Wednesday, 23 June 2010 by Marcus Aquinas.

I finally broke down and got an eReader (a Barnes & Noble Nook). I’ve been using various laptops and PDAs for the past 15 or 20 years, but they had problems of one sort or another. Laptops, for example were a bit too bulky for a relaxing read and with just a few hours’ worth of battery life were not exceptionally well suited to sustained reading. PDA screens are too small to read comfortably (I’m pretty much at the point where reading glasses are de rigueur) unless I zoomed the text to the point where I needed to turn the page every couple of seconds. So buying a dedicated device for reading eBooks seemed the logical way to go. Here are some of my impressions of the Barnes & Noble Nook. I don’t know that this qualifies as a full-blown review, but the Nook has its good points and its bad points.

Like most eReaders on the market today, the Nook uses Electronic Ink for its display. This type of display provides very good contrast, doesn’t use much battery power and is quite readable, even in bright sunlight.  The downside of this revolves around some limitations of the technology itself. Probably foremost among my complaints is that it precludes any type of backlighting, which makes reading in dim conditions almost impossible. If I read on the patio in the late evening, I have to increase the font size to compensate for the patio lighting, even though the lighting is sufficient (barely) for reading a normal book or magazine.

Another limitation of the Electronic Ink technology is that keyboard input is very slow. I’m a reasonably good typist, but typing on the Nook’s touchscreen is aggravatingly slow at perhaps one or two characters per second. Part of this is due to the touchscreen’s responsiveness (or lack thereof), but the remainder is due to the very slow refresh rate of the Electronic Ink display. This also means that while you can use the Nook as a basic web browser over Wi-Fi (more on that later), navigating web pages is tedious at best. My recommendation would be to use the Nook as a browser of last resort. If you’re in a position where you must have mobile web access, you’d be better off with a laptop or smart phone.

Moving on to power issues, B&N claims you can "Read for days. You can read for up to ten days without recharging with wireless off." My experience shows that to be an overstatement by a factor of about five. I can’t seem to go more than a couple of days without recharging and that is with the wireless turned off. If I were to leave my Nook in its screensaver mode, I could probably squeeze ten days out of it before needing to recharge. But two or three days of normal reading is about all I get. Someone else, who might read for no more than thirty minutes or an hour at a time, might be able to squeeze a few more days out of it. But for people who do extended reading sessions, ten days between charging is so far out that it is pure fluffery, bordering on false advertising (kind of like your cell phone will go for two or three days without charging if you don’t talk to anyone, which sort of defeats the purpose of having it in the first place).

The Nook supports a wide variety of file formats, specifically: EPUB, PDB and PDF. It does not support MOBI, TXT, or other file types. This makes Amazon’s Kindle a bit more flexible in some respects, except that Kindle does not support EPUB. It also means that you cannot read DRM protected eBooks purchased from anyone other than B&N. Non-DRM protected books can come from anywhere as long as the file format is supported. I found this a bit frustrating since one of my summer projects was to go back through L.E. Modesitt’s "Recluse" books, but I found that while they are almost all available in digital format from Amazon, only a couple are available from B&N. Advice to potential purchasers: check for availability of eBooks from your favorite author(s) BEFORE locking yourself into an eReader. Just like the Mac vs. PC vs. Linux conflicts, your hardware purchase is going to determine the books (software) available to you.

The Nook now comes in two flavors: Wi-Fi only and Wi-Fi+3G. The difference in cost for having 3G support is about $50 (~$200 for Wi-Fi+3G and ~$150 for Wi-Fi only). The data transfer speed for the 3G is nothing to write home about, but it’s more than adequate for downloading eBooks. In this, B&N’s claim of being able to read your book within a couple of minutes is pretty close to accurate. Considering that I am only using the 3G and finding it more than adequate for the demands that I place on it (checking daily updates and downloading the occasional purchase), I don’t have any major complaints on AT&T’s network support (OK, having only one bar of connectivity and then getting 4 bars by moving the Nook a couple of inches - "more bars in more places" should be taken literally, I guess). Since Kindle uses the same network, 3G support should not be a deciding factor in making your purchase decision.

