What is going on across the Atlantic? Thanks to Zen of Writing, I find that Jane Austen is ‘too ugly’ for book covers (BBC News).
Basically, they took the only authenticated Jane portrait, by her sister Cassandra, and ran it through Photoshop to make her look more attractive:
Before: watercolor sketch of Jane Austen (1810) by Cassandra Austen, held by the National Portrait Gallery, London. After: new Jane Austen portrait (2007), from Wordsworth publishing.
Yikes.
Some more great stuff I’ve been meaning to post – these classics will resonate with anyone who has ever taught a science course. Especially the teacher’s comment that reads “I wish I could give you credit for this.” I’ve written that so many times!
Via lots of places.
Cut-and-Paste Is a Skill, Too (washingtonpost.com)
According to Jason Johnson, maybe we shouldn’t try to fight plagiarism any more:
Research papers — of varying lengths, written without the instructor’s direct supervision — are an academic staple. They’ve been a successful way for teachers and professors to evaluate students because they allow the students to create something that tangibly displays their skills and knowledge without using any class time. But despite all its attractive qualities, the paper is an extremely weak link in academic assessment, largely for the same reasons that it has been successful — the work is done outside the classroom.
The comments on this article are pretty funny. Cognitive Daily has a good response.
I’d post the most memorable plagiarized paper I ever got from a student – note: one needs some grasp of grammar, noun/verb agreement, and sentence structure before one can cut-and-paste convincingly – but some student would probably copy it and hand it in, thus torturing a future colleague.
Language Log notes that the British softcover edition of Louann Brizendine’s The Female Brain
The American cover represents the female brain as a tangled phone cord, clearly implying communication, which is a theme of the book (though arguably a tangled and outdated analog communication?) The new British cover depicts a purse jam-packed with cosmetics and accessories, implying. . . superficiality? A cell phone (about to be clobbered by an open lipstick – handbag disaster in progress!) references the communications theme, but overall, the bursting purse barely resembles a brain to me, and certainly not MY brain. I thought the phone cord was clearly brain-shaped, elegant and serious in its cream-on-white aesthetic. The British version is flashy, pink, and disorganized – kind of a Bridget Jones’ Brain.
For everyone sleeplessly pondering this right now (or is it just me??) – proof that Harvard is better than Yale.
Whew. Glad that’s sorted. Now I can relax and eat some Triscuits.
Apparently only my Puritanical upbringing keeps me from teetering into hedonism. And given the completely frivolous, overpriced shirt I bought this afternoon, I think my inner Bentham was having an off day.
| You scored as Utilitarianism. Your life is guided by the principles of Utilitarianism: You seek the greatest good for the greatest number.“The said truth is that it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.‖Jeremy Bentham
“Whenever the general disposition of the people is such, that each individual regards those only of his interests which are selfish, and does not dwell on, or concern himself for, his share of the general interest, in such a state of things, good government is impossible.†–John Stuart Mill More info at Arocoun’s Wikipedia User Page…
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What philosophy do you follow? (v1.03)
created with QuizFarm.com
PS. This is why I thought I was a nihilist. Best xkcd ever.
Le Mont Solaire
Mont Saint-Michel, 2006
Things are getting away from me, so here’s a list of especially good art & book links I’ve collected from the past week.
One of my favorite blogs, Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society, posts about a stunning giant sundial constructed at Mont Saint-Michel, off the French coast. This video, “Le Mont Solaire”, from the project website, shows the sundial in action. The hours are indicated by reflective panels in the sand, while the spire of the abbey itself is the gnomon (the pointer casting the moving shadow).
Proceedings also has a fascinating but disturbing post on books bound in human skin. Apparently the term for this is anthropodermic bibliopegy. (Because we really, really needed a special term just for this.)
In the “disturbing books” category, our runner-up is this post from Street Anatomy about a renowned anatomical atlas whose illustrations may have been based on the dissected bodies of Holocaust victims.
3 quarks daily is like that fascinating but garrulous friend whom you find yourself dizzily talking to until 3am, despite knowing you’ll go to work the next morning sleep-deprived and sallow. I can barely keep up with its feed. In the past week or so it’s called my attention to Bookforum’s review of A Natural History of Pragmatism by Joan Richardson, which scared me, as I did not realize Jonathan Edwards went to Yale (trust me, that’s scary for personal reasons); and a truly enjoyable NY Review of Books article on Shakespeare and power, by Stephen Greenblatt, and an article on atheism and academe that I’ll have more to say on later.
Then there’s novelist Jonathan Lethem, currently popping up all over the blogosphere with interesting things to say. He’s chatting with Janna Levin at Seed , interviewed at Salon , and, if you are really interested in his perspectives on plagiarism, copyright, and creativity, you could read Lethem’s 12-page article “The Ecstasy of Influence” from the February Harper’s (which, alas, when I went to get it, has disappeared into the subscribers-only realm. Harper’s redid their website on April 1, so any old links you have may no longer work).
I don’t begrudge Harper’s their subscription fees – I’ve been meaning to subscribe for a while, but it’s ostentatiously ironic that Lethem’s article on the future of open source (and how he’s giving away film rights to his latest work) is now behind a paywall. Naughty Harper’s!
Update: Harper’s has fixed the Lethem link already (see comment below). I take the naughty thing back.
And over at the Valve, Amardeep Singh suggests peer review for blogs. Read the comments, too; they touch on some of the major problems with peer review in general, and the fundamental differences between blogging and formal publishing, which reminds me that Bruce Sterling has, if you missed it, given blogs only 10 years to live. Uh-oh. I’ll never be caught up with all the things I want to post by then. But it will be nice when my feeds dwindle to some manageable number – so I can read my New Yorker backlog. These days, life is TMI.
Biomechanical arm tattoo
2006
Anil Gupta
Inkline Studio
This amazing tattoo is the work of Anil Gupta, at New York’s Inkline Studio. Go to the Inkline site for a larger view of this piece (on its owner), and check out the rest of Gupta’s portfolio. I’ve never wanted a tattoo, but I have to admit this is really cool!
Last year, two missing altarpieces by Fra Angelico were discovered in Oxford. You’d think they’d have been tucked away in a forgotten treasure room at the Bodleian or something, but no, they were hanging behind the guest bedroom door in a local woman’s house. If only she’d gone to the Antiques Roadshow!
The paintings are due to be auctioned April 19, so if you have a spare $2 million and space on your guest bedroom wall, go for it.
It’s not often you see a biology teacher fired for claiming evolution is a crock. But that’s what happened to Kris Helphinstine, in Sisters, Oregon. I think it was a good decision; I’m tired of people complaining about inadequate public high school math and science education, and in the same breath allowing religion into the science curriculum. “Teach the controversy,” my gluteus maximus.
We now have access to actual Powerpoint presentations (“Eugenics (pdf)” and “Human History (pdf)”) used by Helphinstine through the Bend Bulletin; an IE-only slide viewer is available as a link from the Bend Weekly article linked above. In addition to the usual tenuous anti-Darwin junk (it wasn’t Darwin’s fault that Galton was his cousin – don’t you have any cousins that embarrass you?) the Eugenics presentation relies heavily on clumsy but suggestive juxtaposition of images – putting holocaust scenes next to evolutionary trees, and Darwin next to a swastika. It is April Fools’ Day, and I started to wonder if these were fake, because they’re just so amateurish, inaccurate, and inflammatory:
