Results tagged “updates” from Eccentric Eclectica

On or off. True or false. One or zero.

This is how life feels right now, as another year ticks off on my personal odometer. The input/output circuitry has been set on high input and appear to be stuck. I’ve been inhaling books, web pages, podcasts, lectures, art museums and more for the past year or so, and now I feel like there is little to show for it. Everything is unidirectional. A change is needed.

Making a promise is probably a bridge too far. In the past I’ve managed a month and half of daily blog writing. So a resolution to return to the blog for a whole year is asking for failure.

But my philosophy, perhaps a bit too sanguine, too even-keel for ambitious minds, is that blogging is a cycle. Sometimes you have to declare bankruptcy and step away from the keyboard to realize what has been missing. Like the trip I took to the Boundary Waters in early September. A natural kick in the head that sent me scrambling for my copy of Lost in the Cosmos by Walker Percy when I reentered the human world.

So I read and read. Flitting from subject to subject. Diving hard into modern art, radical science fiction, and linear algebra. Try fitting all those into a job description, oy vey.

This missive can’t be a promise. Resolutions fail and disappoint more often than not. So make it a hope, a goal, a dream. I’m back here for a time, swimming in and out of the virtual lifestream. You’re coming up to an iceberg mighty fast.

Here are some of the things I’m currently thinking about:

• Framing and communication. I got sucked into the most recent dustup about framing, evolution, and atheism over at Science Blogs. I even started leaving snarky comments at Chris Mooney’s blog The Intersection. So I took Matt Nisbet’s advice and started reading the research on framing, agenda setting, and priming in the communication science literature. I haven’t reached any conclusions yet but the question that bugs me is the assumption that negative arguments of any kind that criticize the core beliefs of other people are doomed to failure. The default assumption of the framers seems to be that people would respect science more if only scientists were nicer and didn’t say anything controversial. I just don’t buy it. There’s a lot of complaints out there in the media-criticism-sphere deploring the polarization of politics. I don’t find it very persuasive. First, polarization is not new. Second, the evidence that polarization turns people off or makes them not pay attention seems scanty or more honored in the breach than the actual world.

• Knowledge and information cycles. I’m trying to push myself out of the acquisition stage and into the publishing/production stage. Need to put more thoughts into the blog and elsewhere.

• Business, consulting, freelancing. Making a living. Future career steps.

The blog has languished for many months but this will hopefully be the beginning of a new wave of publishing around here at EcEc.  To the whopping 16 Feedburner subscribers, most of whom are probably bots, I ask you not to hold your breath for too much.  For those looking for archives: things are broken temporarily until I get the new software sorted out and import my old entries in a format that I can tolerate.