5.0160 Rs: POGO; QWERTY (again); What Next? (4/79)
Elaine Brennan & Allen Renear (EDITORS@BROWNVM.BITNET)
Wed, 19 Jun 91 16:48:53 EDT
Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 5, No. 0160. Wednesday, 19 Jun 1991.
(1) Date: Tue, 18 Jun 91 11:05:03 EDT (31 lines)
From: weinshan@cps.msu.edu
Subject: Re: 5.0150 Grace Hopper and the 'Bug'
(2) Date: 18 Jun 91 14:53:00 EDT (16 lines)
From: "Mary Dee Harris" <mdharris@guvax.georgetown.edu>
Subject: Keyboards
(3) Date: Tuesday, 18 June 1991 3:08pm CT (9 lines)
From: EIEB360@UTXVM.BITNET
Subject: 5.0146 Humanities Computing; Co
(4) Date: Tue, 18 Jun 1991 23:41:45 EDT (23 lines)
From: TFGREEN@SUVM
Subject: More on What Next -- Research
(1) --------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 18 Jun 91 11:05:03 EDT
From: weinshan@cps.msu.edu
Subject: Re: 5.0150 Grace Hopper and the 'Bug'
On "truths which transcend truth" (Jim Marchand's recent comments):
Pogo did NOT say, "We have met the enemy, and they are us."
I have a letter dated June 9, 1969 from Walt Kelly.
"The quotation to which you refer is in the last paragraph of the
foreword to THE POGO PAPERS, which reads as follows:
'There is no need to sally forth, for it remains true that those things
which make us human are, curiously enough, always close at hand.
Resolve then, that on this very ground, with small flags waving and
tinny blasts on tiny trumpets, we shall meet the enemy, and not only may
he be ours, he may be us.'
"It has been erroneously quoted over the years and attributed to the
strip. I've come to suspect that someone may have picked it up and take
a few liberties in the process. Far too many people recall it as you do
to account for that long arm of curious coincidence."
Serious POGO schollars may write for photocopies of this letter.
Don Weinshank
Computer Science Department
Michigan State University
East Lansing MI 48824 USA
(2) --------------------------------------------------------------23----
Date: 18 Jun 91 14:53:00 EDT
From: "Mary Dee Harris" <mdharris@guvax.georgetown.edu>
Subject: Keyboards
More trivia about keyboards --
The way I heard the story about the qwerty keyboard was just the opposite
of an earlier response. When typers proficiency exceeded the speed of
the typewriter, the typewriter makers redesigned the keyboard to slow
typists down -- rather than the other way around.
The most famous shrdlu I know about was the (imaginary) robot in Terry
winograd's blocks world -- one of the first sucessful natural language
systems (from about 1970).
Mary Dee Harris
(3) --------------------------------------------------------------13----
Date: Tuesday, 18 June 1991 3:08pm CT
From: EIEB360@UTXVM.BITNET
Subject: 5.0146 Humanities Computing; Co
Willard, it seems to me that humanities computing also includes,
somewhere, the invention of new fields of inquiry ("invention" being
perhaps the wrong word) having to do with the emergence of new media.
John Slatin, U of Texas at Austin
(4) --------------------------------------------------------------28----
Date: Tue, 18 Jun 1991 23:41:45 EDT
From: TFGREEN@SUVM
Subject: More on What Next -- Research
Willard's recent note on "What next?" prompts me to wonder when the
sorts of things he calls 'research' began to be described in such
terminology. Having a PhD in philosophy, I have always found it
awkward, pretentious, or just plain wrong headed to suggest that
anything I do in writing philosophy could be called research. On
the other hand, it seems to me reasonable to say that those engaged
in writing the history of ideas do do research. I can't imagine a
novelist ever speaking of the actual writing of a novel as "doing
research," but it seems fitting to say that in preparing to write
a great deal of research is done. I wonder if Johan Huizinga
thought he was doing research in doing Homo Ludens, or Fustel in
writing The Ancient City.
Is the spread of the term "research" to describe the activities of
scholars a clue to the penetration of R&D standards to fields of
scholarship where such standards don't fit? Are there changing limits
to the context within which talk of "research" is taken to make sense?
Tom Green