One Trick Pony

Had lunch yesterday with two colleagues, one who retired three years ago, the other who’s probably less than five years away from it. Among lots of other things, we talked about the difficulties faced by people who retire without any hobbies lying in wait ready to take up the slack. My retired friend hasn’t had that problem, and I don’t think I will either (ten years from now), as I’ve got enough projects in mind to keep me happily engaged for another half century.

If I run out of old projects, though, making things like THIS looks like fun. After decades of slinging pixels, it might be good to rearrange atoms for awhile.

In the interim, maybe I’ll just buy one. [via Boing Boing]

Spent parts of Thursday and Friday in Portland for five hours on stage at the Northwest Council for Computing Education. It was my second quick trip there, and now I’ve spent a total of 48 hours in Oregon. Seemed like a very liveable city: good food, beautiful rivers and bridges, courteous, positive people, and a light rail system that took me all the way back to the airport for $1.55. Hope to spend more time there someday.

In the dead time between my two Friday sessions, I wandered through the vendor area and saw nothing new except Mediator 7 which collected quite a crowd of paying customers. What does it do? It claims to let you create interactive presentations in a jiffy and export them as DHTML or Flash for CDROM or web delivery. Just what I need to get EDTEC 570 ready for going online over the next three weeks. Unfortunately it’s Windows only, but I’m willing to stoop in order to get the job done. The box should arrive Wednesday. We’ll see!

What can one say about this?

Or this?

Or this?

So many clever people out there.

Interesting article in The Chronicle.

“John M. Gottman and his colleagues have developed “influence functions” to illustrate how the partners in various types of couples influence each other’s moods over the course of a difficult conversation. The horizontal axis represents a range of verbal and facial expressions — from highly critical and contemptuous (on the left) to highly supportive and affectionate (on the right).”

Rings true to me, and it’s comforting to see that the model predicts that conflict-avoiding marriages tend to be long and stable. I wonder if this would make a good project for my Simulation and Games class next fall?

Cool stuff! The Historical Event Markup and Linking Project is developing XML schema for describing events, locations, etc. It gives you multiple ways to store and display the unfolding of history.

Around ten years ago some teachers and I wrote a proposal to Apple (never funded) for something called The Boswell Project. We were going to build a tool for kids to analyze the lives of individuals as a way to study history. It was going to be HyperCard-based and the resulting files would be shared and compared clunkily by putting them on a local fileserver. Nowadays, HEML would be the way to go and the sharing would be transparent and instantly global. Wish I had time to play with this. [Via Ed Tech Dev]

By now you’ve probably seen the decks of cards they’re giving to the troops to help them identify Iraq’s most wanted former bigwigs.

I’m sure a zillion spoofs of those cards will be appearing all over cyberspace any minute now, and, with a free hour on a lazy Saturday morning, I couldn’t help making one myself. These

American Personality Identification Cards are designed to help you spot the neocons and spleenmongers who have dragged us into this mess. By the next election and by displacing them on the media with new faces, may we soon make them former bigwigs themselves.

Is it just me, or does it seem just a little creepy that you can buy gas masks now at Fry’s? Are things going askew so gradually that we can accept living in perpetual alert status without getting worked up about it?

It reminds me a bit of The Sheep Look Up, the classic John Brunner novel in which the environment degrades slowly and commercial bandaids like oxygen vending machines and birth defect insurance step in to smooth over the symptoms without addressing the root cause.

That’s one of life’s enduring questions, especially for the disoriented. Thanks to IndyJunior, a tool that combines Flash and XML, I now have created an answer to the question for myself on a new page called Where’s Bernie?.

Now that I’ve played some with XML, I’m eager to apply it to other things like lesson planning and adventure games. Stay tuned.

From the The Smoking Gun:

“In an exquisite example of unfortunate timing, as the SARS epidemic rages in the Pacific Rim, magazine advertisements placed by the Hong Kong Tourism Board promote the city as a vacation destination that “will take your breath away.” The half-page ad is appearing this month in a variety of British publications, including Cosmopolitan (which is where TSG found the below ad, placed prominently on page six of the fashion mag’s April edition). Shortness of breath is one of the principal symptoms of severe acute respiratory illness, or SARS. The illness, which apparently began in China and then moved to Hong Kong, has resulted in about 100 deaths and more than 3000 cases worldwide. The tourism ad campaign was planned before the SARS outbreak and print ads could not be yanked in time.”

This article by Ken Jowitt in Policy Review, articulates some well-informed skepticism that sounds right to me. The remarkable thing is that this is a conservative writing. How often do I sing in their choir?

Third, and most important, the attempt to impose democracy in Iraq and the Middle East has all the unreality of Don Quixote. The truth is that an invasion and occupation of Iraq with the pronounced intent of imposing democracy will more likely be a poison dart with a boomerang effect than a magic bullet with a democratic domino effect in the region. For decades, the Iraqi middle classes have been forced to act like supplicants towards those who rule them with arbitrary power. Their servility has undoubtedly produced a psychology and culture that emphasize avoidance and distrust of political life. In no way do the Iraqi middle classes resemble the proto-liberal capitalist classes of seventeenth-century Western Europe with their preferences for, and understanding of, a legally framed market economy and individual autonomy. As for Iraqi society in general, it is fragmented into hostile tribes and clans based on kinship, religion, and ethnicity. In such an environment, creating civility will require Promethean effort. Creating a civil society and democratic government will take a miracle.