John Crowley's Blog, page 14

Boston grassy knoll

Somewhere in the course of yesterday a taxi was stopped on Commonwealth Avenue and two passengers taken into custody.  A pipe bomb was removed from the taxi and exploded on the green nearby by the bomb squad.  The taxi was taken away on a police trailer.  As far as I can tell nothing further has been said about this incident.  Who were those people and what became of them?  

Jesus!

Stanley Fish explores the academic and philosophic implications of an exercise in which students were asked to step on a paper with the name of Jesus written on it. Fish suggested that a thought experiment ("what would you think of stepping....") would have been as effective and less controversial than making students do it for real. He got 522 comments (and counting).

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/15/stepping-on-jesus/

Since my response elicited only a single recommendation despite being highly suggestive and sort of secretly profound (story of my life), I copy it here:

Write a paper analyzing your different responses if the name on the paper were a) Jesus b) Mohammed c) Abraham Lincoln d) your mother. Consider whether you would be as willing to step on Jesus's name if you understood that those around you were horrified at the thought though you yourself are indifferent. Think about what your different responses would be to the demand that you step on the name of Jesus you wrote yourself, or that the teacher wrote, or that was given you as a printed paper. Describe your response as compared to being asked to step on (or step into) a pair of Jesus brand jeans. Consider your willingness to step on Jesus's name after watching fellow students step on Jesus's name a) with casual indifference; b) hooting with laughter; b) grimacing, covering their eyes, and weeping. Respond to the question "I believe my teacher when he tells me that refusing to participate in this experiment will not affect my grade." Extra-curricular credit: Gather with fellow students and keg and decide what names you would be so ready to stamp on.

Indistinguishable

At Yale I am a Senior Lecturer but at Harvard apparently a Distinguished one.  And Distinguished Lecturers give Distinguished Lectures.  (Do they?)

http://c-emergencyinformatics.tamu.edu/ai1ec_event/distinguished-lecture-april-17-2013-410pm-124-hrbb/?instance_id=

Bazooka Joe

A mention of bazookas caused me to wonder if the weapon came before the bubble gum or the other way around.  Why would a weapon be named after bubble gum?  But why would bubble gum be named after a weapon? 

Time Marches On

NY Times article announces a Xerox invention of teeny "chiplets" that can be strewn over printed circuits and attach in the right places to make electronic... okay, lost the train of thought there, read it yourself:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/09/science/tiny-chiplets-are-a-new-level-of-micro-manufacturing.html?ref=science

Here it touts the enormous changes that the chiplet has over the chip:

Moreover, the research could have tremendous economic consequences — feeding the emergence of a new digital era in manufacturing, much as laser printing transformed publishing three decades ago.

By replacing the circuit boards now assembled in factories, the technology would vastly compress a supply chain that spans the globe and employs hundreds of thousands of workers.

Progress!

Utopia On Film

Now that my class has read through a number of Utopian fictions, they have conceived the idea of a Utopian film bash. Lost Horizon of course, and Things to Come, and... what?  NOT dystopian, plenty of which come immediately to mind -- though the question of why dystopia is more popular remains unsettles (is it simply easier, or more convincing?)

Anyway -- suggestions?

crowleycrow @ 2013-04-08T07:18:00

NY Times article about the proliferation of pseudo-academic journals that publish anything submitted, for a fee, and hold fake-ish conferences etc., a growing problem.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/08/health/for-scientists-an-exploding-world-of-pseudo-academia.html?ref=us

Journals and conferences are given names hard to tell from the respectable ones.  A librarian in Colorado is keeping a black list of these journals:

One publisher on Beall’s list, Avens Publishing Group, even sweetened the pot for those who agreed to be on the editorial board of The Journal of Clinical Trails & Patenting, offering 20 percent of its revenues to each editor.

I think I might have smoked that one out.

Ben Katchor Again

Paul Di Filippo, whose always reliable and witty reviews in the Barnes &Noble monthly online magazine are not to be missed, outdoes himself with this fine appreciation of one of my own favorite modern artists:

http://bnreview.barnesandnoble.com/t5/In-the-Margin/Hand-Drying-in-America/ba-p/10197

Let alone again before

Grazing for something in old LJ entries, I find that I, or we, discussed the new deformation the usage of "let alone" meaning a more specific or recondite thing (that's a poor definition).

http://crowleycrow.livejournal.com/125167.html

Some of the smart people who commented on that original back in the dim days of 2009 have not visited here lately.  Sigh.

Bull session

This is from Maureen Dowd's NYT column today:

“Same-sex couples have every other right,” Chief Justice John Roberts said, sounding inane for a big brain. “It’s just about the label in this case.” He continued, “If you tell a child that somebody has to be their friend, I suppose you can force the child to say, ‘This is my friend,’ but it changes the definition of what it means to be a friend.”

This is entirely unintelligible to me.  It sounds like the remark of someone who hasn't thought before speaking.  What's the difference between telling a child he has to be someone's friend and making him say it?  What is the analogy here?  WHo in the real-world analog is the child, who is the friend, and who is the person saying the child must be a friend?  What definition has been changed by asserting a lie?