Not the movie.

My contacts with other people yesterday were frequent, surprising, and rewarding. That’s true most days, actually, but even so yesterday was unusual. Here’s a partial list off the top of my head:

1. I got to school and found that the writer I had blogged about the day before, a magazine columnist named Chris Pirillo whom I’ve never met and never blogged about before, had left a comment on the blog. About 15 hours after I blogged about the writer, the writer had read my blog and commented on it. (Deep breath.) Okay. Wow. I then went to his blog and learned about Podcasting and about blogging from a Palm Pilot. A “handwritten” blog is an interesting thing. I’ve linked to his site in my blogroll (see right).

2. An daily email digest of stories at MIT’s Technology Review led me to a blog on TR’s website that led me to an online Physics World piece on great equations, the piece that was the subject of yesterday’s blog. The end of the essay had a mailto link to the writer. I emailed him and thanked him for his wonderful essay. Within moments I got an email back saying “you’re welcome, and how did you happen upon my piece?” Another massive attack of reflection ensued.

3. In my film studies class, I went over the midterm exam that I handed back. We watched a clip from Notorious together, going over the camera motion I expected them to be able to see and note. Following that review, we began our discussion of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind by “mapping the diegeses,” that is, listing the story spaces in the film and thinking about how they were related. The discussion was very intense and very fruitful; the students were ready to go and they inspired me. In the evening, I read posts on our electronic discussion forum that reflected on the movie as well as on the full breadth of my students’ movie-going experience.

4. I had lunch with a good friend and talked about the Presidential debates we had both seen on television. We also discussed the spin we had been seeing on TV, in newspapers, and on the Internet.

5. We in the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies here at the University of Mary Washington are beginning an experiment with an intranet content manager as a way of communicating more fully and frequently and as a way of collecting and managing our knowledge more effectively. Martha has set up the site and included a very nifty chat room. I’ve not done much IM’ing or chatting online, but my eyes are beginning to be opened to their value and usefulness. Along the way, the chat experiment led to an interesting conversation with a colleague about one of her friends for whom English is a second language, and for whom online-speak has complicated her acquisition of standard English. I’d never thought about this issue, I blush to admit, but it’s interesting to consider. In the past, immigrants learned the language from newspapers, then from radio, then from television–and now from online-speak? The topic reminded me of the discussions I’d had with my son about “leet,” a super-esoteric kind of geekspeak. Super-esoteric to me, anyway. I shared a little bit about “leet” with my colleague and dropped off a movie for the media collection.

6. I went to a farewell party for another colleague. (Thankfully, she’s not leaving the University.) It was bittersweet, as all such occasions are. Much of the conversation had to do with workplace stuff, but a lot of it also had to do with books, movies, myth, television, and the general power of compelling symbolic worlds made of language, images, and sound. We shared our virtual worlds and our private experiences with mediated language as we stood face-to-face, ate cake, and prepared for (and marked) another organizational transition.

7. I began a cell-phone conversation with my wife as I left work and continued it when I got home. Just before bedtime we watched a little of an old favorite of ours, In The Line Of Fire. This morning, I’ve already gotten my first email from her.

If Rod Serling were here (who knows? maybe he is) he would do a much better job of summarizing the lesson. In his absence, I’ll just say that contact is awfully sweet, sometimes, no matter what the medium.

I just ran across an article that I need to share with you. It’s the kind of article that makes me take in a deep, deep breath and move to a higher level of understanding. I love that feeling, even though the pressure changes sometimes make my ears pop, cognitively speaking.

Nothing some cognitive chewing gum wouldn’t help.

The article is called “The Greatest Equations Ever” and it’s truly inspiring. Here’s one excerpt that I hope will lead you to read the entire piece–even if, like me, you’re neither a physicist nor a mathematician:

The unifying power of a great equation is not as simple a criterion as it sounds. A great equation does more than set out a fundamental property of the universe, delivering information like a signpost, but works hard to wrest something from nature. As Michael Berry from Bristol University once said of the Dirac equation for the electron: “Any great physical theory gives back more than is put into it, in the sense that as well as solving the problem that inspired its construction, it explains more and predicts new things” (Physics World February 1998 p38).

