Archive for June, 2010
I’m going to Disney World
Starting tonight, I’ll be in Disney World for a week. My father-in-law is turning 60 and he’s taking the whole family (not least his three-year-old grandson) to Florida. I’m very much looking forward to it, especially seeing my wife’s great family.
That said I have to admit that Disney World would not be my first choice of vacation destination. The reason, I tell myself, is that I don’t care for artificial experiences. At Disney World, “cast members” are never allowed to frown, for example. The smell of fresh-baked cookies is pumped into the air around “Main Street.” In fact, the very idea of a long lost American main street is fake.
But then I think, isn’t immersing ourselves in fantasy exactly what we do when we go to the theatre or read a book? Disney World is just intensely more immersive, that’s all. Why not just enjoy the ride? That’s true, and that’s what I intend to do. And I’ll make sure to report back here on what I learn.
Let me briefly tackle another objection to Disney World. One can conceive of two types of travel–for escapism and for enlightenment. Two me, these don’t have to be mutually exclusive. They are probably on a spectrum. An all-inclusive beach resort is way to the escapist end, but you can learn something if you try, and while tooling around souks in Turkey may be enlightening, there’s certainly an element of escapism or it wouldn’t be a vacation. So while I don’t think there’s anything wrong with escapism (quite the opposite) I’m thinking I’ll be able to learn a lot about America at this most escapist of destinations.
Is the internet making us stupid?
Over at my humble podcast, I interview “Is Google Making Us Stupid” author Nick Carr about his new book, The Shallows, and what the internet is doing to our brains. Nothing good, he argues.
Carr’s publicist deserves a gold medal because the NYT today is running a series of articles on the “trend” that Americans are coming to the conclusion that gadgets and always-on connectivity is turning their brains to mush (one, two, and three). What’s more, on its Bits blog, the NYT is asking for volunteers to unplug from the internet and then report on their experience. And Carr had op-eds in the WSJ on Saturday and the WaPo yesterday.
So this is all to say, listen to my podcast. But also to ask, do you feel more distracted, unfocused and forgetful since the rise of the internet? For some of us “before the internet” is a meaningless distinction. Do you find it hard to concentrate on deep reading? Do you read as much as you used to?
Why do so many artists have lazy eyes?
From Scientific American, another disability turned on its head:
By examining photographs of artists, Livingstone and her fellow researchers found that Andrew Wyeth, Edward Hopper, Marc Chagall, Jasper Johns, Frank Lloyd Wright, Robert Rauschenberg, Alexander Calder and others all had misaligned eyes. (And by studying the self-portraits and etchings of Rembrandt, she found he also seems to have had a strong lazy eye.) Why this pattern? She proposed that people who have less detailed three-dimensional vision of the world might have an easier time translating what they see onto the two-dimensional page—whether it was for a painting of a dinner scene, sketch for a mobile or plan for a building.
Steve Horwitz hits some dingers
I usually find sports metaphors for non-sporting activities to be strained at best, trite at the mean, and misleading at the worst. Especially when discussing trade and economics, which are non-zero sum games, sports metaphors (where one team inevitably wins and one loses) are lacking.
But Steve Horwitz hits some dingers over at Coordination Problem with some observations about the lessons from last night’s terrible call that cost Armando Galarraga a perfect game (what would have been the third of the season) and what they can tell us about public relations and the rule of law. Steve’s a Michigander, so this has got to be especially painful for him since no Tiger has ever pitched a perfect game.
Steve writes:
The reaction by almost everyone after the game was really classy. The Tigers bitched a bit, but didn’t go off the rails. The umpire admitted he just flat out blew the call. No excuses, just “I screwed up and cost the kid a perfect game.” He also apologized personally to Galarraga. This is an outstanding lesson in how to handle a huge public mistake: don’t try to cover your tracks, just admit you screwed up and apologize to those affected. As frustrated as I am by the mistake, I totally admire Joyce for the way he handled it, and Galarraga too, who gracefully accepted the apology.
