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gallimaufry

gallimaufry, grad school
Periphery apparel and a grant for attendance at this year’s AAGs
10.21.09 | Permalink | Comment?

MaxPAC (I didn’t know Maxwell has a political action committee) is having an apparel sale, which reminded me of an idea I had last year. I never followed up on it, but perhaps here is my chance to lure people out of the woodwork and to comment on the blog.
It goes like this. I can [...]
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The Best thing in the intertubal corridors
10.01.09 | Permalink | Comment?

The Coudal Partners website just turned 10 today. Sure, it’s the web playground of a design group, but the ideas they come up with, and the talent they’ve gathered are brilliant. Being designers, they also execute it beautifully. I’ll let you explore the site on your own, but I particularly enjoyed the simple, yet clever [...]
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A return to historic futures
09.30.09 | Permalink | Comment?

After dropping our forward looking print edition and the revolutionary WWJJD club mix, we thought we’d return to an old an classic theme: the way we used to imagine the future. First, we’d like to share a glorious reimagining of Carl Sagan’s imagination, and second in an historical future of roboviolence and mechanical geopolitics.

Now wasn’t [...]
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Who took the ecology out of human ecology?
09.13.09 | Permalink | Comment?

I just learned that Syracuse has a College of Human Ecology. The goal of this portion of our fine university is to:
“The College of Human Ecology brings together Syracuse University’s professional programs in Child and Family Studies, Health and Wellness, Hospitality Management, Marriage and Family Therapy, Nutrition Science and Dietetics, Social Work, and Sport Management [...]
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Learning to be a better writer
09.13.09 | Permalink | Comment?

Perhaps the greatest sentence of all time:
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
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Best Spammy comment so far: Information is useful
06.13.09 | Permalink | Comment?

As we haven’t been getting many real comments lately, I’ve been reading the spam comments with relish and mustard. The best one so far: “Gr8 post. Thanks for posting. Information is useful.” You know what, I mostly agree, which is why some information in the comment would have been useful.

So that this post isn’t a total waste of time… If you are looking for information, particularly of the quantitative, graphable, chartable, datariffic variety, you may want to check out the new “Wolfram Alpha” search engine, which is designed to:

make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.

To be totally honest, I haven’t had much luck with it, but geographers of all stripes might find it useful. It does, after all, help you gather information. Information, as we learned today, is useful.
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Kafka on the Edge
05.26.09 | Permalink | Comment?

No. Not on the shore. On the fringe, where he belongs.
“Therefore I always enter the periphery with mixed feelings of anxiety, distress, pity, curiosity, haughtiness, wanderlust and virility, and I return with a sense of well-being, of gravity, of calm.” (From his diaries, via K.)
(the Soderbergh flick is worth checking out as well.)
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The New Geography and Popular Grad School ethnotainment
03.25.09 | Permalink | Comment?

Two quick links to share with the 3 people who are reading the blog these days.
First, a nice piece of self-referential ethnographic transcript: Saved by the Bell: The Grad School Years. Perhaps the most informationally rich line:
He’s such an imperialist oppressor—a Kipling without conscience.
Second, and more theoretically and conceptually interesting, bookforum.com has a fairly [...]
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Indexing Harper’s Index
02.26.09 | Permalink | Comment?

Total number of times the words “periphery,” “fringe,” or “edge” have appeared in Harper’s Index since it became a part of the magazine 25 years ago: 0
Total number of times the words “center,” or “central,” have appeared: 84