From the preface to The Vision of Islam by Sachiko Murata and William C. Chittick: In this book we try to pry open the door to the Islamic universe. We are not interested in evaluating Islam from within those dominant perspectives of modern scholarship that make various contemporary modes of self-understanding the basis for judging [...]
This afternoon I have been following the mis-framing of Chicago’s newly announced plan to release 10 years of… not crime statistics as has been reported, but… police incident reports. From the Boston Globe: Chicago to publish crime stats online CHICAGO—Long a city with a reputation for withholding information, Chicago now wants to make public every [...]
This is a set of images from a self-journaling project I’m working on based around my media-consumption habits. A few months ago I designed a self-journaling worksheet for Angelina, and she really liked the use of a blank face for the critical-reflection process—so that’s one part of it. I just sent off Version 0 to be [...]
The introduction to Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture: In the mid-1990s, as first the Internet and then the World Wide Web swung into public view, talk of revolution filled the air. Politics, economics, the nature of the self—all seemed to teeter on the edge of transformation. The Internet was about to “flatten organizations, globalize [...]
Peter Klausler’s “Principles of the American Cargo Cult” is one of my favorite statements (even more when applied to the idea of “best practices”). II. Causality is selectable All interconnection is apparent Otherwise, complicated explanations would be necessary. The end supports the explanation of the means A successful person’s explanation of the means of his success [...]
From Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: At present we’re snowed under with an irrational expansion of blind data-gathering in the sciences because there’s no rational format for an understanding of scientific creativity. At present we are also snowed under with a lot of stylishness in the arts—thin art—because there’s very little assimilation or extension into underlying form. [...]
I was pointed to Political Scientist Michael Parenti’s 7 categories of generalizations about the way the news media create anti-union messaging by this article analyzing the media’s portrayal of the Philadelphia public transit strike. I got really steamed about a month ago listening to a local interview/call-in show about Boston charter schools and the Teacher [...]
“We’re placing so many demands on bees we’re forgetting that they’re a living organism and that they have a seasonal life cycle,” Marla Spivak, a honeybee entomologist at the University of Minnesota, told The Chronicle. “We’re wanting them to function as a machine.… We’re expecting them to get off the truck and be fine.” From a [...]
HouseSitter movies Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture has an amazingly pointed criticism of modern technocracy (my word) following what is an amazing outline of both Countercultural/Communal philosophy and modern cyberculture. One book mentioned in this conclusion is Ellen Ullman’s Close to the Machine: (page 258, paragraph breaks and emphasis mine) [Ullman’s life is] flexible [...]
Today I was helping a work-study student down the hall from my office on a film studies essay. Her assignment was to analyze what critics had to say on Woody Allen, specifically whether his films were comedies or dramas. She had only read one of three critics (Carney) but it was interesting to map out [...]
