I am … unhindered by talent

In the recent and ongoing efforts preserve, rehabilitate, and ultimately strengthen the Morris Theatre, two local lawyers have played (and continue to play) crucial positive roles. They have donated time, expertise, and enthusiastic support, and it’s hard to imagine any of this progress being made without their assistance.

Every profession (most definitely including education) has its low-lifes and losers, however, that do their best ot make everyone look bad, and endless reams of lawyer jokes have to be based on something. Well some some of those cephalopods in wigs are apparently assisting a “scientific” author who’s either very thin skinned or very greedy or both. Stuart Pivar is the author of Lifecode, which PeeZed panned twice (two editions, so two chances to be bitten, you see). Pivar has apparently had enough of this whole idea of peer review of scientific work and is suing PeeZed and Seed Media (who manage the whole Scienceblogs site where PeeZed’s Pharyngula lives). He’s looking for a total of $15 mil, apparently arguing that Paul’s comments have damaged book sales, bruised his ego, etc., blah, stuff.

I don’t claim to be on top of all the details (it is, not surprisingly, complex and will take a while to fully unfold), but it would appear that at least part of the problem is the PeeZed (and various of his regular commenters) helped determine that at least one of the book jacket blurbs (which was also used on-line to promote the book) was partly out of context and partly an outright fabrication. Oops.

Suing is apparently more fun than admitting to a mistake, so Paul’s now been sucked into the mire of “Holy frivolous litigation, Batman!“. Not surprisingly, much blogging is happening on the subject, so you can read til your vision blurs (or your stomache turns). PeeZed’s saying nothing (on advice of counsel), Panda’s Thumb has a nice piece (complete with a photo of Dr. Evil!), this piece on Sunclipse has the whole timeline complete with links, and this Scientific American blog post has more detail on the specifics of the legal filing.

I wonder what the impact of being a “commercial” blogger instead of a “private” or “academic” blogger has on all of this? Would Pivar be less (or more) likely to sue if Paul was blogging on the U of M blog cluster instead of ScienceBlogs? In what way would that change both the offense and defense in the case? I have good reason to believe that the U’s lawyers would happily and aggressively defend their faculty in such a case, but I suspect that Paul’s contract with Seed means that it’s their lawyers who get to handle this ball.

I don’t think there’s much anyone can do at this point but watch and wait as the lawyers unwrap and rewrap this puzzle. I always have this naive hope that the courts will recognize this sort of thing for the vicious, intimidatory tactic that it is, but “naive” is the key word there, and I am often wrong.

Thanks to losiek for the cool photo.

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I would like to point out, in case anyone out there is calendrically challenged, that it’s AUGUST. The whole “summer” thing seems to have pretty much missed the UK this year, and whatever passed for it in 2007 appears done in all but name. With a few nice exceptions, it’s been cool and cloudy ever since we got here, with highs sometimes being around 20c (quite decent), but often only 15c, which is darn chilly for “summer”.

Last night WeatherGirl got fed up with it and actually turned on the heat in our house for a little while.

In August.

I’m guessing it’s gonna be a cold, damp year. Which, of course, is exactly what we expected, but we didn’t really expect it to start quite this early.

* The photo is from Alaska, which I realize is cheating, but I didn’t have anything sufficiently grey and dreary from here to share yet. I assure you that this part of Britain is entirely devoid of anything that would remotely look like a mountain.

** Since posting this, my lovely sister informs me that they’re having very similar weather in Ithaca, NY. The North Atlantic is going to a damp soggy place in a hand basket, apparently.

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Another from Mum’s garden in Preston :-).

