I’ll say more tomorrow

By AMH

A couple of thoughts on motivation and procrastination for your Monday…
Working hurts less that procrastinating, we fear the twinge of starting
“Thanks to hyperbolic discounting (i.e., weighting values in inverse proportion to their temporal distance) the instant pain of disengaging from an Internet article and paying a prefrontal override cost, can outweigh the slightly more distant (minutes in the future, rather than seconds) pain of continuing to procrastinate, which is, once again, usually more painful than being in the middle of doing the work.”
where’s my motivation from pictures for sad children

Brief Interviews and Broom of the System, DFW

By AMH

One of the best things about the holidays is always the opportunity to do more reading than usually happens during the semester. This past break, I tackled two books by David Foster Wallace: Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and The Broom of the System. Of the two, I greatly preferred Broom.
Brief Interviews is a collection of stories (or vignettes? or “interviews”?) that hang together through themes of relationships, connection, and what it is for people to see or know each other (or not). The titular interviews give the accounts of a number of undescribed subjects of a significant relationship in their life. These were, for me, the most entertaining portion of the book. Interspersed between them were more traditionally structured stories. Even though the book itself is fairly short and the individual stories cannot be considered long, I found myself frequently feeling I like got the point and was ready for the story to end five or ten pages before they actually did. Ultimately, I think the book did a fine job expressing the often painful uncertainty in others that comes with a relationship, but the pain was expressed without the humor I am accustomed to with Wallace that usually cuts the tension.
In contrast, The Broom of the System was closer to what I expect from Wallace’s fiction – a rambling story with bizarre characters suffering surreal experiences that ultimately end up connecting in an unanticipated resolution. Highlights here include a missing great-grandmother who cannot regulate her body temperature and must live in a room at 98.6 degrees, a building owner who has decided to eat the world, a baby food mogul and his rebellious daughter, a mysteriously malfunctioning telephone system and a newly loquacious bird. The characters all suffer from various delusions, paranoia or uncertainty about their own reality. It was thoroughly entertaining – highly recommended if you enjoy ridiculous twisting puzzle-plots.
The books share some major themes – connection, relationship, knowing oneself and others, and the boundaries between people. Both books feature characters mocking the therapeutic process/therapists and their own neuroses – perhaps a bit moreso in Broom. But on the whole, I found Interviews significantly darker and more hopeless. Broom certainly does not end on a hopeful note full of rainbows and unicorns, but while the characters may be filled with despair, somehow it does not feel as if the book is. Interviews (which I read first) left me wondering if I wanted to even bother with Broom – I am certainly glad that I did.

Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere

By AMH

Based on my experiences being seen with the book, I feel like I have to preface any comments on Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere with a disclaimer that I am aware it is based on a television series and, yes, I decided to read the book anyway. And while I can see how the story could translate well to a serial format, it is also perfectly nice as a single unit.
The story is grounded in a typical fantasy context – average guy accidentally falls into another side of the world, struggles to make sense of his new surroundings, finds out there is more in him than he thought. It’s executed entertainingly, though, with a good plot-to-characterization balance and enough mystery about how things will turn out. Well, perhaps not about how things will turn out, but about how we will get to the place where things eventually do turn out. The main character, Richard Meyhew, had tones of Arthur Dent from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to me, in the way that they experienced the shock and weirdness of their new reality.
Being more spoilery…. I think it was the fun little scenes that made the book for me. I can’t resist talking rats and night-at-the-museum adventures. Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar are ridiculous villains, bickering over who they can or cannot kill. And I really appreciated that the story didn’t fall back on Richard having to help in order to save the “real” world, put at jeopardy by events in the “other” world that they have no awareness of. It isn’t clear whether anything more hangs in the balance that the peace of mind of two individuals, and that is allowed to be enough to drive the story.

one place one place one hill one joy

By AMH

I’ll need someone to explain why combining Dickinson with Moby Dick is particularly interesting, but I love the interactions with the generated poem with its assignment of latitude and longitude to each stanza of the merged poem. And the javascript driving it is available for perusal as well. I think my favorite function in it is:
function nailedLine(n)
{
var a = n % nailedEnding.length;
return ‘nailed to the ‘ + nailedEnding[a];
}

CaN yOu ReAd ThIs?

By AMH

So many fun things to explore in this suggestion that students learn better from materials printed in harder-to-read fonts. First, I have only skimmed and not read the source paper, but they do acknowledge up front that this is part of a larger body of work that suggests that students learn better and retain their knowledge longer when they have to exert more thought in obtaining the information or knowledge. What is novel is that something as simple as the presentation font can trigger this effect. I liked the finding that just shaking a page while copying it to make it a bit blurry can have the same effect as well. One wonders if poor handwriting when commenting on student papers could be argued to have educational benefit, though of course that benefit would only accrue in cases where the comments were read (and the article concedes that text that becomes too challenging to read may dissuade the student from trying to understand the content at all, leading to a worse outcome than the simple-to-read text).
There is an interesting comment on the weblog entry describing the story that the researchers claim but do not rigorously establish the difficulty in reading these fonts, and that the “readable” font chosen was not designed for running text but rather for titles or the like. While I’m not sure the design intentions are relevant here, some data on time-to-read or imaging of brain activity while reading texts in these fonts would be interesting to solidify the claim that the fonts take different amounts of cognitive effort to process.

Books! and Graphs!

By AMH

It almost surprised that this diagram of all of the relationships in Infinite Jest is as simple as it is. Oh, it’s a huge graph, and there are a ton of people on it, but when you realize that every student ever named, for example, is included, and that some of the nodes represent categories of people rather than individuals, it is not as daunting as I would have expected. Still awesome though[1], and with tons of potential for expansion. The creator mentions adding line thickness or color to represent the importance of a connection, for example. They also mention that adding more detail made the diagram unreadable – that step would probably require some type of interactive layers to make the additional information coherent. If you have read the book, though, check it out!
[1] A few unlabelled connector nodes, which does bother me a bit…but awesome!

Feeling the Pinch

By AMH

Moving financial information tracking to an intuitive interface, MIT’s Media Lab has developed “smart wallets” that provide tactile feedback about your financial transactions. The three designs either vibrate when funds are deposited or withdrawn, grow or shrink with the size of your balance, or become harder to open as you have less money in your account. The video showing these interactions is highly recommended. I like not just the cuteness of the tactile interface, but I also enjoy that they are embedding the interactions in a wallet, which is already linked to financial tracking in our minds, and not just another phone app that might blink or buzz or beep as just one more notification out of many.