force. potential. no visual.

la force du potentiel électrique [mesurée, en système international en Volt]

Pour un circuit fermé donné, plus la force électromotrice (f.e.m.) de la pile est grande, plus le courant circulant dans le circuit est intense.

La concentration des électrons varie tout au long du circuit. C’est à la borne négative qu’elle est la plus forte et à la borne positive qu’elle est la plus faible.

Le potentiel V est maximal à la borne positive et minimal à la borne négative.

Entre deux points A et B d’un circuit on peut ainsi définir une différence de potentiel

( V_A-V_B) ou tension électrique (U_AB)

one man i respect a lot used to have electricity in his wrist. due to an old injury, when you touched this spot, it tingled like mad. i am getting ahead of myself. this high voltage folder will not abate as the night moves on. the sound of typing is altered by darkness. i think of his music of chance, and the twists in each of our lives’ trajectories. they are only understood by the principle of getting outside of their point of origin, in time or space. an epistemology we hold so dear, as it simplifies things. and then there is the crazy idea that there is, perhaps, just one electron. everywhere at once yet nowhere.

perhaps you understand my words better than others’ because they are written for you. no magic in that.

can anyone spare a faraday cage so i can go to sleep?

personality types.

due to my prospective job-seeking position, i’ve taken an interest in meyers-briggs personality types.

here’s what i am: INFJ, the least common personality type. more here. just like garfield, hehe.

fully realising the limitations of such instruments of categorisation, i am nonetheless curious what ‘type’ you represent, dear reader.

so if you have some time on yer hands, let me know. ) perhaps we could learn something in the process.

24 seconds.

While it had been raining all afternoon, the light changed a bit after four and gave the shower a new quality. It compelled me to turn away from my writing and observe quietly what was happening. I sat and watched a tiny squirrel meander below the big tuya in which it lived, as the shadows returned. One girl with wellingtons and a striking amount of plastic bags walked past in a hurry. I thought of the E.C. Escher painting that I had copied when I was a teenager. Patches of light and darkness instantly created a new kind of playground for the squirrel. The wind moved the leaves as much as did the brilliant drops of rain. One good thing about North-east Scotland is that it never loses the lush green from its meadows and Kulturlandschaften. All the time spent here tugs at my heart and I wonder whether I can ever entirely leave. I left my fever behind, and tried not to think of the way in which my limbs were still hurting. Hurled into the future again, I smiled. No, it was not winter yet. time was honey. 64 years ago today, the second bomb dropped. Think quietly of the dead and the living.

here’s a riddle…

Three cannibals and three anthropologists have to cross a river. The boat they have is only big enough for two people.

The cannibals will do as requested, even if they are on the other side of the river, with one exception. If at any point in time there are more cannibals on one side of the river than anthropologists, the cannibals will eat them.

What plan can the anthropologists use for crossing the river so they don’t get eaten?

Note: One anthropologist can not control two cannibals on land, nor can one anthropologist on land control two cannibals on the boat if they are all on the same side of the river. This means an anthropologist will not survive being rowed across the river by a cannibal if there is one cannibal on the other side.

(thanks to greeni)

metaphor is revelation.

mr happy.

one swallow does not make the spring
neither does slush make the town beautiful

you like the snow you told me
and wonder whether you’ve left to higher grounds

i miss your grumpiness in the morning your protests
at offerings of tea and that low chuckle you do so well

i plead guilty to all sorts of things and
shall not say things like ‘i wish you would wait until…’

some girl played all her chances and lost
but wonders how you are and what makes you tick

still

is anger a gift?

Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone.

You are the one who gets burned.

Gautama Buddha

image rippled from here

discipline-trapped (again).

no matter how many times I consider it, and however much I want to believe this is how it is, I think there is a definite problem with Ingold’s assertion of shared worlds, a continuous world of subject positions. I cannot imagine how much you can legitimately speak of shared worlds, if at the first round you try to speak outside of your discipline you are misunderstood and even an enormous amount of arguing cannot get you a lot further, possibly because other disciplines are not quite as open to the workings of disciplines that are not their own. Anthropologists (whatever else they do in terms of ridiculous closed argument-styles in a highly hermetic language) do open themselves up for difference when doing fieldwork. They learn, among other practical skills, how to learn to see how other people see, through dialogic engagement and everyday presence in other people’s environments/lifeworlds.

It made me quite sad to discover myself thinking that speaking outside my discipline was, to a significant degree, a waste of my time, if I am not willing to speak another’s language entirely and actually lose a lot of what I have to say about a certain social contexts and human lives. If I cast everything I know about people’s lifeworlds in utilitarian terms, am I not defeating the purpose of what made me look at those lifeworlds in the first place? The trouble with being in and of a subaltern discipline has hit me, again…

The consequence of this line of thinking frightens me, because it radically questions ideas of intervention, and makes me question the kinds of ideas I have been harbouring about the possible uses of anthropology outside of ‘academic argument’. If by adapting to power I change the content of my inquiry so much that it is unrecognisable and largely just like any other policy-speak (drawing also on those boxed conclusions), do I want to go ahead with it still? In an environment more and more hostile to alternative thinking do I really want to bail out from education and go into policy?

Ach, let’s finish this piece of academic argument aka thesis first… and if that doesn’t win me over to academia, nothing will...

p.s. happy kleeserchersdag! bei mech war e jo dest joer scho mi frei komm…

notes on the crisis.

- permanent crisis of capitalism? (one of many, or different now?)

- ordinary people will lose out, that much is clear – but what are the practical conclusions we draw from this. someone mentioned ‘paradigm shift’ this morning. (it woke me up instantly – unheard of!)

- a space of hope? (pleease…)

six days.

i felt as if caught in a time warp, boards of canada blaring in my ears a music of anti-emotion and numbness. the feeling of inadequacy, restlessness and fixity resurfaced. i was faced, yet again, with aspects of my research that i do not master or understand and that make me feel as if the whole project is redundant and impossible to finish. they flood my being with anxiety that now leaves its cohabitation with me rarely.

last night, i reconsidered a lot of opinion-matters and realised how much being opinionated can get in the way of true communication/communion. we got to the stage i was so tired i talked freely and was surprised at what i was saying. you astounded me, and i felt grateful to be able to spend time with friends. i wish that i will never get too caught up in professional discourses that are, often, alas, one-sided.

i’m going home in six days, and i cannot wait to leave, to hopefully roam and think quietly and come back and get on with writing. strangely, i feel i have absorbed some of the stories told to me in romania about the waiting for indefinite time to arrive and it never does.

my thoughts stray to the south, again.