kip/bot/blog

One of the fun things to do with the Kindle is NowNow, a question answering service under the “Experimental” menu of Kindle. NowNow is based , I think, on the “mechanical turk“, a group of humans paid in a micro-fashion by Amazon to curate content and, under this program answer questions.

My first question to Nownow, sprang from a conversation with our CTO about gnostic and apocryphal scrolls (a very important part of our business of web marketing) and said that Mary Magdalene was the brother of Lazarus (the resurrectee). I didn’t know that, and while I didn’t doubt it either, I thought it was a good time to test Nownow:

Within 5 minutes, I had gotten three answers with varying shades of personal voice, exploration of nuance to the answer (”No … although it’s hotly debated”), and citations in the form of hyperlinks (you can use the Kindle’s wireless EVDO connection for web browsing).

This morning, while reading a trashy genre novel (I’ll do anything to get back in the fiction groove), the narrator described a character as “a real trouper.” Nice! Trouper! As in, the show must go on or do your part within a troupe/ensemble. I didn’t know that. I’ve usually encountered it as be a real trooper - soldier on, take your orders. Trouper felt right, but I ran it past the folks at Nownow.

My favorite answer comes from a person who I think I would like to have more chats with:

It’s definitely “trouper”, but “trooper” is taking over because so many people misuse/misunderstand the phrase. It seems likely the correct “trouper” will die off because it’s so neglected.

(In the same way “presently” is starting to mean “now” instead of “in the near future”, which is what it ACTUALLY means… just because people have been misusing it so much for so long.)

Anyway, a “trouper” means a member of a theatrical company (usually traveling, in a troupe) and has come to mean someone who keeps plugging away even when things go sour.

While both troupe and troop derive ultimately from the Latin troppus “flock”, one was adopted for military use while the other was applied to performers. However “a reliable, uncomplaining person; a staunch supporter or colleague” is, indeed, a trouper, likening someone to an actor or dancer who goes on despite hardship or impediments. It’s a compliment.

Troupe “group of performers” dates from the early 19th century in English, having come from French, and trouper “a performer belonging to a troupe” dates from the late 19th century. Trouper as in “she’s a real trouper” dates from the 20th century; it was already a cliche as evidenced by this quotation from 1959: “The phrase ‘she’s a trouper’ now has an old-fashioned and faintly derogatory air and is usually bandied about when someone continues to play with a high temperature or a shattering bereavement.”

Troop as in “a body of soldiers” is earlier, dating from at least the 16th century and deriving from Old French trope. A trooper is therefore a member of such a military group (1640), or, by extension, a certain type of law enforcement officer (especially in the U.S., where we have state troopers, who are state police. They’ve been called troopers since the early part of the 20th century). Calling someone a trooper in this way isn’t so much a compliment as a statement of fact: they’re a normal member of a group, nothing special.

This has been misused for a long time, though, and in the USA where the word “troop” is much much more common than “troupes”, it’s completely predictable that people would start using the “wrong” one. If you use the wrong one over and over again, over decades, it becomes acceptable, of course.

English is like that.

I hope this answer is good for you!

You can just tell this person enjoyed writing the answer, was glad for an excuse to dig into the mutual latin roots of both possibilities, and is sadly resigned to the way common usage overrides the richer, deeper original meaning.

I would, of course, be devastated to find out that this is a turing test and this was software generated:

if (question == usageOfWords) then

print “English is like that.”

endif

When I was in college, striving to be an evolved male, I bought a fair amount of Wyndham Hill music. It was all very groovy, trippy, good pot-smoking stuff with folk and burgeoning world overtones. At some point, though, it devolved into a sign of new age triteness — above the level of patchouli and wymmyn retreats — but it sank pretty low.
Imagine my surprise, then, to hear, in the space of a week, two Wyndham Hill artists being used on creepy crime shows, during creepy moments. A theme from Shadowfax’s only album is cop-cum-tortutred-serial-killer-of-bad-guys Dexter Morgan on Showtime’s Dexter. And a piece from Michael Hedges’s Aerial Boundaries is the chase music on Bones when they capture seasons-long bad guy Gormogon (a cannibal with dentures made of human canines). (On a sidenote, I very nearly wept tears of joy when it was revealed that Booth was not in fact dead, but was faking it so he could catch a bad guy.)

And on the subject of music, is anyone else bummed out that M.I.A.’s wondrous “Paper Planes” is being used as cheap trailer music for the new Seth Rogen film?

