Helen DeWitt's Blog, page 48

iPad replaces Julie Andrews

Joshua Gans talks about terrific uses of the iPad for children learning to read, learning about music, learning about the periodic table and so on, at Game Theorist.

ahem

Andrew Gelman casts a critical eye on John Lanchester's analysis of UK electoral districts and supposed advantage to Labour of these as currently drawn up. (Er, we at paperpools blithely linked to the post on the theory, to which we are still partial, that we can never get too much of John Lanchester.)

Theophrastus & electioneering

John Lanchester has been writing regularly on the LRB Blog in the run-up to the UK election; today he describes Mosaic, a package used by the Tories to get insight into the electorate:

Mosaic is well worth a look, and is very striking for its mixture of first hand research and thundering clichés. The population of the UK is represented by 15 groups, broken down into 67 household categories – one of which will be applied to you, whoever you are, by Mosaic's all-knowing postcode-centred...

dolce vita ist vorbei, iii

got the following enchanting announcement from Wu Ming:


Questa è l'ultima mail che riceverete perché vi siete iscritt* a Giap, ormai tanto tempo fa. Stiamo per cancellare l'intero indirizzario. Quindi, se avete qualcosa di cui lamentarvi (ricezioni multiple etc.), potete lasciar perdere. La lista non esiste più.

Da oggi poniamo termine alla "crisi" di *Giap* e alla frammentazione dovuta al proliferare di blog e siti tematici dedicati a singoli libri (*New Thing* , *Stella del mattin*o, *Altai

ben arrivati ad Hameln

Jonathan Galassi has a post on the FSG poetry blog about poetry in translation.

Galassi has just finished translating the poems of Leopardi, a project which has taken 10 years (in part, no doubt, because he is also President of Farrar, Straus & Giroux); the book is due for publication in the fall.

The blog tells us Mr Galassi will be adding occasional thoughts on poetry during the course of National Poetry Month. When we note that the date of the initial post was 1 April, and that the 11th i...

national poetry month

Farrar, Straus & Giroux are sending out a daily poem through the end of April. You can sign up here.

eudaimonia

Selfishness, good health and stupidity are, Flaubert suggested, the prerequisites of happiness. But without the last, he added, happiness is unattainable. How then do we get happy? Isn't it obvious? We must cultivate stupidity.

Stuart Jeffries on Michael Foley's The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes it Hard to be Happy, Guardian Review

eheu fugaces labuntur anni

The bigger, more headache-inducing Atari programming challenge was dealing with the TV. The cathode ray tube screens of the late '70s and early '80s used an electron gun that drew individual scan lines on the screen. To create something as simple as a tank or a pong paddle, Atari programmers had to choreograph an intricate timing dance between their code and the electron beam. The most basic accomplishments on the 2600 could take months of solo work. The famous programmer of Adventure...

do you admire the view?

Peter Singer, for his part, showed some flexibility when I e-mailed him about this piece. "I've gone back and forth on this over the years," he said. "Perhaps there is a scintilla more doubt about whether oysters can feel pain than there is about plants, but I'd see it as extremely improbable. So while you could give them the benefit of the doubt, you could also say that unless some new evidence of a capacity for pain emerges, the doubt is so slight that there is no good reason for avoiding e...

to say nothing of salad bars

Let's get something straight: A vegetarian is someone who doesn't eat meat. It's not someone who loves vegetables.

Ezra Klein on the GVP.