It's all good: "If Things Seem Under Control, You're Not Going Fast Enough"

Monday, November 01, 2004

"If Things Seem Under Control, You're Not Going Fast Enough"

Apparently, Mario Andretti made the remark that is today's title. Makes sense that a race car driver would say this. I have driven on a racing oval once and at about 70mph, going around a tight curve, the instructor grabbed my steering wheel and yanked it hard to the right to make my cornering much, much tighter. To that fellow, 70mph was slow. It's all relative.

As a kid, I knew who Mario was, as well as Jackie Stewart, Emerson Fittipaldi, Sterling Moss and Jack Brabham. My brother Andrew had a pedal car designed like a racing car, with a number on the side. And if you look at the photo at this link, I sat with my dad sometime in the early 60s on the crest of the ridge watching cars come up the hill in an event called the "Rest and Be Thankful" hill climb. So, perhaps my penchant for speed, both in cars and in the pace of change is something I absorbed young.

OK, enough time in the past!

We've not been here much lately. We've been busy in the real world. As George mentioned, our Members Council delegates got to hear from 2 real gamers who are also real academics. I found Kurt and Constance's presentations fascinating as did many other attendees. I think it might be the first time I've heard "semiotic" said at an OCLC meeting. The video of their presentation will be up on the public OCLC web site soon as will the minutes of the other meetings and sessions. We'll let you know when they are.

Lorcan Dempsey, VP Research, passed this along over the weekend: "Computer games should be taught in schools because they are good for children's development, researchers said today. " The whole article is in TES (The Times Education Supplement), October 26.

Lorcan's until-now-internal-to-OCLC-only blog was released to the world on Friday. He's been posting to it for about one year so there's a lot of content there. It has the utilitarian name "Lorcan Dempsey's weblog" and you'll note immediately that he's much better than we are at the mechanics. And he's much more research oriented--no suprise there, he's supposed to be.

And I wanted to write a cogent little paragraph about manga and other graphic novels but have run out of time, so I am just going to link to a bunch of things that I think are interesting in and of themselves, and that all together make me wonder what this trend means.