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May 4th(b) Props to [davisam] for beating me to the quiz before I entered planland. I'm intrigued by all the responses to the quiz. I think the most important question is posed by [leachale]: "What constitutes a 'good' score, anyway? Is there one?" I don't think so. Once upon a time, anxious about my career choices, I had a two-day battery of tests done that provided similar but much more finely-tuned information to that quiz. One of the things I found fascinating about the way the testers interpreted my results was that they convincingly talked about "high" and "low" scores rather than good and bad ones, and they pointed out the advantages and disadvantages of both kinds of scores. For instance, my memory for visual details is really low. They said that's bad news for remembering faces out of context but good news for concentrating on the big picture of a long-term project without getting bogged down in details. On the other hand, I scored pretty high in working with concrete geometric forms. They said that's good news if I want to build a bookcase, bad news because I'm likely to be frustrated in a profession that deals with abstract ideas at the expense of working with physical stuff. For whatever it's worth, I think all those statements were basically accurate. With the Guardian quiz, I think the principles are similar--the writers go out of their way to say that low scores aren't problems, and I can see positive and negative sides to a great many of the questions--but the information isn't as useful because a) it depends on self-perception, whereas the more specialized tests don't care what you think, only what you can do, and b) the categories are so broad that (as some people pointed out), they group together all kinds of subcategories of aptitude and inclination that might well function independently. The two scores undoubtedly say little about appropriateness of career choices or other big issues. As clear as those problems are, it's interesting that the gender split reported in the article seems even more dramatic in the small sample of people who have taken the quiz here. I really didn't expect that difference to be so stark. It would be more compelling, I think, if we had more male humanities majors and female science majors taking the quiz. This stuff gets complicated fast, doesn't it? Perhaps the great writers have a point in their contradictory impulses. May 4th Mary Wollstonecraft wrote, "Mind has no sex." [Footnote: She means that minds aren't male or female, not that minds are unable to get it on--though, in a literal sense, I guess that's true.] Byron wrote, "My brain is feminine." Virginia Woolf lamented the lack of a tradition of women's writing: "The weight, the pace, the stride of a man's mind are too unlike [the woman writer's] own for her to lift anything substantial from him successfully." It seems, friends, that great writers will not lead us to an easy answer to the question of whether brains can be male or female. But what has the latest science to tell us? Your link of the day is this article in The Guardian, wherein Simon Baron-Cohen writes, "Are there essential differences between the male and female brain? My theory is that the female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy, and that the male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems. I call it the empathising-systemising (E-S) theory." (The rest of the article details the research behind that claim, and it offers some interesting commentary on autism.) I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "But [simpsone], the nature-nurture debate on this issue is old has the hills. Why take valuable planspace to tell us about this article?" Friends, the anwer lies in the article's next sentence: "Do you have a male or female brain? Take the test." Ha! An online self-test for sexing your brain! How cool is that? Cool enough, I think, to make it my plan entry for the day. For the record, my Empathy Quotient (in contrast to the English department rugby match, I'm not making this up) is 43, and my Systemizing Quotient is 41. What does that mean? See for yourself! May 3rd Peep Research, from the Millikin University library, is flat-out hi-larious. Go on, Sixers! When the TV coverage cut to the game in the first quarter and the Sixers were down by 13, Musberger opened the broadcast by saying we'd see game seven in Philly on Sunday. Are you kidding me? Calling an NBA game in the first quarter? When the Hornets were up against my #3 jersey and [gumben]'s novelty foam finger? Please. I don't know whether I'd rather draw the Orlandos or the Detroits for the next round, but I'd rather face either of them than the Nets or Celtics. (Of course I personally would fare poorly against any of those teams. This is metonymy at