Archive for December, 2006
Birthday Tomorrow: James Frazer
from our friend Gerald’s blog : http://reykr.livejournal.com/
When I was a boy, in the 1940s, I sometimes read the Sears-Roebuck catalogs, for fun and information. Among the books that were shown for sale in those catalogs was an abridgement, I think in one-volume, of Frazer’s classic work “The Golden Bough.” I don’t think that book was available in the Carnegie Public Library in Cresco, my home town. When I grew up and got to other places, with bigger libraries, I finally read it.
The following is from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
Sir James George Frazer (January 1, 1854, Glasgow, Scotland – May 7, 1941), was a Scottish social anthropologist influential in the early stages of the modern studies of mythology and comparative religion.
He studied at the University of Glasgow and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated with honors in Classics (his dissertation would be published years later as The Growth of Plato’s Ideal Theory) and remained a Classics Fellow all his life. He went on from Trinity to study law at the Middle Temple and yet never practised. He was four times elected to Trinity’s Title Alpha Fellowship, and was associated with the college for most of his life, except for a year, 1907-1908, spent at the University of Liverpool. He was knighted in 1914. He was, if not blind, then severely visually impaired from 1930 on. He and his wife, Lily, died within a few hours of each other. They are buried at the Ascension Parish Burial Ground in Cambridge, England.
The study of myth and religion became his areas of expertise. Except for Italy and Greece, Frazer was not widely traveled. His prime sources of data were ancient histories and questionnaires mailed to missionaries and Imperial officials all over the globe. Frazer’s interest in social anthropology was aroused by reading E. B. Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1871) and encouraged by his friend, the biblical scholar William Robertson Smith, who was linking the Old Testament with early Hebrew folklore.
Frazer was far from being the first to study religions dispassionately, as a cultural phenomenon rather than from within theology. He was though the first to detail the relations between myths and rituals. His theories of totemism were superseded by Claude Lévi-Strauss and his vision of the annual sacrifice of the Year King has not been borne out by field studies. His generation’s choice of Darwinian evolution as a social paradigm, interpreted by Frazer as three rising stages of human progress — magic giving rise to religion, then culminating in science — has not proved valid. Yet The Golden Bough, his study of ancient cults, rites, and myths, including their parallels with early Christianity, arguably his greatest work, is still rifled by modern mythographers for its detailed information. Notably, The Golden Bough influenced René Girard; and led him to study anthropology to develop his mimesis theory of the scapegoat. The work’s influence spilled well over the conventional bounds of academia, however; the symbolic cycle of life, death and rebirth which Frazer divined behind myths of all pedigrees captivated a whole generation of artists and poets. Perhaps the most notable product of this fascination is T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.
The first edition, in two volumes, was published in 1890. The third edition was finished in 1915 and ran to twelve volumes, with a supplemental thirteenth volume added in 1936. He also published a single volume abridgement, largely compiled by his wife Lady Frazer, in 1922, with some controversial material removed from the text.
thanks, gerald!
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Speaking of Orwell…
Whoever controls the image and information of the past determines what and how future generations will think; whoever controls the information and images of the present determines how those same people will view the past.
 George Orwell, 1984 (1949)
Orwell Was Right
[from bloomberg.com]
Almost 70 years after George Orwell created the all-seeing dictator Big Brother in the novel “1984,” Britons are being watched as never before. About 4.2 million spy cameras film each citizen 300 times a day, and police have built the world’s largest DNA database. Prime Minister Tony Blair said all Britons should carry biometric identification cards to help fight the war on terror.
“Nowhere else in the free world is this happening,” said Helena Kennedy, a human rights lawyer who also is a member of the House of Lords, the upper house of Parliament. “The American public would find such inroads into civil liberties wholly unacceptable.”
Don’t be so sure – according to this article, those of us who participate in the social networks [ie MySpace and others] are freely giving up our rights to privacy.
Is it that we don’t realize what we’re doing, don’t care, are being tricked or all of the above?
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deep linking’s shallow grave
via [slashdot]
Judge Rules Against Deep-Linking of Content
Posted by Zonk on Friday December 22, @04:35PM
from the this-makes-a-lot-of-sense-honest dept.
