Google+.

Anyone on this yet? Looks like Google's pulling together some current functionality, renaming parts of it, and creating a platform for connecting with people. Also looks like the emphasis is on f2f interaction, unlike Facebook, which emphasizes Facebook interaction. Hard to say if the pendulum is swinging back toward f2f activities yet.

My Paint skills are UNRIVALED.

Heaven is not complete without a singing Neil Gaiman.

Quote from BoingBoing writeup by Maggie Koerth-Baker:

WITS is best described as the very nerdy, slightly tipsy, younger cousin of A Prairie Home Companion. There are authors, there are musicians, there are the creators of MST3K heckling from a balcony seat. In other words, you'd love it.

I very much miss this kind of environment. Aye, DC, I love you, but you're a bit dull.

The ring chose you. Use its power to defend our universe.

In brightest day, in blackest night,
No evil shall escape my sight.
Let those who worship evil’s might
Beware my power...Green Lantern’s light!

Finland: Explain, please.

On the one hand, I see its value. Looks like some good core strengthening work. Then they start galloping and jumping verticals. All I can think of are ponygirls.

Happy birthday, Alan Turing.

What a tragic life you led, Dr. Turing. I know you not so much through your own work, but through your characterization in Cryptonomicon. I would have liked to have known you.

Another sign of the apocalypse, or, Heather sees naked people and gets confused.

This gallery (totally NSFW) on BoingBoing has me confused. They're supposed to be naked, right? So why are they wearing clothes, body paint, and/or masks? And shouldn't the gentleman in this image be mindful of that bike seat?

Scratch that. I might find out that he's feeling inviting.

Woolite: Your demise is imminent, but your laundry is brighter.

Reassurances about your delicates courtesy of Rob Zombie. Now, if we could just get Treyarch to make commercials for Walmart....

There can be only one NIH Highlander.

Link is to an excellent, though brief, article in The Scientist about the first NIH researcher. Yes, there was only one. James Kinyoun was the NIH Highlander. He was such a badass that he did not require a sword to decapitate his foes.

Corollary 1: Scientific thought, as derived from rigorous examination and the scientific method, will lead us to ideas that will eventually become axioms.

Corollary 2: The more rigorously derived ideas we have, the better.

Corollary 3: It is important to distinguish between bad ideas rising to the surface for examination and dismissal, and bad ideas being recycled by those with even worse motives.

Science and truth: Couldn't have said it better myself.

This comment was posted by commenter Johan(tm) Strandberg in a discussion of a Richard Dawkins piece on preferential sex selection. Unlike numerous other Internet venues, on BoingBoing there's remarkably little Bible thumping and irrational sky gazing. Like numerous other Internet venues, though, there's a good bit of narrow or otherwise selective argumentation. Johan(tm) Strandberg makes some clear, well-considered points about science and its corollaries:

Science as a collective iterative process to get closer to The Truth. This goal is never attainable as such, but we can get arbitrarily close to it over time. Science in this sense is neutral and judgment free. In retrospect, it might also be wrong.

Scientific Investigations are not value neutral — although the best ones strive to be.

Applications of Science is by default to be considered biased and with selfish motives — but sometimes it rises above that. This should in no way reflect on the value of science itself, only on the entity who is [claiming to be] applying science. Sometimes the claimed use of science is based ignorance or other motives [e.g., homeopathy]. This should only reflect on the entity making the claim, not on Science itself.

You will never know for sure. The very essence of Science is that is a collective refinement over time. At best you later discover that some particular part of Science was wrong. However, once consensus — based on a large set of opinions — has been established, it is OK to assume that that particular piece of science is "true".

Get used to never knowing for sure, and be very suspicious of people claiming to be.

Nice use of simple typographic conventions to indicate distinctions among terms, too. I have long argued that science is the only way we'll get closer to understanding objective truth. The fact that I am convinced there's an objective truth at all is enough to make some people stop listening to me. (Eh, we all have our blind spots.) If someone wants to cling to subjective truth as an item of value, they're welcome to do so, just as long as they don't then try to make it into an objective truth through some fallacious appeal.

Cthulhu: He'll cure what ails ya.

Who couldn't love these lollipops?

After the cold I've been nursing for the past 10 days, I think Doctor Muñoz would give me one. Strange, I suddenly feel a draft in here...

Your blog is the new business card.

I read a fair bit about blogs, blogging, and how to do more/be better/all that. Reading about productivity is one of the biggest time sinks I practice. Ever since I got onto Twitter, which mind you was in June 2006 (yowza five years ago), I've been drawn to the production of social media. Early debates about Twitter versus blogs had to do with audience. Some argued that a good tweet could sum up a blog point (valid only if you're interested in communicating solely through topic sentences), others insisted that blogs would die off in the face of tweet competition, and yet others used Twitter to sell their blogs (which were usually about blogging itself) and blog services. Lots of recursive data in those early days.

I think it's clear now that there's space for both, though I am always concerned about the value of information versus the time spent reading it. I worry about shortening attention spans; perhaps I would be instead cheering the demise of assigned research papers of specific lengths.

So if it's okay to be a blogger, then how does one gracefully mention one's blog? Where does good taste fit into this?

I've decided that a blog should be mentioned with the grace and frequency that one would produce a business card. Nothing is more off-putting than having someone comment solely to mention his blog, just as nothing is more graceless than a party arrival who's plastering hands with his business card.

