So, which page is your favorite and why? (Defend your answer.) I’m partial to the Escher-like quality of Thunderstrike’s – what is it? I guess you could describe what we are seeing here as a cross between a deltoid and a mobius strip. Or between a pectoral and a tesseract?

In short: where exactly is either his left shoulder or the left side of his chest? Did his shoulder just sort of give up on becoming an arm and then the arm tried again, launching itself out, a bit below, where the intercostals should be? I could stare for hours. It’s like a cross between a Japanese sand garden and a fancy butcher shop. But perhaps you prefer the Doctor Strange pin-up in which the good doctor is – well, how tall would you say he looks to be?

via War Rocket Ajax

I like this next one for its precocious meta quality. Making fun of people making fun of Oscar Wilde:

I don’t really have a lot to say about all this. I just thought my post about OCR applications was getting a bit boring, at the top of the page.

[UPDATE: see below in comments for a possible, major drawback: namely, Readiris has trouble with PDF’s based on black&white, as opposed to grayscale, scans.]

First, processing really long documents that might be of borderline quality, threatening you with a huge amount of clean-up. (I’m assuming you have decent scan quality, otherwise you should rescan it; but maybe the original print quality was so-so.) You have to spend maybe 15 minutes training Readiris to process the distinctively dubious quality of whatever specific thing you’ve got. But it actually seems to learn. Then the app pretty much just chews through, in 50 page chunks, surprisingly error-free. Not perfect. But better than I had expected. I was on the fence about some projects for making e-editions of old public domains books I’ve got kicking around the place. Now it actually seems like a do-able thing.

But what most scholars need more than the ability to convert whole old books into e-books is the quick-and-dirty (but surprisingly clean) capacity of Drop2Read, which is part of ReadIris. It sits in the dock. You just drag-and-drop a PDF onto it; it creates and autosaves an RTF conversion into the same folder as the PDF original, then opens it for you to check. (You can set preferences about the details of all this.) It works well, often even with multi-column text with figures and illustrations. (It doesn’t preserve and place illustrations for you, but it isn’t driven mad by the presence of such things.) It’s 90%, for formatting and for the text itself. For one measly click, that’s a bargain. Text masticated via Drop2read is more wholesome for feeding DEVONthink. More to the point, for most people, it’s ready for you just to cut&paste, later, when you want that block quote. Keep the RTF version alongside the PDF, which can be used as a reading copy and/or a thing against which you check OCR problems. (Next: I need a faster scanner.)

But what should I listen to while performing these night-time chores? What plangent sounds to soothe my ears, as I watch the scanner weave it’s gentle path of light ‘neath the closed cover? If you don’t like Philip Glass … then you’ll probably hate the Doveman I’ve now got on high rotation. I love the new album, The Conformist [amazon]. (And before that, I liked The Acrobat a lot, too.) You can stream various tracks here. And there are a couple freebies floating around here and here (oh, and don’t miss the Footloose cover.) And if you have listened to that, and want something else breathy and a bit wimpy (but maybe not so Belle and Sebastian tweecore), I notice that Amazon is selling The Zombies, Odessey and Oracle for a lousy $1.99. As I believe I have mentioned: I like Colin Blunstone’s voice. (You like Ray Lamontagne’s voice? It’s like that.) Seriously, this is some classic 60’s slightly not rocking quite enough but still great stuff; right up there with the Beach Boys, Pet Sounds. But more breathy and proto-proggy. Here’s a Pitchfork review of this particular release, with which I am in substantial agreement. (Although I think giving it a 9.3 might be generous.) But it seems like you don’t get all the bonus tracks if you just buy the mp3’s. Hmmmm. Still, a good deal.

Doveman and The Zombies have this in common: the lead singer is basically breathing in your ear, from, like, 3 inches away, sounds like. This could get silly – to say nothing of the threat of looming emo; but instead it’s … steady and consistent. Which may mean that you get a bit tired of it. Me? I’m playing it over and over. [UPDATE: Oh, Pitchfork pretty much agrees about the Doveman, too.)

