recentblogging
"A large city such as Königsberg" | |
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| Posted on 2011-12-09 16:02:16 in nathan @ big ideas | |
Some Thoughts on the London Riots | |
| The disorder London has seen in the past three days has certainly been unusual. Last night similar, although much smaller-scale, incidents took place in a number of other major English cities. Here's how my thoughts stand on this at the moment. I'm responding here mostly to things friends have said over the past few days; I may in places be tilting at windmills, and I may change my views with hindsight, but it seemed worth recording my reactions as they are now. | |
| Posted on 2011-08-09 06:40:58 in This Sentence No Verb | |
Nick Cohen vs The Humanities | |
| Nick Cohen is going after the Humanities in his contrarian manner, claiming that academics have nobody to blame but themselves for the ease with which the current government are going to get rid of them. He seems rather delighted, in fact, by the prospect of the slate being wiped clean. | |
| Posted on 2011-02-01 10:21:09 in This Sentence No Verb | |
Some Quick Logic Puzzles | |
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It's a bit late for Christmas puzzles but these occurred to me this afternoon and I thought they were worth jotting down. | |
| Posted on 2011-01-06 14:16:20 in This Sentence No Verb | |
A Few Remarks on 4'33" and CATM | |
| A few words may be in order in light of Cage Against The Machine, the campaign to sell enough copies of a John Cage's notorious "silent" piece 4'33" to make it the UK Christmas Number One single. I'm not going to say anything very big or clever here, and certainly nothing new, but it might be useful for those who find the whole thing a bit puzzling. | |
| Posted on 2010-12-07 11:18:27 in This Sentence No Verb | |
Presentation on "New Historicism" | |
| I made a quick presentation to give a very simple skeleton for a lesson on New Historicist literary criticism that I'll be doing next Thursday. It's deliberately simplistic so please excuse my mangling of Marx, Foucault and everyone else in the middle bit. | |
| Posted on 2010-10-10 07:09:54 in This Sentence No Verb | |
Awesome digital democracy | |
| This graphic made me pause: [scribd id=35845942 key=key-1hs9g3nnqsl7z1jxjequ mode=list] What's missing? It seems that digital democracy has finally killed off politics: there is no mention of politics or political parties. The diagram is from | |
| Posted on 2010-10-05 18:16:13 in nathan @ big ideas | |
Britannia Hospital: Programme notes and a short account of the discussion | |
| Britannia Hospital: Programme Notes (pdf) For all Big Picture events we produce our own programme notes, with full cast and production information. They’re free | |
| Posted on 2010-09-14 15:30:32 in Big Picture | |
Network: Programme Notes | |
| Network: Programme Notes (pdf) An analysis of the film, and a discussion of its political context. For all Big Picture events we produce our own programme notes, with ful | |
| Posted on 2010-07-28 20:46:53 in Big Picture | |
A Howard Roark building | |
| Pastiching the International Style in The Fountainhead The Fountainhead may not be a film 'about' modern architecture at all, but it certainly features a lot of modernist buildings in the form of plans, maquettes and p | |
| Posted on 2010-06-05 17:11:20 in Big Picture | |
The Fountainhead: programme notes and a short account of the discussion | |
| The Fountainhead: Programme Notes (pdf) For all Big Picture events we produce our own programme notes, with full cast and production information. They’re free with th | |
| Posted on 2010-06-02 11:24:04 in Big Picture | |
Wittgenstein: programme notes | |
| An analysis of the film, and a brief summary of the history of Wittgenstein's thought. | |
| Posted on 2010-05-20 19:12:58 in Big Picture | |
Gattaca: programme notes | |
| An analysis of the film, and some news stories examining contemporary genetic inequity. | |
| Posted on 2010-05-20 19:10:42 in Big Picture | |
Waking Life: programme notes | |
| An analysis of the film, and some (after)lives of the characters who appear in it. | |
| Posted on 2010-05-20 19:09:18 in Big Picture | |
London's ears are burning | |
| I'm browsing an old Rough Guide to London left on our bookshelves by someone I can't remember who passed through London and our flat. There is something pleasurable about reading guidebooks when not travelling, and reading one about your home is like surreptitiously listening in on a conversation about yourself. | |
| Posted on 2010-04-12 14:55:01 in nathan @ big ideas | |
Religious Programming, Secularism and Bad Arguments | |
| The National Secular Society put out an alarming press release last week insisting that the "BBC must not become an evangelical wing of the Church of England". Leaving aside whether the C of E now has wings, how great is this risk and how do the NSS's arguments stack up? | |
| Posted on 2010-02-17 04:35:38 in This Sentence No Verb | |
Risk and Research | |
| Mary Beard's latest Don's Life column refers to the current culture of risk aversion in university research funding. As someone who's putting together a funding application for the ESRC (with almost zero chance of success, I should add) her words seem absolutely right to me: the only way sensibly to be able to conform to the AHRC guidelines is to apply for money for research you've already done | |
| Posted on 2010-02-15 07:18:28 in This Sentence No Verb | |
Care Needed When Campaigning With Indexicals | |
| Just a quick note on the Conservatives' latest election poster. It's not that it's negative: I'm fine with negative campaigning, and I think the Tories, having been in opposition for a long time now, have every right to score points off the incumbent administration's record. | |
| Posted on 2010-02-15 04:50:22 in This Sentence No Verb | |
Emancipation from What by Whom? | |
| I've been reading a fair bit of radical pedagogy (Paulo Freire, Henry Giroux etc) of late and seeing the word "emancipation" so many times that it started sticking out of the page and looking wrong. Then I read something in, of all places, Huddleston & Pullum that I think made sense of it for me. | |
| Posted on 2009-12-18 09:52:44 in This Sentence No Verb | |
An hallucinogenic lecture on London history | |
| Robert Kingham and Rich Cochrane will be putting on another performance of Align on 22 January 2010 at the Bridewell Theatre in London. | |
| Posted on 2009-11-14 12:39:55 in SitRep | |
