Interesting article alert! Jenifer Glynn, author of My Sister Rosalind Franklin, emailed us this fascinating National Geographic article about six female scientists who were snubbed due to sexism. If you’d like to learn more and you’re in Gloucestershire in June, Jenifer will be speaking at Cheltenham Science Festival on 4 June 2013 at 1:30 p.m.
May 24, 2013
Lazyweb, help!
I got an e-mail this morning from someone who found my Github profile through some kind of freelancer search site and wanted to find out if I was interested in a project he’s working on for which they need a little extra development help. And it turns out that I both sort of am and have nothing on my plate during July and August.
So I’m wondering: Do the experienced developers or hirers-of-developers out there have any suggestions for intelligent-sounding questions that I could ask or things that I could say? Bear in mind that I’m a humanities weenie by trade and potentially radically underqualified and if my hat winds up in the ring it’ll likely be stepped on and laughed at. But my hat being awfully tattered anyway, one of those teeny cartoon-tramp hats with a daisy in the brim, I don’t really see the harm in trying.
Was there a question in there?
May 23, 2013
Every poet, consciously or unconsciously, holds the following absolute presuppositions, as the dogmas of his art:
(1) A historical world exists, a world of unique events and unique persons, related by analogy, not identity. The number of events and analogical relations is potentially infinite. The existence of such a world is a good, and every addition to the number of events, persons and relations is an additional good.
(2) The historical world is a fallen world, i.e. though it is good that it exists, the way in which it exists is evil, being full of unfreedom and disorder.
(3) The historical world is a redeemable world. The unfreedom and disorder of the past can be reconciled in the future.
It follows from the first presupposition that the poet’s activity in creating a poem is analogous to God’s activity in creating man after his own image. It is not an imitation, for were it so, the poet would be able to create like God ex nihilo; instead, he requires pre-existing occasions of feeling and a pre-existing language out of which to create. It is analogous in that the poet creates not necessarily according to a law of nature but voluntarily according to provocation.
– W. H. Auden, from The Dyer’s Hand (reblogged from OUP author Alan Jacobs (ayjay))(via oupacademic)
May 23, 2013
I guess, since Tumblr is now an endangered species, that I’m going to try blogging more regularly and more completely at my main site. If I like something, I’ll occasionally post it here, and I’ll still like reblog cats and stuff, but look for me there if you’ve a mind to.
There’s one’a them fancy RSS doodads at http://daniel.sh/blog/feed, if that technology isn’t also in the ole ashcan of history.
First, they came for the otherkin
And I said nothing
For I was not an otherkin.
Then, they came for the men’s rights activists
And I said nothing
For I was not a men’s rights activist.
Then, they came for the porn
And there was nobody left to speak for me.
May 20, 2013
Sometimes in a footnote…
…rather than actually doing something I’ll point out that I’m not doing it. This is effectively the same thing as doing it, which gives me a little douchey thrill.
May 17, 2013
