Currently listening to: “If I Can’t Love Her” – Beauty and the Beast
(clockwise: jimjams, peanut butter cookies, Nutella pinwheels, lemon madeleines)
Want a taste of some of that? Come on out to MASS in Buchanan D tomorrow (Monday, Nov 23) and check out the AUS Garage Sale + Bake Sale in support of rare disease research! We’ll be there from 11.30 am to 4.30 pm, so come say hi, and grab a baked treat!
Tags: AUS2 Comments
Currently listening to: “Somebody to Love” – GLEE Cast
After a few weeks of intense geeking-out, finally, finally!, the Zimbardo lecture! Entitled “A Journey from Evil to Heroism”, it started off with a brief run-down about his Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) and its relevant societal implications. Following the grim discussion of systemic evil, he took on a more optimistic tone, speaking of the absolute necessity of encouraging everyday heroism as a bulwark against the human potential for cruelty. I must say I’m amazed and inspired – despite (or perhaps, as a result of) his first-hand experience of experimental subjects travelling down the slippery slope into depravity, his unwavering conviction in the equally powerful potential for positive action is commendable. An absolutely splendid lecture, not a single wasted word.
And I got my book signed! He seems so incredibly approachable and amiable (:
I’ve been blogging quite a bit lately, so you can expect an entry coming up soon about the social enterpreneurship conference which I just attended. Till then, Medieval French Lit demands my attention, the cheeky blighter…
Tags: Philip Zimbardo · talks3 Comments
Currently listening to: “Alejandro” – Lady GaGa
Brolly, you had been the best of companions. And now you rest in the garbage can in the Gage lobby, alongside your fallen compatriots, a mere shadow of your glorious polkadotted past. Just like your predecessors, you served well in times of desperate need (not forgetting times of less urgency, of course). Where Mary Poppins impersonations seemed apt, you were the perfect prop. When poking the up button in the elevator seemed more appropriate than simply leaning over, you were always there. Late-night traipsing between Gage and Fairview would have filled me with raccoon-avoiding trepidation if not for your presence, warding them off at arm’s length. And if there was a scene to be made, a flounce-off accompanied by a dramatic jab always seemed to do the trick. Not to mention the following: countless baton-twirls along lonely midnight walks, reaching for objects high-up, smacking irreverent individuals, and my god, accessorizing! What larks we had!
and thus commences the Search, once again, for that perfect walking umbrella of just the right height, with the perfectly curved handle…
Tags: rain4 Comments
Currently listening to: “The Jeep Song” – The Dresden Dolls
As I hurried/was blown into Swing this damp morning, I couldn’t help but overhear this snippet from some despondent student’s plaintive cry to her friend. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this! We were supposed to get an education, and then we would have everything!”
Funny how we expect education to be correlational to our supposed acquisition of everything we could ever want, or at least, everything we could complain about not having. In the process, education is ripped asunder, worn down into its parts of mere marks and revision and missed early-morning lectures – some sort of necessary and damningly arbitrary process we must bustle through in order to attain the Holy Grail of everything oh so shiny and marvellous – but what of erudition, of learning for learning’s sake? Of education, not as a means to an end, but the pursuit of knowledge for its own worth? Of us, not being mere cogs stuck in the machine that plods on chewing up ideas! creativity! and spitting out carbon-copy thought processes deemed Acceptable in every sense. Free thought is encouraged, but only if it fits in that rather carefully crafted box of Acceptability with a capital A all neat sharp points and angular lines – none of that loopy trailing ink staining outside the lines doodling down the margins for what is the Purpose? its Price? for god forbid we fill our minds for the sheer ecstasy of knowing!
Tags: musingComments Off on #073: In pursuit of erudition
Currently listening to: “Ordinary Day” – Great Big Sea
This is what’s up.
November 20, 2009 – Philip Zimbardo at UBC!!!!!!!!
Cue excited arm-flailing, incoherent exclamation allsorts, unsuspecting roommates being biffed over the head with copies of his book, et cetera. You might know him as the man behind the Stanford Prison Experiment, and the narrator of the educational television series, Discovering Psychology. For the record, I’m only mildly obsessed with his book, The Lucifer Effect – an absolutely brilliant discussion of his experiment, accompanied by an almost-philosophical musing upon the goodness and evil humans have a capacity for. All in all, a rather fascinating, albeit disconcerting read.
…and that is my book update for the moment; I’ve been falling behind on my literary recommendations, mea culpa. But really, would anyone listen if I tossed out recommendations for books on the World Bank and IMF?
Tags: books · Philip Zimbardo5 Comments
