Eric Giguere reminds us to update our copyright notices for the new year.

It’s 2006, so you wouldn’t want your great-great-grandniece to be cheated out of an extra year of royalties from today’s blog post, 70 years after you die (assuming Congress hasn’t extended the term to death plus 140 by then). Actually, the copyright year is completely irrelevant, since the copyright term is computed from your death date, not the publication date.

You should also be advised that the copyright notice is not required. You’re protected, regardless. According to the linked document, my copyright notice on this site is invalid, since it doesn’t actually include the copyright year. But it’s much more accurate than Giguere’s recommendation, since each post is dated, and it’s a simple matter to refer to the date of the post. Given that the notice isn’t required, I’m not going to sweat the fact that it’s not up to snuff.

I’ve been blogging about Simon Winchester’s book A Crack in the Edge of the World for a week or so now. If you’re late joining this party, you can read my earlier posts here and here.

Now that I’m at the halfway point, the design of the book is becoming clear: the first half sets the stage for the great disaster, and the second half is the great disaster. Winchester has a long chapter explaining the geology of the San Andreas Fault, describing in great detail the motions of the various plates involved, and how exactly California got singled out for all the earthquake activity. It’s interesting stuff, but it also cries out for diagrams. Winchester sometimes spends pages explaining how one plate interacts with the next one, when what we really need is a map with a couple of arrows. There are maps, of course, including two especially beautiful and useful ones in the endpapers. Here’s a detail from the “Map of the North American Tectonic Plate”:

I’m not quite sure what the point of the giant volcano threatening to impede the route of the Exxon Valdez is, but it sure is pretty.

Winchester is more effective when he gives the history of San Francisco leading up to the quake. He gives nearly as vivid a depiction of gold-boom era San Francisco as Frank Norris does in McTeague, that classic horror story about the gold-obsessed dentist in 1899 (indeed, one wonders if Winchester has read McTeague — and if you haven’t, you should!). San Francisco at that time was simultaneously a cosmopolitan center of international culture and a home to a half-million roughnecks and factory workers.

At the end of chapter eight, the scene has been set: San Francisco is a hastily built, massive city, perched atop one of the most volatile faultlines in the world, with an inadequate fire prevention system and a corrupt government (sound familiar, New Orleans?). Chapter nine, which I haven’t read yet, is only 11 pages long, and called “Overture: The Night Before Dark,” and Chapter 10, a nearly 100-page doozy, is “The Savage Interruption.” Hmmmm…. I wonder what that’s all about. I can’t wait to find out.

Asheron’s Call 2, the only violent video game demonstrated not to cause aggressive real-world behavior, has been shut down. (via kottke)

P.Z. Myers has a great post about high school biology teachers, and how uniformly awful they seemed to be, and what a better experience most people have in college.

I, by contrast, had exceptional biology teachers in high school: Craig MacGowan and Mr. Morrison (can’t remember his first name), at Garfield High School in Seattle. MacGowan was a Seattle legend, a great teacher who taught biology with a passion, and every year took his successful Marine Science students to an exotic local — Hawaii, Florida, even Australia (I never went-I didn’t want to sell the requisite number of candy bars, or whatever our fundraiser was). Morrison was a quirkier, more soft-spoken fellow, except when he threw formadehyde-soaked frogs at misbehaving students. In fact, my college biology experience was much worse: dull, dry lectures and boring, irrelevant labs.

English, on the other hand, went the other way around. I did have a few good high school English teachers, but none that excited me as much as MacGowan/Morrison. I’ve already mentioned my pathetic journalism advisor (who shall remain unnamed). When I had him for 10th grade honors English, I hated him so much that I dropped down into the “regular” English class, just so I could have a better teacher.

But in college, I found my true calling in a course on Edmund Spenser, taught by Michael Murrin. Anyone who can make Spenser exciting is a truly great teacher, and Murrin convinced me to be an English major. Unfortunately, my grad school teachers weren’t nearly as inspiring, so now instead of an English professor I’m a part-time litblogger and full-time psychology blogger. Things could be worse, I suppose….

So I wonder if it all comes down to this: we pick careers based on what kind of teachers we had in college, and especially as they compare to the teachers we had in high school. If we had great high school teachers in a particular subject, then our college experience is likely to be disappointing. If we had crummy high school teachers in a subject, then college courses in that subject will be a treat by comparison.