This is Tech

Thanks to Ted at Yaicha, for posting this article following up on the recent coverage by Yaicha and others of Jill Bolte Taylor’s TED Talk. Taylor’s speech about her stroke and the vantage it gave her on the inner-workings of her mind is engaging. We posted an embedded video of her talk last month. I didn’t realize that Taylor had written a book, but based on her Ted Talk, I will be picking up a copy soon.

Yaicha article links to a New York Times Article expanding on the concepts discussed in Taylor’s TED Talk, and a link to her book, My Stroke of Insight, at Amazon. If you haven’t seen her original TED Talk, check it out here. And check out Yaicha for this and other interesting posts.

Cory Doctorow’s new young adult novel, Little Brother, is now available as a free download under a creative commons license. If you read this blog much, you know that I love creative commons and ebooks. The two go together like peanut butter and chocolate. You might know Cory from BoingBoing.net or his work with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. If you have a Kindle or Sony Reader, give this book a read. And if you like it, tell people. This model for publishing needs to be supported.  [Update:  Doctorow has also set up a program that allows readers to donate copies of the book to classrooms.  If you like the book, and want to give back, this is a great way to do it.]

Little Brother » Download for Free: “These downloads are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license, which lets you share it, remix it, and share your remixes, provided that you do so on a noncommercial basis. Some people don’t understand why I do this — so check out this post if you want my topline explanation for why I do this crazy thing.”

More creative commons content for your Kindle or Sony Reader.

Maureen F. McHugh’s speculative fiction collection MOTHERS & OTHER MONSTERS has been released online by Small Beer Press as a free Creative Commons download.

Small Beer is knocking them out of the park with CC releases by some of science fiction’s most talented, most brilliant short fiction writers. An entire Maureen McHugh collection online gratis is a watershed event.

Link

See also:
Kelly Link’s gorgeous short story collection now a CC download
John Kessel’s wonderful short story collection ‘The Baum Plan’ free CC download

(Via Boing Boing.)

Steve Martin on being funny: “Groundbreaking comedian Steve Martin, who recently published his memoir Born Standing Up, has a lengthy piece in Smithsonian on how he became funny. It’s a delight to read someone so smart and hysterical talk about how he ‘got his act together’ in the late 1960s and early 1970s by discovering what makes people laugh. From the article:

In a college psychology class, I had read a treatise on comedy explaining that a laugh was formed when the storyteller created tension, then, with the punch line, released it. I didn’t quite get this concept, nor do I still, but it stayed with me and eventually sparked my second wave of insights. With conventional joke telling, there’s a moment when the comedian delivers the punch line, and the audience knows it’s the punch line, and their response ranges from polite to uproarious. What bothered me about this formula was the nature of the laugh it inspired, a vocal acknowledgment that a joke had been told, like automatic applause at the end of a song.

A skillful comedian could coax a laugh with tiny indicators such as a vocal tic (Bob Hope’s ‘But I wanna tell ya’) or even a slight body shift. Jack E. Leonard used to punctuate jokes by slapping his stomach with his hand. One night, watching him on ‘The Tonight Show,’ I noticed that several of his punch lines had been unintelligible, and the audience had actually laughed at nothing but the cue of his hand slap.

These notions stayed with me until they formed an idea that revolutionized my comic direction: What if there were no punch lines? What if there were no indicators? What if I created tension and never released it? What if I headed for a climax, but all I delivered was an anticlimax? What would the audience do with all that tension? Theoretically, it would have to come out sometime. But if I kept denying them the formality of a punch line, the audience would eventually pick their own place to laugh, essentially out of desperation. This type of laugh seemed stronger to me, as they would be laughing at something they chose, rather than being told exactly when to laugh.

Link to Steve Martin in Smithsonian, Link to buy Born Standing Up

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(Via Boing Boing.)