its raucous, unbridled best.) [gumben] joins me in liking the Giants as well. Hooray for that! On my old computer, I had that "The Giants win the pennant!" clip set as the sound that played whenever I opened a new program. Delish. Another alum surfaces from that Victorians class: [campbelm] is here. Hi, Maggie! We're looking (finally) to get to the gallery this summer. [harrisle] and [plowman] promise all manner of loot for my successful venture into insurance trivia! [harrisle], I worked for CIGNA, so Aetna was our big bad rival. Back in the day, I knew Aetna's website cold. Little did I know you were from an Aetna family. Moral mountain William J. Bennett is a 'relentless gambler'? Huh. Enough for today! I got lots more cooking for you in planland, but I don't want [blancheb] to think it's getting out of hand. :) Note Thanks to the English SEPC for organizing a great picnic! My own favorite part was the faculty vs. student rugby match. The second hour of that got really serious! I'm worn out. May 2nd Another tutee appears on my plan radar: [bealsada] has poetry from English 120 on his plan--good lad! And with [brant] joining [dowd], we're having a regular class reunion of my first seminar here. Good to see you, Marcy! [dowd]'s Lakers are infuriating to watch. I had a little of the game on in the background last night. Just when Minnesota started to come back, Kobe hit three utterly impossible shots in a row. Ballgame. (If you need a blunt object, Erika, I suggest a crude iron cudgel. A better-sounding blunt object you'll never find.) [gumben] says his "tummy hurts." Even in this informal forum, I find such phraseology inappropriate, especially from a professor. Can we not agree, [gumben], that you have a stummyache? I hope you're feeling better. The efficiency of Grinnell's bureaucracy is often breathtaking. We get our preregistration classlists about 15 minutes after the deadline for turning in cards. Oh--if you're in my Trads II for next term, you should know that it's going to be big (35 at this point, but that could go up or down) and therefore probably a touch more lecture-based than it has been in the past. [horn], did I win? [schunaca] asks what my book is about. I'm still working out the details, but tentatively, it's about a boy who feels like a persecuted outcast in his adopted family when, one day, he gets a mysterious letter saying he's about to go to wizard school! But he didn't even know he was a wizard! All manner of adventures ensue. I figure his story should fill about seven volumes in all. What do you think? (I'll shoot for a serious answer later, Carly. Gotta go.) May 1st(b) Just under the wire, I've signed my last two preregistration cards. Hooray! Vicki [horn] offers me a prize, since I "purport to have had a life within the insurance industry," for naming "the insurance capital of the world." I'm not sure about the world, but for the U.S. I'll go with Hartford. (My company had joint headquarters in Philly and Hartford, actually.) Des Moines has struck me in many ways as the Hartford of the midwest, by the way. [sarafsau] asks for the dirt on that insurance life as a "corporate spy." (For the record, competitive intelligence is the normal, legal side of corporate spying. I wasn't doing anything fishy.) I'll start with something that isn't an intelligence-gathering story. I was hired by the company because I could do writing and research for one side of a division and computer work for the other side. My first assignment combined the two: I was told to learn how to use the salespeople's client database and then to rewrite the manual for it. No problem. I spent a couple of weeks on the project, got it ready to go as a nice booklet, and took it to my boss. She said, "OK, looks good. Why don't you take it to Kinko's and have them make five thousand of them?" FIVE THOUSAND COPIES! If the book that I'm trying to finish now sells five hundred copies, including library sales, it will be considered reasonably successful. If everything goes very very smoothly, I will have worked on that book for about seven or eight years. It could easily be ten. Addendum Carolyn saw the note below about the Writers House webcast page and informed me that she (who does web work for Writers House) has created a new, more current, and more navigable version of that page for release at the end of the term. I'll point there from here when it goes up. May 1st Mayday! Mayday! [dowdj], thanks for the tip on "The Coltrane Legacy." I haven't seen it, but I will. [shebeck], I'm not sure my plan will ever live up to the lead-in you've given it. :) Here's a nice paragraph, another Carolyn find, from Randall Couch. Randall does computer work for Penn, and he has gotten involved in the activities of the Kelly Writers House. This comes from a KWH listserv conversation about how to deal with one-sided textbooks:
