-- Because of a sex scandal, the Nobel Prize for Literature will not be awarded in 2018. Writer Tim Parks makes a pretty good case that the project of trying to compare literatures across linguistic and cultural backgrounds is a tough if not impossible task in any event. He questions whether members of a particular culture are the best judges of a literary work and its impact within its own culture, let alone trying to assess the relative rankings of such work. It's a pretty good point, which one might wish King Carl XVI Gustav to notice and junk that particular committee and its work.
-- In an intriguing experiment, Finland opened a restaurant earlier this year built around the concept of having your food delivered there from another restaurant. Working with a restaurant app, the place called Take In offered tables, cutlery and a bar, and seated diners at one of its own tables while they waited for delivery food to come from another restaurant. That's an interesting idea.
-- This item at The Great Courses Daily notes what should be the obvious conclusion that so-called multitasking is usually constantly switching monotasking, with predictable results in the efficiency of all the tasks involved. Even walking and texting made it tougher to keep oneself on course much of the time. Which is the part that intrigued me the most, since it quoted a journal called Gait & Posture. How can print be dying if there is a journal called Gait & Posture?
1. Maybe the Nobel prizes just need to end. I don't know what Alfred Nobel specified but, I dunno, take the endowment and use it to put in water wells in rural Africa or something.
ReplyDelete2. This sounds like one of those "gag" TV shows, like Candid Camera. "We secretly switched these diners' Duc a L'Orange with chicken nuggets from the Wendy's, let's see if they notice"
3. I've had more students than I can count nearly run into me in the halls because they're walking and texting. I'd have let them, too, except I was carrying a microscope or other expensive lab equipment it would be bad to drop. I've also had to slam on the brakes when someone walked out into the street - not even at a crosswalk - without looking because their Invisible Internet Friends were more important, apparently, than their basic safety.