Footnotes on Epicycles

The birth of trivia

At dinner several weeks ago, I mentioned that the word 'broad' to describe a woman originally referred to pregnant cows. I forget why I offered this item of trivia, but several of the people I was dining with were curious about it. One looked at the Online Etymology Dictionary and found an entirely different account. Later, I looked at the Oxford English Dictionary. Alas, it has no etymology for this "chiefly American" usage.

Scouting around online finds a couple of sites that mention the etymology I recounted, but only in the context of praising Robert Baker's 'Pricks and Chicks: A Plea for Persons.' That is where I read it, years ago, but I can find no independent confirmation of Baker's proposed etymology. As far as I can tell, the etymology for 'broad' is simply unknown.

And just today I read an article about the Prefect Vagina. Lisa Rogers laments that a man can talk about his willy, but that women cannot so easily talk about their nethers:

There isn't a similarly recognisable term for the vulva, because actually the vagina is the passage inside, and the word means "somewhere to sheathe your sword"! Yes, even the word means our sexual organs only exist in relation to a man. How depressing is that?

This etymology is easily corroborated. 'Vagina' comes from the Latin for sheath or scabbard. It is a nice illustration of the feminist point that the language describing women and their parts reflects (as the man says) the violence inherent in the system.

One last quibble: Rogers looks in vain for a word to describe the bits that are resculpted in female genital plastic surgery, like the familiar words that men have their johnson. It seems to me that 'pussy' fits the role, even if it has animal etymology and the OED calls it "coarse slang."

Their insidious reference

Not long ago, I picked up an issue of the Artist's Magazine in an airport. (May 2008, as it happens.) It includes a profile of the painter Costa Vavagiakis. Among other things, it recounts how the artist was impressed by the Charioteer of Delphi as a young boy. Understandably, it does not include a picture of the statue. Instead, it offers a parenthetical aside with a link to the Wikipedia entry.

By offering the link, the author of the magazine article gives a nod of recognition to the Wikipedia entry. I presume they actually looked at the Wikipedia article, and so they can attest to its accuracy as much as they would something they actually printed in the magazine. The problem is that the entry may well change. One hopes that changes will only make the entry more detailed, but they might make it less accurate. The magazine article provides no discrimination, and taps the Wikipedia entry with its blessing even if the entry has changed.

With this magazine, there is not really anything at stake. Nevertheless, this is an instance of a broader phenomenon. When David Morgan Mar links to an entry about some topic in physics or mathematics (in discussing the Riemann hypothesis, for example) he encourages his readers to go to the Wikipedia for more information. He says, implicitly, that the article gets the relevant facts right. Since he is a legitimate expert, his say so counts for something. Although he has just looked at the article at a specific time, the link remains. If the article drifts, his nod to it remains.

One solution would be to link to a dated version of the article, but that is not common practice.

The pixels or print dilemma for free textbooks

Free textbooks have gotten media attention recently. Mostly, they are offered as a solution to the rising cost of higher education. See, for example, this USA Today story. Academic fashion plate that I am, I was ahead of this trend. I wrote an open access logic textbook back before free textbooks were cool.*

Kevin Smith has a nice discussion of how universities might encourage this sort of thing (which I found via via Peter Suber's blog). He points out that an advantage of digital resources is that they can be adapted and incorporated by people who have similar but not quite the same needs. With my book, for example, people can change the logical notation to match their preferences and other texts used in their curriculum. They can use parts of the text, possibly in combination with other open access material or their their own additions. People using the text in these ways (Smith suggests) "provide an effective 'peer-review' to measure the quality of the faculty author�s contribution." (I will probably mention this in the context of my upcoming tenure case.)

Unfortunately, these discussions typically conflate online and open access. The USA Today headline reads: Online 'open textbooks' save students cash

I distribute forall x via my website, as well as via the SUNY digital repository, but I don't see the PDF as a product for student consumption. If it were, students would be stuck in a dilemma: Either they print it off or they don't.

A. If they don't print it off, then they just end up reading it at their computer. PDFs aren't optimized for reading on-screen, because the shape of page is different than the shape of a screen. Moreover, most students aren't very good at reading PDFs. Most of them would comprehend the text better if they marked it up as they read: underlining bits, making marginal notes, and so on. Yet most of them are not using PDF readers that allow for commenting.

For books that serve as workbooks and have exercises at the end of chapters, the problem is even worse. Students working through problems need paper in front of them and they need to be flipping between the material, the problem set, and the references in the back of the book. All of this is slightly less convenient on the computer, so learning the material is harder than it needs to be.

Perhaps in the next generation students will be better at digesting documents on screen. Perhaps physical textbooks will actually be harder for them. But my students today are not the students of the future.**

B. If they do print it off, then they probably aren't doing so efficiently. I am not sure of the environmental impact of individual laser printing, as compared to copies by way of a printing service. But most students don't have their own laser printer, and so will probably pay more per page than if the whole book were printed by a copy service. And they will probably print single-sided, using more paper.

Students who have ink jet printers pay more and are indubitably worse for the Earth if they print the book.

The horns of the dilemma strike different students in different ways. The hassle involved in printing discourages some students from having a hard copy. So they end up accessing the book on screen, which is less conducive to learning, which leaves them struggling in the course.

