Against travel

A few years ago, when I told family and friends that I was going to retire, many of them assumed that I would spend a large portion of my time traveling. After I came to California, many of the people I have met here seem to enjoy traveling. While I do not dismiss the idea that they might be getting a lot out of it, I have done very little traveling since I retired since I do not enjoy it, especially if it involves airlines. I have done a lot of traveling in my life, either out of the desire to see family or for work. Seeing new places for its own sake has very little allure for me and now that I do not have to do it, I avoid doing so. I only travel if it means visiting family and friends, nowadays only going to see my grandchildren.

While I enjoy learning about other places and people and cultures, taking a short visit to those places does not satisfy that need. I would much rather read about them or see them on TV. The closest I get to nature is through David Attenborough documentaries and that suits me fine.

So I was interested to read this article by Agnes Collard who shares my antipathy to travel and makes the case against it.
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Charging by the mile for gas

In the US there is a tax on gasoline and the revenues from that are used to pay for road and bridge repairs and maintenance. But revenues from this tax have not been keeping pace with needs due to Congress not being willing to raise the tax to keep up with inflation coupled with more fuel efficient cars and electric cars on the road, resulting in less consumption of gas. While the latter is a good thing in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, it means that much-needed infrastructure repair is not being done.

One solution that is being proposed is to switch from a gas tax to a mileage tax where people would be charged by the number of miles driven rather that the amount of gas consumed. This requires placing of a tracking device on the car and pilot projects have begun in several states, Oregon being the leader.
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The myth of multitasking

(I came across this old post of mine from back in 2011 that I thought might be of interest to those who had not seen it.)

Since I work at a university and am around young adults all the time, I have long been aware that young people today are avid consumers of multimedia, who are adept at emailing, texting, listening to mp3 players, surfing the web, checking up on Facebook, etc. It seems like they are quite proficient at multitasking.

I have always been a poor multitasker. I cannot read or do any work that requires serious thinking if I can hear conversation or loud noises in the background. I have found that I cannot even listen to music in the background when reading. But I know people who seem to thrive on that kind of ambient sound and even deliberately go to coffee shops to do work such as grading papers or writing, things that would be impossible for me.
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How NOT to win friends and influence people

Yesterday morning when I opened up my email, I got this message from someone whose name I did not recognize.

Mano,

I thought you might enjoy:

Link #1

Link #2

Link #3,

Best,

(Name redacted by me)

That is not unusual. I get emails from time to time from people who think I may be interested in something. I did not click on the links (I am wary about links being used to propagate viruses) but the wording of URLs seemed to indicate that they had something to do with Shakespeare’s (or the Bard’s) sonnets, which seemed reasonable since the email arrived the day after I had two posts about the controversy over the Bard’s authorship.
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Documentary of the Shakespeare authorship question

In my earlier post on the question of the debate over whether William Shakespeare was the Bard, I forget to mention a 2012 documentary that I saw on this question called Last Will. and Testament.

It was pretty interesting. While presenting all sides of this debate in the context of the personal and political conflicts of those times, the documentary tends to take a skeptical attitude to the question of Shakespeare being the Bard and spends some time on Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, and a group of authors as the most viable alternative.

Here’s the trailer.

Shakespeare controversy keeps going

If you want to ignite a firestorm among scholars of English literature, just bring up the possibility that the author of the works that now constitute the Shakespeare canon were not written by the historical figure William Shakespeare but by another author who, for whatever reason, chose to be anonymous and had him act as a front. To keep the issue under discussion clear, some people refer to the author of the canon as the Bard and to the historical figure as William Shakespeare, so that the question can be formulated as to whether the Bard was William Shakespeare or someone else.

One would think that the issue would have been resolved by now but part of the problem is that although many doubts can be raised as to Shakespeare being the Bard, the alternatives also have problems. Furthermore, one could analyze the question from different disciplines such as literature, history, and linguistics, each with their own methodologies, and arrive at different conclusions.
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Why do some people litter?

It annoys me when I see people throw things out of their car windows or when I see things like plastic bottles and containers strewn on sidewalks. Litter makes the environment ugly. It does not take much effort to not litter. You just keep the waste item until you reach a trash can. So why do people casually toss things away in public places, even sometimes when there is a trash can nearby? Some researchers are studying why people litter as part of an effort to reduce the practice, and find that there are multiple reasons why people do it.

In 2011, a study in Environment and Behavior observed people littering in public places. The researchers went to 130 outdoor, public locations in 10 U.S. states and watched almost 10,000 people as they went about their business.

When the researchers first arrived at a site, they were tasked with evaluating the area’s cleanliness and the availability of garbage bins. Of the 130 sites, 91 percent had at least one trash can. Only two sites didn’t have any visible litter.
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Ulysses and the nature of difficult novels

Fans of author James Joyce and his novel Ulysses celebrate today (June 16th) because it is the day in which all the events of the book take place and it has come to be known as ‘Bloomsday’, named ofter one of the key characters in the book Leopold Bloom.

Ulysses is a modernist novel by Irish writer James Joyce. Parts of it were first serialized in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, and the entire work was published in Paris by Sylvia Beach on 2 February 1922, Joyce’s fortieth birthday. It is considered one of the most important works of modernist literature and has been called “a demonstration and summation of the entire movement.”According to Declan Kiberd, “Before Joyce, no writer of fiction had so foregrounded the process of thinking.”
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Surviving a plane crash

More details have emerged about what happened to the four children (aged 13, nine, four, and 11 months) who were rescued 40 days after the plane they were in crashed on May 1 in the Colombian Amazon jungle, killing their mother and two other people.

The mother of the four young Colombian siblings who managed to survive for almost six weeks in the Amazon jungle clung to life for four days after their plane crashed before telling her children to leave her in the hope of improving their chances of being rescued.
…

A search team found the plane on 16 May in a thick patch of the rainforest and recovered the bodies of the three adults on board but the children were nowhere to be found.

I was reminded about something I used to do with faculty to make them aware of the benefits of using cooperative learning techniques with their students. It consisted of an exercise called Survival in the Desert and involved giving everyone the following scenario. (This exercise was developed by the US military and there were several different scenarios for crashes, the desert being just one.)
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