Crossing the two cultures Yesterday in my 2oth Century class I discussed C. P. Snow's "two culture hypthesis" and I hinted at some of the way that the divide is still with us. In particular, I mentioned some scientifically oriented intellectuals who have been making commentary on culture and values, the so-called third-culture.

What I didn't mention is that there have always been traditional humanist who have been both knowledgeable and engaged in science. Among the giants, James Joyce comes to mind and you can't really understand Gravity's Rainbow without some knowledge of physics in general and the second law of thermodynamics in particular (note: having that knowledge does not mean that will be able to understand GR).

Fortunately, there are also more contemporary writers taking science seriously. Richard Powers is a personal favoritie. His most recent, The Time of Our Singing is about race, but his earlier books, especially The Goldbug Variations and Galatea 2.0 are serious literary meditations on math and science. David Foster Wallace is a more famous example of the same impulse.

There's an obvious tension between this literary approaches to science and the third culturist's appraoch to value commentary, I don't think either Powers or DFW will pass the test that Steven Pinker constructs for literature in The Blank Slate (which seems to be that a novel should be read in one sitting and not thought about again).
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  The word "blog" actually refers to a whole of technologies centered around a journal. I've been playing around with many of these in recent months. Partially for my own entertainment, but also to get a handle on what sorts of technologies can be used to support my research, publication and teaching.

One really useful thing is syndication, but it takes a second to explain.

The world wide web was made possible by the html language, which abstract content from many forms of appearence. LaTeX has a similar approach to text presentation, keep content seperate from form. This has many advantages, different readers might have different capabilities and you don't want to loose a reader based on their reading platform. In the early days of the internet this was important because a reader could be a university or major defense contractor with a blazing fast connection, they'd look at pictures, or they might be at home with a primitive dial-up modem (apologies to all those still in this circumstance). These folks would generally browse with pictures turned off. So, it was useful not to have to think about how many pictures a reader could access. Today, this has the advantage of allowing many pages to be interpreted for handicapped readers.

Another advantage for straight text is that a writer can concentrate on writing and leave page design to designers (even computer designers by proxy). Amateur page designers can famously create an unintelligible mess.

Syndication does the same thing for blogs, the data (aka what you right) is abstracted from its presentation (aka the format of your blog). Instead of just getting around problems with particular browsers, blog syndication allows for all sorts of interesting tricks and alternatives to ordinary web browsers.

Aggregators, for instance, pull in blogs feeds and keep tally of the new posting on all the blogs that a reader is following. Aggregators generally display the headlines for each new entry with some indication of wether or not the entry has been read. This can be quite handy for someone whose reading a lot of blogs, such as a professor who's encouraging students to keep blogs. (hint)

You'll need to consult the instruction for which ever blog service you're using to get instructions on how to enable syndication. The blogger instructions are here.

You can find a link to the rss feed for this blog in the upper right hand corner where it says XML.

Right now, I'm using an aggregator called SharpReader, though I'd be very interested in hearing about other applications that people might be using.

There's a huge number of possible stupid things that one could use to extend, improve or impoverish one's blog. There are links to several littered around my blog over on the right hand side of this page. I just added sitemeter today. I'll let you know how that works out.


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  Welcome Greetings.

If you're reading this post, odds are that you're enrolled in my Twentieth Century Philosophy class and you were in class today.

Todays class was a flurry of loosely related details that only had loose relations to each other. I thought I'd put together some links for those people who are interested in some of the topics that I discussed in class.

I, briefly, discussed the differences between a word processor and a text editor/ (such as LaTeX). The point of this discussion was that you should at least consider you're choices when you're writing. Writing with MS Word may very well be the best choice for you, but you should choose to use word rather than accepting it because its what everyone uses. There's a pretty good (by which I mean, readable) discussion called "emacs for writers", that looks like another good step.


I also mentioned several bloggin services that you might want to consider:
blogger.com
joeuser.com
livejournal.com
www.radioland.com

I'll post again tommorrow with more details on choosing a style guide and more details on how to blog.


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