Guardian.UK: Carol Ann Duffy is ‘wrong’ about poetry, says Geoffrey Hill.
“What Professor Duffy desires to do I believe – and if so it is a most laudable ambition – is to humanise the linguistic semantic detritus of our particular phase of oligarchical consumerism. And for the common good she is willing to have quoted by the Guardian interviewer several lines from a poem by herself that could easily be mistaken for a first effort by one of the young people she wishes to encourage.” Ouch. One has to admire an eloquent takedown.
Lists of Note: Who killed JFK?
Another fascinating slice of history, from a great blog.
NY Times: Istanbul Yields a Treasure Trove in Ancient Bathonea.
Exciting find, with a very sad side-note: “No shipwrecks have been found at Bathonea; nor are they likely to be anytime soon, said Mr. Oniz, the underwater archaeologist. The lake is so polluted by industrial runoff that diving in it is dangerous, he said. A new water-treatment facility may make exploration possible within a few years.”
Boston Review: Citizen Philosophers
“Teaching philosophy to students who can hardly read and write [snip] is sad foolishness.” Someone needs to introduce him to the story of Jaime Escalante.
Guardian.UK: The first sexual revolution - lust and liberty in the 18th century.
“Everywhere in the west, sex outside marriage was illegal, and the church, the state and ordinary people devoted huge efforts to hunting it down and punishing it. This was a central feature of Christian society, one that had grown steadily in importance since late antiquity. So how and when did our culture change so strikingly?” Titillating read.
Discover: How the Amhara breathe differently.
“But the capital of Ethiopia, Addis Ababa, is nearly 8,000 feet above sea level!” *ahem* So are we, in Santa Fe (7,500 feet). Big deal.
WaPo: Botanists agree to loosen Latin’s grip.
Boo, hiss. I still call most plants and animals by their Latin names - they’re more rhythmic. And, Quae nocent, saepe docent. Then again, I took eight years of Latin.
CarlZimmer.com: King of the Cosmos.
Profile of Neil deGrasse Tyson. An enjoyable romp.
Globe and Mail: All hands on deck - How can we make more heroes?
“There’s an individual moral compass [that] orients human beings to the right things ...”
Big Think: Innumeracy (In a Data-Driven Age).
“Innumeracy, in a data-driven age, means ceding control and understanding of an substantial chunk of yourself – your online reputation, the scores that colleges and employers use to screen out undesirable candidates – to others.” Hmmm. I suspect, as with other data, we’re simply counting on having calculators and other devices around (smartphones). The likelihood of anyone needing to calculate a hypotenuse sans smartphone or other device is rather small nowadays. Yet using our brains for mathematical calculations is the equivalent to the benefits of taking a long vigorous walk, isn’t it? Good for the old synapses?
Hoover Institution: The Death of Honesty.
In talking with teachers, I’ve heard that policing cheating is nigh impossible with the internet available as a resource. Some kids do it and never give a thought to the right/wrong morality, they think everything is free; others do it tentatively, while some go whole-hog and just don’t care. A perceptive teacher has to make judgments from the childrens’ character ... working within the internet culture of ‘cheating’ (some call it ‘repurposing’) to teach larger lessons.
Anyone else care to chime in?
Big Think: This is Your Brain on Shakespeare.
“You can often tell what someone is going to say before they finish their sentence. [snip] This represents a gradual deadening of the brain.” Powerpoint users, take particular note.
Salon: Who’s afraid of “The Tempest”?
Hopefully, AZ is not our future in America.
New Scientist: Red wine researcher accused of fraud.
“Much of his work has been on resveratrol, a compound found in red wine, but in 2008 he published results showing that white wine also improves heart health in rats.” This accusation does not invalidate all benefits of red wine, since there have been other studies, but it certainly puts the kibosh on bathing your liver in red & white wine and beer for purported health effects.
New Scientist: Striving for, and defending, originality.
Always looking for a new angle.
The Economist: Lexical accuracy - The failure of American political speech.
“Words are failing us.” Words aren’t. Education is. More than that, one has to care about at least trying to be accurate. Most don’t give a flying flip.
Chronicle of Higher Ed: Why Did 17 Million Students Go to College?
Statistics can lie, of course. I’ve run across many college graduates who couldn’t spell or add figures. Do the diminutive jobs mean there is too much education, or might it also mean that education is failing? There are a lot of larger questions that plain numbers are not going to answer.
The right wing of American politics has hated public schools for eons, attacked them and handicapped them gleefully since Reagan, and this broader attack on intelligence seems a recent ante-up in their game. As we have “Just In Time” manufacturing, it seems we should only have “Just Enough” intelligence.
When was excess intelligence, unused capacity, ever a bad thing for a human being? You can’t predict the future. A person can work in many different industries, at many different levels in a lifetime. Time and again I’ve used pieces and parts of what I’ve learned, and I’ve been damned grateful for all of it.
DIS: In Response to Cat Kron’s One Side of the Coin: An Extended View of Curating.
Good tips that can be cross-applied to curation in blogging.
The Atlantic: Don’t Let the Economy Pick Your Major For You.
For your family and friends who are still in school.
NPR: Do Robots Have Ethics?
“Who is responsible if an autonomous military robot kills a group of civilians? The manufacturer, the commander, the operator, or the robot itself?” Where do we place responsibility when a gun kills someone - or a car careens out of control and causes death - or an airplane falls out of the sky? More context is needed.
Ed. note: What a mangled bit of grammar that was. Fixed. Lack of coffee.
WaPo: New study shows architecture, arts degrees yield highest unemployment.
“Among recent college graduates, those with the highest rates of unemployment had undergraduate degrees in architecture (13.9 percent), the arts (11.1 percent) and the humanities (9.4 percent), according to the study.” Ouch. One expects this in a down economy.
Two, tangentially linked.
One from Vanity Fair, argues that our culture hasn’t changed much since in the last 20 years. The second, from Discover Magazine, catalogs periods of little cultural change and abrupt cultural change. A mashup worthy of comparison and contrast. Sure to trigger some interesting contemplations.
Naked Capitalism: How to Not Lose Friends and Alienate People When Learning Economics.
Harper’s: The accidental universe - Science’s crisis of faith.
“Dramatic developments in cosmological findings and thought have led some of the world’s premier physicists to propose that our universe is only one of an enormous number of universes with wildly varying properties, and that some of the most basic features of our particular universe are indeed mere accidents—a random throw of the cosmic dice. In which case, there is no hope of ever explaining our universe’s features in terms of fundamental causes and principles.” Perhaps I’m an idiotic romantic, but I prefer the concept of an eternal mystery. So hate me, then.
Discover Mag: The scale of Saturn.
I love this article. Great way to start a Monday - feeling small and insignificant. Keeps things in perspective.