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Originally drafted back on 11 August 2007 in Preston

Laying in bed last night looking out the window at the not so dark, I was reminded once again of how little deep darkness there is to be had out of doors in most of Britain, and how little they see of the expanse of the heavens at night. First you have the profound light pollution that’s difficult to avoid with over 60 million people living (and generating light) together on this little island. Then you have the extremely prevalent low cloud cover acting as an effective diffuse mirror for all that light, throwing much of it back down to any would be sky-gazer. So, for generations of Britons, the night sky is primarily an orange glow off the clouds, with the light pollution and humidity making little more than the major landmarks visible on even a “clear” night.

The day after I wrote the above, WeatherGirl’s mum mentioned that there was going to be a cool meteor shower over the next few days. Making my point nicely, it’s been thoroughly overcast, and we’ll have little chance of actually seeing any of it.

All in all, no comparison with the amazing night skies in and around Morris, especially when the winter cold has driven nearly every stray water molecule to ground.

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When there are significant gaps between visits (it’s been two years since we were last in the UK), there are things you remember but don’t really think about until they stand before you once again. One of those cultural oddities that our first few days in Preston has brought back in force is the strange British attitude towards electricity. Here, in a fully modern, industrialized, electronicified country, up to its ears in cell phones, one still runs across an attitude towards electricity and electrical appliances that is vaguely reminiscent of a remote tribe that appreciates that they have received the gift of fire, but doesn’t fully trust it.

Read the rest of this entry »

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I really liked the way the afternoon light filtered through the petals of this rose in Ann’s garden in Preston.

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This was started on 9 Aug 2007, in the Preston Library, with various edits between then and the arrival at semi-consistent internet.

Don’t let anybody tell you that free internet in the library is just as good as having it at home. Today we spent two hours in the library in Preston (Lancashire, UK) library using their free internet, and it’s nothing close to the experience we left behind in Morris or the connectivity we hope to establish in Colchester.

The problem isn’t the library - it’s a very nice library, and they provided fine facilities (if the connection itself was a bit slow). The problem isn’t really that you have to wait in line (or book in advance), or that you have to use their equipment and annoying IE browser, or that you have no control over the facilities. (Although all these things are certainly a significant nuisance.) The problem is that the value of so much of the Internet is simply that it’s there, at your beck and call when you need it, and that just don’t work in hour long blocks once a week.

When my mom was a kid, they had the standard references (encyclopedia, dictionary) right near the dining table so they could be quickly consulted when a question arose during dinner. This was, in its way, the 1940’s/1950’s version of having a proxy library nearby. It was also the 1970’s version as well, and I still remember our family’s purchase of a World Book Encyclopedia in 1972. Over the years I read very large parts of that many volumed beast, and it was a great resource for a growing kid.

Now, however, traditional print encyclopedias have been almost entirely eclipsed by the amazing range and currency of on-line sources. The encyclopedia I grew up with was purchased in 1972, which means that as far as it was concerned nothing in the world changed after that moment in time. (There were annual yearbooks that we got for quite a while after, but their integration was limited at best, and I don’t remember using them much.) Thus that encyclopedia (which my parents still have) knows nothing about the end of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Iron Curtain, nothing about two Iraq wars, and nothing about personal computers and the Internet itself.

Sure, Wikipedia has its issues, and Google doesn’t always drive you directly to what you’re looking for, but they beat the tar out of that old 1972 encyclopedia. For a library at your fingertips, there has never been anything in human history that comes close to the power of the net. A key part of that value, however, is the “at your fingertips” bit, and that just doesn’t work if you’re scheduling your internet time in two hour blocks days or weeks in advance.

This isn’t to say that I wouldn’t want free internet in libraries. I could see wanting to read or do research in a library (some people like that atmosphere), and wanting to be able to quickly look something up on-line. I finally finished Neil Gaiman’s excellent Sandman series this summer, and there were all manner of odd references that I would look up while I was reading. At home I’d just grab a laptop and Google; if I was instead reading in a library or a coffee shop or at the University, I’d want to be able to do essentially the same.