Be a good person, worthy of attention, and you'll be someone people will want to read.

This is harder than it seems.

HP Lovecraft: Topology and Stephen Colbert.

Contrary to what most people think, HP Lovecraft was not a horror writer. In fact, he considered horror to be hack writing. Instead, he wrote weird fiction, and defined it thus in his essay, "Supernatural Horror in Literature":

The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain--a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.

Or as I call it, Thursday. Interestingly, Lovecraft's feel for the tone of shifting perception was mentioned in this article on four-dimensional space and topology. The author, Richard Elwes, uses Lovecraft as an intro to his notion that four-dimensional spaces are remarkably similar to the shape of Yog-Sothoth as Lovecraft described it. Perhaps that's all we should say about that, lest eldritch horrors appear.

You're feeling courageous? What about an automatic sanity check fail? Here's a mashup of Stephen Colbert and Cthulhu, intended for 3D printing at Thingiverse. Never heard of 3D printing? It's just the most awesome thing ever. Almost as awesome as finding two Lovecraft references to start your day. Tip o' the hat to BoingBoing for both of these.

Solar blowout.

Holy crap--part of the sun just freakin' blew off. Tip o' the hat to Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy fame (@BadAstronomer).

Two sources for how to write.

Providence has dropped wonderful things into my lap once again. First up is Time magazine's list of The Best Blogs of 2011. I'm not going to debate blogs, or the legitimacy of their list, because what's important to me is the descriptions of what makes these blogs interesting. Want to know why anyone should read a given blog? Peruse and adapt.

Second is a list from Famous Writers about the process of writing a book. The range goes from David Crosby (yes, the one of rock music and liver transplantation fame) to Cory Doctorow. I cannot imagine two more different people. At this point, I am not in mind of writing a book, but this is a fine set of pointers from people who know, from my point of view, everything that needs to be known about the process.

Post Hunt 2011.

It's been a crazy two days, with a multicelebrant birthday party most of yesterday and last night, and the Washington Post Hunt today. I'm holding down the fort at Corner Bakery (14th and G NW) while the rest of our group of about 25 solves the puzzles.

This year's format is different, it seems; no opening puzzle to determine coordinates, no list of extensive red herrings mixed in with a few correct answers. Here's hoping that everyone has fun. If not, there's always dinner at Gordon Biersch tonight at 6.

General Electric's tumblr: Well done, sirs.

I'm a fool for scientific and geekly pics. And I'm going to ask the GE tumblr out on a date this weekend. They've even got a pic of an electric car charger from the 1900s. This, however, is my favorite:

As of this post, the "GE Instagram" (as they're calling it) has only two tumblr pages. Best get on it early to stay caught up. Happy drooling!

Washington in 1814.

Now this is snappy.



While watching this, I concluded that the one message I would send those in our collective past would be, "Thank you." What was normal for them seems insurmountable to me. It's not just that we're soft today; I don't have the skills needed to make my way in that world. They're just as smart, crafty, and innovative as we are, yes, but still, there's something about the world of 1814 that reminds me I'm suited only for my current time at the earliest.

I'm also reminded that I have nowhere near the skills of the people who did the work on this mapping project. Thank you, geologists and geographers of the past. Your data has provided essential continuity for the lives of those who have followed you.

A Wunderkammer to explore when next in London.

Curio shops--are they even called that any more, I wonder, or are they now all lumped under the sign "antique and resale shop"--are something that I've loved since I was a kid. My mom and stepfather used to visit one in Gulfport, Miss., called The Purple Lantern. I was enchanted with it; the interior was done in a vaguely Arabian manner, with flowing fabrics covering the walls and dividing the shop into sections, each with a rambling assortment of curiosities linked loosely by theme. No surprise, then, that this article on Viktor Wynd's Little Shop of Horrors (tip o' the hat to BoingBoing) caught my eye.

Only I call my office a Wunderkammer. If I had, as Viktor Wynd does, "a box reputed to contain some of the original darkness that Moses called down upon the Earth (nailed tightly shut, I’m glad to say)," then perhaps my office would measure up. For now, my miniature D&D figures, New Orleans Saints toy ball, glow-in-the-dark skull, reproduction antique tin of dog treats, and plastic jellyfish will have to do.

Obligatory drink post, the second.

The hubby made a batch of these for a party we're got this afternoon. They should make a big splash; the hosting couple have their own regulation-size beer pong table, so it's going to be one of those kinds of parties. And frankly, it's about time.

Important safety tip: Cut the jelly slab into 1"/2.54 cm squares, no matter what the devil on your shoulder urges. The shots are potent. I used Mandarin orange segments and maraschino cherries, cut into fourths, for the garnish. Mine do not look nearly as nice as the photo here, which is from the linked article.

Obligatory drink post, the first.

I confess that I am devoted to vintage cocktails, and for a couple of reasons. One, I remain a bit miffed at bartenders today who repackage vintage cocktails and call them something new. Who can trust a bartender practicing such trickery? Someone needs to be present who can call them out when they've taken a sidecar and renamed it a "Belly Button Licker." Two, I find myself still reeling from the recent barrage of 'tini drinks; this should require no explanation.*

Before I start sounding too arch, I must also confess my love of tiki culture and tiki drinks. (There goes my rep.) I grew up with an interior designer for a mother, and when I was a preschooler and schoolchild, our living room was done Polynesian style--thatching on the walls, palm trees in each corner, solid teak furniture with legs and columns carved like tiki gods, war masks on the walls, emerald green carpet and draperies, and a 50-gallon fish tank with an actual, live, real piranha in it (my mom bought him on the black market, and yes, I know they're from South America). I even love the cheap tiki stuff at party stores.

