Below are links to six articles; I’ve assigned one person to each article. There’s no particular significance to which article was assigned to whom–I just went alphabetically by last name.

The articles themselves are short, so I’d like you to read all of them, but you will be responsible for doing a little bit of extra work on the one to which you are assigned. Because one of the things that we’ll be talking about is the effect of digital technology on reading and writing, and because these are all electronic sources, consider the way in which your article is presented. Follow links and read comments (if available). How does the format affect or inform your reading of the text? I’d also like you to be prepared to talk a bit about “your” article: what it’s arguing, how it picks up on issues from earlier in the course and/or the readings for Tuesday, and what you think of its argument.

Thus, then:

• “Libraries of the Future,” from Inside Higher Ed: Emily
• “Bookless Libraries?“, from Inside Higher Ed: Laura
• Mark Prensky, “Digital Natives“: Kaleigh
• “Drop that BlackBerry!“, from CNN.com:  Chris
• Adam Begly’s “Colossus among Critics: Harold Bloom,” from the New York Times: Kristine (If the link takes you to a log-in page, just Google the title and the full article will come up.)
• “Silence the Snobs!“, from Salon.com: Ben

These articles deal with three issues that are relevant for our purposes: the first two concern the effects of digitization on libraries and traditional book holdings; the second two articles (Prensky and CNN) are about the effects of digitization on individuals, and how this affects issues like education; and the last two are about the changing shape of the literary landscape (Harold Bloom famously defends the Western canon and decries many more recent trends in literary studies and theory).

Please let me know right away if any of the links don’t work.

These songwriting luminaries have been trying to start a conversation, but the music press hasn’t, by and large, picked up on their cue….

Andrew W.K.’s official biography mentions that he started taking classical piano lessons at age four, and that he enrolled in the The University Of Michigan School Of Music Pedagogy program at age five.  His latest release, 55 Cadillac, is collection of improvised piano pieces.

Elliott Smith appended the subtitle “Honky Bach” to his song “In the Lost and Found.”  Smith was caught on film performing Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C# Minor.  He called his version “Punkrockmaninoff”:

Billy Corgan was asked this question in 2007:  ”Of all the artists out there living, living or dead, if you had the opportunity to choose one to cover a Smashing Pumpkins song, which artist would you pick and which song would you have them do?”  Corgan replied, “I would choose the as-yet unreleased version of ‘Gossamer’ to be covered by Bach…. good question.”

Matthew Bellamy ends the recording of Muse’s “United States of Eurasia” with a rendition of Chopin’s nocturne in E-flat major (op. 9, no. 2), which the trio rechristened “Collateral Damage.” Bellamy can be seen playing one of Liszt’s Paganini etudes in a video on YouTube.  His band’s latest album concludes with a three-movement “symphony” titled “Exogenesis.”

Spencer Krug, who studied music composition for three years, had this to say about modern music criticism:

Music journalism is really irresponsible right now and it won’t really take its role seriously if not challenged. They make jokes and make elaborate metaphors; like this Vice magazine bullshit, it’s funny on the first read but it doesn’t actually mean anything; I’ll read Vice magazine just like anyone else on the toilet or whatever. Music journalism doesn’t seem well thought out or in-depth. It’s so many wisecracks and plays-on-words, and it’s just piled onto the pile of shit that has already been written about art. And a lot of music journalists right now aren’t doing their jobs, they aren’t contributing to the back-and-forth of culture in a positive way. Music is important, music journalism is important, like criticism is important to art, but it should be used to propagate banter in society, and to further culture.

The above musicians are telling us that they have a living relationship with the Western art music of earlier eras (also known as “classical music”).  Why does the music press not follow up on this fascinating angle?  Are the interviewers insecure about their own relatively limited knowledge of the canon?  There’s no shame in that – simply let the interviewee take the lead.  Think of how informative it would be if every contemporary songwriter was at some point asked the following:

“Who is your favorite classical composer and why?”

Not every songwriter listens to classical music, but I’m guessing most do.  It is absurd it is that we don’t have an answer to that query for most of our era’s top songwriters, some of whom have been asked dozens of times to hold forth on politics, drugs, jet lag, record sales, and all subjects non-musical.  That this hole in our cultural knowledge goes unfilled and unnoticed should tell us how segregated youth culture is from the multigenerational process of real culture.

The above figures clearly want (or wanted) to talk about classical music.  Through the simple act of letting them do so, we would advance our understanding of contemporary music, classical music, and, I think, our era’s place in the timeline of history.  We would let our artists teach us.

Elaine Showalter’s A Jury of Her Peers sounds right on:

She has insisted that themes central to women’s lives — marriage, motherhood, the tension between family and individual aspirations — constitute subject matter as “serious” and significant as traditionally masculine motifs like war and travel. Yet she rejects the preference of many feminist literary scholars for emphasizing “culture importance rather than aesthetic distinction,” and she doesn’t hesitate to describe some of the writers discussed in “A Jury of Her Peers” as artistically limited, if historically interesting.

She also offers an interesting explanation as to why there were great female authors in 19th century England, but not so much in America.

