Classical music in Great Britain

It’s been weaponized:

They’re so desperate to control youth — but from a distance, without actually having to engage with them — that they will film their every move, fire high-pitched noises in their ears, shine lights in their eyes, and bombard them with Mozart. And they have so little faith in young people’s intellectual abilities, in their capacity and their willingness to engage with humanity’s highest forms of art, that they imagine Beethoven and Mozart and others will be repugnant to young ears. Of course, this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Brendan O’Neill, Weaponzing Mozart (Reason)

The Office on Hulu

My son Ben passes on the news that The Office, “the” The Office, the original U.K. Office, is now on Hulu. (Even the Christmas special.) The U.K. Office is one of our favorite family viewing experiences. Ricky Gervais and company are just brilliant.

(Thanks, Ben!)

Betty Boop with Henry

Henry speaks! In his only cartoon appearance, from 1935:

Betty Boop with Henry, the Funniest Living American (YouTube)

And yes, he sounds like Mae Questel.

Henry turns seventy-eight next month. He’s still working in the funny papers, a beautifully drawn anachronism.


[Henry, February 19, 2010.]

Someday I’d like to live in a city where the sidewalks have plank walls behind them.

Do It, Dolt

User testing at Apple Computer, June 1982:

When the software required confirmation from the user, it displayed a small dialog box that contained a question, followed by two buttons for positive or negative confirmation. The buttons were labeled Do It and Cancel. The designers observed that a few users seemed to stumble at the point the dialog was displayed and clicked Cancel when they should have clicked Do It, but it wasn’t clear what they were having trouble with.

Finally, the team noticed one user was particularly flummoxed by the dialog box and seemed to be getting a bit angry. The moderator interrupted the test and asked him what the problem was. He replied, “I’m not a dolt. Why is the software calling me a dolt?”

It turns out he wasn’t noticing the space between the “o” and the “I” in “Do It” (in the sans-serif system font we were using, a capital “I” looked very much like a lower case “l”) so he was reading “Do It” as “Dolt” and was offended.

After a bit of consideration, we switched the positive confirmation button label to “OK” — which was initially avoided because we thought it was too colloquial — and from that point on people seemed to have fewer problems.

Andy Hertzfeld, Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 2005), 108–109.

A slighty different version of this story may be found at Folklore.org.

Recently updated

Montblanc’s Gandhi pen (now with news of the manufacturer’s legal troubles)

iPad news

My prediction, registered earlier this month, is that college students are the market for the iPad. The Unofficial Apple Weblog reports today that George Fox University will offer Fall 2010 freshmen an iPad or MacBook.

To be continued.

A related post
The iPad and college students

The Pomodoro Technique Illustrated

Staffan Nöteberg. The Pomodoro Technique Illustrated: The Easy Way to Do More in Less Time. Forewords by Francesco Cirillo and Henrik Kniberg. Raleigh, NC: Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2009. $24.95 (paper). $16 (eBook).

Yes, I wound up a timer before beginning this sentence. And yes, as Henrik Kniberg acknowledges in his foreword, it feels a little silly having a timer tell you what to do.

I learned of Francesco Cirillo’s Pomodoro Technique late last year, in Sue Shellenbarger’s write-up of several time-management strategies. The simplicity of the Pomodoro strategy — work for twenty-five minutes (one Pomodoro), take a break for three to five minutes, take a longer break after every four Pomodori— appealed to me at once. I liked the practical emphasis on tasks and minutes, free from business-speak about life-goals. And I loved the idea of a strategy built upon the dowdiest of gadgets, a tomato-shaped kitchen timer.

The Pomodoro Technique Illustrated is a beautiful and potentially inspiring guide to practicing Pomodori. Staffan Nöteberg makes clear the many ways in which the Pomodoro Technique serves to focus attention. The practitioner chooses a limited number of tasks for the day and the most important one among them with which to begin. He or she works on one task at a time, tracking interruptions both external and internal, setting them aside for later attention (whenever possible), and stopping at regular intervals, no matter how well the work is going, for breaks and review.

Repetition is important in the Pomodoro Technique: the repeated gesture of winding up or setting a timer is meant to teach the mind that the time for work has begun. (That must be why Hemingway sharpened so many pencils — not as a way to postpone work but as a way to get started.) Granularity is important too: any task that requires many Pomodori is to be sorted out into smaller tasks. The aim, always, is to create “sustainable pace,” a way of working that lets one keep going without anxiety or loss of focus. That aim allows for considerable flexibility: Pomodori can be of any length, as long as they’re consistent. As an old song says, it all depends on you.

I’ve been working with the Pomodoro Technique, on and off, for about two months, and I’ve found two great benefits. One is that I have a much better idea of how much time tasks require. (Grading quizzes from three classes? One Pomodoro. Re-reading an installment of Bleak House? Three or four Pomodori.) Even more helpful is a drop in self-interruptions, which tend to come about when I stop working on x because I've started thinking about having to do y. The ticking orange that Elaine gave me — it really does work.

This book’s terminology, much of it drawn from software development, might seem to the non-programmer a bit overdone. I draw the line at “drum rhythm,” “buffer,” and “rope” (yes, they go together). But the jargon is offset by Nöteberg’s witty illustrations. They make The Pomodoro Technique Illustrated a uniquely charming book of time-management. Having the book around is likely to inspire its reader to put its helpful strategy into practice.


[Cover illustration by Staffan Nöteberg.]

You can read more about the Pomodoro Technique at Francesco Cirillo’s website (which offers several helpful PDFs). Thanks to Pragmatic Bookshelf for a review copy of this book. This post took four Pomodori to write.

Snow, dirt, paint

A bit of yellow — road paint — in the February greys.

[Photograph by Michael Leddy.]

Another college president plagiarizing

Gary W. Streit, president of Malone University in Canton, Ohio, has resigned. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that “concerns surfaced” about Streit’s use of “unatttributed materials in some of his speeches.” Among Streit’s sources: a Wikipedia article on Janus and “a portion of Enotes.com’s summary of the Robert Frost poem ‘Birches.’”

You might try listening to this January 2010 address and doing a Google search or two as it plays. The first bit that I typed in — even your grandmother has a digital camera — led to an article on Streit’s copying and pasting. That article led me to the AP article that furnished much else in Streit’s text. A search for Mordecai became distressed that all his people would be killed brought up this account of the biblical story of Esther.

The Chronicle notes that because Streit has resigned, there will be no investigation of plagiarism.

Malone U. President Steps Down Amid Plagiarism Accusations (Chronicle of Higher Education)

Other presidential plagiarism posts
Boening, Meehan, plagiarism
“Local Norms” and “‘organic’ attribution”
What plagiarism looks like

Margaret Atwood’s rules for writers

Rule no. 1:

Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can’t sharpen it on the plane, because you can’t take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.

Margaret Atwood’s rules for writers (Guardian)

The Guardian has further rules from five more writers.