In other words, the following tiki drink recommendations are inescapable. These are all good for mixing in big batches. The links will take you to Serious Eats recipes, but that's just to get you started.

Scorpion: This is a pleasant change of pace from the age-old pina colada, which to me should be served only to children (alcoholic or not).

Mai Tai: Many, many variations and ripoffs of this drink abound. The original cannot be duplicated; it called for a vintage of rum that has all been drunk. (Seriously. You can't get that kind of rum any more; no bottles are left outside of private collections.) The key is to not get the ingredients out of balance. If you've had a Mai Tai from a bar, chances are you've had an overload of juice and syrup. This recipe should be a pleasant change.

Fog Cutter: I'll always have a special place in my heart for Fog Cutters (or as my mom jokingly called them after a night of one too many and slurred speech, Frog Cutters). You'll notice a trend in these recipes: Lighter, more naturally sweet, and nuanced. If you've had a Fog Cutter in a bad Chinese restaurant before, don't despair. This recipe should help.

Planter's Punch: I have made many a bad pitcher of this punch and drank them gleefully. I've also ordered many a glass of this drink; no two were alike. Yes, it can be a fruity, oversyruped concoction with umbrellas AND fruit AND a whirlygig AND a plastic whale; Planter's Punch can also be a more streamlined and classic cocktail. I've included recipe links for both here.

It's getting to be time to plan a tiki party. Aloha kakou!



*Yes, I understand that you, you right there, have a favorite 'tini, and I know that the cosmopolitan is a classic cocktail that was stomped to death by Sex and the City. I can't help preference and history.

Gauss facts.

Tip o' the hat to Sam Waltz on the GenX-Ms email list for this one. A sample:

Gauss can get to the other side of a Möbius strip.
Gauss can colour any map using only one colour.
There are no postulates, only theorems Gauss believes are unworthy of a proof.
Gauss disproved Godel's Incompleteness Theorem by exhaustion.

The Wikipedia article on Gauss is here.

Corruption and its contexts.

Corruption is one of those words that's been cheapened through overuse. Still, with regard to some subjects, there's no better way to describe it. This article by Stratfor gives a good overview of the broadest context of corruption within Mexico today. Here's a quote:

The example of the Guatemalan DOAN (and of more recent Mexican police reform efforts) demonstrates that even a competent, well-paid and well-equipped police institution cannot stand alone within a culture that is not prepared to support it and keep it clean. In other words, over time, an institution will take on the characteristics of, and essentially reflect, the environment surrounding it.

As unlikely as it is to happen, the solution for now seems to be to protect the United States as best as possible from the violence that has taken over northern Mexico's hinterlands, whether by constructing more walls, setting up more armed forces, or something else. The situation strikes me as being much like that between Israel and the Palestinian territory. I very much agree with Israel's construction of the security walls (recognizing that I am in the minority on that, usually) and from day one I've been in favor of the walls along the southern US border. Like Robert Frost said, good fences make good neighbors.

Human permeability is behind institutional permeability, despite our efforts in the US to give institutions a life of their own through legal definitions and court decisions. I think this environmental effect goes through every area, every level of life. As I've posted on Facebook before, if you want to change your life, you have to change your values. This is way more complicated than blithely observing, "Do what you always did, get what you always got." The latter is so easy that it's dismissive. Changing values is some of the hardest work anyone will do. If it's that difficult on a personal level, then how much more difficult must it be on the national and international level? People rail about incremental change, but frankly, I don't see any other way that change can happen. So for now, I approve of the walls, the increased numbers of guns and agents, and the heightened awareness being used along the US-Mexico border.

Happy Towel Day!

"A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value--you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you--daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

"More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitchhiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit, etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitchhiker might accidentally have "lost." What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with."

Cocktail culture and its reversals.

Flirty aprons. Highball glasses with inexplicable designs. Polynesian themes. Safe exotica. Men and women playing subtextual games with cool intensity. That was my childhood environment; I watch Mad Men with a feeling of both pleasure and surprise, as I'm sure a lot of us do, and marvel at what it recalls.

But that was then. I think we've inverted all those behaviors, despite the recent (and now fading) popularity of that vintage. Courtship practically no longer exists. I suppose people still flirt, though in my experience we have lost our sense of subtext. Using subtext to flirt requires mindfulness, delicacy, respect, all of which are time-consuming activities and which require attention to others' responses.

I think that's what people are trying to get back. Cocktail culture has a set of understandable, attainable codes, and even though those codes are a bit old-fashioned, they're not so out of date that they can't offer us anything. I'd even go so far as to argue that there was more sexual equality in the original cocktail culture than there is now. Flirting, coyness, playing hard to get--all of those things are games, and games are for those on equal ground (if the rules don't potentially apply to all, i.e., if all players don't get an equal chance to win, then it's not a game). Might there be a difference between the balance of the sexes and their equality?

Context, trustworthiness, and truth-telling.