Four years before this book was published [in 1955], Chapter XVII, “Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow,” appeared in Harper’s Magazine, of which I was then an editor. This chapter was written before any of the rest of the book, but it was written because of it. I thought that if I was going to write about tastemakers, I should define their quarry, and on one of several attempts to write an introductory chapter to the book, I devoted a couple of pages to highbrows, lowbrows, upper and lower middlebrows. I showed this draft to Katherine Gauss Jackson, a colleague of mine at Harper’s, who said, “You’ve got the essence of a piece here. Why don’t you write an article on brows?” So I did, and it appeared as the lead article in the February 1949 issue of Harper’s. Several weeks later Life magazine, which was at the time “the king of the visual media,” did an article about my article and published a pictorial chart illustrating the several “brow levels” of American taste at that time. Since then this article (later the chapter only slightly revised) has had an independent life of its own, and though I invented none of them, the words highbrow, lowbrow and middlebrow, with its subdivisions into upper and lower, have become part of the language of taste along with “tastemakers,” which was, so far as I know, my coinage.

I can think of no better way to indicate the changes in taste that have occurred in the last quarter of a century than to reproduce here the Life chart, in which I had the controlling hand, and to note what has happened in the interim …”

Lynes concludes thusly:

As I look at the chart, which a Life editor and I concocted over innumerable cups of coffee years ago, it strikes me, as it must you, that what was highbrow then has become distinctly upper middlebrow today. The rate of change, indeed, is about the same as that which is demonstrated in the chart showing what happened between the 1850S and the 1950S [I’ll reproduce these charts below]. Who regards an Eames chair as highbrow now? Or ballet, or an unwashed salad bowl or a Calder stabile? They have all become thoroughly upper middlebrow, and what was upper has become lower. Only the lowbrow line of the chart makes spiritual if not literal sense. Today television would find itself at all levels of the chart in ways, as we have noted, too obvious to define. The “pill” has taken the glamor out of Planned Parenthood as an upper middlebrow cause, and Art and The Environment are now their causes instead … and so on. Even if the shapes of the pieces have changed, and the board looks quite different, the basic rules seem to me much the same as they have been since Andrew Jackson Downing set about in the 1840s to make our forebears lead harmonious lives in tasteful surroundings.

“Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow” is a fun read. When it comes to brow-flexing, to hold back the forces of evil, it’s a tough call whether the prize goes to Sammo Hung, for his role as Longbrow in Zu: Warriors of the Magic Mountain (1983), or to Clement Greenberg for his role as Highbrow, getting quoted saying this sort of thing: “It must be obvious to anyone that the volume and social weight of middlebrow culture, borne along as it has been by the great recent increase in the American middle class, have multiplied at least tenfold in the past three decades. This culture presents a more serious threat to the genuine article than the old-time pulp dime novel, Tin Pan Alley, Schund variety ever has or will. Unlike the latter, which has its social limits clearly marked out for it, middlebrow culture attacks distinctions as such and insinuates itself everywhere …. Insidiousness is of its essence, and in recent years its avenues of penetration have become infinitely more difficult to detect and block.”

Lyne is bemused by such stuff:

The popular press, and also much of the unpopular press, is run by the middlebrows, and it is against them that the highbrow inveighs.

“The true battle,” wrote Virginia Woolf in an essay called “Middlebrow” (she was the first, I believe, to define the species) lies not between the highbrows and the lowbrows joined together in blood brotherhood but against the bloodless and pernicious pest who comes between. . . . Highbrows and lowbrows must band together to exterminate a pest which is the bane of all thinking and living.”

Pushing Mrs. Woolf’s definition a step further, the pests divide themselves into two groups: the upper middlebrows and the lower middlebrows. It is the upper middlebrows who are the principal purveyors of highbrow ideas and the lower middlebrows who are the principal consumers of what the upper middlebrows pass along to them.

