Kyle > Recent Status Updates

These are growing pains for soccer fans who ignore there is a world of players outside of England, and at least some of them have recognizable names (moreso for international reader like myself) yet countries like the United States and South Korea still have a lot to prove if riotous and xenophobic Englanders are willing to let go of 1966 and accept the global good game. At least Nick writes about this new narrative.

Guess the sports writing was too much of a stretch to be lumped together with Books, Movies etc. etc. as it appears that Nick is writing in an alien language. Of course he is still the beloved pop-culture author, and soccer is undoubtly popular among many cultures, but it still is strange. Especially with Hornbish references to Kurosawa, Jung and Yellow Submarine here and there, even quantum theory!

Guess the sports writing was too much of a stretch to be lumped together with Books, Movies etc. etc. as it appears that Nick is writing in an alien language. Of course he is still the beloved pop-culture author, and soccer is undoubtly popular among many cultures, but it still is strange. Especially with Hornbish references to Kurosawa, Jung and Yellow Submarine here and there, even quantum theory!

Painters, photographers and Dickens, oh my! Hornby switches gear in the final stretch of this collection, unless the rhythm and blues were somehow encoded terms for visual arts and geographic nostalgia. He proves himself an engaging contributor to what makes hip things cool, even the faded glory of his adopted home (original born a little way up the Thames) that turns out to be much like my Internet-altered hometown.

Painters, photographers and Dickens, oh my! Hornby switches gear in the final stretch of this collection, unless the rhythm and blues were somehow encoded terms for visual arts and geographic nostalgia. He proves himself an engaging contributor to what makes hip things cool, even the faded glory of his adopted home (original born a little way up the Thames) that turns out to be much like my Internet-altered hometown.

Painters, photographers and Dickens, oh my! Hornby switches gear in the final stretch of this collection, unless the rhythm and blues were somehow encoded terms for visual arts and geographic nostalgia. He proves himself an engaging contributor to what makes hip things cool, even the faded glory of his adopted home (original born a little way up the Thames) that turns out to be much like my Internet-altered hometown.

Writing the introductions to books he wrote or read has firmly placed Nick in that ideal England where teens rode the bus in the rain and listen to the radio with their parents. A far cry from the Sundance extravagance life in America continues to represent, each screen adaptation drawing him one step closer, despite the post-production limbo his Long Way Down has had to endure even after Education.

Not trying to be rude, but there is a whole history of politeness that seems to be missing from this brief chapter, that late early modern period better known as Austen's age, where even the tiniest glance and misunderstood word could spell disaster for a young lady of middling fortune. Instead, the focus rests upon the usual authors, with a detailed plotting of Romeo and Juliet as if never yet read closely.

The arrangement of chapters seems to have the eclectic, mix-tape feel to it, jumping from one decade (or century) to the next, but all of it working towards a fuller picture of Hornby's move from the writerly wings of pop culture to decentred middle of it all; meaning he directly contributed to making a movie based upon someone else's words, rather than letting his novel (yes, Fever Pitch, twice) be adapted.

As the year winds down and I am a few too many chapters short of my reading goal, I am really glad to have discovered that Nick Hornby, inspired novelist and screenwright, had published not one but two mercifully short e-books. This first one deals with the ups and downs of being a can't-do author with a BA in English, happy to write anything about any topic he deeply cared for: music, football, his own gormlessness.

So they are sticking with the infinite number of clocks to represent possible positions of an electron (aren't they?) to introduce some of the fundamental principles of quantum physics. Seems like a lot of extra explaining that could misleadingly lead one to believe some sort of time travel is involved. At least theorists mentioned: Heisenberg, Planck and Einstein, may have got a chuckle out of this extended analogy.

Of course fiction provides a much more captivating story when facts don't have much of a role to play in the telling. The Yellow Superbmarine was a good way of setting up the type of gossipy nonsense found in many books. Even life outside of Eco's reading list starts to reveal the lure of fiction. Earlier today at Yokohama's Orbi 23.4 screening BBC's Meercats had a disclaimer that some events were fictional.

A peek into a world of possibilities that readers are prone to accept, suspending the belief and accepting the alchemy the author's words, can present carriages without horses, giant human-sized bugs and two-dimensional shapes that move of their own volition. A good example of ways that an author can force one's own perspective is the optical illusion that has three round prongs on one end and a box end on the other.

A peek into a world of possibilities that readers are prone to accept, suspending the belief and accepting the alchemy the author's words, can present carriages without horses, giant human-sized bugs and two-dimensional shapes that move of their own volition. A good example of ways that an author can force one's own perspective is the optical illusion that has three round prongs on one end and a box end on the other.

