Studying these matters causally might be impossible, but a recent paper, “Sameness Entices, but Novelty Enchants in Fanfiction Online,” explores a correlational relationship between the enjoyment of a work and the work’s originality through a data analysis of an online fanfiction archive.
Systems, Morals, Rulers, and Rebels
When I shared that notion – that evil is a matter of mismatched expectations – with some colleagues in a conversation, they thought I was making a joke. It’s not intended as one. Indeed, it is a somewhat frightening, and certainly disconcerting, idea to countenance
Enthusiastic Educating
Exhibiting and sharing a genuine enthusiasm for your topic, for education in general, is amongst the most powerful tools an educator has to bring students along on the journey towards some small sliver of understanding.
Magical Explanations
Magic stops being magical when it’s explained, but physics becomes more magical the more we understand it.
Some Thoughts Concerning Golden Dome
My greatest concern with Golden Dome is not its technical feasibility, its geopolitical impact, or even its cost. It is that Golden Dome may prove a distraction from addressing the threats we are far more likely to face, and breed complacency in the process.
Nonlinear Storytelling
Balancing a timeline across multiple viewpoints and storylines, and deciding how the viewpoints will be sequenced and presented is all the nonlinearity most stories will necessitate or support. But there are stories where it is appropriate to do something more creative and imaginative.
Teaching Fundamentals
At its best, teaching must be a dynamic process. Just like storytelling, even in the written form, is a dialogue between author and reader, teaching is a dialogue between teacher and student, instructor and learner.
Creating Room for Creativity
When we are willing to disrupt the status quo, we create space for something new.
Complexity and Entropy – Two Sides of a Coin?
In the functional information hypothesis, high complexity is not the opposite of high entropy, but more of a different way of looking at the probability or phase space of a system to describe its entropic states.
Lengths and Forms
Working within those forms is part of managing reader expectations, which is a key component of making a story appeal to a given reader, but the expectations we have around form and length of stories are not derived from some optimization method synchronized with humanity’s ability to interact with literature.
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