director steers away from the somewhat murky plot, emphasizing instead the character development and thematic points. The adolescents spend very little time pouting and fuming (thank you, thank you, please remember how much this strengthened the movie when you direct the next one!). Harry and Hermione have grown into exceptionally good-looking young actors, and Phoenix gives them room to work. Even Harry’s sense of isolation — which in some of the movies would have occasioned frequent tantrums — is here subordinated to the struggle between Voldemort and Harry, between suspicious self-centered isolation and trusting, loving mutuality. Dumblebore’s decisions show frustrating lack of insight into Harry’s needs as a teenager (especially as an extraordinary teen), and educational policies of the Ministry of Magic (under both Dumbledore and Umbridge; you can’t dump the blame on her) seem bizarrely dangerous. Still, those perplexities don’t overshadow the satisfaction of seeing the films hero-children emerge as effectual agents with initiative. And the paring-away of Quidditch, Hogsmeade, and so on all served the laudable purpose of keeping attention on the protagonists’ progress toward maturity and reliance on one another.

Margaret thought the battle sequence at the end was too confusing and cluttered. I suppose so, though it caught me up into an uncertainty that intensified the excitement of the special effects.

I give Order of the Phoenix high marks. It’s not Citizen Kane, but it ranks with Prisoner of Azkaban as my favorites in the series so far. Not surprisingly, my main suggestion would be— more Lupin! I hope Rowling draws on his character more generously for the final volume, especially as Sirius Black and Dumbledore are now offstage.

We’re arranging to buy Deathly Hallows from a local bookseller, without the loss-leader discounting that the megachains will offer. I’ll have to wait my turn to read it, but I’ll be exceptionally eager to see what Rowling has up her sleeve. Well done, all around!
Continue reading “Ten Thumbs Up”

I had nothing to do with it, so there’s no basis for me to bask in their glory, but I nonetheless take pride in my alma mater Bowdoin College’s triumph in the international 4-legged soccer tournament Robocup. (Back when I went to Bowdoin, I hacked the campus mainframe version of STRTRK, first to replace the various galactic locations in the array with place names from campus, then to eliminate the annoying flaw in the game architecture that squandered energy by firing phasers at Klingons that were hiding behind planets. In those days, hacking was made simpler by the fact that security consisted to a large extent to “no one knows how to do that,” “nobody would try that,” or “no one knows where we put it.”)

The online type-design community that gathers around Typophile and Typographi.ca just announced their favorite fonts of last year (yes, it’s July, there were technical complications). Of the faces they cite, my favorite has to be Fabiol; I’m a sucker for Venetian Renaissance type. (Plus, anything from the Font Bureau. I want the job of composing their type specimen copy.)

One might think that after five hundred years of typography and more than a decade of the democratization of digital typeface design, that relatively little room remains for creativity in legibly, gracefully representing the Latin alphabet. These designers demonstrate how false that inference would be.
Continue reading “Best Typefaces of 2006”

I can’t wait to hear what Bruce Schneier has to say about the FBI’s new “system to assess risk.” (A German report here, which quotes Schneier as saying something like, “These programs are based on the dangerous myth that terrorists fit a particular profile, and we can pick them out of a crowd if we only put all people into it.” ) It would be great to see an internationally-prominent body adopting the principle that you can’t out-anticipate terrorists, but you can uphold an open, respectful, resilient civil order.

I’m not sure who established Fair Use Day, but as the corrosion of equity and common sense continue to tip the balance of copyright benefits toward corporate publishers (not artists, writers, and creators, and certainly not readers, viewers, and listeners), exercise your prerogative to quote, parody, criticize, or educate using copyrighted works. Use it or lose it!

Courtesy of Doc and Nate:

First, JP “I’m cool for more reasons than just my collaboration with Chris Locke” Rangaswami, the grand slam analysis of Prince’s decision to give away copies of his CD to residents of the UK:

Prince understands how he makes money, what’s scarce and what’s abundant about it. Digital downloads are abundant. Concert appearances are scarce. He makes money because of his CDs and not with them [this emphasis c/o AKMA].

