Science without proof

Last year, John Brockman sent out a call to the global scientific and digerati community to answer the question "What ideas do you believe to be true, but cannot prove?"and 120 eminent thinkers answered. The result created a book, What we Believe but Cannot Prove.

This year, the big question being sent out is, "What is your most dangerous idea?". Now this is one that really interests me.

If I had to think of my own and narrow it down? None of them are new, though they aren't very popular. For me, it would be the disservice both science and religion have done to mankind. Probably also the idea that life isn't supposed to have innate meaning - humans aren't here to create, the world doesn't have to have a purpose. It just is.

Like I said, not new. But perhaps something from one of the more complicated and erudite minds out there may spur something for me. I'll look forward to the book.

Value of the intangible

As I recover from a long and hellish December spent writing umpteen pages of essays for various courses, not to mention many application letters for grad school, I am looking ahead to the new semester that starts next week and considering what it means....my last one. Of my BA. Last one. Wow.

It's got me thinking about all the work I have done to get to this point. All the pages I've read of theory and articles. All the pages I've written of theory and ideas and garbage (sometimes). What of it is valuable? What is worth keeping? What would happen if I lost it? If my laptop got stolen?

Stories like this one about a stolen master thesis remind me that I should use the spanky new 200gb external drive I got for Christmas to back up the contents of my Uni folder. Also suggests that I should subscribe to a service like Xdrive when I head into thesis writing land later in the semester, when it is time for me to write up the results of the research project I'll be spearheading.

Sodoku isn't math?

Sodoku has become incredibly popular in La Belle Province of Quebec and has managed to infiltrate my household. I've avoided it, thinking it requires number skill, which I definitely do not have. However, according to American Scientist Online, it doesn't require math so much as it require logic and pattern recognition.

Okay I can buy that. But the medium of its message is still numbers. And I avoid numbers.

[found via Arts & Letters Daily]

Responsibility for action

Reading Arendt's Human Condition. Came across an interesting passage that could be useful in any analysis of the uses to which people put artistic works.

The perplexity is that in any series of events that together form a story with a unique meaning we can at best isolate the agent who set the whole process into motion; and although this agent frequently remains the subject, the "hero" of the story, we never can point unequivocally to him as the author of is eventual outcome" (p.185).

I take this to mean that the author/artist of a work can be seen in their work, but they cannot be held responsible for any action that is the outcome of their speech.

When one considers how this is otherwise often done around violence in video games, Hollywood movies, etc., this quote gives me pause to question my own beliefs.

Gaming in the old media

Does this Economist article that takes on Castronova's new book, Synthetic Worlds indicate that gaming and the analysts who cover it seriously have become newsworthy? I'll let Kelly do the dissecting of the article though, she's far more qualified.

Defining terms

A conversation with Kelly yesterday about terms and their definitions got me thinking about how common academic concepts get taken for granted in the classroom. While I have had an entire class that explained the concepts of ontology, epistemology and methodology, that was a rare occurence. Too often, the professors and instructors assume that we know what a given term or theme is or means.

To whit: dialectic.

Has anyone ever truly explained to you what it means? Independant of using it with Marxian thought?

I realized last night, as I worked through parts of Arendt's Human Condition, that the argument I'm attempting to setup for a long detailed paper on music as mass culture or art requires me to contrast Arendt's work sharply with Adorno's thought. It would seem to me that I'm attempting a dialectical argument.

My understanding of dialectic is the presentation of an argument that has a thesis, an opposing thesis (antithesis?) and a compare/contrast analytical conclusion (synthesis). But is this actually a dialectic?

I'd look downright silly if, in the title of my paper, I grandly proclaimed that I was presenting a dialectical argument, with Arendt on one side, Adorno on the other and my syntehsis of their thoughts with others and my own, if/when, in fact, I am not.

So what does dialectic truly mean anyway? And how am I supposed to know all of these terms and concepts that have cropped up if I've never had the chance to discuss them with someone?

There's my collaborative verbal learning style coming up to bite me again.

Anyway, if you have opinions on the meaning of dialectic, speak up please. My paper is due next wek and I don't want to read as a twit to the professor in question.

Yawning over movies

Yup, there it is. On the front page of my local daily newspaper. "Hollywood fears meltdown".

Seems that movie attendance in theatres is on a sharp decline with no signs of improving. Theatres are pinning their hopes on Jackson's newest, King Kong.

I have nothing against the big ape, but I was never interested in the other versions of this film. I mean, an oversized ape rampaging in Manhattan because he's fallen for a human woman? I have a lot of imagination, but that premise has just never worked for me. I'll be staying home this weekend.

