Common Issues

I’ve been storing potential course readings to Diigo in a list called Common Issues, as I find that the broad subject categories, such as Environment and Cities, can get confusing in terms of what was actually placed there and whether the intent of the bookmark was for course use or for some other purpose.  It would appear that bookmarks without some explanation–tags aren’t enough, as I’m finding tagging is an odd requirement.

I find a lot of interesting reading in the subjects Cities, Environment, Politics, et cetera.  But storing bookmarks in any of these areas randomly can create lists that, weeks later, make little sense.  Tinderbox may be a better method of storing reading materials as I can use prototypes and agents for visual meaning and as intuitive expression.  What I’m finding inconvenient in the size of my laptop screen for dragging things around.

Diane Greco on Mackey

Diane Greco has an excellent response to the Mackey piece in WSJ. She delves into the heart of the issue’s complexity:

Mackey says the HSA-plus-high-deductible structure makes people “careful” about how they spend their healthcare dollars. I would say this just is rationing, except that it is the sick person who is now burdened with the decision to seek care, knowing exactly how much that care is going to cost out-of-pocket. Gee, if I’ve got an infection but my kid needs soccer shoes and vegetables for the week, what am I going to do? I think I’m going to let that infection alone, to heal or fester as it will, and buy the kid what she needs. The whole point of healthcare reform is to minimize the situations where this sort of choice is unavoidable. Under the HSA-plus-high-deductible scheme, corporations will continue to enjoy tax relief for offering even insufficient healthcare plans to their employees (and then only to some of them), and insurance companies still enjoy the premiums paid by said corporations.

On Special Topics in Calamity Physics: Too much Detail?

In Marisha Pessl’s novel Special Topics in Calamity Physics, the narrator, Blue van Meer, describes a locker encounter with Zach. The encounter bears some scrutiny:

He was a tall, tan, supremely American-looking kid: square chin, big straight teeth, eyes an absurd jacuzzi blue. I knew, vaguely, based on chatter during labs, he was shy, a little bit funny . . . also captain of the soccer team. His lab partner was his supposed ex-girlfriend, Lonny, cocaptain of Gallway Spirit, a girl with soggy platinum hair, a fake tan and a marked tendency to break the equipment. No cloud chamber, potentiometer, friction rod or alligator clip was safe with her. On Mondays, when the class wrote up our results on the dry-erase board, our teacher, Ms. Gershon, consistently threw out Lonny and Zach’s findings, as they always flew daringly in the face of Modern Science . . .

He was handsome, sure, but as Dad once said, there are people who’d completely missed their decade, were born at the wrong time–not in the intellectually gifted sense, but due to a certain look on their face more suitable to the Victorian Age than, say, the Me Decade . . . ” (127)

The above are cuts from two paragraphs, the second paragraph difficult to logically interpret. The sections come directly after Blue has supplied her name to Zach in the manner of a “spasm-swallow.” It might be difficult to distinguish Zach in the first paragraph, even with the amount of imagery (I can’t see “absurd jacuzzi blue”) that describes his appearance and some of his behaviors, as in the lab. All of it is a mirror back onto Blue, revealing her concerns, her presentational style, and her inability to self-edit, layering image upon image, reference upon reference, to paint a relatively banal encounter. Blue is vastly well-read, naively punctilious, and awkward in her prep-school surrounds, involved with Blueblood acquaintances and their adventures. She adds to Zach’s temporal nature with this: “And maybe he had a secret diamond earring, maybe a sequined glove, maybe he even had a good song at the end with three helpings of keyboard synthesizer, but know one would know, because if you weren’t born in your decade you never made it to the ending, you floated around in your middle . . . ” and I’m left a tad bit confused.

Sometimes Pessl is deft with an image. Other times, there are odd trips and contradictions, as in “He ran his right hand through his hair and it was absurdly knot free like a shampoo commercial” and “I could feel his minty breath on my forehead, and he was staring at me with his eyes the color of a kiddy pool (blue, green, suspicious hints of yellow). He was searching my face as if he took me to be a cruddy masterpiece in somebody’s attic and if he scrutinized my deft use of color and shading as well as the direction of my brush strokes, he’d figure out who my artist was” (128).

Blue’s youth would certainly fixate on Zach’s appearance. Her inquisitiveness might certainly call for interesting figures. Throughout the novel Pessl’s approach amounts sometimes to interesting surprises. But it also leads to blurry edges, confusion, and imprecision. What color, for example, are Zach’s eyes? And why does it matter so much?

Despite this, I’m enjoying digging out the story.

Rainey on Health Care

LAT’s James Rainey takes the media to task on critical elements on the health care debate:

Rather than try to explain to its viewers how such a commission might control Medicare costs, CNN cut away to an all-important update on . . . Alberto Contador’s ongoing war of words with fellow cyclist Lance Armstrong.

By all means, let’s recap the story of two big-name jocks man-slapping each other, rather than help Americans sort out the central domestic issue (Snore!) of the moment.

America has a healthcare crisis, yes, and so do broad segments of the media, particularly television news. They have transformed the story of how to fix an overpriced and inadequate care system into an overheated political scrum, with endless chatter about deadlines and combatants and very little about the kind of medical care people get and how it might change.

And Dean Baker provides perspective on costs:

The program’s huge price tag is equal to about 0.5 percent of projected GDP over the next decade. The Iraq war at its peak cost more than 1.0 percent of GDP. NPR and other news outlets rarely, if ever, referred to the “huge” cost of this war, which was twice the “huge” cost of President Obama’s health care program. Perhaps the decision of supposedly neutral media sources to constantly warn that the costs of the program are “huge” has something to do with its dwindling public support.

