Oh my God, I’ve got to stop submitting questions to our Friday Five: My question for this week turns to Time Travel again, but this time, it’s a Connie Willis sort. In her novels, characters often return to some time period in the past in order to do research; time travelers are very often historians, and archeologists have been rendered all but obsolete. If you were able to propose five such trips, assuming that one would work and that you would have to go and actually live in that time period, researching it and studying it for up to a …
Month: September 2004
Reading and Reading and Reading Some More
I’ve been reading a lot lately, but haven’t had much of a chance to post about any of it, so this is going to be a mass posting about several books I’ve read lately. (As in, during the past few months, the ones that come to mind only.) Okay, let’s see. First in importance come two graphic novels I’ve read in French: Paul a un travail d’été, by Michel Rabagliati, and Volume 1 of Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi. […and here’s an odd note: both of the authors’ names begin and end with the same letter. Hmmm.] The two graphic novels …
Description Exercise
Another ESL teaching aid: A description exercise for use with lower-level students. This one’s for kids. And here’s a template for a board game. You just need to write “Start” at one end and “Finish” at the other, and then fill the squares with whatever information you want students to get from, or tell to, their partners. You can use this in many ways: write a word and have students use the word in a sentence; write a requested piece of information that you want students to ask their partners for (“Father’s name”, for example), or write instructions for advanced …
Long long day…
Today’s a rather long day. I started teaching at 8:30 am, and I will be teaching until 7pm. That’s because I took on an extra two hours on Mondays and Wednesdays, teaching English at a high school. The kids there are good, so it’s not a chore, but it does mean preparing more exercises and so on. I’ll do that after my writing class finishes, I think. I wish I’d thought to bring dice with me today. Ah well… we can use coins for the board game I will give the kids. But I think I shall have to turn …
Another Week, Another Handout
Yes, it’s that time again. This week’s pair of handouts (one page for Wednesday, one for Thursday) for my writing class is focused on using Question-and-Answer format as a way of organizing their writing and giving them one more style tool for their writing toolkit. The level’s a little high in the handout, but I am making the kind of handout I’d give to a writing class back home. It’s easier to simplify things verbally than to make them more complex, and the level in the class is a little uneven, so I’m trying to include something for the highest-level …
Did someone stick cologne in my backpack when I wasn’t looking?
I’m not sure what’s going on, but just today, in the hour after I finished work, two women “tried to get along with me”, to use the wonderful euphemism I’ve only ever heard Lime use. One of them even saw me with my pants down! Wait, wait, it’s more innocent than it sounds. My pants were only down a little. She was a nurse in the clinic I went to, and she was jabbing a needle into my butt, delivering what’s probably the last injection of painkillers I’ll need for my tonsilitis (which seems mainly to have passed). The last …
Waitless Culture
Walking back from class today I noticed that literally half the people walking around were on phones. They were all chatting, and though I didn’t catch much of the conversations, being that it was at 11:20, I am certain most people were simply making plans to meet their friends for lunch. This is neither good nor bad, but it is interesting. Most of the students I saw had just come out of class, very likely within the previous five minutes. And so many of them were already on their phones. I tried to imagine what they would have done in …
Very Qualified for… uh…
Here’s a pretty accurate resume you should read over at Meanwhile Back In Communist London…. I found this on about pip.
The Singularity Is Not Upon Us
Again linking to Uncertain Principles—I haven’t been there in a while and it’s worth visiting— I have some thoughts on “The Singularity, which Orzel masterfully describes as follows: One of the Big Ideas in modern SF is the idea of a “Singularity,” a term coined by Vernor Vinge (I’m not sure if he originated the concept, but I’m pretty sure the term is his). The idea is based on the observation that the pace of technological change has increased dramatically in the last several decades, and if anything appears to be accelerating. Extrapolating out from this, Vinge (and others working …
I Found Some Of Your Life
Found a link on Chad Orzel’s page Uncertain Principles to this brilliant site:I Found Some Of Your Life. From the introduction: In my possession is one (1) memory card from a digital camera. This memory card was found in a taxi in New York City. I have no idea who the owner of the camera is. The pictures on the memory card were taken over the course of exactly one (1) year in this person’s life, starting July Twenty-Fifth, Two Thousand and Three (07-25-03) and ending July Twenty-Fourth, Two Thousand and Four (07-24-04). I am going to post one (1) …