Author: isi

Glacier’s Singing Dropstones

isi / / Beauty, Environment & Biodiversity

Love this article <3 (because I love pebbles :D)

“During the ice-age when Australia was nearer the South Pole, glaciers dominated the landscape. As glaciers bulldozed through the landscape, rocks and debris were picked up and carried along in the weight and movement of ice. When the glacier reached the ocean, chunks carved off into icebergs. The stones frozen in the iceberg floated offshore.

As the iceberg melted, the stones dropped into the ocean. The glaciers pick up that material, move to the edge of the continent, then move out to sea with it, then drop it. That’s why Geologists call these stones dropstones, or ice rafted debris, and many such pebbles have washed up on the strip of coastline that includes Singing Stones Beach.”

Two hands holding up ocean rock pebbles

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-07-31/epic-history-behind-famous-singing-stones-beach/104148526

Cory about the stolen Public Domain

isi / / Stuff that matters

Cory Doctorow majorly switched on again : 2024’s public domain is a banger – excerpt below, read his post full here pluralistic.net/2023/12/20/em-oh-you-ess-ee/#sexytimes

First in 1976, and then again in 1998, Congress retroactively extended copyright’s duration by 20 years, for all works, including works whose authors were unknown and long dead, whose proper successors could not be located. Many of these authors were permanently erased from history as every known copy of their works disappeared before they could be brought back into our culture through reproduction, adaptation and re-use. (Copyright is “strict liability,” meaning that even if you pay to clear the rights to a work from someone who has good reason to believe they control those rights, if they’re wrong, you are on the hook as an infringer, and the statutory damages run to six figures.)

Works that are still in our cultural currents 50 or 70 or 90 years after their creation are an infinitesimal fraction of all the works we create as a species. But these works are – by definition – extraordinarily important to our culture. The creators who made these works were able to plunder a rich public domain of still-current works as inputs to their own enduring creations. The slow-motion arson attack on the public domain meant that two generations of creators were denied the public domain that every other creator in the history of the human race had enjoyed.

The Miracle Is to Walk on Earth

isi / / Beauty, Stuff that matters

The Miracle of Mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hanh
This book was originally a series of letters to student workers who were being attacked during wartime to remind them of the essential discipline of following one’s breath to nourish and maintain calm mindfulness, even in the midst of the most difficult circumstances.

Thich-Nhat-Hanh_The-Miracle-of-Mindfulness_BuddhismDownload

on Sociography

isi / / Stuff that matters

Sociology is just as much an art form as it is a science. And while sociologists and those in cognate disciplines have long experimented with their writing, the search for new academic forms and practices has acquired new urgency and potentiality. How we write up our research is of paramount importance: our language can be used in experimental and innovative ways to offer nuanced, critical commentary without foreclosing alternative viewpoints, and without excluding others from dialogue.

Sociography offers spaces for new sensibilities and sensitivities; unresolved or incomplete argument; multiple, multi-dimensional and multiplying possibilities: for writing differently. As an intervention in writing the social, our collection works to resist the ideological promotion of dry, dispassionate, and seemingly ‘objective’ discourse, one which has traditionally upheld a set of dominant, privileged voices. And in so doing, our collection explores the potential of new ways of writing the social for both a trans- and post-disciplinary academy and a wider reading public; and seeks forms of writing that do justice to the critical curiosity that animates sociology.

In sum, the challenge embraced by this collection is to argue for and showcase a praxis that activates sociological knowledge and enlarges the sociological imagination.

read on here https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/00380261221108842

bias and trust

isi / / About, Stuff that matters

It’s a bit funny that I feel like I live in the past since I moved to Australia. The gender definitions, the bad coffee, the social segregation, the rampant conservatism with all sides dangling along, building more houses or inheriting their lot while pretending to object… so many moments of total cringe over the past two decades, and now this week brought another one of these moments…

They have upped their anti on the coffee side down here, but the rest is still pretty much strong in traditional hands, and that stridently so on both sides of the political spectrum.

So my lesson learnt is that I have to be even more observant in choosing where to go and who to hang with and what to ask them, as folks really don’t like to be questioned here, especially not about their own cognitive bias.

PS: the word cowardice wanted to be included but I didn’t.