a thaumaturgical compendium

Was talking to a journalist last week about a trend in obituaries. The tradition, when a married woman passes away, has always been to list her maiden as well as her married name, so that those who knew her earlier in her life will recognize her.

Recently, those listing obituaries in the newspapers have requested that this name be withheld, so that identity theives do not have easy access to yet another personal identifier. It’s one of those interesting subtle indicators of a rising concern about personal identification.

As our financial and other transactions are increasingly virtualized, keeping track of who’s who becomes more and more important. Many suggest that biometrics are the answer. I don’t think this is the case. Cash stuffed in a matress is made up of markers of virtual currency, but still works. There are solutions to be had, with some work, particularly in public key encryption. There just needs to be enough popular demand to create the (financial) need for banks and others to take up new patterns of identification, ones that do not rely on the ignorance of criminals.

I started out the semester planning on using my own blogging server for my 360-person class. The advantage was simple: I had set it up so that when students set up a blog, it was automatically included on a lilina-based aggregator. I had used the lilina aggregator in earlier, smaller classes, and liked its combination of “river of news” presentation (in which entries are listed in chronological order, no matter what their source), and the ability to hide or reveal entry text using a javascript link on the page. Great stuff.

Then I realized that my poor ISP would drown under 400 new blogs, and decided to outsource. I recommended my students set up on Wordpress.com, though some have opted for Livejournal or Blogger. I then set up a page that would allow people to add themselves to the lilina feeds.

This seems easy, but given most of the students had never blogged before, understanding what an aggregator is, or what the URL for their blog is, let alone the URL for their feed, was asking way too much. Even more than a month in, I have a feeling many students have a shaky idea of what these things are.

Fairly early on, it became clear that lilina wasn’t going to be able to handle the load. The problem was that it was set up with a kind of cheap cron: it cached the page for an hour, but if you were the unlucky visitor who showed up after that hour, you would have to wait twenty minutes or more while it went out and checked feeds. What a mess. As a result, it wasn’t being updated, or was timing out when trying to get feeds, and students were panicking because they didn’t know if their blogs could be read. Yes, I could have scheduled an update in the normal way, but my (insert not-so-nice word here) ISP for the site only provided cron jobs that could be executed once every 24-hours. Bad news.

So, I figured, no problem: we’ll move to Bloglines, my favored reader. Nice idea, but with 400 feeds, it remains slow. Moreover, students were now used to the river-of-news style (rather than the folder style), and had trouble figuring out that Bloglines could offer that, too. Now we were two strikes down.

I spent a mad few days trying out every possible combination of web-based aggregators and a number of server aggregators. Maybe I could use a service that would blend all the feeds into one, something like Feedblendr. Nice idea, but didn’t update frequently enough. I worked my way through the list of aggregators on Wikipedia, feeling a bit like the three bears. This one had an intuitive interface, but no way of making it public. Another one was set up for public aggregating, but presented the feeds as folders rather than as a River of News. BlogDigger looked just about perfect, but didn’t seem to actually work.

In the end, I installed Gregarious on a new server (where I could do a 20 minute cron job to keep everything up to date). It’s been working well. There is the small issue of the read/unread items, which doesn’t translate well to a public aggregator, but otherwise it is quick, and fairly intuitive.

Some of the postings so far this semester are outstanding, some are pretty atrocious. With this big a class, my ability to improve the writing of the majority is pretty limited. My push over the next few weeks is to highlight some of the more common grammatical errors, in hopes that we can at least limit these a bit more. I’m also going to put up a tutorial on how to get started on Google Reader, so that students can import the OPML from our aggregator and personalize it on their own private reader.

For those of you who are in the DC area (or want to listen in over the web), I’ll be on the the Kojo Nnamdi Show on WAMU for Tech Tuesday. It will by an hour-long call-in program from noon to one on February 21. Ben Bederson will be speaking as well, and there will be others coming in to the conversation that you may know. Naturally, the program will also be podcast.

Went to see the Bodies: the Exhibition. For those unfamiliar with the exhibition, it features twenty bodies and over two hundred organs that have been dissected and “plastinated,” infusing them with a silicon substance that stops the process of decay and preserves targeted tissues. The results provide a way of presenting human bodies so that you are able to see everything in context (well, at least in terms of structure).

