Ralph Windle's Page
Business dominates our modern lives- doesn't it make sense there would be poetry about it?
Ralph Windle posted a blog post
ARTS/SCIENCE ‘ENCOUNTERS’: a Review
SHEFFIELD UNIVERSITY; 2009 ARTS/SCIENCE ENCOUNTERS : Ralph Windle’s Review FOREWORD ‘Ralph Windle is a poet, writer, arts/science commentator, and creator of the fictional character Bertie Ramsbottom. Oxford-based, he has his roots in Sheffield, and we were delighted and honoured to have him ...
March 6, 2015
Ralph Windle posted a blog post
OUT of AFRICA … THE STORY of YOU…
A little while ago I looked forward to the publication in South Africa of ‘The Halo and The Noose – The Power of Story Telling and Story Listening’ (www.haloandnoose.com ) by Dorian Haarhoff and Graham Williams. The good news is that the book is now out and available in both ‘print’ and ‘e-book’ ...
March 6, 2015
Ralph Windle posted a blog post
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS of the TRIPLE KIND.
SYNOPSIS Through the medium of a collaboration with Sheffield University I was able, in January 2010, to publish a Review of the University’s ambitious ‘Arts/Science Encounters’ Programme 2009. I post here the Synopsis of the Review which appears in full below (’Arts/Science Encounters: A Review...
March 6, 2015
Ralph Windle posted a blog post
“ We make more fuss of ballads than of blue-prints – That’s why so many poets end up rich, While engineers scrape by in cheerless garrets. Who needs a bridge or dam? Who needs ...
March 6, 2015
Ralph Windle posted a blog post
Language is the unique, differentiating characteristic of the human species. Yet its origins and workings remain oddly resistant to scientific enquiry, even in this golden age of science. Magnetic Resonance Imaging allows us to examine synaptic formations in the living brain and plot neuronal pat...
March 6, 2015
Ralph Windle posted a blog post
Looking at ‘science’ , as I first did, through the prism of the ‘arts’, one great surprise was how it, too, pursued a pronounced ‘cult of personality’ which not only persists but seems to expand through time. The essential loneliness of the long-distance writer or artist, at his/her solitary desk...
March 6, 2015
Ralph Windle posted a blog post
Spring approaches with much to delight eye, ear – and brain – on the Arts/Science front. WELLCOME IMAGE AWARDS The winners of this year’s awards can already be viewed at www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-12538048 with an excellent commentary by Catherine Draycott, Head of Wellcome Images These images are...
March 6, 2015
Ralph Windle posted a blog post
Since it was promised as an inalienable human right, ( in The American Declaration of Independence, 1776 ) the pursuit of ‘ happiness ‘ has ranked high on the human agenda. In troika with ‘ life ‘ and ‘ liberty ‘, it was taken to share their robust, pragmatic substance, and only the occasional p...
March 6, 2015
Ralph Windle posted a blog post
GOOGLE’S CHAIRMAN ARGUES CVN’s CASE
MARK THIS DATE - 26 AUGUST 2011 ! This was the day when Eric Schmidt, Chairman of Google, delivered the MacTaggart Lecture in Edinburgh as part of the Media Guardian TV Festival. In it, he issued a devastating critique of UK educational policy and, through it, delivered a ringing, implicit end...
March 6, 2015
Ralph Windle posted a blog post
No causal connection, of course, but a welcome serendipity …. - that less than one week from our post on creativity and its arts/science imperatives ( ‘Google Chairman Argues CVN’s Case ‘ 30 August 2011 ) the ‘serious’ press was alive with this issue, and the Shadow Culture Secretary, Iv...
March 6, 2015
Ralph Windle posted a blog post
SCIENCES CIVIL WARS: SEND IN THE PHILOSOPHERS
At times of intellectual doubt or change it’s often best to have early recourse to the dictionary, to check again what the words being bandied about are basically meant to mean. So mea culpa – a confession first! The regular elision into ‘arts/science’ of the key parameters of the inter-...
March 6, 2015
Ralph Windle posted a blog post
‘ EAVESDROPPING ON SCIENCE’: TURNER ACCUSED.
The ‘Turner and the Elements’ exhibition, opening at the Turner Contemporary in Margate, in January , is a ‘must’ on my 2012 calendar. We are also promised a new book of essays on the exhibition ‘s theme by Turner’s biographer, James Hamilton, who has done much to illuminate and popularise Turn...
March 6, 2015
Ralph Windle posted a blog post
With the cream of the world’s most powerful and influential on their recent annual pilgrimage to Davos, it is interesting that even the cohorts of image – makers and their talkative doyen , Sir Martin Sorrell, are no longer bothering to pretend that it is also the Forum of the World’s Most Wise....
March 6, 2015
Ralph Windle posted a blog post
As a student of ( the so- called ) ‘Greats’, I found those heady university days of Aeschylus and Aristotle required some fairly frequent justification to my ex-school- chum contemporaries, then deeply into their physics and chemistry labs just down the road. Maths was the nearest thing ...
March 6, 2015
Ralph Windle posted a blog post
THE BRAIN, CREATIVITY and the USES of BRICKS
Notwithstanding its great contribution to health and the medical sciences, the incursions of the ‘brain scan’ into the debates on ‘creativity’ and ‘innovation’ continue to multiply and stultify in equal measure. The ubiquitous ‘ fMRI scans show ‘ prefix is becoming a dreaded cliché signalling ...
March 6, 2015
Ralph Windle posted a blog post
SCIENCE and the WOULD-BE PRESIDENTS
One of CVN’s many friends in the USA has drawn our attention, this being Presidential Election year, to an interesting innovation we suggest should be replicated whenever other democracies, like our own, take to the hustings. It is a series of questions about key areas of potential science polic...
March 6, 2015
Ralph Windle posted a blog post
SILENT SPRINGS and the AUTUMN of CREATIVITY
In a previous post ( ‘On Minding Your Metaphors’ ) I registered some surprise that, after many years working on issues at the arts/science interface, “ … one of the least expected paradoxes has been the extent to which words, syntax and metaphor have come to dominate agendas …”. I drew two key co...
March 6, 2015
Ralph Windle posted a blog post
The Poetry of Engineering, Science and Technology
Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in the night God said ‘Let Newton be!’ and all was light. Alexander Pope It did not last: the Devil howling ‘Ho! Let Einstein be! ’ restored the status quo. JC Squire ———————– Three initial ‘cantos’ are proposed for the eventual s...
March 6, 2015
Ralph Windle posted a blog post
What follows is a modest diversion from our normal fare – and is based on a light-hearted interval talk I gave, at a ‘Music at The Limes’ concert soiree in October 1987. It was at the request of my late, dear friends, Michael and Jennifer Graham-Jones of Standlake, Oxfordshire. They had opened t...
March 6, 2015
Ralph Windle posted a blog post
We have several times had cause, - perhaps most notably in ‘Mind Your Metaphors’ and ‘ Language, Truth and Logic ’ ( below ) - to acknowledge how big a part words and language play in looking for forward momentum in the arts/science creativity search. It’s one of the key reasons why it’s been ...
March 6, 2015
Ralph Windle is now a member of Berrett-Koehler Community