A great lesson for PR and for life generally. Unfortunately, firms and individuals almost always do the opposite: run, dissemble, cast aspersions, cast blame, and hide. That’s why “getting out in front of it” is so important; it’s the right thing to do and it looks best in the long run. Steve continues:
If I were Bud Selig, the commissioner, here’s what I would do to try to serve some rough justice. He can’t overturn an umpire’s call on the field, as that sets an awful precedent. But what he could do, I believe, is have the official scorer for the game change the play from a hit to an error. That would still deny Galarraga the perfect game but at least give him a nearly-as-cool no-hitter, and it would do so without overriding the ump’s judgment call. Just because the batter was ruled safe, doesn’t automatically mean it was a hit!
If I were Bud Selig, I’d drown myself in a bucket of my own spittle for two decades of unrelenting debasement of our national game, but that’s neither here nor there. Steve’s absolutely right on this: the rule of law and precedent are more important than correcting a one-time injustice. You can’t have baseball commissioners overriding calls on the field willy-nilly; baseball is a sport of rules and not of men (unlike some other sports). Steve’s remedy seems like the best available one.
Clay Shirky’s media diet longview
Clay Shirky describes his media diet to the Atlantic. The whole thing’s a good read (and at the end there are links to media habits of other interesting people), but here’s the part that caught my eye:
In general, there’s no real breaking news that matters to me. I don’t have any alerts or notifications on any piece of software I use. My phone is on silent ring, nothing alerts me when I get a Tweet and my e-mail doesn’t tell me when messages arrive.
I also don’t read any of the big tech aggregators. Knowing that, for instance, Google just bought Blogger, isn’t that useful for me to hear today rather than tomorrow. Some of Michael Arrington’s stuff I think is an example of the worst kind of breaking news. The kind of Apple Insider stuff where they publish something every day to satisfy the news cycle. It’s gossip coverage like following movie stars and it distracts me from thinking longer form thoughts. …
For decades, I religiously read the op-ed pages of the New York Times but recently I’ve stopped because every op-ed is so closely tied to a newspeg that the thinking never gets very far from current events. So I’ve recently gotten away from the daily news cycle. I’ve got a weekly clock cycle and a monthly clock cycle. Time is a precious commodity. Increasingly, I’m trying to maximize it.
Several things strike me about this. First, I’m happy to find a kindred soul who doesn’t read news. People are surprised when I tell them that I don’t read newspapers and simply get my “news” from the ether. It’s a great way to make conversation: “So what happened with some baseball umpire yesterday?” Related to this is what I perceive as the increasing futility of the op-ed, or even blogging about current events, especially the latest policy turn in the tech or telecom sectors that I follow. It’s the same script, over and over, same arguments, slightly different sets of facts.
Finally, it seems like Shirky is accepting Nicholas Carr’s argument that the internet is distracting us and changing the way we think to the point where we can’t think deep thoughts any longer. At the same time, he’s offering a solution: turn it off. You don’t have to check it every five minutes. Unfortunately for most people, that’s easier said that done and requires lots of discipline. But, being aware of the issue is the first step toward addressing it.
FYI: Nick Carr will be the guest on my interview podcast on Monday and Clay Shirky will be the guest the following Monday (6/14). You can subscribe on iTunes.
It takes two to irony
Aaron has a post on hipsters that cites Dan’s essay on irony, the point of which is that the line between sincerity and irony has disappeared. Dan, probably ironically, said, “I no longer distinguish between that which I do sincerely and that which I do ironically.” This got me to thinking, and I’d like to propose a litmus test for irony.
Irony requires an audience. If you listen to Taylor Swift when you’re by yourself, with no one watching you, you’re not doing it ironically. You’re doing it sincerely. This test does not work on the reverse case. If you’re dressed like this in front of your friends, you might be doing it sincerely. We can’t tell.
I think this is what bothers Aaron about hipsters, that everything becomes performance art. While most irony is about humor, the irony of hipsters is all about signaling. When Dan says we don’t know if we’re doing something ironically, I think he’s hinting at how hipsters, especially in their extreme incarnations, seem to have forgotten what it is they are signaling. It’s no longer a smart quip that signals their awareness of the absurdity of modern culture, it’s just signaling about signaling.
Whatever the case, you can’t signal to yourself, and that’s the bright line for irony.