Speaking of Writers House, literary types might want to check out the House's webcast archive. These are full interviews and readings and such, so you'll want a high-speed connection and some free time to look at the webcasts themselves, but the index alone is fun if you're into that sort of thing. Carolyn's sister interviewed the Duchess of York ("Fergie") at The Principal's Des Moines headquarters yesterday as part of the Duchess's promotional work for Weight Watchers. Is that not an amazing collision of old and new empires? Someday perhaps I'll tell tales here of my own life in the insurance business; I worked my way through grad school doing internal research and "competitive intelligence" for one of the big companies. I bet you can't wait! April 30th It's hard to imagine this crowd hasn't seen it before, but I'll point anyway to this Math on the Simpsons page (another Carolyn find), which looks great. Tutees! Tutees! And anyone else who has seen Bride of Frankenstein must must must look at this article in the new Onion: "Ashcroft Rejected by Newly Created Bride of Ashcroft." I don't know how funny it is if you haven't seen the film. I wouldn't try any of this stuff in [simpsone]'s classes 'cause he has no sense of humor: Sixteen Ginsbergian things to do in class in addition to throwing Potato Salad. This year's best burger in economic journalism goes too . . . The Economist! for this informative article on the use of worldwide Big Mac (TM) prices to predict movements in currency markets. [likarish]'s link to Star Wars Asciimation is a hoot. Yay for [aswell]'s film going up! [marzench] outs me as a San Francisco Giants fan. (Barry Bonds and Allen Iverson: if the media hates 'em, I loves 'em.) Chad was incredibly gracious after his Angels ripped our hearts out last year. April 29th(b) In spite of [plowman]'s sensible point that lots of ways of organizing plans can work, as long as one is consistent about it, I have now decided that it's better to put new stuff on top, period. I am therefore rearranging everything from the last couple of days to achieve perfect reverse chronology. Also, [plowman], Carolyn appreciates the wave. On that note, here's a link to my favorite of Carolyn's radio performances in Real format. I don't want to give away the humor, so I'll just say that it's a funny monologue on literary issues. Oh, it does have a title: "Wrestling with Charlotte Brontė." Methinks [blodgett]'s praise of my "completely unbiased playoff coverage" is saucy and ironical. I will forgive him, however, because he has put copies of his [Titular] Head films online for our viewing pleasure. But others are still denied me! No [aswell] film on the web? No [damerowc]'s Extension to immortalize my messy office desk? No copy of the brilliant Belfry, [jansonp]? I know there are copies elsewhere, but seriously, I hope the others go online eventually so I can point them out to friends elsewhere who would enjoy them. Oh, and [titular], the "Best Meat Option" line has to follow the Veggie one for the joke to work. :) Thanks for tutorial planlove from [liuhong], [mckenzi1], [wustepha], and [perinoju]. Nice to see you all here! [stutelbe], truth be told, I also try to revise away from "hopefully" in the manner you describe. I just think of it as a matter of style rather than correctness. [stone]: The "dative of interest"? Too rich for my blood. Fold. April 29th Hmm. When [gumben] has multiple updates in one day, he puts the newest at the top. I put the new day at the top, but each day's stuff stays in the order I enter it. Can planland contain such a shocking contradiction? [gumben]: Happily, I had work to do that allowed me to see most of the Sixers game. Indeed, Iverson's shot was off, but he played very well otherwise, and the team picked up a lot of his misses anyway. In the first half, there was a play that showed why AI's misses aren't as bad as other people's misses: he cut into the lane, beat his own man and the guy who came to double him, thus forcing a third Hornet to alter his three-foot floater. The shot rolled off, but Van Horn was utterly uncontested for the tip-in. Dan Kennedy's Media Log in the Boston Phoenix is a lot of fun. Today's column isn't up yet, but the Monday entry (which will stay up for the week) collects commentary on Apple's entry into the online music business. Yesterday's NY Times had a column on a recent convention of Poets Laureate, where they were talking about an amazing resurgence in popularity of and respect for poetry. Interesting. The current Atlantic Monthly online has an article about Oscar Wilde. (Grammar geek note: the commonly articulated prohibition against beginning a sentence with "hopefully"--or "happily," in my Sixers entry above--makes no sense. Take this sentence: "Hopefully, it won't rain on my wedding day, because