Category Archives: Miscellaneous

The lastest from Apple…The iRack

Ouch…That’s gotta hurt

Here’s a young Steve Nash wanna-be learning that basketball can be a lot like hockey.

There’s something about that kid that looks familiar to me…hmmm.

Philosophical flowcharts and ideological genealogies

According to my son, I’m now a “Stumble Upon” addict.

Here’s a cool item I recently stumbled upon: Flowchart of Philosophy after Kant

And you can find a geneology of the U.S. Left here.

New issue of Cultural Logic

Cultural Logic, an electronic journal of Marxist theory and practice, has just launched its latest issue.

This issue includes:

An edited version of Theodore W. Allen’s “Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race” with an introduction by Jeffrey B. Perry.

A cluster of articles on utopia by Maryam El-Shall (“Salafi Utopia: The Making of the Islamic State”), Christopher Kendrick (“Tendencies of Utopia: Reflections on Recent Work in the Modern Utopian Tradition”), and Michael David Szekely (“Rethinking Benjamin: The Fuction of the Utopian Ideal”).

Kegs banned; no one happy (Of course, not)

iPods might be more popular than beer on campuses these days, but when Fairfield University decided to ban all kegs and beer balls from campus they upset everybody…students and townies alike.

The new policy, spelled out in Fairfield University’s 2006-07 student handbook, states: “No student, regardless of age, is permitted to be in possession of kegs, beer balls, common containers over 64 ounces or equivalent quantities of liquor anywhere on campus.”

The Connecticut Post reports that residents of Fairfield Beach, an off-campus neighborhood where many students live, are now concerned about raucous student parties in the hood.

And Fairfield student Dan Stanczyk, summed up the student side of the problem saying, “We’re not in favor of it. A keg is easier than carrying many 30-packs and cheaper.”

Hard to argue with that!

Atlanta Braves finally respond

Well I finally got a response from the Atlanta Braves regarding my protest of the Faith Nights promotion. It’s pretty lame, as you can see:

From: Braves.Web@turner.com
Subject: RE: atl – Other – None – Faith Nights
Date: September 13, 2006 6:45:27 AM PDT (CA)
To: wayne.ross@mac.com

Dear Wayne:

Thank you for your recent letter regarding the Atlanta Braves Faith
Days. We appreciate feedback from our fans and while we understand your
opposition, we would like to explain our position.

These particular post game events are targeted towards the Christian
community. However, fans who aren’t interested in the post game event
will not see anything different during the game since the events take
place following the game, after fans have left the ballpark and
re-entered if they have a separate ticket.

Our intention is to not offend our fans who are not interested in
attending, while satisfying our fans who find this type of event and
added bonus to coming to Turner Field for a Braves game.

We also have been pursuing doing similar nights for other faiths and
groups and are confident you will see them in the future.

Again thank you for your comments.

Regards,
Atlanta Braves

—–Original Message—–
From: wayne.ross@mac.com [mailto:wayne.ross@mac.com]
Sent: Wednesday, August 02, 2006 2:33 AM
To: fanfeedback@braves.mlb.com
Subject: atl – Other – None – Faith Nights

E-mail From: Wayne Ross

I have been a long time Braves fan (since before the team moved to
Atlanta) and as an Atlanta resident in the 1980s I attended many games.

I wanted to let you know that I am deeply offended by the Braves “Faith
Night” promotion. This promotion is blatantly exclusive of religious
faiths outside of evangelical Christianity and it links the Atlanta
Braves with and organization that is anti-gay and anti-Semitic.

Ostensibly a collaboration with Third Coast Sports this promotion is
apparently (according to the Third Coast Sports website) actually a
partnership between the Atlanta Braves and James Dobson’s Focus on the
Family and evangelical Christian group that is anti-choice, anti-gay,
against sex education, and the leading proponent of the bogus notion of
“reparative therapy” for homosexuality.

I find the very notion of “Faith Nights” at the ball park disheartening
as baseball has (and should remain) a game that brings diverse people
together, however, this crass marketing campaign to bring bus loads of
church goers to the park actually works to build barriers between
people. Personally, as die-hard Braves fan all my life, your
collaboration with religious hate-mongers deeply saddens me.

E. Wayne Ross, Ph.D.

I grin therefore I am

Check out this humor blog by Mike the Evaluator: Grin

UK terror plot, more propaganda than plot?

Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, is skeptical about the plot to blow up multiple airplanes.

