"Columbia professor strips down to underwear in bizarre lesson to help baffled students learn quantum mechanics."

"'In order to learn quantum mechanics, you have to strip to your raw, erase all the garbage from your brain, and start over again,' Prof. Emlyn Hughes said. Against a backdrop of 9/11 and Holocaust images, he remained in a fetal position as two people dressed as ninjas blindfolded stuffed animals."

"Um, nothing you’ve learned in your life up til now is in any way going to help prepare you for this.... I’ve been tasked with the impossible challenge of teaching you quantum mechanics in one hour."

E.J. Dionne asks "Does our presidential campaign lack a moral core?"

He purports to delve into the debate:

However you analyze it in electoral terms, the exchange between President Obama and Mitt Romney was most striking as a festival of technocratic mush — dueling studies mashed in with competing statistics. In many ways, the encounter offered voters the worst of all worlds: a great deal of indecipherable wonkery and remarkably little clarity about where each would lead the country.

However you analyze it? Well, I don't even have to check the debate transcript to remember a striking use of the word "moral." Let me get the exact quote from the transcript. Jim Lehrer had just asked "what are the differences between the two of you as to how you would go about tackling the deficit problem in this country?" And Mitt Romney said:

Good. I'm glad you raised that, and it's a -- it's a critical issue. I think it's not just an economic issue, I think it's a moral issue. I think it's, frankly, not moral for my generation to keep spending massively more than we take in, knowing those burdens are going to be passed on to the next generation and they're going to be paying the interest and the principal all their lives. And the amount of debt we're adding, at a trillion a year, is simply not moral.

But Dionne would like you to think of the debate is just a big indecipherable mush. And then the whole rest of his column is about — can you guess? — Nuns on the Bus! Because who's better than nuns "to remind us that our decisions in November have ethical consequences?" I'd say Mitt Romney was better, in his utterly clear statement quoted above, which is in no way "technocratic mush" or "insufferable wonkery," Mr. Dionne. But... hey! Look! Nuns! Nunnnnzzzz!

The NY Post says a Samuel L. Jackson ad will say: "Wake the fuck up, Vote for Obama."

Why cover an ad that hasn't been filmed yet?!

“It’s definitely going to get attention,” said [Adam] Mansbach, who is writing the script for Jackson’s ad and said it would appear on YouTube on Sept. 24.

So, there's this step, where they say there's a line, but if Mansback "is writing the script," it's a line in the process of getting written. And you get attention saying that's what the potential line is and even outright asserting that it's going to get attention. It will get attention in the future, and you are getting attention now, saying it's going to get attention.

And you've tweaked the NY Post into printing the line and calling it "provocative," and everyone can react, and if the reaction is bad enough the line — the emerging, evolving, line-in-progress — can become something else. And then you can get attention with that ad, that ad that the dumb right-wingers vetted for you, and you can get attention calling the right-wingers dumb for thinking that would be the line.

And you know why they thought that and/or why they got upset? They're racist. You can get attention saying that.

Journalist "thinking about... birth control and the importance of reproductive freedom" steps in front of a moving car, is saved by Ryan Gosling...

... and is now annoyed that — after she tweeted about her encounter with the cinematic dreamboat — people are going on about his being such a hero, thus casting her in the retrograde role of damsel in distress.

[A]s a feminist, a writer, and a gentlewoman of fortune, I refuse to be cast in any sort of boring supporting female role, even though I have occasional trouble crossing the road, and even though I did swoon the teeniest tiniest bit when I realized it was him. I think that's lazy storytelling, and I'm sure Ryan Gosling would agree with me.

Why did the feminist cross the road? To swoon into the arms of a movie star, tweet about it, inspire intense envy, and then to hit those already slammed by envy a second time with the news that they are antifeminist for seeing her as a damsel in distress when she was really thinking deep thoughts about feminism.

"Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel."

A quote that came up in conversation just now. I had to look it up to get it verbatim and was delighted to see it came from Samuel Johnson, whom I happened to quote yesterday. Nice to get a second use so soon for a newly created tag, referring to someone long dead. I hesitate to add new tags on individual names, and when it's someone buried in history, it seems like a particularly bad idea.

