Excerpted tidbit.

Just because I feel like sharing. It’s a big ol’ world, and we’re not.

Internet usage worldwide varies more or less in direct proportion to national per capita income. According to the Google Gapminder World project (last accessed 28 January 2007, currently in beta), internet users per 1000 people are as low as 0.78 (Tajikistan). India and China, the two most populous countries, hover near the middle of the GNP/GNI range but count only 32 and 73 internet users per 1000 inhabitants, respectively.

(me, yesterday, in chapter draft)

Edited to add: the “children born per woman (fertility rate)” chart makes it pretty evident that the rapidly approaching overpopulation bogeyman is just that. Replacement rate (for a stable population numbers-wise) is 2.1. India may be above that, but China and a hefty portion of the rest of the world are below. Not only that, but since 1975 (use the nifty animation feature!) worldwide fertility rates have been on the decline.

In addition, the most rapidly growing populations (top left region of the chart) tend to be dark-blue, which means Africa, which means horrid infant mortality rate. (The mortality rate is another one of the charts available.)

Anxiety and timing(s).

Three months left to finish the dissertation, get comments on it, fix the dissertation as per comments, and defend it. The urge to panic is great.

Support, though, is abundant – and I’m grateful for it. From all sides: family, friends, colleagues, relative strangers.

It’s not that I don’t think I can do it. I can… I think. It’ll help to have comments from my thesis readers (who will hopefully get two chapters and all of the interface from me Wednesday or Thursday), so that at least I’ll know more or less what they’re thinking. Part of me is worried that they’ll be disgruntled, because I’ve veered away from (and so haven’t addressed) some things that were suggested at my prelims. But another part of me knows that this is par for the course: dissertations change direction, and this isn’t even that radical a change. It’s “just” a shift in emphasis. But there’re three months left, so – panic.

Anxiety, more like. I’m told (and also know) that it won’t go away, so it helps to let it flow through me instead of dwelling on it and making it whirlpool somewhere near my solar plexus. Sometimes the flowing works, sometimes it doesn’t, but it’s nice to have some agency over it.

This topic is overwhelming. It’s so poorly explored; there’s so much to do. Most importantly, it’s so interdisciplinary, and I feel like the ultimate dilettante. That’s a-ok with me, but what about the rest of the world? You know, potential employers and such?

One of RolandHT’s early premises was that acquiring knowledge can be done in two ways. You can take in (read, listen to, whatever) large chunks of information, one by one, each of them in its entirety, and analyze each as a whole and in context of the others you’ve taken in so far. Like learning literature by reading novel after novel. Or, you can dabble here and there, follow thematic threads that interest you, and slowly build up a more or less cohesive picture of the world, or a world. The Roland project is the latter; it acquaints you with the archetype(s) by letting you jump around centuries and media and locations. I do this because I think that this is how we learn almost everything we know: building up a worldview by observation, by living and paying attention.

That works very well inside my head; finding words to make it coherent is another thing. Words are coming, slowly but surely. It’ll get there.

The best dissertation is a done dissertation. Yes.

RolandHT, and ask the internets.

I’ve put up the latest version of RolandHT. It can only be viewed with (freely available) Mozilla/Firefox, or another XSLT-aware browser. I don’t know of any besides Firefox, so if you do, please let me know the browser and the operating system(s) on which you’ve used it.

The site definitely needs a help section, and some more intuitive navigation. For now, a few usage notes:

– The links up top don’t do anything yet.
– Pick an excerpt from the list on the left. Mouseover themes/characters/imagery that show up over the sword, and see what happens. Then click on a theme or character or image, and see what happens now.
– Click on the red “reset” at top right to return to initial state.
– For three other nifty features, find the excerpt named “Missionary Work.” Click on the “i” beside the name of the work; click on the quill in the second stanza; mouseover any underlined word.
– Check out also the excerpt, near the very bottom, titled “Battle Near Saragossa.” Click on the image.
– If something seems aesthetically or functionally wrong, it would be lovely if you emailed me to let me know.
– This is a work in progress. If you see the word “check” where you expect information, I’m working on it.

In other news, a couple of questions for the internet. The first, in two parts, is Roland-related – I’d like to know more about two geographical locations. One is Terra Major:

“Could one achieve that Rollant’s life was lost,
Charle’s right arm were from his body torn;
Though there remained his marvellous great host,
He’ld not again assemble in such force;
Terra Major would languish in repose.”

Is TM a region? Is it in Europe? If not, what is it (another name for Charlemagne’s Holy Roman Empire?)?

The other place is a bit more mysterious, partly because it’s in Middle English:

Roulond rod furthe—he wold not rest, I wene—
he sawe wher a Sairsin seche hym wold,
kinge was of Criklond, croun[y]d with gold.

What, pray tell, is Criklond?

