Salvifici Doloris, John Paul II, 11 February 1984
On salvific suffering...

From CNN tonight: Doctors Perform Tracheotomy On Pope

Kristen ruminates (sweetly!) on "the longest short month ever."

Phil Luciano at PJStar.com says: "News needs eyes like Thompson's"
He eulogizes Thompson the writer, and his ability to make a story really live. "That's important, I think, because everyday newspapers are boring. That's why people don't read them as much anymore. Publishers are in denial about this. They say people are too busy to read newspapers. I say people are too busy to read boring newspapers."

Writer Hunter S. Thompson Kills Himself ... Oh, man...

Slate Asks: "Do You Feel Holy, Punk? - Keanu Reeves, as an Exorcising Dirty Harry, in Constantine"

The Science of Middle Earth ... Those Amazing Mammals
Fun Tolkien stuff via Mixolydian Mode...

Landing Pages...
Nick Usborne writes on eXcess Voice about a new study from Marketing Sherpa that indicates just how important landing pages are ... "50% of landing page visitors bail in 8 seconds or less..." Copy is huge, but design just as important since in that 8 seconds the reader needs to learn something, not look at clip art images or funky graphic elements...

A Change In The Ecology Of Information

Vanity Fair media columnist Michael Wolff argues in a recent speech that the "information "industry is evolving into the "media" industry, that it's losing authority and coming to rely on being a marketing partner rather than an information purveyor to earn its paycheck. He further argues that the Wall Street Journal, despite being a great newspaper, is irrelevant, specifically because it chose to charge for its content.

Content is not king, Wolff says. Information wants to be free.
The devaluation of information prompts the question, he says, of "why are you still here?"

"And it is the question. There is a set of answers. One is the existential answer: You're dead but you don't know it. The other answer is the perfectly human, practical response, which is that the industry is dying, but industries take a long time to die and we all will actually be dead before the industry finally expires. Or there's the third thing, which is just, you know, the industrial revolution happens and people are still left on the farm."

He goes on to say...

"The magazine industry literally decided that having people pay for information was not as valuable as essentially giving it to them and aggregating a large audience, which was then sold to advertisers. This is, of course, fundamentally the Internet business, and fundamentally the model that was entered into there. It's the eyeball business, the marketing business."

Which means that the fundamental balance of power has shifted and affected the "church and state" separation between advertising and editorial.

Which leads to a situation in which ...

... "consumers fundamentally recognize this and say, 'This is a goddamn rip off. I'm just being sold something.' And so they just turn the dial or throw the magazine. We've created a situation of such high disposability of information that, of course, the value is going to drop."

Which leads him into speculations on the core change in the "ecology" of information; a change produced by having control of information in the hands of the consumer instead of the media provider.

Of course, I think the super-saturation of media means more opportunities for old media to distinguish itself -- to provide context to the unbridled mélange of ideas that have overflowed the culture. The answer for the modern media company is not to sell simply information, but context. Not that I think that's much different than it ever has been ... what's new is the technological field on which the struggle to provide context must be waged.

Deeper and Deeper
Steffen Fjærvik at E-media Tidbits speculates on how text stories could duplicate the "zoom" feature of this Super Cool Illusion.

Fjærvik asks, "Where could that lead us? Can we imagine giving the reader/viewer the right to choose the level of detail in a story? Where they can choose to stay on a superficial level and only get the big picture, or they can dive into the details, whereby they will find more and more and more and more and ... ?"

Good questions. Reminds me of hypertext storytelling concepts that people have been talking about since, well, hypertext. But I've yet to see it applied really well to journalism. (Which doesn't mean somebody, somewhere hasn't done it, but it certainly hasn't become a standard!)

Here are a couple of things this brings to mind for me ... one is something visual like http://www.visualthesaurus.com and the other is the much more basic hypertext style of content presentation in http://wikipedia.org.

For The Birds...
We got a couple of pairs of binoculars, a bird feeder, some suet cages and a bird identification book for Christmas (thanks Sheila, Ed and Wendy). Since then we've kept the book and the binoculars on the counter in the kitchen and kept an eye out. We soon attracted a pair of chickadees, but haven't seen much else except high flying and distant birds.

The warm sunny day today was filled with bird song, though, and while Kristen and Sofia napped away the remnants of colds, David and I went for a stroll.

Beyond our usual chickadees we also identified a downy or hairy woodpecker (they look almost exactly alike) and a red breasted nuthatch. David spotted the nuthatch first, calling out: "look, an upside down bird!" Sheila told him about upside down birds months ago, and it seems the lesson stuck.

Marine's Family Fighting To Get His Internet Data

Amazing. My first reaction is to say that somebody's estate should be able trump privacy issues and obtain his e-mail and online data. Though somebody who was doing something online he'd rather not have a public or even familial posthumous record of -- and I don't mean something unpleasant necessarily, just something private -- might feel differently ...

The real answer, I suppose, is for this to become a pro forma part of modern life -- everybody sets up a living will for digital media, licenses and asp's and designates an appropriate heir or specifies that all personal online data be destroyed at the time of his death.

