Amongst the various media that I consume is TED - "Ideas Worth Spreading". Most recently, fuelled by my analysis of the public speeches in Julius Caesar, I watched the video below.

I thought that this talk had a lot of interesting ideas in it, but one thing I felt unclear about at the end was: what was the lost art of democratic debate ( Read more... )

I bumped into Ivan at CONfusion, and he asked me whether I'd come to a conclusion on my thinking on Baudrillard. I think that I have more-or-less come to terms with the concept of the hyper-real, and now I'm mentally cataloguing examples and situations where it applies, trying to build my own knowledge base before doing much more with it ( Read more... )

In the early phases of his book, Baudrillard thinks a lot about how we interact with reality. A pretty key idea which underpins all of his writing on the topic is that there is a reality. While he believes that it is a reality inaccessible to us, without a reality of some kind, his whole notion of hyperreality strikes one as tautological. On some ( Read more... )

anarchangel23's response to my two posts on Baudrillard boils down to "So what ( Read more... )

I just want to begin my second look at Simulacra and Simulation with a caveat: I may be utterly wrong. This is a book dealing with stuff unfamiliar to me that assumes the opposite: that I will be familiar with all the allusions and references. It's language is dense and highly elliptical, possibly not helped by the translation from French ( Read more... )

I am used to a certain amount of complexity. I have degrees in Civil Engineering, English Literature and Classical Studies. I'm a chartered professional engineer, which demonstrates a certain mastery of my profession. The most complex thing I encountered in my career as a Civil Engineer was probably Laplace transforms - conceptually these are ( Read more... )