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Continue reading ‘Links for the week of July 23rd, 2010′
Tag Archive for 'society'
If you want to follow my shared links in real time instead of as a weekly digest, head over to Delicious. You can search them there easily too.
Continue reading ‘Links for the week of June 26th, 2010′
I say to you that we are full of chemicals which require us to belong to folk societies, or failing that, to feel lousy all the time. We are chemically engineered to live in folk societies, just as fish are chemically engineered to live in clean water—and there aren’t any folk societies for us anymore. (Kurt Vonnegut)
Wolfgang Pauli apparently once said of a student’s work: “This isn’t right. This isn’t even wrong.”, to deride it for being unfalsifiable. Grad school isn’t quite that bad. We’re all running the experiment together every day. We can tell whether or not it’s working, at least in theory. But only if we’re willing to look. I’m looking; I say it’s not working, at least not for graduate students, not on average (mean or median, pick your poison).
Continue reading ‘What’s (socially) wrong with graduate school?’
If you want to follow my shared links in real time instead of as a weekly digest, head over to Delicious. You can search them there easily too.
Continue reading ‘Links for the week of June 11th, 2010′
If you want to follow my shared links in real time instead of as a weekly digest, head over to Delicious. You can search them there easily too.
Continue reading ‘Links for the week of June 4th, 2010′
Science is a strange kind of reality worship. We want to know what really is, out there in the physical world, independent of the vagaries of our internal experience. We try to find what’s true for everyone, all the time. It’s easy for me to forget that there are some contexts in which what is actually happening, in a measurable sense, is not what matters most. Sometimes, it hardly seems to matter at all. Corporate PR hacks, religious proselytizers and other propagandists understand this intuitively. If you tell people a story they want to believe, often they will go ahead and believe it, regardless of any countervailing evidence. They will thank Big Brother for increasing the chocolate ration from 30 grams to 20 grams per week. But this kind of disconnection of external from internal reality isn’t always sinister. Sometimes it isn’t even a disconnection so much as it is an orthogonality. Disconnection suggests that the two were once connected, or are intended to be one, but our internal experience is just not the same thing as external reality. They are related, but separated, by warm vitreous pools of light and hairy waveguides. There is some part of us which is intrinsic, or such a distant and distorted echo of the outside world as to be unrecognizable.
I feel the way I did that morning in the hostel in Juneau, when Becky and I were starting our kayaking trip in Alaska in May of the year 2000, almost exactly 10 years ago. I feel that way, but on a different time scale. I woke up in the bunk, and didn’t know where I was. I’m sure that feeling has a name, but I don’t know what it is. I was temporarily misplaced. The most recent bits of history, which had gotten me there, were lost in my mind somewhere. An episode of micro-amnesia. Where am I? And then in a wrenching mental gyration, it all comes back. Like looking at a map and a compass, and suddenly realizing you’ve gotten turned around. It’s not that peak, it’s this one. That means we’re here, not there. And fuck, we’re out of water too. Now what?
David Montgomery‘s Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations reminded me a lot of When the Rivers Run Dry by Fred Pearce, except that instead of looking at how we have allocated our water resources globally, it focuses on the way humanity has husbanded (or not) its soil resources throughout history, through a vast array of case studies in what we got wrong. It also reminded me a little bit of Energy at the Crossroads, insofar as the last chapter or two, instead of being a concrete, level-headed outline of what we need to do if we actually want to solve the problem which has been presented, it devolves a little bit into a lament. You’ve convinced me there’s a problem. Clearly you have some idea of what the solution looks like. Please don’t be afraid to put that idea into words, even if you think the plausible solutions are so far removed from our current way of doing things that someone is going to think you’re crazy. I think a lot of the most credible solutions to our sustainability problems sound “crazy” to “normal” people these days… but that’s just the way it is. We still need to know what the available solutions look like, or at the very least, what characteristics one can sketch out which any available solution has to have.
Continue reading ‘Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations by David Montgomery’
If you want to follow my shared links in real time instead of as a weekly digest, head over to Delicious. You can search them there easily too.
Continue reading ‘Links for the week of March 4th, 2010′
If you want to follow my shared links in real time instead of as a weekly digest, head over to Delicious. You can search them there easily too.
Continue reading ‘Links for the week of February 5th, 2010′
