After returning to Sydney, having lived and travelled around Asia for several years—from Shanghai, Seoul and Taipei, to Chiang Mai, Angkor Wat and Bali,—I’ve been wondering what’re some of the biggest differences in lifestyle between a Western country like Australia and East and South-East Asian countries. While food is the obvious difference, I actually think [...]
—Turn your iPod into a language learning device
Many people think that to learn a language they need to attend many classes or to buy language books. What they don’t realise is that their mobile devices like iPods and smart phones can be turned into language learning devices. In this post I will show you [...]
by Joseph Devlin
Requirements of speech, vocabulary, parts of speech, requisites
It is very easy to learn how to speak and write correctly, as for all purposes of ordinary conversation and communication, only about 2,000 different words are required. The mastery of just twenty hundred words, the knowing where to place them, will make us [...]
In the era of globalization learning languages is becoming increasingly important. More and more people have to speak English for travel, work or business. Other languages will become important as well. Increasingly, people are learning Mandarin Chinese because of the business opportunities in that country. We are all coming in contact with other languages in a [...]
I recently discovered that I have an interest in design. I’m not sure when this happened. Most recently it’s manifested in heavy doses of reading, and listening to, the Monocle and other design magazines.
This is more of a re-discovery actually. I’ve always had some interest in culture and design, especially architecture and urban design. [...]
Critical theory’s interest in art is primarily as a source of the ideological underpinnings of an oppressive social order. Affirmative culture is the sanctified ‘museal’ art that is relegated to the realm of aesthetic appreciation and spiritual fulfilment (“aesthetic education”) in a way that diffuses its dangerous and explosive contents. It succeeds in reconciling the liberal [...]
I just realised that I don’t have any videos of Contact Improvisation and this one is just so inspiring. It’s rare to find decent pieces of this calibre. Filming dance is not at all easy because good dance is so subtle, and making film from it is a whole other art. So that’s something that I also [...]
At a time of ever increasing accessibility to information from non-traditional sources such as Wikipedia, Youtube, or Wikileaks, the established sources of information and institutions that disseminate it are coming under challenge.
Established media organisations, institutions of higher education, publishing houses, and so on used to be able to present themselves as the necessary vehicles [...]
I have started to realise that my thinking about things has become entangled, and of course that usually means that some disentangling needs to be done. So I got stuck on the word ludic as the key to thinking about those activities that are aesthetic, pleasurable, or to use the newly coined term, somaesthetic, in a [...]
The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:
The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is doing awesome!.
Crunchy numbers
A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 3,100 [...]
Alain De Botton explains on the Monocle Weekly podcast that university education does not make you a nicer person. Here in a School of Life “secular sermon” he finds Anthony Robbins (“Awaken the Giant Within”) and positive thinking self-help genre deeply depressing, meritocracy and individual agency a recipe for suicide, the idea of work as [...]
“Nothing is more oppressive and regulated than being a simple hedonist … ” says Zizek in this talk “God Without the Sacred” at New York Public Library. No science versus religion pop-philosophy. Jokes and references to 9/11, anal hedonists, Dawkins, atheist Zionists, Obama’s stance on the Gulf spill, Harry Potter, and randy clips from “The [...]
In the previous post on the end of work I introduced the topic of the crisis of structural/technological unemployment that’s been recognised for a long time but is seen as an acute crisis since the 1980s. As an educator faced with students entering the workforce one is often forced to ask oneself some hard questions such as, [...]
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