And we’re off! But you should probably start by reading the original Woolf essay (really, a letter), which some months ago my friend Josh Glenn very kindly and shrewdly and thoughtfully posted on his site, Hilo, which is all about this stuff, and then some. Here is Woolf, coining the term:

Lowbrows need highbrows and honour them just as much as highbrows need lowbrows and honour them. This too is not a matter that requires much demonstration. You have only to stroll along the Strand on a wet winter’s night and watch the crowds lining up to get into the movies. These lowbrows are waiting, after the day’s work, in the rain, sometimes for hours, to get into the cheap seats and sit in hot theatres in order to see what their lives look like. Since they are lowbrows, engaged magnificently and adventurously in riding full tilt from one end of life to the other in pursuit of a living, they cannot see themselves doing it. Yet nothing interests them more. Nothing matters to them more. It is one of the prime necessities of life to them — to be shown what life looks like. And the highbrows, of course, are the only people who can show them. Since they are the only people who do not do things, they are the only people who can see things being done. This is so — and so it is I am certain; nevertheless we are told — the air buzzes with it by night, the press booms with it by day, the very donkeys in the fields do nothing but bray it, the very curs in the streets do nothing but bark it — “Highbrows hate lowbrows! Lowbrows hate highbrows!” — when highbrows need lowbrows, when lowbrows need highbrows, when they cannot exist apart, when one is the complement and other side of the other! How has such a lie come into existence? Who has set this malicious gossip afloat?

There can be no doubt about that either. It is the doing of the middlebrows. They are the people, I confess, that I seldom regard with entire cordiality. They are the go–betweens; they are the busy–bodies who run from one to the other with their tittle tattle and make all the mischief — the middlebrows, I repeat. But what, you may ask, is a middlebrow? And that, to tell the truth, is no easy question to answer. They are neither one thing nor the other. They are not highbrows, whose brows are high; nor lowbrows, whose brows are low. Their brows are betwixt and between. They do not live in Bloomsbury which is on high ground; nor in Chelsea, which is on low ground. Since they must live somewhere presumably, they live perhaps in South Kensington, which is betwixt and between.

The puzzle about where the middle-brows can possibly live has been pursued down the decades to this very day. In the very best and most thoughtful book on the subject ever written – that would be Carl Wilson’s Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste (33 1/3) [amazon] – the author quotes a baffled British critic, wondering where all the Celine Dion fans can possibly live. “Wedged between vomit and indifference, there must be a fan base: some middle-of-the-road Middle England invisible to the rest of us, Grannies, tux-wearers, overweight children, mobile-phone salesmen and shopping centre-devotees, presumably.”

But I promised you Lyne’s original, pre-Life charts. Here they are. (The one on the bottom is supposed to be on the facing page. So the top level is high, the middle middle and the bottom low. Obviously.)

Reginald Marsh, it turns out, was “best known for his paintings and illustrations depicting scenes of vaudeville, night clubs, burlesque, and New York City. Marsh was a lifelong free-lance illustrator for the New Yorker, Esquire and many other national magazines.” I know that because you can see a lot of his material here.

I heard about the book via John Kricfalusi’s epic screed against the UPA style (which I linked before in this post (Plato, Plato, Plato! – there, that oughta be enough SEO for this week.) He alleged that it provided some evidence of ‘the UPA style before UPA’, and of a greater diversity of cartoon styles early in the century. Which seemed interesting to investigate. I have to say I come away with a different impression: namely, that the received wisdom about UPA turns out to be right. That stuff feels different to me, in terms of graphic sensibilty, than a lot of the stuff in Calvalcade, which cuts off exactly when the UPA era begins. (It’s a bit more complicated. Maybe I’ll post more about that later.)