A word of caution. Some people are just not comfortable with abundance economics, so they try to create artificial scarcities as they go along. Second nature to them, I guess. . . .

You cannot bundle abundance with scarcity, it’s like trying to implement region coding of the air that you breathe. But then some people will try anything.

Then, via Nate (the unlinkable), the latest news from Canadian band Stars:

On September 25th, Arts&Crafts will release Stars’ fourth studio album, In Our Bedroom After War. . . .

Traditional music business practice says we are to begin sending out copies of this album now. We give advance copies to print publications in hopes of securing features that coincide with our September date. We meet with radio stations in hopes of securing airplay. etc, etc.

Inevitably someone will leak the album.

Throughout this process, the most important people in this value chain, the fans, are given only two options – wait until September 25th to legally purchase the new album or choose from a variety of sources and download the album for free, at any time.

We hope you’ll choose to support the band, and choose to pay for their album. However we don’t think it’s fair you should have to wait until September 25th to do so.

We believe that the line between the media and the public is now completely grey.
What is the difference between a writer for a big glossy music magazine and a student writing about their favourite bands on their blog? What differentiates a commercial radio station from someone adding a song to their lastfm channel? or their myspace page?

As such, we are making the new Stars album available for legal download today, four days after it’s completion. The CD and double vinyl versions of the album will still be released on our official release date, September 25th. We hope you will continue to support music retailers should a physical album in all it’s packaged glory be your choice of format.

It’s our hope that given a clear, legal alternative to downloading music for free, you will choose to support the creators.

We hope you enjoy it as much as we do.

Sincerely,

Stars and Arts&Crafts

If only they realized that it’s not the dollars-from-bits that they’re selling; it’s the packaging (for the physical artifact) and the performances (at live venues). But Rangaswami’s, and Prince’s, understanding of how this digital economy works will prevail in the long run. And if you want to buy the Stars album now, you can go here now; me, I’ll wait to hear how it sounds before I rush to buy. At least Arts & Crafts doesn’t DRM-cripple their digital versions.

Trying to work on some lectionary essays while also getting ready to decamp for Princeton, and pondering the possibility of using Inform 7 for educational games in New Testament studies (thanks for the distraction pointer, Steve!).

I was about to buckle down and write a real review of Everything is Miscellaneous — among the other things I’ve spent the last month on the verge of buckling down to write — when yesterday, David Weinberger offered a wonderful reflection on age, death, John Lennon, and our intertwingled lives.

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On a very much lighter note, the Simpsons avatar maker does its magic even more impressively than the Lego Mini-mizer did.

Before I go to church, so that I don’t give the impression that I’m thinking about any particular service:

The point of worship is worship. The point of taking pains about liturgy — well, I can think of several. One point involves trying to say what we mean, liturgically, rather than our services just mumbling. (Despite my sympathy for the Motu Proprio permitting wider use of the Tridentine Mass, I admit that this gesture may convey both an imprecise retrograde nostalgia and, more importantly, the revival of gravely problematic liturgical antisemitism.)

The other point I had in mind involved the action of worship, when clumsiness and confusion call attention to the goings-on as something other than fluent praise of God. Turbulence distracts; coordination facilitates. (Yes, it’s possible to make an idol of hyperprecise liturgical fussiness; on the whole, I observe a great many more situations in which careless confusion is shrugged off as inconsequential than I observe situations in which fastidiousness interferes with worship. That fits a more general U.S. ideology of casualness, and of theological topics not mattering much.)

I find that my students work better on questions of ethics when you supply them with concrete case studies — so when I read the first bit of this story about Pete Doherty, I immediately thought about it as an example relative to questions of truth-telling and fidelity. But the more you linger with it, the more ethical plot lines come to the fore (especially as you read on to the end of the piece). You could devote an entire semester to teaching the ethics of this narrative.