Timothy Green's Blog
March 27, 2009
March 26, 2009
The best teacher I ever had died yesterday. 66, cancer. He was a legend in our little suburb, the kind of teacher that teenagers tell their younger siblings stories about, and then those siblings grow up and realize that all of the stories are actually true. If he caught you with a cheat sheet, he’d proofread it, correct any errors and slip it back where he found it. If you were doodling in class, he’d pull his tie up onto his forehead like a bandanna, yell out “Staple Man!” in a trademarke
March 20, 2009
March 17, 2009
Really brief as-promised follow-up to “The Gender Question.” I spent the weekend doing the layout for the summer issue, so our contributors are now finalized.
The count: 46 men, 40 women = 46.7%F
Still leaning male, but Rattle #31 is more female than our 45% ten-issue-average, and we’ve bucked the disturbing trend of Gender Climate Change — apparently the recent spike in testosterone was due to random fluctuations in solar iridescence and the earth’s magnetic field, not men-made.
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An eve
March 16, 2009
March 13, 2009
March 11, 2009
I’ve been meaning to write a follow-up to Monday’s post about reader response, but it’s new-issue week for me — typesetting Rattle #31 before we send it on to our brilliant team of proofreaders — and time has been scarce. This is an important topic, and I really don’t want to half-ass it, but half an ass is better than no ass, right?
In listening to the feedback on issues of Rattle — whether in print or online, whether the commenters are writing letters or talking to me after readings — I alway
March 9, 2009
The graph on the right is “unique visitors” to Rattle.com. I had to crop out the y-axis, but you get the drift. On Saturday morning we went from our usual 1,000 or so visitors a day (is that good or bad for a website? I have no idea) to 20,000, thanks to the snowball effect of online networking. A couple people recommended the poem at StumbleUpon, and “Death and Tacos” by Nathaniel Whittemore went viral.
I love it when that happens, as it did last summer with Brett Myhren’s “Telemarketer.” The
March 6, 2009
March 4, 2009
Since the book came out, it’s been a real treat trying to explain to friends and family what a fractal is. My grandma says she understood it one afternoon a few weeks ago, but can’t remember how it made sense at the time. Most people just assume it has something to do with fractions and leave it at that. The truth is, I’m not even remotely a mathematician (although it might have been my best subject in school), and don’t understand enough about the interactions between computers and modern ma
