Author: Derek Mueller

Goes Round and Round and Round

/ Derek Mueller / 4 Comments

Now that I’m on with the more serious and alert segment of my morning (up
next, summing up c.1 of H. White’s Tropics of Discourse), I have to point
you to

a bit I landed
via Metafilter
on

proposed legislation to fine drivers of spinner-adorning autos in Iowa. 
Spinning hubcaps can be misleading, you know; they give off the appearance that
the vehicle’s wheels are moving when they aren’t. When the vehicle stops, the
wheel covers keep moving.  When the vehicle’s moving, the wheel covers
could be rolling in reverse motion. They’re perceptually dishonest. 
Unethical.  Basically, expensive lies. And so to curb rampant wheel-cap
mendacity among Iowa drivers, the fine would charge

ten bucks for the offense.  I’m sharing this just because the comments
are a riot, from comparisons of spinners to moonwalking (which also should be
banned, yes?) and rear-view mirror danglers.  And definitely scroll down to
the Jetta collapsed under the load of wood (in the linked entry, not the MF comments).

Open in a different tab:  Slate’s Ed-in-Chief on
"Blog Overkill." Gist: you be
careful fetishizing new media, and journalists are s l o w e r than bloggers:

The biggest difference between me and conventional bloggers is that I
usually pause between first thought and posting. Inspired by the
slow food movement,
I like to think of myself as a slow blogger. Sometimes I’m so slow–as this
Wednesday dispatch from a Friday-Saturday conference proves–that I resemble a
conventional journalist.

And

I’ll send a U.S. dollar to the first who writes "Shafer doesn’t get it."

For a dollar? Shafer doesn’t get it.  If not getting it means
overgeneralizing about the thoughtfulness and care girding
most writing in the blogosphere or, in another spot, suggesting that new
media merely mimic the work of old media, then it deserves more
nuance.  But subtleties aside, the essay offers insight to the tensions
between clashing info-economies–the flows and mediums and controls and values
tangled together.  And that’s worthwhile, especially if such attempts bring
about dialogue that pushes any of us beyond revolution/stagnation cliches.

Heliostatic Bounce

/ Derek Mueller / 3 Comments

BendAlpine
townsfolk in Rattenberg, Austria figured out

one way to promote "psychological well-being" despite resting in the shadow
of sun-blocking mountain (Statberg Mtn.). To deny the ominous rock-face one consequence of its presence, a redirect, a mirror-refraction from nearby Kramsach. (via)

Dr. Peter Erhard: "Erecting mirrors to shine a bit of light on our village is
a great idea." Redirect.

Here in Syracuse, we don’t live at the foot of the Alps, but Thornden Hill
obscures sunrays in the neighborhood.  Well, the hill and the clouds, and
the standpipe. On overcast, frigid winter days, I’ve started thinking about ways
to bring such a device to Westcott (E. Syracuse).  But even more than an
application for lifting the shadows with eight-foot mirrors, I dig this setup
for its figurative applications. Redirect. Shine a bit of….

If all of this is unusually off-balance, the break I deserve is that I’ve been in
just more than seven hours worth of class time devoted to prefigurative tropes, blog issues, RSS
feeds, Bloglines, OPML imports with 205ers, Hayden White, transclusion.  To
relax this evening: a quick game of Operation.  Guess the part
nobody could get.  Yeah.  Wrenched ankle. Gets me all the way from
naive metaphor to self-critical irony.

Tech Distribution

/ Derek Mueller / 3 Comments

Last week at Worldchanging,

Alex Steffen

posted a
few

links to

InterConnection, an organization actively improving technology
access.  By no means am I an access expert.  I am, nevertheless,
familiar with some of the commonplace arguments: if we (teachers/scholars)
privilege particular forms of knowing and performing, we must take stock of the
factors affecting widespread, democratic access to the apparatuses/devices that
make such forms of knowing and performing possible.  Put on the
brakes…tap them gently.  Or abandon.  Give it the ol’ Luddite
hammer. Drive it off a cliff.  Without being curt, this is, more or less, a
usual way of taking up questions of access. 

