Nature as redeemer, nature as escape, nature as the solace for our "gridded, controlled, mannered urban lives." So far so romantic. Well, nature is on the road, and she’s gunning for the lot of us. We’ve poked the beast, and now it really is waking up. On a quiet day, you could hear it snoring.... Continue Reading →
According to the American humourist Dave Barry “Meetings are an addictive, highly self-indulgent activity that corporations and other large organizations habitually engage in only because they cannot masturbate.” (As in, meetings aren't just ego-potlaches, they're also for the recycling of anxiety and responsibility). While meetings might be full of wankers, they’re surprisingly joyless experiences. “Nesta”,... Continue Reading →
“There was a period of about three years (1987-1990), however, when it became fashionable for physicians to reduce the rather long MR imaging times by using anisotropically shaped (i.e., non-square) imaging pixels in studies of the spine. As it turned out, this resulted in a prominent dark line appearing within the spinal cord. The dark line was a Gibbs... Continue Reading →
Barry Jones was the Australian Science Minister between 1983 and 1990, and a key figure in the coming of climate awareness to that country. He is also a pretty smart guy (didn't help him as a politician, naturlich). Keynes said something different but similar - We needed to be transruptive [another of my shoddy neologisms],... Continue Reading →
Here we go. Here we go with the summit-hopping and the protestations that we have to Build a Mass Movement and the only/best/sensible (delete as appropriate) way to do that is to have a big march/ruck at (Prague/Genoa/Copenhagen and… Paris. (Yeah, well – screw Paris. No, seriously, screw Paris.) Here we go with the sages... Continue Reading →
Went to something on “radical information literacy.” The questions are Who knows things, how to know things/find them out, how to critique sources and figure out when they are being manipulated by friend or foe? Et cetera. At least it flags up that a simple “information deficit” model is grotesquely inadequate for explaining why we... Continue Reading →
There are so many reasons we don't DO reflective learning. We live in our habits/routines/comfort zone (as as Charles Duhigg points out, habits can be Good things) Time (lack thereof) Energy (exhaustion) It's difficult to reflect. We get little or no training. It's not something we are encouraged to do in school. It's far more... Continue Reading →
The last post was about what happens to technologies that challenge the “Leviathan” - of hierarchy, class, habit and the external and internal oppositions. It's worth a read, and I can say that because there are big slabs of quotations from two brilliant articles (about the 1970s industrial-policy-from-below Lucas Plan, and the present problems of... Continue Reading →
marchudson.net 