Wednesday, December 3, 2008

Kokko

So the new job, it turns out, on the bright side started way sooner than I expected, but on the dim side does not provide much in the way of blobbing time. So this experiment in rebloggification may have to come to an abrupt end. I may pop back in from time to time, but I'm trying to limit my free-time internet consumption in favor of doing other things, like reading and watching movies and listening to music and making music and writing and figuring out my video camera and applying to library school, so it won't be that frequent. I promise that as soon* as I have CD-to-computer capability again I'll post the second half of Barock-Plastik.

I leave you now with this quote I really like, from the mouth of one Hanna Kokko. Science News, where I got the quote, describes her as an "animal ecologist" from the University of Helsinki. The name of her field seems a bit self-contradictory to me (if you're studying ecology, you can't exactly limit yourself to animals), but I'm sure if I took the trouble to find out what it actually is that it would make sense. Anyway, SN pulled the quote from an interview with Kokko published in the September 9 issue of Current Biology, and I really, really like it.

"There is always an applied side to thinking deeply. In any society there are many complicated issues that unfortunately get simplified to the point where short-sightedness wins.... Science teaches us to think more broadly than that. If we really had wise leaders, they would take the long-term perspective seriously precisely because we are so prone to ignore it. They should listen to scientists and philosophers much more than economists who tend to be interested in what happens in the next annual quartile."

On a hopeful note, I'm tagging this post "science", which is a tag I've never used before. We'll see if I end up using it again.

*I just accidentally typed "Soong". I think I have Star Trek on the mind.