Posts from the ‘cultural criticism’ category

It’s the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine)

Talking zeitgeists – the whole we’re all gonna die mentality that is somewhat prevalent in the culture of global issues. Here the talk was to break…

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Google trending the webosphere – comparison of volume of “Paris Hilton” vs “Britney Spears” vs “Climate Change” searches.

…Which is kind of sad really. Here is what it looks like. The axes imply relative number of searches since it doesn’t seem like you get…

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Brainspace: Literacy in the humanities and in the sciences vs Britney Spears et al.

Last night, we rolled in the new course (ASIC 200) and it was a lot of fun (a little odd for me doing what was essentially…

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Paper, Plastic, or Neither? An Olympic Terry Challenge

  Some Olympic math … The 2010 Olympics are coming to Vancouver in approximately 785 days (according to the monstrous countdown clock outside the Vancouver Art…

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A Hunger for Books

This is beautiful. The acceptance speech of Doris Lessing, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature this weekend. Well worth a read.

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Yann Martel: Imaginative Atrophy and Lonely Book Clubs

(Reprinted from Shifting Baselines) Yann Martel, author of Life of Pi, spoke on campus last night and I was smart enough to attend. I cannot possibly…

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Divorce Your Spouse, Harm The Environment – or – “How an English King Killed The Planet 500 Years Ago”

“Environmental Impacts of Divorce” (pdf here) reads the title of an accepted manuscript soon to be published the highly accoladed journal PNAS (press release) You meet…

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The Art of Science – The Science of Art?

We started a new unit in my grade 12 biology class yesterday, on the mechanisms of inheritance. I wanted to impress on my students how the…

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Free Movie Nights by Cinema Politica

Check this out, a student in one of my classes just told me about, Cinema Politica at UBC. Every Wednesday they show a movie at the…

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Gender and Academia

Although not of global significance in the “Climate change is a global problem” sense, the following certainly pertains to the struggle of social injustice and discrimination.…

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