Welcome!

Sean — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 13:00:58 +0000

This is a landing page for ectopist, the author of two blogs and a bunch of other on-line content. There is no content on this page per se, but here are the links to my other sites:

caelum novum, a blog about economics, business, ICT, politics and society, with a focus on the EU, UK and Belgium
sex and spirituality, a blog about those themes, from a tantric viewpoint but also with a strong dose of psychoanalysis
blueskybru, a blog I am using to crowdsource design ideas for renovating a house. This is also a little experiment in the power of social media.

Most of my other content (on Twitter, Posterous and Google Reader) is accessible through the blogs, but just to save you time, here is an overview:

Ectopist stream:

twitter.com/ectopist
ectopist.posterous.com (I use it for jottings that are not quite full-blown blog articles but more than the 140 characters given by Twitter!)
www.google.com/reader/shared/sean557 (I use it to comment mainly on press and blog articles and to share these, together with my comments. Google would like to apologize for the scary URL.)

Aruhea stream:

For direct links to personal information on the web, please ask me.

Why ectopist?

Ectopistes is a genus of the family Columbidae, doves and pigeons, consisting of a single historically attested species, ectopistes migratorius, known as the passenger pigeon or, in French, tourte voyageuse. It was once the most common bird in North America, but was hunted to extinction, with the last known representative, Martha, dying in Cincinnati zoo in 1914.

Ectopistes is a neolatin formation by Linnaeus from Greek ektopidzein, meaning to migrate or to force out. It has a number of other euphonic associations for me. As a modern-day ectopist, I like to think of myself as defending some truths which should be self-evident, but somehow no-one gets. I also like to imagine myself as something of a Renaissance man, with a wide grasp of the most disparate fields of human knowledge, sensitive to the Zeitgeist, and able to create new phenomena and synergies out of this intellectual and cultural material. “Ectopist” also sounds like it should mean something like hors piste, and I like the excitement of striking out in new directions which others have barely explored. Finally, an ectopist must be off-topic and in the wrong place entirely. At the very least, he is some way away from the gravitational center of things. That’s fine with me; if you all come and see the world from where I’m standing, you’ll see it looks a lot better.

I am a Briton in my early 40′s, living in Belgium where I work as an economist; in my spare time, I like to change the world.

A warm greeting to all my friends, online and offline; I bid you welcome to this small but proud corner of the sprawling internet jungle!