Ignorance is Bliss

Posted on June 22, 2007 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

Last night our dulah said “The more civilized you are, the harder it is to give birth.” We we talking about Lamaze, breathing strategies, and how to remain focused during labor. The key seems to be to shut your consciousness off. Let all of our civilized cogito fade away. Trick your consciousness to turn off. Let your body do its job.

The more I learn about delivery, the more I appreciate SJ’s Mind Wide Open. Our conscious mind is such a small part of our total intelligence–our body is thinking in ways that our consciousness can’t imagine.

Posted in stevenjohnson, theory, theory-in-practice | Comments Off on Ignorance is Bliss

Another Quick One

Posted on June 22, 2007 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

I don’t think we can be friends if you don’t like this one:


Powerthirst Sports Drink Spoof – Watch more free videos

Oh, one more thing: the Celtics are in such a dismal place that Kevin Garnett, who hasn’t sniffed the playoffs in recent memory, is refusing what (in theory) would be a pretty good trade. Paul Pierce would be the talented wingman that Garnett’s never really had in Minnesota. Those two players would make the Celtics a legitimate contender in the East. Oh well. I still think we’ll end up trading our #5 pick to the Blazers for Randolf (that way Conley can be united with Oden and the Celtics get another low post player to match up with Jefferson).

Posted in celtics, cool, funny, remix, sports | Comments Off on Another Quick One

Way back machine

Posted on June 21, 2007 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

I spent most of my blogging brain cells responding to Casey’s question on yesterday’s post, so here’s a breather:

This ranks high in the hall of awesomeness. “Give him ze uppercut!”

Posted in cool, remix, videogames | Comments Off on Way back machine

There goes Obi-Wan

Posted on June 20, 2007 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

I read a kind of farewell post over at Lawrence Lessig’s blog yesterday with a heavy heart. Lessig announced that he will be changing the focus of his research and activism, moving away from intellectual property and net neutrality and toward what he terms political corruption: the influence of money and greed on political process. No doubt one reason he’s come to this decision is the massive amounts of corruption plaguing ip debates. And while I am happy to have someone as brilliant as Lessig on the case, I’m also feeling as if the digital collective has lost its most powerful ally: a figurehead that other figureheads will listen to. While he claims that others can fight the fight better than he, I don’t know of anybody that can command attention like he can. Perhaps that’s the whole rhetoric part of my brain kicking in (ethos is, um, important).

Lessig himself admits that the prospects for this second venture are extremely grim. Hopeless. And I think that’s what bothers me– the digital battle doesn’t seem quite as hopeless. And this year will be one of its most important: as we move toward our next presidential election, issues such as net neutrality should be near the forefront. Probably won’t be, but should be. If internet service providers gain the power to regulate content types, then you can kiss the internet as we know it goodbye. If the government continues to claim regulatory power, then kiss the internet as we know it goodbye (think of China– where it seems they’re always thinking about the children). These are not the dystopic ravings of a mad man (o.k., maybe a little bit), they are political questions facing all three branches of government in the upcoming years. They will largely determine the economic and cultural directions of our country for decades to come.

Lessig writes that he will remain committed to this cause, if not as active. Let’s hope his presence is enough. And let the rest of us see this as a call to increase our own activity.

Posted in digital-media, education, internet, net-neutrality, politics | Comments Off on There goes Obi-Wan

Dante didn’t descirbe this one…

Posted on June 13, 2007 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

…but I think this might be a lost layer of hell. I am speaking of grading AP exams down in Daytona Beach.

Ethics disuade me from sharing any of the “jems” I have read over the past few days, but I will say that I have graded almost 500 high school essays in three days. I am wondering what sins I have committed to deserve this.

On the flip side, at least its Daytona Beach.

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Bring on 2084?

Posted on June 9, 2007 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

I’m not sure how I feel about a recent Wired article on contemporary internet security issues. The rhetorical side of my brain sees a lot of metaphors flying around, with significant [disastrous] implications. But another part of my brain sees the internet as potentially dangerous, and in need of security.

Let me break this down: as a left-oriented academic, I see the internet as opening the possibility of ideal democracy. Free access to all. Unmitigated exchange of information.

But as a right-oriented investor, I see the internet as a playground for hackers, crackers, spammers, and other seedy characters. Being a victim of identity-theft doesn’t help this argument (apparently, according to Capital One, I spent several thousand dollars in a state I have never visited. Investigation pending).

In the article, security experts are calling for government involvment in internet security, essentially, IP experts are throwing their hands-up in surrender. Now I know this doesn’t represent all internet security professionals, but Wired is a fairly liberal and certainly pro-technology publication. If this were Fox News or the Indy Star, I’d dismiss it. But its not.

For those without the time to RTFA, experts are most concerned with bots capable of unknowingly wire several / hundreds / thousands of computers together to perform malicious operations. Some solutions, such as ingress filtering, are pretty unobtrusive. But consider:

A few audience members argued seriously that computer users should have to take a test to get an internet license, maintain botnet insurance and have their machines inspected for information-super highway worthiness. Others countered that individuals shouldn’t have to know how to secure their own computers — the machines should simply be more inherently secure.

