Unsought Input

  Over on Neil Gaiman’s web journal there is all sorts of news about his newest novel, The Graveyard  Book, due out by the end of the year. If you weren’t sure, I am pretty excited about this whole affair with Mr. Gaiman being one of my favorite authors of all time. A quick little quote from his site quoting Kurt Busiek talking about the novel:

THE GRAVEYARD BOOK’s title is an homage to THE JUNGLE BOOK, since TGB is about a boy whose family dies, and who winds up being raised in a graveyard, by ghosts, and the other things that lurk there.

The boy, named Nobody (“Bod” for short), learns many things, discovers odd places and curious people, deals hesitantly with the world outside the graveyard and eventually has to deal with the forces that killed the rest of his family, and who are still looking for him. I won’t say much more about the plot, because hey, it’s not going to be out for months.

But I think it’s likely Neil’s best novel yet. It has a great deal of warmth, whimsy, dark fantasy (verging on horror), adventure, charm, suspense, monsters, ghouls, a witch, school bullies, policemen, ancient burial mounds, knife-wielding killers, dancing, mystery, trouble, a dash of romance, life lessons, and a creature named Silas, who is both what he seems to be and not. And the most endearingly dangerous and threatening ancient terror you’ve ever met. The story’s engaging, there’s a real sense of menace, and it builds to a strong and satisfying climax.

Either way, it’s in my things to check out list. If you are unfamiliar with Neil Gaiman’s work you can read American Gods for free on line. Personally, I like American Gods and it’s sequel Anansi Boys the best of his work. You can read the whole novel. In fact, I insist you read the whole novel. It’s free. The whole book. And it’s a pretty big book. You can read a few pages a day while at work or before bed. Whenever. But it’s free and it’s available and it would be a shame not to take advantage of it.

Which brings me to my next little subject, has anyone heard of Endless Reflections, the Sandman graphic novels? That link right before this sentence was something I stumbled upon which makes me think that there might be a TV series for the Sandman comics. How cool would that be!? If anyone has any news, please post in comments. I looked all over wikipedia and his site with no avail. I really hope this isn’t just a joke, I think this would be the coolest TV show.

A few months back we wrote about the comedic possibilities of super heroes confronting real life.  In the last few years there has been a flood of super hero comics, movies, and TV shows and many of them place people with extraordinary abilities in ordinary situations.  Witness the blockbuster Spider-Man movies, or heroes like Hiro from Heroes.

But beyond the world of fiction, what kind of super powers can we find in real life?  Sure, it’s fun to come up with speculative pseudoscience explanations for Superman’s heat vision, but that’s not likely to produce any results.  Even non-powered heroes like Batman rely too much on poor comic book physics and unrealistic survivability to produce real-life counterparts.

We’ll find our real-life super powers in less obvious places.  In the 1980s Marvel had a character named Cypher, or more properly Doug Ramsey.   Doug wasn’t known by his super hero name because his power wasn’t flashy or very useful in battle - Doug was genetically gifted with the ability to understand languages.

This amazing ability to learn languages (along with numbers, dates, etc.) is something you can find in real life, often linked with disabling autism.  Often, but not always.  Watch the video to see the life of Daniel Tammet, the boy with the incredible brain.

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Who says that nerds won’t make good parents? Oh, no one said that? My bad. I guess I misheard, but here is a list anyway. Oh, and I am too lazy to prioritize these, so they are in no particular order.

1. Who has cooler toys and gadgets than nerds do? I can tell you my husband has three little man armies downstairs that he built from models, a million dolls-oh, I mean action figures- all over the place, card games, board games, you name it. As far as gadgets, how about good computers, video games consoles, large televisions and home theater systems? And let’s not forget about the plethora of DVDs or Blue Ray or whatever you happen to own. The child of a nerd will want for no awesome toys, as the nerdy parents will have already bought them all for themselves.

2. The children of nerds will not be left to watch TV alone for hours on end while the parents ignore their children. Oh no. And I can guarantee you that these children will not be watching The Doodlebops, either. These kids will be watching DVDs of G.I. Joe, Transformers, Thundercats, Sesame Street, Voltron, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and many more of our childhood favorites. And we will be sitting right beside them reliving our childhoods.

3. A Surplus of old comic books to read. Your nerd child is years behind on the X Men Series so you had better start reading him/her in the womb. Think about it, if you had the comics you had now as a child (all of them at once, I mean) you may have never left your room. Nerd children will be able to read by the time they are in kindergarten and they will have already read the entire Phoenix Saga. (more…)

Spider-Man 3 seems like a shoo-in to join Spider-Man 1 and 2 in the top ten highest-grossing films of all time, but reviews have been mixed. Right now it’s running about 60% positive at Metacritic and 61% positive at Rotten Tomatoes.

So is it any good? I thought so, but this isn’t a movie review. As an internationally-recognized expert in Spidey Studies, I thought it would be important to point out where Spider-Man 3 gets it right, and where it get things wrong. I’ll start with the bad news first, with the good news to follow in the next day or two.

Please note: this is not a series of gripes over deviations from the “cannon” of the original Amazing Spider-Man comic books or anything like that. Spider-Man, like many of his his comic book and other literary brethren, has been written by many different people over the years in many different media. Instead, I hope to point out where Sam Raimi deviated from the crux of the characters or missed opportunities that presented themselves.

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I ran across a great post at Technocrat titled If We Taught English the Way We Teach Mathematics.

“Suppose that those classes, from elementary school right through to high school, amounted to nothing more than reading dictionaries, getting drilled in spelling and formal grammatical construction, and memorizing vast vocabulary lists — you never read a novel, nor a poem; never had contact with anything beyond the pedantic complexity of English spelling and formal grammar, and precise definitions for an endless array of words. You would probably hate the subject.”

This is a great point, and the post goes on to talk about why it’s not just a lack of “real world” examples that makes math and science such boring, intimidating subjects.  Here’s the perfect example of how a real world example definitely did not help one student with physics:

So if memorizing facts and formulas is no use, and contrived, often bizarre examples are no help, how should we teach math and science?

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