Random Thoughts

Oracle of the Dead

Book: John Maddox Roberts, SPQR XII: Oracle of the Dead (2009)

This is the latest installment in Roberts' mystery series set at the end of the Roman republic. It's good and I recommend it, but people new to the series might want to start at the very beginning. It's certainly been interesting to me to see the character development, and I wonder if people new to the series might really be missing out on something if they start here.

Confucius Lives Next Door

Book: T.R. Reid, Confucius Lives Next Door: What Living in the East Teaches Us About Living in the West (1999)

What are "Asian values"? T.R. Reid and his family spent five years living in Japan for his job as head of the Washington Post's Tokyo bureau. This book is his explication of how Japan has developed as a nation built on a Confucian model and how that contrasts with Western society. Essentially, Japanese society has been set up to form its members in a Confucian milieu, and the Japanese then perpetuate that formation through their actions. Most enchanting to me was the chapter devoted to Yodobashi No. 6 Elementary School, the Japanese grade school where his two daughters studied for three years. Certainly Japanese education is not the wholly rote experience I had thought it was. I highly recommend this book for those interested in Japan and Asia, and also for those who would like to see how a successful society could be organized in many ways better than the U.S.

Watch this video for the soundtrack

Seriously. You may or may not care about spelling reform, but the soundtrack for this video is amazing! A mash-up of Gun 'n Roses with the Jackson 5. It works!

Thanks to: Matthew Yglesias

Script and Scribble

Book: Kitty Burns Florey, Script and Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting (2009)

This is a popular book about the rise and fall of handwriting in the U.S., wonderfully exemplified by the author's own history. Kitty Burns Florey, the author of Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog, has again mined her childhood education, this time to show the use and teaching of handwriting. The book's most illuminating chapter is "The Golden Age of Penmanship," discussing Platt Rogers Spencer's method of penmanship and its subsequent debasement. In the book's final two chapters, Florey chats about the importance of handwriting in a digital age and on how the teaching of handwriting could be improved. 

I found this book to be inspirational--I certainly want to improve my handwriting now! Not to the beautiful but excessive level of Spencerian penmanship, but at least to the italic handwriting that Florey recommends. And some of the handwriting examples provided are truly beautiful; I wish there had been more of them. The book's weakest chapter is its discussion of graphology, the "science" of handwriting analysis, which could have been dropped without real loss.

Polyglot

Book: Kató Lomb, Polyglot: How I Learn Languages (2008)

I actually finished this a while ago, but never finished my draft entry for this book. The author was a Hungarian translator who worked in 16 different languages (fluent in five, and performing written translations in another 11). Her book is an account of her personal history in learning languages and her thoughts on the language learning process. It's an interesting read, perhaps more so if you're now interested in learning languages but didn't quite do so well with that in school.

The book can be purchased through Lulu.com but is also available online as a pdf on the website of TESL-EJ, the publisher of this edition.

Update

Hey, I've updated my blog! This is a new post!

My Life With the Saints

Book: James Martin, S.J., My Life With the Saints (2006)

James Martin has written an entertaining and thoughtful series of reflections on the lives of saints whom he has discovered in his time as a Jesuit. They are not hagiographies in the traditional sense, a straightforward biography of the lives of saints. Rather, each chapter has a biography of the saints intertwined with stories from Fr. Martin's own life, showing how he came to know each of these saints and appreciate their examples, if not their workings, in his life.

Not all of the saints in the book are canonized saints (although I'm sure the canonization process has started for those who aren't), which I found interesting and valuable--in a way, it makes them seem less distant and more real. I also appreciated being introduced to people whom I had never before encountered in this way. Probably the one person whom I least expected to encounter in the book was Pedro Arrupe, the former Father-General of the Jesuits, and Fr. Martin's chapter does make me want to learn more.

From the book, here is a meditation popularly attributed to Pedro Arrupe:

Nothing is more practical than finding God, that is, than falling in love in a quite absolute, final way. What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything. It will decide what will get you out of bed in the morning, what you will do with your evenings, how you will spend your weekends, what you read, who you know, what breaks your heart, and what amazes you with joy and gratitude.

Fall in love, stay in love, and it will decide everything.

A talk by Fr. Martin, Laughing with the Saints, can be seen on YouTube.

Bad Bluebook!

Many law students get frustrated with the Bluebook, especially if they're on a journal and need to use the Bluebook frequently. Here's a problem (two problems) that came up last semester (yes, this post is quite delayed) when I was helping a student with a citation during the most recent spurt of cite-checking by the 2Ls here. 

Problem #1: Popular title vs. AACR2

This happens with a lot of sources. Basically, neither the popular title of a work nor the title given in a citation will be the title listed in the library's catalog. This is because the Anglo-American Cataloging Rules (AACR2) require the official title of a book in a library record to be the title on the title page of the book.

So the Bluebook says the title of the work is Inter-American Court of Human Rights, Decisions and Judgments, while the library catalog says the title is Serie C -- Resoluciones y Sentencias.

 

Problem #2: Harvard Law Review

The Bluebook is largely the creation of the Harvard Law Review, and I think that the Harvard editors have made erroneous assumptions about citation formats based on how things are done at the Harvard Law Library.

