martin remy

In Defense of Teaching Creative Writing

Martin Remy — Thu, 10 May 2012 20:51:55 +0000

Two weeks ago we showed you an opinion piece in the New York Times by Claire Needell Hollander, who says children should be reading more great literature in school. Claire was kind enough to write the following piece for us, arguing the flipside: that children should be taught to write creatively. – Eds.

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Years ago in a creative writing class I was a teaching, a student of mine, a fourteen year old eighth grader—we’ll call him J—wrote a narrative about playing in the snow in Central Park with his mother, his stepfather, and his natural father, all of whom were dead.

Fiction Advocate of the Day

Martin Remy — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 19:09:54 +0000

Reblogged from :

Claire Needell Hollander, a reading enrichment teacher in the New York City Public Schools, did some serious fiction advocacy in the New York Times yesterday. For the last seven years, Hollander has worked with sixth through eight graders who wouldn’t normally be exposed to classic works of fiction.

Along with Of Mice and Men, my groups read: Sounder…

Tweaking the UI

Martin Remy — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 00:41:20 +0000

Who wrote this?

… with enough money … I’ll tell you what I would do. In the first place, I would change the general appearance of the site and make seven wide columns where we now have nine narrow ones. Then I would have the font spaced more, and these two changes would give the site a much cleaner appearance. Secondly, it would be well to make the site as far as possible original, to clip only some leading sites … [we] must also increase our number of advertisements [even] if we have to lower rates to do it … images are a detail, though a very important one … images attract the eye and stimulate the imagination … all these changes [should] be made not by degrees but at once so that the improvement will be very marked and noticeable and attract universal attention and comment.

Perhaps the antiquated language at the end gave it away. This is not an email from an online publisher to her investors in 2005. I just replaced paper with site, type with font, and illustration with image in an excerpt of a letter William Randolph Hearst wrote to his father in 1885, listing changes he would make to the San Francisco Examiner if his father would just let him run that paper. Hearst did take over the paper and, after making a number of changes like these, made the Examiner the most popular paper on the west coast.

Source: The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst by Kenneth Whyte (a great read).

Newton's method using rational arithmetic

Martin Remy — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 14:30:46 +0000

Reblogged from Rod Carvalho:

The floating-point number system puts further restraints on what can be expected. We can at best hope to keep the relative error under control, and we cannot expect to find zeros far from the origin with great absolute accuracy.

– Richard W. Hamming [1]

I am somewhat disenchanted with floating-point arithmetic. We all have implemented numerical methods using floating-point numbers. But, how many of us have implemented numerical methods using…

Bring back the Muppet Show!

Martin Remy — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 20:05:04 +0000

Watching The Muppets with my family last weekend made me nostalgic for that Saturday afternoon ritual from my childhood, dubbed in German of course. It’s still funny:

How I fell out of love with my Nook

Martin Remy — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 01:30:57 +0000

I’ve been an early adopter of gadgets for a long time. I remember buying a Sharp TM-20 before a trip to Europe because I thought, Won’t it be bitchin’ to get my email by just holding this gadget to a hotel phone or pay phone! That was one of the few impulse gadget buys that worked out, the TM-20 really was bitchin’.

A few years ago, when the Kindle was launched, I ordered one on the first day. I was hooked on carrying around dozens of books instead of having to choose before a trip.

But I soon realized that it was better for reading linear stuff like novels, and not so good for reading technical books, in which flipping back and forth between chapters and index is a core pattern of usage. When the giant Kindle DX came out, I completely ignored the fact that the larger size didn’t make books any more flippable, and I bought one.

And then it really sank in that e-reader user interfaces till had a very long way to go, and I went back to buying printed books. Until a month ago, when I couldn’t see see the floor near my bed anymore because of the many stacks of books. I did some research on the latest e-readers, went to Best Buy to play with some, and ended up buying a Nook Simple Touch.

The Nook was perfect. It’s light and grippy. It has a crisp E-Ink display, and you can turn pages by swiping across it — no more buttons to press. You can look up words with a couple of touches. I’ve heard that there’s even software that will let you convert the Kindle books that you paid for and own for reading on the Nook. You can even highlight stuff in your books!

And that’s when I fell out of love with my Nook. Why in the world can’t I see or search my highlights across my books? Without this feature, highlighting is no better than sticking Post-It flags on pages in my paper books. In fact, Post-It flags are better because I can see across my bookshelf which books have them.

Another reason not to love e-book readers right now is that the eBook market still hasn’t figured out that charging more for e-books than paperbacks isn’t going to fly for very long. Sure, it’s convenient to carry dozens of books in one reader, but the cost of distributing eBooks is vanishingly small compared to printed books — the only reason e-books are so expensive is that the fat cat middle men from whom you buy e-books own the store, the reader, your library, everything. I could go on, but this isn’t a treatise on the broken e-book market.

Another reason I fell out of love with my Nook: I have a retired neighbor with whom I have an unofficial book club. Not the kind where cakes and cookies are served, literary theories are expounded, and husbands are gossiped about, but simply the kind where one club member says to another over a glass of whiskey, “hey, I just finished this crazy novel by this Irish guy Lorcan Roche, you might like it, here you go”, or the other says “I found this copy of Sterling Hayden’s Wanderer, have you ever read it?” Some Nook books are lendable, most are not. End of informal neighborhood book club.

There’s also something disturbing about stripping away all of the produced aspects of a printed book and normalizing it to an e-reader: the size, the cover, the paper, the font. And the bookmark from my favorite bookstore.

I’m not putting my Nook on craiglist just yet, but I’m going back to printed books for now. Maybe someone will disrupt the e-book market. And maybe someone else will invent a reader with a more book-like user interface. Until then, I’ll keep dreaming about the the best of both worlds.

Got Telescope? Binoculars?

Martin Remy — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 16:51:33 +0000

Last night I noticed some bright planet-like things in the western sky, so I dragged the old Dobsonian telescope out of the basement for the first time in years. The objects turned out to be Jupiter and Venus. I’m clueless at taking photos through my telescope, but I found some examples by the talented jpstanley to give you an idea of what you can see through a normal amateur telescope:

Jupiter and its satellites (photo by jpstanley)

Venus (photo by jpstanley)

Even a good pair of binoculars will show you Jupiter’s moons and Saturn’s rings, and if you catch a half-moon (when the shadows are longest), it’s one of the most rewarding sites in the night sky:

Moon (photo by jpstanley)

The next time you see a half-moon, grab your binoculars, you’ll be amazed at the detail you can see.

More info:

Celebrate Your Milestones

Martin Remy — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 17:03:41 +0000

Reblogged from WordPress.com News:

Once in a while, it’s important to stop, catch your breath, and look at your accomplishments before you move on to the next thing — to put a stake in the ground that says, “I made it this far!”

Today, we’re rolling out a couple of notifications to help you celebrate your blog activity milestones. From now on, whenever you hit a milestone for how many…

Where in the World?

Martin Remy — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 15:05:38 +0000

Reblogged from WordPress.com News:

If you’ve ever wondered where on Earth all the visitors to your site are coming from, this feature is for you!

Mosey on over to your My Stats tab on the WordPress.com homepage:

…and check out the brand new “Views by Country” panel. Now, you can see at a glance exactly which countries comprise your audience:

When you click on or hover over a country name, the map zooms in so you can really get a feel for all the parts of the planet your content has reached: