Okay, I have just about had it with this fellow and his astonishing brain. I stumbled upon his blog on one of my word searches as he has a fairly comprehensive list of nautical terms, briefly defined, and had been at it like me only smarter, more energetic and professional, putting up obscure words on the web for his own and a smattering of fellow humans’ edification. Had I pursued my academic career, I could only have hoped to be as frenetic and delightful a professor, and not a chance I would have been as well-read.
So here I was hoping to purloin some bit of wisdom from his website to spark my brain into remembering a word it was looking for in the recesses of my mind, or just something to help keep my metaphors on track, and had to click on this link which turns out to be an introduction to a course he is offering this fall, with this bizarre title, at least to the non-polymath: Anthro X: An anti-seminar in culture and cognition. Now I am not a big fan of anthropology, and it played a stellar role in one of our offspring’s disillusionment with a fine Canadian university that seems to be running on the fumes of its past greatness, not that I am bitter or anything. But not to throw out the baby with the bath-water, just because anthropology as a soft science has attracted many weak logicians to its jacuzzi, does not mean there isn’t a hot baby to be kept.
Which all brings me to his reading list from which I have chosen a few gems to get you started, but I will send you to his blog to see the pharmacopeia for the mind that Stephen Chrisomalis has assembled.
[OMG, I just went and checked his name and where he teaches: he graduated from McGill in Montreal, which just might be the fine Canadian university to which I referred in the last paragraph that chewed up and spat out our child, and now he teaches at Wayne State, in beautiful Detroit, Michigan, a state that I believe is well represented by my copious readers, and from which my marvellous nephew-in-law was sprung. Maybe Professor Chrisomalis will meet Rodriquez! He specializes in numerical anthropology and was the fellow who noticed that we could celebrate Pi approximation day here in Canada, being sensible about the way we write the date and therefore never experiencing the joy of March 14th being Pi day, 3/14 to Americans, but having to wait until July 22nd, because dividing 22 by 7, that day being 7/22 to us logical Canadians, you can approximate Pi, which just has to do.]
Malafouris, Lambros. 2013. How things shape the mind: a theory of material engagement. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Saxe, Geoffrey. 2012. Cultural development of mathematical ideas.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tomasello, Michael. 2014. A natural history of human thinking. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wengrow, David. 2013. The Origins of Monsters: Image and Cognition in the First Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Wierzbicka, Anna. 2013. Imprisoned in English: The Hazards of English as a Default Language. New York: Oxford University Press.
Wynn, Thomas, and Frederick Coolidge. 2012. How to think like a Neandertal. New York: Oxford University Press.
See you next year …
This even happened to me once, but I was near English Bay with my little pie faces, while hubby high-tailed it to Seattle back in the high-tech boom days. We had a blast in Stanley Park.
Here are the pie faces in Stanley Park:
Mikey’s sweet girlfriend just came through our door and brought me a red velvet cupcake. I am not normally a sweet-toothed person, but her timing was awesome and it is a very good cupcake.