David Wiesner

It’s Friday, and I don’t know about you, but I am looking forward to a relaxing weekend (in amidst all my chores, that is). I have always been a firm believer in picture books as a great way to relax, especially if time and energy are in short supply, and I thought I would share my favorite author/illustrator.

David Wiesner is first and foremost an amazing illustrator. But the thing that stands out most about his books is probably his bizarre sense of humor. In his books, clouds become schools of fish, fish take pictures of each other underwater, and the three pigs have postmodern adventures beyond the pages of their story.

I am not familiar with all of Wiesner’s work (I’ve been rationing it so there will always be something new to surprise me), but I can speak to some of his books.

Flotsam is his most recent publication, and it won the Caldecott Medal this year. One look inside and you will see why. A boy finds an old camera washed up on the beach. He gets the film developed, and the pictures he sees amaze him - fish swimming past the camera, octupi in armchairs, etc. And finally, a progression of pictures of children holding up pictures of other children, which makes it clear that this camera has been travelling the seas for years. Wiesner’s imagination is captivating, and the pictures are breathtaking.

The Civilizing Effects of Conversation

From Kamran Nazeer’s Send in the Idiots:  

What might be politically valuable about conversation is the insincerity it encourages… Conversation flourishes when we entertain each other. Conversation flows when we, each of us, flit between different points of view. Conversation sometimes requires us to ask questions, the answer to which we are not interested in ourselves, but which we feel the other person might enjoy or appreciate the opportunity to provide. Conversation, in short, promotes civility. And a society that is marked by deep disagreement and characterized by a high level of heterogeneity should certainly place a high value on civility. It may not be possible for use to agree. But it may be possible for us to disagree entertainingly and be able to disagree in ways such that we can see and even expound each other’s point of view.

-Nazeer, 33

One of the things that struck me from that passage was the idea that the more heterogeneous the society, the more value it should place on civility. While that certainly makes sense, I’m not sure I’ve seen that happening. I think the societies I’ve experienced as being the most civil are the ones where people have less personal space and are therefore much more aware of the effects of their actions on others. Then again, maybe I’m just projecting, because I’ve always prized civility, and I’ve always tried to be aware of how I might be affecting those around me, although, like most people, I’m sure I don’t always succeed.

I’ve actually gotten into arguments with people about whether politeness is a form of dishonesty or not, and how much it should be practiced. Nazeer notes that as a child, he thought most parts of conversation were forms of insincerity, but over time, he grew to understand their value. Do you agree with his statement above, about the importance of conversation in promoting civility? Do you think it could work?

“Dogs make us human.”

[Warning: The following may piss off all the cat people who read this blog. I am about to make the claim that all humans are, at heart, dog people. Please keep all pet-speciesist vitriol to a minimum in the comments.]

Near the end of Animals in Translation, Temple Grandin uses an Aborigine saying: “Dogs make us human.” She presents a very interesting bunch of evidence of just how right this saying seems to be. 

But a study by Robert K. Wayne and his colleagues at UCLA of DNA variability in dogs found that dogs had to have diverged from wolves as a separate population 135,000 years ago. The reason the fossil record doesn’t show any dogs with humans before 14,000 years ago is probably that before then people were partnered with wolves, or with wolves that were evolving into dogs. Sure enough, fossil records do show lots of wolf bones close to human bones before 100,000 years ago.

If Dr. Wayne is right, wolves and people were together at the point when homo sapiens had just barely evolved from homo erectus. When wolves and humans first joined together people only had a few rough tools to their name, and they lived in very small nomadic bands that probably weren’t any more socially complicated than a band of chimpanzees…

This means that when wolves and people first started keeping company they were on a lot more equal footing than dogs and people are today. Basically, two different species with complementary skills teamed up together, something that had never happened before and has really never happened since.

Suggested Reading

In the absence of someone else posting today, I submit the following, for your reading pleasure. Inside Job is a Hugo-award-winning story by Connie Willis, who writes rather decent science fiction, to put it mildly. Asimov’s has it available for free right now, (and possibly forever?,) and I’ve been reading over the course of the day. I don’t remember where I ran across the link to it this morning, but it has done an excellent job of distracting me from work and from having real conversations ever since.

Anyway, go, read, enjoy, and begin to idolize H.L. Mencken. He plays a large role in the story, and you will get to enjoy many of his fine, skeptical, cynical quotations, such as these:

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.

Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

That’s it. Really. Go read. I have nothing else to say.

Visual vs. Verbal Ways of Thinking

As I said a few weeks ago, I’ve been reading Temple Grandin’s Animals in Translation at work. And before some people start saying, “What, still?,” I would like to point out that 1) I am actually expected to do other things at work ocassionally, and 2) there’s so much information in this book I kept having to stop and think all the time, which slows down the reading process a bit. Darn that interesting nonfiction. So anyway, I finished the book today and now have several posts worth of stuff to talk about.

For today, I’ve picked out some of the information she had to present about the way human verbal vs. visual cognition works. Grandin is known for her assertion that she thinks in pictures, hence the name of her autobiography, Thinking In Pictures, so she’s done a lot of thinking about this topic, clearly. She describes the following study to demonstrate how the two types of thinking seem almost opposed.

