Catherine Howell tagged me today for a meme that requires me to post 5 things I think you probably wouldn’t know about me, and then tag 5 more bloggers. I don’t actually usually participate in these things, but this time I was so annoyed that I had forgotten my login details to my Educause blog that I set about hacking back in to my own account, and lo and behold I made it. So here goes.
When I was 12, I went trekking in Nepal.
I suffer from labyrinthitis, which has brought a new appreciation for a sense we rarely think about: balance. Nobody can see the effect of this illness.
I’ve been to the USA 14 times in 14 years. The last time I was there was 2003. Most of these trips have been work-related, and I want to go back this year because it seems like such a long time ago that I was there.
I’ve lived a double life since the early 1990s, as a member of obscure online communities such as The Foothills, Brainstorms and GCS. None of these communities has a special topic, they’re there for online discussion, and I met some of my best friends at them.
Tonight I’m performing in the opening night of a dance show called ‘Elemental’ at the ADC theatre here in Cambridge, and I’ll perform every night this week, finishing on Saturday.
Mike the headless chicken disproves the theory of ‘threshold concepts’. Let me explain. I recently started reading David Sudnow’s Ways of the Hand – A Re-written Account, on loan from a friend. It’s an ethnographer’s approach to learning improvised jazz piano, and is interesting to me in the context of the question of the embodiment of (for want of a better term) knowledge. After I got into the first chapter of the book I picked up a couple of others, getting stuck on a Sci Fi thriller that was a present from my sister, Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan, among other things. Anyway today a colleague (another Richard) emailed about ‘threshold concepts’ in canoeing, which reminded me to get back to Sudnow. Threshold concepts (Meyer and Land, 2003) are supposed to be difficult bits of learning that we tend to get stuck on but ultimately allow a kind of breakthrough moment. The thing is, most of the work on these has been done in areas where knowledge is thought of as something you obtain through careful thought, not by practicing something by tinkling the ivories, or in my case, treading the boards. In Lee’s case, it also involves kicking people’s teeth in (in self defense of course) because he teaches Pencat Silat and just finished his anthropology PhD thesis on the topic.
So is it really all about threshold concepts in that case? Sometimes it must be, because you can often get to the next stage of learning by introducing a concept, like say, lead and follow technique in lindy hop, Sudnow’s techniques in WOTH, or in Richard’s case, “the static paddle” in a canoe. But also, obviously people must learn these things without ever going through the stage of conceptualising anything. Like learning to drive a manual car without anyone needing to tell you just how to ease off the clutch, or all the pianists who have never really thought about technique but are still technically brilliant. Anyway (stay with me here) this talk of embodied knowledge got me thinking of the story of Mike the Headless Chicken. Yes, Mike the rooster stayed alive for 18 months after having his head lopped off with an axe. He even toured, raising quite a hefty amount of money for his owners before starving to death by accident. He reportedly only had a bit of brainstem left and one ear, yet his bodily functions and reflexes remained completely intact — so much so that he gained quite a bit of weight over his life time. So Mike’s body, in a sense, still “knew” how to survive, just as a spider knows how to spin its web. Yet at the same time we can say that a great dancer might not really know how they do what they do. Yet there will, I’d argue, still be thresholds in their ability to do the things they do — embodied thresholds, if you like. That’s surely one reason professional musicians, dancers and martial arts experts still practice for hours every day to get to the next level. I think this shows that it’s not necessarily about concepts, but it might still be about thresholds in learning.
Here’s the first batch of photos from our Engagement Party in Utrecht. If you were wondering where the photos were, so were we. It turns out that the family had been preparing a really amazing printed book made from all the photos taken on the night. We were given the book and about 230 digital images when we went over for Sinterklaas. These are just a few of my favourites.
Here’s a couple of photos from the Friday night party at Barcelona. Lotte is judging the Jack’n’Jill contest, and generally having a great time dancing to the spectacular Ivanow Jazz Group. We were over there for a series of weekend workshops that Lotte was teaching with Bill at the Balliball dance studio. I deejayed a 2 hour set on the Saturday night at the studio, and both of us had a fantastic time dancing till the wee hours both nights. We didn’t really have enough time for sightseeing, even though we planned an extra couple of days — but that just means we will have to go back for the Barcelona Swing Festival next year.
