Objectivity by Lorraine Datson and Peter Galison.

Hupomnemata are journals that people keep for the purpose of developing themselves. Apparently it is of greek origin and was brought into the modern context in an book by Michel Foucault entitled "Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth". A starting point for the evolution of subjectivity, and I mention it because it is a strange word that I had never seen before reading this book, but it is a very good description of what blogs are, or at least what I hope this blog would be.

An analysis of the development of objectivity in scientific thought from the 1800's until present. This theme is developed around the use of scientific atlases that were generated to be used as objective reference points in scientific thought. Examples of these would be atlases of flower types, birds, star charts, etc.

The major thesis is that the use of these atlases, and therefore the mirrored development of scientific objectivity, went through three main stages; these were: truth to nature, mechanical objectivity and trained judgment.

Truth to nature was exemplified by realistic drawings that were generally made by an artist supervised by an expert, a process they refer to as "four eye sight".

It was often the case that such an approach, although appearing detailed, was not necessarily that realistic. The second stage, mechanical objectivity, relied on the use of impersonal visualization techniques such as daguerreotype and photography. Eventually it was determined that such methods were also dependent on many subjective variables such as lighting effects and angles. It is also true that some photographs require an expert to interpret the information contained in them.

The final stage of "trained judgment" flows from this limitation. In this stage of the history of objectivity, trained experts consciously attempt to apply objectivity to the reasoning processes involved in assessing data such as spectral charts, radiograms and so forth.

This is an expansive and satisfying work. There is a scholarly attention to detail with respect to setting the historical framework of these ideas. The book is copiously and beautifully illustrated with supporting drawings and images.

Library Thing

Greetings from The Big Beluga

At the bottom the blog page you will see that there are several books randomly selected from the library of The Big Beluga. Library Thing is a type of social networking service that allows you to enter books that you have read, review them and apply tags etc.

The Big Beluga has personally checked out a few of these internet services. They all typically have a look-up feature that allows you to enter a title or author and then search for the particular book you want to add. In this way all of the bibliographic information goes into a database with a minimum of effort, these can be later downloaded as a text file, which can be very convenient. Most services allow you to try them out for free by limiting the number of books in your library, for Library Thing it is 200.

The Social Networking aspect enters in with the tagging and reviews. The software automatically compares the tags, book titles and authors of books in your collection to those of other users. This allows you to compare what books other people with similar interests have read that you have not, also very handy and somewhat similar to the suggestions provided by Amazon when you have an account with them. Of everyone can review books and share reviews. It is possible to search the membership for people with similar interests to your own and send correspondence - within the context of Library Thing, in your typical blog like fashion.

In addition to tracking books read, I thought that it would also be useful to start reviewing them, even with a short summary, so that I can personally keep track of what I have read and those books which I have found valuable. My library currently consists of non-fiction only and I have included audio books because I am increasingly finding them a useful way of covering material that I simply wouldn't have time for otherwise.

I will be cross posting reviews of some books here, but mostly I hope to discuss topics on this blog more than the books themselves.

The Mandatory "Why This Blog" Entry

It is nice to have a formal theme, but this blog doesn't really have one.

One of my daily routines has been to visit a local eatery called "The Falafel Place". I visit there for morning coffee to get a break from the office. For many years it was just across the street from where I worked, although it moves from time to time and the moves always seem to take it further away.

Anyhow while attending The Falafel place, I eventually met and began having morning coffee with several interesting individuals who also took their morning repast around the same time. Extremely stimulating discussions ensued on a wide variety of topics. The person with whom I talked the most was Rick McNair, he passed away suddenly early in 2007. The other person that was part of our morning coffee, was Jim Welsh, a local University Professor and Photographer, among other things. At the time of this writing Jim is in the final stages of life, having been stricken with cancer late in 2007.

I learned an enormous amount from these two people but what I will miss the most is the opportunity to share ideas, particularly about books read and so on. I think that I was very fortunate to have met these individuals and to have learned and shared with them, that opportunity is not likely to arise again.

So I suppose the idea is to use this Blog to continue having discussions and to trust to kismet, fate, elan, whatever, that they will find their way to some new and interesting people.

I also feel that I should be writing more and hopefully having a Blog will encourage me to develop more discipline in that regard.

Origin of The Big Beluga

Well, it was time to start a blog and The Big Beluga has been my Internet identity for some time. I have had one other Internet Identity and that was "The Inquiring Mind". Way back in the day, which is to say, the late '80s - when Internet access was only available in academic environments - I had created "The Inquiring Mind" as a Bulletin Board System (BBS) that was part of a network that allowed access to Internet email and newsfeeds. Eventually I let that go when Internet Service providers became available. For some reason I never maintained the Inquiring Mind or "inqmind" identity, preferring instead to use my normal email address.

Of course, having an anonymous and even whimsical identity has its advantages from a personal security point of view, but what I am seeking is not anonymity so much as what I call the "disembodied intelligence effect". That is, the feeling that our interactions on the Internet have less to do with the nature of our physical bodies and more to do with pure ideas, pure information, pure intelligence.

But why The Big Beluga? Well, I am a Canadian Beluga and for many years played hockey, specifically oldtimers hockey (I am a Babyboomer Beluga). One day after a spirited session of shiny I was lined up with several other guys waiting for a turn in the shower. While we stood there contemplating this mass of unsightly human male flesh, slowly turning from pallid white to pink under the clouds of steam and uncontrollably hot water, my friend Tony turned to me and said, "I don't know about you, but I'm thinking that we should make a calendar."

This is, of course, a reference to the many calendars that are made for charity featuring men from Police forces or Firefighters, etc. Rather than conjuring up an image of beefcake, all I could image at that point in time was a bunch of beached beluga whales, and I would be the biggest beluga of the bunch. Somehow the image stuck with me. Shortly after that I was trying to think up an Internet name and it came to me, I am The Big Beluga baby!

p.s. The beluga image in the title was obtained from Flickr under the Creative Commons Licence and is the work of Sally London. Share beluga images if you like!