I picked up the Penguin Classics edition of Marco Polo's The Travels, translated by Ronald Latham, because of Uncharted 2, a videogame whose treasure-hunting plot was based in part on Polo's doomed voyage home from China. I had no expectations of becoming a treasure hunter like Nathan Drake, looking for clues to hidden exotics in Polo's published pages. Instead, I was more curious about what Polo claimed to experience and witness. I bought The Journals of Lewis and Clark the same day for the same reason.
My experience of reading of Polo's experience, though, proved frustrating at times. The focus of this frustration was upon Latham. For the most part, he's a more than capable editor and translator. He introduces the text with some broader history as well as an account of the many different copies and translations of Polo's Travels. It is clear of the time and effort expended in the production of this particular translation of the text. However, a handful of footnotes marred, even ruined, certain passages.
It is with apparent bewilderment and fascination that Polo writes of certain animals, minerals and rocks. Latham's translation captures this well, but he lessens the impact with asterisks placed early in paragraphs. Rather than allow the reader to define and discern on their own just what Polo's writing about, Latham is all too eager to explain. In other words, Latham's a spoiler. Instead of being helpful, his footnotes are annoying, if not insulting. The Travels is not so cryptic in presentation and style that it requires such handholding.
Below are the passages from Polo's Travels that Latham asterisked and explained without so much as a "SPOILER ALERT."
"When the stuff found in this vein of which you have heard has been dug out of the mountain and crumbled into bits, the particles cohere and form fibres like wool. Accordingly, when the stuff has been extracted, it is first dried, then pounded in a large copper mortar and then washed. The residue consists of this fibre of which I have spoken and worthless earth, which is separated from it. Then this wool-like fibre is carefully spun and made into cloths. When the cloths are first made, they are far from white. But they are thrown into the fire and left there for a while; and then they turn as white as snow. And whenever one of these cloths is soiled or discoloured, it is thrown into the fire and left there for a while, and it comes out as white as snow" (89-90).
"It is a fact that throughout the province of Cathay there is a sort of black stone, which is dug out of veins in the hillsides and burns like logs. These stones keep a fire going better than wood. I assure you that, if you put them on the fire in the evening and see that they are well alight, they will continue to burn all night, so that you will find them still glowing in the morning" (156).
"In this province live huge snakes and serpents of such size that no one could help being amazed even to hear of them. They are loathsome creatures to behold. Let me tell you just how big they are. You may take it for a fact that there are some of them ten paces in length that are as thick as a stout cask: for their girth runs to about ten palms. These are the biggest. They have two squat legs in front near the head, which have no feet but simply three claws, two small and one bigger, like the claws of a falcon or a lion. They have enormous heads and eyes so bulging that they are bigger than loaves. Their mouth is big enough to swallow a man in one gulp. Their teeth are huge. All in all, the monsters are of such inordinate bulk and ferocity that there is neither man nor beast but goes in fear of them" (178).
"...they brought back with them the tusks of a wild boar of monstrous size. He had one of them weighed and found that its weight was 14 lb. You may infer for yourselves what must have been the size of the boar that had such tusks as this. Indeed they declare that some of these boars are as big as buffaloes" (300-301).
It's pretty clear what Polo describes, right?
Floating through Tetris’ cranial hyperspace forces a natural introspection. Often, sort of insanely, I’ll dwell upon what my playing method can tell me about myself. My technique isn’t to plow through rows or shatter a score; I play Tetris for the tetris: the four-row clear that comes with the vertically-nestled “I” block. Self-denial is necessary for the maneuver, as all must be laid aside for the blessed piece’s arrival. Meanwhile, the pile mounts dangerously. When the block finally appears, this mild daring and asceticism are handsomely repaid: there’s a flash of light, a scream of sound, and the pile’s heavy fall.
via themillions.com
M: The corporate yakuza guys get a thumbs up for realism. Nice suit. Smart. Financially savvy. Obsessed with money. Sneaky and conniving. Ruthless.
S: There are a lot of guys whom I feel like I know. The dialogue is right too. They sound like yakuza.
K: Braggarts, bullies, and sweet-talkers. I agree — it feels like I know the guys on the screen
via boingboing.net
the main reason games like Farmville maintain a huge player base is the enticement of the metagame. The actual game mechanic of farming — which comprises most of the game — is unfathomably dull. It’s the abstracted layer above the farming that creates the primary motivation: ribbons (achievements), new items, leaderboards, etc.
But the blur of time-consumption and value is simultaneously damaging Farmville. Because satisfaction is derived only from the metagame, success is a measure of how many hours you’re willing to play, not your abilities. Players who have invested a lot of time into the game end up feeling bitter about the fruits (or vegetables) of their labor.
via sleepoversf.com
On the page, the rhythm of the text emerges from both the macro design—the pleasing shape of the page, the proper amount of thumb space—and the micro—the right amount of leading, the evenness of the word spacing, the correct break of a line. On the screen, the rhythm of a text encompasses all of these things and more—the placement of a link, the shift from text to video and back again, the movement from one text to another. The rhythm becomes more complex as the orchestra gets larger, but the desire for rhythm does not subside.
In order to create this rhythm, the book must be designed and composed for the screen. A beautiful digital text can no more be arrived at by “converting” from a print design than a beautiful print book can be created by converting a Word file. The digital book will never come into its own so long as it is treated as a byproduct, unworthy of attention.
The research, published in The Journal of Educational Psychology, found that students tend to study on computers as they would with traditional texts: They mindlessly over-copy long passages verbatim, take incomplete or linear notes, build lengthy outlines that make it difficult to connect related information, and rely on memory drills like re-reading text or recopying notes.
Meanwhile, undergraduates in the study scored 29 to 63 percentage points higher on tests when they used study techniques like recording complete notes, creating comparative charts, building associations, and crafting practice questions on their screens.
via sciencedaily.com
Many of the advances in space travel have come from the hard-won experience of past failures, but NASA and its brethren also rely on paid volunteers, who subject themselves to all manner of surreal and bizarre experiments that attempt to replicate living in space. For instance, in 1962 NASA funded a motion sickness study in which twenty Navy cadets were harnessed to a chair mounted on its side, and then rotated, rotisserie style, at up to thirty revolutions per minute, approximately six times faster than the chickens turn at Boston Market. (Only eight of the twenty cadets completed the exercise.)
via failuremag.com
While the invention of writing itself could never have progressed without a highly structured and even authoritarian state to back it up, the coming of the modern alphabet is a completely different story. Written in Cuneiform we have the wonderful adventures of Gilgamesh and his companion Enkidu, but most of the clay-tablets from the agricultural city-states are more mundane: lists, taxation, and commercial transactions.
Over the past eight years I’ve been studying the cognitive demands of physical work. That includes comparatively high-end jobs such as surgery and physical therapy, but mostly blue-collar and service occupations, such as plumbing and hair styling — the kind of occupations the people we just heard from hope to enter. Our society tends to make sharp and weighty distinctions between white collar and blue collar occupations, between brain work and hand work, “neck up and neck down” jobs, as one current aphorism has it.
But what I’ve found as I’ve closely examined physical work is its significant intellectual content. This content is no surprise if we consider the surgeon, but the carpenter and the hair stylist and the welder, too, are constantly solving problems, applying concepts, making decisions on the fly. A lot of our easy characterizations about work just don’t hold up under scrutiny. Hand and brain are cognitively connected.