books

books / history / photo / video — Comments Off on There’s nonsense, a great book and a terrific video here
3
Aug 22

There’s nonsense, a great book and a terrific video here

It was a lovely day. Fine blue skies, no ceiling to be found. It is a standout day, standing out. Gray yesterday. Grayer tomorrow. Sometimes it is difficult to enjoy the one for thinking of the other.

But that’s not a problem today. It’s too bright and blue for that. And warm. Hot, even. The heat index flirted with 105 today. A good day to enjoy the sun from the shade, or indoors.

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Sorry, I was cleaning some schmutz from my keyboard. The near symmetry almost suggests a meaning. Almost as much as any other meaning here. Perhaps more! Maybe I should really highlight it.

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You’re right. That’s too much.

Anyway, nothing to it. Welcomed a new person to the office. Watched construction work beginning outside of the building. Ate a peanut butter sandwich for lunch. With pretzel bites!

Probably explains the schmutz.

I also brought two more books to the office. One of them is a volume on First Amendment research, rounding out my collection. The other is the famous Communication of Innovations book, Everett Rogers’ second edition from 1971. He made an entire career on this, and its supporting work, and it’s brilliant. But I might be biased. I had one of his students as a professor in graduate school, and his work comes up all the time because of how it resonates in these fast-moving times.

“An important factor affecting the adoption rate of any innovation is its compatibility with the cultural beliefs of the social system.”

This is a line from the fifth page, explaining why a two-year public health campaign failed in one particular Peruvian village. The effort focused on installing pit latrines, burning garbage, controlling insects and boiling drinking water. In most villages, the public health workers got 15 to 20 percent of the housewives to boil water. Rogers notes that, in Los Molinos, a village of about 200 families, only five percent made the innovation.

In Los Molinos, tradition links hot food with illness. Boiling water was appropriate only for the sick, and a person who is not ill wouldn’t drink the water because of the cultural norms. And Rogers further breaks it down, as a sociologist should.

Two pages later, he dives into social change as “the process by which alteration occurs in the structure and function of a social system.” And, in four more pages, as a footnote, he describes development as “a type of social change in which new ideas are introduced into a social system in order to produce higher per capita incomes and levels of living through more modern production methods and improved social organization. Development is modernization at the social system level.”

Soon after, he gets into innovation, “an idea, practice, or object perceived as new by an individual. It matters little, so far as human behavior is concerned, whether or not an idea is ‘objectively’ new as measured by the lapse of time since its first use or discovery. It is the perceived or subjective newness of the idea for the individual that determines his reaction to it. If the idea seems new to the individual, it is an innovation … The ‘newness’ aspect of an innovation may be expressed in knowledge, in attitude, or regarding a decision to use it.”

In the fifth chapter, “Adopter Categories,” we get the famous graphic.

Nobody ever made a better bell curve.

Classroom flashbacks are a lovely thing.

And if that’s not your speed, there’s this great package from Vice. Dexter Thomas went on a ride with Erick CedeΓ±o as he follows in the pedal strokes of the Buffalo Soldiers, the 25th Infantry Regiment Bicycle Corps who took a 1,900-mile journey from Montana to Missouri in 1897.

It took them 41 days, going over mountains and through forests and deserts and rivers. They pedaled and pushed their bikes across dirt trails, and railroad tracks, covering about 50 miles a day through all sorts of weather. The iron riders, as they came to be known, crossed five states and the Continental Divide, making national headlines. This was no small effort, and it came with a lot of baggage — in both senses. Thomas and CedeΓ±o talk about all of that. It’s a really nice package over an incredible effort, in a unique moment in American history.

Auburn / books / IU / memories / photo / Thursday — Comments Off on 2Γ—π‘šΓ—π‘£2 + π‘šΓ—π‘”Γ—β„Ž = What, exactly?
28
Jul 22

2Γ—π‘šΓ—π‘£2 + π‘šΓ—π‘”Γ—β„Ž = What, exactly?