I think that books by, about and concerning women are certainly unfairly trivialized, but I also think that, in service to some mistaken idea of diversity, insignificant works do tend to be dredged up to represent women’s voices during historical periods when women were mostly silenced. Historical revisionism is no help to feminism – if women were uneducated and unliberated, and so unable to write literature or compose music, or do anything other than work, breed and die, we shouldn’t pretend it wasn’t so.

I did feel alienated all through school by reading novel after novel that portrayed women as clingy, irrational, two-dimensional fools – either virgins who sucked the lifeblood out of the protagonist, or predatory ho-bags who first enticed and then suffocated him. I think teachers understand how tiresome this is and want to provide a brief respite, and, while that is important, the solution is not to elevate something substandard just to provide an alternate point of view, because that further convinces those already convinced that all points of view other than theirs are substandard.

Elaine Showalter’s A Jury of Her Peers sounds right on:

She has insisted that themes central to women’s lives — marriage, motherhood, the tension between family and individual aspirations — constitute subject matter as “serious” and significant as traditionally masculine motifs like war and travel. Yet she rejects the preference of many feminist literary scholars for emphasizing “culture importance rather than aesthetic distinction,” and she doesn’t hesitate to describe some of the writers discussed in “A Jury of Her Peers” as artistically limited, if historically interesting.

She also offers an interesting explanation as to why there were great female authors in 19th century England, but not so much in America.

I think that books by, about and concerning women are certainly unfairly trivialized, but I also think that, in service to some mistaken idea of diversity, insignificant works do tend to be dredged up to represent women’s voices during historical periods when women were mostly silenced.  Historical revisionism is no help to feminism – if women were uneducated and unliberated, and so unable to write literature or compose music, or do anything other than work, breed and die, we shouldn’t pretend it wasn’t so.   

I did feel alienated all through school by reading novel after novel that portrayed women as clingy, irrational, two-dimensional fools – either virgins who sucked the lifeblood out of the protagonist, or predatory ho-bags who first enticed and then suffocated him.  I think teachers understand how tiresome this is and want to provide a brief respite, and, while that is important, the solution is not to elevate something substandard just to provide an alternate point of view, because that further convinces those already convinced that all points of view other than theirs are substandard.

To follow up on the Pete Seeger video I posted below, my friend Joe Kille wrote an e-mail to a couple mutual friends and me about Seeger and his particular approach to folk music. Joe basically argued that Seeger was advocating for the homogenization of folk music by trying to standardize the folk repertoire a la Rise Up Singing. To Joe’s credit though, he was also moved by the whole “This Land Is Your Land” singalong, so he’s no party-pooper. I wanted to quote the whole e-mail, but the formatting was just insane, so here’s a taste (in order print this here, Joe wanted me to note that he did not edit this at all – hence overuse of parentheses, typos, etc):

I know it was the 60’s reformed communist dream that we could all understand each other through some uni-culture but that does a lot to whitewash peoples/music/cultures. Kind of kills the whole Lomax / Lost Sounds idea (of which some people say seeger was involved…what?)

…

Seeger travelled the country singing other people’s songs. His contributions to the folk cannon are notable (turn, turn, turn; where have all the flowers gone?; if I had a hammer) but lack any real teeth. Pete Seeger (more than dylan) made a career aping Guthrie’s legacy. Where Guthrie was singing specifics, Seeger is singing generalities.

Maybe I’m a prematurely crusty old man, but I think that the idea that any song can be song by a huge group of people can only go so far (despite the fact that This Land Is Your Land should be our national anthem). As irritating as it is when they do it, the Carolina Chocolate Drops do it best when they sing other people’s songs, which is to give an exhaustive measure of where you can hear the original (or earliest recorded) version of the song and from what musical tradition it came. Even then, they wind up putting their own spin on the songs they sing (even if just instrumentation wise) and recognize it. If you’ve ever read Pete Seegers Folk Singer guide you get the impressions that he’s laying out the way that people should perform by themselves and with a group and that’s it. As a country, we don’t need directions for how to perform music. It will just happen by itself. As Big Bill Broonzy said (when asked if what he was singing was considered a folk song) “It must be, I’ve never heard a horse sing it.”

First off, I’m obviously with him on the awesomeness of the inclusion of the “lost” verse of “This Land Is Your Land” at the inaugural concert. His major point, besides dissing Seeger’s lame voice and playing (and I’m with him on that) is that he is basically advocating for a standardization/homogenization of folk music, something that is almost inherently heterogeneous. I agree that folk music is in many ways a spontaneous, improvised experience rooted in distinct cultural traditions. In a country like the United States where many different traditions and folk musics eventually became intertwined to the point where we can legitimately talk of American folk music that includes blues, old time, zydeco, corridos, etc. This is especially true since many of these divisions were created by record executives who were maybe not directly of the cultures from where these folk traditions came.

Seeger was similar to these executives in terms of his relative outsider status, but engaged in similar manipulation of what “folk” really meant. I do think that almost anybody talking about this engages in some kind of manipulation of what is basically a not-entirely-definable term, so to say that Seeger manipulated its meaning is not necessarily a bad or evil thing. So even if Seeger is maybe aesthetically lame, the fact that he popularized much of this music was an important contribution, especially since he did not actually succeed in his drive to standardize what he saw as a folk canon of sorts.

