Fun and games

.. just start marching.

It’s cute. I had already found the dinosaur steps blogworthy two years ago, but this newer option is even more amusing.

Jim got such great response to his academic haiku contest that he decided to categorize the submissions by field. You are requested to cast your vote in the following categories:

• tech/computer/Internet haiku
• social science haiku
• humanities haiku
• physical science haiku

I’m surprised by some of the classifications, but I’m sure it wasn’t easy with some of those submissions. Why my paper that was published in Social Science Quartery was not classified as social science is beyond me, but perhaps Jim needed some excuse to create a fourth category to make things manageable and thus put some entries in the the fourth interdisciplinary tech/computer/Internet-related, but otherwise unrelated group. Even in the realm of academic haikus my work lands in a heap of confusion, the story of my academic life.

In any case, this was a really fun exercise and I thank Jim for inspiring so many of us to think about our work in 17 syllables. If you haven’t done it yet, I recommend playing with the concept even if you are too late to enter this contest. Go read the submissions and vote to get inspired.

Grad school pal Jim Gibbon launched an academic haiku contest a week ago. I only noticed it today (Wednesday),which happens to be the deadline for submissions. If you still have time, head on over and submit something. If it’s past Wednesday then feel free to add your creative output in the comments here.

The idea is that the haiku should represent some of your work (a paper, a book, a dissertation, etc.). Here are my two submissions:

I am an expert.
I am man, you are woman.
I exaggerate.

From: *Hargittai, E & S. Shafer. 2006. “Differences in Actual and Perceived Online Skills: The Role of Gender.” Social Science Quarterly. 87(2):432-448. June.

RSS, widgets,
Don’t know one from the other.
Average Web users.

From: Hargittai, E. 2007. “Wikis and Widgets: Differences in Young Adults’ Uses of the Internet” Paper to be presented at the 2007 ICA meetings.

[*] I have to add that it’s actually not possible to tell from the findings whether men overestimate or women underestimate their skills, but perhaps that amount of artistic freedom for the haiku is allowed.

One of the nice things about blogging is the way you get to find out about new things, read books and watch films you’d never otherwise have come across, and so on. “Eszter”:http://www.eszter.com/ recently persuaded “me”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/chrisbertram/ to take part in a Flickr project where you take “one photo per day”:http://www.flickr.com/groups/project365/pool/. Some days, especially dark cloudy ones with British weather, can be a challenge, and I’ve sometimes been reduced to taking a pitiful snap of a household object. But I’ve also noticed a real impact on my perception of the world. Walking around, camera in pocket, being open to the opportunity to take a picture has a striking effect on what one sees. An interesting form here, an odd pattern of rust there, a splash of colour, an unusual building or a surprising or funny scene…. And the competitive/comparative element comes in too: you hope for comments, or for a given image to be “favorited”. You quickly get to notice, too, that there are some pretty interesting people on Flickr here and there. There’s “this guy”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/fray_bentos/, for example, who has a nice line in images of buildings taken from the same point, but 20 or 30 years apart (and he supplies the architectural and social commentary to match). Or “this one”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/urbanphotos/ , (a kind of latter-day Cartier-Bresson) who captures street scenes in New York in black and white and has a sharp eye for the incongruous. So thanks, Eszter, for opening my eyes a bit.

(I can see that this is going to get expensive too: I’m already looking to buy a digital SLR and puzzling over the Nikon-Canon version of the Apple-Microsoft divide.)

Not interested in football, but still want to get into the Superbowl spirit? Check out Jeremy’s “The Boy Detective” dance choreographed for the occasion. Try at your own risk.

Requisite addendum from a Chicagolander: Go Bears!

“This”:http://littleprofessor.typepad.com/the_little_professor/2007/01/scholars_studen.html is rather wonderful.

If you haven’t seen the Grow Cube before then you are lucky and I do apologize for bringing it to your attention. I realize that it’s been around for a while, but some may have missed it. [No thanks to Marc Rittle for the link.]

If you don’t have hours to kill then a search for grow cube solution on your favorite search engine should do the trick. But I doubt you’ll appreciate it if you don’t spend at least a bit of time trying to figure out the solution on your own. No comment as to how much time.

I had lunch at the Googleplex yesterday and as a result got to add several geeky license plates to my photo collection. I wasn’t even trying hard to look for these, I was just glancing at the plates I passed walking to and from my car.

In unrelated geekiness, if you prefer to unleash your inner geek with the help of a bit more text then I recommend the quotes on this page. A couple of my favorites:

There are only two kinds of programming languages: those people always bitch about and those nobody uses. (Bjarne Stroustrup)

[The BLINK tag in HTML] was a joke, okay? If we thought it would actually be used, we wouldn’t have written it! (Mark Andreessen)

If none of that made sense then you could go watch some Jay Leno Headlines where it is by design that many of the featured items don’t make sense.

