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"Conflict is neither good nor bad. It is only the opposite of harmony and a stepping stone to creativity. We must challenge our concepts...so that negative fighting spirit becomes creative fighting spirit." Mitsuge Saotome
[To the tune of Ice Cube, "Gangsta Rap Made Me Do It," from the album "[untitled]".]
One of my all-time favorite classes in college was David Brownlee's history of modern architecture. It was one of those few classes that genuinely changed the way I was able to look at buildings and cities, by introducing me to the vocabulary of modern architecture, and giving me a measure of appreciation for interesting places I've visited since.
So between that background and my current gig, I was interested to see Slate architecture critic Witold Rybczynski argue that avant-garde architecture, which is often described as "'experimental,' 'innovative,' or 'cutting edge'"-- and thus a preview of what everyone will be designing in years to come-- is actually a pretty unreliable guide to the future of architecture:
the term architectural avant-garde is an oxymoron, since an architect, unlike a painter, is able to experiment only within relatively narrow bounds. Buildings are expensive, and they are intended to last a long time, so the people who build them tend to be risk-averse.... Even if a building succeeds in breaking the mold, that is no guarantee that it is showing the way, for innovative buildings rarely anticipate the future. There have been exceptions. Frank Lloyd Wright's first Usonian house, built in 1936, with its one-story living, open plan, carport, and low-slung roof, did foreshadow the ranch houses of the '50s and '60s, and Mies van der Rohe's novel Lake Shore Drive apartment towers in Chicago, completed in 1951, were the first example of the steel-and-glass-curtain wall that would dominate commercial architecture for the next two decades....
The truth is that buildings belong firmly to their own time. This is especially true of architecture that self-consciously attempts to predict the future. That's why the settings of old sci-fi movies are often so funny; the future never turns out the way people imagine. Most buildings have a shelf life of 20 to 30 years; that is, it takes 20 to 30 years before they are perceived as "old-fashioned." This doesn't mean that the buildings are ugly, or not useful, or not cherished—simply that they now represent the past. That's not necessarily a bad thing—it would be disorienting to live in an environment that never aged (actually, it would be like living in Las Vegas).
[To the tune of Mogwai, "Big E," from the album "Life at Cafe de la Danse, Paris, May 14, 2001".]
Technorati Tags: architecture
Tue 01/29/2008 21:16 01292008786
This forthcoming issue of Convergence looks really interesting.
Special Issue on ‘Digital Cultures of California'
Guest editor: Julian Bleecker (Near Future Laboratory and University of Southern California)
This call invites submissions for a special issue related to digital cultures of California. Internationally, California is a phenomenon in terms of its relationship to creating, consuming and analyzing the era of digital technologies. From the legendary garage entrepreneurs, to the multi-billion dollar culture of venture capital, to stock back-dating scandals, to the epic exodus of California’s IT support staff during the Burning Man festival, this territory plays an important role in the political, cultural and economic underpinnings of digitally and network-mediated lives on a global scale.
Half of my brain trying to figure out if there's some piece of my end of cyberspace project that I can carve out and submit, and the other half is more sensibly telling me to get the Hell back to work on the book ms. This damn essay on paper spaces-- on how some interactions with paper are more architectural and spatial than merely personal (obviously I need to work on the language a little)-- is the last distraction I should allow myself.
[To the tune of Billy Idol, "Flesh for Fantasy," from the album "Rebel Yell".]
Technorati Tags: California, digital culture, end of cyberspace, postacademic, writing
Mon 01/28/2008 09:15 01282008784
The Big Building, this morning.
Mon 01/28/2008 09:13 01282008778
At Peninsula School this morning.
The New York Times recently had a small, but surprisingly touching, article about educator Janusz Korczak and the last surviving members of the orphanage he ran:
They are in their 80s now, the last living links to Janusz Korczak, the visionary champion of children’s rights who refused to part with his young charges even as they were herded to the gas chambers.
When they speak of him, the old men are young again: transported to their days in his orphanage, a place they remember as a magical republic for children as the Nazi threat grew closer.
Korczak’s ideas for a declaration of children’s rights were posthumously adopted by the United Nations, and dozens of Korczak associations exist worldwide. Last year, a compilation of his advice for parents was published under the title “Loving Every Child.” Its message: listen to children at their level, celebrate their quirks and dreams.
His work at the orphanage was interrupted in 1940 when the Nazis forced him and his orphans into the Warsaw Ghetto.