Multiple links behind this idea: Here is an interesting blog post about context by Stijn Debrouwere, and here is the source for the quote below, an article by Jay Rosen of the NYT about where journalism may be headed:

Long ago, something went awry in professional journalism the way the Americans do it, and it left these visible deformations. In my own criticism I have given various names to this pattern: agendalessness, the quest for innocence—most often, the View From Nowhere. The problem is not what it is usually said to be: that the press is supposed to remain “objective” but no one can be totally unbiased. The problem is equating trustworthiness with the prohibition on taking sides, when the actual result may be exasperation with he said, she said, rage at the helplessness that “leaving it there” creates, and mistrust of the formulaic ways in which journalists try to advertise their even-handedness.

This is part of the problem that I keep coming back to with regard to truth. Again I quote Mark Clark, my classics and Greek professor in my undergraduate studies, who asserted that in order to be a good skeptic, one had to believe in the truth. I immediately saw the wisdom in his statement and adopted it as one of my own truths. Here, though, the question is, how can we have journalism if we can't have truth? How can we have anything at all, really, if we can't have truth? We are slowly being reduced to facts only, yet we refuse to endorse science, which functions on facts, wholeheartedly, out of our fear of offending the religious. Facts are data; truth is our understanding of the larger implications of facts. Where will the idea of the truth be when we need it? Locked away somewhere because we can't trust ourselves to be right? Hidden because we are too afraid to take a stand? We have reduced truth-telling to court decisions and legal documents; that's the only safe place left for the truth to be judged, and I fear that even that is disappearing.

We have given up our responsibility to gather facts, understand them, and judge for ourselves, instead becoming wheedling and fearful. I fear that there may be a tipping point already passed, that we've taken on too much fear as a culture and will not be able to overcome it in order to reach the truths we'll need to survive.

Buildings in LEGO at the National Building Museum.

I've never quite been sure how LEGOs create a world once they're assembled. Maybe it's the strength of the image on the box; maybe it's the detail that the LEGO builders manage to include despite the essential clunkiness of the blocks. Maybe it's wishful thinking. This exhibition is running until September 5. I'll be there with my microscope.

George Washington's rules of civility.

Is civility relative? Given that by its nature, civility is about common ground, do we have a sense of what that is? Is our generation--and by "our" I mean mine, GenX--the last generation raised with the duty of civility? Is it possible that civility is something that we truly hold in common?

I ask this because Washington's rules of civility strike me as being just as apt today as they were when he copied them from the Jesuits. (Now that I've been to the George Washington Masonic Memorial, I cannot picture him without a Masonic apron.) I cannot profess an ability to get inside the minds of all classes and creeds, nor do I pretend to include the most extreme or isolated groups in this. I mean the middle ground. Is a sense of civility what begins to define the lower edge, so to speak, of that middle ground?

I think a lot about social markers and markers of privilege. Washington, DC, is a battleground of those markers; we are each assessed, day in, day out, by those in each rung. Civility as self-discipline, as an external signification of self-control and self-mastery, is the least of the lessons that we carry forward from Roman stoicism. Yet these limits imposed on the self seem to be slipping away from us. Perhaps it's not that we've lose a sense of civility so much as we're losing belief in ourselves. After all, self-discipline requires one believe that such discipline is possible and fruitful.

Bread and circuses did not help Imperial Rome outlast external aggression. For all our democratizing of education and social access, we still cast bread about and set up circuses to entertain. What will it take for us to believe in ourselves enough to master ourselves?

Christopher Hitchens: Unspoken Truths.

Hitchens is undergoing treatment for throat cancer. If it overcomes him, it will be a great loss to the world of writers. This essay is a simple, fine example of that. I don't mean that statement to be a pre-emptive eulogy, either; it'll be a damned bloody loss if the cancer takes him. We do not have enough Hitchenses to replace him.

In this essay, Hitchens's topics range from the painful mundanity of radiation therapy to the friendship of Heraclitus and Callimachus; and of course that's the range, because Hitchens is learned and mindful. But the idea of voice goes farther than that. Here's a quote that I, as a former college writing instructor, identified with:

"To my writing classes I used later to open by saying that anybody who could talk could also write. Having cheered them up with this easy-to-grasp ladder, I then replaced it with a huge and loathsome snake: “How many people in this class, would you say, can talk? I mean really talk?” That had its duly woeful effect. I told them to read every composition aloud, preferably to a trusted friend. The rules are much the same: Avoid stock expressions (like the plague, as William Safire used to say) and repetitions. Don’t say that as a boy your grandmother used to read to you, unless at that stage of her life she really was a boy, in which case you have probably thrown away a better intro. If something is worth hearing or listening to, it’s very probably worth reading. So, this above all: Find your own voice."

Italics are Hitchens's. Unbeknownst to me that Hitchens used these ideas to harangue his students, I was doing the same thing when teaching. I'd even have my students read their essays aloud in small groups so that they could hear the flaws and correct them (and they did, scratching out swaths and making margin notes). Funny how good ideas survive through movement among persons, not the stasis of pages and screens. At any rate, Hitchens's essay is a reminder that voice, a voice worth hearing, is not simply sound.

The Brownian motion of the borderland.

When I first read the Stratfor article linked above five years ago, it fundamentally changed the way that I looked at immigration in America. Here's a quote.