Of course, this also reminds me that I've often wondered if the historical figures whose private letters and journal entries get pored over by historians really intended these documents to become part of the "official" record. Did everybody who ever wrote in a diary write with the self conscious sense the he was writing for posterity?

(Thanks for the link, James)

Will The Fourth Estate Destroy The Internet Or Subsume It?

Neither, I think. But the predictions are gaining steam on both sides.

Eva Dominguez reported in E-Media Tidbits on the 'Mediatization' of the Internet. "An interesting analysis recently published by Gazette magazine concludes that there is both an 'internetization' of traditional media and a 'mediatization' of the Internet going on. But while the former is having less impact, the latter 'threatens making the Internet a monological space.'"

This post is especially interesting when considered relative to Epic, the future history piece that made the rounds recently predicting the demise of the Fourth Estate.

Does Language Come From Culture Or Is It Built In To The Brain?
From the Rutland Herald today ... a story on how scientists are looking at the Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language to determine whether it demonstrates that language reflects the brain's innate neural circuitry.
Linguists have long disputed whether language is transmitted just through culture, as part of the brain's general learning ability, or is internally generated with the help of genetically specified neural circuits that prescribe the elements of grammar. Since children learn to speak from those around them, there is no obvious way of separating what is learned from what is innate except by observing a new language being developed from scratch, something that happens very rarely.

Gritty The Bold
We have mice. You can see the little trails in the snow that lead from the old stone wall down the hill up to the foundations. And you can hear them sometimes in the walls. It's annoying because we're human beings, and we want to control everything in our environment. (And more practically, because they get into things...) It's cute because we were weaned on stories like Stuart Little and The Mouse and The Motorcycle. It's cute because it's winter in the mountains and there's a warm quilt on the bed and furnace chugging away in the basement and mice stealing birdfeed and tucking it up in their little nests under the eaves and... well, you get the picture.

We have a black and white cat named Gritty. Kristen's sister Kate, who lives on a farm, found Gritty in the barnyard one day. She'd been kicked out of the litter. Kate fed the kitten, whose eyes were still closed, with a bottle. Not long after we came down for a visit and Kristen fell in love with the little beast and we took it back to Nashua with us. Turns out the premature weaning and the lack of litter mate socialization made Gritty a little crazy. Well, really crazy. She ran really fast around the house and bumped into things. She always wanted to suck on people’s fingers. But we'd made a commitment, and so we kept her. She decided she was a guard cat. She attacked our landlord; jumped from the floor all the way to his back, trying to get at his neck. One time Kate’s husband Jerry was visiting and she attacked him. I had to hold her at bay with a pillow while he escaped the room.

Tonight I heard something under the stove. I got the flashlight and a broom and saw a little mouse -- or mole, I think it might have been a mole. I pulled out the stove a ways and sent Gritty in. She was back there a minute. I heard the click of her claws, a swipe and then she backed out from behind the stove, butt wobbling in terror. The mole was making an angry chittering noise. It poked its nose out from under the stove, saw I was still there, and ducked back in. I chased it around the kitchen for another twenty minutes with a broom and a plastic cup but I never caught the darn thing.

Gritty hid under Sofia's high chair. She's so territorial she will take on a 200-pound stranger with the temerity to come into the house, but she cowers before moles and mice. Part elephant, maybe?

Grammer The Symptom, Not The Substance Of Good Writing?
Via Arts Journal ... Author Philip Pullman writes about the results of University of York research into the teaching of grammar. The researchers' conclusion? Teaching a kid grammar doesn't make him a better writer. It actually doesn't seem to have any impact on his writing at all.

Pullman writes: "If we want children to write well, giving them formal instruction in grammar turns out not to be any use; getting them actually writing seems to help a great deal more. Teaching techniques that do work well, the study discovered, are those that include combining short sentences into longer ones, and embedding elements into simple sentences to make them more complex: in other words, using the language to say something."

This seems evident to me. I was no fan of grammar in school, and actually don't recall ever getting much formal instruction in it. I do remember being read to constantly, then reading, and being encouraged to write. I didn't begin to take any sort of interest in grammar until I began studying Spanish in my late 20s.

Which also might have been a mistake.

This from Wikipedia's entry on language learning (via Puerta del Sol blog):

"Repeat and memorize whole sample phrases and sentences which embody grammatical rules. Grammar requires calculation before speaking. It is easier to use a memorized sentence pattern as a basis instead."

I wonder how much better a grasp I would have on Spanish now if I'd spent fewer hours studying Spanish grammar and more hours learning the language by memorizing phrases? After all, what do I care if it's a gerund so long as it assists me in speaking, writing and communicating?

UPDATE
Hmmm... as I thought about my initial enthusiasm for this idea in part because I wonder if there isn't more to be said about the meaning of grammar? Is grammar only grammar if you're diagraming sentences? It seems rather that grammar, which is the study of structural relationships in language, happens with the sort of exercise Pullman is describing.

In the case of foreign language learning ... and this may be due to the fact that I've had to do most of mine from books and CDs ... I really rely on grammar to help understand what is happening in a sentence in order to be able to remember that sentence.