String bags FTW

The New York Times reports this morning that reusable grocery bags (the ones made from recycled plastic) may contain “potentially unsafe levels of lead”:

“Bummer! We’re still not doing the right thing,” said Shelley Kempner of Queens, who was looking over the produce at Fairway on Broadway at West 74th Street. She prefers a reusable bag, she said, because she “likes the idea of not putting more plastic into the environment.”

Told of the recent lead findings, Ms. Kempner sighed — “It’s still not good enough” — and wondered if she would have to switch to something else. “Are we going to have to start using string?” she asked.

String bags are terrific. They’re inexpensive, durable, and fit easily into a pocket or bag. And because they stretch, they hold a lot. How much is a “lot”? A lot! Elaine and I bought our bags from a natural-foods store. As you might expect, Amazon has them too.

A mystery challenge

[Photograph by Michael Leddy.]

Can you identify the object in the photograph above? The object is made of plastic, 2 15/16" long, 1 5/16" wide at its base. The black-and-white is meant to suggest “the past.” But not the distant past. (Yes, that depends upon how one defines distant.)

Reader, I invite you to play twenty questions or shout out the answer in the comments. I have no idea how recognizable this object is, and I’m curious to see what happens.

7:34 a.m.: The mystery is no more. Emerick Rogul identified the mystery object as a floppy-disk notcher, used to turn single-sided  5 1/4" floppy disks into double-sided disks by punching a notch into the side of the disk’s plastic housing. Congratulations, Emerick!

A Google Books search for suncom notcher turns up the following item:

[InfoWorld, January 20, 1986.]

And suddenly I’m back typing on my Apple //c.

Domestic comedy

While watching five minutes of Jeopardy:

“Who would name their kid Jove?”

“Saturn?”

Related reading
All “domestic comedy” posts
Jove Graham Wins on Jeopardy! (Swarthmore News)

The lobster, considered

Boing Boing considers the lobster, or the most humane way to kill one:

According to Jennifer Basil, associate professor of Biology at City University of New York, Brooklyn College, it’s boiling. That’s because lobsters, like most invertebrates, don’t have the same kind of brain we do. Instead of having one, big central mass of neurons — i.e., the brain — lobsters spread their thinking around their bodies in several smaller masses, called ganglia.

“Every segment has its own little brain doing its own thing,” says Basil. Which is why, she says, it’s better to boil the lobster and kill all those mini-brains at once. “Cutting it up just creates two uncomfortable lobsters.”

But consider David Foster Wallace’s essay “Consider the Lobster”, which begins its examination of these matters (in the pages of Gourmet) by quoting a statement of the Maine Lobster Promotion Council: “‘The nervous system of a lobster is very simple, and is in fact most similar to the nervous system of the grasshopper. It is decentralized with no brain. There is no cerebral cortex, which in humans is the area of the brain that gives the experience of pain.’” Says Wallace,

Though it sounds more sophisticated, a lot of the neurology in this latter claim is still either false or fuzzy. The human cerebral cortex is the brain-part that deals with higher faculties like reason, metaphysical self-awareness, language, etc. Pain reception is known to be part of a much older and more primitive system of nociceptors and prostaglandins that are managed by the brain stem and thalamus.[12] On the other hand, it is true that the cerebral cortex is involved in what’s variously called suffering, distress, or the emotional experience of pain — i.e., experiencing painful stimuli as unpleasant, very unpleasant, unbearable, and so on.

Endnote [12] adds:

To elaborate by way of example: The common experience of accidentally touching a hot stove and yanking your hand back before you’re even aware that anything’s going on is explained by the fact that many of the processes by which we detect and avoid painful stimuli do not involve the cortex. In the case of the hand and stove, the brain is bypassed altogether; all the important neurochemical action takes place in the spine.

I’m in no position to decide who’s right here. I only invite you to consider what Jennifer Basil has to say, what David Foster Wallace has to say, and what the lobster might have to say.

“This is college. Everyone cheats.”

A leader of tomorrow:

“This is college. Everyone cheats. Everyone cheats in life in general. I think you’d be hard pressed to find anyone in this testing lab who hasn’t cheated on an exam. They’re making a witch hunt out of absolutely nothing, as if it were to teach us some kind of moral lesson.”

That’s Konstantin Ravvin, a student at the University of Central Florida, commenting on a cheating scandal in professor Richard Quinn’s senior-level business-management course. Yes, the students involved — perhaps 200 of 600 — are seniors.

Konstantin Ravvin may be right about as if. The Orlando Sentinel reports that “Quinn brokered a deal with the business dean that would allow students to clear their records if they owned up to cheating before the rewritten exam started being administered this morning.” You read right: everyone gets to take the midterm again. That’ll teach ’em.