But mostly I was hoping to press Cavalcade into service as a kind of visual companion to Gilbert Seldes’ discussion of comics in The 7 Lively Arts [amazon]. Seldes perpetrated some of the earliest positive comics criticism way back in 1924. (He was a big Krazy Kat fan. Who isn’t? He also loved UPA stuff, later on.) Reading his early comics writing, I have always regretted not really knowing what the hell he is talking about some of the time. Now I have a better sense of some specific titles he mentions.

One thing I was surprised to learn is that Buster Brown is actually sort of funny. But only sometimes. All I knew about the strip before was that Buster’s creator, Outcault, was a true comics pioneer; that Buster was sort of like the Katzenjammer Kids, in that he basically made trouble, then got whacked for it. But he was a rich, Anglo-Saxon kid and invariably delivered some sort of mea culpa after getting whacked. And that somehow he was supposed to provide the Ur-Calvin and Hobbes template: boy with slightly smarter talking animal tagging along, in Sancho Panza mode. Indeed, this would appear to be true.

To my surprise, it turns out that that the pious little homilies are actually the funny part:

And my favorite (I’ll skip the panels in which Buster goes out with a gun and gets whacked from one end of the farm to the other, which really isn’t very funny):

On the strength of this pair, from Cavalcade, I snagged another old item – Buster Brown’s Maxims For Men (1906); which isn’t funny. In fact, it’s a pious, conventional bore. Outcault seems to have been only intermittently aware that this whole formula only works when the final panel declines into incoherent self-parody. A seriously wounded kid maundering on about Teddy Roosevelt’s faults, by way of planning to do better, is funny. A kid just plain planning to do better is the death of comedy, and now I own the book. Fortunately, it was cheap.

There is, I think, an even more basic problem, which is theoretically interesting, which I would certainly like to see used to swat down Boehner-style arguments, and which I’ve never actually seen anyone make (but probably I just missed it). Practically all crime is ‘thought crime’ in the good ol’ common law sense of the Latin phrase actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea – ‘the act does not make guilt unless the mind be guilty.’ If we were to take a strict liability approach to all violent crime we would be obliged to place wrongful death on a par with premeditated murder. (After all, it’s not as though the lives of those killed accidentally are worth less.)

This refutes the notion that there is something sinister and Orwellian about post-Drakonic/post-Hammurabian developments in criminal law. (Damn liberals and their newfangled political correctness!) It doesn’t follow that ‘hate crime’ legislation makes moral and practical sense, of course. We could have that discussion after Boehner is done looking up ‘immutable’ in the dictionary.

Seriously. This can’t be a picture of a published book, can it? On the other hand, it’s an image of a book published in 1984, so presumably they made the image by scanning an old book. I am curious whether such a monstrosity exists in real life. It’s not just the misspelling. It’s like a full course in how not to design a book cover.

As of 2009, there is no fully conservative translation of the Bible which satisfies the following ten guidelines:[2]

1. Framework against Liberal Bias: providing a strong framework that enables a thought-for-thought translation without corruption by liberal bias
2. Not Emasculated: avoiding unisex, “gender inclusive” language, and other modern emasculation of Christianity
3. Not Dumbed Down: not dumbing down the reading level, or diluting the intellectual force and logic of Christianity; the NIV is written at only the 7th grade level[3]
4. Utilize Powerful Conservative Terms: using powerful new conservative terms as they develop;[4] defective translations use the word “comrade” three times as often as “volunteer”; similarly, updating words which have a change in meaning, such as “word”, “peace”, and “miracle”.
5. Combat Harmful Addiction: combating addiction by using modern terms for it, such as “gamble” rather than “cast lots”;[5] using modern political terms, such as “register” rather than “enroll” for the census
6. Accept the Logic of Hell: applying logic with its full force and effect, as in not denying or downplaying the very real existence of Hell or the Devil.
7. Express Free Market Parables; explaining the numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaning
8. Exclude Later-Inserted Liberal Passages: excluding the later-inserted liberal passages that are not authentic, such as the adulteress story
9. Credit Open-Mindedness of Disciples: crediting open-mindedness, often found in youngsters like the eyewitnesses Mark and John, the authors of two of the Gospels
10. Prefer Conciseness over Liberal Wordiness: preferring conciseness to the liberal style of high word-to-substance ratio; avoid compound negatives and unnecessary ambiguities; prefer concise, consistent use of the word “Lord” rather than “Jehovah” or “Yahweh” or “Lord God.”