A pediatrician, educator and writer, he was born Henryk Goldszmit (Korczak was a pen name) to a Jewish family in 1878. He was beloved in Poland for his children’s stories and the radio show on which he counseled parents. Friends offered to smuggle him out of the ghetto, but he refused to abandon the children. When it came time to be deported to the Treblinka death camp in 1942, he led them, each clutching a favorite toy or game, in a silent march of protest to the train that would carry them to their deaths.
[To the tune of Joni Mitchell, "Blue," from the album "Blue".]
Technorati Tags: education
As someone who does plenty of walking around in cities at night, I quite appreciate Kate Pullinger's essay in The Guardian:
I've always loved the city at night, even before I knew what it was like.... At night it's as though the city's history comes alive, bubbling up from where it lies dormant beneath the tarmac: when the crowds are gone, modernity slips away, and the city feels ancient and unruly. How could anyone not love London late at night, or early in the morning? How could the wide black Thames with the city reflected upon it not remind you of everything that is most desirable and glamorous in life?
But sinister, too, of course, and this is part of what makes the city at night such a grown-up, adult, provocative space.
Technorati Tags: travel
I've seen this linked to a couple times recently, and finally read it for myself: Dorothy Thompson's now-famous 1941 Harper's article, "Who Goes Nazi?"
Lifehacker points to a blog with a title that seems more oxymornic than "relevant history:" Academic Productivity. It's really pretty good.
[To the tune of Johann Sebastian Bach, "Toccata & Fugue in D minor BMV 565," from the album "Bach: Famous Works".]
Technorati Tags: academia, productivity, work
Has anyone written about the history of those boards that stock exchanges use to show information to traders-- the ones that in the movies always have guys running around them, frantically updating prices?
[To the tune of Ratatat, "Wildcat," from the album "Classics".]
Spark, a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation show about technology, is running a segment on RFID in which I'm interviewed. (I wrote several articles about RFID for the Institute a couple years ago, and have done a few talks about the technology since then.) The full details, a link to the podcast, etc. are available at the Spark blog. (Or just download the MP3.)
I did the interview a few days ago over Skype, and I was pleasantly surprised at how good the sound quality was. I used to think it was very hit and miss, but now I'm turning into a true believer: my experience recently has been pretty good.
We spoke for about 40 minutes; they used discussions of the Internet of Things, smart home applications of RFID, and privacy issues.
The show is pretty amusing, in a good way. Nora Young has a light touch, but I still get the sense that she works hard to make the show engaging.
You can tell that the interview didn't take place in a studio, but nonetheless, you can make sense of it. Unfortunately, you can also tell that I haven't had a huge amount of media training.
[To the tune of Radiohead, "Scatterbrain (As Dead As Leaves)," from the album "Hail To The Thief".]
There's some strange format thing going on with the blog. Let's see what happens when I post something new.
My mail at work is usually pretty dull-- people tend to e-mail me the really cool stuff.
But today was an exception: there was a very nicely-wrapped copy of my all-time favorite Wondermark cartoon, autographed by David Malki.
Late Christmas present? An attempt by the author to get me to stop stalking? Who knows!
But now I've got to find a frame.
And thank you, somebody!
Update: Thanks, Jason!
[To the tune of Al Stewart, "Year Of The Cat," from the album "The Best Of Al Stewart".]
Technorati Tags: humor, wondermark
Late last night I finished up an article for an edited volume of proceedings based on the Budapest conference I attended in October. Now it's on to an article on media technology, materiality, and meeting facilitation. Though I'm going to consciously avoid using too many "M"s in any sentence.
Geeky Mom recently gave a talk about blogging her dissertation. Go check out her presentation:
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Elsewhere, she writes about the problems of isolation in scholarship that echo things I noticed at AHA:
Although I consider part of what I do scholarship, I don't think many others would consider me a scholar. I'm not sure I want to be a scholar, at least not as it's currently conceived--the isolated individual hunched over books (or maybe more contemporarily, the screen)....
Here's what I learned, or what I'm chewing on right now. The real work of scholarship takes place in isolation and through individual work. From that isolated position, isolated works get created and those works are read only a few people. There are exceptions to this, of course, and the sciences are much more collaborative than other disciplines, although they also are at greater risk of being scooped than humanities faculty, for example. In my work field, instructional technology, much of the thinking and work that looks like scholarship happens online, via blogs, wikis, podcasts, etc. And that's one of the things that draws me to the field. I like thinking out loud with others. I feel more comfortable moving the thinking and scholarship that happens online within the ed tech community into formal publication than I would going from online to formal within rhetoric and composition field.
