Overheard

"Hotel rooms usually come with coffee, don't they?"

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Multitasking: "not paying attention"

From Jared Sandberg's column "Cubicle Culture":

Multitasking, a term cribbed from computers, is an information age creed that, while almost universally sworn by, is more rooted in blind faith than fact. It's the wellspring of office gaffes, as well as the stock answer to how we do more with less when in fact we're usually doing less with more. What now passes for multitasking was once called not paying attention. . . .

"Multitasking doesn't look to be one of the great strengths of human cognition," says James C. Johnston, a research psychologist at NASA's Ames Research Center. "It's almost inevitable that each individual task will be slower and of lower quality."

Link » Why Multitasking Doesn't Work (Wall Street Journal, subscription required)

Related » Multitasking Makes You Stupid

Also related » Clutter

Words from Walt Whitman

The poet Edwin Denby called him "Brooklyn Whitman, commuter Walt." Whitman's words seem appropriate today:

Others will enter the gates of the ferry, and cross
      from shore to shore,
Others will watch the run of the flood-tide,
Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and
      west, and the heights of Brooklyn to the south
      and east,
Others will see the islands large and small,
Fifty years hence others will see them as they cross,
      the sun half an hour high,
A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred
      years hence, others will see them,
Will enjoy the sun-set, the pouring in of the flood-
      tide, the falling back to the sea of the ebb-tide.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky,
      so I felt,
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one
      of a crowd,
Just as you are refreshed by the gladness of the river,
      and the bright flow, I was refreshed,
Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with
      the swift current, I stood, yet was hurried,
Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships,
      and the thick-stemmed pipes of steamboats, I
      looked.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
These and all else were to me the same as they are
      to you,
I project myself a moment to tell you - also I return.

Walt Whitman, lines from "Sun-Down Poem" (later "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"), Leaves of Grass, 1856 edition

9/11/01

Above, a scan of Art Speigelman's "9/11/01." As Spiegelman explains, this image "can really be seen only in its printed form." The towers of the World Trade Center, "printed in a fifth, black ink, on a field of black made up of the standard four color printing ink," might be barely visible on your screen.

Link: Re: Cover. How It Came to Be, Art Spiegelman's commentary on his cover

Hair

We live in a world in which men can buy a Philips Norelco Men's Bodygroom to meet their "unique grooming needs." "[T]rim and shave all body zones - not for use above the neck," the ad copy says. Yikes. Here's a defender of hirsuteness:

Plenty of hair gets in my eyes and shadows
My shoulders like a grove. Don't think it ugly
If my whole body is covered thick with bristles:
A tree is ugly without its leaves, a horse
Ugly without a mane, and birds have feathers
And sheep have wool, so beards and hair on the
    chest
Are the sign of a man.

Of course, he goes on to say

                                    In the middle of my forehead
I have one eye, so what? Does not the Sun
See all things here on earth from his high Heaven?
And the great Sun has only one eye.

Yes, it's the Cyclops Polyphemus speaking, in Ovid's Metamorphoses 13 (translated by Rolfe Humphries, 1955).

Proust: Norwegian fjords

This Proust post is for my friend Norman in Norway:

Well, at this point in the social calendar, when anyone invited the Duchesse de Guermantes to dine - with great urgency, in case she was already engaged - she would turn down the invitation with the one excuse that no society person would ever have thought of: she was about to set off on a cruise - "Quite fascinating, my dear!" - of the Norwegian fjords. Society people were thunderstuck by this, and, without any notion of following the Duchesse's example, nevertheless derived from her project the sense of relief you get when you read Kant, and when, after the most rigorous demonstration of determinism, it transpires that above the world of necessity there is the world of freedom.

Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, translated by Mark Treharne (New York: Penguin, 2002), 474

Link: Proust posts, via Pinboard

Forever

Q: If you could live forever, would you, and why?

A: I would not live forever, because we should not live forever, because if we were supposed to live forever, then we would live forever, but we cannot live forever, which is why I would not live forever.

Exchange between an interviewer and Miss Alabama, from the 1994 Miss USA Contest

Proust, overheard

The narrator is in a Paris restaurant with Robert Saint-Loup, late on a foggy night:

A remark made by one of the diners behind me made me turn my head for a second. Instead of the words, "Yes, I'll have the chicken wing and a little champagne, too, but not too dry," I thought I had heard, "I would prefer glycerine. Yes, hot, that's right." I was anxious to take a look at the ascetic who was inflicting such a diet upon himself, but I quickly turned back to Saint-Loup to avoid being recognized by the man with the strange appetite. It was simply a doctor I knew whose advice was being asked by another customer, who had taken advantage of the fog to pin him down in this café. Like stockbrokers, doctors use the first person singular.

Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, translated by Mark Treharne (New York: Penguin, 2002), 404

Link » Proust posts, via Pinboard

Hallway sprawl, down and out

When I began teaching, students tended to stand in the hallway, close to the wall, in the few minutes before entering a newly-emptied classroom. At some point they began to move downward, sitting with legs crossed, still close to the wall. Then they began to move outward, sitting with legs extended toward the middle of the hallway. Now when I walk to class there's often only a small channel in the middle of the hallway for foot traffic, barely enough room for two people to walk past each other without one having to yield. Students are sitting, legs out, on both sides of the hallway, even right up next to the men's-room door.

Now everything is again moving downward: I notice more and more students lying on their backs while waiting to enter classrooms. Students who lie down keep themselves parallel to the walls — they thus claim less of the space that can be used for walking but more of the space that their peers might have used for sitting (or even standing). And just this past Friday I noticed a new variation — someone lying in the hallway on his side, reading a book, head propped up by an arm.

I don't understand hallway sprawl. It seems to be partly about living large and privatizing public space, partly about refusing to grow "up." Nobody knows you when you're down and out.

Have profs or students elsewhere noticed hallway sprawl?

The doctor's bag

I have dim Brooklyn-childhood memories of housecalls from the doctor, Dr. Freeman (first name Charles, perhaps). Dr. Freeman's overcoat would go over a chair (these visits, as I remember them, took place in cold weather), and his doctor's bag would sit on the bed.

I wish I'd looked inside — I've wondered on occasion what "the doctor's bag" held (aside from the otoscope, stethoscope, and prescription pad that seemed to come out during every visit). The Internets have given me some answers.

The Doctor's Bag  A grim-looking photograph of a smallish bag and its contents. "Every museum dealing with medicine needs a doctor's bag for completeness. Insisting on electricity would just make the search more difficult." (Why that sentence about electricity? Because the page is from The Bakken, "A Library and Museum of Electricity in Life.")

Photographs of doctors' bags and their contents  From the Oregon Health & Science University Digital Resources Library.

The Doctor’s Bag — What to put in it  Advice for British doctors on what to carry: "GPs working in remote parts of the Highlands of Scotland will obviously have very different requirements from those working in inner city Birmingham."

The Doctor's Bag  Dona Barnett writes about the contents of a bag owned by Joseph E. Osborne, a doctor/dentist in Rosman, North Carolina. The bag is now in Special Collections at the University of North Carolina's Ramsey Library. "Some of the contents are self-explanatory like the forceps. Intriguing as they are, occasionally hospitals even today have them in use. But the cyanide tablets? Why would a country doctor carry those alongside tongue depressors?"

My Black Bag  Joseph Friedman, MD, on carrying a traditional black bag: "I'm hoping that the bag outlives my career so I won't have to worry about choosing between an expensive leather bag and a cheap, efficient canvas one."

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February 4, 2009: Here’s a photograph from Life.