Tea Parties and future of politics
Don’t miss this AEI panel next Wednesday, June 9 at 2:00 about what the Tea Parties mean for the future of politics with Ross Douthat, Kristen Soltis, and Dave Weigel. Fun fact: Cheryl Miller, the organizer of this event, says
According to my highly unscientific count, they have the youngest average age (28!) of any AEI panel. If we include the moderator, Jonah Goldberg, we’re still at a record-making 31.
Why is self-experimentation effective?
Seth Roberts has a new paper trying to explain the “unreasonable effectiveness” of his self-experimentations efforts. To me it’s more evidence of the rise of the amateur.
The puzzle began in graduate school, where I studied experimental psychology. To learn how to do experiments, I tried to do as many as possible. At the time I had acne. It was easy to measure (count pimples each morning) so I decided to do experiments about it. My dermatologist had prescribed tetracycline, an antibiotic. A few months of self-experimentation showed that tetracycline did not work, which surprised my dermatologist. Later conventional research found that tetracycline often fails. My dermatologist had years of experience. Yet a little self-experimentation by a non-expert found something important that he and other dermatologists did not know.
Unconstrained by groupthink, the need to signal status, or professional regulations, non-expertscan more easily think outside the box.
Data-mining the novel
Interesting report at the Chronicle about how Google Books is beginning to allow literature scholars to use data-mining techniques on novels:
New insights can be gleaned by shining a spotlight into the “cellars of culture” beneath the small portion of works that are typically studied, [Franco Moretti, a Stanford professor of English and comparative literature] believes. He has pointed out that the 19-century British heyday of Dickens and Austen, for example, saw the publication of perhaps 20,000 or 30,000 novels—the huge majority of which are never studied. The problem with this “great unread” is that no human can sift through it all. “It just puts out of work most of the tools that we have developed in, what, 150 years of literary theory and criticism,” Mr. Moretti says. “We have to replace them with something else.” Something else, to him, means methods from linguistics and statistical analysis. His Stanford team takes the Hardys and the Austens, the Thackerays and the Trollopes, and tosses their masterpieces into a database that contains hundreds of lesser novels. Then they cast giant digital nets into that megapot of words, trawling around like intelligence agents hunting for patterns in the chatter of terrorists.
Unsurprisingly, this has sparked a methodological debate in the field:
Novels are deeply specific, [Katie Trumpener, a professor of comparative literature and English at Yale University] argues, and the field has traditionally valued brilliant interpreters who create complex arguments about how that specificity works. When you treat novels as statistics, she says, the results can be misleading, because the reality of what you might include as a novel or what constitutes a genre is more slippery than a crude numerical picture can portray.
Worth a read.
Hitch-22 out tomorrow
Christopher Hitchens’ long-awaited memoir Hitch-22 comes out tomorrow. (Fortunately, the publisher, Twelve, has seen fit to release it same-day on Kindle.) Here’s a partial list (below the fold) of what the reviewers are saying about it. I have it on pre-order; I only wish it had come out in time for the long Memorial Day reading weekend.
Japan is building a moon base
Japan is building a moon base. Actually, it’s building robots that will build a moon base.
An ambitious $2.2 billion project in the works at JAXA, the Japanese space agency, plans to put humanoid robots on the moon by 2015, and now official backing from the Prime Minister’s office says the Japanese could have an unmanned lunar base up and running by 2020. Key to all of this, of course, is the robots themselves, and who better than the Japanese to dream up and realize the kind of intelligent, self-repairing, multitasking bots that will be needed to fulfill such a mission. As currently envisioned, the robots that will land on the lunar surface in 2015 will be 660-pound behemoths equipped with rolling tank-like treads, solar panels, seismographs, high-def cameras and a smattering of scientific instruments. They’ll also have human-like arms for collecting rock samples that will be returned to Earth via rocket. The robots will be controlled from Earth, but they’ll also be imbued with their own kind of machine intelligence, making decisions on their own and operating with a high degree of autonomy.
When the robots control the moon, what’s to keep them from weaponizing it and using it to destroy Earth?
What are you waiting for? Why haven’t you purchased robot insurance yet?