Partly, of course, it's because I've lost touch with that scholarly community and what I know of it from reading and contact I've had with people in the field, it's both going in directions that interest me and in directions that really don't interest me. Honestly, I think to some extent, I'm skeptical of scholarship in many (most) fields. I find some of it very valuable, but the way that scholarship is produced and the reasons it's produced (for the sake of getting tenure and promotion, maybe to forward the field, maybe to say something new) tend to make it less valuable to me personally.
In contrast, my work at the Institute is, at its best, effervescently collaborative. One of our most important research tools is the expert workshop, which is what it sounds like, but is actually more fun. We write just about all our important stuff using Google Docs, sitting around in a space, talking through suggested revisions in real time, batting opening lines and transitions back and forth. (For someone who spends so much time reading, the opportunity to do it in a fundamentally new way is really refreshing.)
Today, working on things like the end of cyberspace book is pleasant a break from that ultra-social routine, a chance to step inside the venerable courts for a few hours. (Not that we should completely abandon older ways of working. The ability to make creative use of solitude is something that psychologists have recognized is quite valuable; and good work often requires moving between collaborative and contemplative modes.)
I'm not sure I'd be happy going back to a life in which I was mainly working by myself. But I'm also curious how long a life like that-- one lived, in its most essential parts, alone-- will be available to professors of history and literature and the like. Already they're mild anachronisms on campus: for most departments, I'm willing to bet, collaboration-- or at least joint authorship, and a lot of work in which your research projects plug clearly into someone else's research agenda-- is the rule rather than the exception. (It would be interesting to compare the number of jointly-authored articles in leading history journals to the number in, say, economics and sociology.) The infrastructure for more intimately collaborative forms of historical research and writing are emerging, at least for a few specialties. Will it be very long before the students in first-year methods classes all have to work together on joint projects, and before people who become accustomed to working with others don't feel that that capability makes them different from scholars?
Technorati Tags: academia, blogging, collaboration, postacademic, university
Thomas Van der Waal has a great post about "the elements in the social software stack." In addition to having some great advice, and offering a nice clear way to think about social software, the following bit jumped out at me:
It was through reading Jyri Engeström's blog post about "Why some social network services work and others don't — Or: the case for object-centered sociality" that I came to have familiarity with Karin Knorr Cetina's object-centered sociality. It was through the repeated mentioning of this Knorr Cetina concept by Rashmi Sinha in her presentations and from personal conversations with Rashmi that the ideas deep value sunk in (it is a concept central to Rashmi and Jon Boutelle's product SlideShare).
Interaction designers have long been reading anthropology-- Chris Espinoza once told me that when they were designing the first Mac interface, he and the other designers had copies of George Lakoff's work on metaphor in the office-- and I've been aware for a while of more academic interface design types being familiar with STS and history of technology. But it's good to see that people who are actually doing serious products-- Jaiku, SlideShare, etc.-- are using it, too.
[To the tune of Cocteau Twins, "Pur," from the album "Four-Calendar Cafe".]
Technorati Tags: postacademic, social software, STS
Guardian commentator John Harris draws an interesting line from the Led Zeppelin reunion and Police tour, to Hollywood's love of remakes, to social networking software: what connects them, he argues, is "an almost neurotic retrospection" that seems to define this decade.
Across the globe, 18 million people subscribe to Friends Reunited, keen to rekindle playground bonds that are usually best forgotten, and one of the appeals of more cutting-edge social networking to anyone over 20 is much the same.
A case might be made for all this future denial being an inevitable response to our horizons being cast in terms of post-9/11 dread and ecological apocalypse - but past generations had the threat of the cold war going nuclear to deal with, and they managed to keep moving ahead. More relevant, perhaps, is the reinvention of what age entails, and the power wielded by people who affect to stay young by endlessly reviving their past....
[F]xating on the past is an in-built aspect of the human condition, but limited technology used to keep it in check. We had space and productive capacity only for so much stuff: a hidden hand cleared the cultural world of outdated clutter. And now? Bandwidth and memory grow exponentially, TV channels extend into the distance, and providing the means by which the classes of 77, 87 and 97 can get back in touch is a cinch. The same technology that we once thought would propel us into a fast-changing future stokes nostalgic appetites and condemns us to a present so laden with repetition that it's beginning to feed back on itself.
