Here’s me minutes before the debate giving some pre-debate analysis and speculation.
Full debate to come in a matter of hours. It’s rendering right now.
Drinking coffee and uploading some pics to facebook so I have a few minutes to procrastinate and offer something interesting I found: Michael Bierut’s Notebooks
Talk about hermeneutics. How does one read a life via notebooks? That is apparently what they stand for, or at least what I’m getting they should be interpreted as. I really like the obsession the guy has for his notebooks.
When I read, I usually take notes on the PC. I do have a couple of notebooks for ideas. One is a steno pad split between paper ideas and books to read (two lists basically). The other is a rather nice moleskine notebook that was captured and taken over by my attic Greek studies. I like the idea of carrying one around and always working in it. I’m taking notes in a smaller one now about some reading I’m doing but have a nagging fear it won’t be very useful unless it’s typed up in a computer file. I think this is just my obsession that everything in my life be digital or digitally enhanced.
Notebooks aren’t that much harder to sift through for info. Just number the pages and make an index in the back. Or like Ray Johnson, make tabs down the side with a razor.
I’m using my planner as a notebook now, putting ideas and such on particular dates. i think that’s my foray into something more like this guy – I like the linearity of it and the “archive” sensibility of the notebooks.
Sweet huh? That’s a picture of it.
It’s an HD video camera that uses HCSD cards – an 8GB gives the reading of almost 3 hours of video.
In SD DV mode, it’s 11 hours of recording time.
The amount of 11mp pictures? it’s in the 10,000 range.
I’m super happy. It was free via credit card points. And before you say anything about that, they were points accrued through paying forward debate expenses on my personal card and being reimbursed. So there.
If you want one it will run you 140 dollars plus the SD card which is about 16 dollars. These are buy.com prices by the way.
First big test will be the practice on Thursday then videoing the scrimmage with King’s college in Manhattan on Friday night. I’m sure I’ll post at least a couple of the videos.
Having some doubting moments recently about, well, most everything related to University. Hope I don’t end up like this guy, but I can sense it.
Intellectual sparring (dare I use the term) about ideas – among students and faculty – has been replaced by one-sided, partisan drivel (for example, Obama = admirable. McCain = terrible and, for the record, I will be voting for Obama). While it would be easy to blame a liberal bias among faculty for this groupthink, it should be noted that this simple world of good and bad pervades the world around us. On radio, television and the Internet, ideological pundits scream at one another with vitriol and fervor. My partisan colleagues are universally National Public Radio listeners. They do not hear the other side, so it is easy to demonize the other side. Their students are listening, and sadly think of conservatism in its many forms as horrific. Worse still, they now conflate liberal passion and advocacy with justice, and by default, analytic rigor and reason. They do not weigh evidence, or take note of pro, cons, costs or benefits. Doing so would be to admit that there are merits to positions they do not hold. To acknowledge that their ideology is imperfect is the first step towards compromise, or in their overused, precious phrase, “selling out.”
Funny, in the day in age he admires, most every University, college or community college would find it unthinkable to cancel their debate team. Today it’s almost unthinkable to start one for most administrators and department chairs. But you reap what you sew; professors can only do so much, and without the engaged minds of competitive debaters in the classrooms, the intellectual quality of life for the whole campus suffers.