I have not been thrilled with the inability of my Nook to connect to my home wireless network. Even though it’s 802.11b/g and my network is 802.11g, the Nook apparently does not support the encryption protocol that I am using. Leeching off of a neighbor’s unencrypted network was enough to show that yes, the Wi-Fi does work. It also demonstrated that the Nook is a browser of last-resort since some webpages will not even display in it. But for what it’s worth, the main display screen shows the webpage and the Nook’s touchscreen is used to move the cursor to the portion of the page you want, where you can then click on any links you might want to follow on the touchscreen. It works (sort of), but is kind of kludged.

The Reading controls are fairly simple: use the right arrow to move forward one page and use the left arrow to move backward one page. I was going to gripe about the inability to move to a particular page unless it had been previously bookmarked, but that capability was added with the v.1.4 software update (released this morning), as was "Extra Extra Large" font support for those of us who aren’t as eagle-eyed as we used to be. Which leads to the issue of software updates.

You are notified of software updates in "The Daily", which is B&N’s way of communicating with you. "The Daily" contains a couple of short blog columns (which are fairly well written) and the occasional notice about free eBooks (more on that later). It updates in the early morning hours during the week. I haven’t noticed any activity on the weekends, although I suppose such updates are possible. Once you have applied a software update, the notice goes away.

Software updates can be installed via two methods: either get it over the Wi-Fi connection or use a regular computer to download it and use the USB cable to move it to the Nook. Since I can’t get to my wireless network on the Nook, I had to use the latter method, which worked quite well. As soon as the file had been moved into the root directory of the Nook and I had ejected/disconnected the Nook, it immediately recognized that it had a software update to install and went right to it. A couple of minutes later, it was back up and running as it should.

EBook purchases are very quick and painless. Finding the book that you want is bit more complicated than simply browsing the aisles at a regular bookstore. But once located, purchasing and downloading an eBook are very simple, perhaps too simple. Like Amazon, B&N wants you to store a credit card or gift card with your account (you must have an account and register your Nook in order to read any DRM-protected eBooks). Assuming that you furnish such information to B&N, purchasing an eBook is as simple as selecting "buy it", confirming your purchase and waiting a couple of minutes for it to download.

One note of caution for those of you with B&N membership cards. All of your eBook purchases count as "online" purchases, so you will not receive your normal discount (and no discount on the Nook itself, either). In and of itself, this isn’t that big of a deal since the eBook is significantly cheaper than new hardbacks. But most other eBooks are priced comparably to paperbacks and you *DO* receive your discount on paperbacks, so the eBook actually ends up costing more than the paperback unless you factor in the the time and cost of driving to the closest B&N. An example should suffice to illustrate the point: "Haze" by L.E. Modesitt is $24.95 cover price in hardback and $7.99 for either the eBook or mass market paperback; you get your B&N discount on the hardback or paperback, but not on the eBook.

OK, now that I have the technical and financial gripes out of the way, let’s look at the Nook’s intended purpose: reading eBooks. On the whole, it very much lives up to expectations. Navigation is relatively easy, it feels good in the hand (it’s about the size of and perhaps a bit heavier than a small hardback) and the Electronic Ink display is crisp and very easy to read. About the only issues that I’ve encountered are its tendency to go to sleep unexpectedly and I keep forgetting that the controls were designed for either right- or left-handed readers. For some strange reason I keep thinking that the buttons on the left side are to go back a page. The touchscreen can be swiped (right-to-left to go forward or left-to-right to go backward, sort of like turning a regular page), but my results have been inconsistent. Perhaps it is a learned skill rather than a skill transferred from regular print reading.

Publications that were not formatted specifically for the Nook may not always display correctly. I transferred a couple of .pdf articles to check it out. The Nook did display them and they were quite readable, but sidebars and text highlight boxes seriously interfered with the flow of the text. It didn’t render them unreadable by any long stretch, but it did require giving much closer attention to breaks in the text in order to figure out where the text picked up again. EPUB books from B&N, Google Books and the Gutenberg Project all displayed nicely, although the text from Gutenberg was not quite as dark as the others. I’m not sure why that might be. Perhaps the book had been a conversion from Text to HTML to EPUB and something got lost in the process?

