Community, Democracy and Performance

Stumbleupon Review of : http://junana.com/CDP/corpus/

    “So long as the work of education is not clearly institutionalized as a specific, autonomous practice, so long as it is the whole group and a whole symbolically structured environment, without specialized agents or specific occasions, that exerts an anonymous, diffuse pedagogic action, the essential part of the modus operandi that defines practical masters, is transmitted through practice, in the practical state, without rising to the level of discourse. The child mimics other people’s actions rather than ‘models’. Body hexis speaks directly to the motor function, in the form of a pattern of postures that is both individual and systematic, being bound up with a whole system of objects, and charged with a host of special meanings and values. But the fact that schemes are able to pass directly from practice to practice without moving through discourse and consciousness does not mean that the acquisition of habitus is no more than a mechanical learning through trial and error”

    (Bourdieu 1990, 73-74).

Tagged , | Leave a comment

Magnificent Oil Paintings by Leonid Afremov&-&AmO Images: Capturing Life…

Posted in Parapluie | Tagged | Leave a comment

YouTube – Пикник – От Кореи До Карелии (клип

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TffQeeVmAE[/youtube]

Posted in Music | Tagged | Leave a comment

YouTube – Red Elvises &My love is killing me&

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMz8vGUQhas[/youtube]

Posted in Music | Tagged | Leave a comment

Epsilon Aurigae Eclipse Campaign 2009

From the page: “Epsilon Aurigae Star System

The epsilon Aurigae system is among the most interesting eclipsing star systems. It has puzzled astronomers for nearly 200 years. It is a bright star (3rd magnitude) located about 3 degrees southwest of Capella and eclipses once every 27.1 years. It is at the vertex of a triangular group of stars known as “The Kids”. Zeta Aurigae, another interesting long-period eclipsing binary, makes up one of the other two stars.

What makes this star system so intriguing is not just its long period but the length of its eclipse, what happens during the eclipse and what happens out-of-eclipse. The eclipse lasts nearly two years which with the 27.1 year period means the eclipsing body must be gigantic. There have been no satisfactory explanations for this. To make matters even more interesting, there seems to be a mid-eclipse brightening. How can this be? One explanation, according to James Kemp, is that the eclipsing body is a giant cloud of gas enclosing two small stars in orbit around each other. These stars sweep out an area in the middle. It would be a bit like a giant donut. This donut must be tilted such that as it eclipses the primary star, the system’s total light decreases and the “donut-hole” allows some of the primary star’s light to sneak through at mid-eclipse.”

Tagged | Leave a comment

Only In It For The Gold: Can Computation Help Solve the Economic Crisis…

From the page: “What we want is a huge system where the computational cost of each individual event is very small. And we want huge amounts of observational data to calibrate against them. And we want to build lots of models. Lots and lots.

The analogy to a continuum model in economics is obviously the agent model. The simulation thus needs make no assumptions of perfect information, price equilibrium, discount rates, anything. No approximation for the whole system is necessary and it seems likely that none is even possible. What we can model is how individuals make decisions in certain circumstances and see the large scale economic activities that emerge.

I’ve met a few people who both understand this much and indeed are pursuing it. Yet they are still hypnotized by the idiot passivity of the “neoclassicists” (H/T Erik Conway) and thus, think of economics as a branch of pure science,.

It is anything but. Economics is the most applied of sciences.”

Tagged | Leave a comment

YouTube – travelfilmarchives Channel

From the page: “Travel back in time and around the world with The Travel Film Archive. The Travel Film Archive is a collection of travelogues and educational and industrial films — many of them in color – that show the world the way it was between 1900 and 1970. Our holdings include archives of the renowned travel filmmakers Burton Holmes, Andre de la Varre, and James A. FitzPatrick, as well as footage shot by many other intinerant cameramen.”