Essentially, the drama that Ellen Ullman described several years ago about the differences between computer and human memory is playing out on a grander, more social and public, scale.
[To the tune of Todd Rundgren, "Dust In The Wind," from the album "Something/Anything? (Disc 2)".]
Technorati Tags: memory, history, social software
Proving that half of my brain is also filled with game memories.
"Tron Contest Framed," from the fantastic Retro Arcade set on Flickr.
Tags: arcade, videogames, tron
Sat 01/12/2008 22:09 01122008612
I was going to title this post "Why do these kids love school," after Dorothy Fadiman's great documentary, but then I realized I'd already published two posts with that title. So this time I'm going with something more descriptive.
These were taken a couple days ago, when I came to pick up my daughter from Girl Scouts.
The girls were having a break, and they were all outside, running around (or through) the huge mud puddles that had grown over the last few days. (This is the same puddle where they hold the annual re-enactment of the sinking of the Spanish Armada.)
Peninsula doesn't quite have tie-dyed girl scout uniforms, but they come pretty close.
Technorati Tags: menlo park, Peninsula School
My son, skateboarding outside the graduate school of business this afternoon.
I don't think my kids spend as much time on campuses as I did when I was young-- after all, my dad was a professor-- but I'm trying.
I've sometimes joked that my wife's motto has been, "Reproduction-- why stop with biology?" We live a couple miles from where she grew up, and they go to the same school she attended. If I had my way, however, there are two elements of my early childhood I'd reproduce: we'd spend some serious time abroad, and they'd spend more time in on campus. As a fourth-grader, I'd get out of school a couple hours before Pop was finished with work, and so I'd go do my homework in the student center or university library; I even had a couple carrels I favored.
And we just bought tickets to take the kids to Europe this summer, so we're starting to get them out into the world.
[To the tune of Blue Öyster Cult, "Burnin' for You," from the album "Blue Öyster Cult: Super Hits".]
Technorati Tags: children, Stanford University
I've recently been reading some brain science stuff, but haven't found anything as interesting as this:
Half Of 26-Year-Old's Memories Nintendo-Related
Nearly 50 percent of 26-year-old paralegal Philip Jenkins' encoded long-term memories involve button combinations, game-playing experiences, and spatial-cognitive maps of various levels and worlds from Nintendo's line of video-game consoles, a team of neuroscientists reported Tuesday.
[To the tune of Jethro Tull, "Cross Eyed Mary," from the album "Bursting Out: Jethro Tull Live".]
Technorati Tags: humor
"Learning develops your intelligence and learning makes you more sensitive."
Words to live by! Thanks, Jess!
Those of us hearing pundits talk about how wrong they were about the New Hampshire primary are missing out on a really awesome sex scandal in Greece, involving an archaeologist who nailed a Ministry of Culture official, allegedly at the behest of real estate developers who wanted to build condos or something on the site of an archaeological dig and thought the MoC dude would grant a permit.
She then tried (allegedly) to blackmail him for a couple hundred thousand Euros. When that didn't work, she (allegedly) sent DVDs of the two of them getting it on (for 100 hours) to every journalist in Greece.
Said official (quite definitely) threw himself off a building (but survived), and the blackmailer's lawyer, who apparently didn't realize that it's just an expression, threw himself under a bus (and survived).
My favorite part, however, is the article in the Times of London that concludes that, because of this twisted story, Greece should stop asking about the Elgin Marbles.
Technorati Tags: British Museum, politics
I've posted the slides from my AHA talk on SlideShare. The talk is something of a sequel to my "Journeyman: Getting Into and Out of Academe" essay, which coincidentally I wrote ten years ago.
Unfortunately, SlideShare has a pretty limited range of fonts, and doesn't handle comments, so I've had to work around both of those a bit. However, it's still comprehensible. I think. If you just click on the slides here, you won't get the transcript of the talk, which I've pasted into the comments on the SlideShare site (and also can be read after the jump; so I recommend clicking through and looking at the talk there.
When you're looking at the first slide, look underneath the slide and click on the tab that says "Comments on Slide 1"; you'll see the comment for that slide, and as you advance, you'll see the comment for each later slide.
[To the tune of Keith Jarrett, "Vienna, Pt. 1," from the album "Vienna Concert".]
