Star Children

I attended a lecture by Lawrence Kraus the other day at the IHR. It is part of a faculty seminar that is exploring "origins." I'm not sure exactly what he had to add to the origins discussion other than to point out that we are "star children," (which I must say, was moving and poetic--we are all composed from the atoms of long-dead stars) but he did spark interesting discussion about the role of humanities in science. He said that he feels philosophy is pretty useless and should not have much of a role in universities and especially not in science.

Sing a little

Recently I have been thinking about "high stakes" situations in which to theorize about compromise, or agency. It seemed to me that the stakes had to be high on some kind of universal level in order to be worth thinking about or to be impactful in any kind of lasting way. When I read Hull and Katz's "Crafting an Agentive Self: Case Studies of Digital Storytelling" last semester, I loved the idea that digital story telling could perhaps help a marginalized young person (which to an extent is all young people, whose needs and skills are never valued, only 'crafted') to craft a sense of agency for themselves. But I worried that it would be only that: a sense of agency. One of my concerns perhaps was that the stakes of "succeeding" at DUSTY were too low.

Congestion

I just read this interesting post from BikePortland.org (via my favorite brother) about how turning off traffic lights in one small town in England actually decreased travel time and made everyone stop acting like bunch of toddlers with driver licenses.

I've actually seen something like this before and never stopped to think about it. When the power goes out on a light, people approach the light slowly, cautiously. They take turns, being very careful to make sure the next person in line is the next person to go. It's amazing. Drivers do this without getting together and talking about it or voting on it or even being told to. They just do it.

Schizo

I had a strange sort of epiphany today. I decided to go public with my blog by posting it on my facebook. I also decided to finally change my profile picture to something that more closely reflects my identity (whatever that means, see my previous post "Identity"), as opposed to that picture of the Columbia Basin gorge. And I engaged in a pretty interesting blog-off with Kaseido/John.

When I first set up this blog, I didn't know what it would be about. Still don't, really. But I knew I didn't want to be constructed as female. I loved the idea of being able to be anyone or anything on the internet. But that's not what happened. My blog wandered, directionless, and my online identity floundered, essentially meaningless and context-less. I couldn't escape being me.

A Voice in the Wind

I just saw yet another article on Engadget about how Android sales are overtaking the iPhone (and other smartphone OS). I rarely actually read these any more because I am so tired of the media (yes, I'm referring to Engadget and its tech-blog cronies as media) constructing this Apple vs Android war.