then people will say the weather is ironic, thanks to Alanis Morissette, even though it's really just an unfortunate coincidence." Many people, including my high-school English teachers, say that the sentence doesn't work because the opening adverb needs to modify the noun that follows it, and "it" is not "hopeful." However, we use similar constructions [called "sentence adverbs all the time, with basically or briefly, say, and nobody says boo about it. Oh--this is probably what people fear from an English teacher's plan.) April 28th(c) [harrisle], the email is out: you got no troubles with Sunday night. [butchers], you thought that I wrote the Mil Millington site before you took my class? That's fantastic! I can't imagine encountering plain old me on the first day of class if you were expecting Mil. Now to work on teaching-related emails and organizing files during the rest of the Sixers game. I know [gumben] is with me on the bandwagon! Addendum Thanks to [harrisle] and [schunaca] for Derrick's info. I think we're set. And right on, Sixers! Super game for E-Snow. April 28th(b) [dowdj], the Coltrane recording of Lush Life that I have in mind is the title track of this 1957 album. If your reservation about the one you know is that it's too short, you'll love all 13:57 of this one. Strayhorn is a magic man. I don't know the Joe Henderson rendition that you like; I should listen more to Henderson--I even played with him once upon a time when he guest-starred with a band I was in--but he has never captured my affections the way that Coltrane and Stan Getz and even Joshua Redman have. Lately I've been into Dave Holland. I saw his Quintet in Charlottesville in college and again last semester in Davenport and loved them both times. I'm not sure their brilliance always comes across on CD, but I like Prime Directive a lot. I'm not terribly crazy about Chris Potter, the saxophonist, but the rest of the band is terrific. If someone would be willing to alert me to Derrick Mitchell's current mailing address, I would appreciate it. Carolyn got a letter from him (as we arrived home from the YGB concert in his honor, amazingly enough), and she isn't sure she can make out the return address. For those still following the saga of the dresser: it went into the bedroom last night and displaced my truly repulsive K-Mart dresser and a particleboard set of bookshelves that was holding sweaters. I'm not sure the room quite looks like adults live in it yet, but it's a big step forward. If you haven't seen it through my website or [bloom]'s quotation of it yet, do have a look at Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About, by Mil Millington. Be sure to follow the link in the middle, too. Reading the whole thing is not a small project, but it is one worth undertaking, though perhaps after finals. April 28th My daily look at the amazing Arts & Letters Daily turned up an article from The Economist about the political history of Beethoven's Ninth. It's a review of a new book by a fellow named Buch--creating lots of potential stupid Buch-book puns among Buch's English-speaking friends, of course--and perhaps some of the hundreds of you who will perform the Ninth in May will be interested in the review or the book. (Now that my wife is in the viola section of the college orchestra, I'm much more attuned--so to speak--to that world than I once was.) The aforementioned Arts & Letters Daily looks overwhelming at first glance, but the new stuff goes at the top. The links running down the left side of the page are worth a peek, too. Does everyone know that the inimitable Onion will now send you a weekly email when the new edition comes out? The current issue is not quite top-quality Onion, IMHO, but this piece on waking up to a one-night-stand's lousy DVD collection isn't bad. Good to see you're still hanging around virtually, [dowd]! I hope all is well. April 27th(b) Thanks for the wave from Costa Rica, [Twohy]! Good to know that students are only semi-stressed there. [sarafsau] speculates on my role (which I didn't realize I was playing) as the first non-math/CS professor here, saying that "the simplicity of [my] HTML code alone proves that his familiarity with computers is way higher than the average Grinnell professor." I appreciate the compliment, but I think my budding affection for planlife goes back to the early days of Usenet, which is now dying off but was once an amazing cross-disciplinary online community for discussing just about anything. I agree with [rebelsky]'s analysis of the "must rat" clause of honor codes. I went to a big honor code school. (Virginia, that is--the code supposedly goes back to a moment in the early 19th century when a professor, dying from gunshot wounds inflicted by a student, refused to identify the culprit, saying that "A man of honor would turn himself