In the US, an undergraduate education used to be an option, one way to get into the middle class. Now it’s a hostage situation, required to avoid falling out of it. And if some of the hostages having trouble coming up with the ransom conclude that our current system is a completely terrible idea, then learning will come unbundled from the pursuit of a degree just as as songs came unbundled from CDs.If this happens, Harvard will be fine. Yale will be fine, and Stanford, and Swarthmore, and Duke. But Bridgerland Applied Technology College? Maybe not fine. University of Arkansas at Little Rock? Maybe not fine. And Kaplan College, a more reliable producer of debt than education? Definitely not fine.
Jacques Maritain
Dancing On and Beneath the Great Wall - 50 WattsClick through. You won’t regret it.
Matt is right. I didn’t regret it!
Autopilots on the other hand, unless integrated to your wind instruments, will force you to sail a direct course but autopilots are idiots and, since most folks using them simply dial in a compass course, you’re not going to be in sync with the wind…Not so long ago I realized that my chart plotter had a problematic effect on my sailing ability. Seeing my current course as a graphical interface, while being neat and all, had a real tendency to distract me from the course I should be steering in favor of the subliminal desire to make for a straight line on the chart plotter. Put the cover on the chart plotter and, hey presto, all of a sudden I’m going faster towards where I want to go. Take the cover off the chart plotter and I’m losing a knot or more… Kinda like Kryptonite for boat speed…
Which, I suppose, is why so many folks sailing from St Thomas to St Martin simply wind up motoring on a straight line course into the wind and swell as they’re addicted to those nice straight lines on the chart plotter.
Poster for Lynda Barry’s class, “The Unthinkable Mind”, Spring 2013 at The University of Wisconsin-Madison
I’m Trending, a publication by Ryan Gander
With the launch this weekend of Nintendo’s dual-screen Wii U, we seem to be crossing some new Rubicon of Virtuality. It’s not that the ability to control or augment one screen with another screen is new — you’ve been able to use a smartphone to control a TV for years — but the Wii U promises to take the twin-screen lifestyle to a whole new level. We’re going to see, pretty much immediately, an explosion of innovation in the creation of experiences involving the simultaneous use of two screens. The explosion will begin in the world of videogames, but then it will spread outward, like a mushroom cloud, to many other realms.In gaming, the incorporation of a little touchscreen monitor into a controller promises some big benefits — notably, in helping remedy the kludginess that has long characterized multiplayer action games on consoles — but it also marks, as game critic Chris Suellentrop points out, a capitulation to the tyranny of the screen. With the Wii U, Nintendo retreats from the original Wii interface, which was designed to bring a whole-body physicality to videogaming, in order to accommodate ”the new mode of living that Apple’s iPhone and iPad have introduced.” We won’t be happy, it seems, until the screen wields total control over our eyes, our fingers, our minds — until its suzerainty extends to all the precincts of the cortex.
The soldiers’ resurrection: altar wall of Sandham Memorial Chapel, Burghclere, Hampshire by Stanley Spencer (painted 1926-32)