ethics & philosophy

ideals, breaches, disappointments and inspirations

“Mens sana in corpora sano”

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I’m reading “Enforcing Normalcy”, by Lennard J Davis. The second chapter, “Constructing Normalcy”, talks about the development of the concept of “normal” in European/American culture, mostly from the seventeenth century onwards. On page 37-38, he talks about early twentieth century… Read More ›

Sunday Quote: Carl Sagan

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An oldie but a goodie:

We’ve arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.
Carl Sagan

The dreaded Bandwidth Exceeded notice etc

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The most frequent visitors here may have noticed that last month we managed to exceed our bandwidth allocation twice, requiring upgrading our webhosting bandwidth quota twice. Lauredhel and I have discussed several times over the last year or so how to fund the space, at least to the point of covering hosting costs every month. Some extra for a biennal cross-continental get-together would be gravy. Enough for an annual meet-up would be super.

Political speech and PR cleanup: the AAP squirms at the DigitalNow conference

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You can download the full video of Amber McArthur’s keynote here, but I’ve picked out the part of interest to me, because it is right at the end.

Why is it of interest? It’s a chap from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), in this video called only “John”, quietly panicking about the organisation’s latest public relations disaster: Jay Gordon’s April Fool press release stating that the AAP would no longer accept sponsorship from infant formula companies.