A discussion of Steven Pinker in the comments for my last post brought up a memory from grad school, and I thought I’d post it here. I was sitting in the little coffee shop/diner place across from the Second Cup on du Parc, up in the McGill Ghetto in Montreal. It was basically my favorite place for a light meal, and I always had a samosa and a calzone — usually chicken, sometimes beef or veg. This time, I’d met up with my friend Chiraz and we were having coffee and talking. Somehow, I got onto the subject of the …
Tag: academia
A “Sense of WTF?”
I’m one tiny little paragraph away from completing a draft of my paper which, well, I can’t quite call it the first draft. It’s more like draft v2.1. I wrote most of it once before, realized it sucked in structure and voice, restarted with a totally different voice but a similar (though subtly reworked) structure, and then filled in soe of the holes I’d left gaping in the first draft. I’ve edited so much of it already, though, that I anticipate only a half-day next week for editing, which means, once I finish this final paragraph, I’m free, free, free! …
The Singularity Ate My Homework and Other Database Wrestling
My employer doesn’t have good access to any of the fulltext databases with literature stuff (like MUSE or JSTOR). While it looks like this might get rectified in the next while, I am not going to be able to get my hands on this article. Which, in case you’re lazy, is titled “The Singularity Ate My Homework and Other Reasons I Can’t Predict the Future” by Ariel Mameon. It was published in the New York Review of Science Fiction back in 2004, is apparently available in the Texas A&M database. Or am I misunderstanding the listing? I’m wanting a look …
All Yesterday’s Tomorrows: Future Shock (1970) by Alvin Toffler
(Note: The “today” I mentioned at the beginning of this post was on April 21st. This has sat in the drafts pile for a while.) Today, I happened to pick up a copy of the 1970 futurist classic Future Shock, by Alvin Toffler. This being Korea, there’s never a shortage of Toffler books around: the author’s tenure as an advisor to Kim Dae Jung seems to have ensured an enduring reputation here. (The library where I work even has a Korean translation of the book! I wonder how faithful the translation was, as well as how some of the, er, …
From an email
Yes, this is from a real email: Ha, I love saying, “hack my way into JSTOR”: it’s so mildly subversive and so painfully academic at the same time. Like painting academic graffiti (with in-text citations) on a library wall or something. If you’d shown me this when I was in high school and told me I’d written it, I’m not sure I would even have understood it, let alone gotten any enjoyment out of such a glimpse of my future self. As an undergrad? Oh my, I can imagine how dumbstruck I would have been. And now? Muhahaha. My, how …