They are basically planning to start with the King James Bible and then just make it say what they think it should. Not only do they apparently regard it as inessential to involve anyone with knowledge of the original texts – although they off-handedly contemplate this as a possibility – they are touting ‘mastery of English’ as one of the benefits those who help with the project can expect to reap. What can one say? I find it hard to believe the whole thing isn’t some sort of elaborate, Borat-style hoax. Could it be? (Is Conservapedia for real?) Discuss.

via Sadly, No!

is available in German translation under the title, Klonk!:

I think German readers must lose some of the heavy, earthiness of the English word in translation. ‘Klonk!’ is lighter and more metallic. I don’t think it means the same thing as ‘thud!’ Discuss.

Tell me of your time-saving note-taking methods, but don’t tell me to type it all in. What are good scanning products and OCR software suites and notetaking software. I’ve been using Zotero and I like it just fine. But maybe DEVONthink is better enough to be worth paying for, especially with the OCR?

I might also add that the ‘anti-relativist’ or (as I would prefer to put it) ‘anti-contextualist’ position is generally hopelessly confused in that they tend to use Positivist arguments to support Realist positions. But you can’t do that. The positivists were instrumentalists, as befitted their anti-metaphysical, pro-empiricist assumptions. Realism is a metaphysical position.

The rest of the comment suggests this is supposed to express a Nancy Cartwright-style view, which I don’t think is really quite properly described as anti-realist. (It is anti-Realist, for certain values of the self-important capital-R. But that is another kettle of fish. Or, possibly, Fish. I mention this out of scrupulosity because it just isn’t clear to me the positions Hidari is objecting to in the thread are Realist, as opposed to realist.) Anyway, the point is this. I’ve been watching the new They Might Be Giants Here Comes Science DVD with my girls [amazon]. It’s great! Can’t decide yet whether I like it better than the earlier TMBG kid’s discs, but it does measure up so far.

In the opening number, one of the Johns does exactly the thing that bothers Hidari (and Cartwright is indeed someone who scourges this particular move): offering positivist arguments on behalf of realism.

As I was saying, one of the Johns quotes Rudolf Carnap, “science is a system of statements based on direct experience and controlled by experimental verification.” And the other John then says: “Or as we say, Science Is Real!” And the song starts. But these two statements are hardly equivalent. Indeed, even the graphic for the song title is eloquently anti-Carnapian:

This clearly implies that science does not consist of sentences. It is a thing that itself contains the things that sentences about science are about. Or as we say: things! Reality! (Call it what you will. Place is thick with the stuff.)

Here’s a YouTube link to the video for TMBG “Science is Real”, complete with Carnapian intro. (You can also watch it as an Amazon preview, but they cut the Carnap bit! That was the best part!)

So your job, this Reality Thursday, is to write a song – or poem – expressing as clearly as you can, with extra style points for keeping it intelligible to an 8-year old – your favored philosophy of science. Does it consist of sentences, or does it consist of reality? You decide! The only thing I can think of that rhymes with ‘paradigm’ is ‘spare a dime’. As to the rest: I’m recovering from the flu myself and have 100+ papers to grade, so don’t ask me to dance you a little jig. I don’t have the time or energy.

You can also comment in prose.

Masterpiece Comics

UPDATE: Before accusing me of misreading Fish, please consider whether this comment satisfies you.

