items impersonal

[calimac]

1. Science fiction isn't supposed to predict the future, but I get a kick when journalism does. I found two examples in The New Yorker's new 1960s decade collection. One is in a 1965 profile of Marshall McLuhan. Among the wacky things that McLuhan has said, it reports, is that he has "predicted a happy day when everyone will have his own portable computer to cope with the dreary business of digesting information." Well, that happened.

The other is an interview that I'm astonished I'd never seen reference to before. It's of Brian Epstein, in New York in late 1963 on his scouting trip to make arrangements for the upcoming visit of what the article austerely calls "a group of pop singers called the Beatles" ("the origin of the name is obscure," it adds). Although nobody in America has yet heard of this group, they seem to be very popular in Europe. Epstein concludes the interview by saying, "I think that America is ready for the Beatles. When they come, they will hit this country for six." I don't know what that expression means, but I can guess, and that happened too.

2. A lot of my friends are posting papers at academia.edu. I have a reading account, but I've resisted the temptation to contribute to it myself, and the e-mail I recently got explains why. It says that 143 papers on academia.edu mention my name and then offers a link to "View Your Mentions." Only that's not what the link does. It takes me to a page where I can upgrade my membership. That's not what it says, of course. But any button on that page that says "Get Started" or "View Your Mentions" gives me the same popup where I can pay $99/year for the privilege of seeing what it just told me I could see without bothering to mention this charge.

It says it can find things Google Scholar can't. Maybe so, but as most of the mentions of my name on Google Scholar actually just mean that my last name - which is not unique, and is used by at least 3 other scholars, one of them much more prolific than I - and my first name, which is quite common, appear somewhere in the same paper. And I'm not paying $99 to find out if this is the same.

Comments

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

In case you're interested, "hit for six" is a cricket term. When a batsman hits the ball over the boundary without its touching the ground first, it scores six runs - the maximum possible. (If it reaches the boundary but hits the ground first, that scores four.)

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

No, my limited knowledge of cricket did not reach that far. Thanks. All I knew of the scoring was the term "century" for getting 100 runs.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Ah, I'm surprised you didn't know that one. It appears in The Hobbit in the bit about how Bandobras Took knocked the head off of Golfimbul. It mixes two sporting references by purporting to have invented golf at the same time. Tolkien must have been feeling especially whimsical when he wrote that passage.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

no ... I don't think so. There's nothing about scoring in the Hobbit passage, which was the aspect of cricket I said I knew nothing about. And as I read the passage, it can only be about cricket insofar as both it and golf involve hitting a ball with "a wooden club," which is still a better description of a golf club than a cricket bat. Then the head goes down a rabbit hole, which nicely evokes a golf hole-in-one but has nothing to do with cricket, where there are no holes.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

I can't lay my hand on a copy of The Hobbit right now, but I'm pretty sure the sentence is approximately "hit for six and went down a rabbit hole." Translation into American would have been "hit for a home run." I know I didn't know just what it meant at the time, and it wasn't until Cheryl taught me how cricket is played that I actually got it.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Nope. Bullroarer "knocked their king Golfimbul's head clean off with a wooden club. It sailed a hundred yards through the air and went down a rabbit-hole" - that's what it says, and the annotated variorum edition confirms that's what it's always said. No such phrasing anywhere else in the book either. If you can find some unauthorized reprint which changed the wording, that would be astonishing and a great coup in Tolkien scholarship.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

It then occurred to me that it might have been in one of the author's draft versions, which have subsequently been published.

But no. This passage appears in the surviving fragment of what was apparently the very earliest draft of the story, which the author altered to add a reference to chess (!) - "in this way the battle was won by checkmate, and the games of Golf & chess invented simultaneously" (an alteration which did not appear in subsequent drafts), but still nothing about hitting anything "for six."

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Does Google Scholar not give you the option of searching for "David Bratman" or "D. Bratman" or "Bratman, D." (or all three) as a character chain longer than one word? I remember doing that back when I used AltaVista. Not having it in Google Scholar seems like an astonishing omission. Or does that still not narrow things down enough?

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

It is very difficult to persuade Google that when you put quotes around something, you want to search for that specific thing, and not for what Google thinks you want instead. It used to believe you when you did that; it's much less effective now. In information science, we call this "high-recall, low-precision" results, and it's a bane.

And to the extent that it did work, it was necessary to use every single permutation that might occur. Sometimes names occur in inverted order. Sometimes I use my middle initial, sometimes not. Etc.

Also - this was my original point - the academia.edu ad doesn't say what form of searching came up with 143 items with my name. Considering the mendacity of the ad, I wouldn't trust it to actually mean that.