Of time immemorial. Via Bitch Ph.D., in her campaign to annex the whole blogosphere, a bad (undergraduate) writing contest announced over at Waste (herewith added to my Bloglines blogroll) that gave me a bit of a jump start this morning. I'll let Ben tell you about it.

Here's the basic idea. Write an essay starting with either sentence two or four from this post of Hirta's. Let's say it should be no more than ... two pages. Let's call it 500 words. ... Anyone who writes, in response to Beginning Sentence Two, a brief history of the attempt to measure longitude and its solution with the invention of accurate naval chronometers will be summarily shot.

Essays essayed, the enblogged can post it to their blogs and include a link back here or use the trackback mechanism or make a note in the comments or some such. The disenblogged, or those who don't want to sully the purity of their blogs with this kind of drivel, can email me their entries and I'll post them in some fashion.

And yes, this is what I'm doing instead of Monday-morning job-hunt stuff. (Or taxes, even worse.) But I started thinking about it, and damn if I could keep myself from following through. I'm writing from Beginning Sentence Two, which is a beaut, namely:

For many millennia, man has tried to create ways to measure time.

My own interpretation of the contest—which I strongly recommend to anybody else willing to misallocate their time this way—is that it ought to strive for verisimilitude, the ideal target being the inadequate-but-honorable C essay. In other words, don't go for the easy laughs; you need to try to reproduce the texture of half understanding, missed connections, and word-count sweat that constitutes the real pathos of the middling.

My entry's probably too well organized, on the macro level, to make an absolute bull's-eye, but I've tried to compensate with various local confusions. My undergrad also has a bit of a lyrical bent, which helps with the padding and also to cover for argumentative gaps. [The fact that the essay clocks in at exactly 500 words is just icing on the cake.] Really, for a C essay I think this is A+ work. I'm especially proud of the penultimate graf:

In the era of the Cold War, which ended in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall, time became atomic. The US and the USSR (Soviet Union) each had giant nuclear missiles facing each other, as well as a Space Race. President Kennedy proclaimed that man would go to the moon, and within a mere decade. All of these systems needed absolute precision, which was measured using atomic nuclei. The Star Wars (Missile Defense Shield) took this idea even further, when it was decided to use missiles to pinpoint other missiles and knock them out of the sky. With this, we see that man was not merely subject to time any more, but now believed he was in control of time itself.

The idea here is of a course where the prof is teaching against her students' unthought belief in time as a given of the physical world; the essay represents the necessarily paradoxical result of undergrad inattention trying to negotiate a complex account of time as a social technology, a product of need and the limits of invention. And that's way more highfalutin explanation than could possibly be appropriate to this dopey exercise, which probably ought to count as a points deduction. Anyway, the complete mess is safely stowed away on the jump page, if you want to look.

Read "Time and Measurement through History" >>

posted by michael  11:03:56 AM  
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