Category Archives: Idle Speculation

BoF III: Keybeards and Bagpopes:

Idle Speculation, Internet Culture, Music, Puns

S Writes:
“But see, if they play the pipes near other people, they’ll be arrested.”
“Arrested? By whom?”
“… by the Scottish bagpipe police?”
“Piffle! No such thing! In fact, there is a Scottish bagpipe brigade whose job it is to ensure that the pipes are played often and loudly. They must conform to the exacting standards set forth by the…”
(at this point, B blows up my pantleg, and I pause.)
“… Bagpope.”

“The Bag Pope?”

“Imagine the mass! Every parishioner plays the pipes, and the church has to be burned to the ground after every service.”
“Wait, why? Does it seep into the stones?”
“IT IS RUINED.”

BoF II: Some one-liners from 2014

Character Classes, Idle Speculation, Internet Culture, Puns, Thoughts on Thoughts

(Along with some selected* comments.)

“Chaotic Justified. That’s my alignment. -S”
J: “Do you tab indent every third line?”
Me: “It’s more that I tab indent a number of spaces equal to the strange attractor?”

“Church bells: A peal to authority.”
Me: “Perhaps more specifically: ‘Church Bell Arguments’.”
Me: “http://mzonline.com/bin/view/Python/ChurchBellsSketch/”

Almost a Koan:
“Is Evening Performance when you balance something on top of an evening?”
M: “or light the evening on fire and spin it around”
K: “Every response merely encourages him!”

“New idea: Name one of the rooms in your home ‘Metonymy’.”
S: “That’s where we’ll store the literary theory!”
K: “Based on the amount of my mortgage that I’ve paid off, I figure that I own whichever room of my house that I am currently occupying.”
K: “I get metonymy and synechdoche mixed up.”
L: “The only example I can remember from highschool english re: metonymy is breadwinner. Does the aforementioned room provide earnings and sustenance for the rest of the domicile?”

“Sometimes unceasing horrible noise is its own reward.”
J: “That would explain your presence in bands in high school. Har har.”

*Generally from those who were playing along. If you have issues with my editing, tell me! 😀

Essays and Pedagogy

Idle Speculation, Thoughts on Thoughts

The discussion started with the article:

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2013/12/college_papers_students_hate_writing_them_professors_hate_grading_them_let.html

and evolved into a fun discussion about pedagogy in English classes.

I was reminded of:

http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html

and how it talked about (amongst many things) how learning how to write was combined with the study of literature in a more or less default way.

As a significant part of my background is running a teaching lab, I immediately thought of a similar process for teaching people how to write. You might have 10, maybe 20, maybe 30 students in a room with an instructor/teaching assistant for a few hours, writing on a topic or topics. They could have a computer with internet access if the topic required moderate levels of research. Ideally, the topic would be chosen where the writers could write something interesting, but not have to access primary source materials which were not on-line (this is becoming less and less of an issue, as more materials are digitized).

The student to teacher ratio would have to be a balance of keeping the students and the instructor engaged, and affordable to the students and worth it for the teacher.

As I say this, I can’t be the first person to think of this, and:

“2787 Weekend Intensive: Fiction Workshop”

http://2learn.utoronto.ca/uoft/search/publicCourseSearchDetails.do?method=load&cms=true&courseId=21311438

Which is 24 hours of sessions over 4 weeks, for $650.

The caveat is that this is for “A workshop for aspiring writers with short stories and novels they want to improve”, and you have to already have some writing. But there’s no reason this couldn’t be adapted for students at an earlier stage/lower level.

I would guess that the only thing stopping this is university budgets and classroom ratios.

I see a parallel between this sort of writing workshop and parts of a computational biology course I took a number of years ago. To fully express your ideas and explore them in computational biology, you want/need to have command of computer programming, in perhaps a similar way that to fully express your ideas in Literature, or Theory, or the any of the other myriad disciplines of English, you want/need to have command of writing in English. So, what was done, as it was an interdisciplinary course, for those who needed programming training, there were intensive how-to-program lessons (and the same for those like myself, who were weaker on the Biology side).

All this is a very long-winded way of saying that there are solutions to the problems that the original author faces, and they do not necessarily lie with reducing standards in English/Literature/etc. classes. (From the comments in the conversation, it seems as if the actual issue is more one of Universities and other educational institutions not being interested in applying the resources required to actually solve the problem of people who cannot write…)

Go: The Original Sandbox Game?

Games!, Idle Speculation

So my good friend Greg suggested that I learn Go recently. After being schooled multiple times (both by him and my computer game on easy), I figured that I should actually go out and learn something about it in a more organized way.

Then it got me thinking… What is it that really makes a sandbox game?

Something where you have a large amount of freedom to play in the style you want, but more importantly where you have large amount of freedom to play in the way you want, doing anything you want before the world impinges on you and makes that impossible?

Examples that come to mind are the Ultima series, Oblivion, Arcanum/Fallout, but all of these have a large variety of types of ‘moves’ that you can make.

Go has “two simple rules”:
– You can place a piece on the board anywhere where it will not be immediately taken by your opponent
– You can take your opponent’s pieces by completely surrounding one or more of them them with no empty spaces in the group

But out of this, you can make the most elegant patterns, and so many emergent properties, in a “Conway’s Game of Life” way. You can make so many different shapes, that all mean different things, and that your opponent will respond to in different ways, depending on who they are.

Maybe it’s more of a co-operative sandbox game.

Investigation is ongoing.

Propulsion, Conpulsion

Idle Speculation, Science!

Question: At this pace, how soon will humans colonize our system and others?

Clarke/Niven standard physics universe? Is there something past the standard model?

It might take decades or centuries… Is this enough to keep humans focused and occupied, to help prevent malthusian self-destructive behaviour? Is there enough for enough people to do? What else?

0th world problems

History, Idle Speculation, Puns

“Heaven’s out of toilet paper. You have to wipe your butt on a cloud.” -SN

But really, what would a 0th world problem be like? We have First world problems, like your internet not being fast enough, or having to wait 3 hours at the ER for your free non-emergency health care.

For that matter, what is a second world problem?

History repeating itself first as a farce?

-N 😀