"Sicilians might remember Sicily, they might harbor a cultural commitment to its values and they might even have a sense of residual loyalty to Sicily or to Italy — but Italy was thousands of miles away. The Italian government could neither control nor exploit the migrant’s presence in the United States. Simply put, these immigrants did not represent a geopolitical threat; even if they did not assimilate to American culture — remaining huddled together in their “little Italys” — they did not threaten the United States in any way. Their strength was in the country they had left, and that country was far away. That is why, in the end, these immigrants assimilated, or their children did. Without assimilation, they were adrift....

"The immigration debate in the U.S. Congress, which conflates Asian immigrations with Mexican immigrations, is mixing apples and oranges. Chinese immigration is part of the process of populating the United States — a process that has been occurring since the founding of the Republic. Mexican immigration is, to borrow a term from physics, the Brownian motion of the borderland. This process is nearly as old as the Republic, but there is a crucial difference: It is not about populating the continent nearly as much as it is about the dynamics of the borderland."

I recommend Stratfor to people all the time (and no, I don't receive anything for doing so, nor do I work for them). This article in particular is refreshing in its clarity and precision. I need more of that, daily; I think we all do.

Zombie preparedness: CDC gets on board.

For a bit, the CDC servers crashed from the traffic, but the post title link above should work now. Meanwhile, the debate on DCist over proper home defense supplies is raging. I am in favor of a flamethrower for perimeter control and possible group control should retreat to another safe house be required, but others are adamant about its lack of efficacy.

Yes, and.

I've been reading and thinking lately about people who live life according to the principles of improvisation. The title link above is to the blog I found this morning; looks like it's got good insights, or at the very least foundational ones. So the questions are, do changes really happen when people shift to a "yes, and..." way of doing things; do those changes reflect only a different inner state; and does that distinction matter?

Our souls against the weight of a feather. I am still convinced that this is by what we will be judged. Thinking again about a "yes, and..." way of living, the emotional work required to shift one's inner space would necessarily change the weight in the scale pans.

NB: Yes, I watched the Jim Carrey film Yes Man. I think it lacked the core of ideas necessary to make it an equivalent to Groundhog Day, which is unfortunate because we could use another film like that.

I've also been thinking about how the film Eyes Wide Shut seems like Hollywood allegorizing itself yet again, but that may be unnecessarily reductive. Might turn into another blog post.

Ruben's tube.

Fire-based visualization of the sine wave in sound. I'd not heard of a Ruben's tube, which really doesn't mean much given that my background is in literature, but still. Less than 3 minutes long, well worth a look.

Plagiarism versus remixing.

I'm not sure how I feel about this. The 17-year-old author of a white-hot novel in Germany has admitted to lifting large parts of other works and inserting them into hers. She claims it's remixing rather than plagiarism. From the NYT article:

“There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity,” said Ms. Hegemann in a statement released by her publisher after the scandal broke.

Are we looking at a future with the loss of the self?

Scholarship is not only about recognizing and crediting one's sources. More than that, it's about finding relationships with texts, through those texts relationships with other writers and thinkers, and one's place in the dialogue around a topic. So if it's remixing, if we don't have to acknowledge outside sources, and if no one has to acknowledge us, then there are no relationships and no identity within the dialogue. As writers and thinkers, we would be submerged. So are we looking at a future with the loss of the self?

Sometimes I love people.

The material in quotes was taken from one blog comment by another commenter, whose response follows.

--

"Just further evidence of global warming."

Just further evidence of how cuts in education benefit the radical right. They get elected because they keep the population ignorant. If they adequately funded schools, more people would know the difference between climate and weather, between short-term temperature fluctuations and long-term global temperatures. So to remain in power, they keep the public mesmerized by their bumper-sticker slogans and away from the dangers of reading books.

Who are your five peers?

"Who are the people you respect most? And what if you did things with the intention of gaining their approval instead of Cousin Cletus’s?"

Good question for anyone, even those of us who don't have a Cletus in our lives (and aren't looking to gain one). I especially like the idea of loving one's family and friends, but choosing one's peer group.

Making changes that last.

Normally I am not a big fan of Parade articles--largely fluff but for Marilyn Vos Savant's column--but this is worthwhile reading. I came across it through FlyLady. I especially appreciate the Elephant and Rider analogy:

"Perched atop the Elephant, the Rider holds the reins and seems to be in charge. But because he is small, he’ll lose to the Elephant whenever they conflict. You experience this whenever you act against your better judgment and hit your alarm clock’s snooze button, have one drink too many, or procrastinate."

Oy vey. I'm not even Jewish.

Dogs, chimpanzees, and 18th-century novels.

Interesting stuff about canine learning and perception in this article, but one sentence struck me as almost out of a novel of manners:

"Our...cousins are simply too distracted by their aggression and competitiveness to fathom gestures easily."

It got me to thinking about the relationship between increased social status and increased surveillance. One of the characteristics of someone living within a higher social strata is a concomitant sensitivity to gesture, tone, and inflection. Those living within lower social strata are portrayed as coarse, uncomprehending, and oblivious.

Having said all that, I am obligated to note that the ellipsis in the above quote replaces the word ape. I would argue that in the 18th century novel of manners, the parallel is intentional. This quote, however, comes from December 2009. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Obama's Nobel Prize speech.