Electronic publishing does present one drawback that every reader needs to keep in mind. Because the barriers to publishing have been lowered somewhat (it doesn’t take much technical savvy to publish an eBook), you do not necessarily have agents and editors to help you separate the wheat from the chaff. I downloaded a few free eBooks from B&N and found that for about half of them, calling the writing "amateurish" would be a compliment. I won’t name titles and authors because I am not a professional book reviewer and my take is purely subjective. But take advantage of sample chapters when they are offered. The Nook allows you to read any B&N eBook for an hour per day as long as you are in a B&N hotspot. If time permits, use that capability to avoid the chaff.

On the whole, I’m not terribly dissatisfied with my Nook. Its technical specs don’t quite match up to real-world usage, but that’s generally to be expected with any piece of technology. Reading is different enough from regular print publications that it will take a little time to get used to it, but it’s pleasant enough that it won’t interfere with the enjoyment of a good book. Go forth and read.

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Friday, 7 May 2010 by Marcus Aquinas.

Lost in the shuffle of Parliamentary elections, economic problems, political crises and the usual detritus shoveled up by our assorted “news” services is the remembrance that today (May 8) is the 65th anniversary of the Allied victory in Europe during World War II.

It is appropriate that we take a moment to remember that we Americans did not win that war by ourselves. Fighting alongside us were the United Kingdom, France, the Soviet Union, China (mainland and Taiwan; it is a distinction without a difference in this context), Poland, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa, every country invaded/annexed during the war and countries that I, with a degree in History, cannot remember ever being mentioned in any of my coursework or readings on the period.

We Americans smugly pat ourselves on the back for a job well done, but seldom stop to consider the cost of that war to others. Here is a nice chart detailing civilian and military casualties of the war (post-war casualties are a different problem). I would urge everyone to consider whether they would have what they have today had the “Greatest Generation” not handed it to them through sacrifice and sheer determination. My uncle served in three theaters of the war (Africa, Europe and the Pacific) and it is to him and his comrades-in-arms that I extend my sincere gratitude. 90% of them are no longer with us, but it is because of them that we are what we are (for good or ill).

I urge everyone to contact Mr. Obama (http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact), Mr. Brown (he still holds the office - https://email.number10.gov.uk/Contact.aspx), Mr. Sarkozy (http://www.elysee.fr/ecrire/), and Mr. Medvedev (http://eng.kremlin.ru/articles/send_letter_Eng1a.shtml) to express their gratitude. While I do not wish to exclude our Chinese allies (Mr Hu and/or Mr. Ma, depending upon your definition of “China”), thanks to them is more appropriately due on August 14 (V-J Day), or September 2 if you want to go with the signing of the formal surrender document.

“We are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more than they, and things at a greater distance, not by virtue of any sharpness of sight on our part, or any physical distinction, but because we are carried high and raised up by their giant size.” Bernard of Chartres

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Monday, 26 April 2010 by Marcus Aquinas.

Brian Leiter’s blog (Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog) linked to an interesting review by Troy Jollimore at TruthDig of Martha Nusbaum’s book, “Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities”. Perhaps I am just more aware of the issue than I had been in the past, but the review raised a number of very interesting points as to the value of the Humanities in a well-rounded education. A similar point was made by Robert Paul Wolff (see my earlier post for the link) in slightly different terms.I confess to having a somewhat personal axe to grind on the issue since it pertains to my own education. Most of my readings in the traditional Liberal Arts have been at my own instigation. On the one hand, I have enjoyed the freedom to explore, question and ponder pretty much as my curiosity has directed me. On the other hand, this has happened in an environment with few people who were capable of telling me when I was full of it or not; their educations being even more lacking in this area than mine. But on one point, coming from an admittedly limited and informal foundation, I have to agree: the Liberal Arts help the student develop a particular sympathy for others’ viewpoints. To sacrifice that for economic gain is to do a great disservice not only here, but to the future.

If of thy mortal goods thou art bereft,

And from thy slender store two loaves alone to thee are left,

Sell one, and with the dole

Buy hyacinths to feed thy soul.

–Moslih Eddin Saadi, Gulistan

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Monday, 29 March 2010 by Marcus Aquinas.

