 Image by Southworth & Hawes (The Metropolitan Museum of Art) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons |
JQA Lecture XXXVI Delivery. |
Lecture XXXVI, Delivery, has been added to the John Quincy Adams Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory page.
April 28, 2011
JQA Lecture XXXVI Now Available.
April 14, 2011
To e-, or not to e-… That is the Question
 Image by Christoph Michels via Wikimedia Commons. |
Are e-books really here to stay? Not yet… |
There have been many articles coming out of the publishing industry, both for and against the inevitability of e-books replacing print books. Most have focused on the industry impact e-book sales are making to publishers’ bottom lines, which e-book formats are selling best, and what the pricing on e-books should be. What the e-book industry is neglecting, however, is the end user’s experience. They’ve forgotten that, as in the case of the Daewoo Matiz, that customer satisfaction drives sales, not the other way around (that and decent engineering).
I’ve been quietly enjoying my Sony large-format e-reader for over a year now, and the hardware itself seems to be stable. The software interface, or “library” that is maintained on my Mac, not so much. Whenever my e-reader’s memory has been zapped, It it needs to synchronize the whole library all over again, choking up every time. But this is a time inconvenience — I can leave it to synch overnight if need be. At least I haven’t lost any of my books. Or so I thought.
Enter the Borders.com e-book store. A while ago I purchased a few e-books online from Borders.com, and loaded them into my library without a problem. Then my computer crashed in January. Aside from the nightmare of rebuilding my system disk and reinstalling my software, I suddenly realized that some of my e-books were no longer available for reading. What did the missing books all have in common? They were all .pdf files purchased from Borders.com. So, I logged into my account there to download those files again. The deal was that Borders.com was supposed to remember what I had purchased and make sure that those licenses were available to my home computer. But, surprise, the files are now registered to another user — i.e., not my rebuilt system.
I’ve emailed Borders asking for a way to fix this but have received no response. This in itself should be no surprise since the IT department was gutted in the last reorg before they declared Chapter 11 (my source is Publishers Weekly’s Borders Watch column.)
Purchasing e-books from other sources can be fraught with frustration as well. Amazon requires either owning their Kindle or downloading a free kindle-reader app. Similiarly, Barnes and Noble does the same thing with their Nook.
The obvious problem that all these companies are overlooking is that no one wants to pay $100-$300 for three different devices so that they can read the books they want to read. That’s why the open-source .epub format exists — it’s a free format that allows people to read e-books on Sonys, Libres, and all the other third-party e-readers. The problem is you can’t buy an .epub book on Amazon or B&N, and if you purchase on Borders its linked to one machine and can’t be shared or loaned out.
So, ignoring the other reasons for not purchasing e-books (like the lack of tactile materials, dimensionality for pop-up books, and ability to have a favorite author autograph your copy), until a single usable universal format exists, I’m going to have to keep killing trees, or risk losing my library in an EMF event.
February 11, 2011
Web References for the Writing Life
The following is a running compilation of other blogs’ articles focusing on the art, craft, and business of writing that I’ve found helpful. It is primarily for my own reference. As such, article links may change without notice, but I wanted to make it available to anyone else who might find it useful. Wherever possible, I’ve provided links and citations. If you find an incorrect or dropped link, please contact me about the problem, and I’ll fix it. I hope this list of links will be as useful to you as it has been to me.
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January 12, 2011
Life as Art, or Catch a Shooting Star
 Image from Wikipedia. |
Art, or garbage? |
 Image from Taglialatella Galleries. Also, you can paint your own Marilyn at WebExhibits. |
Art, or mass production? |
 Image from ObeyGiant.com. |
Art, or graffiti? |
 Image from Microscopesblog.com. |
Art, or life? |
What is Art? Is it true that art is better defined by what it is not than what it is?
We believe that garbage is not art, but Marcel Duchamp proved that wasn’t true when he displayed a urinal as found art with his piece, Fountain, back in 1917. Andy Warhol went about proving that mass produced items can be art with 100 Soup Cans and Marilyn Diptych in 1962. Shepard Fairey has echoed the same theme in a new way begining in 1989 with his André the GIant Has a Posse street art sticker campaign, and more recently with his Urban Renewal Kit, which makes people part of the performance aspect of the art by allowing individuals to download, print and paste up copies of his André Obey images.
Usually, one can label things like urinals, mass produced paintings, and graphics as “design.” But the fact that Duchamp’s urinal, the Marilyn paintings, and the André graphics are considered art, points to a more subtle idea: the definition of what is art changes over time. Art is actually a moving object, defined by what has come before. Anyone else, at this point, simply displaying a urinal is a plumber, anyone making block prints is a factory worker, anyone posting an André sticker is a defacer of property.
