Archive for literature
Posted in Academic Life, Artificial Intelligence, Critical Thinking?, Digital Culture, Evolution, Extended, Feminism, Philosophy, Science, Technology, ethics, literature
March 30, 2010 at 5:28 pm
I’ll be asking this repeatedly via all of my web-presences, but since this one sits idle these days I probably won’t have to ask more than once here; it’ll just stay on top since I never blog.
I’m teaching a First Year Initiatives course in the Fall. These are basically first-year seminar classes designed to teach college- and learning-based skills to incoming students. The content is meant to be highly interdisciplinary, but the content is also secondary in these courses. The primary goal is to give them training in critical reading and writing, public speaking, etc., as well as get them introduced to the college environment and the surrounding community and its needs.
I’m teaching a class with a cyborg theme, because the knitting theme I wanted to do just seemed too tough to sell (I wanted to attract the right sorts of students and I haven’t figured out how to do that with a knitting-themed course yet). I’ll be working on my syllabus once the semester is over (May) and I hope to have a sizable list of books, stories, and articles, both fiction and non-fiction, to examine and consider for the class by then. I have a few non-fiction items already to look at, but I don’t have many fiction pieces (aside from “The Girl Who Was Plugged In”). I welcome recommendations, and the ideal pieces will examine multiple facets of the cyborg concept (Hayles, Haraway, Stelarc, for example). The fiction pieces should do more than look only at the human-machine blending, although good fiction will always deal with more than one dimension. The social aspects, the economic aspects, and the philosophical aspects are all as important as the biological.
Please leave comments with recommendations, or also feel free to email me if you’d prefer that. And thanks in advance if anyone is still reading here and has something to contribute!
Posted in Digital Culture, Extended, Feminism, literature
October 13, 2009 at 9:33 am
This one is worthy of a post in the Big Important Column of Things You Really Ought to Take Notice Of.
Scalzi succinctly and beautifully suggests a course of action for the SF Boys Club folk:
At this late date, when one of these quailing wonders appears, stuttering petulantly that women are unfit to touch the genre he’s already claimed with his smudgy, sticky fingerprints, the thing to do is not to solemnly intone about how far science fiction has yet to go. Science fiction does have a distance to go, but these fellows aren’t interested in taking the journey, and I don’t want to have to rideshare with them anyway. So the thing to do is to point and laugh.
There are few things I love more than a wonderful writer who, when exposed on a day-to-day basis, continues to be brilliant. When I read columns or blogs by authors whose books I otherwise adored only to learn they’re backwards, close-minded fools, their books become tainted and unreadable. Scalzi’s books take on an aura of betterness when I read his blog.
Link to Whatever.
Posted in Blurb, Feminism, literature
September 23, 2009 at 6:28 pm
Accusations of sexism have been levelled at the horror fiction industry after a new collection of interviews with 16 horror writers failed to include a single woman. Link: British Fantasy Society admits ‘lazy sexism’ over male-only horror book
Posted in Extended, Philosophy, Science, literature
September 20, 2009 at 8:56 am
In news that is sure to annoy those “who needs the humanities or liberal arts” types, it unsurprisingly turns out that absurd literature does wonderful things to the brain.
Psychologists Travis Proulx of the University of California, Santa Barbara and Steven Heine of the University of British Columbia report our ability to find patterns is stimulated when we are faced with the task of making sense of an absurd tale. What’s more, this heightened capability carries over to unrelated tasks.
[...]
This suggests “the cognitive mechanisms responsible for implicitly learning statistical regularities” are enhanced when we struggle to find meaning in a fragmented narrative.
[...]
To Prolux and Heine, these finds suggest we have an innate tendency to impose order upon our experiences and create what they call “meaning frameworks.” Any threat to this process will “activate a meaning-maintenance motivation that may call upon any other available associations to restore a sense of meaning,” they write.
Of course, this “meaning frameworks” talk calls to mind Mark Johnson and George Lakoff’s work on conceptual schemas and metaphor theory for me, but this particular understanding of frames can be found in most disciplines within cognitive science. Claims about the existence of conceptual schemas seem relatively uncontroversial at this point, but the fact that non-sequiturs activate pattern-seeking schemas is, while completely reasonable as a hypothesis, new and exciting to see come through in the data.
Link to article. (H/T to Nuclear Dwight on twitter.)
Posted in Blurb, Digital Culture, Science, literature
August 31, 2009 at 9:56 pm
“I can’t help but think neurodiveristy is an area in which science fiction and fantasy fans are a long, long ways ahead of society in general.” Ponderings by Jason Henninger at Tor.com
Posted in Books, Democracy, Digital Culture, Media, Technology, literature
July 22, 2009 at 10:56 am
“You can’t get anything done by doing nothing. It’s our country. They’ve taken it from us. The terrorists who attack us are still free–but we’re not. I can’t go underground for a year, ten years, my whole life, waiting for freedom to be handed to me. Freedom is something you have to take for yourself.” – Cory Doctorow at Amazon.com
Posted in Books, Media, Philosophy, literature
July 7, 2009 at 11:44 am
“Ok, look,” Wilson said. “You noted it yourself – without the brain, the pattern of consciousness usually collapses. That’s because the consciousness is wholly dependent on the physical structure of the brain. And not just any brain; it’s dependent on the brain in which it arose. Every pattern of consciousness is like a fingerprint. It’s specific to that person and it’s specific right down to the genes.” John Scalzi on Amazon.com
Posted in Academic Life, Extended, literature
May 25, 2009 at 4:40 pm
Trying to decide what book(s) to bring on my travels next week. Long flights and I don’t watch movies while flying, so I’ll be relying on books, knitting, and some D&D podcasts by the Penny Arcade blokes.
I’m thinking of bringing a few John Scalzi books because they’re not giant texts like most of my books, but I have a lot of hidden gems in my collection and not all of them are read yet. (I have a habit of buying several books at once, and getting sidetracked before I read the whole stack). I’m open to suggestions, but I’m not going to buy any new books. Feel free to look at what’s already here, and suggest your favorites in the comments. I appreciate all suggestions, especially if they come with specific recommendations. (If you recommend any of my giant 70lb texts, I won’t like you anymore!) If I’ve already read your suggestion, then we can rave about how awesome it is in the comments instead.
Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Books, Media, Philosophy, literature
April 9, 2009 at 3:05 pm
“Man did not feel inches or meters, pounds or gallons. He felt heat, He felt cold; He felt heaviness and lightness. He knew hatred and love, pride and despair. You cannot measure these things. You cannot know them. You can only know the things that He did not need to know: dimensions, weights temperatures, gravities. There is no formula for a feeling. There is no conversion factor for an emotion.”
“There must be,” said Frost. “If a thing exists, it is knowable.”
“You are speaking again of measurement. I am talking about a quality of experience. A machine is a Man turned inside-out, because it can describe all the details of a process which a Man cannot, but it cannot experience that process itself as a Man can.”
-Roger Zelazny at Amazon.com