Ntuple Indemnity

Fall away from the Internet for a week or two and the Internet falls on you. Here’s some of what I saw when I succumbed to its gelatinous reach:

• Turn up your speakers and read Jan Swafford’s article in Slate about performing classical piano repertoire on classical pianos, which is full of audio comparisons that will make you wonder if the homogenized ideal of the modern Steinway grand is really a good thing.

• The Guardian asks a wide selection of novelists for their writing tips, which have a way of telling us more about the authors than about writing. Some of my favourites: Geoff Dyer (“Don’t be one of those writers who sentence themselves to a lifetime of sucking up to Nabokov”), Anne Enright (“The first 12 years are the worst”), Philip Pullman (“My main rule is to say no to things like this, which tempt me away from my proper work”).

• Ben Goldacre shows us how regulating alternative folk medicine through requiring certification is no use at all when we don’t know what’s being certified.

• From The New York Times: Canadians shoot left, Americans shoot right. The article is about hockey players but I think there’s something bigger in this.

• Teresa Nielsen Hayden remarks on the imaginative poverty of failed authors who think suing J.K. Rowling for plagiarism is a good idea.

• Civilization IV lead designer Soren Johnson talks about designing strategy games around our intuitions about probability (or lack thereof).

• Mark Chu-Carroll explains why computer simulations of biological phenomena will never replace animal testing.

• Joel Stickley’s explorations of bad writing by example finally catch on to my fatal flaw.

I missed most of the live broadcast of the opening ceremony of the Vancouver Winter Olympics, but from what I saw it was quite the Canada-fest. Someone should look into how it compares to the way Calgary presented the country in 1988. As someone who grew up in Calgary in the decade following the Olympics, I can attest that it had a permanent transformative effect on the city and its sporting culture, and its legacy can still be felt there today.

But let’s begin with some links. I read up on much of what I missed via this article by Paul Wells, who saw the opening from inside GM Place. Jonathon Narvey and Adrian MacNair made photographic excursions to capture the early protests, which they described as scattered in a plurality of marginally coherent agendas; that was before things turned violent. For an alternative look at the political counter-programming, my friend and former schoolmate Meera Bai visited the Poverty Olympics in the Downtown Eastside. The political dimension of the Olympics doesn’t interest me all that much, to be honest, but the stories and pictures are flavourful.

I have a lumbering giant of a feature article in the works that will hopefully see the light of day soon. Until then, content yourself with some further reading:

• Kevin Brown of Geographicus wrote a comprehensive introduction to authenticating rare and antique maps—a must-read for the cartographically inclined.

• And while on the subject of maps, Google incorporated aerial images from World War II into Google Earth.

• Roger Ebert took a mental walk around London. Like most of the personal recollections Mr Ebert has put in writing of late, it’s a beautiful piece—and near the end he comes by my present stomping grounds in Cambridge and Grantchester.

• Terrence Deacon raises some problems with the theory that language is a product of natural selection.

• When David Ben-Gurion was Prime Minister of Israel, he considered Albert Einstein for President. Einstein declined.

I don’t follow American football whatsoever and would probably be unable to name any former or current NFL player that hasn’t been involved in a highly publicized criminal investigation, but you don’t need to know football to enjoy the Super Bowl pieces in McSweeney’s. The two that stuck out for me, both from a few years back: “NFL Players Whose Names Sound Vaguely Dickensian, and the Characters They Would Be in an Actual Dickens Novel” and “Famous Authors Predict the Winner of Super Bowl XLII”.

This week’s bag of links:

• In a rare sighting of the man behind Calvin and Hobbes, Cleveland newspaper The Plain Dealer interviews Bill Watterson fifteen years after the legendary comic strip ended its run.

• Peter Hum ruminates on the “ugly beauty” of avant-garde jazz.

• The big news coming out of Barack Obama’s 2011 budget was the abandonment of NASA’s plan for the resumption of manned spaceflight to the moon. SPACE.com has the analysis.

• Jonathan McCalmont, caught between the debate over high/low culture and his vehement dislike of the popular video game Bayonetta (“a game so dumb that it makes a weekend spent masturbating and sniffing glue seem like an animated discussion of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921)”), spun it all into a compelling essay on hypnotism and lowbrow art.

• This Charles Petersen piece in The New York Review of Books is one of the better histories you will find of where Facebook came from and how it has transformed, and offers a thorough look at the content-pushing pressures facing the social-network model of a nominally private Internet.

• Mark Sarvas identifies some common problems of debut novels from the perspective of a prize-committee veteran.

• In The Guardian, Darrel Ince implores scientists who rely on internally developed software to publish their source code.

In a way, the media frenzy over the death of J.D. Salinger can be understood as a kind of cathartic relief—i.e. now that he’s croaked, we can finally talk about him without feeling like we’re intruding on something. It has, at least, made for some very good reading about one of literature’s most enigmatic figures. Rather than collect the obituaries myself—I haven’t had time to read them all—I’ll link to the links at Bookninja here and here.

Serious aficionados should take a look at this 1957 letter by Salinger explaining why he saw The Catcher in the Rye as unfilmable. Really dedicated junkies of all things Salinger may even go as far as perusing Joyce Maynard’s 1972 article, “An 18-Year-Old Looks Back On Life”, which led her to drop out of Yale and live with the author for a year. (I personally find it nigh on unreadable, but it’s evidence that the cliché anxiety about settling down with 2.2 kids has been around for nearly four decades at least.)

And now for something completely different:

• How to Write Badly Well is consistently superb, but Joel Stickley has really outdone himself with this legitimately amazing poem.

• Alex Abboud previewed the new Art Gallery of Alberta, which opened its doors this weekend.

• Juan Cole speculates that Osama bin Laden is probably dead and has ceased to be relevant even if he is alive.

• Ethan Iverson makes the case for extravagant public funding of Wagner’s Ring.

• This weekend’s New York Times Magazine featured a marvelous piece by David Hajdu on AIDS survivor and phenomenal jazz pianist Fred Hersch.

• Those interested in the history of computer games will appreciate this Wired article on how perfectionism killed Duke Nukem Forever, the most infamous piece of vapourware in software history.

Here’s your grab bag for the week:

• I was already aware of Ren and Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi as a superb animation educator via the meticulous frame-by-frame studies at his blog, but Letters of Note has a real treat: a letter from Kricfalusi to a 14-year-old aspiring cartoonist.

• Rohan Maitzen makes a passionate argument that the value of a literary education is in the study of literature, not just the ancillary job skills that English departments cite to defend their own worth. (Continued here and here.)

• Jeff Foust surveys the debate over the scientific value of human spaceflight and what it means for NASA policymaking now.

• Sarah Eve Kelly, whose Anne Boleyn novel got picked up by an agent and is currently being shopped around, tells writers inundated with industry advice to shove it aside and get cracking on a draft.

• In the Columbia Journalism Review, Miles Corwin gives us a look at the young Gabriel García Márquez as journalist.

• The Economist‘s Democracy in America blog muses on the conservatism of the Muppets.

• Finally, in anticipation of whatever Apple is announcing this week, Beat-era poet Gary Snyder shares a poem about his Mac.