Consummation

The New Yorker, August 6, 2007

Consummated. My final paper, essentially the culmination of what I’ve learned over the course of this project, is finished (a little late, but much the better for it). It covers a slew of topics from my notebook and readings. Among them:

Frogs, Bd and habitat Loss; Bats, WNS and habitat loss; Bees and CCS; Holocene Extinction and the 5 Big Extinctions; language death and ethnocide; Oryx and Crake; Arks, Svalbard Seed Vault, El Valle and Zoos; megafauna; post-apocalyptic novels; man-made extinction; partulid land snails; modern technology and exploration; the internet; new species; old species; the hydrosphere; anthropology and Mark Twain; epibatidine; immortality; mortality; “The March of Time” a la Tom Stoppard's Arcadia; impermanence; “Benjamin”; the Golden Toad; and Kermit the Frog.

Ideas from Notebook, VII

Working without the internet, I’ve developed a bit of a backlog on my blogspace. I have been writing on several topics, speaking with teachers and, mostly, reading materials. Though they are not public domain, I procured several New Yorker articles in digital format for my own benefit and citation, along with other web resources now linked on the sidebar. As always, I have been keeping my notebook – here is the most recent batch of notes:

Deglobalization and Daimler(Chrysler), “Branded Nationalism”; Moore’s Law; Aung San Suu Kyi and John William Yettaw; Kilcullen’s “anthropological approach to thinking about war” in Afghanistan; problems of nuclear power; “nuclear renaissance”; Nueva Germania; Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty; Stockpile Stewardship program; United States’ 12.8 million acres of cotton; “Religulous”; perfect numbers; infinity; Fermat numbers; heuristics; four-dimensionality; “inventor’s paradox”; Elizabeth Kolbert (“Field Notes from a Catastrophe”); lebensraum; reconciliation; the Holocaust; Israel – land vs. ideology; regional instabilities and political interplay; “Entebbe model”; oral history; Hebrew as once-dead – lingual resurrection; information repositories; Ostara.