Also, it’s worth considering the alternative. Many different parties are constantly trying to define what America means. Both of us might agree that a search for a clean and tidy national definition is a stupid, pointless quest to begin with. That in and of itself might explain your problem with Seeger. He’s trying to define the indefinable. But if there are going to be others defining it by “I’m Proud To Be An American” and all other kinds of vaguely objectionable drivel that is often part of the conversation when it comes to American music, it’s nice to know that someone fought for a definition of this country that could include not only “This Land Is Your Land,” but a host of other blues and old-time standards. These are songs that were presented in a particularly lame, and perhaps harmful (with regards to Seeger’s overeager attempts to standardize a folk canon), but can at least provide an opening for many Americans to explore the real folk traditions of this country. I know that growing up in the house of South African immigrants, Seeger was a way for my parents to introduce me to the music of a country who folkways they only kind of understood themselves.

And anyway, without Seeger, that singalong at the Lincoln Memorial could’ve been “God Bless America” instead of Guthrie’s response.

Every once in a while, my reading life will experience a drought.  Nothing seems readable, interesting, worth my time, et cetera.  Then, for some reason or another, I will become inundated with books, and as enjoyable as one might be, six is definitely better, and why not, if I’m already reading six at once, make it seven?  This leads to some pretty interesting dreams–otherwise, I mainly love having a big stack of books to get through.

Anyhow, this past couple of weeks has been a time of plenty, and I thought I would share my reading list.  These are all (so far) really solid pieces of writing, and they fill the spectrum from fiction to memoir to science writing.  Something for everybody.  Let’s go.

Dreams from my Father; The Audacity of Hope:

Do I have to tell you the author?  I’m probably late on reading these, at any rate, they’d be great even if Obama wasn’t the President of the United States.  But he is, and that added little bit of context pushes the relevance that much farther.  Read them if only for the reason of experiencing the contrast of introspection between our current pres and the former (woohoo!).  It’s mind-boggling.  Plus, in Dreams he drops some swear words–who can’t like that?

Pour Your Heart Into it (plus some subtitle I can’t remember right now):

This is Howard Schulz’s book about building that coffee behemoth Starbucks.  Relevant to me because that’s who cuts my checks, but also an interesting story about a very idealistic program set to the beat of corporate America.  It’s hard to tell who’s winning.  These days at the Bucks, I find a lot of conflict with our ideals and the actual day-to-day operation, which resembles any other fast food joint more than anything else.  But, in all honesty, most people are still driven by the culture that Howie outlines in this book, and they still believe that Starbucks is the place to experience a different side of the corporation.  Maybe so.  I’m not going to jump on that bandwagon just yet.

If you can get past the patronizing idealism and the not-so-subtle selling of the prose (books written by business men are always ghostwritten and usually at a fifth grade level) then you might find some good stuff in here.  Mainly, it won’t totally waste your time.

Climbing Mount Improbable

You probably know this author by his more controversial book, The God Problem.  In this one, Richard Dawkins attempts to form a winding proof of evolution.  It’s pretty good, but if you already subscribe to the “theory,” then it will probably just function as a buttress to an already well-structured cathedral.  There’s a cool section on the evolution of spider webs (hadn’t thought about that, had you?), so even if it is preaching to the choir, it’s still a good sermon.

Hip Hop Wars:  What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop, and Why it Matters

I haven’t talked about my almost religious adoration and allegiance to hip hop on this blog, but those who know me know that I’ve spent a large part of my life by now enthralled by this music and culture.  I’ll save most of my general tirade for a future post, but suffice it to say that if you’re not listening to hip hop, you’re not listening to modern American culture.  As hip hop enters its thirtieth year, I think it’s fair to say that it’s experiencing a lot of the same life issues that your average thirty year old feels:  loss of youth, accountability to the past, responsibility for the future.  Also like a lot of thirty-somethings, there’s a fair bit of denial, and the author, Tricia Rose, writes this book as a call to arms against the all to easy “eyes wide shut” attitude taken on by many of hip hop’s listeners.  She also takes to task the many, many critics of the culture.  She is fearless and heartfelt in her arguments; she is not an outsider performing a sociological deconstruction, but rather, an aficionado and advocate for the massive potential that hip hop has to positively affect the world.

My main disappointment with this book is that it is largely concerned with the most popular of artists, and leaves out the many hundreds of artists who are already actively engaged in these issues.  I suppose there’s only so much you can do in one book, but I’m still waiting for the underground hip hop manual to hit the shelves.

Cradle to Cradle

LB lent me this book–the first thing I noticed about it was how heavy it is.  Seriously.  Are the pages made of plastic?  Oh, yes, they are.  William McDonough and Michael Braungart lay down their vision of a design world that considers every product as a continuing piece of the entire ecosystem and the economy.  Sounds weird?  It is, but they make a compelling case.  The easiest example is in the construction of the book itself.   Any other book is subject to what they call downcycling, in that as it is recycled, the materials it is made of can only be used in progressively inferior products, until eventually, it’s just trash.  By contrast, this book is made in such a way that the ink can be “washed” from the pages and reclaimed to print an entirely different book.  Or the pages could be reclaimed to make another product entirely.