…We then have the extraordinary question of Bush and Blair discussing the possible arrests over the weekend. Why? I think the answer to that is plain. Both in desperate domestic political trouble, they longed for “Another 9/11”. The intelligence from Pakistan, however dodgy, gave them a new 9/11 they could sell to the media. The media has bought, wholesale, all the rubbish they have been shovelled.

We then have the appalling political propaganda of John Reid, Home Secretary, making a speech warning us all of the dreadful evil threatening us and complaining that “Some people don’t get” the need to abandon all our traditional liberties. He then went on, according to his own propaganda machine, to stay up all night and minutely direct the arrests. There could be no clearer evidence that our Police are now just a political tool. Like all the best nasty regimes, the knock on the door came in the middle of the night, at 2.30am. Those arrested included a mother with a six week old baby. …

We will now never know if any of those arrested would have gone on to make a bomb or buy a plane ticket. Most of them do not fit the “Loner” profile you would expect – a tiny percentage of suicide bombers have happy marriages and young children. As they were all under surveillance, and certainly would have been on airport watch lists, there could have been little danger in letting them proceed closer to maturity – that is certainly what we would have done with the IRA.

In all of this, the one thing of which I am certain is that the timing is deeply political. This is more propaganda than plot. Of the over one thousand British Muslims arrested under anti-terrorist legislation, only twelve per cent are ever charged with anything. That is simply harrassment of Muslims on an appalling scale. Of those charged, 80% are acquitted. Most of the very few – just over two per cent of arrests – who are convicted, are not convicted of anything to do terrorism, but of some minor offence the Police happened upon while trawling through the wreck of the lives they had shattered.

Be sceptical. Be very, very sceptical.

Atlanta Braves disinvite Focus on the Family from “Faith Day” events

As noted previously—here and here—the Atlanta Braves became the first major league team to sponsor a so-called “faith day” event. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution described the event as a “blend of big-tent evangelism and the national pastime.”

But as David Zirin pointed out in The Nation last month the events were to be cosponsored by right-wing group Focus on the Family, which, according to their press release, used the event to distribute promotional materials about a website they run called TroubledWith.com, which features virulently anti-gay content:

Male homosexuality is a developmental problem that is almost always the result of problems in family relations, particularly between father and son. [Link]

The following factors can also contribute to the homosexual orientation: pornography; spousal abuse in the home; molestation and pedophilia… [Link]

‘Mom…I’m Gay’: The story of one woman who heard these devastating words. [Link]

While the Braves have not cancelled the remaining “Faith Day” events at Turner Field they have given the boot to Focus on the Family. The Associated Press reports today that:

Focus on the Family, a group founded by James Dobson, was barred from participating in Sunday’s postgame activities after sponsoring the first such event at Turner Field last month.

While the team wouldn’t provide a reason for its decision, several gay rights groups on the Web bristled with speculation that Focus on the Family was given the boot for promoting its belief that homosexuality is a social problem comparable to alcoholism, gambling or depression.

The Braves remain under the curse of the FSM for their collaboration with Focus on the Family and are currently mired in 4th place in the National League East, 17 games behind the evil New York Mets.

The cognitive style of PowerPoint

I’ll admit to producing a few PowerPoints presentations in my time, but not that many … really!

In fact, I’ve even broached the idea with a few colleages (and students in my curriculum seminar last term) that powerpoint has a “controlling” if not “silencing” effect on classroom interactions—absolute heresy in an era when it seems powerpoint is de rigueur in the university classroom (at least among folks who think good pedagogy can be had by merely adding technology to the classroom).

But I never really thought about powerpoint as Stalinist pedagogy, until now…

Well, seems I’m not alone as Edward R. Tufte has produced a devasting indictment of powerpoint in his essay “The cognitive style of powerpoint”, where he argues:

In corporate and government bureaucracies, the standard method for making a presentation is to talk about a list of points organized onto slides projected up on the wall. For many years, overhead projectors lit up transparencies, and slide projectors showed high-resolution 35mm slides. Now “slideware” computer programs for presentations are nearly everywhere. Early in the 21st century, several hundred million copies of Microsoft PowerPoint were turning out trillions of slides each year.

Alas, slideware often reduces the analytical quality of presentations. In particular, the popular PowerPoint templates (ready-made designs) usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis. What is the problem with PowerPoint? And how can we improve our presentations?

Here’s another sample from the Tufte’s essay: Powerpoint does rocket science