explaining the long tale
Scudéry’s Artamène and Richardson’s Clarissa are the longest works with the Latin alphabet. Specific socio-economic circumstances help to explain them.
Tagged: content
COB-25: forms
Fast-paced, consumerist society emphasizes functionalism and results. Hungry? Go to a fast-food restaurant. Want to do something? Figure out how to get it done quickly and with the least amount of effort. The value of everything is instrumental. Bureaucracy, in contrast, emphasizes the artistic and the beautiful. Long-time bureaucrats have deep appreciation for forms and [...]
flatlands
A man climbs to stand in a stratospheric wind. Another scuba-dives through subterranean streams. The light at the crosswalk flashes “Don’t Start”. The world is flat. Journeys to the East yet returning from the West only prove this. The light at the crosswalk flashes “Don’t Start”. Striving cannot turn a son into a friend, or [...]
demand for images
The magic lantern was the first device that could display at zero marginal cost many large images to large groups of persons. Magic lanterns were for sale in London as early as 1663. They projected an image on a glass slide through a lens to a distant screen. By the nineteenth century, magic lanterns had [...]
Tagged: images
aging
You can tell a man’s age by the count of blankets like the rings of a tree that wrap around him, by the width of his bark, by the thickness of the life that will flow from his heart if you tap it.
debating the long tail
Getting a good, well-understood model often takes you three-quarters of the way toward solving a class of problems. Persons’ choices among a large number of symbolic items still lacks a good, well-understood model for business analysis. Among a set of similarly instantiated symbolic items in a given domain of choice, item popularity vs item rank [...]
Tagged: content
games need regulation
To increase my regulatory expertise, I recently attended a four-day VHSL Basketball Officials Camp. The camp included both class sessions with top officials and on-court practice. The supervising officials provided extensive feedback on mechanics and calls. One supervising official told me bluntly to drop my laissez-faire approach and put some air in my whistle. By [...]