Google Makes Us Dumber?

The headline says "Google Is Making Us All Dumber," but the article is about memory loss.

The study finds that when we know where to find information online, we are less likely to remember it or recall that information. Instead just relying on conducting a quick search.*

Since when is not being able to remember something a sign of stupidity? The dumbest person in the world can also have the best memory, no? There's nothing contradictory here. And then there's the quote from Einstein: "Never memorize something that you can look up."** That sounds like the smart thing to do, at least from the standpoint of efficiency.

Stupidity is lack of intelligence. Intelligence is the ability to learn or understand or to deal with new situations. It's also the skilled use of reason. Another definition is the ability to apply knowledge to manipulate one's environment.

Is Google impairing this ability? I'd argue for the opposite. Google is becoming a virtual extension of our brain. While scary I think that's pretty cool.

But judging from my having to look up the definitions of dumbness, stupidity, and intelligence, maybe the author has a point.

* Is that a sentence fragment? Are news articles ruining our grammar?

** A classic appeal to authority. But I wonder, why do people cite Einstein for things other than physics? Because he was a brilliant physicist he was an expert in everything else? Let's cite someone else to help me out. Dear old Nietzsche to the rescue: "If one has become a master in one thing one usually for that very reason remains a complete bungler in most other things; but one thinks precisely the opposite, a fact experienced already by Socrates. This is the drawback that makes association with masters unpleasant." But I think that quote applies much more to Nassim Taleb than Einstein. You don't believe me? Try having a conversation with him about something. And it doesn't apply to me because I'm not an expert in anything!

House of Rejects Book Giveaway

I'm giving away 10 copies of my novel House of Rejects at Good Reads. If you want a chance to win and live in the US, there's more info here.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

House of Rejects

by Devin Hobbes

Giveaway ends July 27, 2011.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter to win

The Heist -- Short Story available for free on Goodreads and Smashwords

"The Heist," a riveting tale about a criminal, his well meaning friend, and a few zombies is available for free at GoodReads (PDF) and Smashwords (multiple formats, including epub and Kindle).

A couple of guys on the run for robbery find a deserted town. The cash registers are full, and the bank's door is unlocked. Jackpot!

But what's with the army signs? And are the people really gone?

It's about 10,000 words. And did I mention it's free?

A note to readers: If you think you've encountered any misspellings, grammatical errors, or similar things, you are wrong. That's not what they are. They are improvements upon the English language.

House of Rejects

My novel is finally out in electronic form. House of Rejects is available on Amazon (Kindle), Barnes and Noble (epub--Nook), Smashwords (Kindle, Nook, Sony, PDF, and a bunch of other formats), and in a few months on iTunes and probably other places. I'm told the physical version will be out by August.

The novel takes place in the early 1990s during the first Bush recession. It's a coming of age story about a kid, Roger, who gets taken in by an eccentric family after he loses his parents.

Here's the back cover description:

Roger hates the third grade. Dealing with bullies, incompetent teachers, and tyrannical administrators is bad enough. Worse still--far worse--he loses his parents. All Roger wants is some stability and a place to call home. He gets his wish when his best friend Tommy's family takes him in. His relief is temporary, however, as the family has problems of its own.

Chaos reigns. Led by an angry Pomeranian and by a former professor obsessed with conspiracy theories and shopping, the family is always in trouble. Repo men lurk around every corner. Notices from the government clog the mailbox and court summonses decorate the front door. There is never enough money for anything--except for the weekly, circuitous tour of the outer boroughs, a shopping spree, and a quick stop at a fancy restaurant. Now the family might lose its house with no place to go.

Determined to save their home, Roger and Tommy hatch a number of schemes. There's the candy selling scheme, the organic lemonade stand, and the bank robbery. Will they succeed?

I haven't read the book myself, but I'm told it's good. If you think you've encountered any misspellings, grammatical errors, or similar things, you are wrong. That's not what they are. They are improvements upon the English language.

Everyone's a Photographer

Everyone's a photographer these days. Thanks, digital cameras.

Everywhere you go there's a woman crooking her head and awkwardly angling her body to take a picture of a sticker, graffiti on a light pole, or a puddle. Or there's some guy stooping next to a sleeping homeless person, trying to get the perfect shot.