Paradox

It seems to me that the healthcare issue is ultimately a series of paradoxes:

1. The doctor wants to provide care and the layperson wants care but the costs are typically too high for most people to pay.

2. Insurance companies are for profit agents and most people and doctors want what insurance companies don’t provide (that is, care) and the costs of care are typically too high for people to pay.

Is this right? Doesn’t this mean that healthcare should not be a market venture?

Infamous and Ethics

Infamous was an interesting game. My son and I played through it over the last couple of weeks. A couple of quick ideas:

1. There’s no gore but the game does go for grit.
2. The game play is pretty tame though the combat can be psychologically relentless.

Gameplay in Infamous is driven by an interesting ethics or choice narrative. Cole, the protagonist, can move through his goals taking good or evil actions, thus calling attention to why Sucker Punch designers deemed one action good and one action bad. When I was first confronted with the decision fork, I chose good action, that is to attack a group of soldiers inhibiting escape off a quarantined island by avoiding harm to civilians. The evil and easier method of fighting would have been to start the battle shielded within the crowd, thus keeping the focus of fire off of Cole. The notion of the human shield is pretty thick throughout the game.

As the player moves through the game in the process uncovering information about several conflicts, some personal, some environmental, the player takes on a pattern of ethical behavior, hence establishing player “character.” It just doesn’t seem right to run down the roads healing people with your healing powers and then deciding next day to leach them of their life force. The later action is an “evil action.” The fictitious space, demolished after an explosion, is comprised of three plague infested islands. Nothing in the behavior of the survivors or the strange enemies compels good or evil choices from the player. In other words, to beat the game, the player can ignore ethical risk, but in my case I felt compelled to follow the ethical chain, so, at the end, I made what felt was the right choice given my behavioral habit

I could go back now and play the game in two additional ways and consider how outcomes might change: take on an evil persona or mix the personas.

In any event, character in Infamous is what I would describe as novelistic, as it takes time for Cole to emerge as a fictional being. There was one ethical scenario where Cole emerged as a character separate from the player, which is what’s interesting about play. We learn a lot about characters in story and novels by learning how others react to them or how they affect others, though we can’t affect any of these relationships. What’s different about the game is that what appears to develop is an observational third, the persona who watches the avatar and the player from a distance, the persona who says, “How will I play such and such a scenario; how will I direct Cole?”

Domains

Kenneth Gosselin writes in the Hartford Courant

Even though debate continues over whether the $569 million busway should even be built, the state has spent millions taking properties through eminent domain and demolishing buildings along the proposed route. It’s even tossed out some well-established businesses.

The New Britain-Hartford busway has been in the news a lot. Gosselin’s tack in the article has to do with the power of eminent domain and gray areas between the idea and requirements of the busway and its likelihood of ever seeing reality. So, question: should the state acquire properties for a project even before it sees approval and design? It seems a solid approach, but the real question seems to point to a larger problem of the state’s lack of a long term design orientation for Connecticut as a whole, which would be an intensely complicated task.

Is the busway a local issue? In larger states, what one city or town does may not immediately affect a more distant region, as those regions may be separated by hundreds of miles. In Connecticut I have a hard time envisioning parts, as the state is so small, but this may be due to my own lack of insight or familiarity.

Marigolds and Brevity

Somewhere in the story The Day I Became a Marigold this is written:

The Marigolds celebrated on their front lawn. We’d watch from our porches as they turned and turned in unison and then lit fires and roasted pigs and ate with paper plates. The Marigolds sat in the grass. One Marigold drifted out of the sky on a parachute, landed on the highest eave, and declared, “I’m mayor now.”

The Marigolds were many and elusive. I went to school with one of them. He’d tell me on our walks home about the Trips, the Uncles, and the Oddities in various rooms, and when I told him about mine he said, “I wish I were you.”

In the first paragraph the Marigolds celebrate on the lawn; they dance; they eat “on” paper plates, not “with,” which is a mistake. Anyway, “turned and turned in unison” is an image of absence–treating an image that goes unwritten in the text, as Marigolds making random motions in the grass makes little sense. And the line was written ahead of the image, which is a habit that I’ve become accustomed to and which took time to develop since May. Another instance, which I would describe as a “sharp” image, is that of the parachutist landing on “the highest eave,” a pretty good trick for someone on a parachute, I suppose, but for a Marigold, probably doable.

Writing short short stories is not about writing short short stories for the sake of being short or as a kind of genre hack, as “I went to the store, got my hand stuck in a pile of melons, and a quick thinking clerk yanked me free, and so I kissed him” is a brief narrative but not all that compelling. It’s about writing stories that compel and that work within a constrained space and time. Within that constrained space and time, they enclose a narrative and its world and necessary populations. Nor are they the result of some issue with attention span, as one one would need accuse the Italian poets of some cognitive disfunction in the 1600s for writing sonnets.

Mind Mapping

Via Seed:

Picture this: the whole of human knowledge as a figurative mind that can selectively focus on certain areas. It’s a profound notion, and visualizing such a construct is an enormous undertaking. But with last week’s release of a new “map of science,” a team of researchers led by Johan Bollen is attempting to do just that — with a high-resolution visualization of how scientific literature is accessed based on users’ downloading and browsing behavior, known as clickstream data. This usage data was collected, aggregated, and normalized across a wide variety of journal publishers and institutions. The result is a network map with color-coded nodes (clusters of research articles from different fields) and interconnected lines (shaped by users’ clickstreams), demonstrating the connections among a comprehensive sample space of scholarly research.

I can’t find links to the actual work, which would be useful. But MESUR is available.