malvasia bianca

Dragon Age 2 starts off with a frame: the Seeker interrogating Varric about Hawke’s deeds, and calling bullshit on him. So: it’s first of all a game about story. But not a story with a clear ending or a clear path; and not a story where we the player (or, for that matter, the player’s […]

I’ve recently been reading Bruno Latour‘s Politics of Nature, and have been struck by how well various agile practices fit into his framework. So I want to try to explain his framework (again!), and to explore how agile practices might fit in. His book begins as a reaction against the split between nature and society, […]

Another quote from Latour’s Politics of Nature (pp. 208–209, emphasis in original): If we borrow Lévi-Strauss’s powerful definition and use the term “barbarians” to designate those who believe that they are being assailed by barbarians, conversely, we can call “civilized” those whose collective is surrounded by enemies*. In one case we have contamination by barbarianism, […]

I was amused by the synchronicity of my going straight from a discussion of YAGNI on the XP mailing list to reading the following in Politics of Nature (pp. 195–196; emphasis in original): As soon as we agree to differentiate the past from the future no longer through detachment but through reattachment, political ecology begins […]

Something else Rorty and Latour have in common: they both answer their e-mail quite quickly. I got a short note from Rorty saying, among other things, that he particularly liked We Have Never Been Modern, and a longer note from Latour gently chiding me for completely misreading him. (“ah readers, readers…”) Latour’s point (unless I’m […]

I’ve been reading Rorty’s Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, and he reminds me a lot of Bruno Latour, especially his We Have Never Been Modern and Politics of Nature. Both of them, as far as I can tell, see statements about science having a special direct relationship with reality as, at best, not adding anything to […]

I’ve been a big fan of Bruno Latour for a long time now. He started off working in sociology of science, with some very insightful observations of scientists in action, of how science is actually produced and how scientific facts become accepted. Which is not quite the way it is presented by many scientists (or […]