While waiting for Hawkes

Chuck Grimes cgrimes at rawbw.com
Fri Jun 7 21:13:55 PDT 2002


On Kuhn and Gould. Waiting for Hawkes.

I am about half way through Mike Perlman's Steal this Idea. I swear reading it is like talking to yourself. I mean what's the point? I don't mean that as a critique at all. It's like I've been over and over this stuff in my mind ever since the mid-nineties, so reading it is like talking to myself again. Of course it is better and more thoroughly argued with a lot of useful examples I didn't know. After thinking about recommending it to a friend---who was going to a meeting to set up a community satellite dish so everybody could just aim at it and get 11 meg/s bandwidth, ie. stealing it from Brad and Larry's telecom hierarchy---I realised that Perlman was far more radical sounding to the uninitated than might be supposed from my narrow little tree hugging let's burndown the Empire world....

In any event, I went out just now and bought both Kuhn (paper) and Gould. I wasn't prepared for Gould. It's something like 1343 pages long, and nicely bound. Now tell me Hawkes read this start to finish. Shit. I probably won't read the whole thing and should.

I have a general question in my mind as I look at Gould's giant. How much of the non-biological world will he admit as the external template of phenomenon and forces about which biological communities configure themselves?

Chuck Grimes



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