And finally, a non-Roland-related query: what’s your favorite slow-cooker recipe? Things I’m trying to stay away from: large chunks of boiled onions (I’ve disliked them since forever), and really heavy dishes like mac and cheese. Meat is great, veggies are great, seafood that’s sturdy enough to survive a slow cooker is great, wacky but tasty ingredients totally get bonus points. Non-desserts is what I’m after.

Rewards, or maybe CRACK.

My beloved bought Guitar Hero II. Note the time stamp on this post. And I’m not even into video games much.

It is crack. Also, it’s hell on my left arm, all the way from the forearm to the shoulder.

But oh, the sweet sweet reward for having gotten work done. Dissertation, we have a PLAN.

Practical writing advice sought.

The kind of information I’m looking for, there’s a lot of it on the internets. But somehow it carries more weight when it comes from people I know personally, even if only through the blogosphere.

Say, hypothetically, you’re writing a dissertation (a book, any kind of long writing project). You were all set to dive into work, but life’s been uncooperative, and now that you can think straight again you’re dealing with fear, anxiety and vague waves of unattached guilt. How do you get from there to producing stuff of a quality at least good enough to propel you along?

Strategies I’m familiar with: freewriting, timed and non-; reward systems (I get to play videogames/have some ice cream/take a 15-minute walk for every X amount of work done); timed work schedules (must write 10-noon and not one minute more, every day); buddy systems; changing work venue every once in a while.

Freewriting works to a point, if I don’t let little things slow me down. Rewards work on a very limited scale. Timed work schedule works when I can stick to it and don’t have internet access. Buddy systems… well, they’re nice in theory but in practice there’s nobody I can do this with. Online venues like PhinisheD don’t really work for me either. Changing work venue actually works most of the time. But, although it helps deal with wanting to hide under the covers, it doesn’t help with the fear or anxiety. Or guilt.

So: aside from the above, what do you do?

Global warming and other calamities.

Back from California, with a cold given to me by brother and nephew, who brought it with them from New York.

The funeral was… a funeral. It was sad. We cried.

I feel like my grandmother left so long ago, it’s difficult to find the words for talking about her death as something recent. Far more real for me was my mother’s pain, and my uncle’s. From this perspective, the family time was a very good thing indeed.

Now we’re back, and I would be diving right into the work if not for the cold that waylaid me in the morning and early afternoon. And I have a doctor’s appointment in an hour (unrelated)! Guess today’s a sick day.

Last week Ethan and I and other family had a long and at times heated conversation about politics, environment and other controversial topics. My mom and I have one of those more or less every time we see each other, and given that we’re on the opposite sides of the political spectrum from each other, you can imagine how they tend to go. One thing, though – we’re learning to not let the disagreements cloud our interactions for days. I guess that’s a good thing.

I’m all for providing information, but hate it when someone force-feeds it to me. So, WHEREAS I desire to share information on contentious topics with my mother, AND I love her, AND I don’t want to force all of it upon her, LET THEREFORE be established a new purpose for this weblog, BEING to more thoroughly document my perception of the world.

Let’s see if this lasts for more than a day, mm? I was always terrible at letter-writing, and diary-writing, and blogging. I’m hurtling headlong into the (hopefully?) final stages of my dissertation. But the world keeps going, and I need an outlet – and a tangible link to the outside of my head.

The evening after our big debate, I found the following interesting bits on the web.

Personal Responsibility

Wired reports that people can cause earthquakes! The 5.6 one that took place in 1989 in Australia was caused, National Geographic says, by 200 years of coal mining. And, HA ha, the extensive damage done by the earthquake cost more than all the coal they got out of that mine, put together. The damage and undoubted deaths aren’t funny, but in a perverse sense, the whole thing is. Remember, gang: what we do with our environment affects everyone.

Global warming isn’t new. It’s happened before, it’ll happen again. With or without us. Except that this time around, it’s us making it happen.

Fear not, though, some of us are acting to make things better. Jyllands-Posten reports that Danes will have access to bioethanol by 2010. Denmark is generally pretty cool, as Brad DeLong documents in “The Scandinavian Model.”

So what can you do? Well, for one thing you can offset the emissions you generate through travel by buying energy credits. Their calculator is flawed, but the money goes to developing renewable-energy projects.

Depending on where you live, you may also have the option of paying a little more to get your energy from renewable sources only. Here’s one place to start (in the US, at least).

You can even join Al Gore’s information troops.

Giving The Man The Finger

Wired:

All passports issued by the US State Department after January 1 will have always-on radio frequency identification chips, making it easy for officials – and hackers – to grab your personal stats. Getting paranoid about strangers slurping up your identity? Here’s what you can do about it.

They do warn that tampering with these chips is illegal, and let me emphasize that I’m linking to someone else’s article here. Don’t shoot the messenger, Mr. Man!

Just Cool

Pleo the Robo-Dinosaur!

Off to the doctor’s. Y’all take care now, y’hear?