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Monthly Archives: March 2009
on the pauperism of intellectuals
Lee Siegel writes:
What we never hear about in the popular media—where intellectual discussion once took place—is debate over fundamental meanings, or essential definitions, or connections between seemingly unrelated phenomena. Those are the elements of an idea, which is the challenge consciousness makes to concrete reality.
Of course, intellectuals are victims of their own drive to specialization, [...]
on marijuana legalization
Okay, it’s finally grown irritating enough to merit a few short moments of analysis: should marijuana be legalized? The issue has become something of a hot-button topic of late, even getting its fair share of airtime on CNBC. There are three reasons for the recent push for marijuana legalization, all of them related in their [...]
Posted in economics Tagged crime, drug war, legalization, marijuana, mexico, violence Leave a comment
Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-03-29
Hard to get over the fact that I went from mustique beaches to dour Hudson forests in less than 24 hours. #
Audio: luxembourg: http://tumblr.com/x2b1gvcmw #
Anyone know great songs to fall asleep to? – (via luxembourg) I fall asleep to the album “Devotion” by Beach… http://tumblr.com/x2b1gvdmx #
Photo: mustique what an amazing week http://tumblr.com/x2b1gy7vw #
Photo: http://tumblr.com/x2b1gy8iy [...]
human nature?
normblog has a post highly pertinent to my interests: on the debate over nature vs. nurture in determining “human-ness”.
‘norm’ (should I know his name?) writes:
cultural determinism, in the sense of denying the reality and/or causal influence of a common human nature, has always been unsustainable. It is an absurdity. Plain facts of material life include [...]
Posted in philosophy, science Tagged determinism, human nature, nature, nurture, philosophy, relativism, science Leave a comment
Review: Sin Nombre
Sin Nombre is a frenetic drama about the teeming and ignored life of migrants in central America and the ultraviolent gangs to which this life is inextricably linked. I had the pleasure of attending a screening of the film this afternoon, with a Q&A afterwards with the director, Cary Joji Fukunaga and the CEO of [...]
Posted in criticism, film Leave a comment
against boredom
The assorted fiscal and political crises now saturating western intellectual conversations and cocktail party bon mots are united by their total lack of appeal. When anyone with even so much as a passing interest in the “Credit Crunch” must learn about the particularities of Collateralized Debt Obligations and Keynesian financial stimulus theory, we are lost.
There [...]
Twitter Updates for 2009-03-22
Hard to get over the fact that I went from mustique beaches to dour Hudson forests in less than 24 hours. #
Audio: luxembourg: http://tumblr.com/x2b1gvcmw #
Anyone know great songs to fall asleep to? – (via luxembourg) I fall asleep to the album “Devotion” by Beach… http://tumblr.com/x2b1gvdmx #
Twitter Updates for 2009-03-15
Photo: Off to warmer climes for a week. Updates when I return. http://tumblr.com/x2b1ffo5m #
Photo: yaywhales: O_O OMG OMG :L HAHA ROFL PMSL http://tumblr.com/x2b1ffods #
Visualizing Science
Information visualization is one of the buzzwords of 2009 and is definitely on the list of things I knew how to do better (with cooking, tennis, speaking french).
The “Map of Science”, developed by a team of researchers lead by Johan Bollen at the Los Alamos National Labs in my glorious home state New Mexico, [...]
Posted in images, science Tagged information aesthetics, information visualization, los alamos, new mexico, science 1 Comment
communalism in the 21st century