wallpaper dinding

When Newman writes about the intellect, the principal category that he draws on to describe what it does is 'meaning'"The intellect of man [...] energizes as well as his eye or ear, and perceives in sights and sounds something beyond them. It seizes and unites what the senses present to it; it grasps and forms what need not have been seen or heard except in its constituent parts. It discerns in lines...

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If educational engagements are not meaningful -  for both teachers and learners - then nothing in education really works: meaningless education is an oxymoron. Unfortunately, it is an oxymoron which we somehow succeeded in realising! Meaningfulness can be a precursor to deeper levels of understanding. Things mean something to us before we begin to understand them (think about falling in love)....

A friend commented on a desire to twirl on a swivel chair to the music of Bach. "But Mozart is not the same for twirling!". Having noticed my daughter also having a propensity for twirling on swivel chairs (although not requiring the aid of music), I thought this was an interesting statement.I think there's something in it. After all, 'spinning' in Bach and Baroque music generally is well-known to...

The current economic difficulty started with a crisis in banking and is ending with a crisis in public services as nations grapple with the fallout out of their intervention with the banking crisis. The public services in the form of health, education, welfare, law enforcement, street lighting, public housing, planning, waste management, transport, utilities management and broadcasting are relatively...

Forget global warmingWe must heal our fragmented world.  This is a world of disjointed meanings.We move...      from the office          to the art gallery              to the shopping centre,                  the car,                 ...

I've been playing with JeeNodes recently, soldering stuff together, getting wireless connections working... and then tying it into the Socket.io implementation of the real-time web. The idea is to create super-cheap controllers which can be used as interactive voting tools, RFID readers, etc... but all of which can talk to each other and change things that happen on the web.Here's a (slightly wobbly)...

Following on from yesterday's post, and a few others where I have been developing ideas around meaning, I'm thinking more about the economic role of 'disconnected relics' (Bach Passions, Picassos, Beethoven manuscripts, etc), for whilst the inherent meaning of these relics is lost in time, they still play an important function in economic life. I alluded to this yesterday when I said that the risk...

I had a strange experience at a concert performance of the St. Matthew Passion last night. Performed by the Thomas Kirche choir (celebrating its 800 year anniversary), it was deeply affecting. But all the more so, not because of the intrinsic beauty of the music, but also I found the experience moving because of what it meant to me. So after three and a half hours, the music closed, tired singers,...

The Liebestod from Wagner's Tristan is the most remarkable music. For those first audiences, it must have felt as if music, which had always hinted at orgasm but never fully revealed it, finally revealed what had been veiled for so long. Perhaps the more explicit verbal expression of the subject through Freud was inevitable afterwards.But it is the nature of the climax itself in Tristan which is interesting...

Something is happening in the world of physical computing. In the last week or two I've been soldering components onto PCBs, uploading software, programming behaviours, etc, etc. That's with JeeNode - a wireless Arduino microcontroller clone which promises very portable and adaptable connected sensors in the environment. JeeNodes are cheap (about £15). But then so is Raspberry Pi - which is a whole...