Technorati Tags: American Historical Association, conference, history, history of science, postacademic, work
20 years ago, Russell Jacoby published The Last Intellectuals, on the rise and fall of the public intellectual in 20th-century America. He has an op-ed piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education that reviews the book, public (or at least academic) reaction to it, and how the argument has stood up.
The piece is worth reading, if only because it nicely lays out his argument:
I offered a generational explanation for what I saw as the eclipse of younger intellectuals. Why in 1987 had the same intellectuals dominated for more than 20 years, with few new faces among them? Why was it that the Daniel Bells or Gore Vidals or Kenneth Galbraiths seemed to lack successors? Professionalization and academization appeared to be the reason. Younger intellectuals were retreating into specialized and cloistered environments.
Earlier 20th-century thinkers like Lewis Mumford and Edmund Wilson kept the university and its apparatus at arm's length. Indeed, they often disdained it. They oriented themselves toward an educated public, and, as a result, they developed a straightforward prose and gained a nonprofessional audience. As his reputation grew, Wilson printed up a postcard that he sent to those who requested his services. On it he checked the appropriate box: Edmund Wilson does not write articles or books on order; he does not write forewords or introductions, does not give interviews or appear on television, and does not participate in symposia.
Later intellectual generations, including, paradoxically, the rebellious 60s cohort, do give interviews; do write articles on demand; and most evidently do participate in symposia. They grew up in a much-expanded campus universe and never left its safety. Younger intellectuals became professors who geared their work toward their colleagues and specialized journals. If this generation — my generation! — advanced into postmodernism, post-Marxism, and postcolonialism, where the Daniel Bells and Lewis Mumfords never trod, it did so by surrendering a public profile.
The book is still well worth reading, I think.
[To the tune of Bill Evans Trio, "What Is This Thing Called Love?," from the album "Portrait in Jazz".]
For years there's been anecdotal evidence, and a couple surveys, suggesting growing use of drugs like Ritalin and Provigil by undergraduates looking to get an edge over the competition. Now, some faculty are starting to claim that professors who study the brain have started doing it, too:
While caffeine reigns as the supreme drug of the professoriate, some university faculty members have started popping "smart" pills to enhance their mental energy and ability to work long hours, according to two University of Cambridge scientists.
In a commentary published in the journal Nature last month, Barbara Sahakian and Sharon Morein-Zamir revealed the results of their informal survey of a handful of colleagues who study drugs that help people perform better mentally....
But brain boosting raises hackles in some parts of academe. "It smells to me a lot like taking steroids for physical prowess," said Barbara Prudhomme White, an associate professor of occupational therapy at the University of New Hampshire, who has studied the abuse of Ritalin by college students. After recent revelations about the use of performance-enhancing drugs in professional baseball, she sees parallels between athletes and assistant professors. "You're expected to publish and teach, and the stakes are high. So young professors have to work their tails off to get that golden nugget of tenure."
The poll was not meant to be a comprehensive study, said Ms. Morein-Zamir, a research associate at Cambridge. Rather, the essay, "Professor's Little Helper," was intended to provoke a public discussion of whether society in general, and universities in particular, should regulate the use of available compounds and medications that might be developed in the future. "If a drug helps you be more alert but also make better decisions, how does society feel about that?" she asked.
The essay, published in Nature, is a rewardingly geeky piece that includes a long discussion of how these drugs work, and what dangers exist in their use.
Technorati Tags: brain, drugs, university
Tue 01/08/2008 06:49 01082008581
Mon 01/07/2008 21:53 01072008571
One of the sessions I went to yesterday at the AHA was on cultivating and maintaining passion in graduate school. It was a roundtable discussion with several professors who are or have been graduate department heads (meaning they were responsible for their department's graduate programs, as opposed to its undergraduate courses), and was attended mainly by graduate students themselves.
A lot of the discussion was around fairly practical things that good programs do to promote a sense of cohesion and community among graduate students.
Many of these recommendations are aimed at two things: creating spaces in which students can pick up the informal or tacit knowledge that constitutes a lot of professional practice and identity; and illustrating that the life of an historian is a public, collective thing, not just something that's lived privately.
To some degree, it also serves to offset the fact that the practice of doing archival research and writing history is a much more solitary and isolating activity. You can share dissertation chapters and that kind of thing, but really, when you're writing, you're alone.
