My mind is just brimming with ideas for this blog, especially as we roll into our 3rd summer (2nd full) in Montreal. Reflections on my big course this term and the project of mass education that universities have undertaken; reflections on our “settling” here and changing knowledge of the city; a few technological matters in …
Category Archives: Text
A Brief Gee-Whiz Post
As I may have mentioned before, my mp3 project has a bit of an oral history dimension to it, since may of the people involved in developing the technology are still alive and happy to talk about their part in it. I’ve done a couple of these interviews by telephone now, as I’ve been travelling …
A Few Thoughts on the Virginia Tech Massacre
Despite my taste for violence in fiction, I have a very limited appetite for mediatic violence when it corresponds to something that actually happened. Which is to say that I’m not particularly a news junkie when it comes to disaster and monstrosity and thus have not been following the Virginia Tech Massacre beyond reading enough …
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A Dispatch From South of the Border
The following email arrived in my inbox yesterday, which I am reproducing here. If you want to skip to the chase, here’s a link to a letter you can send to the Postal Board of Governors. I’m not sure if they’ll pay attention if you’ve got a Canadian address, but then, it being the U.S., …
Here Come the Leaping Lesbians
For each academic year since I’ve become a professor, the end of classes has been punctuated by a rock show. I have fond memories of sitting on the Carnegie-Mellon lawn in Pittsburgh, lazily watching a lukewarm set by Superchunk. Another year we drove to Cleveland to watch Shiner (one of my favorite bands at the …
Penguin Cam
I just learned of this last night. The refresh rate is too slow, but hey, it’s pictures of penguins. How can you go wrong?
The point being made. . .
I just finished reading a comprehensive exam answer in which the student refers to Lewis Mumford’s notion of “biotechnics,” which he elaborates at the end of The Myth of the Machine. For Mumford, biotechnics is an attempt to subordinate technological development to the rules of life instead of the rules of math, an attempt as …