Author Archives: Steve

character and audience

Susan Gibb writes

Excellent writers group meeting tonight, and I’ll post more on it tomorrow. But one thing remains floating in my mind that I wanted to put down.

One of the workshopped pieces we felt needed a character buildup, fleshing out. While I said at the time that we need to sympathize with the protagonist, the author rightly said that it is not a likeable character, and that’s exactly the reaction he wanted to him.

This is very true, of course. It’s not sympathy or empathy we’re seeking from the reader for the character, it’s knowing him well enough to love or hate him. Otherwise, we just really don’t give a rat’s ass what happens to him, or his story.

My question goes to the nature of the story in this regard. I agree that the success of a character depends less on likeability than on depth and dimension, but without development, change, or disruption, then what reaction to a character will come other than “okay but so what?”

If a story is mearly meant as an exercise in getting a specific reaction from the audience, the story becomes a manipulative prod, much like ghasts in a haunted house. Is a story really meant for workshop that seeks nothing more for itself?

what to do now

From Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

WASHINGTON, D.C.–Global warming conversations have shifted from whether climate is changing to how we will deal with the inevitable consequences. And the price you pay will depend on where you live and how well you prepare, suggests one of the most detailed studies to date on global warming and its likely effect on human activity.

“Like politics, global climate change is local,” said Michael J. Scott, a staff scientist at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash. “Our behavior where we live must change with the climate if we are to stave off economic and natural catastrophemeet the challenge Mother Nature may hand us in the next few years.”

And the good news continues from Wisconsin-Madison via Eureka Alert

As a result, governments and health officials need to begin to think about how to respond to an anticipated increase in the number and scope of climate-related health crises, ranging from killer heat waves and famine, to floods and waves of infectious diseases.

That, in a nutshell, was the message delivered to scientists here today (Feb. 20) at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) by Jonathan A. Patz, an authority on the human health effects of global environmental change.

As the world’s climate warms, and as people make widespread alterations to the global landscape, human populations will become far more vulnerable to heat-related mortality, air pollution-related illnesses, infectious diseases and malnutrition, Patz says.

eyes, a frequent theme here

From Carl Zimmer

The more scientists study the eye, the more they recognize that Darwin was right. This is not to say that they know everything about how the eye evolved. Evolutionary biology is not an automatic answer machine that can instantly tell you every detail about how eyes–or any other organ–evolved. Instead, scientists study eyes of different animals, the proteins they are made of, and the genes that store their recipe. They come up with hypotheses about how evolution could have produced these results. Those hypotheses then point the way to new experiments. In this way, evolutionary biology is no different from geology or meteorology, or any other science that illuminates the natural world.

To be precise, I should say that scientists study the evolution of “the eye.” There are millions of different eyes (and other light-detecting organs), each built by a different species from its own unique set of genes. Closely related animals tend to have similar eyes, because they descend from recent ancestors. Some scientists study how eyes can adapt over a few million years to the special circumstances of a particular species. Other scientists step a little further back, to look at how the different types of eyes have evolved from simpler precursors. And other scientists step even further back in time, to find clues about where those simpler precursors came from. In this post, I will move back through time through these different stages of eye evolution (a la Richard Dawkins’s The Ancestor’s Tale (link in original).)

IF, the ecodigital, and abstraction

One of the things inching around my head these days is how to generate an environment where student writers can practice writing value claims and evaluative approaches in argument in a concrete ways. A problem in serious games concerning writing is that much of the apparatus of composition is abstract. Consider the complexities of standard ethical, aesthetic, and utilitarian judgments. Value claims sometimes aren’t as simple as text books make them sound. It’s one thing to generate criteria to judge a movie, but even in such an enterprise value systems come into play audience to audience. Criteria for measuring art can be quite contentious. In value claims, definitions are of supreme importance. Thus a space in a digital environment would have to be immense, non-linear, and intensely mnemonic.

Let’s say the concrete company wants to start up a plant in town. Such an enterprise would generate jobs, taxes, and but would also potentially hurt quality of life and property values. The company has a right to exersize the use of its property, but what is the balance of equal protection? Which values do we pledge to define in context?

To write about this is fine but what should be learned here through the writing? So we create a game where the big box store is about to come into town. The place is populated with people with good intentions all around. The scene plays out. Does the writing come “after” the experience; is this research; what can or should be measured as an outcome? Does such an environment become a muticredit, mutidisciplinary operation?

imagery and character

Susan Gibb at her weblog creative writing journal asks a good question

I don’t know that I have ever gone back and added in so much, a good forty percent increase–and no doubt some will be cut out–and I wonder why the images don’t come with the first writing, why the story wasn’t clear as it unfolded.

I don’t know if I have a good answer for this, but I know what she’s talking about. She also writes

Much of the simple description, the simile and metaphor, a single added movement of the protagonist, reveals so much more about her.

Many writers on writing comment on how a character in the writing process develops upon reflection, revision, and rewriting. Character in the building of the story is an element of knowledge. A character may be something that we come to know, something that we discover after lots of thinking (writing). It begins as something we don’t know and is slowly uncovered (discovered).

I call our world Flatland, not because we call it so, but to make its nature clearer to you, my happy readers, who are privileged to live in Space.

Abbot knows the process. The finished work reveals the results.

broadband for everyone?

From NYT on Philly’s broadband plans

If Mayor John F. Street has his way, by next year this 135-square-mile metropolis will become one gigantic wireless hot spot, offering every neighborhood high-speed access to the Web at below-market prices in what would be the largest experiment in municipal Internet service in the country.

City officials envision a seamless mesh of broadband signals that will enable the police to download mug shots as they race to crime scenes in their patrol cars, allow truck drivers to maintain Internet access to inventories as they roam the city, and perhaps most important, let students and low-income residents get on the net.

Experts say the Philadelphia model, if successful, could provide the tipping point for a nationwide movement to make broadband affordable and accessible in every municipality. From tiny St. Francis, Kan., to tech-savvy San Francisco, more than 50 local governments have already installed or are on the verge of creating municipal broadband systems for the public.

The article articulates various issues that make sense as questions to raise. Since information is physical–it’s made of something–what holds it, makes it, carries it, or spins it can take mucho forms. But such a move on the part of a city “reveals” something about the nature of communications, technology, and the science of information. Does the means of distribution reveal value?

blue skies on Saturn?

From NASA

If you’ve ever looked at Saturn through a backyard telescope, you know it’s true: Yellow is the dominant color of Saturn’s thick clouds. “Sunlight reflected from those clouds is what gives Saturn its golden hue,” explains West.

But Cassini saw something different. Close to Saturn, the spacecraft was able to photograph the clear air above the planet’s clouds. (“Air” on Saturn is mostly hydrogen.) The color there is blue.

“Saturn’s skies are blue, we think, for the same reason Earth’s skies are blue,” says West. Molecules in the atmosphere scatter sunlight. On Earth the molecules are oxygen (O2) and nitrogen (N2). On Saturn the molecules are hydrogen (H2). Different planets, different molecules, but the effect is the same: blue light gets scattered around the sky. Other colors are scattered, too, but not as much as blue. Physicists call this “Rayleigh scattering.”

End of story? Not quite.

“There are some things we don’t understand,” says West. For example, while Saturn’s northern hemisphere has blue skies, Saturn’s southern hemisphere does not. The south looks yellow. It could be that southern skies on Saturn are simply cloudier, yellow clouds making yellow skies.

Intriguing, especially since we’re reading Shelley at the moment.