10 Reasons Why the Internet is No Substitute for a Library, from the ALA.
Libraries are icons of our cultural intellect, totems to the totality of knowledge. If we make them obsolete, we've signed the death warrant to our collective national conscience, not to mention sentencing what's left of our culture to the waste bin of history.
So, if you were an Afghan man who could read English, and you were getting bombed all the time, and a flyer fell out of the sky which said that "The Partnership of Nations is here to Help" and "The Partnership of Nations is here to assist the People of Afghanistan", would you believe it?
In a mineral store in Boron, I bought specimens of borax, colemanite, and the very bizarre ulexite. All these were collected by the proprietor of the shop in the Mojave Desert.
Ulexite is really bizarre; it's a "natural fiber optic" and allows one surface of the crystal to form an accurate, clear, and full-size image of an object placed against the opposite side. They call it the "TV rock".
In a casino in Las Vegas, we watched a high-stakes baccarat game. This was interesting in part because it was separated from the rest of the casino by a low but intimidating wall -- so you could see the game table and surrounding lounge easily enough, but the idea of entering this space was scary. The players were dressed in relatively fancy clothes (but things that looked comfortable, not ostentatious); they looked very intense.
At each of the two high-stakes tables, there was a dealer and a cashier, and three pit bosses standing around watching the play. (For extra security, there were dozens of cameras built into the ceiling of the high-stakes room.) Although the pit bosses chatted with each other, at least one had his eyes on the players at all times.
When a round ended, a remarkable procedure took place. A group of cocktail waitresses emerged from a door and led the players away from the table and into a rest area, where they supplying drinks and snacks. A casino staff member then came out carrying a pile of fresh decks of cards and a silver wastebasket. The cashier gathered up all the cards from the previous round, took out a large permanent marker, and drew a huge "X" on each side of the pile, then bound the cards with a rubber band and tossed them into the wastebasket. Next, as the pit bosses watched especially closely, the dealer took each fresh pack, opened it, showed it to the pit bosses, removed all the cards except for the jokers, and set them in a pile on the table. Then he passed the card case across the table to the cashier, who looked inside, verified that both jokers, and only both jokers, remained in the box, and then threw the box into the wastebasket.
After all of the fresh packs had been opened this way, the staff member took the wastebasket away, and then the pit bosses supervised an elaborate shuffling procedure which included (if I remember correctly) both overhand and riffle shuffling, spreading the cards around on the table and gathering them again, and finally summoning a cocktail waitress to choose a cut location, which she marked with an index card. Then the cashier made a complete cut and placed the cards into a card shoe, which he passed across the table to the dealer. (The pit bosses never took their eyes off of the cards during the entire procedure!) Finally, the players were called back from the rest area, and play began anew.
The whole thing was done quietly and efficiently. Each person, including the gamblers, seemed to know his or her role thoroughly; there were no signs and no directions, nothing showing off or bragging, but we imagined that hundreds of thousands of dollars were being wagered.
Teach for America: I have a friend in TFA who liked it, at last report. TFA is one of these things for aimless college grads in the way that the Armed Forces are one of those things for aimless high school grads. Going to college supposedly made these students antagonistic toward, or suspicious of, the military, so they have to have a different organization to deal with their aimlessness.
Good, motivated teachers are one of the world's most precious resources. If you can be one, you'll be doing something very real.
However, jumping into that position of responsibility could be a big shock (perhaps in the way that jumping into a position of responsibility in the military could be a big shock, only as a result of different sorts of problems). For example, you might have to deal with some of your students getting pregnant. Are you ready for something like that?
"To be": Korzybski's linguistic philosophy of General Semantics holds that you should avoid the verb "to be", because it's philosophically misleading; the modified English which follows that direction is called "E-Prime", and Gardner mentions it critically in some of his skeptical essays.
I've tried writing in E-Prime; I found it difficult. Value judgments are harder to convey with any apparent impartiality; in fact, impartiality in general is a difficult sort of thing. (This is deliberate.) Without "to be", almost all statements pertain to some person's or some groups perceptions, decision, or actions -- not to the way the world is in itself (Ding-an-sich and all). Possibly this is very Existentialist in its implications.
I had a discussion once, either in my diary or in a letter, about the difficulties I would have had talking, thinking, about girlfriends without "to be". This is because I thought of boyfriend/girlfriendness as a status and not as an iterated interaction (which some people call a "relationship", meaning a pattern of relating or of interacting). I thought of it as something you are, not as something you do. To make a claim or ask a question about a status, you normally need "to be": the temperature is 30 degrees, it is raining, I am 22 years old, etc. (Although: accurate thermometers show a temperature of 30, rain falls from the sky, I survived 22 years.)
I did make an argument that almost all of what I had to say about romantic relationships for the past ten years would have been difficult or impossible in E-Prime. It would have had to be more limited and skeptical statements, more observer-relative statements, more historical, more contingent statements. And these trends don't necessarily bother General Semantics enthusiasts; they might say that statements like those are more specific and more accurate and more meaningful. They were not the statements I wanted to be able to make.
"Free": The issue of whether things are "free" when you give out information to get them is still murky. The SEC decided a few years ago that personal information has intrinsic value (example) so that people who offered stock in exchange for personal information could be accused of "selling" stock (whereas such people often argued that they were giving away the stock for free).
I always thought that entering a sweepstakes was "free" if you just had to fill out a card; I didn't even realize that the whole purpose of holding a sweepstakes is to gather personal information. (Before I had any disposable income, I didn't see any reason why anybody would want my personal information in the first place.)
"Existence and Uniqueness": Apparently my poetry contains Umberto Eco spoilers, if only the word "ecpyrosis".
Burning books or libraries is such a vast and deep cultural idea that I think Eco could hardly have failed to use it. See, e.g., "Burning Libraries", in The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility by Stewart Brand. Also, Eco's villain is none other than a censor, who is willing to destroy culture and civilization in order to save them.
My arms hurt (not because of yoga, I think). My father sent me a historical atlas of Judaism, in which I read a few dozen pages and started to feel overwhelmed.
Somebody stenciled some hate speech on the sidewalk at several places along Shotwell Street (between 23rd and 22nd and between 21st and 20th, if I remember correctly). I saw it every day on my way to and from work.
After a few days, someone came along with some white spray paint and blotted out a couple of the messages, adding the new inscription "GOD FORGIVE U.S." (perhaps it was originally "GOD FORGIVE US" and someone added some periods?). But another of the stenciled inscriptions popped up and nobody's gotten rid of it so far.
Contact: Seth David Schoen
