forgive and forget

After watching those videos, I never thought this strike could be settled. But the student strikers and our administration reached agreement tonight after a marathon negotiation. Excellent news.

Massachusetts crime lab catastrophe

Good God. Woman in state crime lab admits to faking thousands of drug test results, with up to 11,000 results manipulated or outright fabricated. Throw open the gates!

HERE.

Poland next weekend

The schedule for Łodz can be found HERE (Polish only).

The other scheduled speakers are Jason Barker, Tomasz Kozak, Paweł Mościcki, and Alberto Toscano.

haiku occuring in the Wikileaks U.S. State Department cables

Good for a few minutes of breakfast-time amusement. HERE.

As is typical,
the Pope stayed above the fray
and did not comment.

a short piece I’m writing on sound is related to this event

HERE.

Levi on internal and external relations

HERE.

It’s a good post that moves the ball forward.

Sunday lecture postponed

For Cairo readers who were planning to attend my September 30 lecture on Latour at AUC, it has been postponed indefinitely due to the strike. It will be rescheduled in the departmental series, but it’s too early to say whether that will be this semester or Spring Semester.

interviewed in Russian

HERE.

monads and undermining

From Twitter (which I find to be a bad place for a conversation):
Edward Butler ‏@EPButler
@t3dy When Graham Harman uses Bruno as an exemplar of “undermining” objects, it is clear that Bruno’s monadology is being overlooked.
Hardly. A monadology is one of the textbook examples of an undermining theory. You don’t have to believe in a single unified world-lump to be an underminer.

Here’s another example of a classic undermining theory: atomism. All larger entities can be explained in terms of the workings of simple underlying physical pieces. The plurality of these atoms does not prevent the theory from being an undermining theory.

As Aristotle already notes in the Metaphysics, there are two separate kinds of undermining theories, both of them traceable to the pre-Socratics. There is the kind that selects some privileged physical element as the root of everything else. And there is the “apeiron” sort of theory that thinks something deeper and more formless than any specific physical element is needed.

a good Latour Litany from the Twitter Latourbot

Can’t remember at the moment which book this is from:

“He then opens a private Foundation where people study neurons, children’s behaviour, rats in mazes, monkeys in tropical forests and so on.”