Posts

Showing posts from March, 2010

Colliding the beams in the LHC and other progress

UPDATE: See live webcas t now before it ends in a few more hours. Perhaps even right now. It is scheduled for 7 am. I will know soon. Unfortunately, I could not access the site from my IP. Hopefully I can find some way to access the webcam images. At any rate, I'll be paying the physics building, HEP section, a visit tomorrow, on my way to class. Work is going rather slowly in this area, for the time being, because of so much other work (the fact I am still typing this in the office at 1:30 am when I should go home and sleep!) I'm excited though that I will have a bit time to talk about the simulation process when I do comparative study between the experimental processes involving the colliders and Monte Carlo simulation versus biomedical hospital platforms. Bringing another scientifc field into the investigation could possibly lend insight to my work (and gives me some time, on borrowed time, to think more thoroughly about how I am going to plan the next direction for my

Raising money for my work

I wish fervently that there is a specific fund I can apply to where the jury that dispenses the fund will understand what I am trying to drive at with this project that I am doing with the LHC, high energy physics and basically comparative critical theory on science, gender and epistemic politics. I suppose I am beginning to despair slightly over ever getting funding to go to CERN this summer, especially after having failed in securing funding from one of the potentially biggest funder (this is not my lucky year as every place I've applied to seem to have more "eligible and qualified" applicants than funds. I am not sure if it's the economic downturn that's spurring this or there's just a sudden emergence of scholars. Being interdisciplinary and doing something that is potentially different also doesn't help. Maybe I need to sell my soul to corporations to get some money? It seems that those who critique the "corportization of knowledge" do not s

BBC documentary on the Large Hadron Collider

Rumination from a working group discussion on phenomenology and media

At the reading group on phenomenology today, we were discussing Mark Hansen's latest work on ubiquitous sensations in talking about new media art, which attempts to interrogate the notions of the "atmospheric, impersonal and microtemporal" in media even as we are trying to make sense of Varela's project of using neuroscience to fill in the gaps of the Husserlian phenomenological model (I don't think we did much in making a connection of them). However, in talking about ubiquitous computing, the meaning of art and the productive (unproductive) intervention of phenomenology in the discourse on art (particularly of art taking place in a non-traditional or new medium), I want to point to the latest issue of the ACM on cloud computing/ volunteer computing in my attempt to draw a correlation between a form of relationality/interactivity mediated through technological hardware but going beyond that as the main players are the human agents who determine how and what they