The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by clew:

Help and advice, o Fluorospherians?

I am tasked (forgive the language) with giving a section of a speech on "How to Use Powerpoint" for a class of graduate students next week. I have warned the professor that I am going to be giving a speech on good reasons not to use Powerpoint, overhead text outlines, slideware, and projected images, in that order (thing one that bothers me is that we aren't distinguishing among any of these tools).

I would like to convince a reasonable proportion of the class that these things are distinct, and not always useful for teaching; and give them a short rule of thumb for when to avoid them. I have the kneejerk coder-dweeb arguments to hand; in fact, I can jerk that knee hard enough to hit myself in the face. I would rather use arguments nearer to the, mmmm, current understanding of people who assume that business practices are efficient and that all visual aids increase learning for all subjects.

Other people are covering *good* ppt practice, so I don't have to approach that; just the question of when not to use it at all.

Would doing CPR on a plastic dummy bother you, Michelle? It's pale and wan, but not otherwise icky.

Serge: I dunno. There was an author Charles Maturin who wrote _Melmoth the Wanderer_, which I haven't read, but flagged for O'Brian-ism because it has (IIRC) a shipwreck and a creepy doctor in it.

You know, this is not utterly unlike how the - mild, peaceful, it only seemed shocking at the time - "Battle of Seattle" felt from the edge I saw: that they reduced or restrained normal policing until there was enough property damage that they had an excuse to clear the streets entirely.

I still think policing could have kept the protests down to extremely unruly but never life- and rarely property-threatening behavior, because I know lots of the crowd was against property damage. But Seattle is still arguing over this, not that many people change their minds any more.

In short,

"My thing is my own, and I'll keep it so still,
Though other young maidens may do what they will;
yes, my thing is my own and I'll keep it so still,
Until I am married; let men say what they will."

Paul Bunyan coulda dunnit right.

I am making a Truly Sturdy Trellis out of half-inch copper pipe for a ?Gold of Ophir?, but because I am very sloooow soldering, and because Seattle had yet another totally uncharacteristic summer downpour, the longest cane folded over and probably pinched itself off. I am a bad rose-mother.

I hope it means more canes next year. Sad this year. Sad.

My easy rose is an actual weed: it grew as a seedling in a new bed and is now putting out few but frequent semi-double red blooms. Probably only a rootstock by Tea Rose standards.

"Invasive" in plants makes me very very nervous; ivy and silverlace kill enough trees to knock out urban woods. "Disease-resistant" and "drought-hardy" and "native" do me fine.

Pellegrina; there's a Librarian in _Snow Crash_, and I second the recommendation of _Mirabile_ - they have the library; they've damaged the catalog; they don't know what they know...

Also McKillip's _Alphabet of Thorn_, though that's fantasy. I can't remember if the library is mentioned in Bellamy's _Looking Backward_, but it's the sort of thing he liked.

...would googleprint/Search Inside and good metadata make this question easier to answer, or impossible to sift through? There's a meta-question...

"Death, the Knight, and the Devil"; or sometimes "and the Maiden".

I'd say she's well within the standards of English grammar, which are loose, but is failing the basic test of *effective* rhetoric: the more obvious it is that you're using Style, the more perfectly you have to pull it off.

I had this rueful thought while nearly buying a diadem at a summer festival recently; there is sufficient nerdiness in a diadem that it had better be perfectly designed and made, or no degree of sprezzatura in the wearer will carry it off. And while these diadems were good enough for earrings, if you follow me, they weren't good enough for headdresses.

Anyway, back to the annoying sentence: "you are reduced to petty taunts" would be idiomatic, yes? because slightly cliché we understand 'reduced' as 'forced' or 'compelled', and 'taunts' is as much a noun as 'ridicule', and slapping the adjective on it is fine.

This isn't capitalism at work, it's the free market at work - which capital often hates because the market is now in play.

There's an excellent book by a educated-hands archaeologist on the history of labor in cloth: Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years by E. Barber.

I would like to know that I wasn't patronizing local sweatshops... although I hope that local makers will be more able to disintermediate close aggregation than far. Maybe not true at family-scale.

What Steve Eley said about some of the problem being seriously dubious metadata. I've been amused and appalled by the factods one gets when screen-scraping Amazon or Powell's for info on a book; it sure doesn't map to Dublin Core. I don't know where they get their info. What would Tor hand off to Amazon, for instance? Is there a book with several different creator-types to check goodness of transmission with?

(The LoC and the British Library have good data, but aren't particularly indexed by ISBN, especially not by the ISBN of newish cheap paperback copies I happen to own. Anyone else with a good solution to this problem?)

Ovid's Heroides as fanfic? mm, except he was all sorts of pro.

Jonathan Vos Post, at fifteen I attempted a play in which all the characters who died in the great Athenian tragedies laid in wait for each other at the banks of the Lethe and had bitter family squabbles. I wish I could say that I meant it to be funny.

Kate Nepveu:

Yeeees, the way you describe it could be accurate for most or all people. But I also get worried that we - for some nebulous, pontificating, condescending value of 'we' - are becoming intolerant of the not merely unsaid but unknown, and need to make up something precise rather than deal with unfillable gaps.

There's so much history completely, hopelessly lost that I don't think this is an intellectually healthy need. Not just history; much human motivation is probably indeterminate, many rigorously stated questions undecidable.

(I was trying to explain Chaitin's Maximally Unknowable Number to a buncha high-octane tech geeks a while ago; was startled that many hadn't even studied Computability & Unsolvability, and therefore hadn't been cured of the characteristic techies' belief that any problem you can state clearly enough must have a solution.... I feel this gap in their educations may help to explain the goofier branches of techno-libertarianism. I am now hopelessly off point.)

Wasn't there a discussion a week or three ago of lit. students who had been assigned a Neil Gaiman novel, but had trouble reading it because they liked the story but it wasn't explicit enough? details weren't all laid out in order?

Because that sounded like an unhealthy weakness in the readers - it will certainly limit their ability to read classic fiction, or study stuff that nobody knows all of yet. The desire to make everything explicit, which some but not all fanficcers have claimed as a strength of fanfic, seems to me like an extension of that weakness, or a crutch for it.

Whether that's a weakness or not should be independent of whatever's being exposed. As it happens, I also think the obsession with sex as the moving force is currently overdone and limiting, like trying to express every detail about a character by naming the brands they consume and the VIPs they know.

" We were a constant referendum on and demonstration of the idea that liberty, equality, and government by the consent of the governed are not only possible, but work better than elitist kleptocracies."

And we will be still, alas.

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