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"I am the world crier, & this is my dangerous career...
I am the one to call your bluff, & this is my climate."
—Kenneth Patchen (1911-1972)
—Kenneth Patchen (1911-1972)
Sunday, September 7
For the Brain, Remembering Is Like Reliving
Experts say the study has all but closed the case: "Scientists have for the first time recorded individual brain cells in the act of summoning a spontaneous memory, revealing not only where a remembered experience is registered but also, in part, how the brain is able to recreate it.
The recordings, taken from the brains of epilepsy patients being prepared for surgery, demonstrate that these spontaneous memories reside in some of the same neurons that fired most furiously when the recalled event had been experienced. Researchers had long theorized as much but until now had only indirect evidence." (New York Times)
Quiz: Palin or Bush?
"See if you know your hockey mom from your Dubya." (Salon)
Confessions of an RNC security guard
"'There's a lot of hot chicks here,' he tells me in a failed attempt at a whisper. He reeks of chardonnay. 'You cannot spring a woody here, dude. Your pants got no give, know what I mean? It'd be totally obvious. Gov. Palin is staying here -- you gotta be careful. You get what I'm saying? You can't get wood on the job.'
'Thanks. I got it,' I say.
One of his pals chimes in.
'Gov. Palin is hot, dude,' he says, collapsing onto a bench in front of the hotel entrance.
Even in their lusty, alcohol-fueled swoons, these young politicos still call Palin 'governor.' In a way, this reverential horniness is sort of endearing. But mostly it's just creepy. Sitting on the bench, the young man leans his head back and squeezes his eyes shut, trying, and failing, to stave off vertigo. 'Total MILF.'
'All right, gentlemen,' I say, wielding the word 'gentlemen' like a prison guard. 'Get out of here. Time to go to sleep.'
The right-wing youth resurgence is taking shape here before my eyes and it has a strong erotic undercurrent. For the first time in American politics there is a strong alpha woman with whom mothers identify, and after whom sons lust. The GOP is playing the Oedipal card. And it could mean bloody war, fought house to house.
...I'm developing a purely anecdotal theory about Republican drunkenness: that it's related to ideology. The less ideological arrive back at the headquarters earlier in the evening, between midnight and 1 a.m. These are, in chronological order, the Romney and the Giuliani supporters. Both are East Coast, urban college grad, corporate types. They like to drink and reminisce about the Harvard-Yale game, but they also like to wake up early, shave and not smell like booze at committee meetings. The Giuliani people are secular and more openly lecherous. So they tend to drink a bit harder and stay out closer to 1 a.m. The Ron Paul people party past 1 a.m., but not much. And they shave but they don't showboat.
The ones who stay out the latest and come back the drunkest, I notice, are the Huckabee folks, the party's rural conservatives. They believe in Jesus, in the hard-bitten way of the true alcoholic. If they ever sober up, it'll be by the grace of the Lord; and if they intend to stay on the sauce and continue living, then they'll really need His loving kindness. If you intend to be drinking heavily until closing time -- 4 a.m. in the Twin Cities during the RNC -- you had better walk home with Jesus.
I can't place true McCainites on the alcohol-ideology matrix. I think they were all asleep by 9:30 p.m." (Salon)Labels: GOP, Republican Party
Saturday, September 6
Chart Toppers
Reflections on Travelodge's annual list of the books most abandoned in their motel rooms. (Guardian.UK) (The Kama Sutra??)
Labels: books
Is the Electoral Process About Reality?
George Lakoff Warns Democrats: "...[The] election campaign depends on the political mind-how people understand the candidates and the realities. Democrats have mostly criticized Sarah Palin as unqualified to deal with the realities we face as a nation. But the choice of Palin had to do with the way the political mind works in elections. In dealing with the McCain-Palin ticket, Democrats must take the way voters think into account, in addition to the external realities." (Truthout)Labels: George Lakoff, John McCain, Politics, Sarah Palin
School of Everything
eBay for knowledge: "Last night, I attended the launch of School of Everything, a new web service that acts as a kind of eBay for people who have something to teach. Potential teachers list their areas of expertise (anything from knitting to programming to driving to yoga to TIG-welding to whatever) and potential students find teachers with a simple search that can be geography bounded (for in-person instruction) or not (for online instruction). It's one of those great, simple, smart ideas that make you want to smack your head and say, 'Why didn't I think of that?'"
...The service is only available in the UK now, but the plan is to spread it around the world. Now I just need to find something I want to learn and give it a spin. School of Everything. — Cory Doctorow (boing boing)Labels: School of Everything
There He Goes Again
Charles "Bell Curve" Murray on Education: "Once again, Charles Murray is arguing that some people are not worth the time and trouble to educate because they are “just not smart enough,” in his words, to learn anything more than manual skills. And he can prove it! Scientifically!