I had four meetings today. The first was scheduled for me in advance. The second was scheduled for me while I was in the first meeting. Everyone knew about it, it seems, except for me. (Everyone knows more about me than me.) The third and fourth were spontaneous meetings of opportunity.

I was in no condition for any of these meetings, I think. So if my charm or humor or good answers or input were off by six percent, I apologize. I apologize and I blame the big tour I gave yesterday, an event from which I am still recovering.

Not sure how I became the tour guy, but I’m the tour guy.

I saw this bunny this morning. He is perfectly evolved to blend in with the cement. That’s an amazing summer coat, if you ask me.

The bunnies have the most curious sense of personal space. You’re fine in their eyes until you get about 18 inches away, and only then do they do the rabbit thing. Makes you wonder about how that comes to be learned. I bet each one has an experience, learning when to hop away. It’s a valuable lesson. One learned, I hope, in a not-too-painful way.2Γ—π‘šΓ—π‘£2

I looked through some old books today. There’s often a table of books someone is willing to donate. You can pick your way through them and, if for nothing else, it is a nice momentary diversion to read the spines. I picked up one for my lovely bride, and grabbed one or two for me, as well. Not this one. There are only so many writing handbooks I can process.

But this one fits in your pocket!

Does it? Which pocket?

Or maybe your hand!

Well, sure. Most books these days do come with the ability to be manually manipulated.

And we sprung for the spiral binding!

That’s not the selling point you think it is.

Sure it is! You can distinguish it in your bookcase!

I can’t read the non-existent spine, to see if it is the book I need to pull.

But it has this wire spiral! Easy to find!

What if someone already has that in a book.

Who would have another book like that?

I have nine of them in my office bookcase alone.

Oh? Wow. Well, this one is a writing style guide!

Seven of the nine I have in my bookcase have to do with writing or style.

And you still write like this?

Look, fictional book seller —

Fictional book giver-awayer.

Fine, whatever. You’re not really making a strong case here.

I was able to make a 2010 joke this evening, which meant I needed a 2010 photo.

Turns out the specific photo was from 2011, but it fit the point perfectly. My confusion of the date of the particular photo gave me an excuse to spend a few minutes clicking through old photos of happy times, so that was a nice part of the evening.

Also tonight, we discovered the joys of grilled wings, with nothing more than a simple salt and pepper seasoning. We bought a lot of wings, recently, and we’ll probably be returning to this style. I mention it because they were good, and you should know, and we can all want some more wings together.

books / Tuesday — Comments Off on Reading stuff
26
Jul 22

Reading stuff

Not much today, but I did want to share one little passage from this book. Juan Gonzalez and Joseph Torres wrote an important book. The blurb on the cover, “We’ve needed this book for a long time.” from the journalist and LBJ press secretary and journalist Bill Moyers seems apt. And if we needed the book when it was published in 2011 there’s no less of a need for it today.

The text has a few small problems — every book does if you pick at it long enough, and this is late night, few-pages-at-a-time reading for me — but there are so many lessons to learn.

So I was reading a bit about Jose MartΓ­, a pioneer of social justice journalism — think Ida B. Wells. You have to agree with Gonzalez and Torres, his “dispatches should long ago have accorded him a special place among America’s nineteenth-century newsmen.”

The problem, as Gonzalez and Torres see it, is that MartΓ­’s work was in Spanish so he often gets overlooked by English readers and historians. But, almost everything he wrote seems evocative. He was also a revolutionary in his native Cuba, but I think of him as a writer. And, based on a conversation with a colleague, I learned there are at least six books of his works that are translated into English.

So I guess I’ll have to buy some of those.

Why not? Nine other books I purchased just arrived this weekend — free shipping! — after all.

It might be a problem.

(But it isn’t a problem. I can not read whenever I want.)

books / Monday / photo / Twitter — Comments Off on Two cats and a book
27
Jun 22

Two cats and a book

It has been three weeks since we featured the most popular part of the blog — hey, we’ve been busy. But now we can catch up with the kitties. They’re both doing well, thank you.