Now, this is quite different from most professional schools, and even the way graduate training works in most of the sciences: there, collaboration and group work are the norm. So I asked a question: would you consider creating a course for first- or second-year graduate students where they do group projects-- where they collaborate on a significant piece of research?
Some of the panelists reacted as if I'd just drunk a six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon and belched the "Star Spangled Banner." One of them said it was "a really weird idea," which I actually thought usefully revealed how different historical scholarship is from other kinds of scholarship. (Update: Actually, he said "wild," not "weird." My mistake!) Fortunately, Anthony Grafton stepped in and saved me with a riff from Carl Schorske's autobiography about how he and his fellow graduate students took to forming "cells" while at Harvard in the 1930s. (Someone who's not an historian, and doesn't know about Schorske's towering reputation in the profession, may not appreciate just how precisely this was the right response to keep the subject from being dismissed completely, but trust me-- it was perfectly pitched.)
But it is an interesting contrast: in many graduate schools, group work is course work. Business schools love group projects, in no small part because they assume that their graduates are going to be working in groups. But more fundamentally, all knowledge-production has a collective quality to it, and it's just a question how far down into the mechanics of scholarship or research those collaborations go. Historians today are unusual in that collaborative research and writing is not the norm, and I suspect that in the long run that's a structural weakness, and in the short run that creates psychic burdens that we all have to bear. To put it in the language of economics, the isolating quality of scholarly practice creates an externality that the profession itself doesn't have to account for.
One final thought. One way for a program to measure the "passion gap," and to know if it's doing a good job of giving students a strong identity as scholars, is to look at what its non-academic Ph.D.s do. My graduate program turned out a number of people who aren't professors, but still converted their dissertations into books, and have crafted scholarly identities for themselves. Looking back on it, I credit an intense socialization process that taught us how to be scholars, not just how to do scholarship.
Technorati Tags: academia, American Historical Association, collaboration, history, postacademic, travel, university, washington DC
I'm at the American Historical Association conference in Washington DC this weekend. Heather and I are using it as a way to get a little vacation from the kids, and to give talks. We're both on a panel on post-academic careers, organized by friend of mine who I knew when I was at Berkeley-- and who later beat me for a job at Montana State.
I haven't been to AHA in about 15 years, and the last time I attended it was in Washington DC. History of science has its own set of conferences, which are smaller and a lot more intimate, and I usually went to those. AHA is kind of so large, it's a great place place to hook up with friends from school or people in your speciality, but that size makes it hard to meet anybody new, or the have those serendipitous encounters that are so valuable in social networking events.
When I first got here, for a couple hours I kept looking at people and thinking, I think I recognize them. Then I had another realization: it's not that I recognized 80% of the members of the American Historical Association, it's that We all look the same. The dress code (tweed or other woolens for people with jobs, suits for young job-seekers), the ubiquity of backpacks, the predominance of beards and glasses, and a few other things, and a certain look of abstraction or otherwordliness, all combine to generate a certain Look. I wonder if I could still pass.
Not to sound snide or critical: this is a look I sported for years, and see whenever I go home. But it's illuminating to look in on a group you were once so deeply a part of.
[To the tune of Bombay Dub Orchestra, "Feel (Thievery Corporation Remix)," from the album "Bombay Dub Orchestra".]
Technorati Tags: academia, American Historical Association, conference, history, travel, washington DC
Now there are high wind warnings for SFO. Sounds like the airport might close.
/O.CON.KMTR.HW.W.0001.080104T0000Z- 080105T0000Z/ NORTH BAY INTERIOR VALLEYS-SAN FRANCISCO BAY SHORELINE- EAST BAY INTERIOR VALLEYS-SANTA CLARA VALLEY...INCLUDING SAN JOSE- MONTEREY BAY...NORTHERN SALINAS VALLEY... HOLLISTER VALLEY...AND CARMEL VALLEY- BIG SUR COAST- SOUTHERN SALINAS VALLEY...ARROYO SECO...AND LAKE SAN ANTONIO- 929 AM PST THU JAN 3 2008
...HIGH WIND WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM 4 PM THIS AFTERNOON TO 4 PM PST FRIDAY...
A HIGH WIND WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM 4 PM THIS AFTERNOON TO 4 PM PST FRIDAY.