Old news, but here’s the launch trailer for the upcoming “Splinter Cell: Conviction”

And thanks to the good folks at IGN for a quick write-up on the stuff due out in the next couple or three months (The Games of Spring). Just confirmed my suspicion that I hadn’t missed anything noteworthy (“noteworthy” from my perspective – others might find quite a bit to keep them occupied).

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Thursday, 18 March 2010 by Marcus Aquinas.

The Spring issue of “American Educator” showed up in my mailbox today. There must be something in the water. In response to Dr. Wolff’s lecture (links to a QuickTime .mov – runs about an hour), I was preparing a rather lengthy rant entitled “The Necessity of a Liberal Education” when I saw two related articles occupying a sizable chunk of the magazine:

“The Most Daring Education Reform of All” by Diana Senechal (links to a .pdf)

“21st Century Skills” by Andrew J. Rotherham and Daniel T. Willingham (links to a .pdf)

Hmmmm. I’ve never really considered myself to be at or near the cutting edge of anything, especially when it comes to hot educational issues, so it must be a combination of the Luck o’ the Irish and the corned beef and cabbage I had for St. Patrick’s Day. Perhaps that’s my cue to go buy a lottery ticket. Probably not.

The Most Daring Education Reform of All

21st Century Skills: Not New, but a Worthy Challenge

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Tuesday, 16 March 2010 by Marcus Aquinas.

I have only recently discovered the joys (and frustrations) of Google Reader, an app that delivers summaries of recent website activity. I used it to subscribe to a few compilations of feeds in a few areas of interest, including several philosophy feeds. One of the feeds includes Brian Leiter’s “Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog” which contained a link to this article at “Crooked Timbers”, which linked back to a recent article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which prompted me to add a new category called “Carthago delenda est”.

The phrase is attributed to Cato the Elder (~234-149 BC), although there seems to be some dispute over its exact wording. Following the Second Punic War (218-201 BC), Cato the Elder served in the Roman Senate and was reported by several sources as ending every speech with the phrase "Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam" (“Moreover, I advise that Carthage must be destroyed”), or words to that effect, whether the subject of the speech was Carthage or not. In the end, Cato got his wish. Rome went on to wage the Third Punic War in 149 BC and Carthage was completely destroyed in 146 BC. In English, the phrase is commonly rendered as “Carthago delenda est” (“Carthage must be destroyed”) and is taken as a repetitive call to action to the point of being an obsession. All of which leads back to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article and my new category.

Aristotle opened his Metaphysics with, “By nature, all men desire to know.” I will accept the statement as axiomatic. Everyone wants to know something, even if it’s just the current time or what’s for dinner. I believe Aristotle would not have put it quite so frivolously, but the germ of the idea is intact.

If everyone wants to know something, then they must invariably turn to someone else to satisfy that want. I include self-education in this because such endeavors must include surveying the extant knowledge to see if the desired knowledge exists. In general, people do not want to reinvent the wheel. Educational institutions, of whatever sort, are simply more formalized ways of turning to someone else for the desired knowledge. So, at their core, schools have become the common method of formally imparting knowledge on a mass scale (one-to-many as opposed to one-to-one, such as with a parent and child).

As most people perceive it, the purpose of a school (kindergarten, high school, college, university, whatever) is to educate its students. But when you start asking about why they do this, you will get a variety of responses. Here are a few, copied liberally from teachersmind.com:

“The central task of education is to implant a will and facility for learning; it should produce not learned but learning people. The truly human society is a learning society, where grandparents, parents, and children are students together.” ~Eric Hoffer

“No one has yet realized the wealth of sympathy, the kindness and generosity hidden in the soul of a child. The effort of every true education should be to unlock that treasure.” ~Emma Goldman

“The only purpose of education is to teach a student how to live his life-by developing his mind and equipping him to deal with reality. The training he needs is theoretical, i.e., conceptual. He has to be taught to think, to understand, to integrate, to prove. He has to be taught the essentials of the knowledge discovered in the past-and he has to be equipped to acquire further knowledge by his own effort.” ~Ayn Rand

“The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think—rather to improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, than to load the memory with the thoughts of other men.” ~Bill Beattie

“The one real object of education is to leave a man in the condition of continually asking questions.” ~Bishop Creighton

“The central job of schools is to maximize the capacity of each student.” ~Carol Ann Tomlinson

To add a cynical note to the whole thing, “What gets measured, gets done” (attributed to more people than I can remember), so the purpose of education must be to pass tests.

