writing and translation
Gregory Bateson: The Legacy of a Scientist. A biography by David Lipset, Boston: Beacon Press, 1982. Gregory Bateson must surely have presented a daunting prospect to his biographer. Lipset takes us on an epic...
This title is adapted from Why Fish Don’t Exist [1] which in turn draws on Carol Kaesuk Yoon’s taxonomy study Naming Nature[2] to support its startling contention. Everyone knows what fish are. But today,...
There are ten of these books — same title, volumes I – X — published at irregular intervals between 2000 and last year. I don’t own them all (about half are in my nearby...
Is there a problem? There is. It concerns the relationship of the measurer to the measured, the scientist (or her measuring tools) to whatever-is-being-measured. Philosophers tend to view it as the relationship of subject to object, noting...
There’s a conference coming up next year with the title “Flusser’s Languages.” One of the questions to be addressed is, “Is Flusser untranslatable?’ Yes, I think he is. And although the same might be...
Opportunity Rover was a very engaging robot. It “lived” on Mars for nearly 15 years, gathering and transmitting data back to earth; it “died” or, as NASA put it, completed its mission on 13 February 2019. In...