Their vision for industry in general works like this.  It’s basically a paradigm shift from how do we lessen our impact to how do we positively impact the world?  It’s a book I recommend largely because I don’t have a lot of faith that people are going to pick up these ideas, and they really should.  So read it.  Because I said so.

Coyote

Okay, here’s where I start to geek out.  This book, by Allen Steele, isn’t the best sci-fi novel I’ve ever read (let’s go ahead and give that accolade to Sirens of Titan, by Kurt Vonnegut), but it’s fun and has some great environments.  The basic premise is interstellar colonization, but it takes place in a political setting that closely resembles the last eight years in America.  There’s a lot of interesting plot points in here, plus the fun of reading about settling a new planet, but if you only read one part and then throw the book away, read about the crew member who wakes up in the middle of the journey and spends the rest of his life alone on the space ship.  Chilling, because he pretty much goes insane.  I love insane space travel.

The Canon/A Short History of Nearly Everything

I still have intentions of weaving these last two books into another post, but let’s just say that these are two great, accessible science books.  The Canon comes with the subtitle “A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science,” and the author, Natalie Angier, isn’t kidding around.  Her quest is to educate us on the basic scientific knowledge that professional scientists wish the laity would have.  These days, I’m sure they would settle for the knowledge that “theory” doesn’t mean “guess,” but she dishes out basic knowledge in every scientific field that I’m aware of, at least.  Bonus points for writing beautifully about it, too. Plenty of witty alliteration, assonance and et cetera.

The “Short History” has one of the best creation stories that I’ve read in a while, and I love a Big Bang retelling.  I haven’t finished this one yet, so I’m not sure of the overall quality–the geology chapter has been pretty excruciating–but as it is, interesting stuff.

Okay, there it is.  At least one of these books ought to flip your lid, or at least satisfy you while you go to sleep, so good luck.

That’s it.  I can’t take it anymore.  I just can’t read The Canon.  Anyone want a copy?  I love what is in the Canon, I just can’t get past the way it’s written.  I’m tempted to try and see what someone in our writing center would think of it, or even better, one of our English professors.

I’m back on track, and am starting to enjoy reading this book again.  In chapter 3 of The Canon, Angier takes on measurement and types of scales.  Her primary focus is on getting readers to look beyond their normal human-based sense of scale, so that they can deal with the extremely large, and the extremely small, both of which we are not really equipped to easily understand.  Basically, calibration in this chapter is about fitting these into our human perspective of them.

The chapter starts with Angier reminiscing about how a visit to the neighborhood she grew up in humbled her, “what distressed me was how minor and compressed everything seemed”.  Her perspective of course was that of an adult looking back at childhood memories.  I can relate.  I still vaguely remember the dog that my parents had when I was born.  It seemed like a giant.  It was a beagle, and I was two.  So we need to escape our human perspective on size.

Angier argues that much of our perspective is related to our particular place in the solar system, and that gravity plays a large role here.  We inhabit a planet that revolves on its axis approximately once every 24 hr.  We complete our circuit around the Sun once every year.  Distances also come into play – measured first by body parts of monarchs, and slowly becoming standardized (at least for most of the world) to the easy to use metric system, based on simple powers of ten.

From there, Angier deals first with time, and then with distance.  She and her interviewees argue that human concepts of time are somewhat strange, inherently limited to our planet and solar system.  The universe has either been around a very long time (13.5 billion years), or an astonishingly short time (13.5 billion years).  Several ways to put the Earth’s 4.5 billion year lifetime into human perspective like a day, or a year.

After working with very long times, she looks at very short times, down to trillionths of seconds.  One nice comparision is that of the Earth vs. a quark.  In its lifetime the earth has “only” made 5 x 10⁹ orbits around the Sun. A quark, in its lifetime, completes about 2 x 10¹⁰ orbits. Which is more stable? (Of course, quarks have short lifetimes…).

Then its off to distance. From the astonishingly large size of the universe, and it’s vast stretches of emptiness, to the amazingly small sizes of atoms and molecules (how many oxygen molecules fit on a pinhead?). All put into human terms.

So, ultimately, a nice chapter. However, I frequently was wishing for more detail. As usual, just as her points were becoming more interesting, she would take off in a different direction.

Sorry it took so long for me to get back to The Canon.  In the second chapter, Angier writes about probability.  As I posted earlier, I had a hard time reading this chapter, mostly because everytime that Angier seemed to be getting to a point, she would veer off in another slightly related direction.  What my friend earlier called tangents.

It seems like this is probably a reasonably good chapter for introducing non scientists to basic statistics.  Angier concentrates on the types of statistics that are widely reported, such as medical studies.  she gives a sense of what 95% confidence means, especially when N is really large (sometimes there are a large number of outliers).

Mean vs. median is covered, as is the universality of the normal distribution.  The biggest omission, in my opinion, is lack of any mention of the standard deviation.  In my experience, this is just as important a measure of a distribution as it’s mean and median, and seems like an important concept to get across to the general public.

“Science is not a body of facts.  Science is a state of mind.  It is a way of viewing the world, of facing reality square on but taking nothing on its face.” -Natalie Angier, The Canon

About a week ago I came home from work and found my kids perplexed with our TV.  The volume wasn’t working and they didn’t know what to do.  My first grader knew about the “volume” and “mute” buttons on the remote, but neither worked for her.  This was clearly a family crises, so I made correcting this situation my top priority.  