But I wish I could replicate the conversation that led Meade to paraphrase the quote. He said "Patriotism is the last bastion of the scoundrel." Which makes me wonder: What's the difference between a refuge and a bastion?

refuge
late 14c., from O.Fr. refuge, from L. refugium "a taking refuge, place to flee back to," from re- "back" (see re-) + fugere "to flee" (see fugitive) + -ium "place for."

bastion
1560s, from M.Fr. bastillon, dim. of O.Fr. bastille "fortress, tower, fortified, building," from O.Prov. bastir "build," perhaps originally "make with bast" (see baste (1)).

The dictionary man chose the better word for his aphorism. And Meade's deviation says something about his relationship with patriotism. I love the details in the etymology of those 2 words — fleeing versus a fortress. We'd puzzled some of that out before checking the wonderful Online Etymology Dictionary. Fascinating to look closely at a word and find the dead metaphor. It's easier to discover "fugitive" inside "refuge" than "bastille" inside "bastion," which shows the reward of paying even closer attention to things.

But let me try to summarize the conversation that led us to that quote.

1. I was saying how impressed I am that the American people genuinely care about the Constitution and that we believe our elected representatives must abide by it. I was thinking of this poll that showed that only 20% of American voters think the individual mandate is constitutional and only 37% think the Supreme Court should uphold it. That, despite the media effort to treat the challenge to the law as trivial or worse and to promote the idea that it's embarrassingly retrograde to think courts should enforce constitutional limits on Congress's enumerated powers.

2. After I used the word "sacred" to characterize the way Americans think of the Constitution, Meade expressed suspicion about regarding worldly things as religious, and I agreed, noting the way we Americans have come up with our own alternative to ancient ideas about monarchs embodying God's will.

3. We talked about how, when we were young, coming out of the culture of the 1960s, we thought of "patriotism" in a negative light. It was all about mindless deference to power (which, I note now, is the opposite of what constitutional limits on government represents).

4. Meade comes up with the quote.

"Can you concentrate on Flaubert when your cute cat is only a few feet away, or give your true devotion to Mr. Darcy when people are swimming in a pool nearby?"

"People who read books on paper are realizing that while they really want to be reading Dostoyevsky, the real world around them is pretty distracting with all of its opportunities for interacting with people, buying things in stores, and drinking coffee."

Alex Madrigal lampoons that NYT article about ebooks that we were talking about a couple days ago.

Switching from paper books to ebooks may turn into a transition away from books altogether.

Once you're on the iPad/Kindle Fire, it's so tempting to do other things too — email, Facebook, Googling here and there — that you lose the single-minded concentration that pulls you straight through a book.

Not that everyone reads books that way. You might have piles of paper books around the house that you dip into and keep meaning to finish. The nice thing about ebooks is you don't see them lying around and feel guilty.

Me, I've found a way to read ebooks that gives me that internetty feeling I love. I have hundreds of books in my iPad (where I use the Kindle app, and read books bought on Amazon). I keep my list of books in the order most recently read, and I like to pick something near the bottom of the list, read it until I get itchy for a distraction, then select another book near the bottom.

Why not? Well, the linked article takes the point of view of booksellers. They're worried people will stop reading things in book form. Me, I'm a blogger. It's a market. People will buy what they want. There are other choices that to be trapped in one author's mind for days on end.

"2Ls With Higher LSAT Scores Goof Off More With Laptops in Class, With No Effect on Grades."

Interesting... but if that's happening in your class, professors, I'd say your class needs to be taught on a more challenging level, and it needs to be apparent that the way things are presented in class will matter for exam purposes.

Now, you might think if students are going to go off task during class that they'd just skip class, but the laptop is a great compromise for the student. You have a complete defense against boredom. If you can go on line, you're able to do what you'd probably be doing if you'd skipped class. And there's the added bonus of putting in an appearance and being able to engage with the class at any point.

Presumably, a good student has learned the rhythms of the less-than-challenging class. He knows how it feels when the prof is drifting into a languor — repeating things, reciting the facts of the case the student already read, riffing on the general themes of the course, amusing himself with stories about some judge he's always fawning over. And this good student can half-listen and reengage when he hears key words and changes in intonation that signal that something useful might be happening.

Profs, don't take the laptop away from the student. Take the student away from the laptop.

Left-handedness.

From the Wall Street Journal:

•Six of the last 12 U.S. presidents, including Barack Obama and George H. W. Bush, have been lefties.

