antithesis to modernity?

{I wrote most of this right after the blogpost linked below…so much of this line of thinking is percolating concerning my prospectus, grant proposal, teaching, interpreting physics….anyway, today is the Celebration Party for the Crew and Shore Support for Shemaya’s Serenity Sail, 2007. More thoughts will follow, I’m sure!}
Just because sailing resists the dominant forces of modernity, does not … Read more...

neuroscience

A WordPress blogpost categorized under “teaching” led me to this timely piece: Charlotte Mason on neuroscience.
Who has “the explanation” for the relationship between language and consciousness, philosophers or neuroscientists? This debate has been going on for a long time; its competitiveness ~ as if one side has an answer or can determine the truth ~ bothers me. :-/… Read more...

social metonymy in Iraq

One of the New York Times lead stories, Shiite’s Tale: How Gulf With Sunnis Widened, opens with a microsocial version of the macrosocial dynamics which has overtaken Iraqi politics. The cycle is vicious…previous macrostructures inspire (infect?) microsocial interactions which, in their turn, lead to widespread social (cultural, political, religious) patterns. Effective interventions have to occur at both (all) levels … Read more...

Carlos quotes Fanon

An email from a colleague came with this quotation by Frantz Fanon:

I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language. To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or
that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the
weight of

Read more...

on trust and systemic issues

Weirdness.
I woke up this morning freaking out that I’ve shared my current work with someone who may actually “steal” my ideas. I’ve sent the paper I wrote for Critical Link 5 to four people (one academic, two interpreters from the European Parliament, and a fellow graduate student). It is the academic I’m worried about – only because weeks have … Read more...

Science Revolutionaries: struggling for soul?

“The giant brains who devised quantum mechanics, whatever that means” is the tagline for this book review in The Economist (14 July 2007.
Both Faust in Copenhagen: A Struggle for the Soul of Physics, and Uncertainty: Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, and the Struggle for the Soul of Science intrigue me.
An adaptation of the introduction to Faust in Copenhagen is … Read more...

matching the patchwork of the landscape

Changes in the Land gives the best, most readable, sensible, and fair description of the ecology and economy of American Indians that I have ever read.
“… we must be careful about what we mean by ‘property,’ lest we fall into the traps English colonists have set for us” (1983:58). William Cronen carefully delineates the difference between ownership and sovereignityRead more...

social metonymy

I’m still clarifying for myself the original linguistic context that metonymy describes, which is apparently synonymous or parallel with cognitive linguistics’ use of it through (it seems?) the common conflation of linguistics and cognition.
My own conflation (!) is between language and action, recognizing in the definition (at least as I originally understood it) a label for the way certain … Read more...

updated references (EP)

What I had found before: European Parliament Procedural Rule 138.
Now, TITLE I : MEMBERS, PARLIAMENT BODIES AND POLITICAL GROUPS; CHAPTER 3 : BODIES AND DUTIES
Rule 22 : Duties of the Bureau
“8. The Bureau shall be the authority responsible for authorising meetings of committees away from the usual places of work, hearings and study and fact-finding … Read more...