Unfortunately, because access pre-conditions everything we might do with
technologies and particularly electronic devices (no access means no next step, right?  Anybody have a pen to lend?) access rationale often curb
whatever might follow.  And that’s a problem.  I can’t think of anyone
who would say we should *not* be cognizant of access issues, but I can think of
arguments I’ve heard that until access is corrected, we must withstand pushing
technology’s ends, exploring limits, developing pedagogies around them, etc. 
I tend to disagree with the || pause || model for addressing access limitations. 
For this reason, I’m always watching (passive, huh?) for actual practical
change–organized resolution–toward correcting the distribution of, access to
and training toward uses of electronic technology.  Too often, I think I
stop short (in our interchanges on access) of seriously taking up what must
happen to change who gets to use computers and how such uses are prefigured by
material privilege.  But InterConnection seems to be doing something about
it–a good enough reason for me to circulate links to them. 

From

another entry at Worldchanging, this

link to community-centered sites/projects.

Li-li-logging

/ Derek Mueller


Van Dijck suggests that we might think of a weblog as a journal or
diary nouveau–the result of digital media and the internet blending to
enable linked writing spaces.  I like the genealogy she traces: the
long (papery) tradition of daily record-keeping from the confessional,
lock-n-keyed entries of a teenager to the
"communal means of
expressing and remembering"  we find in the nautical records of S.
Pole explorers.  And yet I’m uneasy with the correlation between blogs and
diaries, perhaps because "that’s just journaling, right?" often comes with a
sneer meant to infantilize/trivialize the medium of weblogs (or perhaps that’s
just my own sensitivity to such suggestions, which I have, at times, thought to be pejorative, aimed at demeaning that which bloggers claim to find so
meaningful).

Continue reading →

Booking Social Nostalgia

/ Derek Mueller

Thursday’s Daily Orange ran a feature story on the steady decline in
sales of yearbooks to Syracuse seniors. SU students tend to live in campus
dormitories; fraternities and sororities, academic and social clubs, and a
relatively compact campus (among other factors, I suppose) combine to make the
social patterns of each year’s undergraduate cohort more encapsulable, as has
long been the case in the annual memento of the yearbook, which, I’d say, works
well at some colleges and universities and less well at others.  FWIW, I
held off on posting these few notes about the fade of yearbooks and the
coincident emergence of thefacebook.com, social software, and other
network-enabling mobile technologies because I thought there was a slim chance
the story, "Shelved books," would pop up on DO’s web site.  So far, it
hasn’t.  But I was impressed to find that the DO offers an
RSS feed.  When I
didn’t find one a few months ago, I sent the editor a quick email.  Never
heard back, but at least the RSS feed is available now, even if many of the
stories are late to filter to the web site or the syndication channel.

Continue reading →

Kisser’s Lips, Blow Hard

/ Derek Mueller

Via Boing Boing, Corey
Doctorow

posts this trill-iant link to the
Whistler’s
Delight–a mix from DJ Riko that works together The Bangles, Sweet Georgia
Brown, J. Giles Band, Otis Redding, G ‘n R, Andy Griffith theme and several
others into one. Good listening for your happy Sunday.

Patch Footography

/ Derek Mueller / 9 Comments

 

Warning

Warning:
nasty ankle photo herein.

In the spirit of nearly copying (but not quite) my esteemed professor who has
dangled brightly manicured toes on her internet weblog, I’m showing you what
I’ve been doing all day with my sprained ankle, the (naturally) purple balloon of inexorable
pain that it is.  Cranked it while landing with a rebound (from my own
missed shot) during the usual
Friday afternoon basketball workout.  And we were winning, too: ahead 9-3
in a game to 11 (it matters, this is no loser’s limp).  Was me, Ph., J.
(math education prof) and C., an undergrad we’d just picked up to take on four
other students in the last game of the day. But now I’ve got healing to do. 
Here’s how. 

1. From the yard, gather one plastic storage bin half-full of cold, cold
snow.  Make that cold, clean snow, please.

Snowtub

2. Mash the sprained ankle into the snow for twenty minutes, until numb
(longer will make it swell worse, shorter will be ineffective).  Repeat every two
hours. Wrap, prop and do not disturb during the in-between.

Twisted

3.  After 48 hours, start the hot/cold/hot/cold contrast baths (wrenched
extremity only). 

4.  Pain killers, college hoops muted on TV, reading for coursework,
relax.  Been through it a zillion times before.  And the snowfall
outside will reduce all the swelling my bum ankle can produce.

[Note to studious-minded self: Is this link-logging or life-logging?]

[Added to clarify | 7:25 p.m.: D. and Ph. harvest the snow, not me. The foot photo is slightly skewed because of the contorted position I was in (from the recliner) to accomplish a photo of the outside of the right ankle. My dogs are not normally so crooked.]

Frigid Trending

/ Derek Mueller / 6 Comments

trend.jpg

Trending

Record-setting cold today in Syracuse. Awoke this morning to something like -8
F, and now the temps have steadied at -1 for the rest of the day, according
to weather.com’s trender. The winter weather warning running through late this
afternoon involves the cold air more than the snow. D. and Ph. are celebrating
cancelled school due to cold temps; the city school district tends to cancel
because of the number of walkers.

I know: cold day in Syracuse–big news. (!) It’s January. Actually, I wanted
to note the morning’s household debate over the threshold beyond which it’s
too cold to sled. See, we live just two blocks from Thornden Park, the largest
city park in Syracuse, inside of which is Thornden Hill (yeah, I made up the
name)–the best public sledding/snowboarding hill around. On the weather report
earlier, the meteorologist warned of a wind chill as low as -30 F, which, when
met with exposed skin, he said, renders said skin frostbitten in 15 minutes.
About that debate: Ph., bundled up, sled in hand, seeking family-wide approval
to venture to the hill, doesn’t agree with the meteorologist (who I, more or
less, have begun to sound like in my frequently imitative style). Back and forth
for a few minutes before we decided to let the weather prove itself. Makes me
cold just to think of it.

The Other Bone Collector

/ Derek Mueller / 4 Comments

D.’s busy modeling pellet-gogy.  You know, pellet-gogy? 
Owl
pellets?WhoBone-bits

Turns out the timeless icon of wise (How many licks does it take to get to
the center of the TRTP?) chows small animals whole…then returns the
too-bony-to-pass bits in a hardened furry ball.  She tells me most of the
kids are eager about the put ’em back together project, which involves picking
through the dried gunk, finding resemblances, bringing them to the frame (a
paper outline) and so on.

She’s hot-glue-gunning the intricate bones of rodents, piecing
together–femur by rib cage by skull–the outline of a tiny skeletal structure,
all to show the school kids what it might look like, provided the dense
hunk-o’-burped-up by the owl indeed consists of a like specimen. Sure it’s
disgusting; after that, however: research methodology.  Sorry for crossing
signals; I’m tuning 205 stuff.  But what if we thought about
about a metaphor for research that makes use of the pellet topos–reconstituting
once-unacceptable bits into something tangible–restoring robbed coherences?

Just Augural

/ Derek Mueller

If, like me, you missed yesterday’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee
questioning of Sec’y of State nominee Condaleezza Rice,
Fred Kaplan’s
Slate column offers a nice run-down.  Even with a free day, I wouldn’t
have watched the session (all nine hours) in its entirety, but I am interested
in the ways the next Sec’y of State talks about what is happening in
Iraq.  And the exchange between Kerry and Rice–where the two jostled for
distinctive ways of framing the causes and complexities involved in Shiite and
Sunni dispositions–and this representation of Kerry’s re-made role make it
worth the read:

One remark in particular raised the possibility that Kerry might emerge, in
Bush’s second term, as an insistent critic of the president’s war policy. "Our
troops are stunning, superb," Kerry said, but "they’re going on missions that
are questionable in terms of what they’re going to achieve." Was it by chance
or intention that this statement–more than anything Kerry has uttered publicly
in the last 30 years–stirred memories of the famous line during his testimony
before this same committee in 1971, as a protesting Vietnam veteran: "How do
you ask someone to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

On the immanence possibility of "regime change" in Iran:

Rice replied that the administration’s goal is to have a regime in Iran
that’s responsive to U.S. concerns. She then noted that the current regime
stands "180 degrees" in opposition to those concerns–on nuclear weapons,
relations with al-Qaida, and support of Hezbollah. She added, "The Iranian
people, who are among some of the most worldly that we know–in a good sense–do
suffer under a regime that has been completely unwilling to deal with their
aspirations."