The city is replacing all the parking signs in Park Slope and will suspend alternate-side parking in order to facilitate the process.  The NYT has a funny tongue-in-cheek, ever-so-slightly-caustic piece about it.  My favorite bit:

Plenty of New Yorkers spend more time each week parking than they do in a house of worship, or visiting aging parents, or reading to kids. And nowhere is this truer than in Park Slope, Brooklyn, named not for the ability to do just that — park — but for the kind with grass and trees, useless to drivers. Even on a good day, parking is scarce: No-Park Slope.

While it’s not a great movie, Walk Hard has some great moments that I can’t stop re-watching (the protest song phase, India, the Beatles(!), and the world music song in particular).  While obsessing about the movie’s attention to detail in spoofing 70s rocker career (the Dewey variety show interstitials are awesome), I found the Dewey Cox album covers below.  I love when movies put together these kind of artefacts (right down to the tortured punctuation):

Just saw this while ordering some forgotten/hidden/kooky New York books.  It’s a customer review for Lost New York:

A nice moment from Clay Shirky’s Web 2.0 Expo talk vindicates a crankiness I’ve blogged about before: the contempt that various people (esp. baby boomers) have for users who generate content:

I started telling her about the Wikipedia article on Pluto. You may remember that Pluto got kicked out of the planet club a couple of years ago, so all of a sudden there was all of this activity on Wikipedia. The talk pages light up, people are editing the article like mad, and the whole community is in an ruckus–”How should we characterize this change in Pluto’s status?” And a little bit at a time they move the article–fighting offstage all the while–from, “Pluto is the ninth planet,” to “Pluto is an odd-shaped rock with an odd-shaped orbit at the edge of the solar system.”

So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, “Okay, we’re going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever.” That wasn’t her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, “Where do people find the time?” That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, “No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you’ve been masking for 50 years.”

The argument is based on the historical realization that surplus time needs to be managed. In pre-industrial/industrializing England, surplus time was managed with gin (people drank to use up the surplus time). Shirky casts this surplus more specifically as cognitive surplus — a recognition that there are brains available and itching to work and it’s more than our economy actually knows how to deploy. He argues that the great ‘heat sink’ for cognitive surplus (he really is as brilliant as the ITP kids say), is the sitcom.

All that background to set up my favorite line from the talk. Shirky is explaining WoW guilds to this same television producer and can tell that she’s thinking, what a bunch of losers, grown men pretending to be elves. He goes on a riff about how stupid and generically plotted sitcoms are and ends with: “However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it’s worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.”

Earlier in the talk, Shirky notes that the current body of entries that makes up Wikipedia took about 100 million hours of labor. What a waste, right? But then he points out that we collectively watch 200 billion hours of TV every year. Even worse, we spend 100 million hours every weekend watching ads.

NYT article today about the last pinball machine manufacturer. One of those articles that makes me love living in NY and love the Times. The article is a reporter’s dream: a small world of pinball fanatics (including a “historian of the sport”), a 62-year old owner who yells at his employees for not playing enough pinball and bruised a rib snowboarding in December, really cool pictures of the craft and the mass of the enterprise, and fun quotes like a bug list which includes the comment “flipper feels soft.”

This article also highlights how well the Times has evolved into its digital presentation of itself. I’ve been getting caught up on my podcasts and just listened to a conversation about Eric Alterman’s New Yorker article on the death of newspapers. Articles like this show that, on the content side at least, that some papers are finding ways to embrace the medium: interactive slideshows that highlight photography and have a slightly different narrative arc, the nice incorporation of sound files into an otherwise conventionally formatted article, the use of thumbnails on the top page to pull people in (the two pics above are intriguing at thumbnail size).

David Brooks doesn’t usually inspire me, or inspire me to even read him with the chance of getting inspired, but a piece that he did yesterday, describing the modern depletion of imagination, was terrific and made me want more, but now I’m adrift and have much too much work to do to get it.

The article centered on a piece about C S Lewis:

The essay, which appeared in Books & Culture, is called “C. S. Lewis and the Star of Bethlehem,” by Michael Ward, a chaplain at Peterhouse College at Cambridge. It points out that while we moderns see space as a black, cold, mostly empty vastness, with planets and stars propelled by gravitational and other forces, Europeans in the Middle Ages saw a more intimate and magical place. The heavens, to them, were a ceiling of moving spheres, rippling with signs and symbols, and moved by the love of God. The medieval universe, Lewis wrote, “was tingling with anthropomorphic life, dancing, ceremonial, a festival not a machine.”

