Från en intervju med Joakim Haugland, innehavare av skivbolaget Smalltown Supersound (min fetstil nedan):
I’m not a musician myself. I’ve never played an instrument in my life. But for me, it’s a meeting of sounds and souls in the moment. That’s what I love so much about free jazz. Right now I’m talking to Mats Gustafsson and he has the second oldest instrument in the world, a flute that is 30,000 years old. It’s a long story, how he got it, but it’s checked by professors in China and it’s real, and he’s going to record an album on that. And what I’m thinking about is, I love the basics of how humans connected with each other through music. And I think that that connection is still there with free jazz.
Claire L. Evans besöker en forskarkonferens på Kavli Institute of Theoretical Physics och jag fastnade för det hon säger om metaforer inom vetenskap:
After all my years spent talking with scientists, I’m still never quite sure when it’s appropriate to speak in metaphor. As Philip Ball observes, there are plenty of metaphors in science. Molecules recruit one another, for example. Cells signal to one another. The so-called central dogma of molecular biology is that DNA transcribes genetic instructions onto messenger RNA, which then translate them into proteins. These are accepted analogies, so absorbed into the language of biology as to be effectively invisible. Others, more emergent, remain hotly contentious.
Philip Ball, som hänvisas till, skriver så här:
Much of the important work done by metaphor and narrative in science happens, so to speak, out of sight: it tends to come in the form of traditions and customs that are inherited through the culture of science and, like many cultural norms, rarely questioned. I believe that this aspect of science cannot and should not be subjected to some kind of rigorous testing and scrutiny in the way that theories are; by their very nature, metaphors and narratives need to be afforded space for ambiguity, for open-endedness, and for plurality. Rather, the process needs to happen “in the open” and with recognition that these tools are not simply pedagogical but shape the way scientific questions are framed, priorities set, and resources allocated.
Mer från Claire L. Evans: Historien om James McConnells forskning på en slags plattmaskar på 1960-talet och hur hans teorier om var minnet sitter föll i glömska och/eller motbevisades (sitter det i cellerna eller mellan cellerna?), för att ändå fortsatt vara av intresse att undersöka i andra organismer, är kul läsning.
Jag minns att jag läste Celine Nguyens "research as leisure activity" och tyckte den var sympatisk. Därför roligt att se hur hon och Laurel Schwults till veckan som kommer anordnar en workshop på temat/med "metoden":
There’s a special quality that comes from starting projects, and a different, also special quality that comes from finishing them. Because of that, we’d like this class to be a container for making something (even if it’s small!) in a single weekend.
Elvia Wilk om "nattlogik" i berättelser...
The whole time I have been thinking about Kelly Link’s concept of Nighttime Logic. The idea is that there is a kind of story logic that adheres neither to the sense-making of waking life nor the surreality of dream life, but produces meaning in a different way. It’s not irrational or unreal, but it’s not on the surface level of reality. Something else is ticking the clock of the story. It lives somewhere between the indeterminacy of the dream space and the overdeterminacy of waking life. This seems like how Mark Fisher describes the Eerie: as a disjuncture between cause and effect, where the events are related, but we aren’t sure exactly how.
...vilket fick mig att tänka på François Jacobs idé om "nattvetenskap" som det sammanfattas av Yanai & Lercher:
As Jacob says: “Night science wanders blind. It hesitates, stumbles, recoils, sweats, wakes with a start. Doubting everything, it is forever trying to find itself, question itself, pull itself back together. Night science is a sort of workshop of the possible where what will become the building material of science is worked out”
En bild med förklaring:
The popping-out model of day science and night science. Day thinking proceeds in logical steps, and thus only ideas that are closely related to the current hypothesis can realistically be reached (symbolized by the isolated valleys in the lower part of the picture). But one can pop out to the much more open night science world, where leaps among ideas are made possible by intuition, associative thinking, unexplained observations, and loosely applied principles from other fields. When a new idea has been generated, one can pop back into the day below and test it efficiently using day science methods
De har återskapat Umberto Ecos boksamling på 32 000 volymber i ett palats i Milano. Automatiskt översatt från Elle Italia:
Entering the Eco Library means then going through a cartography of knowledge that shuns every compartmentalization. Semiotics and philosophy coexist with the Middle Ages, linguistics with esotericism, popular fiction with Aristotle, comics with school, art catalogs with mass culture. It is the same method that crossed his novels: from the Name of the Rose to the Pendulum of Foucault, the high and popular culture are never antagonistic, but parts of the same living organism. The choice to faithfully recreate the original organization of the house of Milan tells much more than just archival respect. It means recognizing that thought also possesses a spatial dimension.