To my mind, the question that has yet to be answered by anyone is whether the purpose of a university is primarily to educate or train. In other words, do students go to a university primarily to learn how to do a particular job well (or better)? Or do they go to a university primarily to become more well-rounded human beings? I tend to fall somewhere between Beattie and Creighton on that spectrum of opinion, but I am still working on being able to clearly articulate the reasoning behind that position (a subject for a later post, I’m sure).

If the aim of an education is to produce people who can perform certain tasks well, then the “justify your existence” approach has some degree of merit. The idea being that the marketplace demands people with certain skill sets and those skill sets change over time. For example, there isn’t much demand for people who can use Morse Code these days, but there is certainly a demand for people who understand and can use TCP/IP. Since universities and similar educational institutions are a major supplier of those skill sets, they must remain sensitive to the demands of the consumers and must occasionally weed out programs which are not providing the currently demanded skills. In primarily utilitarian economic terms, it’s the greatest good for the greatest number and the loss of anything else is just a cost of doing business in that marketplace.

If, however, the aim of an education is to produce well-rounded people, then the “justify your existence” approach does not make much sense. It does, however, open a nasty can of worms over the value of knowledge (whatever that may be). The fact that people are willing to pay to obtain knowledge would suggest that it does. But does knowledge have a value only relative to this particular culture at this particular time or does knowledge have some absolute, universal value? If the former, then we must probably return to the utilitarian paradigm.

Rephrasing the question somewhat, does knowledge has some absolute intrinsic value (is it an end in and of itself) or relative intrinsic value (good only under certain conditions or in certain circumstances) or is it merely a thing that has value for its instrumentality (a means to some different end)? That’s a monumental question and one which, I think, has no answer upon which everyone will agree. But the last time I checked, trying to answer those kinds of questions was the the thing with which Philosophy concerns itself. And that, my friends, is the use of a Philosophy Department.

Granted, the idea I have presented assumes infinite resources to provide an infinite number of courses of study, among which people may pick and choose the things that they wish to learn, guided by what seems best to them at the time. The reality is that the resources available to any educational institution are finite and must, of necessity, be allocated in a manner that best promotes its overall mission. The fly in the ointment is that until there is some general agreement over what that missions is (“know how” versus “know that”) there will be disagreement over how those resources are allocated.

I find compelling arguments on both sides of the absolute vs. relativistic arguments, so I do not presume to propose a solution to the problem. What I do propose, however, is an attempt to find a general agreement as to the purposes and aims of a post-secondary education, hence “Carthago delenda est”. Carthage does not need to be destroyed, but the question must be answered.

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Sunday, 14 March 2010 by Marcus Aquinas.

I think I have let this thing sit and gather dust for long enough. I’m still not sure what I’m going to do with it, but I cleaned out all of the old junk in preparation for new junk. I would have saved it all except that I forgot where the “Export” button was hiding and didn’t find it until the “Delete” button had finished doing its work (bummer, but oh well). I copied off everything of importance to another webspace a few months’ back, so it’s not like it’s any great loss (arguably not a great loss in spite of my having copied the important stuff elsewhere).

So, what to do? What to do? I dunno (what do you want to do?).

For the moment, I’m working through John Stuart Mill’s treatise, “On Liberty” (which is probably why I saved the Epictetus post) and it seems I can’t go more than a paragraph or so without hitting something that just really clicks. I suppose that the surprising part is that I had already reached most of Mill’s conclusions, but had never read them before now. Weird, because I know I’m nowhere near as sharp as Mill was (this is a guy who was reading Plato, in Greek, by the 3rd grade). Nevertheless, we shall see where it leads.

In the interim, I am busily playing Fallout 3, Bioshock, Grand Theft Auto IV, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Civilization IV, TES IV (of course), and the like. They’re all getting a little old, but there just isn’t anything out there that’s grabbing my interest.

Eidos has released a teaser trailer for “Deus Ex 3” that has me semi-drooling, but it’s not going to hit the shelves anytime soon. They promise lots more goodies at E3-time in June, but still….

