Cory Doctorow:
Scott "Understanding Comics" McCloud is taking his family -- including his talented 13-year-old daughter, Sky -- on a one year cross-country tour. Scott's going to be touring with his new book Making Comics, giving speeches, and his kids will be home-schooled by producing a blog and a series of podcasts and video podcasts documenting their travels. Scott and Sky talked to Henry Jenkins's students at MIT about this (listen to the 2-hour webcast), explaining:
Each member of the family is blogging about the trip over on Live Journal. And they are working together to produce a series of podcasts which they are calling Winterviews (after youngest daughter, Winter, who will be the on-camera presence in these films). The daughters will research about some of the comics people they will meet along the way, read and discuss some of their work, prepare questions, do interviews, and edit them for transmission via the web. Sky is also preparing an evolving powerpoint presentation as they travel to explain to various audiences about the trip and what they have learned along the way.
Meanwhile, she remains in contact with a larger circle of home schooled kids who are also tapping into their interests in popular culture (in this case, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Veronica Mars) to inform critical essays and research projects. We all concluded that Sky could be a poster child for the new media literacies we have been exploring through our project with the MacArthur Foundation -- someone who is tapping the full range of new media technologies to learn and share what she is learning with a larger community. Sky is incredibly articulate, holding her own debating the fine points of comics aesthetics with her dad and fully comfortably plopping herself down and conversing with a room full of graduate students. We were delighted to hear her say she was potentially interested in being an MIT student some day. She won the hearts of many of us here.
I met Scott this summer and he told me about Making Comics -- it's a tutorial for people who want to learn how visual storytelling works, drawing on styles from manga to Will Eisner. The book is a tutorial for budding comic-book creators, with exercises and patient, lucid and funny instruction, just the kind of thing that made Understanding Comics into the best book on media I've ever read.
Surgeons in China who said they performed the first successful penis transplant had to remove the donated organ because of the severe psychological problems it caused to the recipient and his wife.
I accept that I can't possibly know how I would feel in this situation, but I truly suspect I'd rather have anyone's penis rather than none.
This band doesn't get much better. Joe Henderson(ts) Freddie Hubbard(tp) Herbie Hancock(p) Ron Carter(b) Tony Williams(ds)
I saw Joe in concert in a small club in Los Angeles a bunch of years ago (The Catalina) and he was masterful. He's the type of player that you drop everything you're doing and run to see when they come to your town. I used to play to his perfect solo on Horace Silver's Song for My Father, over and over again[sigma]He died in 2001. Wikipedia on Henderson
Spanish media reports say five models hoping to be booked for Madrid's major fashion show have been banned from participating because they are too thin.
I'm not sure how one fashion show can influence the very complex cultural and sociological pressures on body image for young girls, but maybe this is a start.
September 15 marks the 90th anniversary of the first use of a tank in warfare. On this day in 1916, British tanks advanced toward German positions in the Battle of the Somme. Here's more at the Sydney Morning Herald, and source article at the BBC.
This story, in today's Guardian, is just mind-blowing. The common sleeping pill zolpidem, sold in the US under the name Ambien, can reverse serious brain damage and wake up patients in persistent vegetative states!
The hospital ward sister, Lucy Hughes, was periodically concerned that involuntary spasms in Louis's left arm, that resulted in him tearing at his mattress, might be a sign that deep inside he might be uncomfortable. In 1999, five years after Louis's accident, she suggested to Sienie that the family's GP, Dr Wally Nel, be asked to prescribe a sedative. Nel prescribed Stilnox, the brand name in South Africa for zolpidem. "I crushed it up and gave it to him in a bottle with a soft drink," Sienie recalls. "He couldn't swallow properly then, but I helped him and sat at his bedside. After about 25 minutes, I heard him making a sound like 'mmm'. He hadn't made a sound for five years.
"Then he turned his head in my direction. I said, 'Louis, can you hear me?' And he said, 'Yes.' I said, 'Say hello, Louis', and he said, 'Hello, mummy.' I couldn't believe it. I just cried and cried.
Zolpidem seems to work on PVS patients about 60% of the time, and is effective in the treatment of other brain injuries. Parts of the brain considered "dead" because of zero activity (but not deterioration or necrosis) return to life. It's not a cure -- the pill must be taken on an ongoing basis -- but it is a nearly-miraculous treatment.
As wonderful as this is, the legal and ethical implications are unsettling. Will people who have "pulled the plug" on loved ones in persistent vegetative states in recent years read this news with the horrible realization that the now-dead partner or relative might have been saved with a $5 pill? Could a lawyer for family members opposed to the termination of care for a PVS patient sue the family members who chose to do so, and win?
Trials are set to begin in the next few months in South Africa. The original discover of zolpidem, Sanofi-Aventis, has chosen *not* to participate -- no doubt because the drug is no longer controlled by a patent.
Cory Doctorow:
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has refused to censor the content on the Chinese version of Wikipedia, resulting in its being blocked by the Chinese government. Google, Yahoo and others have folded to demands from Beijing's totalitarian bureaucrats, but Wikipedia has stood firm. Predictably, Beijing has come to Wikipedia to ask them for some kind of peace-treaty, because China can ill-afford to block critical information resources if it is to remain economically strong. If only Google and Yahoo's executives were as confident in the importance of their services as Wales is of Wikipedia.
Wales said censorship was ' antithetical to the philosophy of Wikipedia. We occupy a position in the culture that I wish Google would take up, which is that we stand for the freedom for information, and for us to compromise I think would send very much the wrong signal: that there's no one left on the planet who's willing to say "You know what? We're not going to give up."'
Wikipedia's entry on the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 includes the government's official claim that 200-300 died and the Chinese student associations and Chinese Red Cross's estimate of 2,000-3,000 deaths.
Wales said: 'I think it's an interesting question whether they're prepared to understand the difference between advocating one set of figures or another versus simply reporting on what the controversy is. I can understand that they would be upset - although of course I still don't think they have any moral right to ban anything - if we were pushing one set of figures in contrast to their objections, but if we are reporting both, to me that's exactly what an encyclopaedia should do and they should be comfortable with that.'
..the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.
Each member of the family is blogging about the trip over on Live Journal. And they are working together to produce a series of podcasts which they are calling Winterviews (after youngest daughter, Winter, who will be the on-camera presence in these films). The daughters will research about some of the comics people they will meet along the way, read and discuss some of their work, prepare questions, do interviews, and edit them for transmission via the web. Sky is also preparing an evolving powerpoint presentation as they travel to explain to various audiences about the trip and what they have learned along the way.
