Synthesizing
I’m at the point where I just have to stop reading and focus entirely on bringing together the hundreds of notes I’ve made toward the thesis.
Credit: http://flickr.com/photos/hawksanddoves/
This is insanely difficult.
The trouble is that I’m pulling four things together: Hayden White’s ideas about the emplotment of history; Kenneth Burke’s ideas about Myth; Claude Levi-Strauss’s ideas about Myth; and T.S. Kuhn’s paradigms. But I’m not just pulling them together – I’m pulling modified forms of them or incomplete pieces of them together. I’m using White, for example, only so that I can step beyond him, knocking down the barrier he draws between history and the sciences. But for the reader to follow along with me in knocking down that barrier, he has to be familiar already with Kuhn’s work. And what I want to say about Kuhn depends upon a familiarity with Burke. Et cetera.
To throw in the final twist, I’m using Cormac McCarthy to tie them all together. See, for me the principle “argument” running through the Border tetralogy is that all the sense we can make out of the world comes through the construction of narratives – that “All is telling” (The Crossing 155). This all-inclusiveness bridges the divide between the sciences and humanities. Burke restricts himself from applying his uses of myth to any science and White, as I’ve said, believes that history cannot ever be a science. On the other side scientists are loath to get anywhere close to anything that could be called myth (even people like Kuhn who are quite willing to undercut the sacrosanct status of science. But what’s to stop us from saying that all fields are essentially mythic – they all work to generate the narratives we use to order the world. Science places particular limits on the types of elements one can place into the narrative but that does not make it exceptional – all mythmaking has rules. Science is a form of mythmaking that is incredibly well adapted for application to the manipulation of our environment. …But I’m digressing into my theory stuff.
I’ve been bashing my head against this introduction for two weeks and I still have a tangled mess of these different strings. I know the theoretical knot that ties them together is mythic narrative, and I know that McCarthy provides the light with which to view those connections. But untangling them such that the reader can follow one thread without having to know all the others is killing me.
another reddit find
Yet another interesting blurb from the collective at reddit science. Biomimicry is explained through 15 examples.
Balderdash
An article in yesterday’s NYTimes makes the move not necessarily to equate, but to strongly link scientific pursuits with democracy. The author, David Overbye, suggests that the scientific tenet of questioning everything in order to get at “truth” mirrors or is an analog of free speech in a Utopian democracy. To what degree you buy into the proposition that scientists feel free to question everything I leave to you. I think they can be about as stubborn as anyone. Anyway, a short read, worth its time.
posters
Making science hip. Found this on boingboing.net (be sure to check out the flickr photostream)
I’ve long believed that distinctive promotion for academic functions is key on campuses. I did graphic work for the English fest at UWEC. I had pulled old movie posters (like those for Vertigo, Casablanca, etc.) into photoshop and modified them to promote the fest (this was long ago, before such a tactic had become cliche). I got done with the posters, and I wanted to print them off poster-sized and in color, then get them up in every building. Of course, the budget for the fest didn’t allow this. Since then, I’ve always wanted a science-sized budget to promote my humanities events.
End of semester madness
I had seven posts that I planned to make about things I found on teh webz. It’s the end of times the semester so what little free time I get I spend watching pirated television shows. Then my motherboard blew a few caps and I had to do a complete reinstall of Linux and lost the bookmarks. I’ll probably stumble across them again eventually but for now enjoy this comic:
Search Engine With Roots in Genomics Unlocks Deep Web
How many times has Google failed you? More times than you know. This engine claims to pick up much of Google’s leavings. Unfortunately only its beta version is free, and you have to fill out a standard info form just to get access to that. I’ve signed up and will post what I find out.
How Awesome is This
Science is so cool in its own right I don’t know why anyone would prefer religious explanations. Dark flow is the latest dark phenomenon, and I wont pretend that I understand it at this point.
Everything in the known universe is said to be racing toward the massive clumps of matter at more than 2 million miles (3.2 million kilometers) an hour—a movement the researchers have dubbed dark flow.
The presence of the extra-universal matter suggests that our universe is part of something bigger—a multiverse—and that whatever is out there is very different from the universe we know.
The trouble with conceptualizing things like this is nicely described by Dawkins here.
Cinelerra project
Edit: I’ve uploaded a version to YouTube.
I’ve been dawdling on posts. I’ve also been putting together a small movie project for 7045. I pulled some footage from the Prelinger Archives and a few photos from the Creative Commons search on Flickr.
Sexual Selection (2:57) (35 MB xvid avi)
The little project sort of conflates the modern practice of sampling and the feel of the ephemeral educational films it draws on (bad editing, loud string music, etc.). The most difficult problem was that I had a certain set of ideas I had to address and finding relevant footage was hugely time consuming. So I had to compromise on my original plan, which was to pull in bunches of clips, settling for a few and using images for filler (eg. the section on natural selection.)