• Left-handed people earn on average 10% lower salaries than righties, according to a recent study. Findings of some earlier studies on income have been mixed.

•Despite popular misperceptions, lefties aren't more accident prone than right-handed people and don't tend to die at a younger age.

•Left-handedness has been linked to increased risk of certain neurodevelopmental disorders like schizophrenia and ADHD. Mixed-handedness is even more strongly associated with ADHD.

•Most people's brains have a dominant side. More symmetrical brains of mixed-handed people may explain the link to some neural disorders.

Forget NaNoWriMo. It's AcBoWriMo.

Charlotte Frost declares the first Academic Book Writing Month. (Hey, that's what I meant to do last August!)

We are going to wear comfy clothes, drink a lot of coffee, probably nap in our offices at strange hours and see how close we can get to writing 50 thousand words in one month. I know, it’s totally insane, there can surely only be a handful of academics who can actually turn out decent material in such a short space of time. 

It's 1,667 words per day. About 7 pages a day. You can do that! I've written as many as 15 pages a day though not for an entire month. I think 5 pages a day is doable for academics cranking out books. So why not 7 pages a day? Make a sport out of it. A contest.

There’ll be a hashtag for Twitter where anyone interested in participating – or indeed watching from afar – can talk about progress and share tips and ideas for speed reading/writing (#acbowrimo). And we’re also hoping there might be a write-in in our department or someone’s apartment where we gather people together for mutual support and literally write the night away. Maybe you fancy staging one too somewhere and Skyping us for solidarity?

I like the Occupy Wall Street vibe translated into productive individual work. Not that I could picture myself engaged in group writing. Or... no... maybe I could. I remember loving the "blogger dinners" we did back in 2005. 

(Sorry the photos on that post are not currently displaying. Apple changed up Mac.com — for which I paid over $100 a year — in a way the wrecked the photo URLs. I'll try to redo them today.)

"Look, if you put the Internet on the device I am supposed to be using to read, I will never read again."

"Can you blame me? I am only human. I can’t focus. If all these studies about multitasking have taught us anything, it is that we all think we can multitask but no one actually can.... It’s not that people will stop reading. We do vast amounts of reading online every day — the equivalent of a good Hemingway novel. But it’s not deep but broad, not focused but fast."

Oh, now, now... is Hemingway actually deeper than your favorite blog?

***

Show your love for reading and for the Althouse blog by buying your Kindle Fire here.

"How many ways can one say 'one of the worst ideas of all time?'"

Medical marijuana for kids... with attention deficit disorder.

UPDATE: Candy!

"What I started noticing around 2007 was that I seemed to be losing my ability to concentrate."

"Not just when I was sitting at a computer. Even when the computer was off and I tried to read a book, to sustain a single train of thought, I found it difficult."

If you don't click through and read the whole interview, you'll be proving him right. But he wants you to read his whole book. If you need to read it, you won't be able to. You won't want to. La la. Stay here with meeeee.......

"Facebook has no charms for me. It looks inward. Twitter looks outward..."

From an essay by Roger Ebert about how the internet rewires our brains. A lot of the essay is about the importance of stepping away from the computer and reading our way through actual books — long books that you read straight through in a linear fashion (which ends up being long novels, which just happen to be something he loves doing anyway). But I was struck by the Facebook/Twitter point. We spend a lot of time on the internet, but we do different things here, so it's not just a matter of what The Internet does to our brains.

In fact, Reading Books isn't just one distinctive activity. Ebert writes about books as if book = Victorian novel. But some of us like reading nonfiction, including books that don't require linear reading at all. You can dip back and forth in a book and read snippets in very much the same style as web-surfing. When I'm reading books, I like a stack of books of different kinds. I might read a few pages in one, then switch to another, maybe rotate through the whole pile, very similar to the way I'd open up a set of tabs in my browser and cycle through them. And I like reference books and essay collections — e.g., a collection of movie reviews — that are best read by jumping around.

By the same token, on the internet, there are different ways to read. As Ebert's Facebook/Twitter point shows, reading is deeply interwoven with writing and with the feeling of interacting with other people. Sitting by yourself with a long book is quite unnatural by comparison. I think it could be said that the internet takes our urge to read and reintegrates us with society. It's more like the natural world that we evolved to live in: there should be the constant potential for interruptions and distractions; we should be giving and receiving communication to and from other people who are alive now and able to respond to us. In that light, long books distort our brains, and the internet brings us back to human society.

