About
The Part About
Welcome to Earth Wide Moth. I'm Derek Mueller, Assistant Professor of Written Communication in the Department of English Language and Literature at Eastern Michigan University. Generally, my teaching and research concerns writing, rhetoric, and technology. More specifically, I'm energized by questions concerning new media and networked digital writing activity, mapping and geographies, visual modeling methods, network studies, and theories of composing. In addition to this blog, which occasionally blurs the boundaries commonly thought to separate personal and professional interests, I make use of Delicious, Flickr, Twitter, etc. Send email to dereknmueller at gmail dot com.

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F.A.Q.

Q: How wide is the Earth?
A: Funny you should ask. People come here asking that question all of the time. If you are asking about circumference (the size of belt Earth would need to secure trousers), the answer is 24,859.82 miles (40,008 km). If, on the other hand, you are asking about the distance of a line through the Equator (i.e., its diameter), the answer is approximately 8,000 miles.

Q: What is your record in the Ann Arbor Men's Basketball League at Pioneer H.S.?
A: Season ended 3/21. We're league champs with a record of 8-3. Lost in the first round of the MRPA tournament to a team from Northville, 71-57.

Q: How do you expect people to take E.W.M. seriously when you used to post badly drawn, humorless comics every couple of days?
A: This is a serious3 question, and it deserves a serious2 answer.

Q: What is your favorite movie?
A: Jules Marey's Pelican, followed closely by What's Eating Gilbert Grape?.

Marey's Pelican

Q: On Monday, November 5, 2007, you posted an entry titled "Blog Melt." Only it wasn't the sort of Earth Wide Moth entry readers are accustomed to finding. It was clear something had gone terribly wrong with the main template for your blog. What happened on this sad, unforgettable day for E.W.M. readers?
A: I don't know, really. I was tinkering around with the templates. On Tuesday morning, I found the main index template was ruined. It was a half-deleted carcass of its former self, as if eaten by the quirky MT4 installation. You can imagine my shock. I immediately went about creating a new and improved template.

Q: How is this F.A.Q. organized? Should it be read in any particular order?
A: That is up to you.

Q: Do you have any questions for me?
A: Yes. Can you explain "metaphysics of presence" in 140 characters?

Q: Are you packed and ready for the Pray-Harrold renovations?
A: Almost.

Q: Your dissertation is about clouds, graphs, and maps. Are you more of a watcher of formations, a plotter of points, or a charter of terrains?
A: I am sorry for answering the question with a question, but how can you get anywhere without all three of these? They are required for traveling.

Q: What's the matter?
A: The apple I brought for lunch had a pleasingly taut, colorful peel, but when I took a bite, mush. I am often disappointed by deceptive fruit.

"The promiscuous collection and tabulation of data have given way to a process of assigning possible meanings, merely supposed real entities, to mathematical terms, working out the logical results, and then staging certain crucial experiments to check the hypothesis against the actual, empirical results" (20). Susanne Langer, Philosophy In a New Key.