Blooming heck. It’s not every day that you get to spend two hours in the presence of someone who, with zero flashiness, expands the floor of your mental cage every five minutes or so. (1) There was a CIDRAL (Centre for Interdiscplinary Research in Arts and Language) panel/symposium thingie at the Tin Can on Oxford... Continue Reading →
From “All Our Yesterdays” – Jan 28, 1987 – a warning from history
I have a side project - a website on which I blog something that happened "that day" in "climate" (that's a loose term) history. Today there's two posts - here's the second... An extra "All Our Yesterdays" post today, in honour of two excellent scientists, Professor Veerabhadran Ramanathan and Professor Wally Broecker. It was Ramanathan's work... Continue Reading →
Social Movement learning from academic research (or “looting the ivory tower”)
Barriers There's the translation problem. Namely, academics write like, well, academics. There are a finite number of activists who are both willing and able to loot the Ivory Tower and then translate information into digestible bits for other activists. And those finite activists have very finite time, energy, attention, morale and bandwidth. This, of course,... Continue Reading →
Stepper: Augmented miners, Academic games, reputational repair and rehearsing the apocalypse
Mix of what I read on the train yesterday and what I read on the stepper this morning; Bassan, J, Srivnivasan, V. and Tang, A. (2013) The Augmented Mine Worker: Applications of Augmented Reality in Mining CSC Australia Lots of good stuff here. It's a bit more complicated than sticking googleglasses on folks and hooking... Continue Reading →
Stepper: “Energy Flow in #Australia” -1978 article, depressing prescience…
On stepper this morning I also read some Financial Times, natch. But here is the short version: in Australia there was a small, well-connected and highly intelligent “epistemic community” (h/t Peter Haas) around energy/climate from the mid-1970s onwards. People like Mark Diesendorf, Hugh Saddler, Roger Gifford, Graeme Pearman. Many of them are still alive... And... Continue Reading →
Do digital natives learn electronically? Or “The Panspectron and the Ivory Tower”
Can information technology help us “in the real world”, as students and scholars? Marc Hudson attends a link-heavy lecture and comes away inspired and a bit overwhelmed. The startling factoids come thick and fast in Professor Derek France’s talk; Over 90 percent of students have a smart phone or mobile device, The average number of... Continue Reading →
On the Stepper: 13th January: Climate reports, Stockholm syndrome and Green Bans
On an "Australian science/politics in the 70s and onwards" binge at mo' (trying to be more systematic in my PhD reading). Garratt, JR, Webb, EK and McCarthy, S. (2011) Charles Henry Brian Priestley. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 57, 349-278. Didn't read all of this, but the bits that relate to his... Continue Reading →
Writing goals Week 2, 2015 (Jan 12th to Jan 18th)
Directly relevant to PhD a) 2500 words on the coming of climate change awareness in Australia (1987 to 1990) – who, how, why; and the response from coal interests. Indirectly relevant to PhD b) 10 “All Our Yesterdays” posts allouryesterdays.net “Don't get it write, get it written.” From week 1: 2500 words on “capsule biographies”... Continue Reading →
On the stepper 11th January 2015: Wind power romance, past warnings, science hacks, climate histories
Trying to form a new habit – typing up what I read “as I go”. And connected to that, giving an account of what I read while on the stepper for 90ish minutes a day (mostly). The habit is not “fully bedded in” as a habit yet, but I refuse to use that as an... Continue Reading →
Let’s airbrush the black people out of the narrative, eh?
It’s easy to spot when the “right” is distorting the past for the purpose of shaping the present and future. It’s easy to denounce their focus on kings and queens and Great Men, and the technologies of innovation that create a “whiggish” narrative of white power (in every sense). It’s easy to get outraged by... Continue Reading →
marchudson.net 