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Moving to DW
I will be leaving my posts here for a while (not importing them wholesale to DW) but will not be making new posts to LJ. Account will remain active only to comment on others' LJ posts. -
Has it ever occurred to the people sponsoring earth hour...
... that burning candles has a much higher carbon cost than consuming hydro-electric or nuclear electric power, and probably higher than natural-gas power (efficiency per lumen bring better ( Read more... ) -
Littérature Engagée
In 1976 I spent a year in France when my father was on sabbatical. The first paper I had to write in my Lycée French class was on "La Littérature Engagée". I argued at the time (I recall) for the primacy of pure art over any mandate for political engagement; I would take a somewhat more nuanced view now, beginning with the recognition (which makes ( Read more... ) -
Tawney on the Working Classes
How things have not changed:
R.H. Tawney, writing of the English working class in 1929 (in Equality"They still often accept quite tamely an organization of industry under which half a dozen gentlemen, who are not always conspicuously wiser than their neighbours, determine the conditions of life and work for several thousand families, and an ( Read more... ) -
Chivalric Romance and its Descendents
Back in the High Middle Ages, a literary form developed (well, many literary forms developed, but I'm interested in one): the chivalric romance. Most English-speakers get little contact with the form, unless they're specialists (the main example in English is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; most of the examples of the form are in French and the ( Read more... ) -
Douglas Cowling (1950-2017)
Doug Cowling died last Monday of a heart attack; his funeral was on Friday ( Read more... ) -
Rosa mystica, Turris Davidica
There is no rose of swich vertu ( Read more... ) -
i
For about the 100th time I have been reading a book of science popularization when it stops dead to explain the imaginary and complex numbers from scratch.
It's been almost 250 years since Euler's Elements of Algebra. Maybe it's time to introduce C and a complete coverage of the number system as part of a basic mathematical education in ( Read more... ) -
Why I am disowning my undergraduate university
I greatly enjoyed, and benefited from, the time I spent as an undergraduate. I went to a small university which was focussed on undergraduate (B.A., B.Sc.) studies in the humane letters and core sciences. Its main distinction was not its specific programmes (although it had a few interdisciplinary areas: Environmental Studies, Native Studies, ( Read more... ) -
Local weather
What is the late November doing ( Read more... )