Phoebe has been having a lot of cabinet meetings of late.

I’m sure there are many important policy decisions are made in those meetings. Where to map, what to scratch, how to stretch.

Probably the cabinets are a part of her routine to try to create distance between her and Poseidon, seen here showing of his regular charming nuisance.

No breakfast is safe from this guy. Mine certainly wasn’t yesterday.

Can’t say he didn’t warn us. Here he is, warning us.

“YOUR BREAKFAST IS NOT SAFE!” — Poseidon, probably.

I don’t know when I wrote the nerdiest thing I’ve ever written, but it occurred to me early this morning that this is a thing we should chart. I wrote this.

The book is News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media.

It is a good book. It is, unequivocally, an important book. It was when it was released in 2011, and remains so today. But these little problems are compounding. Maybe it is a function of the editing process when they created the Kindle version.

Look, I’m not an expert in this area. Far from it. The first error, I knew a tiny bit about the man involved. The second was revealed as a chronological inconsistency one page, and a few paragraphs, apart. The third is an obvious error. The fourth I found because now I’m googling every name and publication in this book. I’m enjoying the book and learning a great deal. It’s just slowing me down, from the continued learning, is all.

Of course, I’m also picking up tidbits here and there about the people and their work that weren’t included in the book. When the world wide web is your footnote database …

I don’t know if this is the nerdiest thing I’ve ever written (Not by a longshot. — ed.) but it is somewhere on that list.

Come to think of it, let’s never chart the nerdiest things we’ve written. Never, ever.

books / Indiana / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off on Pick up some books
22
Jun 22

Pick up some books

And how was your summer solstice? The day was 14 hours, 55 minutes and 28 seconds here. And there’s always that guy who just can’t wait to point out that the days are doing nothing but getting shorter until December.

Around here? We hate that guy.

But we love the long days. If you stepped outside last night at 10:19 and looked west, moments before nautical twilight, it looked like this.

No camera tricks, no Photoshop treatments. That’s just the view after 10 p.m. in June.

If I ever say anything here is better than that, I am, in fact, making a secret, coded cry for help.

Since we talked about books last, I have recently finished you might be interested in. First was The Last of the Doughboys by Wall Street Journal reporter Richard Rubin.

In the earliest days of the 21st century Rubin started interviewing the surviving military veterans from World War I, all of them centenarians. He wraps his interviews around rich context about the Tin Pan Alley music of the era, and his own tours of France and a general historical overview.

Those stories are as uniques as the men and women’s experiences. Some of them colorful and sharp as they were in 1918. Some of the details had become foggy over the course of their long lives, as you might expect.

Some parts of the book are about some of the other parts of their lives. None of the people Rubin interviewed were a part of this experience, but that was up to chance and good fortune as much as anything.

I knew this particular story, but it is always surprising to think about it in the full context.

The crux of the book are those interviews, though, and memorializing those last veterans’ experiences. Rubin, in fact, had the chance to meet the last American survivor of the Great War. All of that is in the book. It’s a worthwhile read.

Now this one, Longitude by Dava Sobel. This book was a surprise hit, even for the author. She saw it go through 29 hardcover printings, translated into more than 20 languages and become a national and international bestseller. The 10th anniversary edition includes a pretty special foreword by Neil Armstrong.

Granted, the idea of a book about longitude seems like an important one. But it also seems like a daunting tome. How do you write an interesting book about invisible lines on a map? Sobel is about to show you. First, just enough of the technical to explain what she’s talking about, and why this is all so important.

And so now you know why this had been a problem for generations, and why the search for a solution was so important. As the book gets into that it quickly becomes obvious, even to land-lubbers, how most of the success of those pre-longitudinal sailors was about luck with skill. How anyone got to where they wanted to go before their supplies ran out is a mystery.

Then, we meet the people.

For whatever reason, when I opened the book I expected this to be a dense read, but, to Sobel’s great credit, it’s just about the most approachable text you can imagine. Give this a read, you’ll be pleased and surprised.

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