Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

The Phantom Prof Offers a Free Writing Class

Posted on August 10, 2005 by Michael Froomkin

Lots of people offer free congealed work product online, be it articles or software. But how many people offer free personalized classes? The Phantom Professor is thinking of doing it:

Here's the offer: The Phantom Professor's Online Writing Workshop. Open admission. Free tuition.

Using all the exercises, reading lists, quizzes and other tricks I have developed during 15 years of teaching, I will offer you, the blogistas, the benefit of my experience and expertise. I will also incorporate new things I learned at the University of Iowa Summer Writing Workshop, the most creative and inspiring haven for writers in America. You can find most of what we'll read on the Internet or in a library, so you don't even have to buy books. (Though some of them you will want to own.)

If you need help getting that novel or screenplay started, this four-month workshop will kickstart you into a creative mode that will get that sucker under way. If you're interested in journalism, here's where you can start. If you have just never felt confident putting words on paper, step right up. You don't have to be college age. My techniques work whether you're 12 or 92.

I will post short exercises to help you improve grammar, punctuation, spelling and style. You will do them at your own pace and grade them yourself.

Every couple of weeks, you'll have a short assignment (no more than 300 to 500 words) due. You can email them to me or post them in the comments section for everyone to read. We can “workshop” your output together. With positive but honest critiques to work from, you will rewrite these assignments until they are polished. You can even drop in and out as your schedule permits or your interest waxes and wanes.

Why am I doing this? Why not? As I watched my professor friends head back to classes, I just thought, “Why waste all the good stuff I've accumulated? Why not make it available for anyone who wants to do it?”

Even my agent likes the idea. Even though I'm doing it gratis.

So let me know what you think. Would you join this “class”? If enough of you do, we'll start a week from today. I always did like the Tuesday-Thursday schedule best.

I imagine there will be a stampede.

Posted in Internet | 7 Comments

Safari/Mac Rendering Woes

Posted on August 9, 2005 by Michael Froomkin

Something is messing up this page on Safari, and (not having a Mac to test with) I can't figure out what on earth it could be.

The problem pre-dates the addition of the clustermap in the right margin (which will start functioning tomorrow, if all goes well). As far as I can tell, it also seems to be unrelated to the previous change, the addition of the Google page rank graphic in the right margin. I've seen a screenshoot and both of the outside columns are overlapping the center one, leaving a wide swath of blank stuff where the two outside columns should be.

I know that my HTML isn't completely standards compliant; some day I'll move to wordpress and do a better job. In the meanwhile, if anyone has a suggestion as to what might be the cause of this problem, I would be grateful for advice.

Posted in Discourse.net | 7 Comments

Edgy Thinking

Posted on August 9, 2005 by Michael Froomkin

This query at Nicholas Weaver's Random Thoughts is the sort of thing you see first at the edges, on smaller blogs, and then, sometimes, a few days later you see it everywhere.

Except that I just spent a chunk of Monday morning in the car repair waiting room, which was playing one of the local TV stations, I think the NBC affiliate.

In the hour and a half I was there, the news covered the following topics (that I can recall):

  • The weather (the sun rose this morning — illustrated with lovely pictures of Miami)
  • Anchorman Peter Jennings dies
  • Yoga for dogs (actually, they didn't cover this — they produced a lengthy promo for the upcoming story on the nightly news).
  • Space shuttle landing delayed due to weather
  • The weather (the sun is in the sky, illustrated with lovely pictures of Key West)
  • Extensive interview with a mother who had to take her kids to the first day of school today.
  • What to do about the “problem” of curly hair
  • The world's smallest ice cream
  • Interview with Barbara Walters about Peter Jennings [note that he anchored for a different network; this wasn't an internal ABC promotional thing]

There were probably other stories, but I can't remember them. I can, however, assure you that the following topics were never mentioned at any time:

  • The war in Iraq1
  • The economy
  • Any foreign countries
  • Any other states (except in the weather report) (update: and possible landing sites for the shuttle)

Which is why some of this edgy thinking stays at the edge….

1 Update: I forgot one: the war did get mentioned during a segment on four singing grannies who were interviewed wearing their silly costumes. The grannies write and sing anti-Bush protest songs, and they called the war illegal and immoral. The segment didn't actually make fun of them, although one had the sense the interviewer was struggling between a desire to mock and a desire to respect the aged.

Posted in Econ & Money, The Media | 3 Comments

The Philosopher at the Cocktail Party

Posted on August 9, 2005 by Michael Froomkin

Wacky (academic) fun at Thoughts Arguments and Rants: Silly Talk about Philosophy (spotted via Leiter) in which real live (academic) philosophers respond to this invitation:

what about a thread on the silliest things people have said to you about philosophy, or silliest philosophical claims you’ve heard made?

Posted in Completely Different | Comments Off on The Philosopher at the Cocktail Party

That’s Charming

Posted on August 8, 2005 by Michael Froomkin

Isn't this just charming: the UK is considering establishing Secret courts for terror cases. That's “Special anti-terror courts sitting in secret to determine how long suspects should be detained without charge.”

We had to kill liberty and justice in order to save it?

Posted in UK | 5 Comments

More on Cell Phone Paranoia

Posted on August 8, 2005 by Michael Froomkin

Since we’re doing such a good line is worrying about cell phones this week, here are two more items to tickle the fancy.

First, Michael Zimmer writes about Public Surveillence via Cellphone, pointing to a Wired article on some work at MIT:

Eagle’s Reality Mining project logged 350,000 hours of data over nine months about the location, proximity, activity and communication of volunteers, and was quickly able to guess whether two people were friends or just co-workers. It also found that MBA students actually do spend $45,000 a year to build monster Rolodexes, and that first-year college students — even those who attend MIT — lead chaotic lives.

He and his team were able to create detailed views of life at the Media Lab, by observing how late people stayed at the lab, when they called one another and how much sleep students got.

Given enough data, Eagle’s algorithms were able to predict what people — especially professors and Media Lab employees — would do next and be right up to 85 percent of the time.

Ben Hyde noticed the same Wired story and supplements it with this amazing story:

A few years back the Irish cellphone company discovered that they had neglected to discard ten years of this data. Traces of every cell phone user in Ireland for a decade!

Posted in Law: Privacy | Comments Off on More on Cell Phone Paranoia