A striking quote:

"...a few small men with outsized rage..."

Indeed, Obama.

A doggy Christmas surprise.

A doggy Christmas surprise - Karácsonyi kutyás meglepetés

Amazing rugby kick.

Rugby Kick Hits The Jackpot £250,000

A question to live by.

I ask myself, “What would the person I want to be do?”

from here. Tip o' the hat to Kate Dreadhawk and her Facebook news feed.

Der Spiegel interview with Umberto Eco.

Excellent interview. An excerpt:

"I have a hallway for literature that's 70 meters long. I walk through it several times a day, and I feel good when I do. Culture isn't knowing when Napoleon died. Culture means knowing how I can find out in two minutes."

Character.

This may be the best definition of character that I've ever read:

Modern life is rubbish | SMLXL - Engagement Marketing and Communication principles from Alan Moore

For Sennett, “character” is defined as the capacity to construct and keep commitments – not just in marriage, but also in friendships, communities, and workplaces – and the ability to provide continuous, coherent narratives of personal experience.

So what we have when character breaks down is (1) a lack of capacity to construct and keep commitments, and (2) an inability to provide a continuous, coherent narrative of ourselves. In other words, we lose our capacity for autobiography.

I find this fascinating. Much more to think about on this.

herbs on the deck

Overheard at Nats Park

"A baseball pitch is 300 feet by 300 feet , which is like 1000 square feet."

Dogwood in my yard.

Another insane asylum to be explored.

Forest Haven, Maryland. Wow. These Flickr photos from Kasia Swierczek are amazing. I've got to check this place out.

Obama in Turkey: One statement of interest.

Got this from @Thandelike:

Obama tells Turkish uni students that friends give each other honest opinions and that's a benefit of friendship between states

While I totally agree with Obama on this, I don't know how it'll be received. When a country or a group places honor above all, the rule of law disintegrates and the rule of subjectivity replaces it (or in the case of a group, the willingness to abide by external rules). Subjectivity intrudes upon perception and prohibits humility. It permits self-deceit.

If it sounds like I'm saying that states and groups abiding by honor also abide by self-deceit, then you get your choice of stuffed animals from the middle shelf. It was necessary for Obama to say that to Turkey; we'll be lucky if they are only made uncomfortable by it.

Indeed they do go to the basement.

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

New drink to try.

Balia

1 oz Pimms No. 1 Cup (a gin-based spirit)

3/4 ounce citrus vodka

1 ounce pomegranate juice

1/2 ounce orange bitters (optional)

Orange twist

Shake all ingredients with ice. Strain into chilled martini glass. Garnish with an orange twist.

Friday quickie: One from Twitter.

My powers, like my underpants, are Ancient and Terrible.

via @warrenellis, and if you're not following him, it's worth it to join Twitter just to do so. Check him out at www.warrenellis.com and his work at www.freakangels.com.

When chihuahuas attack.

Okay, so it's not the Death Star. It is, however, a video of the most tolerant cat alive.I can't tell if that's a chihuahua puppy. I mean, who can? Like how big are they? A teaspoon or something?

One problem with literary criticism.

Literary criticism today works the same way that medical research would if every researcher arrived with an entirely different approach to medicine. Like one guy's homeopathy, another one is faith healing, another one is ancient Vedic, etc. And they're all talking and using the same tool set, but their ways of evaluating what they see are so different that there's effectively no dialogue. No one can assign legitimacy to anything because any pretension to decision making has been given up.

Keep in mind that I once did lit crit. I guess I didn't come out of the right school, because I couldn't see any point to it. That didn't stop me from picking up multiple degrees in it.

Quote of the day.

Twitter / Home

“Our doubts are traitors & make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt.” ~Shakespeare

awesome shot

Got this from someone around me who was on BrightKite. Amazing shot. I wish I knew where it was; for some reason, I can't find it on BK now because of all the inauguration photos (difference between what I get on my cell and what gets posted to the BK page). Things like this get me thinking about a Call of Cthulhu blog.

The fresh hell of retail.

The first boot on my neck was McCrory's.

I worked at a small-chain department store. I lasted there about four months making minimum wage. Christ, what a shithole.

Vegas to Paris via Prague and Berlin, 2009

Accelerating on the autobahn as the soldiers' boots crunch-crunch against the pavement.

Red by Junkie XL

Links 234 by Rammstein

Im Rhythmus Bleiben by Front 242

Twitter and languages.

How much knowledge of a foreign language is enough to make a fellow Twitterer a good follow? And is a good follow the same thing as a reasonable follow?

In going through emails re: new followers, I came across one person who tweets in Portuguese. (This isn't the first one, either.) I studied several languages as an undergraduate, French was my language in graduate school, and I did some brushing-up of my German not long ago. I follow a few people who tweet in French, Spanish, and German occasionally. Portuguese, however, is not on the radar despite my brief encounter with Spanish in middle school.

Does Twitter make it easier to pick up language and/or meaning from context? IM can be difficult if one is at a stage earlier than the two-year point, I think; message boards, just as with posts in English, contain jargon, slang, typos, and other difficulties. But Twitter might provide the right combination. Since Twitter is just now moving out of the early-adopter stage, it's still got people on it who are smart, clear thinkers and whose tweets reflect that.

