Okay, I said yesterday that part 2 would end my book review, but I lied. There is one crucial aspect of Latour’s book that I didn’t cover yet. To review, part 1 essentially covered chapters 1 and 2, part 2 covered chapters 3 and 4, and today we’ll cover chapter 5, which covers how to […]
Category: thoughts
Politics of Nature part 2
Continuing yesterday’s summary of Politics of Nature, by Bruno Latour. Today’s subject: Latour’s proposal for a “Constitution” on how we construct reality in a democratic fashion via due process, one that cuts across science and politics and multiculturalists and facts and values. I’m going to sketch out the process first, and then go back and […]
Politics of Nature, by Bruno Latour
Amazon link I started this book more than a month ago, as I mentioned at the end of this post. It’s incredibly dense. I don’t think I could have even started on it without having been trapped on that crowded bus with no other options for a few hours. Even once I got started, it […]
Crime pays, or why people suck
Two days ago, a woman was mugged at 6pm about 50 yards from my front door. My friend and I were walking up the hill from dinner when we heard a commotion up ahead – about half a block up, two black men ran across the street and jumped in a car, chased by a […]
Mercedes sucks more
Update on the car: Mercedes sucks more. They called me a couple days after I brought the car in and said that they were refusing my demand that I get my money back under the lemon law. Corporate headquarters refused to pay up without knowing what was wrong with the car. Of course, if they […]
Being all I can be, whatever that may be
Question of the day – where’s the balance between accepting who you are and pursuing paths that leverage that identity, and striving to be a different person? I was writing email to a friend last night and made the claim that a lack of self-acceptance drives American culture, from our dieting crazes to our willingness […]
Mercedes sucks
As some of you know, I bought myself a Mercedes SLK230 a year and a half ago, a completely impractical obnoxious two-seater hardtop convertible. But I figured, what the heck, I was young and single and male, and when would it be more appropriate for me to have such a car than now. And, damn, […]
More on language alignment
I’d been meaning to follow up on last week’s post on conversational alignment but hadn’t gotten around to it. As I admitted in the livejournal comments on that post, I may have over reached in saying that reality coefficients had to be aligned to have a good conversation, because, as Dan pointed out, we can […]
Comedy and drama
While driving into work yesterday, I started thinking about humor for some reason. I guess I was thinking of practical jokes, of the variety that Ashton Kutcher purveys on Punk’d, and why I find such jokes shallow and cruel and not very funny. It seems to me that such jokes are funny because the audience […]
Conversational Alignment
This is a post I’ve been thinking about for a while, partially wrote, but never got around to finishing. And I’m only finishing it today because I want to write another post that refers to it. Welcome to the wacky world that is my mind. Here’s the question of the day: why is it that […]
