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.

Food for Thought: Quotations

"You are a beautiful boy," he told the frog.
Above: Horned marsupial frog (Gastrotheca cornuta)

“Ethnobotany can give us a glimpse of the future,” (Ethnobotany 10).

“Coming from an industrial society where plants are primarily aesthetic parts of the urban environment…[one] must undergo a process of reeducation to see an environment shaped by plants and landforms, an environment where plants are an integral part of human lives,” (25).

“Long term changes in vegetation affect language and culture,” (26).

“Other cultures are not failed attempts at being modern, but alternate answers to the question, ‘what does it mean to be alive?’” – Wade Davis

“Of the many species that have existed on the earth – estimates run as high as fifty billion – more than ninety nine percent have disappeared. In light of this, it is sometimes joked that all of life today amounts to little more than a rounding error,” – Elizabeth Kolbert, “The Sixth Extinction?”, in New Yorker magazine (52)

“Education should be used to animate and generate belief, not just sophisticated doubt.” – Michael Roth, Wesleyan University president

Ideas from Notebook, III

Cryptic species; William of Occam; “Buridan’s Ass”; Alberto Giacometti; Charles Demuth; Cezanne’s preoccupation with Montagne Sainte-Victoire; Back to Africa and the Nation of Islam; Nunn-Lugar; John Harshberger; Francis Alÿs on Cezanne and seeing*; ethnomusicology; Indo-European and ethnolinguisitics; schulzi bats in Suriname*; the Innocence Project; firestick, swidden and fallow; Bedouins, refugees, migrants and internally displaced peoples; “firewood crisis”; “Big Five” extinctions*; El Valle Amphibian Conservation Center; Dr. Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury.