Archive for the 'Links' Category
July 16, 2010 @ 6:07 am | Filed under: Links
• For those of you who wrote about wondering whether to go with the Nook or the Kindle, here’s a good article comparing the two: Which E-Reader Is Best?
• Amazon is offering a year of free Amazon Prime membership to college students. That means free two-day shipping on most items. The student must have a .edu email address to be eligible.
• I enjoyed this article (and so many others) by Tom Hodgkinson at The Idler: “Discover How to Intersperse Loafing with Latin.” His reasons and approach are markedly similar to mine. Have any of you tried the Cambridge Latin Course he mentions? We’ve enjoyed materials by Memoria Press and Classical Academic Press.
• Speaking of The Idler, these posts at Farm School and Mental Multivitamin prompted me to put Hodgkinson’s The Idle Parent on hold at the library. I read the first chapter yesterday via Kindle’s “sample this” feature, giggled my way through, read various bits aloud to Scott, forgave Hodgkinson for scorning the Wii, and enjoyed his Idle Parent’s Manifesto. “Play more, work less”: well, yes.
June 16, 2010 @ 6:15 pm | Filed under: Links
At io9: The physics behind Roberto Carlos’s “Impossible Goal.”
June 6, 2010 @ 7:06 am | Filed under: Links,Music
Pennywhistle lesson videos via YouTube. I’ve been using the Clark Pennywhistle book and CD to learn, but I wish I’d found these video lessons, offered for free by a Jesuit priest, a long time ago. It’s much easier to understand the ornamentation techniques when you can see them.
Scrivener. How is it possible none of my writer friends clued me into this sooner?
Listography, which is, at last, the internet notebook I’ve been looking for. The format just works for me.
This incredible guitar arrangement of the Lyke Wake Dirge (a very old song, and “happy” is not the right word for it—moving, stirring, haunting—those are better).
June 4, 2010 @ 2:10 pm | Filed under: Links
Starts today. Details and starting line at MotherReader.
Busy weekend around here, so this year I’ll just be cheering the rest of you on. Gatorade, anyone?
June 2, 2010 @ 6:50 pm | Filed under: Links
At Wired.com, author Nicholas Carr asserts that “The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains”:
The Internet is an interruption system. It seizes our attention only to scramble it. There’s the problem of hypertext and the many different kinds of media coming at us simultaneously. There’s also the fact that numerous studies—including one that tracked eye movement, one that surveyed people, and even one that examined the habits displayed by users of two academic databases—show that we start to read faster and less thoroughly as soon as we go online. Plus, the Internet has a hundred ways of distracting us from our onscreen reading. Most email applications check automatically for new messages every five or 10 minutes, and people routinely click the Check for New Mail button even more frequently. Office workers often glance at their inbox 30 to 40 times an hour. Since each glance breaks our concentration and burdens our working memory, the cognitive penalty can be severe.
The penalty is amplified by what brain scientists call switching costs. Every time we shift our attention, the brain has to reorient itself, further taxing our mental resources. Many studies have shown that switching between just two tasks can add substantially to our cognitive load, impeding our thinking and increasing the likelihood that we’ll overlook or misinterpret important information. On the Internet, where we generally juggle several tasks, the switching costs pile ever higher.
The whole piece, which is well worth a read, is based on Carr’s new book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Your Brain—the one mentioned in this recent post.
Could I be more self-conscious about including those hyperlinks? 
May 27, 2010 @ 5:32 am | Filed under: Links
• After keeping us waiting for a century, Mark Twain will finally reveal all—The Independent
“…in November the University of California, Berkeley, where the manuscript is in a vault, will release the first volume of Mark Twain’s autobiography. The eventual trilogy will run to half a million words, and shed new light on the quintessentially American novelist.”
• Douglas Adams: How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet (1999)
“Because the Internet is so new we still don’t really understand what it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that’s what we’re used to. So people complain that there’s a lot of rubbish online, or that it’s dominated by Americans, or that you can’t necessarily trust what you read on the web. Imagine trying to apply any of those criticisms to what you hear on the telephone. Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can’t easily answer back – like newspapers, television or granite. Hence ‘carved in stone.’ What should concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on the internet on trust – of course you can’t, it’s just people talking – but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV – a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make. One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no ‘them’ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‘us’.”
• Reading Rockets: Three ways to ruin a good book
May 15, 2010 @ 7:26 am | Filed under: Links,TBR
• Joshua Klein on the intelligence of crows | Video on TED.com—Hat tip to Mental Multivitamin
• “If Socrates Had E-Mail…”—About Kenyon—Kenyon College
Augustine’s brilliant emphasis on language as a means of passage between our interior selves and the external world, a bandwidth for the expression of desires, introduces a theme which resurfaces again and again, almost uncannily, in the consideration of communication or information technologies. What is striking is not the truism that media of communication provide a link between internal selves and the world around them; what is striking is the anxiety that surrounds that linkage. We find that anxiety even in Augustine’s conclusion, that language acquisition propelled him “into the stormy life of human society.”
• Trianon: A Novel of Royal France by Elena Maria Vidal in Literature & Fiction—Another title for my TBR list.