Great equations change the way we perceive the world. They reorchestrate the world — transforming and reintegrating our perception by redefining what belongs together with what. Light and waves. Energy and mass. Probability and position. And they do so in a way that often seems unexpected and even strange.

The deep connection for literary people like me is the power of the symbol.

My thanks to David Appel of Technology Review for blogging about this article. (Yes, of course, it was an email with links to a blog with links to a website: that’s one of the railroads I like to travel.) My thanks to Robert P. Crease for writing the article. (Short bio from the Physics World website: “Robert P. Crease is in the Department of Philosophy, State University of New York at Stony Brook, and historian at the Brookhaven National Laboratory.”) And since there’s an email link at the end of the essay, I’ll soon be writing Dr. Crease a short note of personal thanks.

Some strength for the day.

I’m always happy to see a new issue of CPU on the kitchen table. Yesterday was no exception. Chris Pirillo’s column on “The Future of Blogging” is written from the perspective of someone who’s been in the Web game since the mid-90s. (You can read the first little bit of the article here. You have to be a subscriber to go farther, alas.) He accurately notes that blogs are a way to “scribble down a few notes and hit Send,” an operation that was too difficult before the widespread availability of blogging tools like the one I’m using now (Word Press). The key is that you have something to share, and a desire or need to share it.

Chris started with “Chris Pirillo’s Multimedia Madness” and the promise of “one cool MIDI file” a day. Now Chris is at Lockergnome.com, and he has a monthly column in CPU magazine. It’s interesting that I first ran into him in the magazine, which takes me to my blog to note the site on the web that you can go to by clicking a link in my blog. See, I want it all: magazines, newspapers, books, the WWW, CDs, DVDs, the works. (Okay, I don’t want VHS. Ugly medium.) Each connects to the others in interesting ways. Each presents a slightly different experience to the reader/viewer. Each is wonderful on its own. Together, their mutual reinforcement takes me farther and faster than I’d otherwise be able to go.

“Life piled on life were all too little,” as Tennyson’s Ulysses says.

That’s grab bag, not gas bag.

I attended a cybersecurity conference yesterday in Charlottesville and I have a URL for you: the Center for Internet Security. This site has free downloads that will test your computer’s security. You’ll have to register but the process looks fairly benign.

Probably the spookiest thing I learned yesterday was that organized crime groups are getting money from large corporations by hacking into their networks and then threatening to go public with the news that their security has been compromised and their customers are at risk. Companies that refuse to pay up get their customers’ SSNs and credit-card numbers posted to the web. Those of us with shallower pockets still need to keep our computers secure: the biggest game in town is taking over unprotected computers and using them for denial-of-service attacks and worm-spreading.

In other spooky news, bloggers once again are causing a ruckus. This time it’s about the mysterious bulge spotted on George Bush’s back during the first debate with John Kerry. The White House denies the rumors.

And finally, I got to see Brian Wilson perform in D.C. Sunday night. He and his band did a bunch of great Beach Boys material, but the real highlight was a complete performance of SMiLE. It was overwhelming, even better than I’d hoped. If you’d like more details, see my review on the Steve Hoffman forum.

I’ve added Dolen Perkins-Valdez’ blog URL to the list at the right. Dolen is a new colleague in the University of Mary Washington’s department of English, Linguistics, and Speech. Her scholarly specialty is African-American literature. With her kind consent, I am sharing her blog with you. If you need a better reason for visiting than “Gardner likes it”–and who wouldn’t?–I can tell you that her blog on the late Richard Avedon is very cool and presents some Avedon photos I’ve never seen. Two in particular amazed me: famed singer Marian Anderson (“force of nature” comes to mind here) and Marilyn Monroe (dressed up as silent film star Theda Bara–Madonna, eat your heart out).

There’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear.