SOUTH TO SOUTHEAST WINDS WILL INCREASE LATE THIS AFTERNOON TO 20 TO 35 MPH WITH GUSTS TO 55 MPH...AND WILL CONTINUE THROUGH THIS AFTERNOON. THE SECOND...MORE POWERFUL SYSTEM WILL BRING EVEN STRONGER WINDS TO NORTHERN AND CENTRAL CALIFORNIA. BY TONIGHT... WINDS ALONG THE COAST AND VALLEYS WILL INCREASE TO 30 TO 45 MPH WITH GUSTS TO 60 MPH POSSIBLE. WINDS IN THE HILLS ABOVE 1000 FEET COULD POSSIBLY GUST TO HURRICANE FORCE...75 MPH ON FRIDAY. WINDS WILL DECREASE FRIDAY EVENING.
A HIGH WIND WARNING MEANS A HAZARDOUS HIGH WIND EVENT IS EXPECTED OR OCCURRING. SUSTAINED WIND SPEEDS OF AT LEAST 40 MPH OR GUSTS OF 58 MPH OR MORE CAN LEAD TO PROPERTY DAMAGE.
Fortunately, the talk isn't until Saturday, but still....
My wife and I are going to the American Historical Association annual meeting tomorrow night-- actually, tonight. Or at least I hope I'm going: I just noticed that my name on the ticket is "ALEXS PANGPHD," which I suspect might get me into trouble when I check in at the airport.
I called United Airlines, and they say that since I booked the flight through the AHA's official travel agent, I have to call them to get my name changed. Though you would think that a travel agency that deals with a professional scholarly association would know better than to make "Ph.D." part of a traveler's surname. Let's hope I can either get this fixed, or it's not really a problem.
To make things even better, our nonstop from SFO to DC has been changed, and we're now booked on a flight that goes through Chicago.
Presumably this is because of bad weather, but being re-routed through O'Hare when there are storms is not a development I really welcome....
For once, it wasn't me dominating the Wii.
Wed 01/02/2008 13:50 01022008566
I rode the exercise bike ten miles this evening for the first time in I don't know how long, so I'm a bit in a New Year's resolution mood. This (along with having a history teacher wife) inspired me to look up the virtues or rules for living that Franklin and Jefferson came up with.
Benjamin Franklin's thirteen virtues were written when he was twenty.
1. Temperance: Eat not to dullness and drink not to elevation.
2. Silence: Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself. Avoid trifling conversation.
3. Order: Let all your things have their places. Let each part of your business have its time.
4. Resolution: Resolve to perform what you ought. Perform without fail what you resolve.
5. Frugality: Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself: i.e. Waste nothing.
6. Industry: Lose no time. Be always employed in something useful. Cut off all unnecessary actions.
7. Sincerity: Use no hurtful deceit. Think innocently and justly; and, if you speak, speak accordingly.
8. Justice: Wrong none, by doing injuries or omitting the benefits that are your duty.
9. Moderation: Avoid extremes. Forebear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.
10. Cleanliness: Tolerate no uncleanness in body, clothes or habitation.
11. Chastity: Rarely use venery but for health or offspring; Never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another's peace or reputation.
12. Tranquility: Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.
13. Humility: Imitate Jesus and Socrates.
Thomas Jefferson's rules, I think, were written when he was quite a bit older:
1. Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today.
2. Never trouble another for what you can do yourself.
3. Never spend your money before you have earned it.
4. Never buy what you don't want because it is cheap.
5. Pride costs more than hunger, thirst and cold.
6. We seldom repent of having eaten too little.
7. Nothing is troublesome that we do willingly.
8. How much pain the evils have cost us that never happened.
9. Take things always by the smooth handle.
10. When angry, count ten before you speak, if very angry, count a hundred.
Interesting how many of Jefferson's are now commonplace. I wonder how these became so well-known? Were they reproduced in some ninteenth-century boys' guide to good conduct, or printed in an early Sears catalog, or something?
[To the tune of Sting, "January Stars," from the album "Exclusive".]
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I'm a research director at the Institute for the Future, a think tank in Silicon Valley, where I conduct research on the future of science and technology. I'm also an Associate Fellow at Oxford University's Saïd Business School, where I work with students on projects related to the future technology and strategy. I'm also a visiting scholar in Stanford's HPST program. More professional details are available in my c.v.
In my free time I'm working on a book on the end of cyberspace, tentatively titled The End of Cyberspace. My first book, Empire and the Sun: Victorian Solar Eclipse Expeditions, was published by Stanford University Press in 2002.
The banner is from a picture taken at Hidden Villa, a farm and conference center in the hills above Silicon Valley, March 2009.
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