Research shows that language suppresses visual memory. This is called verbal overshadowing and is a well-established phenomenon… For example, in one study people watched a short videotape of a bank robbery, then spent twenty minutes doing something unrelated. Then one group spent five minutes writing down everything they could remember about the bank robber’s face, while the other group did an unrelated task.

Two thirds of the people who wrote nothing down and did unrelated tasks could identify a photograph of the robber, while only one third of the people who wrote verbal descriptions could pick him out…

I think for normal people language is probably a kind of filter. One of the biggest challenges for an animal or an autistic person is dealing with the barrage of details from the environment. Normal people with language don’t have to see all those details consciously…

-Grandin, 261

World Without Oil

World Without Oil (WWO) is Jane McGonigal’s latest project. Like the name implies, WWO describes a world where peak oil has been reached and the world is quickly finding out that less oil means a lot more than less transportation. McGonigal was involved with I Love Bees, the Alternate Reality Game (ARG) produced to advertise Halo 2. It’s no surprise then that WWO has many classic ARG elements.

Many characters post to LiveJournal or the WWO site itself, which makes it possible to leave comments and speak to them directly. Some even hang out on IRC for some real-time interaction.

Most of the content is created by players, though. Players sign up to represent their area, helping the in-game reponse there. They can improve their area’s response (and their own ranking) by posting in-game blogs, podcasts, or video. Every day, dozens of posts are aggregated on the front page of the WWO site. In addition, the WWO team picks their favorite posts of the day and puts them in the summary for that “week.”

In a new twist for ARGs, each real-time day counts as a week, including spikes in gas prices, riots, terrorism overseas, and mention of some of the things that players have blogged about. Players are also taking on a definite role instead of playing themselves as in other ARGs.

Treating Guest Workers Like Guests

For the past several weeks here in NC, the local NPR station has been covering the story of a group of Thai farm workers who are suing the recruitment company that brought them to the US. A few days ago, the story made the national NPR news. You can hear the whole story here, (HumanTrafficking.org has good coverage of it as well, with more details,) but the basic story is that these men paid very high recruitment fees to the placement agency. They had checked the agency out to make sure it was legitimate, and truly thought about whether the high fee was worth it. Many of them had to mortgage all their land, and their family’s land as well, to pay. And of course, they were asked to pay an additional, “small” fee before leaving for the US. But they did it, because the promise of guaranteed pay of at least $8 hour, full-time, for 3 years, was worth it. They calculated they could pay off the debt in a year, then save lots of money in the next two years to send home.

However, the reality was that the visas they were brought in on were for seasonal work, limited to one year, and the hours were nothing like full-time once the initial season they had been brought in for was over. The situation was now a nightmare version of what they had expected, as the HumanTrafficking article describes:

When they arrived in the United States in August 2005, the labor contractor confiscated the Thai men’s passports and return plane tickets, the lawsuit says. They got only two or three days of work a week on farms. And after about a week living in a motel in Benson, they were moved to a small storage building in Dunn, behind the home of Seo Homsombath, a native of Laos who is president of Million Express, the lawsuit says.

There, the 30 men slept on blankets spread on the floor and shared a single bathroom, Asanok said. Homsombath took them to work, and otherwise didn’t allow them to leave the property.

How To Be A Star In Fiction

Maybe that title is a little ambiguous. I don’t know how to be a star in writing fiction (I can only wish) but over the last week I’ve been staving off serious work by spending my free time reading far too many historical novels. This has been an on-and-off pastime since I was about twelve, and the source of a truly embarrassing amount of knowledge about the Angevins, Plantagenets, Tudors and other royal, fratricidal families. The Tudors, of course, get a disproportionate amount of attention, which seems a little unfair since the Plantagenets lasted three times as long and had just as many insane, bloodsoaked intrigues as any Tudor could muster. But that’s by the way; what I often wonder, on reading the fortieth variation on “Anne Boleyn First Encounters Henry VIII” is what the actual people beneath the layers of fiction would think if they could read later generations’ ideas of what they were like. Would they like it? Hate it? Laugh like madmen? I think it would be fascinating to see what people made of your life five hundred years from now, and so, in the spirit of not doing any constructive work, here’s a few ways to make sure you get your own historical novel.

Geek Buffet Theatre Presents: Chickens, Dinosaur Supermodels

Scene: A phone conversation.

Dana: (idly wondering) Do you think evolution is going to be all downhill now?

Mark: What?

Dana: I mean, look at chickens. They used to be dinosaurs, and now look. That seems like a rather downward slope.

Mark: Yeah, but take a triceratops, for example. It weighed, what, several tons? And it still had a brain about the size of a chicken’s. That’s not really better, is it?

Dana: So it’s just a more streamlined version now, huh?

Mark: Yeah, it just lost all the extra weight.

Dana: So… chickens are like the supermodels of the dinosaur world?

Mark: Exactly. That’s why they have those spindly little legs.

The End.

Harry Potter and the Big, Fat Secret

A few weeks ago, I was put in charge of banker’s box labeled “Harry Potter 7: CONFIDENTIAL.”

I knew right away that it couldn’t be the book– it’s too soon for that and when it does come, it will be hidden away in our cataloging and processing area until the big day.

So, what was in the box? Is it really a great big secret? Well, yes, and no.