First I turned the amplifier mute on and then off.  Nope.  Then the cable receiver mute on and then off.  No again.  Next I rebooted the cable box.  Didn’t work.  But when I tried the mute button on the cable receiver again, voila!  We have all used a simple sequential problem solving process like this for issues with a TV, computer, or some other home appliance.  By developing a clear hypothesis, isolating potential solutions, and testing these solutions one at a time, we are implicitly using the scientific method.  The feedback loop on whether our experiments worked or not is abundantly clear — the volume is either on or off.

Then we go to work.  And despite a degree from XYZ university in engineering or business, we often apply less scientific rigor to product development than we do to fixing the volume on our televisions at home.  Think about it.  Product releases are often packed with features.  Why?  The product development leadership has decided that those features are what the customer wants, right?  But how will they know if their hypotheses are right if they are simultaneously running a large number of experiments (features)?  Sure they can develop statistical inference models to isolate certain variables, but why go there?  It’s like trying to solve a home PC internet connectivity problem by trying every potential solution simultaneously.  That’s a terrible algorithm, yet it dominates product development.

Less is More?

There is a fashionable design philosophy in product development circles these days — let’s call it less is more.  37signals has been a champion of this approach, but there are many others.  A key tenet of the philosophy is that uncluttered products with fewer, better features are preferred to similar products with more features.  I agree with the less is more product development approach, but for a different reason.

The reason I like less is more as an approach is that it allows for a more scientific approach to product development.  By starting a new product off with as few features as possible (1?), you can be incredibly scientific.  With 10 features in a single release, you may spend more time trying to figure out what is working and what isn’t working than it took to build the thing in the first place.  As you incrementally experiment with your product, you can observe the impact of a particular feature one at a time and adjust accordingly.  

Scientific product development.

So this leads us to the following approach to developing new products.

Step 1.  Have a very clear idea of the problem you are trying to solve.  

Step 2.  Develop a hypothesis about the minimal feature set that will address the problem (ideally just one thing). You can do research or just have a gut feeling about the answer.  A good “product picker” offers significant leverage in this step of the process.

Step 3.  Test your hypothesis by shipping product quickly.  A killer engineering team provides massive leverage in this step of the process.

Step 4.  Observe the results of the experiment.  Did the results of your test match what you expected?  If not, kill the feature and start over at Step 2.  If things worked, continue feature development by starting over at Step 1 again.

Most experiments fail.  Many teams do a relatively good job on Steps 1 through 3, but forget the importance of Step 4.  Instead of killing bad features, they simply add more hoping that feature 10 will somehow make crappy features 1 through 9 better.  

By embracing a scientific approach to product development, not only will your business have a much higher probability of success, but it will also be a more fun and creative place to work.  Nothing kills innovation like the fear of failure.  And nothing leads to failure like a process that resembles astrology more than it does astronomy.

Believe it or not, I am still reading The Canon.  I’ve been mired in the chapter about probability for quite a while.  The information is interesting, but one of my friends said it quite well in an email:

“I started reading the Canon, and I have to admit that I find her writing style very distracting. It’s too bloated with weird or unnecessary metaphors and tangents.”

I have to agree.  Scientists are taught very early on to write concisely with well structured sentences and paragraphs.  While this blog may not be a good example of that type of writing, I’d argue that The Canon is even worse.  I guess that’s what the “Whirligig” part of the tour in the book’s title means.

I promise to get something posted about chapter two this week.  Really.

“The quest to answer a question is where the learning takes place, not the answer itself.”

-Dick Zare, Stanford University in his Chemical and Engineering New editorial (July 14, 2008).

I really hope that a lot of non-scientists read this book.  I also really hope a lot of scientists, and students who are thinking about becoming scientists do too.  Angier’s synopsis of her intereviews with scientists about what scientific thought is are good.  Wordy, but good.  [1]

Here’s some of what you might get from this chapter:

• Science is a way of thinking, not a set of facts to memorize.
• Science is not reductionism.  Understanding science enhances one’s appreciation for the natural world.
• Scientific thought is based on evidence.  Good evidence can (eventually) be revolutionary.
• Science is uncertain.  And that is certainly a fact.
• Scientific thought is not math.

I can’t agree more that science is a way of thinking, and not a set of facts to memorize.  I think this is a misconception that many students, teachers, textbook authors (or at least publishers) have.  As a chemistry professor, I frequently encounter the dogma of science from many different sides.  Students want to know what will be on the test.  Colleagues worry about the amount of content covered in a course.  The facts, however, are that research in scientific pedagogy show that students learn more and enjoy the subject more when depth of coverage, rather than breadth is emphasized. [2]

The message?  When science is treated as dogmatic facts, it turns people off.  The joy in science is the doing of it, the method, the process.  That’s where you learn new things, often things you didn’t set out to learn.

