Author Archives: Steve

College and Value

My wife sends this to me from the NYT. Here’s a snip (login may be required):

Some public university officials say they worry that students who are charged more for their major will stick to the courses in their field to feel that they are getting their money’s worth.

“I want students in the College of Engineering at Iowa State to take courses in the humanities and to take courses in the social sciences,” said Mark J. Kushner, the dean of that college. To address problems like climate change, Mr. Kushner said, graduates will need to understand much more than technology. “That’s sociology, that’s economics, that’s politics, that’s public policy.”

Undergraduate juniors and seniors in the engineering school at Iowa State last year began paying about $500 more annually, he said, and the size of that additional payment is scheduled to rise by $500 a year for at least the next two years.

Mr. Kushner said he thought society was no longer looking at higher education as a common good but rather as a way for individuals to increase their earning power.

Zafon’s The Shadow of the Wind

Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind was a fun but over-worded novel. When Daniel, Julian, and Fumero finally meet in the geometric web in the same room, the vectors intersect and the parallels move to climax and the complexity is unwoven. But then clunk.

It wasn’t hard, early on in the novel, to grasp the “burned man’s” identity; this, however, didn’t matter. One of the things that kept me reading was a simple question: why would Julian want to destroy his creative imprint? Thus, the slow, multi-voiced unfolding. Zafón crafts an interesting space, a wet, slick, smoky, and tightly designed and powerfully stratified Barcelona, but I wonder at the end of the novel in light of its concept of parallel narrative and sense of solipsistic interiority. Yes, the mystery of identity and cruelty is solved (we learn from Nuria why Julian would burn his books and why he morphs into Lain Colbert), but the suggestion of a reverberative lack beyond just the solutions (those that Daniel seeks) makes me smile a bit.

In the novel, Julian flees to France, avoiding anger over a relationship with his half-sister, Penelope. He lives most of his life in France ignorant of his son’s and Penelope’s cruel death, all the time hoping for a convergence. This narrative approach (we want to know the consequences of his knowing, which doesn’t necessarily require a linear telling) makes Daniel’s decisions and actions at least interesting enough to follow or reflect upon. Daniel’s innocent actions ripple and effect everyone, including Julian. If I wasn’t in such a good mood (at least a little beyond brooding), I’d argue that Zafon dwells a little much on details that prove ambient but skippable, much like the contents of a Harry Potter novel (I’ve read two, well one and a half, if you don’t count the parts I skipped; make that one then).

Side note: The more I think about Borges’ ideas on story length, the more I agree with him.

Now to finish Andreas.

Lying Liar

The Veracifier video of Gonzales testimony here is just outrageous.

Josh Marshall is right on here, too:

Without going into all the specifics, I think we are now moving into a situation where the White House, on various fronts, is openly ignoring the constitution, acting as though not just the law but the constitution itself, which is the fundamental law from which all the statutes gain their force and legitimacy, doesn’t apply to them.

If that is allowed to continue, the defiance will congeal into precedent. And the whole structure of our system of government will be permanently changed.

I think that the future and the past have already connected with this “precedent” or the conditions that provide for its proliferation. Entertainment news, disingenuous schooling, willful forgetfulness, arbitrary government decision-making, inimical government, and scorn for creative problem solving and intellectual pursuit. On a grand scale, we must chose to play by rules and not pervert the very notion of that choice by corrupting agreements. The Constitution is a fragile thing and will only keep if we use it wisely.

Rome did fall.

Crap

Yet more crap.

I’m fairly informed on American history. I wont ever stop studying it (is that knocking on wood?). What’s clear is that our system is a system that must be used and used proactively, and thus I support impeachment with full thrust: American power shouldn’t be about force or information gathering; it should be about sharing and creativity. I don’t believe we can leave Iraq as quickly as some would want, which is a pretty sorry position to have to take. But major media will not cover some stories that matter and need to mater at the human level, such as those effects of ignorance and arrogance that change the lives of millions on pure whim. Media story after story on the subject of the “war on terror” (shameful term) are not about what we need to know.

More specific case: Media force the notion that elections in the US are about candidates. They’re not, so I could care less about what is said in the padded-cage engines of our election cycles. People who run for president are tough customers, but they’re not that tough. The only public figure I’d put a vote down for is Cornel West. Elections should be about need, ideas, and the people who elect. YouTube in politics is curious only.

We just had a family destroyed just down the street. Horrid. This is one of the worst crimes I can think of because it’s about the destruction of space, of an ambient idea, of an ideal, and an expectation, which Langston Hughes teaches me a lot about. Ethically, the invader leaves their rights behind them when they push into my space. In culture we share our spaces with others and learn where the boundaries are. In my mind, you don’t enter another person’s space unless you are invited in or your entrance can assist in some reasonable fashion or reasonably prevent harm.

9/11 was a similar invasion, a breaking of boundaries.

Yes, I believe that the law requires that Bush be impeached.

Games and Art

Roger Ebert sparks more conversation about the subject of games and art in this listing. Mark Bernstein responds here.

Some of this reminds me of our experience with Shelly Jackson in Contemporary Fiction. Each student in the course has a different physical reading of what I would refer to as “the text,” much as with games where puzzles can be solved in different ways or different choices lead to different outcomes, an allure of Borges’ garden.

The question of what makes something art or high art is still up for grabs, even when the concept goes back to Mozart. With games, the question not be if they are art, but “when” something becomes art.

Design School

“Remember: good ideation creates the innovation potential that the rest of the Design Thinking process makes actionable,” writes Michael Tiemann at Open Source.

When people think of design (and this is of course a generalization) they probably think of finished article not the “process” behind or the ideas that generated it. Do people consider a poem something “designed” by the poet. We don’t have to think of a poem’s visual or semantic arrangements in terms of the language of design. Roads, for example, just are: there when we leave the house. Their design, is, therefore, hidden.

Considering how an object is placed in a rock garden can be a question of design, not just “placement.” The environmental features of hypertext brings design logic to the writing, as would writing in Flash, because the author can arrange not just the narrative but also a visual arrangement of the narrative parts onto the screen, like stones in a garden, a wonderful layer of complexity that I think needs more study.

Designers of massive or small public spaces can and should study epistemology.