An eBay employee suggested that a system like the United States credit-scoring system would be better. Every PC user would get a score based on the security of their system, and the computer would transmit that score in every packet it sends out. Websites could then judge what level of access to give based on that security score.

The metaphor here interests me: it operates on a kind of catachresis, crossing tenor and vehicle to discuss the “information super-highway” as a physical place, appropriate for physical laws. So much for the idealism, welcome to the industrialization of the real.

Without coming off as too much of an idealist, this vision of licenses, scores, insurances, frightens me a bit. Cynthia Selfe has already warned us that we need to pay attention–specifically, pay attention to those people who aren’t online, who cannot afford it. The internet creates a significant economic hurdle for those looking to enter the first world or the middle class (perhaps? does the 21st century American middle class revolve around computer ability?). Now we are talking about a series of institutional and economic hurdles (can you imagine how much internet insurance would cost? I wouldn’t be surprised if State Farm starts advertising tomorrow).

I know that many people, especially those that post on places such as /., will consider this as illusionary as WMDs, a scare tacit to transfer control from the bottom to the top. Perhaps it is. But the threat to me seems very real, especially given how little most of us actually know about our computers. If this all seems crazy, then go ahead and call up the task manager on your PC. Unless you know what every operation on that list does, then you should care.

Posted in internet, security | Comments Off on Bring on 2084?

Smartest 4th Graders Ever….(Sorta)

Posted on June 8, 2007 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

As the NY Times reported yesterday, the 2005 NAEP scores are out–and Mass is kicking ass. Woo Hoo! Go home state!! WOO HOO!!!! (Shouldn’t academics get some of that sports-passion?).

For 4th graders on reading evaluation, Mass has the toughest state standards for proficiency (although, um, we also have one of the lowest passing rates… what’s this whole “interpret the numbers” thing). Given how much more difficult their test is compared to other states, it looks like Mass is near the top of the pack. Conn is also putting up good numbers.

For 4th grade math, Mass comes in second in terms of difficulty (South Carolina comes in first 305 to 301), but Mass passes 42% of students compared to SC’s 24%).

For reasons I couldn’t determine, Mass reading scores for 8th graders weren’t included in the study–I wonder if this is because of the MCAS tests (perhaps Mass doesn’t participate in any other national tests since they have such a rigidly structured in-state standardized testing program). In terms of 8th grade math, Mass slips to 3rd in standards. But who cares about math? Show me the reading!!!

As far as my current state, Hooiser nation, its average in reading, but WAAAAAAAAAY low in mathematics. In an effort of cultural fairness, they should recalibrate the math word questions in the form of NASCAR:

If Jeff Gordon has 1 gallon of gas remaining and eight laps left at the Brickyard, should he pit?

Posted in education, mass | Comments Off on Smartest 4th Graders Ever….(Sorta)

For the Love of Gill Sans

Posted on June 7, 2007 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

Argh.

Since getting my MacBook, I rarely use a PC. The notable exception might be a two-screen PC in the English department’s multimedia lab when I am working on a large scale web project. Recently, I helped my wife with the Lafayette Dog Park website (the site is currently being uploaded to a cold fusion server, so no link yet). Since it was my wife’s first go at XHTML or design, we used the two-screen, that way she could work on the code on one screen and refresh the browser in another.

Long story short: during this process, I ended up looking at my homepage. In Firefox. And it looked like crap. To be specific: the font was rendering terribly pixelated and broken. This came as a real shock to me, since I thought I was using a fairly standard font– Gill Sans — which renders beautifully in Safari. Love the Safari Gill Sans. Here’s a screen shot of my design portfolio in Safari (Gill Sans at 0.9em):

Gill Sans safari screenshot. Nice thick, continuous typography

Yummy.

But here’s what the site looks like in Firefox:

Gill Sans at .9em in Firefox, goes horribly wrong

Icky.

So, what to do? Fighting with Firefox is completely new to me. Its like the first fight in an otherwise glorious relationship. Its Conseco nipping McGwire. Its… well, you get the point. Firefox is usually the hero of the browser wars. Internet Explorer does an equally terrible job with Gill Sans. But thanks to the beauty of conditional comments, its an easy fix to tell IE not to try–to use “Tw Cen MT” instead. This was the standard font in my world: I used it at default size for my last Introductory Composition website and again at 14px for my Multimedia Writing website. I moved away from this font as I started paying attention to web typography: I noticed I tended to favor sites that used smaller font sizes, and wasn’t pleased with Tw Cen MT’s small renderings. But Gill Sans, that’s beauty baby: consistent, symmetrical, with a nice touch of curves (good thick/thin ratio). What more could a designer want?

