Hello world!
Why I doubt I’ll return to White Collar (I don’t expect anyone else to agree!): intrusive product placement. I can live with annoying “Ketel One,” because it didn’t hold up the narrative a lot. But stopping the tense get-to- Neal scene to highlight how good this car’s GPS was, that was offensive. The writers have their orders, I know, and the sponsors pay to be part of the plot, but it’s not something I want to watch.
SPN 5x14: Finally watched this a few days ago, and then caught up on commentary. What I really didn’t get was why Dean stood around with his thumb up his ass while Sam whammied Famine. Dean did, after all, have this very big and demonstrably effective knife. Even if he understood what Sam was doing (and I have to say, I didn’t get why that would harm Famine), wouldn’t a prudent hunter have applied a belt-and-suspenders, or in this case mojo-and-blade, strategy? Overall, I thought S2 did a better job with Dean’s underlying depression even when he smiled and capered-at the end of the season, I could easily understand his desperation and sense of worthlessness even though it hadn’t been displayed in every episode, whereas here, for example, the de-aging seemed to leave him full of love of life--but perhaps it’ll come together in the end.
J.D. Lasica, Darknet: Hollywood’s War Against the Digital Generation: The future of entertainment is freedom, Lasica argues, and hidden sharers will route around copyright owners’ controls if they clamp down too hard. Mostly interesting to see how a book published in 2005 speaks about these issues, many of which are still boiling-the index of this book about the future of entertainment and knowledge has no entries for Google or YouTube. Makes you wonder what 2015 will look like, and actually reinforces Lasica’s argument that, with so much in flux, the last thing we need is some sort of clampdown.
Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain: Some interesting stuff on differences in written languages and how they affect reading in the brain, including problems with reading: dyslexia and similar problems manifest differently depending on how closely a written language correlates with sounds as pronounced. Wolf also focuses on the importance of “loving laps” for children learning to read, associating reading with good things, and argues that we’re doing a really bad job with struggling readers because we don’t pay enough attention to fluency/automaticity if it hasn’t already developed in the early grades.
Susan Reynolds, Before Eminent Domain: Toward a History of Expropriation of Land for the Common Good: Argues that the taking of land for public purpose by the sovereign, usually with compensation, has a history wherever records can be found (though her evidence focuses on Western Europe and British colonial America). It was only in recent centuries that some justification for this rule was apparently thought necessary, and, contrary to what some have said, she’s found no evidence that the justification was rooted in a feudal idea that the king was the ultimate owner of all the land in the kingdom.
Deborah Blum, The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York: Entertaining and sometimes gruesome stories of how the medical examiner learned to deal with various poisons. The most interesting bit is about how the US government deliberately made alcohol deadlier during Prohibition in a failed effort to deter people from breaking the law. Breezy and not deep, but you’ll definitely come away knowing more about poison and possibly more about Prohibition.
Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto: Short, engaging book about the use of checklists to enhance, focus and guide expertise and protect against common errors that even the best-trained doctors, pilots, etc. make. There’s something very interesting here about routinization and class/prestige; doctors have been able to resist scripts in ways that CSRs, for example, haven’t been. Gawande does not discuss checklists as used by people without years of specialized education and training, perhaps because he assumes that naturally checklists are appropriate for certain types of jobs. And because doctors share that assumption, checklists are hard for them to accept, as if they involve deskilling. The book doesn’t get into sources of resistance-Gawande, perhaps for what I’d call political reasons, treats resistance like a bad habit rather than an issue of comparing oneself to a lower-prestige worker. Anyway, with medicine and aviation as his main examples, Gawande makes a convincing case for checklists in complicated situations.
comments on DW
SPN 5x14: Finally watched this a few days ago, and then caught up on commentary. What I really didn’t get was why Dean stood around with his thumb up his ass while Sam whammied Famine. Dean did, after all, have this very big and demonstrably effective knife. Even if he understood what Sam was doing (and I have to say, I didn’t get why that would harm Famine), wouldn’t a prudent hunter have applied a belt-and-suspenders, or in this case mojo-and-blade, strategy? Overall, I thought S2 did a better job with Dean’s underlying depression even when he smiled and capered-at the end of the season, I could easily understand his desperation and sense of worthlessness even though it hadn’t been displayed in every episode, whereas here, for example, the de-aging seemed to leave him full of love of life--but perhaps it’ll come together in the end.
J.D. Lasica, Darknet: Hollywood’s War Against the Digital Generation: The future of entertainment is freedom, Lasica argues, and hidden sharers will route around copyright owners’ controls if they clamp down too hard. Mostly interesting to see how a book published in 2005 speaks about these issues, many of which are still boiling-the index of this book about the future of entertainment and knowledge has no entries for Google or YouTube. Makes you wonder what 2015 will look like, and actually reinforces Lasica’s argument that, with so much in flux, the last thing we need is some sort of clampdown.
Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain: Some interesting stuff on differences in written languages and how they affect reading in the brain, including problems with reading: dyslexia and similar problems manifest differently depending on how closely a written language correlates with sounds as pronounced. Wolf also focuses on the importance of “loving laps” for children learning to read, associating reading with good things, and argues that we’re doing a really bad job with struggling readers because we don’t pay enough attention to fluency/automaticity if it hasn’t already developed in the early grades.
Susan Reynolds, Before Eminent Domain: Toward a History of Expropriation of Land for the Common Good: Argues that the taking of land for public purpose by the sovereign, usually with compensation, has a history wherever records can be found (though her evidence focuses on Western Europe and British colonial America). It was only in recent centuries that some justification for this rule was apparently thought necessary, and, contrary to what some have said, she’s found no evidence that the justification was rooted in a feudal idea that the king was the ultimate owner of all the land in the kingdom.
Deborah Blum, The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York: Entertaining and sometimes gruesome stories of how the medical examiner learned to deal with various poisons. The most interesting bit is about how the US government deliberately made alcohol deadlier during Prohibition in a failed effort to deter people from breaking the law. Breezy and not deep, but you’ll definitely come away knowing more about poison and possibly more about Prohibition.
Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto: Short, engaging book about the use of checklists to enhance, focus and guide expertise and protect against common errors that even the best-trained doctors, pilots, etc. make. There’s something very interesting here about routinization and class/prestige; doctors have been able to resist scripts in ways that CSRs, for example, haven’t been. Gawande does not discuss checklists as used by people without years of specialized education and training, perhaps because he assumes that naturally checklists are appropriate for certain types of jobs. And because doctors share that assumption, checklists are hard for them to accept, as if they involve deskilling. The book doesn’t get into sources of resistance-Gawande, perhaps for what I’d call political reasons, treats resistance like a bad habit rather than an issue of comparing oneself to a lower-prestige worker. Anyway, with medicine and aviation as his main examples, Gawande makes a convincing case for checklists in complicated situations.
comments on DW