(The exception to this seems to be when a work is a commentary on a previous work of art, but even then, isn’t it in fact further defining the previous work rather than defining itself? Examples of this are Stieglitz’s photo of Duchamp’s fountain, and Fairey’s self referential Giant Star. But this is a digression…)
The same might also be said of “Life.” Is it easier to define life by what is not life, honing in on the true definition (as science has over the ages), the definition adapting and evolving like life itself? In fact, can’t life be defined more by the questions surrounding its negative space than the answers that fill its matter?
Scanning electron microscopy works similarly, by measuring the angles of bounced electrons to discover what is not under the lens, just as photons bounce off objects to reveal what is not being viewed. And isn’t Duchamp doing the same with his urinal, by allowing it to define negative space, just as Warhol defines what isn’t mass produced, just as Fairey defines what isn’t street art, just as life defines what isn’t inanimate?
January 4, 2011
Fastener Fascination
Swingline stapler image from ACCO. |
How did offices manage before the desk stapler? |
 Image from Wikipedia. |
One of the oldest staplers invented in 1879 by McGill. |
 Image from ThinkGeek. |
And one of the newest, an oxymoron called the “staple-free stapler”, that punches a tab through the paper and tucks it through a slot. Strangely enough, this particular model is not available through Staples. |
- In the 18th century, King Louis XV of France used the first stapler as a royal seal for his documents.
- 1866 saw the manufacture and sale of the first modern stapler, mass-produced by Henry R. Heyl.
- The first staple remover was not invented until 1936, which makes one question how documents were unfastened in the intervening 70 years, as brute force would shred the document. Thankfully it wasn’t necessary to retain originals in pristine condition for photocopying until 1959.
- Other office fasteners include the rubber band (created in 1845), paper clips (1899), the binder clip (1910), Scotch tape (1930), the bulldog clip (1944), screw posts, brass split-pin fasteners, loose-leaf binder rings, and the OIC prong fastener (dates unknown).
- Staples actually date back as far as the 6th Century BCE, when large metal dovetail staples were used to fasten together stone construction in ancient Persia. Staples, usually applied with pneumatic or electric guns, are still used in construction for holding things like vapor barriers in place on housing exteriors prior to finishing.
- Not to be outdone (or undone) the surgical stapler was invented in 1908. Surgical staplers weren’t, however, mass-manufactured and widely available until 1964.
- Surgical steel staples are also used in the BME subculture in trans-dermal and staple piercings, both with pins terminated in screw-on balls to retain the piercing (as in eye-brow piercings), and in a skin-pocketing technique referred to as flesh stapling.
Back in high school, I used to help out in the Education Director’s office during lunch. One student who hung out during lunch with me was so fascinated by the office stapler that she intentionally drove a staple into her finger. (It was 1983, so staples in fingers were unusual, but much tamer than what some of the other kids were doing.)
On a somewhat related note, I also have a friend whose pain threshold is so high that he used to drive Swingline staples, five at a time, into his forearm and pluck them off like burrs. I still wonder that he never contracted tetanus.
December 28, 2010
Automats
Image from the Automat.net. |
The wonder of impersonal food service. |
- Automats almost experienced a brief revival in NYC, where Bamn!, located on 8th Street between 1st and 2nd Avenues offered a modern American comfort food menu. They opened in 2006 and sadly closed in 2009.
- The interiors of automat restaurants were generally in the Art Deco style.
- The first automat restaurant was opened in 1902 by Horn & Hardart, and remained popular until the 1950’s. See the Smithsonian’s online article for more details.
- The last original automat closed in NYC in 1991.
- By all accounts, the automat was done in by fast food restaurants.
I have no personal memories of automats, as the last one in the Boston area went defunct in my childhood. I imagine the experience was similar to picking from a Woolworth’s lunch menu, being served by vending machines, and eating in the atmosphere of a Johnny Rocket’s. Does anyone remember eating at an automat?
December 21, 2010
Philosophical Thoughts
Image from the Sydney Morning Herald. |
This is your brain on blogs.
Any questions? |
From Wikipedia (for whatever that’s worth):
- Sentience: the ability of any entity to have subjective perceptual experiences.
- Consciousness: variously defined as subjective experience, awareness, the ability to experience feeling, wakefulness, the understanding of the concept self, or the executive control system of the mind.
- Creativity: defined by the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary as “the ability to create”, which, according to the threshold hypothesis, has a correlation to intelligence. (Note that experiments to prove this hypothesis has ended in mixed results.) Wikipedia actually requires, by their definition, that something of value be produced! I would make a strong argument that as long as something is being produced, wether of value or not, creativity is occurring. My initial reasoning is that the value of a created valuable is biased by wether the observer considers it to have value, and that is actually a measure of economics, not of philosophy or psychology.