Lewis tried to recapture that medieval mind-set, Ward writes. He did it not because he wanted to renounce the Copernican revolution and modern science, but because he found something valuable in that different way of seeing our surroundings.

The modern view disenchants the universe, Lewis argued, and tends to make it “all fact and no meaning.” When we say that a star is a huge flaming ball of gas, he wrote, we are merely describing what it is made of. We are not describing what it is. Lewis also wanted to include the mythologies, symbols and stories that have been told about the heavenly actors, and which were so real to those who looked up into the sky hundreds of years ago. He wanted to strengthen the imaginative faculty that comes naturally to those who see the heavens as fundamentally spiritual and alive.

I’ve been trying to work through Bullfinch’s Mythology recently, in an effort at self-erudition. One of the disturbing things about reading the book is its rationale:

If no other knowledge deserves to be called useful but that which enlarges our possessions or to raise our station in society, then mythology has no that appellation. But if that which tends to make us happier and better can be called useful then we claim that epithet for our subject. For mythology is the handmaid of literature; and literature is one of the best allies of virtue and promoters of happiness.

Without a knowledge of mythology, much of the elegant literature of our own language cannot be understood and appreciated.

This is the constant sell of Bullfinch, that if you read the book, you can understand references in poems and decode their meaning. Not to unlock their magic, feel what it’s like for absurd but wonderful images to mean something deep and emotional, or tap into stories that tap into obscured parts of our psyche — but to understand poems and literature which are almost as removed from us as the mythic stories they reference.

On the rare occasions when I read Shakespeare, I am always struck by how alive the 16th century was with magically powered plants. References to properties of plants abound in Shakespeare, and I think how cool it would be to walk in the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens and to see flowers which are pretty, smell nice, and have medical/magical/(al)chemical properties. How much more alive and rich the place would be. But that’s gone to us.

So . . . When I see a passage about how night skies used to be magical and once inspired wonder, I want more. Brooks goes on to tantalize even further:

The medievals had a tremendous capacity for imagination and enchantment, and while nobody but the deepest romantic would want to go back to their way of thinking (let alone their way of life), it’s a tonic to visit from time to time. As many historians have written, Europeans in the Middle Ages lived with an almost childlike emotional intensity.

(Tantalize comes from the story of Tantalus, who as a punishment for stealing ambrosia, was put in a pool of water beneath the branches of a fruit tree. Whenever he bent to drink the water would recede away from him, whenever he reached up for fruit, the tree branches would move just out of his grasp. I knew that without looking it up, but I also know it because I learned a bunch of Greek myths in High School so I could be clever and witty in Extemporaneous Speaking.  I’m not sure if that’s good or not.)

At the beginning of Foucault’s Pendulum, the narrator tells of a couple who suffers from this post-medieval condition:

A moment later, the couple went off — he, trained on some textbook that had blunted his capacity for wonder, she inert and insensitive to the thrill of the infinite

Yeah, so I want more out of this Brooks column and there’s nowhere to go. He doesn’t provide a link for the Ward essay, which seems selfish for one who is lamenting the closing of our imaginations, “many historians” gives me nothing, and oh, how I wish there were some implicitly titled “If you like this or care about the night skies, you should check out…”

The internet’s best contribution to this dilettante’s life is “More…” and I have none.

I’ve been seeing a lot of steampunk pics and references in my web trolling lately. Despite being a fan of the aesthetic, the not the fiction so much, I was stumped to see this one at Steampunk Workshop:

It’s a Mac Mini inside an old-fashioned (circa: steampunk) tin.  The picture below of modded headphones also comes from the Steampunk Workshop. But they strike me as pre-atomic-era SF, sitting more comfortably next to an oscilloscope than a brass input device.

Why are designers are getting such a kick out of steampunk mods of Apple stuff? The ultimate design objects being modded and retrofied to the place where there original design is not only lost, but are pushed in a distinctly mechanical direction?

The charm of steampunk for me is that it hearkens to the last great age of the renaissance person: late 19th century Europe, especially England. It’s a time when people could still dabble in many fields and make contributions in them: astronomy, electricity, biology, studies of the ether, psychology were all still open enough that, dare I say it, amateurs could still make discoveries or meaningful contributions in those fields while writing lame poems and playing the pianoforte after dinner for guests.

