Gnosis Software Presents:

Document Revision Date: 2013-06-08

Note: In an overly subtle encoding of information, the textual links are typically to plain ASCII versions of documents, while the eye graphic is to an HTML formatted version.

A version of this page with essentially the same markup was written back in the days when folks like me were complaining about the new-fangled features of HTML 2.0, and about the associated erosion of markup for structural/semantic meaning into markup for visual appearance. I think the page holds up pretty well after ten years (even visually). In fact, I will make the very small changes necessary to make this compliant XHTML, and give it another decade of life. Other old fogies might appreciate the sentimental icons I added to the page.

Computer/Programming Topics

So much good stuff that I have split it into a separate listing.

Text Processing in Python

My book! Electronic version available with the kind permission of my publisher, Addison Wesley.

Voting, Security and Technology

I worked with the Open Voting Consortium, and with the associated EVM2003 Free Software development project.

Older versions of Resume and Curriculum Vitae

Current programming resume

Curriculum Vitae (not as current, but lots of older academic publications listed)

Short Academic/Political Reviews

Physics and phenomenology

Islamophobia and the secularism of fools

The Essence of Sex and Rights

Cyborgs (entry in International Encyclopedia of Communications; ISBN:9781405131995)

Response to E.O.Wilson's, "The Biological Basis of Morality"

Genotype, Phenotype, and "Norms Of Reaction"

Biological Determinism and Sexual Orientation

Bodily Disciplines

Review of Cornel West's Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America

Between an Epistemology of Gender and a Gendered Epistemology

Review of Doug Henwood's Wall Street

The Net's New Enclosures (a review of Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace by Lawrence Lessig)

Review of Steve Martinot's The Rule of Racialization

The Appeal of Pseudo-Science

Reasonable Men and Reasonable Women

Comparative review of Slavoj Zizek's Tarrying with the Negative and Judith Butler's Bodies that Matter

Whither Romantic Love? (published in Sex, Love and Friendship. Studies of the Society for the Philosophy of Sex and Love, Volume 2) Editor: Adrianne McEvoy

Review of the film Hannah Arendt (2012; Directed by Margarethe von Trotta)

My Dissertation

The Speculum and The Scalpel:
The Politics of Impotent Representation and Non-Representational Terrorism

Many of the articles I wrote between 1990 and 1999 were incorporated (usually in modified/improved form) into my dissertation. The whole behemoth is available below; so are parts that I have pulled out as separate articles. You can check my CV to figure out what was published where (or don't bother, the texts are below).

The Prospectus

by David Mertz (HTML)

The Dissertation in "book format"

OpenContent License (PDF)

The Dissertation in "page format"

OpenContent License (PDF)

Just the section epigraphs

Fair use of other folks' words

Day-Care Devil Worshipers (1998)

Hereby released to the public domain

Heady Articles on Poststructuralist Philosophy

The Racial Other in Nationalist Subjectivations: A Lacanian Analysis

by David Mertz (1995)

Cyborg Bodies Revisited

by David Mertz

Notes on Three Economies: Hyper-real, Real and Hidden

by David Mertz

Are There Any Lesbians in the Film Henry and June?

by David Mertz (1991)

Language (an honors thesis in Philosophy of Language)

by David Mertz

The Practice of Mathematics

by David Mertz (1987)

Juvenilia (assortments from early childhood through grad school)

Articles Relating to AIDS and Ethics:

The Sex Wars

by David Mertz

The Bioethics Tabloids

by Udo Schüklenk and David Mertz

Women and AIDS

by David Mertz, Mary Ann Sushinsky and Udo Schüklenk

Deathly Doctrine

by Udo Schüklenk and David Mertz

Neville Hodgkinson's Conspiracy of Silence

contains some nice quotes from me.

I am always working on getting more of my articles online. Many articles on this site have been published in various places (one of the resume type documents will probably have information on this); hence copyright restrictions may apply. I don't like the idea of IP ownership, and believe that information wants to be free and all that. But other folks sometimes think otherwise, so you may not have complete freedom to do what you wish with these documents. Many of these papers are reprinted below in slightly different versions than those published. Mostly it is a question of including extra elaborations which were taken out because of length constraints imposed by the publisher, or in some cases, extra notes were made after publication.

Copyright terms I approve of:

Public Domain.

Normally what I think makes the most sense for works of prose and poetry. Probably what I best prefer for source code also. Anything else is a compromise.

GNOSIS-L.

This is a BSD-ish license that I wrote to apply to some software I had written. It is pretty good, IMO. And the acronym is quite good.

Open Content License and Open Publication License.

Frankly, I am a little bit confused about exactly what the OpenContent folks have done with their different licenses, and what the differences are. The concept is good, but I haven't studied the latter language carefully yet.

GNU Free Documentation License.

Needless to say, the FSF folks are always a little heavy-handed in their approach. But this one is more careful in treating versioning and attribution issues than other "free content" licenses, so it has some strengths.

[hi robots!]