Jessamyn West took a creative writing course with David Foster Wallace in 1987 and posts her course evaluation. Nope, no footnotes.

For fans of DFW.

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Tim Hwang points us to a video demonstrating an amazing physics engine.

Lagoa Multiphysics 1.0 – Teaser from Thiago Costa on Vimeo.

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I find that I’ve taken to tweeting links of sites I think are worth looking at but about which I don’t have much to say.

I think I may try posting them here as well. Why not?

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I just came across (via Megan McArdle) this piece by Gregor Hohpe from 2004 that analyzes Starbuck’s way of queuing orders — the cashier writes your order on a cup that gets filled asynchronously by the coffee-machine oeprator — in computer processing terms. Fascinating.

Clearly, a computer program could do a better job of optimizing for the most rapid throughput, while minimizing customer delay and keeping customer orders batched together successfully. So, you can imagine the cashier inputting the order electronically, and the barista working from a properly queued list put together by the computer.

Unfortunately, this is one of those places where the real world seems to prevent proper algorithmic optimization. What do you do about the cup of coffee that has to be remade because the customer wanted a double half skim double latte, not a half double double skim latte? What do you do about the cup that spills on its way to the customer’s hands? What do you do about the customer with the spilled coffee on her hands demanding that you top it up while she calls her lawyer?

If only life were more like a computer!

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Slashdot discusses a NY Times Magazine article on the problems with remembering everything, and refers to Viktor Mayer-Schönberger’s book Delete. (I interviewed Viktor for a RadioBerkman episode here.) I think this is one of those topics that’s so large that we’ll only understand it fully by living through it. (Not that we shouldn’t keep trying.)

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We saw Inception last night. Here are my predictions for its Oscars:

That’s twelve nominations. Titanic was nominated for 14, Avatar for 9. Inception is certainly better than either of those two movies, not that that has anything to do with it.

I’m not saying I agree with the Academy’s decisions here. I don’t think Marion Cotillard deserves a nomination, and I think Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who was very good in this, will win to reward him for playing humans with decent haircuts in indie movies after “3rd Rock from the Sun.” But then you have to ask why Ellen Page didn’t get a nomination. Sometimes I just don’t understand the Academy!

But Inception is an excellent movie. Much better — in my opinion! — than Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, which I thought was a mess rescued by Heath Ledger’s performance. I also liked it better than Nolan’s The Prestige, a movie I liked a lot even though in the end the plot cheated. As for Memento, well, that movie is just special. Inception is special, too: a Hollywood movie of its sort (no spoilers here!) that actually works. It is conventional enough that you’ll predict some large-stroke stuff, it’s arbitrary enough in its rules that you’ll feel it’s all a bit weightless, and it’s confusing enough that you’ll leave not sure if it followed its own rules (I think it does). But it’s well-imagined and extremely well-told. It’s The Matrix with a brain.

M. Night Shyamalan must be kicking himself that he didn’t come up with the idea of Inception so that he could direct it and really f*ck it up.

Screenrant’s page on Inception is nothing but spoilers, but it usefully goes through the film’s rules and narrative. Read it after you see the movie…

[Later that day] Here’s a Donald Clark’s thoughtful appreciation of the movie, also full of spoilers (via Seb Schmoller).

[Later that day] I put in “screenplay” twice. D’oh. I meant to include cinematography. So, I fixed it.

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The following isn’t actually interesting. It’s just for the “record.”

TechNewsDaily has an article that maintains that teachers are worried about students using laptops in classes. The quotation of mine that the reporter uses to end the article I’m pretty sure I didn’t say. It’s ungrammatical (“mediums,” ” they just have to exercise precaution of the downsides,” and there’s a comma splice) and, more important, I don’t believe what it has me saying (“students don’t want to be told how to learn”). Of course, it is possible that I mis-expressed my meaning and that I spoke in solecisms. If that’s the case, let me here be clear: I don’t believe students don’t want to be told how to learn. And if they don’t want to be told, they still need to be told. After all, teaching students how to learn is the most important lesson to be taught.

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This week’s Berkman Buzz, as compiled by Seth Young:

• Radio Berkman 159: “Spare a Cycle?”
  link

• Doc Searls gets literal with consumption link

• Ethan Zuckerman reports in from Nigeria link

• danah boyd challenges us to think about race and class online link

• Herdict has the word on Pirate Bay (non)blocking in the Netherlands link

• OpenNet Initiative on Chinese Internet deanonymization link

• CMLP on Net anonymity and the Ninth Circuit link

• ProjectVRM on progress “toward free and open markets” link

• Weekly Global Voices: “Kazakhstan: Bloggers see China’s ‘weaponless invasion’” link

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The National Enquirer, which thinks it’s about time it was given a Pulitzer, this week (July 26) blares from its front page “Whitney’s $6,300 a Week Drug Habit.” The story inside tells us that Whitney’s addicted not only to drugs but to eating. And they’ve got the photo to prove it:

As my brother Andy pointed out when he saw me reading it, the least of Whitney Houston’s problems is that she’s over-eating. She really ought to see someone about that extra hand of hers.

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I’ve completed a first run-through of a chapter on the fate of long-form argument on the Internet. I say “run-through” and not even “draft” because I started off not knowing what I thought, where it was going, or how to get there. So, I’m quite confident that when I re-read it, I will discover that even if the chapter moves along ok sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph it will make no sense.

I’ve been writing boxed intros to each chapter, which I’m likely to take out afterwards. They’re more for me than for the reader, because readers shouldn’t need to be given a boxed intro to know why they’re reading what they’re reading; relying on them is lazy writing. Nevertheless, here’s what I have so far for this chapter.

The Nets continues where arguments end.
We’ve liked to think that we think through issues by digging deeper and deeper into our assumptions, until we come to some bedrock. Then we write up what we’ve learned, going in the other direction: establishing a foundation, and then building upon it, board by board, nail by nail. We are thus archeologists when thinking and carpenters when arguing.

The pinnacle of knowledge has been a structured presentation of a long-form argument — a book — that leads us step by step to a conclusion of import. And now we worry that the Net is destroying our attention span so that we can’t follow arguments long enough to reach responsible conclusions.

What is the Net doing to the long form of argument and to the knowledge that it derives?

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