From the daily archives: Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Marilyn Robertson lives in California where, in addition to writing poems, she also composes songs, plays the piano (ragtime) and the guitar, and sings. Maybe she also teaches in a grammar school. Here are two of her poems about the imagination.
After Reading Rilke to the Class
It’ is still possible, I tell my students as I collect their essays,
for you to find the place that Rilke talks about:
the repository of unlived lives.
Don’t let these desks limit your imagination.
For example, I say, and I bang my pointer
against the wall map for dramatic effect,
you could be here — in Spain — tossing dogs in blankets
as the wool gatherers do in Cordoba at Shrovetide.
They look blank. But just before the bell,
a cocker spaniel sails up out of a blue bedspread.
gyrating slowly in the stuffy air, barely missing
the light fixture on its chain in the middle of the ceiling.
The Drummer
A different drummer was seen in Portland this week.
He was marching by an elementary school when
a boy, sitting at the kindergarten art table,
happened to look up as he passed.
After that, the boy could no longer follow
the teacher’s instructions: to make
a collage of colored squares on white paper.
Instead, he made a long chain of squares,
adding red to green to blue to yellow —
and gluing that chain to the very edge of his paper.
Imagine the joy of it.
The sound of the drum growing louder.
The way the man in the bright coat
swung his arms high in the air with each beat.
And the quick smile he gave the boy at the window,
as if he knew him from another time…
long before kindergarten.
Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. At least that’s what it says when you click on About Google at the bottom of the Google page. As a corporation, Google is singular in having as it’s motto “Don’t be evil” — that’s actually what they said in the prospectus for their 2004 IPO, the Initial Public Offering of stock to the public.
And in Google’s 10-point philosophy, under the heading Our philosophy, point number 6 says: You can make money without doing evil. Google is a business. The revenue we generate is derived from offering search technology to companies and from the sale of advertising displayed on our site and on other sites across the web. (And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You can look up what Google has to say, but if we repeat it, you’ll get bored and move on, and we’re trying to make a point of our own, so please keep reading.)
Over the past several weeks, visitors to the Google search page have repeatedly been informed, “We’re changing our privacy policy and terms. This stuff matters.” Visitors are given a chance to click on Dismiss, or Learn more. If you click Learn more, Google will tell you, “We’re getting rid of over 60 different privacy policies across Google and replacing them with one that’s a lot shorter and easier to read. Our new policy covers multiple products and features, reflecting our desire to create one beautifully simple and intuitive experience across Google.”
Who could object to that, right? And if you read the entire policy, which Google put there so you could read it, you’ll learn more details. From Google’s business point of view, the policy is certainly good because Google will have all the information about you in one place. But for people who use Google, it’s not so good. Because when you gather small bits of information about a person from a lot of different sources, and put them into one big heap of information in one place all about that person, you know a lot more about that person than when the information is scattered. Yes, bringing all the scattered bits together does make a difference. It’s a lot easier to put a jigsaw puzzle together if you have all the pieces in one place.
Look at it this way, US intelligence agencies had sufficient information in different places about terrorists, but the agencies failed in their mission because the information was scattered and they “didn’t connect the dots.” Google’s new privacy policy allows them connect the dots about you.
If you’d really like to Learn more about privacy and Google, you might look at Knowledge @ Wharton, the research and business analysis journal of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Google’s new privacy policy is scheduled to go into effect on March 1st, but on the other side of the Atlantic the European Union authorities have asked Google to give them more time to investigate the effects of such a change. That’s a Good Idea.
We warned you it might happen. We ascetics, working with no pay and even less glory at these Critical Pages, were informed that the server at our web host had “encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request. Please contact the server administrator to inform of the time the error occurred and of anything you might have done that may have caused the error.” Anything we might have done? Us? Us innocents? (That’s us and our server at in the graphic above .) Anyway, our website was offline for 24 hours. You didn’t notice? We even lost the last couple of posts. Not to worry, we’ll put them up as soon as we finish sharpening our quills, getting a new roll of parchment and some brightly colored inks. Please have patience.
