Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Wanderers 2008.3.26

Ten of us sat around the big table having our typically meandering conversation about everything: iPhone SDK, the remoteness of southern Oregon, the short attention span of children, three wheeled vehicles, brain function (I think brains are over-hyped).

I often take a rhetorically twisted position on issues of the day, balancing overly sane views with certifiable antitheses.

Regarding short attention spans, yes they're adapted for TV and it's cruel to expect cold turkey kill your television behavior in scholarship; better to go with the flow and teach "television editing" (might just mean sequencing stills together over audio for YouTube, inside an affordable price point for public schools, provided they get sufficient vendor sponsorships (a form of product placement, advertising -- a competitive environment in working models)).

Anyway, lets keep it up with the mathcasts on YouTube and Google Video, in supplement to whatever else is going on.

Many threads broke out around the table for a spell, then converged to one conversation. Jon talked about how sentence fragments might assemble into a semi-coherent dream-like whole, per some passage by William Burroughs. Sleep deprivation might lead to similar results. We had a visiting psychoanalyst this morning, a former student of Anna Freud's; I hope we were fun for her (she said we were).

David Tver: "What thin partitions, sense from thought divide" (Pope, Essay on Mind).