- Intelligence: defined in Wikipedia as “…an umbrella term describing a property of the mind including related abilities, such as the capacities for abstract thought, understanding, communication, reasoning, learning, learning from past experiences, planning, and problem solving.” Of course this doesn’t really get a grip around the topic, as there are at least seven theories of intelligence listed, and two additional scientific definitions, including one published in Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns, a 1996 report published by an APA task force, that itself references at least 5 theories. So, in toto, there’s been an awful lot of intelligence expended in defining what exactly intelligence is.
- Intentionality: the Wikipedia article defines this in a roundabout way to identify wether an act is intentional or not — essentially circular logic as far as definitions go. Further along, the article references Franz Brentano’s definition, stating that intentionality is a characteristic of “acts of consciousness”, which once again avoids providing a proper definition since acts of consciousness have many characteristics besides intentionality, although this definition does begin to hone in on it.
- Sapience: the ability to act with judgement. The Wikipedia article goes on to state that the terms sentience, self-awareness, and consciousness are used interchangeably with sapience in Sci-Fi. Hence the initial thrust of this research into what makes us human.
- Artificial Intelligence: “the study and design of intelligent agents”, or a machine that observes its environment, acquires knowledge from those observations, acts to ensure its success, and learns from those acts. This is a little different from Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics. For a little chuckle, check out Asimov’s 30 Laws of Robotics. (I especially like #11.)
- Self-Awareness: In a bit of art imitating life imitating art, ad infinitum, ad imitatum, the self-referential definition for self-awareness appears to be awareness of oneself. As an individual.
December 14, 2010
Soups On! And a Side of Fries…
 Image from D & S Vending. |
The RMI 8050. |
Back when I was in high school, attending the High School Studies Program on Saturdays at MIT, there were a series of ancient vending machines, including this one (or one similar enough to it that it may as well have been this one), in the basement of Building 7 near the elevator. As a kid who essentially ate school lunches, I thought that the machine was alright. It dispensed chicken soup that was occasionally a little darker than normal, but on a cold winter day, salty soup was good.
I guess the tip off that the machine wasn’t well maintained was when I went to purchase a cup of tea that tasted like it had coffee in it. And again when my hot chocolate had a couple of noodles floating in it that I had convinced myself were actually malformed marshmallows extruded from some sort of tube that needed cleaning inside the device — after all, if MIT could make extruded french fries in their cafeteria, why not extruded marshmallows for the hot chocolate?
Extruded french fries, I hear you ask? Well, that’s another story. At the time — and now I’m dating myself — in 1984 the MIT cafeteria used to sell extruded french fries. My best friend Max and I would go to the corner vendor for a cup of chili with cheese and onions, and then go into the student center cafeteria for the french fries. This part of the experience was kind of a ritual. The cook would place a wire deep fry basket under the receptacle of a big machine attached to a water pipe. Occasionally, the cook emptied a bag of powder — ostensibly potato flour of some sort but it might also have been plaster dust — into a hopper at the top of the machine. He pressed a button on the front, which was inordinately large despite being the only button on the machine. After a compressor kicked on, french fries extruded into the fry basket. Within seconds, the basket was removed from the machine and plunged into oil the color of a raven’s wing at midnight. If the cook wasn’t fast enough, the potato sludge would congeal back into a single mass and have to be discarded.
Those are my memories of the food machines at MIT. Does anyone have other stories of vending machines they’d like to share?
December 10, 2010
The Eyes Have It
 Image from www.makezine.com. |
Big Brother Is Watching |
Wired Science online announced the results of a Newcastle University psychology study today where posters asking restaurant customers to pick up after themselves were displayed with two different designs. The message was the same on both posters, but one had a picture of flowers while the other had a staring eye. The result? People were twice as likely to clean up their messes when the staring eye was used.
The article claims that the study was testing the theory of “nudge psychology”, which posits that people behave “better” (whatever that means) when the “better” option is pointed out to them. I think in this case the experimental assumptions might be flawed. Isn’t it possible that, in a society where we have been bombarded all our lives with the understanding that someone is always watching us (God, the government, whoever’s on the other side of my web camera, the camera on the traffic light on the corner), being stared at, even subliminally by the image of an eye, might do something to keep us reflexively honest?
The Antikythera Mechanism – a Mechanical Computer
 Image from Nikon Metrology. |
The Antikythera Mechanism, which may look familiar to some, was created around 80 BC, and found in a shipwreck in Greece in 1900. |
 Image from Nikon Metrology. |
This photo shows an X-Ray image of the device. |
These images are from the Nikon Metrology website. It has been theorized that the device was used for predicting eclipses.
A video of a virtual reconstruction of the device by Wright and Vicentini is on YouTube.
According to a story by Lester Haines from the online tech news site The Register, a working version of the mechanism has been duplicated in Legos by an engineer from Apple computer named Andrew Carol. Here is the video of the working model.
Other interesting links: