Academia

Truth & MLA

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A muted quote (notice which part is not in “” and which part is not a cliche) from the University of Boston:

“I support speaking truth to power,” said Rzepka, but that requires truth, he added.

MLA debates resolutions this week. “Defenders of the original version faulted Nelson’s version for being even-handed.”   Rhetorician and president of the AAUP, Nelson knows trends; if he’s becoming “even-handed” perhaps MLA is moving toward an accommodation with what we might describe as reality. Anyone who saw Nelson’s debate with Horowitz and has noted his scholarly interests has seen a man quite political, not particularly thoughtful but extroverted & cheerful. If Horowitz is the street corner Bolshevist polemicist that got religion, Nelson is the establishment bore, radical in an appropriately establishment manner. That someone so immersed in cliches calls for equal treatment of Zionists and Anti-zionists may mean the wind has turned. Or his cliches are out of date. I’m hoping for the former.

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Petaflop – Oskee Wow Wow!

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An awful lot of bragging goes on in these parts about the U of Chicago and the accomplishments of that  legendary university, and rightly so.

I am a distinguished alumni of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and I would like to do a little bragging myself about something I know absolutely nothing about.   Well, one thing I know a lot about and one I don’t.

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Metaphors, Interfaces, and Thought Processes

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My post today is inspired by In the Beginning was the Command Line, by Neal Stephenson, a strange little book that will probably be found in the “computers” section of your local bookstore. While the book does deal with human interfaces to computer systems, its deeper subject is the impact of media and metaphors on thought processes and on work.

Stephenson contrasts the explicit word-based interface with the graphical or sensorial interface. The first (which I’ll call the textual interface) can be found in a basic UNIX system or in an old-style PC DOS system or timesharing terminal. The second (the sensorial interface) can be found in Windows and Mac systems and in their respective application programs.

As a very different example of a sensorial interface, Stephenson uses something he saw at Disney World–a hypothetical stone-by-stone reconstruction of a ruin in the jungles of India. It is supposed to have been built by a local rajah in the sixteenth century, but since fallen into disrepair.

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Women to Boyz

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In the comments to a Dr. Helen post: Should Men Get Married?, commenter ‘One More Man’ says:

The preponderance of women I meet daily make a point of trying to be men, and ill-bred men at that. If you are familiar with Sir Compton MacKenzie’s statement that “Women do not find it difficult nowadays to behave like men; but they often find it extremely difficult to behave like gentlemen,” you will know what I mean. [bold added]

I would phrase that slightly different. Since the ’60s we have given women cultural permission not to act like men but to act like boys.

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