Logomacy
Between logomachy and logomancy . . .

Wild and Crazy WTF « Literal-Minded

On the very first page, though, I found this strange passage:

…the mouth speaking the line, the body delivering the gesture, while the mind looks back, observing, analyzing, judging, worrying, and then deciding when and what to say next.

How could a sentence that sounds so wrong have survived numerous rounds of revision and editing to end up in the final product?

Yesterday I got a spam promising “Your dick will be like Jesus when you take this medicine!”

I deleted it without reading the rest, but now I kind of wish I had checked to see whether it was offering to raise it from the dead or if Jesus somehow enjoys a reputation for being well-endowed of which I wasn’t aware.

1. The study game: How to play and win with “Statement-PIE”, by Laia Hanau
The book that taught me how to study and take useful notes. I so wish I ran into it before my Junior year of college.

2. The Selfish Gene – Richard Dawkins
This shook up my thinking about more than just evolution, but how the world operates, and the deep mathematical foundations of growth, competition, and distributed problem-solving.

3. How to Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method – George Polya
Another book I wish I had read earlier in my academic career

4. How to Win Friends & Influence People – Dale Carnegie
Not at all what you might think. I read it because a professional magician recommended it in the strongest possible terms as an aid to performance, and darned if he wasn’t right. If I had to boil it down I’d say it makes the case for sincere empathy with the points of view of everyone you interact with, understanding your role as a bit-player in the story of their lives and getting what you want only through helping them get what they want (what ethicists might call treating people as ends and not means).

5. A Student’s Introduction to English Grammar – Huddleston & Pullum
In which I learned that nearly everything I’d been taught in English class about grammar was either wrong, or worse, nonsense.

6. Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, Freshly Updated – Judith Martin
In which I learned the central importance of politeness and etiquette in civilization. The book is highly entertaining, but fairly discursive since large portions consist of letters and answers, for a more concise statement of the central thesis, see her essay The World’s Oldest Virtue.

7. Historian As Detective – Robin Winks
The book which changed my college career and convinced me I wanted to be a historian.

8. The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space – Gerard K O’Neill
The book which rescued me from wanting to be a historian, and probably prevented me from having a miserable existence as a History grad student at UC Berkeley, where I had been accepted into the PhD program, but where there was no funding available for the first year.

9. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain – Antonio Damasio
The book which finally overthrew emotionless ratiocination as the top of my personal totem-pole of valuable mental qualities. It had been wobbling for a while. Hume certainly pushed it close to the edge, and Nietzche set it teetering, but it took Damasio’s to fully demonstrate through case studies how man cannot live by reason alone, and the model of reason being the core self while the visceral emotions and passions are intruding influences is empirically false. (Don’t worry Reason, I still love you, but you have to play nice with the other parts that go into making up my self, k?)

10. Free to Choose: A Personal Statement – Milton and Rose Friedman
The book that opened my eyes to the moral beauty of Capitalism. Given my origins and predilections, this was as big a brain-quake in its own way as The Selfish Gene.

11. The Substance of Style – Virginia Postrel
This helped me get over my reverse-snobbery in regard to style and design, as well as demolishing the place that Maslow’s hierarchy of needs occupied in my mental landscape.

TNR gets taken down a peg by Ann Althouse over the snobbery and sexism that it displays in its anti-Kindle editorial

Althouse: I get pissed off at TNR.

The breathless, Bezos-loving man from Newsweek says that he is reading Boswell’s Life of Johnson on his iPhone. No, he isn’t. All reading is not the same. It takes more than the apparition of words to constitute a book and its inner forms.

No, you’re not a snob. Oh, no, no, no.

There is a kernel of a point in TNR’s rant: there are sensual enjoyments in reading physical books that are not reproduced when you read electronic versions. But to say that reading Life of Johnson on an iPhone isn’t really reading Life of Johnson is the stupidest thing I’ve read all month, possibly all year. And, really, unless you’re the type of person who will sit down and spend hours leafing through a book written in a script you can’t even decipher, I’d suggest that even if you believe strongly in the weaker version of the claim, you’re probably overrating the sensual enjoyment of handling books just because up until now it’s always occurred in conjunction with the extremely pleasurable experience of reading. I’d bet that there are hardly any people, among the vast numbers who find reading a chore, who nonetheless really enjoy handling a book. I’d further bet that if the form-factor of the Kindle lasted long enough that people grew up reading on it and associating the very act of reading with handling it (admittedly doubtful) in the future we could look forward to paeans praising the sensual enjoyments of the lightness of the tablet and the satisfying clicking of the thumb-button.As to TNR’s sexism (which occurs later on in the editorial), I don’t really have anything to add to what Althouse says, except to say she certainly seems to have a point.

