Adriana Knouf's blog

From the New York Times: "There’s Money in Dirt, for Those Who Find Bits of Silicon":http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/05/world/asia/05kyrgyzstan.html

Sifting black earth inside her hole, 14-year-old Nurzada Meerim admits to breathing problems. “But here is money,” she said, holding up a crinkled silver flake. Across a vast landfill just outside this tiny farming town in eastern Kyrgyzstan, the heads of girls continually pop up from narrowly constructed 10-foot shafts.

M. Serres. Conversations on science, culture, and time / Michel Serres with Bruno Latour. University of Michigan Press, 1995.

From now on we are sterring things that, in the past, we didn't steer. In dominating the planet, we become accountable for it. In manipulating death, life, reproduction, the normal and the pathological, we become responsible for them.

I'm coming to this a bit late, but I figured it was still important enough to post about, especially in light of "recent events":http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/11/world/europe/11cnd-terror.html?hp&ex=1155355200&en=9a447c614b870c43&ei=5094&partner=homepage and the hysteria surrounding them. I'll let posts from others speak for themselves: "Israel Arrests Geography Professor from the University of Akron":http://www.counterpunch.org/nally07262006.html

On the 9 July, 2006 Professor Ghazi Walid Falah--a professional geographer who holds dual Arab-Israeli and Canadian citizenshi

M. Serres. Conversations on science, culture, and time / Michel Serres with Bruno Latour. University of Michigan Press, 1995. Serres, in his discussions with Latour, uses sound, music, and musical instruments quite often to illustrate his points: bq. And something that's even more interesting: Hermes is the one who invented the nine-stringed lyre. What is a musical instrument, if not a table on which one can compose a thousand languages, and as many melodies and chants? Its invention opens the way for an infinite number of inventions.

As I begin (along with "Aaron Zinman":http://web.media.mit.edu/~azinman/) to create the framework for a new reading group at the Lab (tentatively titled _In Situ_ ) that will offer cross-, multi-, and inter-disciplinary analysis of technology, I'm encouraged by a previous experience of this sort over 16 years ago entitled the "Narrative Intelligence Reading Group". An account of their experiences was presented in a paper in 1999: "A Brief Overview of the Narrative Intelligence Reading Group":http://www.lcc.gatech.edu/~mateas/nidocs/DavisTravers.pdf : bq.