Maps for Students

http://www.unc.edu/awmc/mapsforstudents.html

“Cooperating with faculty at UNC-CH, and with the scholars who commission custom maps from the AWMC for their publications, we are developing a collection of free digital maps for educational use. This effort gives teachers and students an expanding set of small-scale reference maps for classroom and personal use. Each may be downloaded from the website in multiple formats. A blank version of each map — suitable for map quizzes and customization — is usually available.”

PowerPoint Corrupts the Point Absolutely — John Holbo

http://crookedtimber.org/2006/08/11/powerpoint-corrupts-the-point-absolutely/

Via Arms & Influence, a passage from that Thomas Ricks book [amazon] everyone has been reading (my copy isn’t here yet):

[Army Lt. General David] McKiernan had another, smaller but nagging issue: He couldn’t get Franks to issue clear orders that stated explicitly what he wanted done, how he wanted to do it, and why. Rather, Franks passed along PowerPoint briefing slides that he had shown to Rumsfeld: “It’s quite frustrating the way this works, but the way we do things nowadays is combatant commanders brief their products in PowerPoint up in Washington to OSD and Secretary of Defense…In lieu of an order, or a frag [fragmentary order], or plan, you get a bunch of PowerPoint slides…[T]hat is frustrating, because nobody wants to plan against PowerPoint slides.”

That reliance on slides rather than formal written orders seemed to some military professionals to capture the essence of Rumsfeld’s amateurish approach to war planning. “Here may be the clearest manifestation of OSD’s contempt for the accumulated wisdom of the military profession and of the assumption among forward thinkers that technology—above all information technology—has rendered obsolete the conventions traditionally governing the preparation and conduct of war,” commented retired Army Col. Andrew Bacevich, a former commander of an armored cavalry regiment. “To imagine that PowerPoint slides can substitute for such means is really the height of recklessness.” It was like telling an automobile mechanic to use a manufacturer’s glossy sales brochure to figure out how to repair an engine.

He reproduces one of the slides—truly a depth-defying plunge into ‘Phase IV’, i.e, reconstruction of all Iraq.

The Original Fiction Mary-Sue Litmus Test

http://www.onlyfiction.net/marysue.html

Keep in mind, some of the things on this list are bound to happen in any story — the problem is when they all start happening in the same story. Obviously, no test can take every contingency into account, and we can’t promise you that every character who scores high on this test is a Mary-Sue, or that every character who scores low isn’t. Heck, Bono from U2 scores a whopping 72 points! That doesn’t mean he’s a Mary-Sue; it just means he has astonishing number of romanticized traits — and although he’s a real person, he might not make a very believable character. It’s up to you as the author to decide, as objectively as you can, how your results really apply to your story. This test isn’t meant to tell you how to write your characters; it’s just a reference list of points to think about when developing them. If you have any suggestions for how to improve it, feel free to let us know.