digital emunction » Science

A Barrel of Fish

Michael Robbins — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 15:37:51 +0000

“Great art, the prevailing theory on the subject goes, forces the artists who follow it to think differently.” Oh yeah? Free DE coffee mug to anyone who can identify the “theory” prevailing here. (I know, I know. But sometimes those…

EvPsych Bingo

Robert P. Baird — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 14:58:16 +0000

Via the Language Log, with serious respect for whoever put it together:

Relatedly.

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How Many Animals Did Moses Bring on the Ark?

Robert P. Baird — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 21:41:00 +0000

A few weeks ago, Ange asked:

Are there ways in which poetry could or does both exploit its own difficulty as well as its pleasures (prosodic, sensual, scenic) to maximize its potential as a unique cultural product—a “super-stimulus”—that can

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Why Don’t Preening Brooklyn Novelists Ever Write Books About This?

Robert P. Baird — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 21:33:52 +0000

From today’s Times:

Some experts say that emissions from airline travel are simply so large that it may be impossible to offset them.

“Buying offsets is a nice idea, just like giving money to a soup kitchen is a nice

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The Matter on the Table

Michael Robbins — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 21:45:17 +0000

If to imagine a language is to imagine a form of life, what do the dead metaphors & clichés of a language tell us about the particular form of life it codifies? Something like this question seems to motivate John…

Dream Song 1864

Michael Robbins — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 22:27:53 +0000

Henry pitched his tone very low in his love of nature—not on stars & suns … but tortoises, crickets, muskrats, suckers, toads & frogs. It was impossible to go lower. Yet it gave him every advantage in conversation: For who…

Down the Memory Hole

Michael Robbins — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 21:42:07 +0000

Unless you live in China, “censorship” is mostly a hysterical trope on the internet, & if you delete a post or a comment, or ban an obnoxious fool from posting on your blog, you will find yourself accused of it…

Jennifer Moxley @ U of C

Michael Robbins — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 19:07:03 +0000

I’ll be introducing Jennifer Moxley at the University of Chicago this week as part of the Poem Present Reading & Lecture series. She’ll teach her twisted speech to the young believers in the Social Sciences Tea…

You Want Ammonia with That?

Michael Robbins — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 02:29:29 +0000

Many people continue to eat meat even after they realize that by doing so they are guilty of crimes so severe in their cruelty & horror that anyone who can witness them without feeling the remorse of conscience must…

Why Nice Guys Get All the Girls; Or, Yes, Virginia, It Really Is the Oldest Profession

Robert P. Baird — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 18:04:43 +0000

From the last-listed article in this bounty:

A third possibility would have been proliferation of sex-for-food exchanges. These would have made provisioning an available solution for both sexes and would have heightened female preference for nonaggressive, provisioning males with

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