Lunchtime Blogging...

Brought to you by my laptop and my tethered Android.  Oh, the heady freedom!

It's a nice sunny day out here on the park bench outside my building.  A little bit chilly, in the breeze, but give it a couple of weeks...

So anyway, today I ran across a friend's post that stated that a friend of his was looking for work in the professional field of radical geography.

Radical geography?

Previously, I would've defined "radical geography" as something akin to what happened in Christchurch, NZ, this week, but according to the wikipedia entry on Critical Geography, Radical Geography:

...emerged during the 1970s and 1980s as the inadequacies of behavioralist methods became clear. It sought to counter the postivist quantitative methods with normative techniques drawn from Marxist theory: quantitative methods, it argued, were not useful unless alternatives or solutions were given to problems.

The final and, arguably, most successful of the three schools was humanistic geography, initially formed part of behavioural geography but fundamentally disagreed with the use of quantitative methods in assessing human behaviour and thoughts in favour of qualitative analysis. Humanistic geography used many of the techniques that the humanities use such as source analysis and the use of text and literature to try to ‘get into the mind’ of the subject(s). Furthermore, Cultural geography revived due to humanistic geography new areas of study such as Feminist geography, postmodernist and poststructuralist geography began to emerge.

My first reaction:  "Wait, what?"
My second reaction:  "No, seriously, what?"
My third reaction:  "We are still talking about borders and land formations here, right?"
My fourth reaction:  "Ok, the next academic who gripes at me about the incomprehensibility of computer jargon will get snarked at with extreme sarcasm."

In all seriousness, I hope the friend of my friend finds a job soon.  And that I might get to meet them someday, so that they can explain what it is they do using the small words.  :)

To quote Larry Colen:

Twas Unix and the C++
Did compile and load upon the VAX:
All Ritchie was the Kernighan,
And LISP ran in GNU EMACS.


"Beware the Jargontalk, my son.
The Mac that talks, the dull PC.
Beware the Amiga, and shun
The voluminous PDP."


He took his listed code in hand:
Long time the pointer bug he sought--
So rested he by the Coke machine,
And stood awhile in thought.


And as in nerdish thought he stood,
The Jargontalk, with awk and grep,
Came geeking through the COBOL wood,
And edlin'd as it schlepped.


One two! One two! And through and through!
The line printer went click'ty clack!
And with a meg of memory dump,
He pulled an allnight hack.


"And hast thou slain the Jargontalk?
Telnet to me, my nerdish boy!
Copyleft GNU! Callooh! Callay!"
He deroffed in his joy.


Twas Unix and the C++
Did compile and load upon the VAX:
All Ritchie was the Kernighan,
And LISP ran in GNU EMACS.