The Internet The Courts
An anonymous reader writes “A Texas judge has ruled that, if a copyright owner objects to the linking of content from another web site, that link must be taken down. This case, which may have some far-reaching implications, centered around a motorcross website. The site, run by a Robert Davis, provided links directly to live feeds of ‘Supercross’ events streaming from the SFX Motor Sports site. The company filed suit, claiming that the direct links were denying it advertising revenue. The article sites previous cases, where sites were prohibited by judges from linking to files which violated copyright law (such as DVD decryption software). From the article: ‘But in those lawsuits, the file that was the target of the hyperlink actually violated copyright law. What’s unusual in the SFX case is that a copyright holder is trying to prohibit a direct link to its own Web site. (There is no evidence that SFX tried technical countermeasures, such as referrer logging and blocking anyone coming from Davis’ site.)’”
Next : Mining the Moon
via [wired]
NASA’s planned moon base announced last week could pave the way for deeper space exploration to Mars, but one of the biggest beneficiaries may be the terrestrial energy industry.
Nestled among the agency’s 200-point mission goals is a proposal to mine the moon for fuel used in fusion reactors — futuristic power plants that have been demonstrated in proof-of-concept but are likely decades away from commercial deployment.
Helium-3 is considered a safe, environmentally friendly fuel candidate for these generators, and while it is scarce on Earth it is plentiful on the moon.
humanity : doomed to run before it walks
Rumor has it NASA wants to build a colony on the moon.
Is this another example of our culture getting ahead of itself? Do we always do this? Most of us still are unable to RTFM on things that have been around for decades much less something that’s not been yet attempted.
We’re cloning living, breathing mammals tho we cannot make even a simple blade of grass from scratch.
Surely you can bet your bottom dollar there won’t be any shortage of “heroes” to volunteer to be among the first to live on the moon!!!
As Kurt Vonnegut said, “And so it goes.”
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if thousands
Perhaps the Twin Cities should be renamed Trio Town because some folks seem to forget about a well kept secret: Duluth.
Duluth is a mix between my last two residences: Juneau and Seattle.
The waterfront on giant Lake Superior mixed with the actively creative population who live there [read Trampled by Turtles, Charlie Parr, If Thousands, to name but a few] make it FEEL like somewhere else, more exotic, far away. But it’s in Northern Minnesota where being cool has absolutely NOTHING to do with your mailing address and EVERYTHING to do with what you DO.
If Thousands is a band that has caught my attention for their ability to float me out in moods that go well with introspection and enjoying in between moments the way coffee goes with cigarettes.
Their music doesn’t force thoughts as much as allows thoughts to do what they’re going to do. This is stream of consciousness put to scales and measures.
What does If Thousands do?
This has some great live footage.
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Symmetry
“There are thousands of other striking instances of animal asymmetry. The akita dog in Japan with a tail that curls one way on males, the other way on females, the tendency of dolphins to swim counterclockwise around tanks, the asymmetric sex organ of the male bedbug, a fungus called laboulbeniales that grows only on the back left leg of a certain beetleâ€Ââ€â€and so on.
Linux to take over Edu market?
kids obviously don’t have as long of a history with Windows as the adults. What about them?
I wanted to find out for myself so I put Linux to the test with the two most demanding public school students I know — some pals’ kids.
I loaded Xandros Professional 4 onto an old Compaq Presario 2500 (I tried SLED 10, Ubuntu and an earlier version of Xandros, but Xandros Pro 4 did the best job of recognizing all the hardware and connecting to the Internet.) I put the notebook in front of the 11-year old daughter, bookmarked her webmail URL, set her up with a Google Docs account for her homework, and showed her how to use Pandora to play her favorite music. And then I walked away; a half-hour later I walked back and she was knee-deep into a Flash-based game on Disney.com via her Firefox browser. She looked happy. She later wrote a draft of an email on Google Docs and then sent it to me. Among other things, she wrote, “Thanks.”
Later in the day, I sat the 10-year old son down in front of the laptop. I set him up the same way as his sister: webmail, Google Docs, Pandora. I left him alone for a half hour and, lo and behold, he found some video games, too.
“So,” he asked. “What is the difference between Linux and Windows?” I tried to explain but it was a waste of breath. “What difference do you see?” I asked back.
“Nothing, really.”
Interesting…
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John Henry hear this
In the continuing quest to see if humans can outpace their electronic creations, the humans have lost another, perhaps decisive, round.
A six-game chess match between Vladimir Kramnik of Russia, the world champion, and Deep Fritz, a souped-up version of commercially available chess software made by Chessbase, ended today in victory for the computer, which won the final game and clinched the match, 4 games to 2.
Mr. Kramnik fell behind in the match when he lost Game 2 by walking into a checkmate in one move with hardly any pieces remaining on the board, a mistake that ranks as one of the biggest in championship-level chess history. Needing a win today to tie the match, Mr. Kramnik took some chances, eventually lost a pawn, and was then outmaneuvered by the computer.
