seed magazine.com: collecting dying languages

'The Linguists' is a new PBS documentary chronicling the adventures of two ambitious researchers who traveled to the most remote pockets of the world to collect audio recordings of seriously endangered languages.

"In a particularly powerful moment in the documentary, Harrison and Anderson use a laptop to show elderly Chulym speakers video footage of themselves speaking that they've edited together via iMovie software. While sitting around the computer as if it were a campfire, the Chulym speakers express a sense of delight at seeing and hearing their recorded voices for the first time. "To see themselves represented in a high-tech way," says Anderson in the film, says to them that "maybe our language isn't so backward; maybe I have a knowledge that really is special."

full story @ seedmagazine.com
'The Linguists' official website

no future in anything

"Charlie there is no future in anything. I hope you agree. That is why I liked it at a war. Every day and every night there is a strong possibility that you will get killed and not have to write. I have to write to be happy whether I get paid for it or not. But it is a hell of a disease to be born with. I like to do it. Which is even worse. That makes it from a disease into a vice. Then I want to do it better than anybody has ever done it which makes it into an obsession. An obsession is terrible. Hope you haven't gotten any. That's the only one I've got left."

-Ernest Hemingway to his publisher, 1940

not spring yet

and maybe we are like trees growing up, stretching into the sky. but we grow both ways, up and down, high and low. we grow in reverse, with our roots reaching deeper and deeper into the ground, anchoring us in so many pieces of past until what's beneath us is so heavy and intricately interwoven that it's a struggle to move up. and then you start to feel like a warrior, because in the end, it's every man for himself. because maybe the stretch into the sky has to be a ruthless venture. because maybe when formulas and strategies fail and the ground is pulling us down, our only chance is to plow ahead towards some illusory bliss with all our bets on the table.

woody on time

"Time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once."
-Woody Allen

ghost bikes

"The practice of erecting ghost bikes to honor the cycling dead began in St. Louis, Missouri in 2003. Patrick Van Der Tuin, a local cyclist who runs a shop that caters to low-income riders, saw a bicyclist struck and killed. He painted a bike white and erected it on the spot with a sign reading "Cyclist Struck Here". When he saw how the bike caused drivers in the area to be more cautious he and a group of friends put up 15 more ghost bikes around the city. Since then ghost bikes have spread to 75 cities across four continents.

"There is something about it that resonates with people from so many different cultures," says Leah Todd, a volunteer at the Street Memorial Project, which builds and installs ghost bikes around New York. "Whether or not you knew the person there is an immediate resonance, a feeling among riders that it could have been you, a shared sense of helplessness on the streets."'

full story at obit-mag.com

beyond reductionism: stuart kauffman on salon.com

"I've fallen in love with the idea that consciousness has something to do with being poised forever between the quantum world of possibilities, where nothing actual happens, and the transformation of that -- whether it's the collapse of the wave function or decoherence, where something actual happens in the world.

If this is related to consciousness, it provides an intellectual framework in which we can understand the mind acting on matter. Quantum mechanics is astonishing because it's not causal. It just happens. Maybe the mind is acausal. Maybe the mind is non-algorithmic. I don't want you to take this very seriously. It's just Stu Kauffman getting old and thinking weird things. But it may be true. And even if my arguments are right, it still doesn't tell us what consciousness is. I don't have any idea. Nor does anybody else, including the philosophers of mind. "

Full Interview on Salon.com