Relevant History

Not long now

Two weeks to Cambridge and counting...

[To the tune of Kenneth Gilbert, "Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1 - Prelude & Fugue #3 In C Sharp, BWV 848," from the album Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier (a 3-star song, imo).]

My Christmas gift to everyone: Amazon's customer service number

For years, I got a post-Christmas spike in visitors looking for Amazon's customer service number, which I've blogged about in years past.

To save already-frustrated people from searching through the site, here it is again: it's (800) 201-7575.

Amazon also now has an option to fill out a form and have someone call you, if you prefer.

[To the tune of Simon & Garfunkel, "The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin' Groovy)," from the album The Best Of Simon & Garfunkel (a 2-star song, imo).]

Unfortunate decorating choice, or nudge?

This in the Hotel Durant, in Berkeley:

urinal, via flickr

On the up side, their grilled vegetable panini is excellent.

[To the tune of Joan Jeanrenaud, "Transition," from the album Strange Toys (a 2-star song, imo).]

Scholarly publishing really is just a form of vanity publishing

Okay, all publishing involves at least a little bit of vanity, but... I recently published an article in an Elsevier journal, and today they sent me a message about their "article services."

Think all you can get are reprints? Think again! I could get an "eye-catching, full-color, poster of your article on the cover of the journal," or "an attractive color poster" of my article, "Perfect for your lab or office," or a "Certificate of Publication... in a high-quality frame, dark brown wood with gold trim."

Just in time for the holidays! Except probably not.

I wonder in which countries, or which disciplines, these things sell? Academic life has lots of well-worn rules about display and status, and the book-lined office, piles of paper on the desk (and floor and extra chair), and harried yet abstracted expression are all signifiers of The Life and how well you play it. (Few things mark the boundary between tenured faculty and adjuncts more powerfully than their control of space: the bare office shared with two other people fairly screams, "I'm just here temporarily, pay no attention to me.")

But having a poster advertising an article... that seems over the top, at least in the places I taught. But maybe in places that are very status- and publication-conscious, it's actually useful to have such in-your-face markers of accomplishment?

[To the tune of Keith Jarrett Trio, "You Took Advantage Of Me [Live]," from the album Yesterdays [Live] (a 2-star song, imo).]

"Solvitor ambulando" was the first expression of embodied cognition

In the New York Times, Edinburgh philosopher Andy Clark has a nice essay on embodied cognition. If you're familiar with his book Natural Born Cyborgs, you'll already know the outlines of his argument; but it includes this update:

Most of us gesture (some of us more wildly than others) when we talk... [and it seems that] bodily motions may themselves be playing some kind of active role in our thought process. In experiments where the active use of gesture is inhibited, subjects show decreased performance on various kinds of mental tasks. Now whatever is going on in these cases, the brain is obviously deeply implicated! No one thinks that the physical handwavings are all by themselves the repositories of thoughts or reasoning. But it may be that they are contributing to the thinking and reasoning, perhaps by lessening or otherwise altering the tasks that the brain must perform, and thus helping us to move our own thinking along.

It is noteworthy, for example, that the use of spontaneous gesture increases when we are actively thinking a problem through, rather than simply rehearsing a known solution. There may be more to so-called “handwaving” than meets the eye.

More on this at Contemplative Computing.

[To the tune of Keith Jarrett, "The Mourning Of A Star," from the album The Mourning Of A Star (a 2-star song, imo).]

Starbucks on a rainy day

Busy week

This has turned into a rather busy week: in addition to scheduling several interviews for a new project, I've been dealing with the last edits to my long-developing piece on cubesats, which appears headed for the February issue of Scientific American. Incredible.

working on the edits, via flickr

I've had a great time working with my co-author (I need to collaborate on more articles-- it really is a good experience), but still it'll be really nice to have that piece out. I suspect there could be an interesting short book in here.

I recently had an epiphany about writing. My academic training hammered into me the idea that ideas need time to mature, that more time in the tumbler of your mind would only improve the brilliance your argument, and that books should be long and take years and years to write. In order to guarantee that your work is well-regarded and stands the test of time, you need to write carefully and deliberately.

But what if that's backward in an important respect? What if importance and timelessness-- that elusive quality that gives ideas a life far beyond the author's-- aren't things that authors can really control, but are constructed almost entirely after the fact, but readers and reviewers and respondents?

coffee at Cafe Zoë, via flickr

That suggests that you should write a lot, in order to give your ideas a better chance of surviving the Darwinian competition between ideas: like salmon, only a few will make it to adulthood, so your strategy should be one of fruitfulness rather than intentional profundity. You should get books out quickly while the ideas are still timely-- and thus, ironically, make them more likely to be regarded by readers and critics as timeless. Put out the best work possible in Prolific Mode rather than Thorough Mode, and just accept that only some of it will survive.

I don't know if I can actually pull that off, and I know lots of writers will consider this completely pedestrian an insight, but I think it's worth a try.

[To the tune of Tzimon Barto, "Preludes: Prelude No. 8 in F sharp minor (Molto agitato)," from the album Chopin: Preludes & Nocturnes (a ^r-star song, imo).]

Distraction

Peninsula School, this afternoon, via flickr

[To the tune of Tzimon Barto, "Preludes: Prelude No. 6 in B minor (Assai lento)," from the album Chopin: Preludes & Nocturnes (a 3-star song, imo).]