 

Here's how the Bluebook (rule 21.5.4) says to cite the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, Decisions and Judgments: "The citation should include the case name; the volume number; the series; the case number; the page number, if needed; and the date." The following example is provided:

 

Durand & Ugarte Case, 2001 Inter-Am. Ct. H.R. (ser. C) No. 68, at 118 (Aug. 16, 2000)

 

But when I checked the catalogs of other libraries, I saw that Harvard and Stanford had bound their copies in different ways, while Yale hadn't bound its at all. So I don't think that this is an actual case reporter (like the National Reporters) with actual volumes. Instead, it looks to me as if the court sends out pamphlets (slip opinions) of the judgments that some libraries have bound together.

 

NYU's Journal of International Law and Politics' Guide to Foreign and International Legal Citations has the following example for this title:

 

I/A Court H.R., Velasquez-Rodriguez case, Judgment of July 29, 1986, Series C, No. 4, para. 167.

Note that this format has neither volume numbers nor page numbers.

So my guess is that the Harvard Law Review editors created a citation form for this title that reflects the physical appearance of this work at the Harvard Law Library. But that citation form does not accurately reflect how the court actually publishes its opinions.

Best article of 2008: Piotr Wozniak and Supermemo

Since I'm clearing out my accumulated draft posts, here's the most interesting article I read in 2008 (because I still find this article utterly fascinating and memorable eight months after reading it):

Gary Wolf, "Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to this Algorithm," Wired Magazine, May 2008.

Wolf has written a fascinating article about Polish scientist Piotr Wozniak and his effort to remember everything he learns. Wozniak's attempt to learn English led him to create a computer program that would quiz him on vocabulary items at the optimum time for retaining them. This program, SuperMemo, eventually became the pivot on which his life revolved around. Wozniak largely withdrew from normal interaction with others to follow the program's dictates as to when to learn.

The article's discussion of the psychology of memory and learning is also quite interesting. I wish I had known this in school, especially when learning foreign languages, which is where the software really seems to shine. If I were learning a foreign language now, I would use a program like SuperMemo.

Related links:

• The SuperMemo website has interesting articles by Wozniak on memory and learning.
• A friend of Wozniak offers details of his own personal experience with him at Antimoon, a site for English learners.
• SuperMemo is the ur-example of spaced-repetition systems (SRS). Here's a good blog post on how they work.
• By many accounts, a major drawback to the use of SuperMemo is its poor user interface, so many would-be users use other products such as Mnemosyne, a free SRS that has a simpler interface but fewer features than SuperMemo (the program uses an earlier version of the SuperMemo algorithm).

The Way is Made by Walking

Book #15 of 2008: Arthur Paul Boers, The Way is Made by Walking: A Pilgrimage Along the Camino de Santiago (2007)

OK, this is really pathetic. Out of a goal of reading 50 books in 2008, I read 15 books from cover-to-cover (note that none of these books were books I had read before; I did re-read some books I had read before, but I'm not including those in this count).

This book is Arthur Paul Boers' reflection upon his walking of the Camino de Santiago (Way of Saint James), the famous pilgrimage route in Spain. Although it has some recounting of his daily travel, it is not a travelogue. Boers explores what pilgrimages are and what it means to be a pilgrim. It is an easily-read book aimed at a non-Catholic audience (Boers himself is a Mennonite pastor). The most interesting of his reflections was his reflection on how the church does not serve pilgrims. By the end of my reading, I too wanted to walk the Camino.

(An interesting and related book that I read much, but not all, of is by anthropologist Nancy Louise Frey, Pilgrim Stories: On and Off the Road to Santiago: Journeys Along an Ancient Way in Modern Spain (1998). Frey's much denser book is based on her interviews of pilgrims and also goes into the history of the Camino and the institutional support of the Camino.)

My Life on the Run

Book #14 of 2008: Bart Yasso, My Life on the Run: The Wit, Wisdom and Insights of a Road-Racing Icon (2008)

I picked up this book because Terri reviewed it favorably. Bart Yasso is Runner's World magazine's "running ambassador." I had heard of "Yasso 800s" as a training aid for marathon runners, but I didn't know anything about him, so I found his autobiography quite interesting. Interestingly, Yasso wasn't a runner in school but turned to running as an adult, in part to overcome his drinking and pot smoking and also to compensate for a poor relationship with his father. I recommend this book even if you're not a runner, just because it's so entertaining. Yasso's status of "running ambassador" meant that he ran in (and was volunteered for) many off-beat races (burro racing, naked racing, mountain racing), and his description of these is often hilarious.

No Tannenbaum, No Tannenbaum

Huh, this was a bit odd. Here's our library's Christmas tree:

Yes. We actually did have a Christmas tree with decorations in that very spot, but it was taken down on the last day of finals earlier this week, even though we're still open until Christmas Eve. I have no idea why that happened.

I wish I could do this

From my e-mail:

Subject: Out of Office AutoReply

I will be out of the office until May 18.

Have an utterly fantastic trip!

Anonymous blogging

I'm seriously considering it. For those things that are just TMI right now for this or Facebook.

Will post "soon"

I've been busy at work, and even though Obama won, the passage of Proposition 8 here in California was a real blow that I still haven't quite processed. So my intended post about the Bluebook will have to wait.