It looks like Rockstar is going to port the GTA IV expansions to PC at the end of the month. I’m not sure that I’m impressed enough with the game to be interested in them, but it’s there should the mood strike. “Splinter Cell: Conviction” is due out next month. Preview comments have been pretty good and all of the earlier incarnations were decent, but the $80 price tag is a little scary.  Beyond those, I don’t see anything earth-shaking on the horizon before summer. We’ll just have to see how it goes.

As to the repurposing, at worst I’ll just have a clean slate on which to blather. At best I might have the germ of a thesis or dissertation. Only time, talent and patience will tell (assuming that I have any of those).

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Monday, 4 September 2006 by Marcus Aquinas.

Many years ago, my parents gave me some old books that had been laying around the house and no one had read in years. For the most part, they were books containing important pieces by various philosophers from the ancient Greeks to the 20th century and were not the sort of thing that a young buck would find terribly interesting. But I’d dig into them from time to time just to give the synapses a workout. Among these philosophical writings was “The Manual” by Epictetus, sometimes called the “spokesman” of the Stoic philosophers. At the beginning of “The Manual,” Epictetus first introduced me to the concept of binary thinking.

For the non-geeks out there, binary only contains two states: 1 and 0. Something is either on or off, true or false, black or white, greater than or not greater than, etc. There isn’t any middle ground because the number system doesn’t permit anything other than one thing or its opposite. Here, then, is the introduction to “The Manual”:

Of all existing things some are in our power, and other are not in our power. In our power are thought, impulse, will to get and will to avoid, and, in a word, everyhing which is our own doing. Things not in our power include the body, property, reputation, office, and, in a word, eveyrhing whcih is not our own doing. Thing in our power are by nature free, unhindered, untrammelled; things not in our power are weak, servile, subject to hinderance, dependent on others. Remember then that if you imatching that what is naturally slavis is free, and what is naturally another’s is your own, you will be hampered, you will mourn, you will be put to confusion, you will blame gods and men; but if you thing that only your own belongs to you, and that what is another’s is indeed another’s, no one will ever put compulsion or hinderance on you, you will blame none, you will accuse none, you will do nothing against your will, no one will harm you, you will have no enemy, for no harm can touch you.

Essentially, everything that happens falls into one of two categories: it’s either something you can control or it’s something that you can’t control. In many ways, it’s the serenity prayer: “grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

To put it in modern terms, Epictetus is essentially saying that everything comes down to what you choose it to be. Think about it — if there’s a meteor hurtling toward your home at this very red-hot moment, there isn’t anything you can do to change that. The meteor will do what it will do and all you can control is whether you and your stuff are going to be there when it hits. If the company is looking at downsizing, you can’t control the decision on whether you’ll have a job tomorrow or not. All you can do is influence the choices of the person making that decision: is keeping you on the payroll more beneficial than not keeping you on the payroll? But in the final analysis, that decision is completely out of your control. “Mandatory” meetings? Same thing. You don’t have to go. But is the bit of extra free time you gain worth the job you may lose? “Do these jeans make my butt look fat?” (Personally, I think you’re hosed either way.)

This is something that my students have a hard time getting their heads around: “Mister, do we have to do the assignment?” Answer: “No, of course not. The only thing you have to do is be born and die; everything else is optional and comes down to choosing the consequence that you prefer.”

So, all of this begs the question. If we are what we choose to be, where does this leave non-protected speech? If I choose to phrase something in a particular way and you choose to take offense, is that my problem or is it yours? Granted, if my words are calculated to get a rise out of you and I get a punch in the nose for my efforts, then I suppose that I got what I wanted. But if I tell a joke that you find offensive, is it not your choice to be offended rather than to see the humor that was intended? Why am I, then, responsible for your choice?

 So rather than, “You have insulted me,” should you not be saying, “I choose to give you power over how I feel”? Or, perhaps more precisely, “I choose to be insulted/offended because in this way I do not have to expend any effort to control myself or understand why I feel as I do.” It is a heady feeling to know that I, a simple techno-geek, can have such power over others. But it must also be true that I have that power because someone gave it to me.

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