in." The student was no such man, however; he ran away and committed suicide.) The original code there prohibited things like playing cards with first-years, but it evolved into preventing only lying, cheating, and stealing. Now the system is run entirely by students, and there is only one sanction: if you're guilty, you're expelled. [rebelsky] writes, "Note that I would not want to see an honor code implemented for drinking, alcohol, or related behaviors." Those matters are the province of a separate "judiciary" system at UVA and at other honor code schools as well. I liked the honor code a lot when I was in school--we could take unproctored exams wherever we wanted to, for instance--but I don't know what it would be like to start implementing a code from scratch. I appreciate [breenpet]'s characterization of my fastball as "wicked," but it wasn't enough to knock [whitcomb] from his perch with a reasonably direct hit (of the target, not Dave). Another humbling life lesson. Addendum Oh--thanks for the correction on the date, [harrisle] and [rebelsky]. Oops. Sign me up for the book, [aswell]! I'll take two if you want to sell more copies, one if you think you might not have enough. April 27th Carolyn (my wife, who was born to have a plan or blog) found a great site yesterday: the British Museum sound archives. Go here for wildlife sounds, here for spoken words, including those of Florence Nightingale and Joyce reading from Ulysses. Seeing the MVP debate between [gumben] and [dowdj] inspires me to plug John Hollinger's Pro Basketball Prospectus. As a longtime follower of the statistical developments in baseball analysis, I am here to say that the revolution has arrived for basketball. I don't know what Hollinger's analysis of this season will be, but he says T-Mac is underrated. FWIW. Side note: following the link to [dowdj]'s plan made me want to listen to The Turnaround. I too have had times where the lyrics to Lush Life wouldn't go away, though the lyrics are incomplete because I primarily know it through Coltrane's version and playing it myself (also on tenor). So it's like being haunted by half a ghost. April 26th(b) Update late(ish) Saturday evening: Wow--planlove! Thanks for the warm welcome, everyone. Thanks especially to [andersem] for telling me how to do links--I tried standard HTML code, and I hadn't figured out the alternative. [gumben] shares my sorrow at the Sixers' loss tonight; here's hoping it was a one-game surge as the Hornets rallied around the broken-fingered Mashburn. The Sixers are still undefeated in the playoffs when I wear my Iverson jersey during any part of the game, for the record. Honk if you think I'm kidding. I was logging on, however, to say that you, my fellow Grinnellians, have helped me have a great time over the last eight days, from Titular Head to IM hoops to the Tennessee Williams one-act to the antiwar dance to Ritalin Test Squad to YGB to the first bit of Waltz tonight. (And of course seeing my beloved students and, as a special treat, my advisees.) I promised myself last year that I would let myself tap into the great end-of-year stuff this time around, and it's been wonderful. In case you're wondering about the dresser--this is the level of drama to expect from my life, incidentally--the third layer of polyurethane now blankets four other layers of stuff, and it looks all right. I didn't want to leave you hanging. April 26th [Tap tap tap.] Is this thing on? Check one two check one two. Sibilance, sibilance. I'm entering planworld for the first time. I couldn't get the Titular Head files online without one, according to [aswell], so this is all her fault. If you're bothering to read this, you probably already know that I'm a professor. Eek. There goes the neighborhood. While I keep this plan, I promise to try to be a good citizen and post stuff. My opening salvo: everyone needs to look at this page to see Weight Watchers recipe cards from 1974. I think the Fluffy Mackerel Pudding will be just the thing! And the picture of Melon Mousse is not to be missed--with racy commentary, too! Paul Krugman had a great column yesterday in the NY Times about Dick Gephardt's proposal to replace the tax cut with health insurance. (Registration is free if you haven't already). The column connects in an interesting way to the sequence in the antiwar dance--playing today in Iowa City, IIRC--about what $75 billion can do. If you've seen the dance, think about that list of stuff and then multiply it by ten to get the administration's proposed tax cut. Yoikes. I discovered the Today's Papers column on Slate a few months ago, and now I'm hooked. Thus ends my first plan entry; I gotta mow the lawn and stain the Ikea dresser I bought last month to see if I can convince it to look like furniture. Hmm.
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