Bloggers on both the right and left wings of the political spectrum are not only getting press coverage these days, they’re making news. They were mentioned prominently today in a Washington Post article about Dan Rather and CBS News. Bloggers raised the question of whether the documents about Bush were authentic, and began the analysis that eventually showed they were probably not. Bloggers now defend Rather and CBS from charges of misconduct. It’s interesting to see this medium become so vital as a forum for citizens. (More on blogging’s place in the info “ecosystem” in this Technology Review blog–registration may be required.) Blogging is just template-driven, easy-to-use web publishing. Yes, just that. Funny how an old idea newly configured can take on a new life all its own. Something like the blues, country, gospel, pop, and folk in the hands of the Beatles, say.

I was also struck by a moment just before the presidential debates last Thursday night. I was watching the full-time ABC News feed on WJLA’s (ABC/Washington D.C.) standard-definition channel just adjacent to their high-definition channel. On the channel was a program featuring a young man with a laptop, a wireless connection to the Internet, streaming webcast software, a microphone, and a light or two. He was interviewing a set of college students in a commons area at the University of Miami. The picture was low-def but certainly watchable. The audio was clear. There were no serious glitches at all. Portable broadcasting, on the fly, on the cheap, without wires. I imagine setup and tear-down took about thirty minutes, max. The biggest issue was probably getting the audio feed back from the anchor to the interviewer.

Everybody look what’s going down.

The University of Mary Washington just joined the National Learning Infrastructure Initiative, a strategic arm of Educause devoted to transforming teaching and learning through the intelligent use of information technologies. It’s been just about a year since I first learned of the NLII. At that time, during a focus group at the 2003 Educause convention in Anaheim, I met one of the 2003-2004 NLII fellows, a man named Cyprien Lomas. I got to know Cyprien a little more during the NLII meeting the following January, and I saw him again at the NLII focus session on designing formal learning spaces just a couple of weeks ago. Cyprien’s a creative and interesting person and I hope to get to know him more as the years go by.

To my delight, I’ve just discovered that the NLII has a blog section and that Cyprien is one of the bloggers. He’s on the lookout for new and interesting ways of using IT in teaching and learning. Call him an intelligent agent–a most intelligent agent. I’m looking forward to benefiting from his expertise and curiosity.

Why blog?

Sharing stuff is fun.

For example, Ernie Ackermann’s blog (which I try to read regularly, and which I have linked this blog to-see the links column on the right) shares cool stuff. Yesterday’s blog hipped me to a site here at UMW that a colleague has put together to help his students prepare their research papers, and to a particular page explaining plagiarism. Who knew? (I didn’t, and I’m not sure when I’d have found out.) Ernie also shared an entire site devoted to issues of plagiarism, as well as the site (Neat New Stuff) that led him to the plagiarism site.

That sharing could have happened any number of other ways, but the connectivity of the Internet makes the particular act of sharing have greater immediate ramifications, and potentially greater depth. And it’s one more occasion to make that sharing happen.

Thanks, Ernie.

Why blog?

It’s an easy way to write down one’s thoughts in a more focused way than casual conversation permits. Blogs also have more “voice” than more formal writing, though that doesn’t mean they should degenerate into rants (though they can and do). If you rant, you lose your voice.

Why write down our thoughts?

Because we want to know what’s on each other’s minds. We can share this in conversation, but see above. We can share it in any number of ways. Blogs are one. Right now, they’re a particularly interesting one.

Why do we want to know what’s on each other’s minds?

Because we should know and enjoy as much of the full personhood of the people we work with as possible. This makes our collaboration richer, more interesting, and more rewarding.

Whom do we work with?

Everyone.

I just dashed away for a lunch-hour purchase. I bought two copies. Even the packaging is a thing of beauty and wonder. Can this be happening?

I’m not sure the world deserves something this good. I’m pretty sure I don’t. But here it is, and I’m listening to it as I type: “Cabinessence,” with the rougher-voiced 2004 Brian, and it’s just astonishing. He’s got every bit of what he had, and more–because now the whole thing is more precious to him and to us than it could have been in 1967. It doesn’t matter that his vocals are rougher. They’re still supple and expressive, and on some tracks (some–not all) they actually suit the music better than they did in 1967. Best of all, they’re fully committed performances. Brian has once again let this music matter to him. That’s an act of bravery that takes my breath away.

Thank God this has happened at last.