Thursday, December 10, 2009

Paul Sherman's lesson on giving credit where credit is due

(Professor Paul W. Sherman lecturing DrTom once again about giving credit where credit is due.)

I was reminded by my old friend Paul Sherman just today, that I need to make sure I credit those whose ideas I use in these blogs (P.S. Sherman, pers.comm., 12/10/09).  I was always told to give credit where credit is due (R.P. Gavin (father), summer 1955).  I learned to cite references properly a long time ago (Mrs. S. Gingerich (high school English teacher), fall 1963).  I have always believed that we should do what we would like others to do to us (Christian Bible, spring, long time ago).  So from now on, I am turning over a new leaf (Acer rubrum, Linnaeus), and I will not forsake anyone who contributed an idea, or a dime (Philadelphia mint, Ben Franklin, 1778), to making my blogging (= weblog, and from Wikipedia, "The term "weblog" was coined by Jorn Barger on 17 December 1997. The short form, "blog," was coined by Peter Merholz, who jokingly broke the word weblog into the phrase we blog in the sidebar of his blog Peterme.com in April or May 1999.  Shortly thereafter, Evan Williams at Pyra Labs used "blog" as both a noun and verb ("to blog," meaning "to edit one's weblog or to post to one's weblog") and devised the term "blogger" in connection with Pyra Labs' Blogger product, leading to the popularization of the terms.") a success.

4 comments:

  1. Adam:

    I'm retired, so I have the time, and this was extremely important. And I have to get this Sherman guy off my back.

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  2. Self-referential madness brings to mind Douglas Hofstadter's Metamagical Themas. And also the case of the demented guy who wrote a diary describing every minute of his life what he was doing every day. The act of the writing took so long that he did little else than write the diary each day. Can't remember his name but it was on NPR years ago. Some university library (University of Washington?) got the diaries when he died on the condition that they hold and preserve all of them and not disperse or divide them).

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  3. Jerry, do you think I'm going mad? Sometimes I just don't know who I am anymore. I was a professsor, now a wood cutter, senescing like a fallen leaf in a humid forest. I thought that alcohol, nicotine, and caffeine might arrest the decline and hold me in that state of exalted virility that I had enjoyed for so many decades. But alas, all those substances just made me drunk and jittery.

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