I’ve been heavily involved with the Hamdan Symposium over at the CT Lab, and a lot of the time I had for blogging (which isn’t all that mch :)) is being taken up over there for now.  Things should get back to normal over the weekend.

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Years ago, when I was researching Western Magic, I came across a then-obscure book called the Kybalion (my copy is from the 1940’s).  It is a masterpiece of the esoteric genre; a genre designed to hide information in “plain sight”.  Reading the comments on Wired in response to Steve Featherstone’s recent Harpers article brought the [...]

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One of the things I was trying to do with my Notes towards a Theory of Asymmetric Warfare posts was to broaden the notion of “conflict” to that of “competition”.  I feel that this is important to do for a number of reasons including, but certainly not limited to, the fact that people tend to [...]

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[This continues from the previous post]
Linking battle/workspaces into perceptual topologies
In a recent article, Raphaël Baeriswyl, drawing heavily on the work of Jacques Baud, argues that there are six distinct “battlespaces”: topographic space (land, sea), airspace, electromagnetic space, cyberspace, infospace, and human space. Each of these battlespaces has emerged as technological advances has shifted the [...]

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Last month, Hugh Gusterson published an article in Foreign Policy entitled When Professors go to War that sparked a fair bit of commentary. This article just sparked a new exchange on the FP site. First, Peter D. Feaver at Duke, responded with a rebuttal called Pentagon Funding? Bring it on. In which he [...]

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On August 5th, my friend Matt Armstrong posted a very interesting article entitled New Media and Persuasion, Mobilization, and Facilitation (cross-posted at the CT Lab). As with most of Matt’s work, it is a great blending of solid academic analysis (in plain English!) aimed at an applied topic. Since Matt’s specialty is Strategic [...]

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For the past several years, we have been inundated with arguments about “the value of cultural knowledge”. I want to make a couple of points about this “value”. Knowledge of culture, what it is, how it operates and how we as humans construct it, goes well beyond the use value that is often assumed to [...]

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For the past week or so, the site has been getting moved around.  At the moment, the web front is on a server in California, the database is on a server in Denver and the author (yours truly) is in Ottawa.  Welcome to the networked world <wry grin>.
The hope behind all of this moving around [...]

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A couple of weeks ago, I was asked by a friend of mine, Jim Cheetham, to come into his class on Biotechnology and Society and talk about agricultural biotechnology from an Anthropologist viewpoint.  Jim will talk for a while on the modern technology and I’ll be talking about the ancient versions - and about their [...]

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I am sitting here, in my home office, listening to a recording of Monteverdi’s Beatus Vir. Officially, I am listening to it because I will be performing it on November 24th as part of the Ottawa Bach Choir. While that is the reason I am gving my wife and anyone else, I think [...]

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