William Meehan update

The Alabama Supreme Court has ruled that charges of plagiarism against Jacksonville State University president William Meehan have no place in a lawsuit over ownership of a plant collection. [Sic.]

Read all about it:

Court stops plagiarism claim against JSU president (Gadsden Times)

Related posts
Plagiarism in the academy
Boening, Meehan, plagiarism
What plagiarism looks like

Google Public DNS

Google at work: “Google Public DNS is a free, global Domain Name System (DNS) resolution service, that you can use as an alternative to your current DNS provider.” According to Google, Google Public DNS provides greater speed and security than the DNS resolution available from ISPs (Internet Service Providers).

I set up Google Public DNS on my MacBook this afternoon (it took no more than ten seconds) and have found that browsing is faster. Much faster. Much, much faster.

Read more:

Google Public DNS (Google Code)
Using Google Public DNS (Google Code)

Jim Lehrer’s journalistic guidelines

He read them tonight, the final night of The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, which on Monday becomes the PBS NewsHour:

Do nothing I cannot defend.

Cover, write and present every story with the care I would want if the story were about me.

Assume there is at least one other side or version to every story.

Assume the viewer is as smart and as caring and as good a person as I am.

Assume the same about all people on whom I report.

Assume personal lives are a private matter until a legitimate turn in the story absolutely mandates otherwise.

Carefully separate opinion and analysis from straight news stories and clearly label everything.

Do not use anonymous sources or blind quotes except on rare and monumental occasions. No one should ever be allowed to attack another anonymously.

I am not in the entertainment business.

I found these guidelines online in a 2007 commencement address Lehrer gave at Wesleyan University. I’m imagining him reading these guidelines not to college graduates but to fellow journalists. They are for the most part not listening. But I’m looking forward to seeing Jim Lehrer on television again on Monday night.

A related post
Jim Lehrer's Post-it Notes

More on the PBS NewsHour
Launching the PBS NewsHour (PBS)
Stressing the Web, NewsHour Begins an Overhaul (New York Times)

Edward Tufte on PowerPoint in schools

The core ideas of teaching — explanation, reasoning, finding things out, questioning, content, evidence, credible authority not patronizing authoritarianism — are contrary to the cognitive style of PowerPoint. And the ethical values of teachers differ from those engaged in marketing.

Especially disturbing is the introduction of PowerPoint into schools. Instead of writing a report using sentences, children learn how to decorate client pitches and infomercials, which is better than encouraging children to smoke. Student PP exercises (as seen in teachers’ guides and in student work posted on the internet) typically show 5 to 20 words and a piece of clip art on each slide in a presentation consisting of 3 to 6 slides — a total of perhaps 80 words (20 seconds of silent reading) for a week of work. Rather than being trained as mini-bureaucrats in the pitch culture, students would be better off if schools closed down on PP days and everyone went to The Exploratorium. Or wrote an illustrated essay explaining something.

Edward Tufte, Beautiful Evidence (Chesire, CT: Graphics Press, 2006), 161.

This passage is revised from Tufte’s The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint (2003).

Related reading
Edward Tufte’s website

Words I can live without

A spontaneous list: bluesy, craft (as a verb), critique (as a noun or verb, unless you’re Immanuel Kant in translation), eatery, gravitas (unless you’re a Roman), hereby, hone (as a metaphor), indicate, jazzy, quality (as an adjective), richly, subtle.

These words can annoy one at a time, as in a New York Times headline this morning: “Sundance Tries to Hone Its Artsy Edge.” Several of these words together can make things unbearable. A made-up example:

The poems are already richly crafted, but they still could benefit from subtle critique.

You are hereby invited to craft your own list in a comment.

A related post
Some Enchanted Evening (“words never to use in a poem”)

A Christmas Carol manuscript online

[My own, and only MS of the Book / Charles Dickens]

The manuscript of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol is online at the New York Times:

A Christmas Rewrite, as Dickens Edits Dickens
A Christmas Carol, the manuscript

A related post
Disney’s Dickens’s A Christmas Carol

How to try the new Google

Not a joke but a redesign:

How to Try the New Google Search (Gizmodo)

The sidebar is handy, but those blue buttons — yecch.

(Thanks, Rachel!)

Movie recommendation: Forever

Forever
directed by Heddy Honigmann
French with English subtitles
95 minutes



The simplest description of Heddy Honigmann’s Forever: a film about a cemetery, Père-Lachaise in Paris, resting place of Jim Morrison, Edith Piaf, Marcel Proust, Oscar Wilde, among many others. But the film travels elsewhere, to the Louvre, to an apartment where three sightless friends take in a Simone Signoret film (yes, she’s buried in Père-Lachaise), to Stéphane Heuet’s study for a conversation about adapting Proust into comic books, to a mortuary to watch an embalmer at work. The film, Honigmann tells a visitor to the cemetery, is to be “about the importance of art in life.” But it isn’t always: it is sometimes about death, plain and painful. The film makes room for cemetery visitors who speak of their private losses, some with equanimity, one with grief so immediate and painful that one suspects Honigmann could not have anticipated it.

T.S. Eliot, in a preface to his translation of Saint-John Perse’s poem Anabasis (1930):

The reader has to allow the images to fall into his memory successively without questioning the reasonableness of each at the moment; so that, at the end, a total effect is produced.

Such selection of a sequence of images and ideas has nothing chaotic about it. There is a logic of the imagination as well as a logic of concepts.

Forever is a film that seems to have been constructed on that modernist principle of composition by juxtaposition of elements. The elements holding the film together are many: scenes of a pianist at work, first practicing, then performing; stories of exile, from Iran and Spain; stories of forgotten poets and singers; stories from daughters of their fathers; images of flowers and water bottles; contrasts of the famous and unknown. A preternaturally young-looking old woman appears and reappears, caring for the grave sites of those whom she admires (Guillaume Apollinaire, Sadegh Hedayat, Proust). An Ingres fan in the Louvre and an embalmer in the cemetery speak in identical terms of the relationship between paintings and reality. And Honigmann joins in uncanny ways women's faces — the pianist, an Ingres portrait, a Modigliani portrait, a woman being embalmed, life and death and art blurring together.

My favorite moment in Forever: Honigmann’s conversation with a student who has traveled from South Korea to bring cookies to Proust’s grave. Proust, he explains, has been food for his brain. He has been reading Proust for ten years, in Korean, it would seem. He has no French; Honigmann, no Korean. He struggles in English, and Honigmann asks him to talk in Korean about what Proust means to him. And the subtitles disappear. It’s the strangest moment in a strange and beautiful film.

Forever is available on DVD.

[In an interview that accompanies the film, Honigmann explains that she chose to omit a translation of the student’s remarks so that the Korean-less viewer must imagine what’s being said.]

Peculiar Beach Boys songs

A smart list by Keith Phipps: 17 particularly peculiar Beach Boys songs.

(But how could he have left out “I’m Bugged at My Old Man”?)

Repurposed tea tin

As I searched (no luck) for a box to hold index cards width-wise, Elaine came up with an elegant solution. A Twinings tin holds about 250 3x5 cards (enough to brew 250 to-do lists or several lengthy projects).

The repurposed dish drainer in the photograph? That was Elaine’s idea too.

And writing this post? That was also Elaine’s idea: “You should put this on your blog.” Hers is mostly for music.

Thank you, Elaine (again).