• mitali’s fire escape: Amazon as Publisher? An Insider’s View From YA Author Zetta Elliott—Excellent post. Zetta Elliott talks about her experience with AmazonEncore, a “program whereby Amazon will use information such as customer reviews on Amazon.com to identify exceptional, overlooked books and authors with more potential than their sales may indicate.”
• Welcome to the April Carnival of Children’s Literature! | forwordsbooks (Did I really never post this? I just found this link in a draft. Doh!)
May 10, 2010 @ 6:30 pm | Filed under: Links
EDITED TO ADD: The name of the Salon post quoted below is annoyingly sensationalist. A much better title would be: “Is the Internet Changing Your Brain?” That seems to be the pertinent question and the point worth considering.
From “Yes, The Internet Is Rotting Your Brain” (Salon), a discussion of the new book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Your Brain, which is an expansion of ideas posited by author Nicholas Carr in the much-discussed Atlantic Monthly article “Is Google Making Us Stupid”:
In the brief period between the writing of the original piece and the publication of “The Shallows,” neuroscientists have performed and reviewed important studies on the effects of multitasking, hyperlinks, multimedia and other information-age innovations on human brain function, all of which add empirical heft to Carr’s arguments.
The results are not cheering, and the two chapters in which Carr details them are, to my mind, the book’s payload. This evidence—that even the microseconds of decision-making attention demanded by hyperlinks saps cognitive power from the reading process, that multiple sensory inputs severely degrade memory retention, that overloading the limited capacity of our short-term memory hampers our ability to lay down long-term memories —is enough to make you want to run right out and buy Internet-blocking software.
and
The more of your brain you allocate to browsing, skimming, surfing and the incessant, low-grade decision-making characteristic of using the Web, the more puny and flaccid become the sectors devoted to “deep” thought.
You know, I’ve noticed this. I’ve been complaining to Scott lately that my short-term memory isn’t what it used to be, and I don’t know whether it’s due to having hit forty (um, over a year ago) or my online reading habits—that “incessant, low-grade decision making” and, well, information-bingeing—or (most likely) a combination of the two.
What do you think? Have you noticed differences in your memory and powers of concentration in the last couple of years? (I know many of us have been online longer than that—for me it’s been almost exactly 15 years—but it seems to me that things have shifted, intensified, in the last couple of years. So many blogs to read. So many conversations to follow and sometimes participate in. So many tabs open in my browser. So much to read, to learn, to explore.)
The Salon piece asserts that Carr backs his theories up with science, citing a number of studies by neuroscientists. I look forward to reading The Shallows (yes, I can still read an actual book, but I will admit candidly—have admitted it here before, in fact—that it takes a great deal more effort and determination than it used to), and, well, even if I don’t see the situation in as dire a light as Carr does (yet?), I acknowledge the wisdom of moderation and prudence, and the importance of continuing to grapple with books—big, long, challenging, commitment-requiring books.
I’m hoping for another fifty or sixty years with this brain, and I mean to treat it right.
May 7, 2010 @ 11:58 am | Filed under: Links
One of the many reasons I’m grateful I live in the age of the internet is Roger Ebert’s blog. With every entry, he makes me think, examine, appreciate.
The best thing that happened to me was a full-page photo in Esquire, showing exactly how I look today. No point in denying it. No way to hide it. Better for it to be out there. You don’t like it, that’s your problem. I’m happy I don’t look worse. I made a simple decision to just get on with life. I was a writer, so I was lucky. There was no question I would continue reviewing movies. And when I started writing this blog, it gave me even more focus, feedback, satisfaction. I plunged into it with sometimes desperate concentration. I wrote, therefore I lived. Another surgical attempt was proposed, but I said no. Enough is enough. I would look the way I looked, and express myself in print, and I would be content.
May 3, 2010 @ 6:23 am | Filed under: Links,Photos
• A Chair, A Fireplace & A Tea Cozy: Faking It—”The problem with McCarry’s arguments (other than that they are unsupported by any facts and force all bloggers into the role of critic, whether it’s a role they want or not) is that not “all” book blogs are part of this “cult of niceness.” And, even if such a cult exists — there are reasons for it beyond a person’s gender. It can be personal preference. It can be professional — there are many reasons why an author may be careful about what they blog or may be sensitive about how criticism is done. It can be because some bloggers see their role as “promotional” for books and authors, so keep their language promotional (aka “nice.”) It can be that life’s too short to blog bad books. Wow, I’ve already listed four reasons for such a “cult” that have nothing to do with my reproductive organs.”
• In Defense of Pollyanna : Robin McKinley—”And this is one of the places where the difference between being a reader and a critic is crucial: a reader can just not like something and keep moving. A critic needs to say, okay, this is why this book is crap, and forge the sticky-dull-achy into something shiny and clean and solid. Criticism is hard. Criticism takes time. Some of us would rather read and keep going. Life is short and full of choices.”
• A Chair, A Fireplace & A Tea Cozy: This Means War—This one sounds like it’d be up Rose’s alley for sure.
• April Carnival of Children’s Literature
