Always Another Windmill

We lived in Carrboro, N.C. for a couple years, from 2002-2005. They were good years. We were just back from Uganda, Weirdbird was finishing her dissertation, I was realizing that I didn’t want to finish mine. We got a dog, set up our cheap little apartment in the center of Carrboro, built a loose circle of friends–neighbors, other grad students, people in Weirdbird’s knitting group, friends of friends, a mixed bunch with criss crossing interconnections. Among them were Steffi and Jamie. Steffi was finishing a PhD in the German department. Weirdbird met her through their knitting group and our friend bugheart. She walked our dog for us occasionally when we both had to be out for a long day. We saw Jamie mostly at evening gatherings, “game nights.” I remember him being tall, kind, gentle. Ponytail like me. He was working at UNC doing some kind of tech stuff in the Language Lab, but seemed like someone who hadn’t quite found his niche yet. Clearly very talented, smart. Loved photography. I think he was there taking pictures at the dog park when another of our friends held a birthday party for their dog. I didn’t know him very well, but I would have liked to. He was part of Kitsch-N-Bitch, founded to give the non-knitting partners of stitch-n-bitch members something social to do on meeting nights–watching bad movies. Clearly devoted to Steffi. Steffi graduated in 2005, and they moved to Blacksburg, VA, where Steffi got a job in the German department. We didn’t really know them well enough to keep in touch.

. . .

This afternoon, I heard that one of the people who was killed yesterday was a German professor. I was relieved it when I heard the name, and it wasn’t Steffi.

I didn’t know Jamie wasn’t his first name, and I didn’t remember his last name, and I didn’t know he was also teaching there, so it wasn’t until I got home and heard from Weirdbird that I realized that Christopher J. Bishop was Jamie.

It wasn’t Steffi; it was Jamie who was teaching introductory German at Virginia yesterday morning when someone walked into his classroom, aimed a gun at his head, and pulled the trigger.

. . .

I wanted a picture of him to help remember, so I searched, and found his old website/online portfolio. It has a sense of being incomplete, not updated since they moved to Virginia. There’s a sampling of his photography, very personal, very intimate. He had the photographer’s gift of capturing moments of people. There are some very tender pictures of Steffi. There are also some pictures of a dresser they bought at a flea market that he planned to refinish. There’s no indication if he ever did.

. . .

While working in Dar Es Salaam last fall, I ran out of reading material part way through a two week stay. I picked up a couple of books from one of the many people who sell all kinds of random used books on the sidewalks–used textbooks of all kinds, trashy paperbacks, ancient nonfiction, old magazines, everything, all jumbled up. One of the books was Ancient of Days by Michael Bishop, an author I’d never heard of, but the book looked interesting, and there wasn’t much selection. I was too tired on the flight home to read very much of it, and haven’t finished it.

But now I know who Michael Bishop is. I’m sure he is grieving, because Jamie was his son.

. . .

It’s only a tenuous connection. I might have thought it would make the horribleness somehow seem more real, and maybe it does that too, but right now it just seems unreal and incomprehensible in a more concrete way. I didn’t know Jamie well, but I know that the world is less without him. I’m sure the world is less without all the others, too, but it’s for Steffi, and for Michael, and for everyone who knew Jamie that I grieve for now.

. . .

I wish I could say more; I find I can’t.

. . .

(via a passing reference on Making Light)

Take one LCD Projector, a folder full of random powerpoint presentations downloaded from the web.  The more random the better. Load up a presentation, and contestants free improv a presentation to accompany the slides, without any knowledge of what the next slide will be. Why am I not surprised that this latest ultra-geek fad got started in Germany (which apparently remains the center of its popularity)?

Best use of Powerpoint I’ve ever seen.

It turns out it’s not just you. Powerpoint slides accompanying a talk may actually make it harder for the audience to retain the information presented, according to recent research done at the University of New South Wales, Australia. (I’m still looking for the original paper to get more details.) The researcher found that being presented with the same information in written and spoken form simultaneously can overload our ability to process and hold that information in short term memory.

Their findings also have interesting implications for liturgists. From the article in the Sydney Morning Herald:

[The study] also questions the wisdom of centuries-old habits, such as reading along with Bible passages, at the same time they are being read aloud in church. More of the passages would be understood and retained, the researchers suggest, if heard or read separately.

I’ve not been a fan of having the congregation follow along in the liturgy with a complete script, and I have to restrain myself from cringing when there’s an audible page turn during one of the readings in the liturgy as everyone in the congregation dutifully flips the page to read along with what’s being read to them. Seriously, in what other context do we have adults read along with the full text of what’s being said?

Now I have evidence to support my crankiness.

As far as Powerpoint itself goes, it shouldn’t really be news anymore that Powerpoint presentations are generally the antithesis of good communication. I suspect anyone who has been subjected to enough of them has come to this conclusion independently, but if not, Edward Tufte has been on this for years now, detailing some of the many ways that Powerpoint is a corrupting influence on information presentation (for example in The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint, and scattered throughout his books, including a chapter in his most recent book, Beautiful Evidence).

That’s assuming, of course, that you think that the purpose of a presentation is to inform or to communicate.  If the purpose of the presentation is to confuse, obfuscate, or convince the audience that the material is too confusing for them, but that the presenter has it well in hand–also known as “engineering assent,” or, as a colleague of mine recently put it “facipulation” (facilitation + manipulation)–then Powerpoint is the perfect tool. (For an excellent discussion of the history behind this, see this post at Naked Capitalism).

And don’t let me get started on the actual use of Powerpoint in liturgy.

As a follow on to this previous post, we did finally get our bag back, about two weeks after our original flight. Where all it was in the meantime is something of a mystery. We flew from RDU to Boston on Wednesday, March 21. Sometime on Sunday, March 25, we got a somewhat mysterious call from someone in Wilmington, NC saying that he had our bag, and would FedEx it to us, although he was a little perplexed as to how it got there. After looking it up, we were a little puzzled about that, too. There are no regularly scheduled direct flights between Raleigh and Wilmington, and American doesn’t fly there at all.

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