So, again, what to do? For assitance, I turned to one of my favorite typography sites: Smashing Magazine. Their site looks smooth and sophisticated in Safari:

Smashing Magazine in Safari: clean header and consistent font weight

Nice consistent font wieght, smooth kerning, nice variation. So, I rifle through the CSS, and find out that they’re using a pretty standard small-sized Verdana. But look what happens to their site in Firefox:

Smashing Magazine in Firefox, pixelated header text and choppy content typography

Icky.

Playing around with other fonts, I’ve come across Univers–which looks pretty good at .8em (and bigger and I find it a bit unprofessional):

Univers at .8 em in Firefox--pretty nice

Not bad… especially considering Univers isn’t recognized by Safari. This means I can create a font family: Univers, "Gill Sans", "Tw Cen MT", Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; to cover all my bases. Except that at .8em, the font-size is too small for Safari. This is where I left off yesterday–tomorrow I’m going to try looking at Univers at .9em in Firefox again. Another possible solution might be to see if I can code a conditional comment for Safari (I’ve never had to code a comment for anything but IE). While the sage isn’t over, here’s a moral for the story so far (one which I supposedly already knew):

Double and triple check typography in all browsers. In my case, originally all the sites were in Tw Cen MT. I then switched to Gill Sans without checking the site in PC. Boo me.

The next time the Red Sox are on TV I’ll do another post looking at typography on the web. Essentially, I want to look at a number of designer homepages (Dave Shea, Mark Boulton, Mike Davidson, and others) to see what kinds of font families and sizes they are using.

UPDATE:: Don’t know what I was thinking. Univers looks terrible. Sigh.

Posted in design, font, homepage, typography | Comments Off on For the Love of Gill Sans

ZeFrank interview

Posted on May 29, 2007 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

Just found a Cecil Vortex interview with ZeFrank shortly before The Show ended February 2007. In addition to gems such as “morphological synthesis” (an inventive approach) and an interesting discussion of how audience provides generative boundaries benefitical to the creative process, he offers this conclusion:

With The Show project, I’ve also been thinking a lot about this culture of authorship that we’re entering into. You’ve got so many people that are making things now, whether it’s emails or instant messages or uploading images to Flickr, making movies, creating audio on cheap prosumer technology. What’s really interesting to me is that, as anyone knows who’s gone into a creative discipline, the second that you start doing those things, the world around you changes. If you draw, you start seeing the edges of things, and you start seeing the deformities of their shape when you move around them. When you start playing guitar, you start noticing notes in all the music you play, and in fact, the music that you listen to never sounds the same from that point on. I think that a lot of people are focusing on the content that’s being produced right now. And I think it’s the wrong thing to look at. It’s actually the pursuit and the perception change that I think a lot of people are experiencing about the world — that’s the thing to focus on and the thing to celebrate.

Amen.

This dynamic he mentions is to me the McLuhan or the Ong factor: the idea that the communicative media we use influence perception, thought, and expression. Medium is not invisible (though I don’t go quite as far as to say that it is the message–its more murky than that. It influences the message. My argument is that when people engage in communicative media that connects them to more people, well, they’ll start noticing those people differently. More positively? Perhaps. But I think an appreciation of difference has to be cultivated.

Posted in diss, writing-tech, zefrank | Comments Off on ZeFrank interview

Smashing Magazine and Networked Research

Posted on May 28, 2007 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

As we start planning out our Blogging as Composition syllabus (see also me and Wishydig and Mrxk), I’ve been thinking about what kind of research assignment we could have students work on. The obvious project to me is a two-phase wikipedia project: first fact-checking an existing page, then providing a re-write (with detailed synopsis of changes) of the page.

But I’ve also been thinking of other ways that research appears on the web. I am particularly interested in Smashing Magazine, which at times has found itself in a bit of controversy. For those not familar, Smashing provides reviews, tutorials, research on web design and technologies: from font choice to microformats, color theory to linkbaiting. What’s the controversy? Well, Smashing often collects wisdom from around the net–bringing information from a variety of sources into proximity with little original contribution. Take, for instance, Smahsing’s recent article on linkbaiting.

After a brief introduction, the article isn’t an article as much as a collection of lists. Something in my old Socratic-Augustan brain cringes at this–shouldn’t there be more synthesis to count this as research? And something in my Derridean-Complexity brain says: maybe. In the networked, digital scene, collection, linking, relating, selecting, mixing is high level intellectual activity–it is turning the desert into the rainforest (Steven Johnson’s metaphor), helping to build the eco-system. Thinking of Spooky, its the digital writer as DJ, spinning information harmoniously together–a symphony rather than a synthesis. Its Rhythm Science.It also presents information in a wreaderly way (we can assume that digital readers are interactive? that they expect to engage rather than consume?), a Levinasian way, a way that invites others to offer their own interpretation.

Therefore, I think the Smashing format could be incorporated into the wikipedia-research project: the step that shows the student can find and organize the voices on their subject area: that they can, in a sense, capture some of the parlor’s exchanges, map the conversation, (etc.).

Posted in 106blog, teaching | Comments Off on Smashing Magazine and Networked Research