Friday Ephemera
Air jelly. // Neo Cube. (h/t, Artblog.) // Nano photos. // Molecule-sized switches. // The tunnels of Niagara Falls. // Architecture in Dubai. // Tokyo’s automated multi-story bike parking. // When galaxies collide. // Brian Greene on superstrings. Vibrating in 11 dimensions. // Heather MacDonald on poisonous “authenticity”. (h/t, Cookslaw.) // PoMo professor threatens to sue ungrateful students. They “discriminated” against her by pointing out she’s incompetent. More. // Parody of gender studies flyer constitutes “violence”. // “My epiglottis is full of bees.” // Bubble cars. // Traffic jam shockwave. // Iron Man: Secret Origins. 1, 2, 3, 4. // The museum of unworkable devices. (h/t, Maggie’s Farm.) // Muppetstar Galactica. // Magic lanterns. Brass, glass and kerosene. // Unusual plants. (h/t, Ace.) // Orange Sunshine. (h/t, Dr Westerhaus.) // The Hendrix sex tape. He’s dead, Jim. (h/t, Protein Wisdom.) // The Kleenex Pillow. // Ten annoying alarm clocks. // And, via The Thin Man, it’s a footwear thing.
“The Muppets were created by man…” lol. So that makes Miss Piggy… Number 6?
Re: “Professor” Venkatesan –
“I am also writing a book detailing my eperiences [sic] as your instructor, which will ‘name names’ so to speak. I have all of your evaluation [sic] and these will be reproduced in the book. Have a nice day.”
What a bitch.
Yes, Venkatesan is a real piece of work. Preening, paranoid, vindictive and desperately insecure. Note the ridiculous namedropping: “Lacan, Lyotard, Latour” – ah, the giants! And note the readiness to denounce those who disagree as “ignorant”, “bigoted”, “fascists”, etc. So much for teaching criticism. It’s a familiar pattern among enthusiasts of postmodernist “theory”. In extreme cases, like the one above, it’s practically psychotic.
Ophelia at B&W comments on the Venkatesan saga:
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/notesarchive.php?id=2288
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/notesarchive.php?id=2289
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/notesarchive.php?id=2290
The students and their parents should, of course, be suing *her* and demanding a refund. It strikes me as important that pseudo-educators and the institutions that employ them should be made financially liable for this kind of intellectual vandalism. When it starts to cost – and cost dearly – Ms Venkatesan and those like her will be thinner on the ground.
David,
I Thought you might like this.
http://progressive-vision.org/blog/?p=121
Luvva-da-bubblecars!
AC1,
Capitalism bad! Mao doubleplusgood! It’s easy to laugh – and we should, quite loudly – but there’s something a little sinister about people, often young people, whose worldview is such that they imagine themselves to be righteous while glorifying some of history’s greatest sociopaths. Everyone’s been foolish as a youth, but some positions are so cultish and perverse, and so inexcusable, it’s hard to abandon them without registering, albeit dimly, just how credulous and despicable one has actually been. So, for some, those adolescent postures become entrenched and are defended in later life, which is pretty much a recipe for pathological denial.
[Cough] Seumas Milne. [Cough]
Wow, that Venkatesan story is something else. I have to suspect, even with no sympathy towards postmodernism at all, that Venkatesan is the kind of person who would discredit any intellectual pursuit with her lack of character and self-absorption. I could imagine a similar type small-minded pedant browbeating students over some highly misunderstood tenet of modernism fifty years ago, or Freud fifty years prior to that, or Leviticus a hundred years earlier.
Venkatesan – what a piece of work. The combination of stupidity and arrogance is very dangerous, particularly when peoples futures are involved. All she is doing is bullying these students, who deserve better.
For tomorrows ephemera.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5HY4hy6HlE