They go home, these photographers, these documentarians of urban decay, and select out of the hundreds the one or two pictures that aren't terrible. Next, they fiddle with them in Photoshop.

From there the pictures go up on Facebook because the photographer never reads the fine print--they're not lawyers! They're artists!--or maybe they just don't care about their copyright; that's such a capitalist social construction anyhow. Then all their friends comment on how pretty the picture is. Maybe they say something about the composition's depth and profundity or use some of the bullshit theoretical language they heard in college.

After receiving enough praise to temporarily fill the void that is their core, they send the pictures out to small college and indie magazines that have an interest in publishing such things.

At these fine establishments, editors with voids of their own sift through the submissions. After several lengthy meetings at which no doubt even more bullshit theoretical language--whatever Frenchified post-Marxist nonsense is currently in fashion--is used and names of obscure academics and artists are dropped, a few of the “pieces” are selected for publication: a shadow on the crumbling sidewalk, some graffiti on a wall, a homeless guy eating, a cloud reflected in a puddle reflected in a mirror reflected in a store window.

After notifying the photographer, the editor sends the pictures to the guy who does the layout. He thinks he's the shit. He probably has a several piercings on his face and a tattoo that the girls who've contracted herpes from him think shows his sensitive side. Perhaps he's working on a theory of the internet that incorporates Martin Heidegger's ideas on technology. He's a philosopher, this layout guy. But he's practical enough to report back to the editors because their resolution is too low for printing.

The editors inform the photographer. This artist, perhaps over coffee in some a trendy neighborhood, whips out his iBook or iSomething-That's-Constructed-By-Slaves-Under-Conditions-So-Terrible-That-Even-China-Complains-About-Them, opens the picture, saves it in a different file format that takes up more disk space, and sends it back to the editor. A couple of tables over, an editor's iPhone beeps. He puts down his own fair trade beverage to check his email. Satisfied, he forwards the picture to the layout guy.

The layout guy pauses summarizing his thesis to a wide eyed undergraduate he's trying to lay to check his own iPhone. He writes back to the editor that the picture's resolution doesn't change when you make the file size bigger.

The editor forwards the message to the artist. The temporary seal on the void breaks. Thoughts of suicide, revenge, rejection and so on fill the photographer's head. Maybe he takes an extra dose of the chemicals his mental health provider prescribed him. Maybe he channels these feelings into something he thinks is positive, like going out to find more homeless people to photograph--after changing the camera settings to a higher dpi. Maybe he gives up and does the world a favor by killing himself.

What he doesn't know, however, is that published or not, all the people that would have seen his picture have seen it already.

How to Copyright Your Novel

If you're wondering how to copyright your novel, short story, poem, painting, song, or some other creative work, you probably don't know that you already own the copyright.

In the United States, anyway, as soon as you create some original work, provided it's not a work for hire, you own the copyright. It's straight from the theory of property by John Locke--the British philosopher, not the bald guy from Lost.

So what you really want to do is not to copyright your work (congrats, you already have it!), but to register your copyright. The place to do that is the US Copyright office.

You don't have to register your copyright, but the $35 fee is a small price to pay to settle future disputes.

For example, say you write a novel and let someone read it. That person might turn out to be a scoundrel who goes to a publisher and claims he wrote the novel. It's published, the guy gets rich and famous, and you get nothing. So you go to court. Among the things you have to prove is that you are the copyright holder. This goes much easier if you registered your copyright with the Copyright Office than if you didn't, because

In any judicial proceedings the certificate of a registration made before or within five years after first publication of the work shall constitute prima facie evidence of the validity of the copyright and of the facts stated in the certificate. 17 USC 410 (c)

 But beware, dear creator, of some potential technical difficulties waiting for you at the Copyright Office website:

Pressing the back button and not panicking usually solves the issue.

I'm Back

Six posts and a two year hiatus. But I'm back.

What've I done in the meantime? I wrote a novel, a few short stories, read a whole bunch of books, passed the bar, and got a master's degree in worthlessness (obviously it's called something else, but listing it on my resume solidifies my un-employability).

I also gave up my Eve Online addiction, where I was a space pirate. It's an awesome game and definitely worth playing (and free if you're even slightly good at it), but it takes time away from everything else. Time is the most precious commodity, or so people say.