Anger

This business with AIG and the bonuses is troubling. People are angry, but people were angry about monster bonuses long before swaps hit the helpless news. I read the initial TARP language.

But I think the question of taxing employees’ bonuses is childishness. And I have to agree with any political entity that seeks to stop the targeted tax. Yes, I believe Krauthammer is correct to bring up Common Law in this (but the same idea should be applied to all contracts, including union contracts). All this is troubling. But the language was there for everyone to see. Congress needs to be smarter.

Plainly, a counterproductive narrative is accumulating and it has nothing to do with what may or may not be real. From the start, politicos have been playing a zero sum game. The Dems want to win and the Reps want to win–there is no real compromise. All or nothing. Future narratives are being written so that candidates can claim wins in their races. “See, I told you the Obama budget was a bad idea or hat the Republican’s have no ideas. All I had to do was oppose it or ignore it and then work behind the scenes to make sure that the other person’s ideas fail.” In my mind, either the cynicism goes, or potential gains and good ideas will get lost. Dodd, as have many politicos, has been trapped in his own vortex.

Meanwhile, the universe keeps expanding.

Narrative and Discovery

I heard a wonderful radio program on NPR yesterday on Miles Davis and Kind of Blue. One of the interviewees was Herbie Hancock (I think). He talked about Miles Davis’ process, specifically on the single session, “first takes,” out of which Kind of Blue was “discovered” in the studio. He talked about how the modes were set and that part of the plan for Davis was to simply let the players go and in that “process of discovery” authentic ideas would come. Thus, when we listen to the music, we are always following that discovery as it happens.

Evans, Adderly, Coltrain and crew, of course, could pull it off. But the idea of discovering ideas “inside the process,” rather than as an act of “revision” has been on my mind a lot. Kind of Blue, as I listen to it, is filled with structure, craft, and surprise. It’s this kind of approach I want to explore in the next 100 project. As I look back at it, this is what 100 Days was all about.

Discovery. I don’t want to overuse the idea. But it’s important. More important, at this point, than worrying about perfection and revising.

Flash Solutions

I’ve solved my display list issues in Flash. I was overthinking the relationships inside class packages. As I was working on an easing method, it suddenly hit me: stop worrying so much about how you declare variables.

Anyway, I’m hoping the students will find it interesting how two different methods of working with Flash illustrate the nature of objects in digital environments and the importance of metaphor for programmers and designers.

Flash and AS3

I’m on break this week. The break has given me some time to study up on matching Flash CS3 timeline development in the coding environment. It’s been interesting as we follow our two new media courses how common metaphors keep bubbling up and traversing across the spectrum.

Things inside things is a major structural idea, of course, and all the connotative language that follows: stacking, nesting, and genealogy.

One persistent issue that keeps trapping me is how to access objects in a complex display list via Actionscript. It seems a simple operation, such as pecking through to a child object: stage.parent.child (do something to child). This problem causes some amount of shifts to work flow as I’d like to place all animation function in one place or affect animations on specific deeper elements.

So we have father.child.addChild(rectArray[i]);

Accessing rectArray or something else bewilders me to affect a change to a nested element: rectArray[i].graphics.beginFill . . . I can affect groups easily but have a more difficult time conceptualizing interactions on deeper behaviors.

Oh, well. Back to work.

Senses

From Dean Baker

The fact that Senator McCain could make such an incoherent complaint about younger generations being mistreated, after they have just seen a transfer of close to $16 trillion in wealth from older generations, warrants attention from the media. It is far more newsworthy than President Obama’s comment’s about “bitter” working class voters that received so much attention during the primaries.

Questions of Value

I’ve been thinking about “place design.” I hope my students are too.

But I think colleges need to do more to provide experience for students. So, here’s the deal. Internships for artists, game designers, graphic designers (message artists), architects and coders, and ecologists on urban planning committees.

Brownfields? Give them to the students, and I’m talking the freshmen.

Literacy

Dene Grigar writes in a recent EBR piece

So, the issue is not that elit is not taught in the academy, but rather it has not yet become an organized field of study anywhere save cutting edge institutions. So, in reality, unless it is an English Department where a Kate Hayles or Joe Tabbi works, a Digital Humanities Program where a Matthew Kirshenbaum teaches, or a Writing program where a Nick Montfort is on faculty, Michael Joyce’s work will not receive the same level of attention that James Joyce’s does.

Hopefully, soon, this will be changing at Tunxis. New Media docs are almost done.

In any case, Grigar is perceptive on the subject of literacy questions, where I think many contra-tech issues arise

Gallix’s essay and the anti-technology comments it spurred has become for me a metaphor for all that is flawed in our perception about the relationship between technology and writing, from the level of what we write, to that of how we write, to finally the way in which we disseminate our writing.

John and I were talking about this issue today. Digital writing and literature is still very young as a physical presence. In my mind, it still wears a soft skin. In fifty years, maybe it will become a turtle.

Math Comps

John and I have been thinking a lot about how things work, particularly the creative brain. We’re thinking about performance-based problem solving. A team, for example, has five minutes to write a story in front of a screaming audience. Typically, one comes up with solutions in private. Readers read finished work, typically.

So, why not math problems, too. We put Hendree Milward on the case, one of our fine Math faculty at Tunxis, and he’s thinking about it.

I’m not sure exactly what John and Steve had in mind for the bigger picture. I think they plan to have contests like this in all disciplines. They definitely gave me an interesting thought problem though.

I’m wondering f we can have teams of math people work on a random problem of professional difficulty and the team would have five minutes to crank out algorithms.

Story Project

In order to prep for the summer project, I’m writing quick narratives and adding them to the mediaplay website. These are quickly written stories with little editing to bog down their progress, maybe some fixes to missing articles and the like. But the idea is not to edit but study problems, characters, plots and, most importantly, middles, with as little “rational bumbling” to get in the way. The Professor took about twenty minutes with John watching, while the new media students working during lab time. The problem overcome with The Professor was to figure out

1. Why the professor left the test
2. What he would do after leaving
3. What to purchase at the hardware store
4. To add wood frames to the door so that the nailgun would be reasonable

The Dream took about ten minutes and The Room little more than ten. The Dream was a question of what to leave out. The Room turned out to be a parody of Interactive Fiction and a reference to John’s “Castle of he Red Key” exercise. The Rat was one of those quick writes in bed.