The natural resolution of this dilemma is to separate 'online' and 'open access'. I make forall x available as a printed course packet for my students. I make it available electronically, but primarily for people in distant places who would like to use it for their own courses or for their own purposes. Of course, some of my students refrain from buying a copy and just look at the text online. This is no different from traditional textbooks, though, which some students refrain from buying in favor of using the library's copy on reserve or using a friend's copy.

* Given the template for this kind of rant, the next sentence should be: All the people writing free textbooks now are just sellouts.

** Note also that many students keep textbooks and refer to them years after having taken a course. Most students don't, but many do. You, as a reader of this blog, were probably one of them. How many old textbooks do you have on your shelves? Hardcopies are fine for this, because they live on a shelf and age gracefully. Digital copies, not so much. Just because a file is archived doesn't actually mean it will be readily available a decade later or that the former student could remember enough about it to turn it up in a search.

Performance in print

Not long ago, I wrote a short paper on musical performance. My interest in the topic was prompted by conversations with Cristyn and various musicians, and further prodded on by my old friend turned philosopher of art Christy Mag Uidhir. Such writing poses the risk that I'll look dilettante, but I am lucky to be in a department that recognizes publication as publication.

The paper has just now appeared in the British Journal of Aesthetics.

Curiouser and curiouser

I've posted a new draft of my paper on epistemic significance and natural curiousity.

In other news, Summer is hot.

A distinct paper on identical rivals

One of my first publications was a PSA paper about what I then called the problem of identical rivals. The 'problem' is that an apparent case of underdetermination might not involve any rival theories after all, if the would-be rivals were merely different formulations of the same theory. In a new paper co-authored with Greg Frost-Arnold, I've begun to think more proactively about dissolving would-be underdetermination in this way. I now think of it as the identical rivals response.

With Greg's permission, I've posted a draft of the paper. Comments are welcome.

Big monkey, logic book

Rob Helpy-Chalk runs down the options for open access logic books, including forall x. He concludes, "Heck, the Magnus book looks like just the item. That was quick."

Meme: Passion Quilt (and merch)

Janet tagged me in another meme.*

THE RULES:
Post a picture or make/take/create your own that captures what YOU are most passionate for students to learn about.

Give your picture a short title.

Title your blog post "Meme: Passion Quilt."

Link back to this blog entry.

Include links to 5 (or more) educators.

I ruminated on this for a while, but all the cleverness has been squeezed out of me by interminable grading. So I drew this:

ARE YOU SURE IT'S A BARN?
(and not a cleverly disguised mule?)

This, of course, is one of the suggested t-shirts from my epistemology class. The rationale for including it in the passion quilt is this:

Philosophy cannot be an entirely abstract discipline. Its principles must apply to some instances, if it is to teach us anything at all. At the same time, philosophical examples can get out of hand. Carried too far, the obsession with examples is a round about way of being inapplicably abstract. As JL Austin once wrote, "over-simplification, schematization, and constant obsessive repetition of the same small range of jejune 'examples' are... far too common to be dismissed as an occasional weakness of philosophers."

I don't think that this is really what I am most passionate about students learning, but it is one lesson that I hope they do learn.

All well and good, but the clever reader will suspect that the drawing is just an excuse to make t-shirts with the clever motto on them. Indeed, I've made a Mule Barn Country t-shirt at Cafe Press; also a polo and a long-sleeved version.

Similarly, I've made the 'Evil Demons' shirt available in white and colour.

* Janet was flexible with the rules and so I will be, too. I won't tag anybody. As chain letters always say, this will probably have dire consequences.

Reid rides again

My Reid paper has now appeared at Philosopher's Imprint.

It's a publication, which is always a good thing, but I'm especially happy with this one. I pointed to an on-line draft of this paper in my first ever blog post. As I've mentioned before, I have a high regard for the journal.

Brief debriefing

Yesterday was the last day of class, and so it was time for the usual debriefing. I asked slightly different questions in 17th&18th c. Philosophy than last year, so I can't compare numbers directly. Considering favorite and lease favorite material with respect to philosophical content, the results were these:


           yay   boo
Descartes    4     5
Locke        5     2
Berkeley     3    10
Hume         7     3
Kant         4     1

Even moreso than last year, even students who find Berkeley engaging and interesting tend to be boo about his philosophy. I am surprised by the dearth of Kant haters, but they appear in a moment.

We also ended up discussing philosophical style, and so I had them indicate which text they found the most enjoyable (least unpleasant) to read and which they found most unpleasant (least enjoyable). Most enjoyable is a tossup between the texts not written by Kant, least enjoyable is a transcendental landslide:


                         yay   boo
Descartes' Meditations     7     -
Locke's Essay (selections) 4     -
Berkeley's Principles      5     1
Hume's Enquiry             6     1
Kant's Critique (abridged) -    23

In my Theory of Knowledge class, I ended with a lightweight question: If you had to summarize the course on a t-shirt, what would it say? Answers tended toward what would make a funny shirt, rather than toward what would convey wisdom. For example:

"I've always had a soft spot in my heart for evil demons."

"ARE YOU SURE IT'S A BARN? (and not a cleverly disguised mule?)"

"You won't know what knowledge is, but you'll know what it's not."

"Knowledge: It's not just for brains-in-vats anymore."

In a similar vein, some students volunteered mottoes for bumper stickers:

"In fake barn country, beliefs in the vehicle are not justified."

"My other car is Nogot's Ford."

Now the only thing between me and a summerful of research is reams of grading.