Lotte and I were in Barcelona on the weekend, travelling on a train when a young guy standing next to us was attacked by thugs. It was just before 11pm and the trains were full, mostly with soccer fans returning from a big game that day. As we entered the carriage I noticed two guys with short cropped hair, army boots and the sort of straight-legged jeans of a trademarked 1970s skinhead. To top it off, even though they were speaking Catalan, they were sporting Union Jacks on their jackets, which made me think more of certain skinhead revivalists and their Nazist tendencies. They were probably about 18, sitting with their legs propped up across the benches, and travelling with a girl who was carrying a small white bulldog. It was the sort of group you generally try to avoid. We kept an eye on them until they got up to leave, pushing past me towards a young guy with long hair, probably 16 or 17, standing near the door right behind me. They started to speak to him, obviously taunting him, and one of them reached out and pulled his hair. Hard. He resisted answering them, and then as the train pulled up to the station each of the guys took a swing at him. They hit him hard — one of the guys connected flush on with his face, sending his head backwards into the wall. It was all too fast to do anything much, and he just stood his ground. He was okay, physically, but I could see how shaken he was by it, as you would expect. All I want to do now is tell that guy how brave I thought he was to just stand there and not give the guys the satisfaction of a fight that could have ended very badly. We reported the thugs at the station, but that was all we could do. Sorry, kid.
If anyone needed any more evidence that the U.S. has become an out of control police state in the last few years, just watch the horrifying video that is doing the rounds today. The student was not able to produce ID on request. Despite the fact that he is quite clearly attempting to comply with the police, he was brutally attacked by several officers with a taser, a technology which is not used in many countries because of the potentially lethal effects. For more about the incident, see Student shot with Taser by UCPD officers and Community responds to Taser use in Powell in Daily Bruin, UCLA. Warning: the video below is distressing.
Following up on my last post, it appears that a lot of people both in the U.S. and abroad agree. The Democrats now have control of both Houses, which no doubt has a lot to do with how out of touch the administration had become with public views on the War on Terror. I also noticed today that the Herald Tribune recently published an article entitled International poll ranks Bush a threat to world peace which states: “A majority of people in three countries with close ties to the U.S. — Britain, Canada and Mexico — consider President George W. Bush a threat to world peace, ranking the U.S. president right up there with the leaders of two countries he has labeled part of the “axis of evil” — North Korea’s Kim Jong Il and Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad… Majorities in Britain, Canada and Mexico — 69 percent, 62 percent and 57 percent, respectively — said U.S. foreign policy has made the world more dangerous since 2001, according to the poll.” So what do you think? Does Bush threaten World Peace?
Recently I’ve been following the case of Indiana graduate student Chris Soghoian, who got himself into trouble with the FBI after putting up a website that creates fake boarding passes, just to show how stupid airport security can be. You can argue that Chris made a mistake by creating a script to automatically generate a fake boarding pass, but he did it to prove a point. He probably should have stopped at describing how someone could do it rather than actually creating the script. But the FBI beating down his door to confiscate all of his computer equipment after the site had been taken down? That is not a response that’s in proportion with the crime.
Today’s Wired story on the incident has a good summary of what happened. Chris has been heartened by a back-down from one of the politicians who was rather hasty in calling for his apprehension, but the fact remains that undue force was used. The story reads more like something you would expect in China or a few years ago in the USSR, not “the home of the free”. The speed of descent of United States into a police state is truly astounding, and the sad truth is that it is probably only because Chris is young, articulate, English speaking and computer literate that we’re hearing his story at all. I happened to be watching CNN the other night when they were discussing the state of delusion that the US government appears to be in. I couldn’t agree more with Andrew Sullivan in that interview. If you happen to be a US citizen, you should do something about it. Write to a politician and tell them you don’t think it’s right. Link to Chris’ blog. And whatever you do, don’t vote for the GOP.