Or maybe it’s the time of the literary engineer — someone out of a Jules Verne novel who knew the classics, might quote Shakespeare, and still be able to improve on a thermal combustion engine and then house it in a mahogany case with brass fixtures. Sherlock Holmes is the quintessence of the literary scientist. Despite some embarassing gaps of ignorance, Holmes was a chemist, a historian, and a supremely gifted violinist who lived surrounded by those same brass-handled cabinets filled with news clippings, biological samples, ashes from cigars, shag tobacco, and sheet music.

This is the appeal of many adventure games, particularly Myst (all about the brass and amateur science), Jules Verne, the emerging adventure game sensibility in Dan Brown and other ‘manuscript’ genre novels. Even Bioshock with its emphasis on an aether-like technology and art deco setting, hearkens back to something more steampunk than cyberspace.

My enjoyment of steampunk is probably due to the demise of the literary engineer. There’s just too much to try and know and lifehackery has us focused on efficiency. I regularly see people on Facebook proclaiming that they don’t read, or don’t read fiction. I have friends who find literature inefficient and while they care about aesthetics, it feels like an efficient post-Swiss design nod to the finer things. The Mac Mini setup above has flourishes and embellishments — its charm is in its non-cleanness. Its celebration of artifice makes it tactile, places it in the realm of the craftsmen, implies the odors of wood and metal polishes, even celebrates its intricacy. By inviting us in to the mechanical intricacies of an object, steampunk acknowledges that we understand it and turns that understanding into something aesthetic.

Some time last year, I got sick of listening to people complain about the negative effects of technology.  It may have been when I got my Sony book reader, but I think it goes back earlier to when some ninny sent me a Thomas Friedman column, in which Friedman suggested that we had gone too far with technology.  The column was nauseating NY liberalism at its snooty self-important worst:

I arrived at Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport the other night and was met by a driver sent by a French friend. The driver was carrying a sign with my name on it, but as I approached him I noticed that he was talking to himself, very animatedly. As I got closer, I realized he had one of those Bluetooth wireless phones clipped to his ear and was deep in conversation. I pointed at myself as the person he was supposed to meet. He nodded and went on talking to whomever was on the other end of his phone.

When my luggage arrived, I grabbed it off the belt; he pointed toward the exit and I followed, as he kept talking on his phone. When we got into the car, I said, “Do you know my hotel?” He said, “No.” I showed him the address, and he went back to talking on the phone.

After the car started to roll, I saw he had a movie playing on the screen in the dashboard — on the flat panel that usually displays the G.P.S. road map. I noticed this because between his talking on the phone and the movie, I could barely concentrate. I, alas, was in the back seat trying to finish a column on my laptop. When I wrote all that I could, I got out my iPod and listened to a Stevie Nicks album, while he went on talking, driving and watching the movie.

After I arrived at my hotel, I reflected on our trip: The driver and I had been together for an hour, and between the two of us we had been doing six different things. He was driving, talking on his phone and watching a video. I was riding, working on my laptop and listening to my iPod.

There was only one thing we never did: Talk to each other.

It’s a pity. He was a young, French-speaking African, who probably had a lot to tell me. When I related all this to my friend Alain Frachon, an editor at Le Monde, he quipped: “I guess the era of foreign correspondents quoting taxi drivers is over. The taxi driver is now too busy to give you a quote!”

I found this infuriating.  The assumption that a cab driver is just dying to be a reporter’s ‘vox populi’, or that he shouldn’t be allowed to entertain himself on the job (presumably Friedman doesn’t listen to music while he writes or watch TV while doing email at night), or cabbies choosing not to talk to a passenger who means nothing to him was somehow wrong, clearly, as indicated by the incoherence of the sentence, bugged me.

What bugged me most, though, was the way Friedman was judging another person’s use of technology through his own lens.  So the Jan Chipchase article in today’s NYT, has a great, liberating moment:

This is when I voiced a careless thought about whether there might be something negative about the lightning spread of technology, whether its convenience was somehow supplanting traditional values or practices. Chipchase raised his eyebrows and laid down his spoon. He sighed, making it clear that responding to me was going to require patience. “People can think, yeah, monks with cellphones, and tsk, tsk, and what is the world coming to?” he said. “But if you wanted to take phones away from anybody in this world who has them, they’d probably say: ‘You’re going to have to fight me for it. Are you going to take my sewer and water away too?’ And maybe you can’t put communication on the same level as running water, but some people would. And I think in some contexts, it’s quite viable as a fundamental right.” He paused a beat to let this sink in, then added, with just a touch of edge, “People once believed that people in other cultures might not benefit from having books either.”

Finally.