Reductionism.  It’s almost as dirty a word as liberal.  Or conservative.  We scientists are often labeled as reductionists, who take all the natural beauty, mystery, and magic from nature when we explain why the sky is blue.  Or why guacamole turns brown. [3]  Or why squirting lemon juice on guacamole slows the browning process down. [4]

Kant said it best (pg 26 of Canon):

The most astonishing thing about the universe is that it can be understood.

In any kind of rational world, understanding adds to the beauty.  That’s my opinion.

Speaking of opinion, that is not what science is about.  Science demands evidence. Opinions don’t.  The only facts from science are the data that we measure.  So we’re very careful to do it well, and we constantly question our own and other’s measurements.  Eventually, some data becomes “fact”, with a bit of uncertainty of course.  Then the interpretations come.  These may change over time – which is exactly why science is not a set of facts to be memorized!

Uncertainty.  We scientists live with it.  A measurement without some statement of the error in it is worthless.  Unfortunately this is often used as a way for politicians to confuse issues, “They aren’t 100% sure…”.  If I told you I was 95% confident that a piano was going to land on your head if you didn’t move, what would you do?  I thought so.  That’s the confidence level that we like to work at – 95%.  If you’d jump out of the way of a piano (even though I’m not 100% sure it will hit you) [5], shouldn’t you take this type of uncertainty seriously?

Finally, scientific thought is not math.  Mathematics does an amazingly good job of helping scientists communicate.  As an experimental physical chemist, math is an important part of my toolbox.  But so is creativity and the ability to apply duct tape to the right part of an apparatus and keep it working.  My colleague, who is a theoretical chemist (theoretical meaning quantum mechanic, not a comment on him as a chemist) uses mathematics at a much higher level than I do.  Some chemists use little more than arithmetic.  Mathematics is useful only because when we make measurements, we often wind up with numerical results, or because it is simply easier to communicate with mathematics.

Probabilites are important.  That’s the subject of the next chapter.

[1]  Scientists are taught to write concisely.  Angiers is not a scientist.  That’s ok though.

[2]  See the Chemist’s Guide to Effective Teaching, Pienta, Cooper and Greenbowe (Prentice Hall, 2005).

[3]  Polyphenyl oxidase, an enzyme, catalyzes the polymerization of catechol.  The polymer is the brown stuff.

[4]  Ascorbic acid inhibits the enzymatic polymerization of catechol.

[5]  Made you look!  This is just here in case Ψ*Ψ is reading.

I’ve always been interested in how to communicate science and what I do to non-scientists.  I admit, I’m not always the best at it, but I hope I am able to convey some sense of the fun I have doing it.  Last week, on a trip to Powell’s with a colleague and some of our summer research students, I picked up a copy of The Canon:  A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science, by Natalie Angier, a science writer at the New York Times.  I had seen it advertised somewhere, and had been meaning to read it sometime soon as I prepare to teach a non-science major writing course next spring semester.

My plan is to blog as I read each chapter in the book.  I want a record of what I think about the book so I can look back as I prepare for the course I’ll teach in the spring since I’m thinking about using Canon (and I’ll have to be careful not to write Cannon) for the course.  My goal, by the way, for this course is to get non-science majors interested in science.  We’ll see what happens.  If any of the dozen or so folks who read this blog have the time, I’d love to get your feedback too.  Sort of an on-line book discussion, but don’t feel like you have to read the book.  I’m especially interested in the thoughts of any non-scientists out there.

Below the fold, I’ve summarized what I think about the Introduction.

Introduction:  Sisyphus Sings with a Ying

Why is Angier writing about science?  Because she likes it.  She admits that she wouldn’t have been a scientist, but she took more science courses than the average writing major – enough to know that lab work was her Achilles heel.  She wants to communicate science to non-scientists, which is of course her job at the Times.  So why a book?  She goes through several arguments for why:

1. The public should know more about the basics of science so they can make informed decisions about current public issues (stem cell research, genetic engineering, bisphenol in water bottles…)
2. A better understanding of science leads to a less gullible public (i.e. The Secret, Astrology, water witching).  My favorite book for this by the way is Carl Sagan’s The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark.
3. A more science literate public would better understand the need for funding of fundamental scientific research.
4. Science is fun.  But the process of learning science drives all of the fun out of it.

Angier chooses the last, because it seems to resonate the most with her.  I agree.  Science is fun.  As the advisor for our department’s chemistry club, I get to go to the local elementary schools and do hands on activities that are always a huge hit.   By the time kids get to me in college though, many come in saying they hate science.  Angier picks up on this, particularly the number of grown-ups who have flunked high school chemistry.

The rest of the introduction describes why grown ups, who have lost interest in science (or had it beaten out of them in college or high school) should read her book.  She talks about knowing just for the sake of knowing, understanding where their tax money is going and what it is being used for, and one of my favorites, being able to have a conversation with a scientist at a cocktail party.

The book focuses on the hard sciences:  physics, chemistry, biology, geology.  The table of contents tells the story:

1. Thinking Scientifically
2. Probabilities
3. Calibration
4. Physics
5. Chemistry
6. Evolutionary Biology
7. Molecular Biology
8. Geology
9. Astronomy

Angiers has interviewed hundreds of scientists, many of whom are quite famous, and forced them to tell her what the most fundamental ideas in their fields are.  She is striving for depth rather than breadth of coverage, which is in tune with what all science pedagogical research points to (for science and non-science majors, which she gets half right).