How might students get hold of an exam and its answer key? By breaking and entering? Sort of. If a comment at Inside Higher Ed is to be believed, students found the midterm and answer key online. Margaret Soltan draws the reasonable inference that the midterm was a canned exam, something supplied by a textbook publisher.

The University of Central Florida recently made the news for its efforts to stop cheating, which include surveillance cameras in “testing centers” and a ban on gum-chewing during exams.

[To readers visiting from this page:

From my perspective, one kind of cheating (if giving a pre-fab exam is cheating) doesn’t legitimize another. Two wrongs (if giving a pre-fab exam is wrong) don’t make a right. I’ve removed the final parenthetical sentence from the next-to-last paragraph — “(Everyone cheats!)” — so as to remove any confusion about whether I think cheating is ever acceptable. It is not, though cheating, like irony, abounds. I do think that Mr. Ravvin’s skepticism about moral lessons is reasonable: allowing a do-over here, because so many students cheated, seems to me to teach a very odd lesson about strength in numbers.]

Update, November 18, 2010: Details emerge in Inside Higher Ed:

What is clear is that some students gained access to a bank of tests that was maintained by the publisher of the textbook that Quinn used. They distributed the test to hundreds of their fellow students, some of whom say they thought they were receiving a study guide like any other — not a copy of the actual test. . . .

[M]any have noted that the students’ initial intent was less troubling than their conduct once they realized they had an advance copy of the test. No one raised his or her hand during the test to acknowledge having had a copy of it, and the incident came to light only after Quinn statically analyzed the scores and saw that they ran a grade-and-a-half higher than in the past.

It turns out that Professor Quinn is on tape stating at the start of the semester that he creates the midterm and final examinations for the class. Thus the defense offered above — which seems a pretty feeble one.

In my experience, academic misconduct has a simple explanation: the student doesn’t expect to be caught, an expectation stemming from cluelessness, hubris, or both.

Related reading and viewing
“This is college. Everyone cheats.” (The Cap Times)
UCF Students Busted for Cheating (ABC News)

[Thanks to Stefan Hagemann for pointing me to this story.]

November 11, 1920

[New York Times, November 12, 1920.]

It was the second anniversary of Armistice Day.

The OED covers snake dance: “A dance performed by a group of people linked together in a long line and moving about in a zig-zag fashion, as at parties, celebrations, etc. orig. and chiefly U.S.”

As for bunkie:

[O.O. Ellis and E.B. Garey, The Plattsburgh Manual: A Handbook for Military Training (New York: Century, 1917.]

A related post
November 11, 1919

A Marilyn Monroe recipe

“No garlic”: thus begins Marilyn Monroe’s recipe for stuffing, now appearing in the New York Times.

Real fake news

The New York Times covers The Onion’s Joe Biden articles.

How to improve writing (no. 30)

From a New York Times obituary for percussionist Howard Van Hyning:

Mr. Van Hyning was also a collector who amassed a trove of vintage percussion instruments that he rented to orchestras worldwide. Comprising more than 1,000 items, his collection includes a snare drum built by Billy Gladstone, a highly regarded Radio City Music Hall drummer of the 1930s and ’40s. Its crown jewel is the set of “Turandot” gongs.

Note the slight bump in the road at the start of the final sentence: its of course refers to Howard Van Hyning’s collection, not Billy Gladstone’s snare. Any reader of these sentences can figure its out, but the greater the distance between a pronoun and its antecedent, the greater the chance for confusion. Consider this possibility:

Comprising more than 1,000 items, his collection includes a snare drum built by Billy Gladstone, a highly regarded Radio City Music Hall drummer of the 1930s and ’40s. Its value is estimated at a quarter of a million dollars.

Now it’s no longer obvious that its refers to the collection. So one might rewrite:

The collection’s value is estimated at a quarter of a million dollars.

In the original passage, replacing its solves the problem:

Comprising more than 1,000 items, his collection includes a snare drum built by Billy Gladstone, a highly regarded Radio City Music Hall drummer of the 1930s and ’40s. The collection’s crown jewel is the set of “Turandot” gongs.

Howard Van Hyning’s obituary describes a man who led a good life, doing something he loved and sharing his instrumental finds with others.

[This post is no. 30 in a series, “How to improve writing,” dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]

Related reading
All How to improve writing posts (via Pinboard)

Pluto redux?

As Boing Boing noted this morning, Pluto is back in the news. What better time to listen to Clare and the Reasons’ tributes to the finest of dwarf planets? In English and French:

Clare and the Reasons, “Pluto,” “Pluton” (YouTube)

“Chin up, Pluto.”

Related posts
Mnemonic
MVEMJSUNP!
Pluto Day
Venetia Phair (1918–2009)