Let me illustrate with a couple cases I’ve personally noted, which I suspect are representative. I just wrote a book about Plato [update: now optimized!], so naturally I’m curious what comes up if you Google Plato. Predictably: Wikipedia. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (I’m going to ignore erroneous results, due to ambiguity: computer systems named Plato, famous drivers named Plato, former child star actresses who committed suicide named Plato.) You get somewhat arbitrary Google book results. Why, in particular, is an edition of the Theaetetus, edited by Robin Waterfield #6? You also get a number of pages that, not to put too fine a point on it, look to have been designed along 1996-1999 lines. Because that’s surely when they were originally posted. This page, for example, is #2, right after Wikipedia, beating out even the SEP. Now, that’s nuts. There’s nothing wrong with the page, as far as it goes. But it’s clearly a beneficiary of the Matthew Effect. Google users are brought to this page – in droves, I’ll wager – because it was posted by an early-adopter of the interwebs thingummy. A similar example is this page, coming in at #6. This one is a much more serious project, by someone who is clearly competent to write about Plato, and who moreover has worked pretty hard to maintain and build-up this site. (Not that I’m implying the author of that other page was not competent. Just that the content hardly explains the #2 ranking.) That second site posts public stats, which are interesting: “870 000 visits in 2008 (an average of 2 374 visits per day).” I wouldn’t be surprised if the author of this site is, in a way, the world’s most influential Plato scholar, due to the fact that he had the good luck to start posting in 1996. Out of the top 10 hits for Plato (ignoring erroneous hits) we get, by my count: 2 that clearly deserve to be in the top 10 – Wikipedia and the SEP; 3 Google Books titles that are perfectly respectable but pretty random – i.e. none of the three is one of the first titles you would mention to someone asking ‘where should I start, to find out about Plato?’; 3 personally-maintained sites that are clearly here because they are late-1990’s Matthew Effect beneficiaries; a pretty good animated video of the Cave Parable on YouTube; and a link to the Plato page of the MIT Classics Archive, which – despite the academic imprimatur – is a late 1990’s affair. Another Matthew case. (The last time I visited, a lot of the links were broken. But maybe someone has fixed that.) The content is Jowett translations; that is, old stuff.

What are we missing? The Perseus Project, for one. I was surprised to see no Amazon links cracking the top 10. (Not that I think that’s so important, but I’m surprised.) How did we do? So-so. Partly the problem is that you should enter more intelligent search parameters. But part of the problem is runaway Matthew Effect. I suspect that the three random book hits could be explained by the Matthew Effect, in some way. Someone must have linked to these books. And these titles, rather than some others, lucked into a high slot. It’s interesting that Google doesn’t do better. (Not that I have any bright ideas.)

Second case: last year I posted this X-Mas card set on Flickr. (I’m making more this year!) Anyway, long story short, one of the images got Stumbled, as a result of which, eventually, two rather similar images diverged dramatically in their traffic. This one has been viewed 2,000 times. This one has been seen 12,000 times and has thereby accounted for 10% of the traffic my Flickr account has ever received. (I actually like the first image better.) I was curious whether it would just go and go like that forever, but recently it’s stopped. My Stumblejuice ran dry. (The part of me that values justice is glad to see this. The part of me that likes getting free stuff for no good reason is a bit dismayed.) Anyway, I don’t really understand how ranking sites like Stumble and Delicious and Digg and so forth work because I don’t use them myself. But it strikes me that all this stuff clutters things up worse, Matthew-wise. [UPDATE: clarification. I don’t mean the one pic got a huge spike that then disappeared. I’ve gotten those, too. Rather, you get a steady, slightly higher rate of traffic – in my case, 25-50 hits a day for months and months and months. But all that adds up.]

What could search engines do to combat the Matthew Effect better, algorithmically? Obviously if anyone knew, then Google would know, and presumably Google would then do it. (Or would they?)