The origins of w00t:

The Lexicographer’s Rules, the weblog of Grant Barrett

The most likely explanation, as is usually the case, is far simpler. Woot is, with some caveats, probably derived from and most likely popularized by the dance catch phrase of 1993, “whoot, there it is!” In clubs and on dance floors across the country, in half-time shows and in baseball stadiums, “whoot, there it is” and plain old “woot!” were shouted long and loud by millions. It was used by hype men at hip-hop shows, dancers and cheerleaders at ball games, DJs at discos, and probably by ball-callers at bingos.

Attack Ad

If this doesn’t persuade you, nothing will

Ever since I decided, some time ago, that Wikipedia had serious problems in accountability and transparency in their meta-editing process, I’ve derived a certain sour satisfaction from articles like this:

Secret mailing list rocks Wikipedia | The Register
Controversy has erupted among the encyclopedia’s core contributors, after a rogue editor revealed that the site’s top administrators are using a secret insider mailing list to crackdown on perceived threats to their power.

Many suspected that such a list was in use, as the Wikipedia “ruling clique” grew increasingly concerned with banning editors for the most petty of reasons. But now that the list’s existence is confirmed, the rank and file are on the verge of revolt.

But this is a clear case of confirmation bias. I’m looking for information that confirms my low opinion of Wikipedia admins, while mostly ignoring the plentiful articles on how Wikipedia is the greatest thing since sliced bread and will change the world (in fact, at the moment every wikipedia page has a banner add that reads “You can help Wikipedia change the world!”).

If I were a journalist, a student, or really anyone whose job required taking notes on what people say, I would be all over this.  As it is I’m kind of wishing my job actually did require it, just so I could play with it.

Livescribe :: Smartpen

The Livescribe smartpen revolutionizes the act of writing by recording and linking audio to what you put on paper. Tap on words or drawings in your notes, and the smartpen replays recorded audio from the time you were writing. Transfer notes to your PC to backup, replay, and share them online.

The pen contains a computer and recorder that can record up to a hundred hours of audio at a time, and a little optical sensor that tracks the position of the pen against the tiny dots printed on special paper that you take notes on (according to at least one account I’ve read you can print your own paper with a laser printer, as well as buying it fairly cheap from the manufacturer).  It uses those dots to synch the audio recording against what you were writing at the time, so that clicking on the notes lets it replay the audio from around that time.  It’s no help if your note-taking (like mine in many of my college classes) consisted of just staring off into space or drawing random doodles, though I guess you’d at least still be able to listen to the lecture again, but if you’re at least semi-diligent about putting something as a mnemonic trigger on the page, this is so brilliant I can’t stand it.

By the way, the book that finally taught me how to take useful class notes was The Study Game: How To Play and Win with Statement-PIE.  Long out of print, it’s still remembered fondly (at least by me and five reviewers on Amazons) for its simple, concise, and practical approach to learning how to listen actively in order to organize your notes into paragraphs consisting of Statement, Proof, Information, Examples.  Most of the time, what a student needs is not a complete transcription of what the teacher said (the production of which generally takes up so much attention that there’s little left over to actually process what’s being said), but a summary of the key information.  Unfortunately, at least some of that time you really do need an accurate transcription, particularly of complex ideas that are new to you and so are hard to summarize.  That’s where being able to replay just that portion of the lecture with LiveScribe would be incredibly useful.  Yes, good teachers will do more than just rattle it off, and can provide a number of ways to convey and reinforce the crucial points, including including it in class handouts, writing it on the board…but honestly, even at (or is it especially at) the college level, good teachers are few and far between, and even they are not generally bringing their A game to teaching Intro Calc at eight in the morning.