Steve Ersinghaus

Here’s the context: Jesse Abbot of English and Philosophy stepped into the office and introduced the idea that Gaius Baltar of Battlestar was one of the most interesting bad guys to come along in a while. So he agreed to a recording and I ran for the Edirol.

 

 Abbot on Gaius Baltar: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

This year I’ll be thinking a lot about creative ecology. Given this or that built environment, and in this I include software as tools, what opportunities for making are made available, and how do the tools shape the object?
I can do a lot with a stick and a rock in the garden, but not much. [...]

Brimmer and Death is growing close to completion. I’ve been through the narrative several times and in doing so have found several elements that continue to develop from connections aided by the editing medium, Storyspace.
Basically, Brimmer and Death is framed by common images and common places, but the premise of the story, fixed in [...]

I learned something today. That if you try to count from 1 to one trillion it would take approximately 200,000 years.
Tht would be a feat. I learned this partly because I hadn’t thought about it. You could count seconds and that would provide he arithmetic formula, and it makes sense.
Deb Hall reminds me [...]

Jesse Abbot kicks off the first of a three part series of talks in the history and philosophy of math and science with Peter Skiff of Bard College. Meet us just off from the Cyber Cafe at 1PM tomorrow at the college.
This should be a wonderful kick-off to an interesting series of events that [...]

Susan Gibb persists into the text and into the analysis:
The idea finally hit, in the middle of making chicken’n’dumplings for dinner tonight: The Writing Space that’s held me hostage has now officially given me two endings for story #1. As mentioned before, that involves the “special link” in Storyspace of ?(n) — in [...]

In many of my courses, I have students keep journals where they log their reading and keep notes. Looking back at my description of the journal reminds me of the ancient practice of commonplacing. Weblogs, Tinderbox, and other tools are methods of commonplacing, which plays a role, I would have to say, in the history [...]

At Hypercompendia, Susan Gibb describes an interesting process:
Just when you think you know these people you find something out and you click open a writing space and you tell everyone else about it. Its free association at its finest and Ill read and reread until I know all there is to know about what [...]

A wonderful examination of the “question” of riddles in the Exeter Book by Adam Roberts at The Valve (links/blockquotes in original). Here’s a nice snip:
So let’s take it as a single, one-line riddle. Here it is, followed by Kevin Crossley-Holland’s concise translation
Wundor wearð on wege: wæter wearð [...]

TV’s metaphors are interesting and scary.
The Visa commercial is the image of America (brain) on Debt (drugs) (and human as conformer).
Desperate Housewives has nothing to do with housewives but has a lot to say about suburban blight.
We’re back on Babylon 5 again. Years 2 and 3 are now more relevant than ever. Yikes.

Wonderful conversation with Susan Gibb about story, hypertext, and edge. Hypertext is the form, but story is still king. We also talked about knowledge as it pertains to thinking about story and all the things that wriers would not have known if they did not write. There are some things a person would never [...]

This post points back to a considerable amount of discussion on McCarthy’s novel The Road including some in the comment space here.
Nevertheless, my reading of the novel goes to vulnerability and implacable loss (the institutions that sustain moral and ethical codes are gone). One of the running ideas that crosses McCarthy’s work is the notion [...]

My wife had a wonderful if question a few weeks back, something simple yet elegant.
What if we had to vote on candidates via radio only?
How would we decide based solely on the aural sense? We were talking about variants of the essay. What if all the candidates had to write their way into [...]

Chris Jordan has some amazing visualizations of amounts here.
The details matter.

In King Lear it’s important that Edmund tells us what he’s up to. He speaks this in scene 2:
Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law
My services are bound. Wherefore should I 335
Stand in the plague of custom, and permit
The curiosity of nations to deprive me,
For that I am some twelve or fourteen moonshines
Lag of [...]