Shrewdness of Apes

This morning’s discussion with Nan concerning the etymology of “murder of crows” led to this search. The Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center and the San Diego Zoo are the most fun.

Then I went and looked up “murder” in the OED, only to find that for the “group of crows” sense, there are references from the 1400s and the 1900s and nothing inbetween. For etymology, they basically said “we have no clue — maybe because crows are associated with murder?” I would have liked it better if they’d made something up so I could feel like I learned something.

Blogs are for sharing.

A Little Academic History

So I was over at the website for the Society for the Social Study of Science to see if this year’s program had been posted yet (travel arrangements, you know — Westjet has some direct flights to Vancouver) and stumbled across their historical programs, which includes the program from the first meeting at Cornell University.

Looking it over is an interesting execise. For one thing, it’s interesting to see which names are there and which aren’t and where they are. Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar are presenting methodology papers. Karen Knorr (now Knorr-Cetina) and Derek de Solla Price are all over the program. And the keynote? Robert K. Merton. New paradigm, meet the old paradigm.

There are other things I think about with conferences from the 70s, even though they weren’t so long ago. After, all the practices were different then. How much did it cost participants to get there and who paid? How many events were they likely to attend in a year? How were participants chosen — through social networks (1), through whatever the organizers were reading at the time, or by some other method? Was the conference organized by mail or telephone? Or at another conference? Did that different make a difference? How did the participants write their papers? Did that make a difference?

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(1) Even then, I am struck by the degree to which Science Studies was, from its beginnings, a field located in relatively elite schools (for instance, in comparison with the emergence of cultural studies).

Italian Design Exhibit at the Musee de Beaux-Arts

We just hit the exhibit today and I found it very engaging. I hate to say it but I think the coolest stuff was when the fascists were on the upswing in Italy. Futurism looks really neat, as do Italian riffs on Art Nouveau. I’m sure that reveals something deeply disturbing about my psyche, but what are blogs for? Basically, the message I got from the exhibit is that Italian design completely went to hell in the 1980s. Though it might also be that the artists depicted there are still alive, and so there’s a certain fawning promotionalism that’s absent from the earlier periods.

The Real Reason CDs Are 74 Minutes Long

I’m not much for using the blog to share works in progress or even discoveries that I hope to share in print, but this one’s too good not to get out there right away.

So today while working on The Book I stumbled across this article, which is recommended reading for anyone interested in the history of digital audio.

There is a standard story about the history of the compact disc that says that it became a 74-minute medium because the then-president of Sony wanted to be able to hear all of Beethoven’s 9th symphony without interruption. It turns out that’s not the case at all, at least not according to an engineer who worked on the CD. Instead, he said, it was Philips, not Sony, who were pushing, and they were pushing for the CD to be close in size to the “compact cassette tape” (what I simply knew as “tapes” growing up).

Exhibit A:

Now, it turns out that a CD is slightly wider than that — 120mm instead of 115mm, but the basic premise holds. And yes, the article also explains why CDs are 16 bit and 44.1khz. Not as arbitrary as we are usually told.

This story clearly is not nearly as sexy or as cult-of-personality as the “we did it for the pres” version but eminently interesting in its own right. The reference points for CD design were — surprise — common consumer electronics standards in use at the time.

Letter to a Friend Who Wants to Start Up a Blog

Here’s an email I sent a friend this weekend. Not sure why I’m feeling like reproducing it here, but I do.

Dear XXXX,

You asked about getting into blogging.

As far as front end goes, I recommend blogspot over the others. Seems relatively straightforward and reliable. And it doesn’t come with a “rep” like livejournal (though livejournal is perfectly fine as a system and the rep is undeserved).

You should think of it a pseudonymous instead of anonymous, since you’ll be writing about real people including yourself. Come up with consistent names for your “characters” that are easy for you to remember (e.g., change all first names by one letter — Jon becomes Ken, for instance, though I would never want to be a Ken).

You also need to think about how anonymous you want to be. For instance, if you want your friends to read it, that’s relatively anonymous (see, e.g., http://gonecompletelyferal.blogspot.com/ for an example) but you will need to avoid self incrimination because unless you swear each one to secrecy, it could eventually come out that “Blog Y” is really “XXXX’s blog.” Still, you have plausible deniability.

The other option is to go completely “dark” and just have one or two confidantes or none at all. In this case, your set of readers will come as you comment on other blogs and link back to your own (people will follow).

You need to also think about tone and personality. A blog, like any other autobiographical writing, basically creates you as a “character.” Since my blog is under my own name, my character is perhaps more consistently positive about all matters than I might be in person. I also can’t write about certain really funny things that happen while I’m at work because they involve others whom I may not wish to discuss in public.

Finally, either way, you may want to do a short test run before going public. See if you like it. Like restaurants, most new blogs fail within a few months.

That’s all I can think of for now.

Best,

–J

Moving Right Along

So the writing thing has been going well and I’m hopelessly behind on email (sorry if you’re waiting for one, it just means I had to think about something you wrote). We’ve got a guest in town this week from grad school (she’s now a librarian at Cornell) and will do some fun tooling around town. In the meantime, here are some further thoughts on two topics – –

E-Mail

It’s funny how talk of changing habits has led to draconian measures — in addition to the program Miriam pointed me to, several friends have told me their chastity-belt-type strategies to slow down the rush. For me, it’s more about habit changing than “the compulsive email check” — though Carrie and I do joke about that behavior. I’m doing so-so so far but it’s something to work on over the summer. It does raise the question, though, of whether email has some special kind of “pull.” Anyway, future posts will have something to say on the matter of my own work patterns since people are game for talking about it. But not tonight.

Tattoos

Today Carrie and I are driving around running some errands and while stopped at the light on Mont Royal (never drive on this street if you can help it), a rather svelte woman with an exposed midriff stood at the corner. Above her butt, she has the obligatory lower-back tattoo of a pair of wings. Which brings me to this deep question:

Why do people always get tattoos of flying things right above their butts?

We pondered this momentous question for some time but could reach no definite conclusions.