Oh what fun, following Feynman's physics, to figure out possible positions of a particle. It doesn't surprise me that younger minds, like the 'Knabenphysik' theorists, would belive the electron could be in various positions at the same time as they probably held onto the Santa Claus story of their youth which the old-guard physicists like Einstein and Schrödinger lost interest in promoting the use of abstract clocks.

Was my advance to candidacy for moving my advisor's piano a promise, directive, compliment or insult?

On to speech acts as "utterance" gets uttered, there is nary a printed word about Mikhail Bakhtin, and probably won't be for the rest of this non-social science textbook. There also seems to be some slight differences speech act terminology, plus a timely quote from the timely text Christmas at Hostage Canyon.

Turns out that Newton was mostly correct with his three laws of motion, but where he misses out are the little huge things happening at the level of electrons - too bad, birthday boy! - but a few other physicists tested out a new theory with the double slit experiment. At last I get why the interference pattern happens, there being peaks and troughs in the same place, much like an eventual gravity collapse of a star.

Very interesting temporal notions of narrative being wrung through the through-the-woods allegory. An inferential walk allows the reader to hop off the marked off trail and explore some of the details of the world created in the story. The model author gives the reader a chance to slow down or speed up the discourse time - really just like what Shakespeare was doing with Othello's "whiter skin of hers than snow" bit.

By now it shouldn't be a surprise that many authors writing about quantum physics like to have it both ways when relating their story: it is both an unfathomable mystery and a simple system of understand what really goes on in the universe. These authors want to do away with the mystery, claiming that their description will adhere to the latter principles. Pure marketing, one might imagine, to make an unmystery book.

One of the first impediments to a teenager picking up a Shakespearean play is the perceived problem of pronouns: some stop at the sight of their first thou and refuse to accept it as English. This chapter give a thrilling account of all the ways one person could directly address another, while keeping in mind that most reported speech is from fiction and may not have actually been spoken to a real-life anyone at all.

There are two and presumably only two ways for a model author to inspire level-one readers to advance to a more critical plane of reading. One would hope a way into these woods would be to write really good stories with enough complexity that the plot begins to shift with each reading. The other way requires a McGuffin able to pull a reader straight through to the other side, to Grandma's house? Poe wrote both kinds.

Ay me! The pragmatic study of the English language starts off wih words that are barely words, but discourse markers and interjections. Well, they may seem simple, but alas, there are as many negotiated meanings as the most overwrought noun or irregular verb. Umm, my future professor gets mentioned again, don't you know, as having written a classic on pragmatic markers, so I better get used to marking, mhm, my words.

A bit weird to be invited into the fairy tale woods with reports that the wolf may not be a wolf, does that mean the woods are not the woods? Or anything anything either the model author or reader could create - I get that there will be some figurative wordplay going on with Eco's grand theory of narrative, but then making such a case over what basically boils down to pronoun usage is not seeing the forest for trees.

Looking forward to this narrative about getting lost in a book, comic or movie - something that can be repeated at various stages in one's life. Also a good opportunity to meet (at last) Umberto Eco, who gets a lot of mention in digital lit. Oddly enough, many of his insights, as listed in the table of contents, would fit more with Theory of Clouds than the black hole-less film Theory of Everything.

More details, the nuts and bolts of how corpora will help researchers find the right method, yet as it is more of an introductory text there is a wide range between the quantitative and qualititative approaches, meaning anything goes until further chapters dealing with specifics. Nice to see the professor who assigned this textbook is prominently featured in this chapter, a good preview of impressive studies to come.

How suddenly the story had gone from a celebration of the artistic and amorphous qualities of the world, to the scientific attempt to understand it all, to the gossipy scandals of leading scientists and at last to the socially disconnected system of computers keeping track of data that once used to inspire wonder. The entire story may only be a curiosity to someone living in a hard-hit wreck after another superstorm.

Victor Turner is again mentioned as a pathfinder from the ancient ritual to theatrical play of a culture, but Bruner's analysis goes a bit deeper than just another level of civilization: instead, the urge to narrate and attempts to mimetically reproduce the world are almost instantaneous. All of it starting a a young age, as Vygotsky points out, becomes internalized similar to another dimension added to our 3D world.

The sex-crazed scientist setting up a protocol for observing women and their (to borrow the icky euphemistic word repeated in place of anatomy) sex at least made one important discovery: the isomorphic quality of everything tends towards the same shape. Other chapters consider how much of a human body water mass, whether smashed onto a sidewalk or instantly vaporized in a flash, will transfer into the idyllic shapes.