And maybe that's the problem. For much of this year, I haven't gone to the movies. Oh sure I've seen films, including Narnia and the latest Hogwarts saga, and I've actually been very impressed and surprised by one (Derailed, believe it or not....see it definitely if you haven't already), but the year overall has been a big yawn at the box office, as far as I'm concerned. I've been getting more satisfaction out of my PVR.

Perhaps that's the reason? With so many of us able to now be choosy about what and when we watch anything, more of us are choosing to watch only what we think is interesting and forgoing the rest.

Or is it actually a sign that online entertainment, a la MMOs and downloadable TV via iTunes, has really started to hit it big?

I look at the near horizon and I see only one movie I'm looking forward to seeing...Brokeback Mountain. A big screen buddy movie about the lives of two cowboys and their more-than-average homosexual relationship? Wow. Count me in.

The rest of what's coming out though? *Yawn*.

Think I'll read a good book instead.

From the "OMG!" files

Talk about stupid ways to advertise...Alternet reports that Starbucks is paying people to drive around cities with fake coffee cups affixed to the roof of their cars. Why? Read the blogpost.

Order out of randomness

A friend has recently been exploring spirituality as a way of making sense of the world. His main argument for his exploration is that the world is too ordered to be a happy accident.

My own preference is for the theories of emergence trickling out these days from biology and sociology, from people like Barabi and from Johnson.

Then through Arts & Letters Daily, I found this article that makes a very coherent statement for the idea of the randomness of order and the impacts of that on religiosity.

Hopefully he reads it so we can continue our intense and enjoyable exchange on this topic. If you want to join in through the comments below, please do!

Feminism, femininity and me

A few things from this week that have me pondering femininity, feminism and me.

The first has to do with sexuality. While sitting in an intro level life development psychology class the other day, the professor asked the students what age do girls get sexy and at what age are women no longer sexy. The class overwhelmingly decided that the age range for "sexiness" was 14 to 40.

40!

Based on that, then, I have only two years and a few months before I fall off the map of human sexuality.

Hmph.

Why is it that, despite the portrayals of sexier older women in movies and television, a large number of supposedly forward-thinking university students still cling to the outmoded idea that women lose their sexiness once they hit their prime years, whereas men only get sexier?

Then today, I was reading that part of the blame may lay in the failure of feminism to change people's private opinions on the 21st century female experience. The issue is apparently with women's choices, as this excellent Alternet article on Stay-at-home feminists discusses.

The issue, they say, is that much of feminism's attacks and efforts have gone into changing public policy and business practice. Little has been done, though, to change individual opinions and the individual female's idea of what it means to be a woman in this century. Hence the fact that many successful women still give up their careers to stay at home once they have children, and most men still see this choice as a given necessity.

I ponder this these days as I attempt to discover how deeply into exploring female voices I want to go in my own social research. Am I ready to adopt a feminist agenda, when for years I've scoffed at the idea and avoided the label as if it carried the plague?

My first tentative forays into the idea were done last week when I finished a paper that explored digital practice as a safe and empowering place for teenage girls, who are otherwise excluded from public physical space and protected (smothered?) by parents concerned for their bodily safety.

Now I'm contemplating doing a small-scale dual qual/quan research project that explores how national survey data from Canada, US and the UK marginalize and trivialize female digital practice by studying it and configuring it as use, rather than practice, regardless of the ages they study.

The idea would be to use feminist research methods which propose a holistic approach merging quantitative data analysis with qualitative exploration of female meaning through oral histories of a few women at various points in the life span of women. One teenager, one young adult, one career adult and one retiree.

Is this the beginning of a way to redress the wrongs pointed out in the Alternet article? Am I willing to start working on research that will immediately be labeled feminist? Am I prepared for the results, both in the research and in me?

Has feminism truly failed? Am I willing to do something to stop it?

Good questions. Don't know yet. But have to decide soon. My undergraduate studies are rapidly coming to an close, as this semester winds down and leaves me only one more to go. One more before I have to hit the ground running as an emerging scholar.

Am I willing to take this issue on and make it a big part of my future efforts? Am I willing to wear the feminist label and do what it takes to be sure the goals of feminism don't fail?

Stay tuned.

Geek gear

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas. Some snow on the ground, -8 degrees and the promotional emails advertising geek geer are coming into my Outlook all fast and furious.

Most make me yawn.. but this? Are you kidding? That is definitely geek gear. Exceedingly cool.

Homogenity of taste

20 years ago, had someone said to the Europeans that the American wine makers would threaten their business by changing the palates of the populace, the Euro vintners would have laughed at them.

