It's a maths conference! It's rock 'n' roll!

[tcpip]

Over the past few months I've been co-writing a paper for the International Conference for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. The paper is a combination of number theory (especially complex numbers,
percolation, criticality, fractal dimensions) and critical-functional social theory (the AGIL shema, uneven development, crises, system/lifworld distinction). It's all about the mathematical modelling of societies, their evolution and when they collapse due to internal contradictions and so forth. It uses (at least from my end) material from Talcott Parsons, Jeffrey Alexander and Jurgen Habermas.

I have just been told that a full-colour A0 poster has been made to advertise the paper. Previously I had been under the evident error that such posters are usually used for advertising recent tours by popular (or subcultural) musicians.

Oh well. As Pythagoras pointed out, even music consists of numbers. Tres rock-n-roll.

Comments

[severina-242.livejournal.com]

LOL! That's really unusual! Will you be obtaining a poster for your walls?

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Apparently one is coming in the post. It will like quite appropriate in this workplace given (a) the nature of the workplace in general and (b) the nature of my particular office in the workplace.

Looking forward to it I must say.

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

Neat! I see some familiar names on the list of speakers...

Mathematics is the root of all (or at least most) that is beautiful, IMHO :-)

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

It's a pretty extraordinary list, no doubt about it!

In mathematics the true, the good and the beautiful are one and the same. It's all about assigning the correct content to the correct sets and keeping the logic together.

And being "neat" in the process!

[angel80.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I'm trying to imagine Habermas and Parsons together (Alexander is unknown to me).

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Alexander developed functionalism to take into account historical and interpretative sociology criticism. Specifically, the discussion is around uneven development in the AGIL schema and the need for axiomatic changes in a social system. The best book on this is 'Neofunctionalism' (1985 iirc).

As for Habermas, well, he's always tried to incorporate Parsons into his work although he is highly critical of the universalizing tendencies of "the system" bringing dysfunctional results to the lifeworld of cultural reproduction.

Parsons is a strange one. I mean he started out with a theory of action and ended up with all-inclusive systems theory. Habermas wryly notes that as he got older he even started to get somewhat metaphysical about his systems theory, talking of "ultimate values" and so forth.

Existentialism gets us all in the end :)

[angel80.livejournal.com]

On a totally different subject, I found some 3 Amigos Cafe Timor in my local supermarket. It's organic and more expensive that my usual stuff, but I bought it anyway. It is produced by Cafe East Timor Corporation about which I can find no further information. Do you by chance know who owns/operates it?

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Hmmm... I thought 3Amigo's was a coop. Oh well. Apart from that I don't know much about it. I haven't seen it the shops for a while, which these days seem to dominated by the very professional Delta brand or by the 'out of a tin shed' Kapa'as brand.

I prefer the latter ;-)

[angel80.livejournal.com]

Must have shifted to the export market. I received a bit of paper with it that says that Cafe East Timor Corporation was established during the INTERFET period. I have a plastic packet brought back by a friend a couple of years ago - Kopi Bobok - the whole thing written in Bahasa Indonesia. She bought it in the market and it was charred rather than roasted! This one is roasted and packaged in Oz. If the World Bank report that I read is to be believed, most Timorese coffee is now processed in Indonesia where the wages are lower (I posted something about this last year).