Enfascination 2011

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Do you ever get this funny feeling that you're getting the hang of this world? Well, you're all wrong, its too big, too wonderful, you can't forget, welcome to Enfascination 2011.

Enfascination is a place and time set aside for the little fascinations of anyone who would like to share, transmitted from each of you to the others of you. Take some small facet of the sum of human nescience, something that causes you wonder, and get it all across in five minutes.

This year's talks will be:

  • ON: Saturday, May 7th
  • AT: 5pm
  • IN: Woodlawn Hall, off the lobby, Indiana University campus

For a sense of previous events:


If you want to give me a birthday present that I'll treasure, tell me about how much you love something.

And while I'm asking for gifts, I've got this other little thing I'm doing to celebrate the year. I like to hear my friends sing, and I also like all of these songs: http://enfascination.com/bdaycovers/wishlist.txt

So I thought I'd ask any of you musician types to record something for a little bday cover album that you are helping me put together for myself. I'll share all the other covers with you ...


Epiphany, Euphony, Both, Thank you!

seth.


p.s. Now for a list of past talks and future talks––the burst and the budding:

How to cross a glacier
Rural desert water distribution systems
Hexaflexagons
The biophysics of brushing your teeth
The world's superstitions about bald people, and hairy people
The psychoactive effects of chili peppers
Roman Emperor Deaths 
Three Great Banquets in Italian History
Salt
How to Sharpen a Chisel
The Physiological Limits to Human Perception of Time
Geophagy
Pond Ecology
Superstition
Counterintuitive Results in Hydrodynamics
The Wolof Conception of Time
Two famous gravestones in mathematics history
Asyk
Arctic String Figures
Brief history of the Jim Henson Company 
Children's nonsense and nursery rhymes from anywhere but Europe and the West.
The cultural history of this sentence in the Bible
Insider Trading: For Fun and Profit
When Worlds Collide!
Film of Peter Greenaway
Homesteading
Cooperative Birth Control
The mischief of demons
The Wonder of Brain Damage
The most important book that never existed
The most important book that no one will ever read that ever existed
The most important person that never existed
William Morris and me
The arcology today
Insights into the structure of thought
How to make THIS out of Nature
a lost treasure
Your intricate personal system for this thing that no one else recognizes as needing a system
The dilettante today
How you discovered that you are crazy, and why its OK
Tones in Mandarin
self-contained, self-consistent, completely incomprehensible worldviews 
Arcane Cosmogenies
The top three things I can do to dramatically reduce my environmental impact.	
Unschooling and Deschooling
How my neuroses help me
How to keep a tree healthy
Things that stopped existing once they were named (like authenticity)
The hills
Chinese Nationalism in Tibet
Ondine's Curse
The Health Benefits of Squatting
Technocracy
How to Pick Stocks Like a Pro
Interoceptive Agnosia
Bengime
A poet from a different time and place and understanding that gets through to you.
the statistical physics of society 
Fordlandia
things about water: culture, politics, physics, all in between 
The Bernoulli Principle
Folly as Spiritual Practice
Jain Forgiveness
peeks into the flimsiness of our apparently stable perception of an 
apparently stable reality 
Commodifying the uncommodifiable
Optimal Playlist Design
An involved trade vocabulary
Indiana Jones
Food Preservation Technique, or Managing Rot
The Hollow Earth
Literary scientists
Human Asexuality
A History of the California Central Valley Watershed
The importance of apophenia
The Maidu Creation
what's so great about polyhedra? 
A plant is a verb
The edge of citizen science
Russian Emblemology
How metal thinks
How the wind thinks
1+1=3
The ocean is not homogeneous
How wood thinks, either when it grows or when you work it
The thyroid, for fun and profit
Why you can jump on the bottom of a foot, but not on the top of one.
Microclimates 
The history of a word I thought I knew (or "OED as a lifestyle")
A practical demonstration in landscape geomorphology
Monastic Christianity in the US
The most beautiful thing that has ever burned down
Mediterranean climates of the world. 
A Moment of Triumph
How this arcane branch of mathematics informs my everyday life
How I see this normal thing as totally weird because of my training
Structure and dirt
and, uhhh, robots––robots and the Japanese––what's up with that?