July 10 - What's your favorite story?

July 10, 2009

Comments

[Greg Goss]

0: Will did indeed project ennui in his opening.

1: Easter Island is too far a flight for any significant tourism industry. There's some, but not a lot. The seventies novel "Shuttle Down" gives a nice overview of how the island was thirty years ago.

2: The coastline search for the "First Americans" evidence is important. It's only in the last five years ago that the "Alberta theory" was disproved by too-old evidence of human habitation in Chile, of all places. Prior to the last few years, it was thought that the earliest Americans arrived by travelling between two of the ice sheets, but that channel appeared too late.

I disagree with Will's scorn on this one. The coastal islands theory versus the "walking" theory of America's settlement is a lot more important than a shirt-camera. I would rate this the #2 story after Neptune.

3: Swine flu to the swine? THIS is the story that "isn't news". A herd (flock? Group? Crowd?) of pigs had to be destroyed in May in Alberta Canada after a carpenter just back to work from a Mexican vacation transferred germs to the pigs. Anyone who felt the need to "experiment" with giving swine flu to swine just isn't following the news. http://www.cbc.ca/canada/edmonton/story/2009/06/07/edm-pig-famer-swine-flu-cull.html

4: I don't want an intelligent elevator talking to me. That way lies the bored door from the spaceship on Hitchhiker's Guide.

Summaries: You've got to give the crew a stack of newspapers to study how to make a verbless statement. The wrapup is a reminder, not a restatement of the story. "Longevity formula from Easter Island"; "Gallileo's Neptune"; and "Swine Flu 2: Back to the Pigs." Forget the "whoever rediscovered it 238 years later." or the "c'mon". Verbs are OK in headlines, but seldom.

If Will's going to give a style report then we're going to start insisting on a webcam version of the 'Bag. Split screen or whatever for whoever's on remote.

Bonsai watermelons? Reminds me of the hoax site from the early days of the internet for "bonsai Kitties".

(And don't forget tinyurl.com/feedblog)

[Greg Goss]

So I'm now the official grumpy reviewer, picking apart the stories afterwards? http://xkcd.com/386/ or http://forum.muppetcentral.com/showthread.php?t=3023. Not how I EXPECTED to become famous. (grin)

This three-stage presentation was what I've been taught in classroom "how to give a presentation" courses. It supposedly was developed by IBM. "Tell them what you're going to tell them; tell 'em; then tell 'em what you just told them." Somewhere back in the misty depths of literature I've read over the years (something by Heinlein?) is a military reference to convincing people -- "What I tell you three times is true". (quick google) It's from a treatise by the foremost logician of the 19th century. Charles Dodgeson, writing under a pseudonym, "The Hunting of the Snark".

Whoops. Didn't mean to run off on a side-track like that. I'm really learning from you guys. In my opinion, a three-stage presentation is overkill for something as casually presented as yours is. Headlines and presentation, or presentation and sum-up. But the three-stage isn't absurd.

Neil Armstrong SHOT FIRST! But it was still self-defense.

Some of the semi-stories that come out in the banter are as interesting as the official stories. Jorge isn't listening to the paragraph about the bowl-shaped Oxy-grabber molecule, but his subconscious draws a bowl on the sketchpad anyhow.

And Jorge can remember the future? He's wasted on a science banter show. We need to get him onto the stock trader networks.

The system asks for my email when I post this. Can't you call that up some how? If you google for Greg Goss Calgary, my web page is the second link.

[Mark A. Wilson]

Always fun, the feedbag podcast, but all three of you very much need a refresher on the geologic time scale:

http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/exhibits/geologictime.php

Looking forward to the next edition!