Now, though, it seems like the US cultural juggernaut has managed just that. The sales of fruity, soft wines have gone up, prompting some European winemakers to start using US methods and apparently threatening ancient European traditions and techniques.

More proof of the globalizing homogeneity of taste?

Quiet calm of classic poems

With snow softly falling outside my window, muffling street sounds and blanketing the bare flowerbeds of my front yard, I find myself in a pensive and literary mindset.

On such days, I look to poetry to explain the thoughts and feelings drifting in and around me. So today, rather than pithy or deep thoughts of my own, I shall share a favourite poem.

Psalm of Life
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Tell me not in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou are, to dust thou returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each tomorrow
Find us farther than today.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world's broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!

Trust no Future, howe'er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act, - act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o'erhead!

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sand of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o'er life's solenm main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us then be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait

Why some languages & not others

Found out about this book on why certain languages endured while others died out, despite the fact that both may have been used for trade.

An excellent review of it is available here.

Many of my friends and fellow scholars are interested in sociolinguistics, so I can see this book going under the tree for a few of them.

On my plate

I got asked today what I'm working on at the moment. Rather than repeating it to a few people, I thought I'd blog it.

My writing plate as of today:

• Paper - How digital fan fiction communities allow adolescent females to transcend the uncertainty and stigma of their changing female bodies while remaining firmly entrenched in their bedroom princessdoms. (For a Youth Culture course)
  
• Paper - How commodification of diamonds has led to the right hand diamond ring as part of a social system of identity presentation for successful, independent career women. (For a Material Culture course)
  
• Presentation - The social system of the right hand diamond ring. (For the material culture course)
  
• Paper - The acceleration of the use and destruction of time through the dominance of the mass culture system over high culture (For a Contemporary Social Theory course)
• 1 mid-term exam (Field Research) and two finals (Youth Culture; Womb to Tomb: Psychological Development through the Life Span)
• Five grad school applications, with their letters of intent or statements of purpose.
  
• Phase II of the GameCODE website.
  

I think I needed to see it presented this way, in a list. Now I can recognize that I have a lot to do in the next 30 days and perhaps I'll stop procrastinating?

yeah....right...sounds good though hmmm? Everyone needs goals!

A list of "isms"

Went looking in the Wikipedia for a definition of social determinism and then, in classic procrastination style, followed a sideways link to a master list of "isms" -- ideas, concepts or schools of thought that end in 'ism".

I knew there were quite a few, but had no idea of how many until I started scrolling that list.

Language evolution or devolution?

This book excerpt about the constant (insidious?) creeping of popular culture speak into the everyday vernacular was interesting, but more interesting perhaps is the comment one person makes about "hasn't it always been thus?"

Got me thinking. What words do I use from my own pop culture background that aren't so popular anymore?

"Whatever"

"Excellent"

"It's just a little thing"

"Talk to the hand".

Wow. More than I thought, and that was just based on a quick 30 second brainstorm.

Doe that make me more accessible or do I just sound dumb? Is this all a devolution of the English language or just another step forward in its constant mutation and evolution?

Digerati

While a bit trite in the way they have been labelled, many of the people on this list do fit my idea of who the digerati would be or are.

Scholar or Researcher?

As I work on my statements of intent for grad schools, I'm grappling with the idea of whether I want to be a scholar or a researcher. I was having trouble figuring out the finer distinction between the two when I got an email from the autoethnography mailing list that deals with exactly that.

Robert Scholes draws a distinction between research and scholarship. Research," he writes, "is progressive; it involves invention or discovery of something new. And it often leads to new techniques or products, for which it is highly rewarded. Scholarship, by contrast, is more about recovery than discovery. It is about understanding more clearly or more richly the meaning of texts or events from the past, including how we got to our present cultural situation. And this is true whether the past is ancient, as in Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, or early modern, as in Michael McKeon's Origins of the English Novel, or quite recent, as in Jane Gallop's Around 1981. The end product of this scholarship is not new commercial processes or products; it is a pedagogy enhanced by the best knowledge available. Scholarship is learning in the service of teaching.

I think this is a perfect synthesis of what I've been trying to express.

It also will give me a way to counter a professor I've been having a friendly argument with about the "proper" result of grad school and post-grad studies, because I now realize I was expressing a desire to be a researcher whereas he gets his satisfaction from being a scholar.

Avatars

Much of what is in this journal article about avatars in online space isn't surprising to me, but I'm pleased to see some truly scholarly research addressed to the concept outside of game studies.