Eleanor Arnason's blog
Money and motivation
by Eleanor Arnason, 7/26/08 • This is a quote from the wonderful Immanual Wallerstein, which I got from the Ambling Along the Aqueduct blog:
Afghanistan
Eleanor Arnason, 7/18/08 • I encountered a remark yesterday on an economics blog that I read — not faithfully, but often. It’s a kind of remark that I’ve seen fairly often: the person who says, “The invasion of Iraq was wrong. But attacking Afghanistan — that miserable, primitive, backward country that does bad things to women — was a good idea.”
Eleanor Arnason writes about science fiction, science, politics, economics, art and bird watching in her blog.
Talking about class
by Eleanor Arnason, 5/29/08 • I think most of the problem [in talking about “the working class”] is the huge inability of Americans to think about class. Working people are not always factory workers. They are not always poorly educated. One of the big lies that we are told now is that people do badly because they are don’t have enough education. Tell that to an adjunct professor with a PhD, who is holding three different jobs with no benefits and no security.
200 Years in the Future, 200 Years in the Past
Eleanor Arnason, 4/2/08 • My assumption, thinking about science fiction novels, is that the world is going to be a lot different 200 years in the future. But then I started thinking.
If we went back to 1800, to the early U.S., how hard would it be to understand people and their lives? And if we brought a bright American here from 1800, how hard would it be for him or her to understand us?
Winter
Since the last time I posted about the weather, winter has come to Minnesota. There have been two snowfalls, and the temperature has been in the zero to mid twenties range. This is cold enough so the snow doesn’t melt. On the colder days, the warm air and fine particulate matter that comes out of chimneys turns to white steam or smoke. It’s wisps coming from the chimneys of houses and great billowing clouds coming from the smokestacks of the downtown power and heating plants. The tall buildings of both downtowns are wreathed in long, drifting trails of whiteness.