I am looking forward to reading the rest of the book, and will provide an update on the first chapter soon.  I’ll also recommend this book to as many of my non-science friends as I can, particularly in light of recent posts about the two cultures on Science Blogs.

Sean O’Brien defends the canon in yesterday’s Guardian. I don’t quite know what to make of it. On the one hand his call to read serious poetry is right; and I agree that it’s important to see oneself as ‘part of a continuum, a community extending across history’. On the other hand, I can’t help but think that beneath the polished prose this is just another subtle, indirect attack on the avant-garde, the innovative – whatever you call it.

For a start, whilst O’Brien readily namechecks the canonical poets he seeks to defend, he doesn’t offer any specifics at all on the kind of poetry he would like to see less of. A clever ploy, because it makes his case a tricky one to argue against.

Autonomy and seriousness come under threat because they represent an obstacle to the progress of the kind of ignorance that prefers to suppose that everything can be consumed, excreted and replaced, that one thing is much like another, and that anyway nobody cares or has time to make their own distinctions. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Yeats, Eliot, Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Walcott and Plath and all the others suggest otherwise. Who would we rather believe? Who would we rather spend our time with? The choice is ours, for the moment.

Is the choice really ours? The pool from which we draw expands and contracts according to the tastes of the age. And taste is driven – by people like O’Brien for instance. One of his other major bugbears is the marketing of poetry† (‘consumed, excreted and replaced’ is partly a nod to that), but this article is itself marketing par excellence. If he bothered to mention some of the poetry he doesn’t want us to read, then we could make some kind of choice. But of course he won’t. Because this whole thing is an exercise in drawing in, tightening, closing up.

O’Brien says, ‘poetry’s subject is life in all its manifestations’. A true thing. But poetry itself is manifested in innumerable ways, inside, outside and on the fringes of authorised/notional imagined canons. It’s a diverse artform and I want access to as much of the good stuff as possible – whatever camp it’s in. Luckily for those with Catholic tastes this first decade of the twenty-first century promises a new diversity of poetries, a breaking away from the centre ground held by certain ‘important’ writers and critics.

I’m sorry to denounce Sean O’Brien so strongly – I know this is just a thought-piece to promote The Guardian’s new series on ‘Great Poets’. Besides, he has his ground to protect, as do all who are involved in this precarious business of poetry. And I guess we should be grateful someone with knowledge and passion is standing up for any kind of poetry at all in the broadsheets.

† O’Brien publicly, though not on the record, attacked my book / touring project Generation Txt for this reason. I don’t think he’s read the book, mind. I’d be happy to send him a copy of course!

Today I attended the first day of a two-day College Board workshop meant to provide additional training to teachers of Advanced Placement English Language and Composition. I’ve been to a number of these over the years, and College Board’s trainers tend to be better than the average presenters we get in education. The workshops also provide an opportunity to see what teachers at other schools are doing with their students.

Anyway, the only reason I bother to write about this is because of an interesting conversation/confrontation that happened almost immediately at the beginning of the session. As per usual with these things, we were to introduce ourselves–how long we’d been teaching, where we teach, the grade levels we teach, etc. The presenter also asked us to identify the book we most enjoyed “teaching.” That was the verb used–”teaching.” We were in a circle; I was one of the last people to have to introduce myself, and I heard repeatedly “I like to teach Gatsby” or “I like to teach Night” or “I like to teach To Kill a Mockingbird” or “I teach Faulkner.” I was getting a little antsy. Here’s why: 1) I don’t teach books–I don’t even know what it means to teach a book, 2) I rarely have my students read a complete book as part of their curriculum–I abridge almost everything, and 3) I’d been in this same situation more than once, and I knew that saying this was going to rub some of these English teachers the wrong way. And of course it did rub wrong, in particular two musty hags of the old school, one of whom cut me off condescendingly in mid-sentence: “So you’re saying that your kids never read a whole book?”

As pleasantly as possible, I tried to explain that I aim to expose my students to a multiplicity of voices and themes and rhetorical styles and methods, and that I didn’t see my primary job as fostering a love of literature; rather, I believe that the main duty of the English teacher is to facilitate the development of reading, composition, and thinking. I tried to explain that, even in my AP classes, most of my students are not avid readers and most of my students do not read at their grade level, and therefore struggling through 4 or 5 novels or plays over the course of one year didn’t seem as valuable to me as working through over a hundred different writers writing in a variety of styles for a variety of purposes. I tried to explain that reading a selection on slavery from 1789 by Olaudah Equiano in conjunction with a 2005 UN report on human trafficking, and then responding to these text was a far more valuable skill than wading through a dusty “classic” hunting down “universal” themes (whatever those are…).

The response, predictably was: “You mean, your 11th graders don’t read The Scarlet Letter? They don’t read Gatsby? That’s terrible!”

Why? Why should The Scarlett Letter or The Great Gatsby be so reverently “taught” to sixteen and seventeen year olds in this country? I like both of these books–I really do (although I think Gatsby is possibly the most overrated and over-read book ever published, and I’d take Hawthorne’s fabulous short stories any day over dreary Dimsdale and Hester Prynne)–but what purpose is there in making kids read them? Are they truly that relevant, or important?