Inasmuch as we can standardize language acquisition, I don't think this is one of those individual pace things. I can see how Twitter could become a huge boon to the learning of foreign languages: an instructor could create a group with people tweeting at levels appropriate to students, who could then follow the group members. Real-time interaction improves language acquisition like nothing else, but it requires a certain level of fluency in order for it to work.

So far, my preliminary answer to the question of meaning acquisition--which isn't language acquisition--is yes. If anyone has experience with this, please comment.

IPv6 shift and the locus of personal interests.

Is there anyone left younger than 50, or maybe 40, who isn't online 24/7? Being online has a different sensibility now. It's not that one lives before a computer so much as one is in some way there and participating. For instance, Twitter is an aggregator for me as much as it is a microblogging tool. Each morning I start at page 12 and read forward. That doesn't catch me up by any stretch (it used to when I followed only a couple hundred people), but it gives me a sense of what's being said by the people I follow.

Given this, it doesn't surprise me to read that one of Bob Gourley's predictions is that the IPv6 shift will begin in homes. Being online is practically synonymous with rich content now. The effect of rich content is to make online experiences more personal rather than less. I wouldn't be surprised to hear at some point that as the content gets richer, the time people spend online decreases rather than increases.

Thoughts? Additional context? You know where the 'leave a comment' link is.

New Year's Day musing.

How wonderful can one's world be if it only exists on the interior?

In reading Chris Brogan's awesome blog post about his three goal words for 2009, I started thinking in a preliminary way about privacy. As a rule, I do not reveal much of myself on this blog; that's partly because I'm a GenXer and thus more individualistic, and partly because I'm an only child who issues press releases, not information. The fact that keeping my own counsel has been a historically poor choice hasn't stopped me from continuing to do so. My brain is quick to remind me that Milton would not advise this.

The people whose blogs I admire most are those who have good judgment about what to make public and what to make private. I don't have a single-word concept for this yet; it's not just "openness." Besides, that's so 2008. Perhaps it's time to consult Roger. (Now that would be a fun set of words--three, picked at random from a thesaurus.) Anyway, more on this as it goes.

If you've got three words of your own, or just thoughts about this as a potential process, I'd like to hear about it.

Back to the normal tone.

Thanks to all of you who sent me messages about the cake experience (just about everyone went to Twitter to do so, which was very cool). I do not intend to turn this into a recipe blog, nor will it become a celebration of postmenopausal visceral fat...uhhhh, I mean, a website validating the experience of women of a certain age. Besides, I'm not there yet.

Today is our first anniversary of wedded bliss. I anticipate having a good bit of blogging time starting tomorrow and through next Friday.

finale

The finished cake.

Bûche de Noël 2008

This year's baking adventure was a Bûche de Noël, also known as a Yule log cake. It's an old French tradition. Some elements are constants: meringue mushrooms, knots made from the ends of the rolled and filled cake. I suspect that whether one rolls the cake from the short end or the long end is a matter of cake religion.

@kellysue (Kelly Sue DeConnick) and I decided to make this a joint adventure. We exchanged recipe and tip links this past week, then yesterday morning I made my plan:

Cake: chocolate jelly roll
Filling: chocolate mousse
Icing: vanilla buttercream
Syrup: simple syrup flavored with rum extract
Other: marzipan mushrooms, white chocolate shavings, sparkling sugar, a dusting of cocoa powder

Tip link: Jean Francois Houdre

A Bûche de Noël is traditionally made from a génoise, but my lack of skills with that was amply demonstrated during my husband's birthday. Instead, I used the King Arthur Flour jelly roll recipe:

Jelly Roll

3/4 cup unbleached all-purpose flour
3/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
4 large eggs at room temperature
3/4 cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Mise en place:

Measure all ingredients plus 1/4 cup of cocoa to go along with the dry ingredients.

If the eggs aren't at room temperature, and I recommend that they are, then put them in a bowl of warm, not hot, water for 10 minutes or so.

Lay out a non-terry towel and sprinkle it with confectioners' sugar. It is essential that this be a non-terry towel; the more texture the towel has, the worse the cake will stick to it. A tea towel is a good choice. The amount of confectioners' sugar that you use is up to you; the more sugar, the more the cake will absorb, which has its bad points in terms of structural integrity. This is a cake that needs to hold its shape, so keep that in mind.

Making the jelly roll...

Preheat oven to 400F. Line the bottom of a 10x15-inch jelly roll pan with waxed paper or parchment.

This is essential. You will not get the jelly roll out of the pan if you don't use parchment. It's that simple.

In a small bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder, and salt. Set aside.

I added the cocoa powder to the flour at this point.

In a large bowl, beat the eggs until foamy. Sprinkle in the sugar gradually, beating all the while, and continue beating until the batter is very thick and light lemon in color, 3 to 8 minutes. The batter will have doubled in volume. When the batter is sufficiently aerated, it should fall from the beaters in a thick ribbon and mound on top of the remaining batter in the bowl temporarily before being reabsorbed. Just before you stop beating the batter, add the vanilla.

This is also known as "making the ribbon" and is an essential element of knowing when a given cake batter is ready for the next step. Note that it is not, NOT the case with all types of cake batter. (The less we say about that birthday génoise, the better.) I ended up beating the mixture for the full 8 minutes, likely because my eggs were not at room temperature.

Gently fold in the flour mixture, using a rubber spatula or whisk. Spread the batter evenly into the prepared pan.