The exhibition has been assailed on a number of grounds: from taste to legality. In London and Tampa, there were questions as to whether there was proper consent granted by the former owners of the bodies. But there was always the suggestion (to my mind) that this had more to do with questions of taste than of the rights of the deceased. The show is “showy,” and not presented in the dry sort of way some commentators might prefer. In the European show, a rider is shown, skin flayed, with his mount similarly revealed, holding the brains of horse in one hand and rider in the other. In the US exhibition, one body carries a football, at full charge, another shoots a three-pointer, basketball in hand. One arrangement has a person balancing against what at first seems like another person, arms outstretched as they lean back. It quickly becomes clear that it is the same person, skeleton on one side, musculature on the other.

Particularly in the above descriptions, it seems fairly ghoulish, to be sure. A sense of the macabre nature of the exhibit–it is never possible to forget that these are human remains, no matter how heavily treated they may be–no doubt was why an hour-long line for tickets snaked through a cold Sunday afternoon at the Fulton Market. But the exhibit itself is endlessly fascinating. It’s hard to know what part of that fascination is voyeuristic: the ability to see inside another person, not through an ultrasound or MRI, but directly through ones own sense organs; including at one point, touching the plastinated organs. But that alone did not explain the fascination and respectful observation of these huge crowds.

While walking through the galleries, I was reminded of Walter Benjamin and the “aura” of human-produced art. These bodies had just such an aura. I have no doubt at all that in observing these displays, I would be unable to discern the difference between a plastinated human brain, and a detailed model of a human brain. But the fact that these had once been living tissues imbued them with an authenticity that would be difficult to match.

Almost as fascinating as the exhibition itself, however, were those who thronged around the bodies, carefully examining them, talking about their structure with their friends. The audience reflected New York (albeit a New York that could afford the ticket to this show), and while there seemed to be a concentration of folks who had studied anatomy, some of these amateur anatomists had yet to finish seventh grade. It was thrilling to watch a seventh-grader carefully explain to his mother the structure and function of a displayed heart, and another student–this time probably pre-med–do the same for his mother as they examined the muscles of the neck.

Indeed, the energy of discovery at the exhibit was palpable. I have been to so many museums where visitors passed over an exhibit with barely a glance, floating though without engaging or really looking at what was presented. Here, there were no bored teenagers sitting at the periphery, and it was rare to see people pass over a presentation. People circled the full bodies, crouching to get better views, or pointing as they followed a sinuous artery. To see people who had shaken off the standards of “taste,” who–though as I said, may have been drawn to the exhibition in part because of its macabre nature–seemed to quickly shed their morbid interest for one more analytical was invigorating and made me hope for a country where science is increasingly assailed by the forces of mystery. As I finished touring the galleries, I only could hope that some American museum would be able to make this part of their permanent collection.

This is the 16th posting I’ve done so far in 2006, making me the most neglectful blogger ever. Alright, maybe not ever, but in an awfully long time. My first New Year’s resolution was to procrastinate more. I figured I’d take care of the rest of them by Chinese New Year. I have one more, and that is to do a better job of keeping up with the blogging.

Which leads me to the question of “why”? This is a question I ask a lot about blogging, and since I don’t know why I myself blog, it’s hard to know why others do. However, I have recently realized that this blog has a much farther reach than I ever would have expected, or really aimed for. Nonetheless, I have an obligation to my readers, even those of you who only come to visit every once in a while, to provide you with as much brilliance as I have to offer.

There are a couple of other reasons I am going to get back to the blogging process. I have been very busy lately on a lot of projects, and frankly, I’m only going to do things worth blogging from now on. That means I am no longer going to do laundry! I’ll tell you how that works out.

I’m also going to sweep up the blog a bit, and do a real design, more fitting with my new urban digs. I’ve never been concerned about being an A-list blogger before, and to be perfectly honest, about growing the number of readers I have beyond those who already read. But over the next few months, I’m going to make a concerted effort to blog more frequently, more fervently, and more expertly, and see if this results in more readers. Hopefully, that means a bit of an infusion of excitement that has been missing lately.

Ever feel like you are in a Simpson’s episode? Now you can make an image to match. (Via Sivacracy.)

You wouldn’t think adding more than one touchpoint would change the utility of touchscreens much. Watch this video and think again. It’s been clear for a while that our processors and storage capacities have outstripped our human-comuter interface. I can see getting a lot done with a touchscreen that really worked this quickly and effectively. Very cool.