Does anyone around here play Fantasy Congress? I’d heard about it before, but now that I was invited to join a league, I started looking into it in more depth.

As in other fantasy sports, you – the Citizen – draft a team of real-life legislators from the U.S. Congress and score points for your team’s successes.

However, as one commentator aptly notes: “[I]t’s lifelike: you win by getting bills passed, not by passing good bills.”

If you only care about winning the game, sure, you can compile a team of senators and represenatives who have an active record. But do you really want to be sitting around hoping that some real-life bill that makes your stomach turn is successful just so you can score some points in FC?

I can see the appeal to some extent, but overall I am not convinced the system is refined enough at this point to get me sufficiently enthusiastic. And while my first reaction was that at least it has educational value by teaching people about the legislative process, now I’m thinking that since it is most likely to appeal to folks who already know much about politics, it’s not clear that it will really spread the word far and wide about how the system works.

That said, I don’t have much experience with fantasy sports so I may be missing some important factors. Moreover, I do think the idea is interesting and certainly impressive that some college students thought it up and managed to execute it. And to be fair, it sounds like its creators – four undergraduate students at Claremont McKenna – are working on refining the system.

Vivian’s recent comment wondering whether my work would interfere with my ability to post Friday time-sink amusements reminded me that I should not abandon my important role in keeping you from doing whatever it is that you had planned to do when you sat down at your computer.

This weekend’s amusement is brought to you by Jeux Chiants (yeah, I know, you’ll have to excuse my French).

Of the large selection, my highest recommendation goes to Double Jeu. You won’t miss much by not speaking French, it’s pretty self-explanatory. Just don’t let either ball drop. Hah, and doesn’t that sound easy? The one thing you’ll miss out on by not speaking French is the derogatory comments after you mess up. I managed to get up to 24.5 32.8 seconds. If anyone does it longer and understands the resulting comment, I’d be curious to hear if you ever get a true heartfelt congratulations.

I thought Labyflou was reasonably amusing and you can get it the first time around. It’s also not addictive, once is about enough.

Le jeu du ver is not bad. It’s one of those games that starts out almost too easy, but then gets significantly harder with each level.

Finally, La souris est invisible is a good reminder of how dependent we may or may not be on visual cues when using the mouse.

Susan Linn from the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood was just on the Chris Evans show (of all places) describing Walmart’s new website, on which kids can choose a bunch of toys to add to a list which Walmart will email to their parents. Evans clearly didn’t believe Linn’s description of the site, especially the bit where she says that when you reject a toy one of the elves says that the other elf will lose his job. I think Linn is terrific, but I, too, thought she must be making that bit up, despite, like Evans, having already heard the astonishing accents the elves have been given.

No. Try it. It really is unbelievable. Come on folks, defend poor old Walmart. What good could come of this for the wider world?

This is pretty cute although it would’ve worked at least as well with a less violent theme. It would be interesting to see something like this with some of the more recent popular programs like Firefox. Not too hard to guess who would win. Anyone know of such a creation?

We recently had the dubious pleasure of watching CNN in a hotel room — Bill Schneider was analysing poll figures concerning whether America should attempt to put a stop to the fighting in Lebanon. It reminded me why I maintain a boycott of stupid news, but it also supplied me with the third of my three wishes, each prompted by recent experiences.

My first wish was prompted by hearing an old radio outside braodcast report. The reporter was watching the Crystal Palace burning to the ground. After a few minutes he said “Well, I don’t have any more useful information, so perhaps you should give some other news”. My second was prompted by hearing the music playing in The Gap when I made a rare trip, accompanying a friend.

1. I wish I could hear a contemporary reporter on TV acknowledge that he has nothing more interesting to say.

2. I wish I could walk in to a regular store and hear Roy Harper singing “I Hate the White Man” followed by Kevin Coyne singing “Lunatic” (from what I still think is his greatest album). Or just either one would do.

3. I wish I could hear an analyst of a foreign policy opinion poll on the TV say “well, that’s what the distribution of opinion is among the public. But, youo know, this is a complicated and difficult matter, about which intellectually honest people who are well informed and have given it a good deal of thought, do not know with much certainty what should be done. So, really, the opinion of the British/French/American/Whateverian public isn’t worth paying any attention to, because almost everyone who answered this poll knows virtually nothing about the issue, and has given it even less thought”.

Just once, in each case, would be brilliant.

3 wishes then; the rule is that their realisation would not materially benefit or harm anyone you care about (other than, I suppose, Roy Harper and Kevin Coyne’s estate, in my case).

Michael Ledeen fails to think things through:

In today’s “reportage” of the World Cup semifinal between Italy and Germany, the (lefty) Washington Post reported that the game-winning goal was scored on a left-footed kick, while the (righty) Washington Times reported it was scored on a right-footed kick. The Post account was correct, but don’t you find it mysteriously symbolic of something or other?

I…words fail me.