links for 2009-09-03
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I sort of feel like I ought to have something to say about the recent controversy over creationists on bloggingheads.tv, which has caused Sean Carroll and Carl Zimmer to renounce the whole site... bloggingheads has twice invited creationists-- sorry, cdesign proponentists-- to appear on their "Science Saturday" segments in recent weeks. Sean and Carl feel that giving people from the Discovery Institute this sort of platform amounts gives them more credibility than they deserve, especially since neither of them was particularly challenged by the other participant in the conversation.... I absolutely agree with Sean and Carl that "Intelligent Design" is not science, has no hope of becoming science, and should not be promoted as science.... On the other hand... bloggingheads is... not Science or Nature. They're not even Discover. They're basically a low-budget general-interest tv network, and as such, they're in the business of selling controversy...
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Speaking of Moby Dick, the bad reasoning in the most recent Richard Cohen column is outpaced by the bad morals, and the bad morals are outpaced by the bad writing: "Call him Ishmael.... Ishmael is someone I invented, but he is not a far-fetched creation. You and I know he exists, has existed and will exist again. He is the enemy." Cohen thinks we should torture him. Or, I guess, we shouldn’t torture him but if he just so happens to be tortured then we should applaud the torturer. Or something. But why on earth are we beginning this column with “call me Ishmael”? Because it’s a famous line from a book, I guess. Richard Cohen wants us to know that he’s familiar with very famous books. Or something. Maybe the idea is that the Biblical Ishmael is the ancestor of the Arab people, so he served well as a stand-in for a generic would-be mass murderer? Either way, it’s a reminder that we don’t have merit pay for major newspaper columnists.
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I really cannot remember when I've had so much fun in front of the TV set with my clothes on. I'm talking about "Playing Shakespeare," the set of master classes by British direcctor John Barton, recently (re?)released (after 27 years!) on video by the BBC. I heard about them on the radio in the car and by the time I got home Mrs.B, bless her heart, had ordered them. We've been making our leisured way through all week. We're not done yet, but I really can't contain my enthusiasm for anything so engaging, so instructive and so much fun.
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Mark has already extensively blogged the Google Books Settlement Conference at Berkeley yesterday, where he and I both spoke on the panel on "quality" — which is to say, how well is Google Books doing this and what if anything will hold their feet to the fire? This is almost certainly the Last Library, after all. There's no Moore's Law for capture, and nobody is ever going to scan most of these books again. So whoever is in charge of the collection a hundred years from now — Google? UNESCO? Wal-Mart? — these are the files that scholars are going to be using then. All of which lends a particular urgency to the concerns about whether Google is doing this right. My presentation focussed on GB's metadata — a feature absolutely necessary to doing most serious scholarly work with the corpus. It's well and good to use the corpus just for finding information on a topic — entering some key words and barrelling in sideways. (That's what "googling" means, isn't it?) But for scholars looking...
