Search results for: Pirsig

Read Owen Barfield’s “Poetic Diction” and “History in English Words” a year or so ago, and blogged several items. [here][here][here]. I was doing a search on Barfield today in preparation for reading more of his work and came across two interesting sites. This review of Barfield’s “Saving the Appearances – A Study in Idolatry” on … Continue reading “Words as Idols”

I thought emergence was going to be last year’s word, but it looks like it’s going to arrive this year at last. It’s been a thread on MoQ Discuss recently and I find this post from Seb Paquet too. Recipes for success are always doomed, in management just as anywhere else in life. Success is … Continue reading “Emergent Management”

Taste ? Quality ? Interesting article from Paul Graham about the subjectivity, but rightness, of taste. His students are clever but do they have taste ? Would they recognise the “strange beauty” in the design of an SR71 Blackbird ? Couldn’t help thinking of Pirsig’s quality.(Interesting reference also to form folowing functon.) [via Rivets]

One of Martin Rees (Astronomer Royal) on the end of the world (again) Another of Ernst Mayr (of Pirsig interest) Just read most of the Mayr interview. Interesting. A bit of a sales pitch for Biology as a distinct subject (motivated by some round of budgeting somewhere I’ll wager). His point that biology is not … Continue reading “Scientific American interviews”

Met one Alex Lennon last night (in the Pickerell, where else). He has his own personal www.embeddedsoftware.co.uk website and works for Organix in Cambridge. He spotted I was reading Anthony Gottlieb’s “The Dream of Reason – a History of Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance” [QUOTE] Already a classic in its first year of … Continue reading “Embedded Software”

This year is 30 years since Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was published. To mark the event …. Fritz Schabmuller and Gregor Schleicher are doing the ZMM route (on Harley’s) to raise money for charities (Medicin sans Frontieres & The White Ring). They leave Ingolstadt on 1st July then starting in … Continue reading “30th Anniversary ZMM Rides”

The Demystification of Management Systems Science. Seems an apt title. Spookily I just came across this PhD course material presented at Helsinki University of Technology, in a cross-search hit on Pirsig, the day after coming back from a meeting / conference at the HUT in Espoo. An interesting paper by David Hawk at the New … Continue reading “The Demystification of Management Systems Science”