Brian Kerr

Event announcement. There’s an empty page for the conference, with details having just arrived via e-mail:

Annual UMInDS Spring Conference
April 4, 2008 Pendleton Room Michigan Union

Disability and War

1:00 pm Poster Session by UM Students and Faculty

2:00 pm Panel: Disability at War

• Rick Briggs, Brain Injury Association of Michigan “Traumtic Brain Injury — The Signature Wound of the War on Terror”
• Sally Chivers, University of Trent “Disabled Veterans Soldier On: Canadians Coming Home from Afghanistan”
• Nina Berman, Documentary Photographer “Purple Hearts“

3:30 pm Coffee Break and Poster Session Continued

4:00 pm Keynote Address Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell
U Illinois Chicago/ Temple University
“The Social Romance of Reintegration: Returning Veterans Films and the Forging of U.S. Disability Collectives”

Co-sponsored by the Department of Comparative Literature
For information contact Carrie Baker at 734 647-6251 or mcarrie@umich.edu

(tags: accessible april 4 2008 conference disability events umich uminds war)

Robert Browning’s “Paracelsus” (1835), re: co-, net-, and notworking:

I will kneel if you require me,
Impart the meagre knowledge I possess,
Explain its bounded nature, and avow
My insufficiency whate’er you will:
I give the fight up! Let there be an end,
A privacy, an obscure nook for me.
I want to be forgotten even by God!

(tags: bounded fight forgotten god knowledge nature nook obscure paracelsus privacy)

From nothing to more than nothing.
Move from zero to one.

Move.

(tags: activities animal control cybernetics machine more-than motion nothing oblique one strategies systems zefrank zero)

Try something tomorrow that you haven’t done today, temporarily and for the activity’s own sake. Don’t eat. Don’t sleep, and work on your favorite project vigorously through the night. Disable Verdana and browse the web.

Find a limit and push it gently.

(tags: cybernetics invitations self)

What I noticed from Adam Gopnik’s The Real Work in The New Yorker for March 17, 2008:

Magic is possible because magicians are smart. And what they’re smart about is mainly how dumb we are, how limited in vision, how narrow in imagination, how resourceless in conjecture, how routinized in our theories of the world, how deadened to possibility. The magician awakens us from the dogmatic slumbers of our daily life, our interactions with cards and hoops and things. He opens a door by pointing to a window.

(tags: cards conjecture cybernetics doors hoops imagination interaction magic magician observation opening perception representation routinized theories of the world things visual windows)

From Community and Privacy by Serge Chermayeff and Christopher Alexander, partying like it’s 1965:

Until one stops using popular or generalized words to describe specific objects and events, one will continue to be deceived by the associations with them and will fail to arrive at the essential functional aspect of things and places that is the planner’s actual concern in problem — analysis and design.

(tags: analysis arrival aspects concerns cybernetics design essence events failure function functional aspect objects places things words)

• Flashlight
• RecentChanges
• A night at the movies
• Sim City aka Micropolis
• A truck out on the four lane a mile or more away
• Peacemaker missiles (almost)
• Depot town railroad crossing, after a summer sunset, among friends

(tags: depot town flashlight micropolis missile testing peacemaker sim city skilled performance summer sunset wikipedia)