Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue on an Auto Tour

I got this from a general lookup of automotive fiction. The free version is available at Project Gutenberg, but I wanted something to read on the bus and I haven’t gotten past my issues around the Kindle’s DRM lock-in yet.

My impressions so far: it is RIDICULOUS. This doesn’t resemble even what I imagine is a real family in the moments before America jumps into WWI. The parents are too chill, the children too well-behaved, and even the dogs are too sentient. However, it’s ripe for mining on several levels – class, race, gender – and that creepy battery-powered Teddy bear with the glowing eyes offers even more potential in a technological reading than the converted moving van does.

Battery-powered toys in 1917 – I’m intrigued. Especially with all that lead.

Carry on.

We don’t want to forget that someone else came up with these sick moves a while back, as this copy of a super-old media image suggests:

Share this with the world. Please.

Here, Justin Rye offers a delightful little exercise in predictive linguistics that starts with contemporary [North] American English, trends linguistic changes from its origins in first-millennium Anglo-Saxon, and offers a possible rubric for what he proposes in 3000 CE as “Late American.”

Don’t try to make it more than it is… it’s an exercise, not a prophecy. That having been said, Rye comes well-armed with a good sense of structural linguistics.

My question: Did David Mitchell use this for background when writing up the “Sonmi-451″ and “Sloosha’s Crossin” chapters of Cloud Atlas? Keep in mind Mitchell’s own recognition of the limitations of the book publishing market:

I have to make it readable. Of course, I will be asking present day users of English and my translators are asking present day users of their respective languages to be reading this book now with the linguistic apparatus that they have. So I can’t change it that much and I can’t change it probably as much as the language really will change. (in interview with Ramona Koval, 20 Feb. 2005)

But for those who have read Cloud Atlas, it’s worth examining Rye’s payoff example at the end of the exercise – a comparison between American English c. 2000 and “Late American” c. 3000. Translate the Futurese back into contemporary idiom, and it sure bears resemblance to Zach’ry, doesn’t it? And, while Zach’ry’s culture is exclusively oral, Rye’s exercise doesn’t mandate the exclusion, removal or other enforced absence of a parallel inscribed linguistic code.

P.S. Rye gets bonus points for acknowledging sign languages and mythbusting a few of those ugly, persistent “facts” about language. Which I won’t circulate further. If you know what I’m talking about, you’ll spot it on his page.

[via BoingBoing]

Next breaking news: Our next president was born in August. (Perhaps explaining the mysterious phenomenon which resulted in the celebration of International Lefthanders’ Day on 13 August).

Further development: This already happened in the 1992 election.

The issue of durability has long plagued archivists, and has often been used as a convenient means for Earth’s 207 remaining holdouts to disparage electronic media – it’s a bit too delicate. (As vellum manuscript aficionados said of wood pulp, as stone scribes said of parchment, as tribal storytellers said of weathered rock.)

Now, hopefully you’ve already started to figure out that the entire history of media is implicated in each new inscription technology and the information coded into it. So I really think it’s funny when the post suddenly reads “the Rosetta disk is not digital.”

Of course, when the information is encoded by means of analog imagery requiring only magnification to apprehend the data (if not interpret it), that’s an easy claim to make. OTOH: could this object ever existed without electronic technologies of inscription? Decoding isn’t the problem: 1000x is fairly within range for optical microscopes. But who has the patience to work out that massive writer’s cramp after spending hours at a time with a hair’s-width stylus to mark up all that nickel?

… oh, they got a machine to do all that work?

Taking instructions from a computer?

… Huh.

Not to belittle the effort. Especially in a world that places increasing pressure on finding ways to preserve electronic works built on platforms with short shelf lives, the first step begins necessarily with accepting the limitations of the original medium of production. What’s needed, perhaps, is a simple change in perspective: the best archives (of which the Rosetta disk is a strong contender) go beyond the simple dualities of “delicate medium” and “durable medium” and take that LOCKS principle one step further: Lots Of Copies in several distinct media Keeps ‘em Safe.