This is where I usually screw up through undermixing. (Again with the ill-fated génoise.) On the advice of my husband, who is a much better baker than I, I ended up using a whisk to mix it and stirred far more than I thought was prudent. Shows you what I know about prudence.

Bake the cake for 12 to 14 minutes, until it's golden brown and springy to the touch. Remove the cake from the oven and invert it onto the sugary dish towel. Peel off the paper. Starting with one edge, roll the cake and towel together into a log and cool completely on a wire rack.

My cake took 14 minutes exactly. I ran a sharp knife down the long edges of the cake to loosen it, then inverted it onto the towel. I had a ton of sugar on the towel and rolled it from the long edge, not the short. I left it on the wire rack for 30 minutes. It's at this point that I remembered to take pictures. I am so not a camera person.

Mummy Noël

Unroll the cake, spread it with filling, and re-roll it. Place the roll on its serving plate, seam side down, and decorate.

All this sounds simple, right? Heh. It's Bûche de Noël time, bitches.

@kellysue and I tossed around several ideas about filling flavors. I think she went with hazelnut; I decided to go with chocolate so that there wouldn't be a lot of visual contrast with the cake. I also decided to use a flavored simple syrup to moisten the cake while filling and rolling it. Ahhh, the filling...I used the chocolate mousse recipe from Martha Stewart. Yes, all these recipes follow.

Simple Syrup

1 cup water
1 cup sugar
1 teaspoon extract of choice

Mix water and sugar and in a small saucepan. Heat over medium heat just until sugar dissolves and mixture becomes clear. Let cool for a few minutes, then stir in the extract. Add more extract if needed. Store covered in the refrigerator.

Here's a pic of the pot of rum syrup.

Chocolate Mousse

The chocolate mousse was the second major mistake; the first one was the simple syrup.

I made the mousse first, before the cake (I'm telling you this now and not in its proper order, I know), so that it could cool for the required hour. As it turns out, that wasn't enough, and wasn't ever going to be enough; the mousse was liquid, not gelatinous, and even after I put it back in the mixer and added at least 3.5 more cups of sugar, it wasn't firm enough. But I didn't want a buttercream filling, so I stopped there and decided to just use less. We followed the recipe exactly. It might've benefited from the use of unflavored gelatin as a stabilizer, but we were past that point. The caravan moves on.

After the jelly roll cooled, I unrolled it and brushed it with the simple syrup. I spread a thickish layer of filling over the jelly roll, being careful to get it under the tighter edge, then removed about half of it when it started oozing onto the towel. Then I removed some more. I rolled the cake back up, brushing more syrup on the exterior, and with the assistance of my very kind mother-in-law, rolled it onto a foil-covered serving pan.

I watched as the filling continued to ooze. Martha, I don't know what alternative universe you live in, but the gravity on your planet must be lower. Way lower. Like all the people are made of air bubbles or polychromatic dodecahedrons.

I cut an angled piece off each end and laid them on the log at diagonally opposite ends. (This was about the only thing the filling was good for.) Meanwhile, the roll cracked along one long edge and bled filling. Awesome. Clearly, the syrup was a mistake for this kind of cake; it further weakened it instead of making it more pliable. Nevertheless, I was committed to finishing it, even if it turned out to be more like pudding than cake.

Decorating the Bûche de Noël: "Nymph, in thy orisons all my sins be remembered."

Frosting, like wallpaper and gaudy knit sweater vests, hides a multitude of sins. My vanilla buttercream frosting now had to hide what was rapidly becoming a puddle.

Vanilla Buttercream Frosting

I used the full 5 cups of sugar and almost the full 1/3 cup of milk. I made the frosting a good bit stiffer than I normally would have.

Frosting the cake wasn't difficult, though I layered it thick-thick around the knots and the bleeding edge. I ran the tines of a fork down the length of the icing to create texture, running it around the knots (I feel like I'm typing erotica now). I took the icing spatula and flattened the texture in a few places for a more varied texture. Traditionally, the knots have a swirled pattern on the end; I had to fill those with leftover whipped cream because the filling had drained out. No pattern for you.

Frosted Bûche de Noël

Mushroom Mushroom Badger Badger Badger Badger

Time for the easiest part of this recipe, the Marzipan Mushrooms. I sprinkled a little cocoa powder over them once I placed them around the cake.

Le sigh. This damn thing was finally done.

nearly done

The cake is done; finale pic tomorrow.

filling

rum syrup

mummy noel

Metro ad.

This reads "Fertilizer: Life's main ingredient."

I've decided to believe that the wry tone is intentional. Somehow, that makes my day a little brighter.

note to self

Write about Ratko Mladic and Poe's The Purloined Letter.

Restoring science in government.

Back to Reality - Olivia Judson Blog - NYTimes.com

The distortion and suppression of science is dangerous, and not just because it means that public money gets wasted on programs, like abstinence-only sex “education” schemes, that do not work. It is dangerous because it is an assault on science itself, a method of thought and inquiry on which our modern civilization is based and which has been hugely successful as a way of acquiring knowledge that lets us transform our lives and the world around us. In many respects science has been the dominant force — for good and ill — that has transformed human lives over the past two centuries.

Amen to that. Thank you for bringing the light of reason with you, Mr. Obama. And welcome to the conversation.