folk theories for folks on a ship

folk theories for folks on a ship the prezi.

Raumschifferde was simply a great expedition. I love Hamburg, but more important the coffee was of superior quality. I unwittingly accepted an invitation from Matthias about speaking, and then found out that I had the keynote. It was however a fortunate set of circumstances. It so happened that the week before I was due to be in Athens where I did not have anything else to do than to work on my book, have a look at the Acropolis,  besides drinking coffee and doing a bit of Aikido with Sensei Jenny Flower. And so it was, plus a few more adventures including the preparation of this talk. By the way, most of the pics on the presentation are from Athens, the big exception being the four of the Basisbibliothek of the University of Bern. Even “le monde” of the 11th of february, used to quote Michel Foucault, was bought in Athens.

I will add a few notes to the presentation as soon as I get a few hours to work on those notes.

Grounded in Structure versus Fictional Veracity

This morning I did the usual very brief scan of the headlines of both local and remote media. This exercise makes me long for the days when radio waves were less used and the internet was something my mother did not know anything about while I was using it to arrange my affairs. On a side note, do recall that I like the word affair. So, let us get back to the bit of public affairs that got me in a bad mood after a delightful morning at the keyboard composing the challenges of my latest love, the character in a novel. It is this gem in the New York Times on the new war between science versus religion.

Climate Change and Theoretical Man

I have been wondering for the past year or so, how could I possibly deal with climate change in my grand old theory.

Getting my head around climate change is a challenge, but then so is anything to do with the financial markets. The latter had me not at all surprised when the latest subprime crises popped, leading me to the short-circuit conclusion that I had been right all along: I did not understand, because indeed the system was flawed and made no sense to me. Take that last sentence as on exercise in arrogance; as an exercise arrogance is not to be ignored. Problems with arrogance only arise when the arrogant believe that their conjectures constitute any sort of irreducible absolute truth to which the rest of the world has to bow to.

However the climate change issue is a very different issue. Somewhere along the line the two issues shake hands on the topic of trust, then again they meet at carbon certificates and trading, but that is about it. The financial world is a virtual conceptual world that we invented not too long ago, and for which we have yet to come up with a solid game plan. Climate change, is here, measurable and real.