WALL-E’s world: animating Badiou’s philosophy

This article illustrates the philosophy of Alain Badiou through Pixar’s 2008 animation ‘WALL-E’. The fictional story tells of a toxic planet Earth long abandoned following an ecological disaster. Humanity now exists in a floating brave new world; a spaceship whose passengers’ everyday existence is drowned by a consumptive slumber. That is, until a robot named WALL-E comes aboard and changes things forever. The purpose of making this connection between philosophy and film is not to trivialize Badiou’s work, but rather to open it up, pull it apart, and synchronize it with a movie that is saturated with Badiouian themes. Beneath the complexities of Being and Event’s set-theory and the Logics of Worlds’ algebra, lay a set of ideas that are fizzing with creativity and disruptive potential. WALL-E gives these political and philosophical ideas a lived expression to a wide audience. The central motif of the article is that the finitude of appearance in a world is constantly overrun by the infinitude of being, and this requires a new theorization of site-based geographies. From the miraculous discovery of a plant growing on a dead Earth, to the tumultuous arrival of WALL-E onboard a spaceship that he never belonged to, the stability of a world is always threatened by a ‘point of excess’, called the site. Three interrelated concepts of Badiou’s will be animated in this article: atonic and tensed worlds, sites, and subjects

From baseworld to droneworld

Our planet is garrisoned by a network of around 1,100 bases operated by the U.S. military. Many of these sites exist in shadow because they are used for paramilitary operations by Special Forces and the CIA. These bases range in size and location, but a recent and favoured strategy of the U.S. military has been to construct skeletal “lily pads” that are scattered in remote outposts across the globe. Chalmers Johnson, author of the book Blowback, wrote back in 2004 that “[t]his vast network of American bases on every continent except Antarctica actually constitutes a new form of empire – an empire of bases with its own geography not likely to be taught in any high school geography class”. Of course, neither would the cost of maintaining this “Baseworld” make it to print: billions and billions of dollars spent on everything from air conditioning to internet cafes. While this Baseworld – which counts Guantanamo Bay as the jewel in its crown – is hardly new, the proliferation of remotely piloted aircraft certainly is. Everywhere and nowhere, drones have become sovereign tools of life and death, and are coming to a sky near you

Transport in a sustainable urban future

Transport is acknowledged as a vital ingredient of any credible strategy for the sustainable city because of the key role it plays in promoting economic development, quality of life and wellbeing. Yet managing urban transport effectively, given its complex and intersecting economic, environmental and social impacts, is also precisely the kind of ‘wicked problem’ that policy makers consistently find hard to resolve (Docherty and Shaw, 2011a; Conklin, 2006; Rittel and Webber, 1973). Many of the reasons for this are longstanding and emanate in particular from the dominance of the private car in meeting the demand for mobility, which has built up over many decades in the developed world, but which is now being reproduced at a much higher pace in the fast growing cities of the Pacific Rim and elsewhere (Newman and Kenworthy, 1999; Lyons and Loo, 2008). Although it has undoubtedly transformed our patterns of travel and consumption, concerns over the limitations and externalities of private car transport – primarily traffic congestion, environmental degradation and social exclusion – have for many years stimulated various initiatives designed to mitigate these externalities (Feitelson and Verhoef, 2001; Knowles et al, 2008). The conflict between the car, long promoted by neoliberal voices as a potent weapon of the free market and individual liberty, and competing visions of a more ‘public’ transport system based on collective modes such as the bus and train, and active travel by walking and cycling, has been played out over many years. Nowhere has this conflict been more intense than in cities, as it is here that the problems such as congestion, poor local air quality and mobility deprivation are often at their most intense (Cahill, 2010; Docherty et al, 2008)

Devolution as process: institutional structures, state personnel and transport policy in the United Kingdom

Devolution has been described as a key ‘global trend’ over recent decades as governments have decentralised power and responsibilities to subordinate regional institutions (Rodriguez-Pose and Gill, 2003). UK devolution is characterised by its asymmetrical nature with different territories granted different institutional arrangements and powers. In this paper, we seek examine the role of state personnel in mobilising the new institutional machinery and managing the process of devolution, focusing on transport policy. Our research shows a clear contrast between London and Northern Ireland, on the one hand, and Scotland and Wales, on the other, in terms of the effectiveness of political leaders in creating clear policy priorities and momentum in transport

Nuclear bars and blue nuclei within barred spiral galaxies

Multicolour near IR photometry for a sample of 32 large barred spiral galaxies is presented. By applying ellipse fitting techniques, we identify significant isophote twists with respect to the primary bar axis in the nuclear regions of $\sim$70 \%\ of the sample. These twists are identified in galaxies as late as SBbc and are clearly distinguishable from spiral arm morphology. At most seven of the galaxies with isophote twists are inferred to possess secondary (nuclear) bars, the axis ratios of which appear to correlate with morphological type. The remainder may result from triaxial bulges, or from oblate bulges misaligned with the primary bar. The near IR colour distributions in these data show evidence for (red) circumnuclear star forming rings in 4 galaxies. The majority of the sample (19) also possess striking blue nuclear regions, bluer than typical old stellar populations by $\sim$0.3 mag. in (J--H) and $\sim$0.23 mag. in (H--K). Such blue colours do not appear to correlate with the presence of nuclear rings or pseudo--rings, nor with the activity of the host galaxy (as determined from emission--line spectroscopic characteristics). Several mechanisms to explain this blue colour are considered.Comment: 24 pages plain LaTex( including table captions), 5 tables and 18 figures. Accepted for publication in MNRAS. Paper and tables available via anonymous ftp://143.167.4.101/pub/papers as sqiid-paper.tex and table1,2,3.tex, table4.ps, table5.ps. Figures available as postcript upon request to first Autho

Transport strategy in Scotland since devolution

This article critically reviews how the Scottish Executive's approach to transport has developed since devolution. Although there is much to commend, a number of concerns can be identified, including the possibility that a number of strategic infrastructure schemes appear to have been approved on political rather than on technical grounds. It is difficult to know whether the current set of transport infrastructure investment plans represents good value for public money

Matrix Formulation of Hamiltonian Structures of Constrained KP Hierarchy

We give a matrix formulation of the Hamiltonian structures of constrained KP hierarchy. First, we derive from the matrix formulation the Hamiltonian structure of the one-constraint KP hierarchy, which was originally obtained by Oevel and Strampp. We then generalize the derivation to the multi-constraint case and show that the resulting bracket is actually the second Gelfand-Dickey bracket associated with the corresponding Lax operator. The matrix formulation of the Hamiltonian structure of the one-constraint KP hierarchy in the form introduced in the study of matrix model is also discussedComment: 19 pages, Revtex, no figures. Minor changes, reference correcte

Alien Registration- Shaw, Shirley I. (Portland, Cumberland County)

https://digitalmaine.com/alien_docs/22018/thumbnail.jp