And being on the internet isn't just one distinctive activity. Some people like Facebook and some like Twitter. Me, I love blogging. I've done the other 2, but blogging suits me best — in part because I have so many commenters who come here and make this feel like the lively coffeehouse or salon I always hoped I could find in real life. Ebert says Facebook looks inward, and he prefers Twitter, but isn't it funny that if Facebook is really inward, it's more like the long novels that Ebert uses as an antidote to the internet experience? Ebert twits like mad — his Twitter feed is excellent — but maybe he's using it, in part, as a change of pace from those Victorian novels.

We can, each of us, design our own mix of experiences — in nature, in face-to-face human encounters, with books, with pen and paper, and using computers to read and write. We balance and offset. We seek pleasure and satisfaction and power and wisdom. We begin where we begin. One individual begins with too few real-life friends and a love of thick novels, another begins with a chattering schoolgirl clique and a Facebook page. Add something to that and then to that. Inward, outward/outward, inward. Make life better, in your own way.

"So what's Shiff's economic prediction for the Obama Administration?"

Noting yesterday's discussion of the unbearable bearishness of Peter Shiff, Instapundit links to the video below. I would love to watch it -- maybe you can watch it for me -- but the background music track -- "Band on the Run" -- is painfully distracting.



Really, if you are capable of watching this, I'm interested in: 1. What did Shiff say? and 2. What is the nature of your brain's capacity for attention that makes it so different from mine?

Also, why "Band on the Run"? Is it sort of like run on the bank?

On boldface and ludic reading.

I've gotten some use out of these bullet points. In case you were wondering about my newfound love of boldface.

The linked article deals with many aspects of the very interesting topic of how we read on-line... and whether our brains are getting rearranged in the process.

But here's the part that really pulled me in:

Ludic Reading

... Pleasure reading is also known as "ludic reading."... Two fascinating notions:

• When we like a text, we read more slowly.

• When we're really engaged in a text, it's like being in an effortless trance.

Ludic reading can be achieved on the Web, but the environment works against you. Read a nice sentence, get dinged by IM, never return to the story again.

I suppose ludic readers would be the little sloths hiding in the jungle while everyone else is out rampaging around for fresh meat.

I love this idea of ludic reading, but if it's about attaining a state of effortless trance, for me, the web environment is much more effective. In fact, it's dangerously effective! Hours and hours slip away as I click around and read and click some more. I never lose track of time while reading a book.

I feel bad about that. I'd love to enter a trance state and live completely inside of a book for many hours. But I have to force myself to stay engaged and keep going. I'm always thinking of other things and jumping up to read (or do) something else.

But on the web, the whole style of reading already incorporates this jumping around. Distractions are built into the experience.

Now, you might want to say this ludic web reading is self-indulgent and feeding what is some sort of attention deficit disorder of mine, but that is only because you are taking book-reading as the norm. Me, I resist the grip of an author wanting me to stick with his order of things, line after line, page after page. I can't find the pleasure in that. I'm not saying I won't read a book, just that if you want to know what is conducive to ludic reading, I say it's the web.

"Is this the best possible book I can be reading right now, of all the books in the world?"

That's Tyler Cowen's question about reading any given book, which he poses in his new book "Discover Your Inner Economist." (Is that the best book?) He seems to be saying you should toss the book aside if the answer is no. I'm afraid that's a formula for never finishing a book. Isn't there something to be said for maintaining your focus and following through lest you approach reading -- and presumably everything else about life -- with a growing case of attention deficit disorder? Take it from me. I read virtually the same advice written by Doris Lessing in the introduction to "The Golden Notebook," which became the first book I tossed aside following the principle. That was about 30 years ago. Since then, I've started a lot of books, and I would have cast them all aside -- save one or two -- had I not forced myself through some of them. But the vast majority of the books I've started lo these 30 years, I haven't finished, and the crazy thing is that I maintain the belief that I'm still reading a book for many years as the pile of books I believe I'm reading piles up. One thing about reading on line -- especially reading to blog -- is that what you don't finish evanesces. Once the day has passed, you feel utterly absolved of any obligation to go back to anything. The text flows on and you grab what you want and feel no pangs about what goes by unread. The question is what's new? I mean, what was I saying about a growing case of attention deficit disorder?

