I think I “run” faster when listening to my iPod because I have it cranked it up so loud — I have middle-aged hearing loss, also known as “Why do today’s youth mumble? It’s a sign of disrespect!” disease — that it masks the sound of my panting. That can’t be a good thing.

In only vaguely related news, I find fascinating the explanatory hypothesis of why we have out of body experiences. If I understand it (and there is no chance that I do), the idea is that the brain constructs the sense of having a persistent body by synthesizing the various streams of internal and external sensations. When those streams fall out of synch, the brain, which would rather be wrong than confused, synthesizes a body standing slightly outside of the one it’s actually in. Ah brains! Can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em! [Tags: brain ipod exercise aging middle_age out_of_body science ]

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Tim “LibraryThing” Spalding bought a box of copies of Everything Is Miscellaneous, Lor’ bless him, and decided to hold a contest of sorts to give the remaining dozen away. So, he asked people to comment on how tagging changes knowledge. Now he’s collected a sampling of the 170 replies. Great stuff.

Also, Tim now let’s you see a reverse (inverse? converse?) tag cloud, which he calls a tag mirror. He says:

Instead of showing what you think about your books—what a regular tag cloud shows—it shows you what others think of them, in effect using LibraryThing’s twenty-two million tags to organize and surface interesting topics from within your own collection…

Here’s a for-example. I don’t use the tags gender studies, patristics or theory. They’re just not terms I use. To some extent, that reflects who I am. But I have a fair number of books that, to others, fall under those categories. It’s interesting to slice my books up in an alien way—to see them through other eyes. Maybe I’m more interested in gender studies than I thought.

[Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous tim_spalding folksonomies tags tag_clouds knowledge ]

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Dave Winer has dug up and made presentable some of the metadata for Flickr photos. Flickr knows more than you think!

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We were expecting so much. My family loves Shakespeare & Co., the Berkshires-based institution. The Company’s founder and spirit, Tina Packer, stars in this production — taking a leading role for the first time in many years. And the play has gotten raves, including in the Boston Globe.

But I thought the performance lacked many of the Company’s signature delights. Although the language was as clear as ever, and many of the performances were strong, the director Michael Hammond staged it inertly. It was as close to watching actors stand and declaim as I’ve ever seen the Company come. Some of this he clearly did on purpose, as when the factional leaders meet and form an alliance. But the rest of the play also was staged as a rectangle within which people talk. Usually, Shakespeare & Co. fills the place with movement that enlivens and enlightens. To this performance’s detriment, two nights earlier we’d seen the Company’s version of Midsummer Night’s Dream for the second time, which is staged beautifully and hilariously. But A & C didn’t just pale by comparison. It was, put most positively, staid. And that’s really being too generous. For example, Hammond chose to insert battle scenes that were slow motion, stylized ballets that conveyed nothing; they might just as well replaced them with a placard that read: “Insert battle here.”

And, although I hate to say it because she has been such a force for making Shakespeare matter despite the barriers of time and language, I thought Tina Packer was not very good in the part. I never believed her. Her final scene — granted, by that time I was already resenting being held in the theater — struck me as a parody of a stagy Shakespeare reading…Cleopatra as performed by Mrs. Rittenhouse. Where she should have shown us Cleopatra’s allure, she was coquettish. Where she should have broken our hearts, she resorted to tricks — the brave smile, the looking away. She was at her best, I thought, in her scenes with her maidens; the Company usually excels at women’s roles.

I liked some of the other performances. Nigel Gore, so good as Bottom, was believable as Antony. I was especially surprised by Craig Baldwin, one of the lovers in Midsummer’s Night Dream, who brought nuance and sympathy to Octavius Caesar’s cold determination. Walton Wilson as Enobarbus, well-delivered the beautiful explanation of Cleopatra. He evoked her better than Packer did.

I’ve never seen this play before. I’m glad to have seen it, but, alas, not because of the strength of this performance of it. I hate to say it. Go instead to see A Midsummer’s Night Dream. Twice. [Tags: shakespeare reviews tina_packer antony_and_cleopatra berkshires ]

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For an alternative view of the same performance, see Meredith Sue Willis‘ blog, where she’ll soon be posting about it. She’s my sister-in-law and a novelist whose opinion is far better founded than mine.

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DishyMix interviews me (and it’s one of the odder interviews, as I recall — it was done a few weeks ago — and decides to use my 1972 college yearbook picture of me. The actual podcast is here. [Tags: dishymix longhairs hippies ]

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Jason Fry in the Wall Street Journal writes:

The Net makes exploring the world and engaging with it easy in a way we’re only just getting used to. Within a few keystrokes, you can be digging into the news, indulging your curiosity, or foundering in an obsession or addiction. Practically speaking, you can communicate with most anyone you wish whenever you wish. And you can do so at a remove &mdash step away from the PC, or just hit the back button, and your engagement ends.

That remove can be a wonderful thing. It lets us indulge our curiosity almost as quickly as we can think, makes it easy to drop a line to someone we might not feel like we have time to call on the phone and allows us to be part of a community that may be too diffuse for real-world interaction.

The danger is that interacting at a remove can come to seem preferable to the messiness of the real world, where a greater commitment is required and interaction demands more of ourselves than it does in our compartmentalized worlds of browsers and digital personas. My apartment’s messy piles of papers and mottled floorboards are hard to model in Floorplanner, and it’s tempting to imagine a living room without them. But take them away, and my living room wouldn’t feel like home.

I’m not sure how broadly that last paragraph applies, but the previous ones make a good point. The ability to play what-if with ideas lets us run down dead ends faster than ever, which is an important benefit of the Web. Finding paths of thought that go nowhere is often the best way to find paths that maybe go somewhere. [Tags: wsj messiness everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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I enjoyed AJ Fortin’s post that trains a Mortimer Adlerian eye on blogs and those who make extravagant claims about them. (I seem to be his main example of the latter.)

And John Eischeid, who worked with NewAssignment, is starting a crowdsourced project addressing broad questions of the effect of crowds and crowdsourcing. It’s called “The Cult of the Rebuttal,” a reference to Andrew Keen’s book (which I’ve tried to explain and evaluate here), but it’s really focused on the topic, not the book. [Thanks to Andy Angelos for the link.] [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous andrew_keen]

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Americans may need passports to board domestic flights or to
picnic in a national park next year if they live in one of the states
defying the federal Real ID Act.

So says the increasingly-ominously named Department of Homeland Security, according to CNN.

Personally, I prefer my totalitarianism to be unobtrusive. [Tags: politics rights privacy homeland_security brave_new_world orwell undesirables ]

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Oxfam is collecting money for the victims of the horrendous earthquake in Peru. That’s where my family is giving.

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Wired is encouraging you to post the most egregious Wikipedia revisions here. Anonymity giveth opportunities for abuse. The crowd setteth right. [Tags: wikipedia marketing pr ]

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