¶ Matins: Not everybody likes the High Line Park. (via Infrastructurist) Make that “not everybody + one.”(via kottke.org) 

¶ Lauds: Smashingly handsome and intelligent design, from Jorge Chamorro (be sure to click through from The Best Part).

¶ Prime: At The Economist, Banyan worries about the recrudescence, this time in Asia, of the world-shattering, sea-power-obsessed ideas of Alfred Thayer Mahan.

¶ Tierce: Warren Whitaker, the T & E attorney who drafted the doubtful 2004 codicil that, prosecutors maintain, Brooke Astor was incompetent to execute, took his instructions from F X Morrissey, co-defendant in the Marshall trial.

¶ Sext: Ha! They knew it was a hoax all along — so they say, at Bentham Science Publishers, a rather hucksterish-sounding organization that just accepted a paper submitted by scientists at the Center for Research on Applied Phrenology.

¶ Nones: How weird is this: Saudi princess runs up huge bills in Paris, then refuses to pay, claiming diplomatic immunity. Huh? (Then she pays — one of the bills, anyway.)

¶ Vespers: If you can stand to wait for the book to appear in shops, read the Rumpus interview with Kate Christensen, whose Trouble is a very thoughtful summer read.

¶ Compline: Alex Krupp defends KWL charts. I had absolutely no idea what KWL charts are. Wikipedia to the rescue. As for the charts…

Oremus…

§ Matins. As Jebediah Reed notes,

It’s important to keep in mind that this is not necessarily a debate founded in practical reality. It’s Kunstler lobbying a hand grenade into the discourse. The Highline was never going to be rehabbed as a rail line. But the fact that it theoretically could have, makes the question interesting.

One the bright side, we really are starting to pay more attention to the remaining value of things like abandoned railroads (including remaking as them as parks or trails). Just in time, hopefully.

§ Lauds. Mr Chamorro’s Web site is entitled La Cáscara Amarga, which I’d have translated, literally, as “the bitter rind.” Happily, my Langenscheit tips me off to the idiom: “advanced ideas.”

I can’t get enough of this. It makes me think of Don Draper. An alternative Don Draper.

§ Prime. The Indian Ocean is the new North Atlantic.

The understanding of sea power has since evolved, yet Mahan is now hugely admired in Asia’s two most populous powers. Banyan was recently in Singapore for the Shangri-La Dialogue, run by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a London think-tank. It seems Britain’s former naval dominance of Asia has been forgiven or forgotten (or perhaps is recalled with admiration), for this forum is where defence types now get together with old friends and future foes. And whenever Banyan prodded a military man from India or China, out leapt a Mahanite.

If this were mere vainglory, it would be bad enough. But it’s about protecting the lanes of Asian markets — notional and suppositious propositions.

§ Tierce. John Eligon’s story at the Times is quite discreetly written: a hasty reader might easily conclude that Mrs Astor telephoned Mr Whitaker with the instructions for amending her will. Not so, of course.

Then there’s the “typo.”

[Prosecutor Joel] Seidemann questioned Mr. Whitaker about several portions of letter he had written to Mr. Morrissey dated Dec. 23, 2003, that addressed Mrs. Astor’s supposed desire to change her will. One sentence read, “Mr. A wishes for him and his family to exert a greater degree of control over the estate and the fund.”

Mr. Whitaker said “Mr. A” may have been a typo that actually meant to refer to Mrs. Astor as “Mrs. A.” But he did not rule out the possibility that he was referring to Mr. Marshall when he wrote “Mr. A.” If he was referring to Mr. Marshall, it would speak to the prosecution’s argument that Mr. Marshall was incessant in his desire to squeeze his mother’s assets.

Doctors call it “Freudian slip.”

§ Sext. For a great party trick, memorize the following extract, quoted in New Scientist:

In this section, we discuss existing research into red-black trees, vacuum tubes, and courseware [10]. On a similar note, recent work by Takahashi suggests a methodology for providing robust modalities, but does not offer an implementation  

Phrenology!

§ Nones. Maha al-Sudairi is the wife of Saudi Arabia’s Interior Minister. Which is very nice and all, but how does that confer diplomatic immunity on while she junkets in Paris. She is, presumably, not in the French capital on diplomatic business. And surely there must be well-established protocols to protect merchants and service providers from this sort of nonsense, at least in the world’s major cities. If you know smething that I don’t know, please advise.

§ Vespers. Whether you’re going to read the novel or not, you’ll find Ms Christensen refreshing on the subject of friendship.

Female friendship can and often does go as deep as marriage or family, but it lacks the codified structures of those more “official” relationships. Therefore it can be either a glorious, carefree bond or a nebulous and swampy world of painful misunderstanding and thwarted expectations — there are no rules about what we owe our friends, and often it feels as if each friendship is sort of made up as it goes along, improvised from scratch.

I’ve taken “friendship breaks,” I’ve flat-out dumped friends and been dumped myself, I’ve struggled through painful situations with friends, and I’ve learned, over the years, that friendship must be seen by both people as entirely voluntary, entirely based on mutual choice — although friends often feel guilty or resentful about letting each other down and say or do things they’d rather not say or do in order to avoid hurt feelings, there really are no obligations, no real responsibilities, that attend friendship.

So in a way it’s the purest of bonds — both people are there because, ultimately, they choose to be together, with every lunch, every walk together, every conversation, it’s a reinforcement of that choice. Over the years, a friendship becomes ingrained, but a friend isn’t someone I feel I can ever take for granted.

I wanted to write about this somehow — raise some questions about female friends who’ve known each other through the decades and have stayed close despite divergences in their lives. I find these friendships deeply moving and inspiring — at the end, after her poignant rapprochement with Indrani, Josie thinks about Raquel and wonders whether she failed her; she realizes, both from what happened with Indrani and what happened with Raquel, that the way to be a true friend is not to judge or proscribe, but to empathize and be as fully present as possible – this is what true friendship is made of, no mater what the outcome.

I question only the limitation to “female friendship,” although it’s a quibble. I find that male friendship is very rare. Men swear loyalty oaths to one another early in life, and although these bonds are familiar, they are often impersonal: it is off limits for one man to question another, something that women do all the time (as Trouble shows, if it needed showing).

§ Compline. KWL charts must be a research-project device that’s after my time. Mr Krupp begins by noting that he hated KWL charts in school — that everybody did — and I can see why!

• K: What I know.
• W: What I want to know.
• L: What I learned.  

The first step, for one thing, ought to be the second step. This makes completing the “know” part much easier. Mr Krupp says as much.

Whenever you’re thinking about a big problem, write down all your questions and background knowledge in advance. Don’t just write down your main question, write down every question whose answer could conceivably be insightful or useful to your intended audience. Then write down all your background knowledge. Not just a paragraph or two, but write down all your subject knowledge and all your theories of how you think things are working. (Preferably in a mindmap.) Don’t do any research until this is done. Not even a Google search.

As for the third component, I don’t see the point of it at all. Interesting things learned in the course of researching the W part but not strictly relevant to it ought to be noted separately.

For grown-up scholars who seek to expand their knowledge, presumably beyond the limits of the library at hand, some sort of bibliography is in order. Where is information likely to be found? What are the sources that others cite?

That said, I see the need (as I did not before) for this kind of research framework.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
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