Sunday, Day of Links

  • Oh for pete’s sake (via):

    Flipping his badge open, he said, “No, not with that shirt. You’re protesting and you have to go.”

    Beginning to get his drift, I said firmly, “Not before I finish my coffee.”

    He insisted that I leave, but still not quite believing my ears, I tried one more approach to reason. “Hey, listen. I’m a veteran. This is a V.A. facility. I’m sitting here not talking to anybody, having a cup of coffee. I’m not protesting and you can’t kick me out.”

  • Blonde mammoths vs. brunette mammoths
  • I haven’t had time to read any of this stuff on interactional expertise in the gravity wave physics community, which makes me sad. Long story short, a couple of sociologists are able to converse fluently in physicist-ese without actually knowing the math or being able to produce new research. This has implications for sociology, blah blah Sokal hoax blah, but I’m more interested in the resulting description of the scientific community. Of the expertise required to, say, pass one’s qualifying exams, how much is really “contributory expertise” and how much is “interactional expertise”?
  • William Tozier on communicating across disciplines:

    Obvious rules of thumb and tools I always use, unthinkingly, in every case—like random sampling the search set of an optimization problem, or saving a record of every solution tested so I can watch progress of an ongoing search…. well, I may as well have invoked Marx or done a little interpretive dance. And at the same time, the consumers of my products are watching for certain significant passwords, and they’re just not coming. Because I’m not seeing the cues, the raised eyebrows, the head tilted, the muttered “…and—?”

  • Mickle on the Heroine’s journey:

    When you compare stories like A Little Princess to the hero’s journey they fit the pared down structure as easily as anything else, but when you start to ascribe monomyth meaning to the thematic elements of girls’ stories, something often seems a bit off-kilter. This is because, while men’s and women’s experiences are hardly strictly divided along gender lines, the stories that epitomize girlhood in our culture, like girl’s moral development itself, is often a mirror rather than an imperfect copy of the “typical” boy’s journey that we accept as the norm. So instead of looking for the rejection of ego, one must look for the acceptance of self.

    Those of you who enjoy mocking Campbell are, of course, encouraged to do so.

Right, then! The bloggery folder is reduced; I’m off to the mountains; I’ll be back in a week.

Comments

  1. Dr. Shellie wrote:

    Hmm… from what I remember, Sara (1) learns what it is like to be poor and work hard (2) eats bread crumbs and makes friends with mice (3) gets rescued by a nice man next door who was supposed to be taking care of her all along.

    Not your usual heroic epic– for one, it takes place entirely indoors. This is interesting– the idea that the archetypical feminine epic is a “battle” toward internal self-reliance (rather than domination), resulting in harmony with the family/society (rather than glory/triumphant return).

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