I should be clear here that I am in no way at all against students reading these books; I wish that they would read these books, in fact. Only, I wish that they would love reading so much that they would be inspired to read books that they’ve heard are great or classic. But here’s the thing: I don’t think that telling a student they must read a book and that that book is a great work of literature and that they should enjoy or be inspired by that book is in any way a fair proposition. It leads only to anxiety, frustration, boredom, and then defeat.

Instead, English teachers should recognize that literature is just one part of reading and writing, and that most of our students are not going to go on to be English teachers or fiction writers. We should focus on a heteroglossic range of voices, styles, and purposes in introducing texts into the classroom. Students should be taught to respond to a variety of texts across a variety of disciplines, not to a few canonical authors. What happens more often than not in English classrooms is something like this: students are forced to read a work too complex for them to comprehend; they rely on the teacher’s interpretation to guide them through the novel (never having been taught a close-reading method that might give them access to the text); the student then writes a meaningless recapitulation of the teacher’s own “universalist” interpretation of the literary work, to the egotistical delight of the teacher who is enthralled that the student has “got it.” What’s lost is the opportunity to engage in relevant, “real-life” writing, writing that enters into an ongoing conversation in a meaningful way.

This is has been a straight-up rant–I’m sorry. I think that the following scene from Freaks and Geeks says it all better than I just did. Kim Kelly (Busy Phillips) critiques On the Road:

Apart from the question of “Who has the rights to the lands of Palestine?” little can be more contentious than the question, “What counts as philosophy?” What are the bounds of this discipline of ours? I like to think that there aren’t any clear and proper boundaries but that there is a roughly common approach (but don’t ask me to define it) and, delightfully, a common canon (at least for what is understood as pre-20th century western philosophy, though lamentably white, male philosophy). Anyone of any persuasion teaching an intro to philosophy class is likely to include some of the philosophers Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Bentham, Locke, Hume, Kant, Mill, Rousseau, and maybe some selection from Marx, Nietsche, and James. With texts of the twentieth century all bets are off. But what’s one century in a discipline that goes back 25? Given our long history, we’ve had nothing like the canon wars that tore apart English departments in the 1980s. The common canon saves us, but it doesn’t give us a way to define or set bounds to what philosophy is. Philosophy has a way of undermining boundaries, like the boundary between what is properly philosophical and what is not. Just try to set up a fence and see how long it stands.

Even to the extent that we have a common canon, the question of what counts as philosophy is desperately unclear, at least once one strays from a “view-from-nowhere” approach to metaphysics, epistemology, value theory, logic, or any of the many philosophy-of-x arenas. Once the approach becomes more specific and situated, the border wars arise. And the lines are usually drawn between what is hegemonically understood as proper philosophy and what is not. Philosophy that is not in fashion in “the best” schools, not “prestigious,” not hard and clear and rigorous, not properly erected — including today American pragmatism, critical theory, post-Kantian European philosophy, and, oh, certainly feminist philosophy — doesn’t seem to count as philosophy at all, at least by those who are counting and protecting a certain definition of proper philosophy.

Just look (and you’ll have to scroll down and then scan the rigt-hand column) at the specialities of the list of evaluators who were invited to rank graduate programs in philosophy for the 2006 Philosophical Gourmet Report. I am told by a defender of the report that this is a “remarkably diverse” group of good philosophers and so it is truly able to gauge what are, objectively, the outstanding graduate programs in philosophy. Any program that doesn’t end up on the list, I’m told, simply isn’t a good program.

Shocking.

Who defines what counts as good philosophy and hence who counts as the good philosophers? Isn’t this kind of counting tantamount to defining philosophy itself, to saying that M&E (metaphysics and epistemology) counts, but feminist philosophy doesn’t? Or if it’s feminist, it isn’t M&E? Or if it’s concerned with Derrida and not Tarski, or the late Wittgenstein but not the early Wittgenstein, it just ain’t philosophy?

Is that very philosophical?

The New Testament and the Deuterocanonicals: Romans-2 Corinthians

It is often claimed by Roman Catholic apologists that the New Testament is full of quotations, citations, or allusions to the deuterocanonical or apocryphal writings, which is supposed to prove that Christ and the apostles considered these books canonical.

This is the fourth article (of four), examining some 78 alleged uses of the deuterocanonicals or apocryphal writings in the New Testament.

Article here.

The New Testament and the Deuterocanonicals: Ephesians-James

It is often claimed by Roman Catholic apologists that the New Testament is full of quotations, citations, or allusions to the deuterocanonical or apocryphal writings, which is supposed to prove that Christ and the apostles considered these books canonical.

This is the third article (of four), examining some 78 alleged uses of the deuterocanonicals or apocryphal writings in the New Testament.

Article here.

The New Testament and the Deuterocanonicals: Romans-2 Corinthians

It is often claimed by Roman Catholic apologists that the New Testament is full of quotations, citations, or allusions to the deuterocanonical or apocryphal writings, which is supposed to prove that Christ and the apostles considered these books canonical.

This is the second article (of four), examining some 78 alleged uses of the deuterocanonicals or apocryphal writings in the New Testament.

Article here