On Markets

To take arms against a market of troubles, or by walking on its flows, to surf them?...

 

Is intellectual change afoot?

Roll Call of the Dead

When all our professions have been replaced, what will we do then?  Of course, there will always be something, won't there?

Satanic Verses: Myths

Great backstory to the furor around that book and its fallout twenty years later.  Yes, the liberal spine needs to relocate its spirit, its imperative, its animus.  And goddamn it--that just might hurt some feelings. 

Susan Sontag

Never thought of her as any sort of model, but this sentence gives me pause to reconsider:  "Sontag continued her intense and sustained engagement with canonical novelists, philosophers, and poets such as Jeremy Bentham, Joseph Conrad, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, André Gide, Hermann Hesse, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Henry James, Franz Kafka, Søren Kierkegaard, Thomas Mann, Friedrich Nietzsche, Rainer Maria Rilke, Anthony Trollope, and Leo Tolstoy."

More Lit-Bashing

I love hearing about the decrepitude of the study of literature in the academy.  It helps to justify a major life decision of mine (and one I continually question):  not to pursue the vaunted PhD and professor of literature perch. 

 

 

Paper Wasting

We waste a lot of paper.  While we have done a good job setting up recycling bins, we could save significant money on the purchase of paper if we found a way to internally re-use paper.  For instance, many times PDF files print incorrectly, producing a line of indecipherable gobbledygook on a huge number of wasted sheets of paper.  Turn these sheets over and they could be easily printed on again--so long as the person printing is only printing a document for internal use.  (I.e., it doesn't require a perfect sheet of paper). 

 

First step:  have a place to collect such sheets of paper.  (the person who printed the document tacitly approves that they be made available for re-use; i.e., there is nothing confidential or private on the mis-printed sheet.)

Second step:  put them in a printer in a designated drawer. 

Third step:  the IT department (perhaps working with printer vendor) will create a means by which anyone printing can choose which drawer they are printing from (so that they can print to the lesser quality paper if they wish to)

Fourth step:  Create 'job aid' sheets and distribute them to employees so they are aware of this option and how to use it.

 

 

On Writing

So You Want to be a Writer?...

YouTube Cashcow

Broadcasting--and earning a living--from the basement.  Wow...

Mortal Coil Shuffle

Worms amuck.  Oh yeah, that's where they live and consume us-- in the muck.  The world has gone awry. 

Mortal Coil Shuffle

Worms amuck.  Oh yeah, that's where they live and consume us-- in the muck.  The world has gone awry. 

Public Schools, Quo Vadis?

To reform or not to reform:  or rather, how much, how deeply to reform.  Soliloquies in Obama land.  I'm on the edge of my seat. 

 

Out of Control

I want to read this book--and it's online also.  It may be great, or it may be a Satanic manifesto on techno-triumphalism. 

 
Out of Control is a summary of what we know about self-sustaining systems, both living ones such as a tropical wetland, or an artificial one, such as a computer simulation of our planet. The last chapter of the book, "The Nine Laws of God," is a distillation of the nine common principles that all life-like systems share. The major themes of the book are:

• As we make our machines and institutions more complex, we have to make them more biological in order to manage them.
  
• The most potent force in technology will be artificial evolution. We are already evolving software and drugs instead of engineering them.
  
• Organic life is the ultimate technology, and all technology will improve towards biology.
  
• The main thing computers are good for is creating little worlds so that we can try out the Great Questions. Online communities let us ask the question "what is a democracy; what do you need for it?" by trying to wire a democracy up, and re-wire it if it doesn't work. Virtual reality lets us ask "what is reality?" by trying to synthesize it. And computers give us room to ask "what is life?" by providing a universe in which to create computer viruses and artificial creatures of increasing complexity. Philosophers sitting in academies used to ask the Great Questions; now they are asked by experimentalists creating worlds.
  
• As we shape technology, it shapes us. We are connecting everything to everything, and so our entire culture is migrating to a "network culture" and a new network economics.
  
• In order to harvest the power of organic machines, we have to instill in them guidelines and self-governance, and relinquish some of our total control.

 

Dead Story?

Alarm bells ring.  Will there still be a beginning, middle and ending?

 

Dawn of a News(paper) Future

"Information is now a public service as much as it's a commodity.  It should be thought of the same way as education, health care. It's one of the things you need to operate a civil society, and the market isn't doing it very well."

 

You can't keeping cutting newsrooms forever--for the sake of almighty profitability--and imagine the journalists won't finally reconvene elsewhere.

The Game

Hmm... So much to say on this subject--the changing mores of the dating game--that she doesn't even touch upon.

 

 

Future Occupations

A roving English teacher/librarian in the hinterlands of South America.  Rambling along the rutted roads, tomes in tow, atop his donkey--the  biblioburro is born amidst the drug war mountains of Colombia!  From so many perspectives, this guy is my hero... 

On Genius

Some come early, some come late. 

Farming the City: Building a Sustainable Food System

I was lucky enough to see a presentation on "Farming the City: Building a Sustainable Food System," recently.  It was a free lecture sponsored by SEED Wayne, a campus-community collaboration dedicated to building sustainable food systems on WSU's campus and in Detroit area neighborhoods.  The guest speaker was Will Allen, 2008 MacArthur Fellow and urban farmer.

 

More on it:

 

"Will Allen is an urban farmer who is transforming the cultivation, production, and delivery of healthy foods to

underserved, urban populations. In 1995, while assisting neighborhood children with a gardening project, Allen began developing the farming methods and educational programs that are now the hallmark of the non-profit organization, Growing Power, which he directs and cofounded.  Guiding his efforts is the recognition that the unhealthy diets of low-income, urban populations, and such related health problems as obesity and diabetes, largely are attributable to limited access to safe and affordable fresh fruits and vegetables. Through a novel synthesis of a variety of low-cost farming technologies – including use of raised beds, aquaculture, vermiculture, and heating greenhouses through composting – Growing Power produces vast amounts of food year-round at its main farming site, two acres of land located within Milwaukee's city limits. Over the last decade, Allen has expanded Growing Power's initiatives through partnerships with local organizations and activities such as the Farm-City Market Basket Program, which provides a weekly basket of fresh produce grown by members of the Rainbow Farmer's Cooperative to low-income urban residents at a reduced cost. 

 

The internships and workshops hosted by Growing Power engage teenagers and young adults, often minorities and immigrants, in producing healthy foods for their communities and provide intensive, hands-on training to those interested in establishing similar farming initiatives in other urban settings. Through these and other programs still in development, Allen is experimenting with new and creative ways to improve the diet and health of the urban poor.

 

Will Allen received a B.A. from the University of Miami. After a brief career in  professional basketball and a number of years in corporate marketing at Procter and Gamble, he returned to his roots as a farmer. He has served as the founder and CEO of Growing Power, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, since 1995 and has taught workshops to aspiring urban farmers across the United States and abroad." 

 

It was a vision of the future.

 

 

 

Game Plan for Financial Snafu Survival

Since the New Deal became the Nude Ill, stripped and derided by Right (and cowardly Left).  By Ripofflickins and Blemocrats.  Now were all hunkered down in our bunkers, preparing to siphon gas for our collective clunkers, like a nation of Mad Maxes.  But like an spry-minded folksinger of old, Greider offers a no bull ballad for us to learn the words to-- those who still play a real six string (the rest are strummin their financial instruments wondering where everything went...)

 

Latin

Latin. In high schools. Awesome! I wish I had stuck w/my personal studies of it. I may just take them up again!...