Interesting headline / byline on this story … the BP Gulf of Mexico disaster … the more information is made available the less people are happy with what they “know”. Less is more. It’s complicated and scary techno-environmental problem BP are dealing with and they need to be allowed, encouraged to focus on that, rather [...]
Entries from May 2010
Damned If You Do
0
May 26, 2010 at 7:41am
by Ian
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Life Changing Proust
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May 24, 2010 at 2:51pm
by Ian
Unusually literary philosophical post from Matt the creative human behind the WordPress tool with which I am blogging this post. Yet another strange-loop ?
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Tabletop
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May 24, 2010 at 2:41pm
by Ian
Reminded by Marsha reading Hofstadter’s “I Am A Strange Loop“, that I never did record the Tabletop (or Theatre of Operations) metaphor for creative analogy … that is analogies that actually create things, things as interesting as humans and minds. I mentioned it twice here and here referring to Hofstadter’s “Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies“, [...]
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People vs the System
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May 21, 2010 at 10:41am
by Ian
Much debate (here Thinking Allowed) since the recent financial crisis on the future of capitalism and global industrialisation, and the failure of economists to keep their eye on the underlying “systemic risks” in the trading of ever more convoluted financial derivatives. (Watched that excellent dramatisation of the Lehman Brothers demise just a couple of evenings ago [...]
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Blues & Twos
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May 19, 2010 at 6:02am
by Ian
It’s a standard joke or maybe urban legend that people in emergency vehicles switch on their sirens and lights to beat the traffic and get home in time for dinner; a perk of the job. I recall this impression vividly from a very exciting trip to Moscow earlier in the year, that there were an [...]
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William James on the Beeb
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May 16, 2010 at 12:18am
by Ian
This was an excellent In Our Time … a discussion on William James’ “Varieties of Religious Experience”. Elevating James to the position of the only philosopher that Wittgenstein looked up to. Telling I feel, how Melvyn struggles when asking the god question, questions within questions, in this religious context. Loved the caricature at the end [...]
Cameron Egoistic Start
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May 14, 2010 at 11:24am
by Ian
Yeah, great Mr Cameron, man of the people, dispense with outriders – brilliant – be the hero yourself, tighten “your” belt. It’s not about you, you bloody dipstick, it’s about the Prime Minister, the institution of the head of the UK government, we’ d like it to get where we need it when we need [...]
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Pirsig Connection
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May 11, 2010 at 3:57am
by Ian
I don’t read any more than coincidence into this, but spooky none-the-less, I’ve been in Oslo, around 20 months so far, and have been aware, from mentions by colleagues, of a bar on the other side of town, Grønland on the east side, we live in Majorstua on the west side. The place is Olympen [...]
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Hailstorm Kills Hundreds
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May 10, 2010 at 1:23pm
by Ian
Stop press (1200 years ago) … never heard of this before. (via Rivets) And with Rivets one is never enough, so this is nice too, if completely different. Oh, and I couldn’t resist this one, chemical weapons in the bedroom !
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Quality of Engineering
4
May 10, 2010 at 1:00pm
by Ian
Very interesting talk from Christof Bartneck at TU/e (Technical University of Eindhoven) explaining Pirsig‘s Metaphysics of Quality (MoQ) in simple design and engineering terms. As an engineer I might have used the word engineering as much as he used the word design, (and he says in the Q&A session he doesn’t make a real distinction here) but [...]
Working With Your Hands
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May 7, 2010 at 12:02pm
by Ian
Interesting to see Matthew Crawford’s “Shop Class as Soulcraft” published in Europe as “The Case for Working with your Hands”, and reviewed here in The Irish Times. It was the working with your hands lyric from Lamb Lies Down on Broadway that came to mind when I reviewed the US edition just about a year [...]
Where were you ?
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May 3, 2010 at 12:38am
by Ian
When you first heard Nessun Dorma ? Nope, not the world cup / championships / olympics / whatever, watching The Killing Fields, that’s where. Nice touch where Sydney just turns up the volume to bring it from incidental background to explicit foreground. Rewatched on DVD over the weekend. Don’t know whether it was a director’s [...]