Prosopagnosia.

The inability to recognize faces.

People with face blindness can typically understand facially expressed emotions — they know whether a face is happy or sad, angry or puzzled. They can detect subtle facial cues, determine gender and even agree with everyone else about which faces are attractive and which are not. In other words, they see the face clearly, they just do not know whose face they are looking at, and cannot remember it once they stop looking.

How strange. A person with this problem must have many painful social encounters, especially before being diagnosed. On the other hand, many of us are just lazy about noticing and remembering people. We could make casual claims of prosopagnosia, the way we make casual claims of attention deficit disorder.

The problems with boys and school.

Melana Zyla Vickers writes in the Weekly Standard about the gender gap in higher education:

What is going on? Schools are not paying enough attention to the education of males. There's too little focus on the cognitive areas in which boys do well. Boys have more disciplinary problems, up to 10 percent are medicated for Attention Deficit Disorder, and they thrive less in a school environment that prizes what Brian A. Jacob of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government calls "noncognitive skills." These include the ability to pay attention in class, to work with others, to organize and keep track of homework, and to seek help from others. Where boys and girls score comparably on cognitive skills, boys get worse grades in the touchy-feely stuff. Perhaps not coincidentally, boys reportedly enjoy school less than girls do, and are less likely to perceive that their teachers support them, according to studies of Hispanic dropouts.

Harvard's Jacob is one of the few scholars to have studied the gender gap in higher education. His statistical analysis suggests it is boys' lack of skill in these noncognitive areas that is the principal cause of the gap.

Let me tie this to my usual point that whatever is discovered to be true of the female is portrayed as superior. Here, we see characteristics discovered in the male portrayed as a deficiency in "noncognitive skills." But isn't this because the scientists are defining "noncognitive skills" to fit what they find to be true of girls? Once could just as well spin what the boys seem to have as "noncognitive skill." You can easily translate Jacob's diagnosis into a positive one for the boys: Boys have wide-ranging, active interests and the capacity to deftly shift from one area of interest to the next. They resist becoming bogged down in details and meaningless exercises and hold fast to their independence. They are not subservient and are straightforward in their criticisms of authority figures. But then the girls might come out deficient. And, of course, designing a classroom to suit these skills would be much more difficult.

UPDATE: Slate links to this post and ridiculously garbles my meaning!

"He's a home wrecker. He's trying to rip a father away from a child, and rip a husband away from a wife."

So says a 22-year-old man who married the 14-year-old girl he impregnated. He's being prosecuted for statutory rape. (To marry, they crossed from Nebraska, where one must be 17, to Kansas, where 12 is considered old enough.)

[The prosecutor's] office has been deluged with letters, the vast majority angrily urging that he leave the couple alone. One, from a woman named Patricia, said, "I'm sure your time can be better spent putting away real criminals."

Why shouldn't this man be prosecuted? You could say, he's been selected for prosecution not for his sexual act — which is far more common than statutory rape prosecutions — but for committing to marriage — which is a conspicuous, public act. The linked article, on the front page of the NYT, seems fairly sympathetic to the man, but I don't see it.

Matthew and Crystal met when she was 8, and he played video games with her half-brother. Mr. Koso, who was in special education classes for attention deficit disorder and other learning problems, graduated from high school in 2001 and joined the Marine Corps, but left after four months on a medical discharge. When Crystal's mother had no car, Mr. Koso drove her to the doctor and the grocery store.

"He's always been friends with people that were younger," said Peggy Koso, recalling her son at age 5 or 6 passing hours with building blocks and racing cars with a neighbor of 3 or 4. "His own peers never accepted him."

The two became a couple, according to Crystal's "Happy Anniversary" drawing on the wall, on Sept. 17, 2003. She was 12 and he 20. Exactly a year later, Crystal's mother, Cecilia Guyer, who is divorced from her father, filed for a restraining order against Mr. Koso, writing of him: "He's too old for early teens. He needs to stay away."

It seems that if Crystal were 10 years older, she would not find Koso to be an adequate partner, and that Koso himself lacks the ability to deal with the adult woman Crystal will be in 10 years. The fact that she may have loved him the whole time is no excuse. Surely, many pedophiles are capable of getting children to fall in love with them.