And far more available to far more people now for making the world a better place. Or whatever else we’re making the world ;-)

!: Unless someone really did confiscate all the Bibles, Torahs, religious-text software and Good Books on Tape…. well, I can account for my copies, anyway.

The early adopters play up – and justifiably so – how GPS and local network alerts on this system provide a needed security enhancement in the open space of the university. Of course the e-mail, the IM’s, the facebook and other apps available through the device make it the state-of-the-art in Weapons of Mass Distraction, and this scares the hell out of professors like Cornell’s Robert Summers, who apparently hasn’t quite embraced laptop computers, understandable if he began his Cornell tenure at about the same time as the first moon walk.

But give him credit for intuiting the dilemma: as laptops are to paper notes, as paper notes were to slates and tabulae, as mass-printed books were to the manuscript at the lectern, interaction with the iPhone produces a different cyborg embodiment – a different physical dynamic between the human and the requisite educational technology that produces that, oh, “student function.” IOW, pedagogy has intellectual and ergonomic aspects. IYOW, you learn with your body (as well as your “mind,” if you insist).

Stay with me here… if you change the embodiment of learning, you have to change the pedagogy.

Actually, this pedagogic shift will happen anyway. The deeper issue is whether we laborers in the knowledge industry are willing to retool accordingly.

If you insist that students only learn by showing up together at the same lecture hall at the same scheduled periods to listen synchronously to a live human deliver a lecture, for which the only remaining record should be a carefully-inscribed set of hand-written notes, you’re in trouble. Wireless technology has already disrupted this, and the iPhone will only push this further.

OTOH if you remember just how crazy a weed ivy is, and you’re willing to think creatively, you might find some new places to plant it, some (not all) of which might be surprisingly successful. Because reorienting the student-learning machine complex amounts to changing the soil, the sun, the availability of water for that ivy.

It’s academic climate change. It’s evolutionary pressure. And this breed of smartphones and UMPC’s, including those free student iPhones, may be the next major selector.

You in?

Having spent a good number of years (ZOMG) studying it, I recognize that English can be a difficult language, but you show disrespect to both your audience and your subject when you don’t perform due diligence in your editing and proofreading.

OTOH if you think that the fabric of society is threadbare, held tenuously in place only by such groups as the Typo Eradication Advancement League, then please close the browser, power down your computer, and get a grip. Grammar nazis who take it upon themselves to force their particular pedantry on the unwilling and uncaring waste their time and give English teachers everywhere a bad name.

First, it insults the intent. Somebody considered it worth putting an informational sign in the middle of freakin’ nowhere (and got the government to pay for it! :-) ), in the interest of enriching the awareness of the visitor who, already amazed at the view, might just become a little more awed by an historical perspective that extends beyond the visible horizon.

Second, and more galling, it insults the substantial initial effort. If the sign had not done its job as an informational marker – say, it was dilapidated to the point of illegibility, or written in Klingon – then there would be no hand-wringing over typos. But you can’t assert an authority to identify and correct typos unless you already comprehend the written message. We should be astonished (or would be, if it weren’t so damn common) that any understandable communication takes place between humans, even humans speaking the same language, given overwhelming evidence of the profound pain and suffering resulting from miscommunication.

Before the unimaginative manichean reader accuses me of repudiating the rules of written language that ensure precision and clarity, let me just sneak in some defensive, self-conscious “of course I care!” And, oddly enough, I do.

Guess what else? The world is large, its problems are legion, and life is short.

So, where was I?… Yeah, the “choosing-your-battles” thing. Let’s suppose there is some thing like karma or doomsday. All else equal (because I like my eschatology with a twist of ecumenicity), If I’ve got to be evaluated on where I put my efforts, would I want the balance to favor encouraging basic, authentic understanding, however tough it is on the eyes and ears, or in picking the nits out of messages that most everyone pretty much already gets?

Your results may vary. But if the world goes ablaze, don’t ask to work my strike team if all you’ve brought is a bottle of white correction fluid.

Courtesy latimes.com

The best part is culled from the comments section of the latimes.com’s report of this mutant beauty: “Great, now they’ve evolved four ears through which to ignore you.”