All of which is another way of saying I want on-line access on demand all the time, even if it pains me to admit it. And I want it for my son, and my students, and everyone else as well. I realize that this comes with risks; I taught a summer class for kids from 9 to 17, and getting them off of IM and Facebook and the host of other on-line distractions was not a trivial thing. My guess, though, is that we will, over time, learn to manage those risks, and that they’ll be outweighed by the benefits of ready access to so much information.

Sadly, this is also probably ultimately an argument for the ubiquity of web enabled cell phones and similar devices. I’m not really a big fan of cell phones. They generally (in my experience) have much poorer sound quality than a good land-line phone, “I’m on the train!” is truly obnoxious, and I’m not sure I want to be that available (people already find me enough as it is!). Still, ubiquitous (and perhaps embedded) computing devices with the ability to access the web are increasingly a reality and almost certainly represent the future.

And in that future, we’ll all have that library at our fingertips all the time, whether we’re in the library or not.

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One of the coolest/strangest things on our trip out to the UK was the discovery that the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport now has vending machines selling iPods, as well as headphones, chargers, and digital cameras! We’ve reached the point where we can buy computers in vending machines, a slight change from the "build a building and hire a staff to support the new computer" culture of 30 to 40 years ago.

Wow.

It would be interesting to look at the sales figures on these things. You’d have to have a reasonable amount of gear with you to make a new iPod useful (i.e., to upload music to it), and the kind of folks that carry that sort of gear would seem to already be iPod (or similar) kind of folks. Maybe the small ones like Shuffles and Nanos appeal to people who want to replace or augment a larger (perhaps older) iPod. As bryankennedy pointed out, the money is probably in things like the headphones (”Ooh, I’ll buy those nifty sound canceling jobbies before I board.”), and the iPods are there as much for attention and advertising as anything.

Perhaps inspired by the whole iPod vending machine thing in the airport, I ended up taking some photos of reflections in the back of the new iPod we purchased to be the "family stereo" while we’re in the UK, separated from our CD collection.

I also caught WeatherGirl and Sub-Evil Boy jamming out to their iPods on the flight over :-).

We bought our first cell phone two days ago because it was just too awkward trying to find a place to rent without any phone number to give people. WeatherGirl and Sub-Evil Boy are just too pleased with themselves over this, despite the fact that we bought to cheapest phone we could lay our hands on. It has been terribly helpful, though, so it was a good thing. We actually put down a deposit on an apartment today, so we’re hoping to have an address and a chance to finally unpack our suitcases sometime next week.

Lastly, I dumped up a bunch of photos from the trip so far (including this shot of the University of Essex) on my “events” account on Flickr. The bored among you should feel free to wonder over and have a look.

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HTB!* We’ve gone and made a silly video podcast that almost entirely fails to detail any of our adventures here in the UK! And posted it to YouTube! So you can watch! And listen!

Phew - I feel so much better now…

Ok, it’s short, silly, and largely pointless, but it’s us without all that annoying cost of flying over here to visit us. (You are, however, more than welcome to engage in the latter behavior as well.) I’ve never done this web video/YouTube thing before, and the amount of compression artifacts is kind of annoying.

We might try to do this every week or two if people care. Or we might not. It all depends :-).

We’re again super grateful to Jess, KK, and KK’s family for their help in getting us to the airport and across the pond. We had a very nice week in Preston (I know I needed the rest), and now we’re in Colchester looking for a place to live and a school for Sub-Evil Boy. We still don’t have stable internet, as the house we’re staying in at the moment doesn’t have any connection. I got a key to my office today, however, which is blessed with much happy internet, so we may spend part of the weekend in here cleaning out accumulated e-mail cruft, catching up with blogs, and the like.

Best to all!

*”Heavens to Betsies!”

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No real internet yet (we’re in a library at the moment, where there are long queues), but we’re here, safe, and happy in the UK. I’ve now started the last Harry Potter book, so I must truly be on sabbatical :-).

More later, including iPods in vending machines and embarrassing photos of my wife and son on airplanes.

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