Shoot, I didn't realize that it's been two weeks since I last blogged. How ironic that the medium used to inform others about some of the things happening in one's life gets the boot when lots of things are happening in one's life.

LOST. I've been loving the episodes so far, but haven't really put a lot of thought into them--just enjoying the show. They're continuing the theme of putting more questions on the table while revealing ever so little by little tidbits about previous questions and issues. Perhaps I'll have a chance to air some of my thoughts in the future. But I doubt it...

1. The next week or two will be super busy with school: papers need grading, exams need grading, Bryan needs to eat and sleep and teach four classes, etc. etc. I sent off two papers to conferences last week--my Valentine's Day gift to myself, which kept me from my traditional V Day activity this year: watching The Graduate. Hopefully the papers will get accepted and I can add that to my CV so that I could hopefully get a stinkin' job one of these days!



2. Most of Bryan's spare time has been gladly taken up by a Special Young Lady, and it will gladly continue in the future, seeing as how we're "dating" and all. I'm afraid the frequency of LOST posts will have to take a back seat. (To be replaced by Special Young Lady posts? We'll see 'bout that.)

This Saturday is Brew Day for Bryan and Eric (and whoever else wants to come watch/help). We're brewing a 35-gallon batch of my award-winning IPA recipe.

Had a weird dream a few nights ago. It probably should have been more terrifying, but, for some reason, it wasn't.

It felt like I was in some kind of Faerie story--a dark and mysterious other-world that, while alien, seemed oddly familiar at the same time.* As it happened, I was put under some sort of spell** that made it more and more difficult to breath, as if I were being slowly suffocated by some unseen force. The weird thing is that I wasn't afraid, even though by the end of the dream my breathing was quite labored. I just kept adjusting to it and walking around, trying to control it and, in some strange way, understand it, but not trying to find out how to stop it. Unlike nightmares I've had in the past, this dream didn't wake me up in the middle of the night.

I'm sure Freud would have a heyday with this one.

*A trailer to the new movie Pan's Labyrinth gives something of the feel of the dream, though I didn't see the trailer until after the dream.
** Not sure how I knew it was a spell--one of those Dream Certainties one has knowledge of in a completely different way than in the Real World.

How can you train honeybees to sniff for bombs?. The "Stealthy Insect Sensor Project"? You mean, we're paying money for this?!

This is what NASA is (read, we are) paying them over at Georgia Tech to do: Spy flies. Interestingly, the same group, the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA) is involved in both of these insect projects.

The Power of Technology

I gave the first quiz of the semester to my ginormous Intro to Philosophy classes this week. The nice thing about these quizzes is that technology made it possible for me to give 200 quizzes without using up one sheet of paper; it took 10 seconds to grade them all; from the comfort of my own home. A decidedly good thing. The power of technology as a tool.

But technology has also made it possible to give students instant access to me in the comfort of my own home from the comfort of their own homes. When I think about it, this is a rather strange thing. A new thing. A powerful thing that has the capacity to redefine how we conceive of the teacher-student relationship. Students emailed telling me that their time ran out on the quiz and that they didn't want to get a bad grade because of it. They emailed telling me about internet problems at a dorm. They emailed telling me that they didn't read the quiz directions correctly and were freaking out because they got a 0. They email me telling me that they are sick, that their grandmother is sick, that they had a family emergency, that the dog ate their blasted homework.

Frankly, I don't want to hear it. Frankly, these aren't my problems. These either are results of failing to be responsible or are things that I have no reason to know about (apart from excuses from the Health Center, which can't be emailed). The thing that most interests me about these emails isn't so much that they exemplify a truly astounding example of nearly-instantaneous written communication; what interests me is why students felt like they had permission to fill my inbox with their insecurities. Yes, I think permission is the word I'm looking for. With such nearly-instantaneous communication comes an expectation of nearly-instantaneous reply to said communication. And this is not a permission that I'm willing to grant. It is an expectation that becomes an imposition. It imposes upon me certain behaviors that I am expected to act out and certain characteristics that I am expected to possess, by definition, as the teacher of this course.

Consider: the teacher is supposed to be available to the students. This is a characteristic that the teacher is expected to--and should--possess; it reflects a certain level of concern for the student that the teacher should himself reflect. A certain level of concern. This characteristic is reflected by the college professor in having what are called "office hours," times set apart during the week for students to have a little one-on-one with their teacher. But email as a technology imposes a much higher expectation, a much higher level of concern that the professor qua professor must have for their students. It imposes an expectation that ought not to be a requirement for office.

I recently heard a story of a high school teacher who, during school hours, is often bombarded with emails from her students' parents. And, get this, the parents took it as a personal affront when the teacher did not respond as quickly as they thought she should. Here is that expectation once again, an expectation that is produced by the technology rather than by the relationship. Since when was it part of the teacher-parent relationship that the teacher, during school hours no less, is responsible for the arrogance of the parents. Yes, I think responsible and arrogance are the words I'm looking for. The teacher is now responsible because, after all, she is the teacher and teachers must show a concern for their students by placating the students' parents. The parents are arrogant by demanding such a silly and outlandish thing.

What interests me about all of this is the power of technology to shape these relationships. Once upon a time, communication between teachers and students and between teachers and parents was shaped by assumed and accepted conceptions of the relationships between them. Communication followed the conception of the relationship. I suspect that the tide has turned, that the conception of the relationship is being shaped by the mode of communication, by the technological medium in which the communication is taking place. That's the power of technology.

My Shure Earphones

A while back I bought some Shure earphones on eBay (the E2c Sound Isolating Earphones). I don't remember exactly how much they were, somewhere in the $40 - $60 range; the point is simply that they were expensive, relative to my niggardly nature (read, cheap self). How could I possibly justify spending that much money on a pair of earphones? I wondered that, too, even in light of the rave reviews by EJ. But any question of justification was duly answered once I got them. Worth every single penny I spent...and then some. These are the most comfortable, incredible sound quality earphones I have ever had--and likely ever will have in this price range. Truly amazing. Listening to one audiobook, I could ever-so-slightly hear the pages being turned, the hazy sound of the reader's phone ringing. Few sounds escape them. Few sounds disturb them. Just thought you'd like to know.

Having had my hopes of reuniting with my Wuerffel Green Bay Packers beanie cap dashed upon the rocks of time, yesterday I purchased a suitable, but considerably more expensive, replacement: a Jittery Joe's beanie cap. Happily, it was a perfect instantiation of the Ideal JJ Cap that I had in mind, though, of course, neither the Ideal nor the instantiation are themselves perfect. The former was a product of my finite and imperfect imagination, the latter a soon-to-be tattered (and thus imperfect) spot of material. It should be kept in mind, however, that my claim that the mental products of imperfect beings cannot themselves be perfect does not preclude the ability of imperfect beings to have ideas of perfect things or of perfections; for not every idea that imperfect beings have are products of their imaginations. Descartes said as much roughly 370 years ago; after all, we have an idea of God. Nor does it preclude a state of affairs in which an object is a perfect copy of an idea of an object, as was the case with my JJ cap; for in this case perfection simply indicates a complete-correspondence-with, which is possible even if it rarely happens. Hence my glee. QED.