Psybertron Asks

Steven Pinker Interview – Pre-Blank-Slate interview from Meaning of Life TV [via James Marshall on MoQ]. My review of Pinker’s Blank Slate.

Fritjof Capra – Tao of Physics (1975)
Fritjof Capra – Turning Point (1982)
Malcolm Gladwell – Tipping Point (2000 / 2002)
Michael Talbot – Holographic Universe (1990 / 1992)
Michael Talbot – Mysticism and the New Physics (Written 1975 / 1981 / 1993 Read already)
Fritjof Capra – Web of Life (1996)
Fritjof Capra – Hidden Connections (2002)
(Plus systems theory stuff – Lazlo, von Bertalanffy, etc.)

Pirsig presented to the Rocky Mountain Modern Languages Association on 13th October 1961 [see Timeline]. It seems Owen Barfield is a regular item on the RMMLA agenda.

And this is a much better Barfield link that the one I blogged earlier which is a nasty frames-base site.

Another little synchronicity the other day. When I mentioned to someone in the Pickerell (by Magdelene in Cambridge) that Barfield was on the reading list after Northrop, they knew of the C.S.Lewis / Inklings connection I blogged earlier. I knew of the Oxford 1917 to 1924 connection when Lewis (at University College Oxford) met Barfield (Wadham College Oxford), and C.S.Lewis was subsequently Fellow of Magdelen College Oxford and English Tutor there from 1925 to 1954, following which he took up the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Magdelene College Cambridge and regularly occupied the sofa in the corner of the Pickerell in, until his death in 1963. Anyway, back to Barfield, before I digress too far- C.S.Lewis, J.R.R.Tolkien and G.K.Chesterton lead off into strongly theistic directions very quickly.

Rough Barfield timeline.
Born 1898 and raised Muswell Hill, 6 Grosvenor Gardens.
Attended Highgate School.
At 20 (1918) joined The Royal Engineers during WW1
At 21 (1919) went (back) to Oxford, Wadham College (Met C.S.Lewis, joins the Inklings)
At 22 workig as Assistant Editor on London Weekly Newspaper
Starts to get works published / interested in Anthroposophy.
At 36 achieves B.Litt Oxon, and becomes partner in his fathers law firm.
Practising lawyer 1931 to 1959
Baptized 1948.
1964/5 Drew University. Madison, New Jersey.
Visiting professorships at various US Universities.
Moves to live in Orchard View, Kent during 1986
From 1986 until his death aged 99 on December 14th 1997, lived ay The Wallhatch, Forest Row, East Sussex.

I’m that close to finishing Northrop – 20 pages maybe (Post note – Completed Northrop BTW) – so I’ve got some more reading material lined-up, already despatched from Amazon.

Richard Rorty – Philosophy and Social Hope
Richard Rorty – Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity
Owen Barfield – Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning
Owen Barfield – History in English Words

Interestingly it’s taken me since late July to complete Northrop – though I did fit in George Lakoff’s Metaphors We Live By and most of Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, and a re-read of Michael Talbot’s Mysticism and the New Physics along the way. Can’t think what to say about Northrop yet, except it was worth the difficult read. Pretty much a complete history of politics, law, religion, empire, invasion and philosophy of the whole world ever in one long book, with some very tricky whole-paragraph-long sentences. Bad news is that because it was an old fragile copy of thebook, I didn’t dare annotate it like I do with all my modern paperback editions – so I’, going to have to read it again to dig out the key references. Well worth it though – what was I saying “Nothing New Under the Sun”……..

Do You Skype ? – Skype – From those whacky people that brought you peer to peer file-sharing via Kazaa in the wake of Napster, a peer-to-peer, free, international, internet, voice and text, PC phone service – dead simple and it works – remarkably well, no-delay and crystal clear. Noticed cropping up on several blogger pages, then noticed Stuart Henshall had a link to his own experimental Bloggers on Skype page, to create a community of bloggers connected by Skype. Like anything peer-to-peer it’s going to need a critical mass of subscribers to be effective – but it’s free while stocks last.

Added the links to my side-bar. Let’s see if this takes off. What have you got to lose ?

Picked up Jack Vinson’s blog [Knowledge Jolt with Jack] from a backtrack link. Some interesting knowledge management stuff with common chemical engineering heritage. Great set of links in his blogroll, beyond the usual KM’ers, including for example …

Hal Macomber’s blog [Reforming Project Management] has this Insead paper on Uncertainty and Chaos on Project Management.

Introducing New Ideas Into Organisations – Mary Lynn Manns and Linda Rising at Uni of North Carolina [via Spike Hall] have a paper (draft of a book) that intrigues me. Partly this is because introducing change into organisations was the subject of a dissertation I wrote ealier, and partly because I am in the middle of a long process to introduce a novel idea into an organisation.

The clincher was seeing the problem of blurring the distinction between the idea and the means of its introduction. Particularly severe in the case above because the idea is about “patterns” as means of introducing – well – ideas ! Stangely this recognition of McLuhan’s “The Medium is the Message” even turned up in the day job recently.