Tagged , | Leave a comment

Wannabe suicide bombers beware: Chris Morris movie gets go…

The project, which Morris has described as showing the “Dad’s Army side to terrorism”, has suffered a year of delays, and was refused funding as a television project by the BBC, amid speculation that the subject was too controversial. But Morris remained determined that it should go into production.

Deirdre Steed, who worked with Morris to secure funding for the film, said the satirist, who fronted The Day Today and Brass Eye, has spoken to terrorism experts, imams, police, secret services and hundreds of Muslims to research the film.

“Even those who have trained and fought jihad report the frequency of farce,” she said. “At training camps, young jihadis argue about honey, cry for their mums, shoot each other’s feet off, chase snakes and get thrown out for smoking. A minute into his martyrdom video, a would-be bomber looks puzzled and says ‘what was the question again?’ On Millennium eve, five jihadis set out to ram a US warship. They slipped their boat into the water and carefully stacked it with explosives. It sank.”

Ms Steed said terrorist cells share the same group dynamics as stag parties and five-a-side football teams. “There is conflict, friendship, misunderstanding and rivalry,” she said. “Terrorism is about ideology, but it’s also about berks.

“Four Lions is a funny, thrilling fictional story that illuminates modern British jihad with an insight beyond anything else in our culture. It plunges us beyond seeing these young men as unfathomably alien. It undermines the folly of just wishing them away or alienating the entire culture from which they emerge. As Spinal Tap understood heavy metal and Dr Strangelove the Cold War, Four Lions understands modern British jihadis.”

Tagged , | Leave a comment

Harold Ambler: Mr. Gore: Apology Accepted

“Ambler’s piece is so lame it is worthy of NewsBlusters or The Examiner, particularly as it affects the same tone of self-righteous arrogance as only the truly ignorant can manage. It is pure Denierism unsullied by any stain of accuracy or logic.” — quoted from greenfyre.stumble on his blog
greenfyre.wordpress.com/2009/01/06/ambler-huffs-and-puffs-but-mostly-he-jus… [wordpress.com] .

See also:

getenergysmartnow.com/2009/01/05/huffpost-scores-a-10-on-the-inhofe-scale/ [getenergysmartnow.com]


In the last paragraph, Mr. Ambler says, “your [Al Gore] contention that the Arctic basin will be ‘ice free’ in summer within five years (which you said last month in Germany), is one of the most demonstrably false comments you have dared to make.”

How can a contention about something to happen five years in the future be demonstrably false now?

desmogblog.com/harold-ambler-huffington-post-global-warming-misinformation [desmogblog.com]
by desmogblog.stumble/

The question for me is: who the heck is Harold Ambler?

And what makes Ambler such an authority on climate science to so confidently make the bold claim that global warming is a lie?

By the looks of his various bios smattered around the internet it appears that Ambler’s background in the area of climate science is non-existent, he is the author of an upcoming book on a rowing team at Brown University and a musician.

dailykos.com/story/2009/1/4/18222/94498 [dailykos.com]


This piece reminds me of conversations I have with my sister who is a very intelligent, educated, articulate… creationist. When I state scientific facts related to the creation of the universe and evolution- her response is to either 1) state that scientists need to do a better job of communicating to the public- unless she fully understands a concept, she is not going to believe it; or 2) point out gaps in the scientific understanding as proof that the scientist is 100% wrong.

#1- Yes, all scientists need to communicate with the public better. But the lay person needs to understand that science is complicated; generally very complicated. And the skills that make us good scientists often compete with communicating to a non-scientific audience. And even if we are communicating well, complicated concepts need to be simplified- example of this. Should it be called “historically aberrant heat and mass transfer fluctuations correlating with modified delta functions of atmospheric trace gasses and the role of the human primate population and technology”?

Tagged , , | Leave a comment

YouTube – Queen Rania spoofs Lettermans Top 10 while accepting award at…

Queen Rania Al Abdullah of Jordan and the top 10 reasons she started her own YouTube channel.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPcw3fLeBHM[/youtube]

Tagged , | Leave a comment