Murray, for those of you who don’t follow this stuff, is the co-author of The Bell Curve, which famously argued, among other things, that poor people are poor primarily because of immutably low intelligence—an argument that has been refuted by some of the top scientists in the country (see, for example, Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man; see also The Bell Curve Wars). Murray is back..." — Karin Chenoweth (Britannica Blog)Labels: Bell Curve, Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life
Terrainspotting
Photosynth, the tech demo that trawls image sharing websites for geographically tagged photos and then pieces them together to form pseudo 3D models of popular tourist destinations, is stitching an increasingly coherent spatial simulation.
However, the edges of the scenes in these demos have always made me curious about the unmapped portions of the 3D model. While there is an abundance of data for the frontal elevations of Notre Dame or Piazza San Marco, but what of the periphery of these buildings? The parts of the building less likely to attract the attention of hungry tourists? And then what about the laneway around the corner? Or the street two blocks to the south? There may be a handfull of photographs that describe parts of these areas, but likely not enough to piece together a rich 3D model." (Super Colossal)
Will He, Won't He?
This review of Ararat by Frank Westerman: interested me, as someone who has been to Mt. Ararat, for the following rant:
"Who was Noah? The Bible tells us little. He was the flood hero of course, but what else? A drunken viniculturist who lived to the age of 950; who was 600 at the time of the flood and 500 when he fathered Shem, Ham and Japheth. His wrinkled bottom was ogled by his 100-year-old sons when he passed out from drunkeness in his tent one night. But was he not also an ‘upright man’ and a man who ‘walked with God’?
Each year hundreds of pilgrims, known as ‘Arkeologists’ make their way to Mount Ararat (where the Turkish, Armenian and Iranian borders meet) hoping to find clues and relics. Some return home with splints of wood, others only with soft memories of mystic vision. Arkeologists are simple folk, of whom the late Apollo astronaut, James Irwin, was one. They ignore the fact that in Genesis, Noah’s ship came to rest ‘in the mountains of Ararat’, which is not the same as ‘on Mount Ararat’. Never mind, they say, and never mind that the modern ‘Mount Ararat’ is situated outside the old Kingdom of Ararat and is not therefore among the ‘Mountains of Ararat’. Why should Arkeologists care if their mountain only got its name from Marco Polo in the 13th century? The Turks always called it Agri Dagi (Mountain of Pain), the Armenians, Masis (Mother Mountain), and the Kurds, Ciyaye Agiri (Fiery Mountain). If you start with an unbudgeable faith in Ararat you don’t give a fig that the Qu’ran claims that the Ark came to rest on al-Judi, a mountain miles to the south; that the 2nd-century BC Book of Jubilees says it was Mount Lubar, that Nicholas of Damascus says it was an Armenian peak called Baris.In the Babylonian account, the oldest extant Deluge story, from which the Genesis authors undoubtedly snitched their plot, the Ark lands on the top of Mount Nizir. " (Spectator.UK)Labels: Mount Ararat, Noah's Ark
For the first time in human history, the North Pole can be circumnavigated
"Melting ice opens up North-west and North-east passages simultaneously. Scientists warn Arctic icecap is entering a 'death spiral'." (Independent.UK)Labels: climate change
Anthropologists Find New Type of Urbanism in Amazon Jungles
"Recently-discovered Amazonian settlements could be a new type of metropolis, unseen elsewhere in the world and hidden until recently in the Kuikuro jungle, say anthropologists.
...The work suggests that the Amazon basin, particularly the Xingu region, may have been more populated than previously thought, but without the traditional city structures that mark other old urban civilizations in other parts of the world." (Wired)Labels: Amazon, Amazon Basin, Brazil
Friday, September 5
Is the common cold becoming a killer?
"Having a cold is a nuisance, but not dangerous. Right? Wrong. Sometimes it can turn deadly. Last year, 140 people in the US were killed by the kinds of virus that usually cause nothing more serious than sniffs and sneezes. In fact, we are surprisingly ignorant about the causes of the world's most common disease. But new technologies are changing that - and turning up cold viruses that are completely new to science." (New Scientist via WaccoBB)
Sunday, August 31
Most Sung-About Body Part?
and broken down by musical genre:
"Visual artists Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg analyzed over 10,000 songs to find out which parts of the human body were mentioned the most and broke down the resulting data by genre. The result: An interactive graphic work called 'Listen' that correlates musical genres with the body parts they mention the most, as part of their ongoing Fleshmap project. Clicking on each genre brings up a more detailed representation of its chief bodily concerns." (Wired)
![[Image 'http://blog.wired.com/music/images/2008/08/25/picture_6.png' cannot be displayed]](http://blog.wired.com/music/images/2008/08/25/picture_6.png "the eyes have it...")
Saturday, August 30
Does CBS News mean it?
CBS
hired gun'body language expert' doubted Hilary Clinton's sincerity when she threw her weight behind Obama at the convention the other night. Language Log's expert begs to differ, and has the analysis to back it up.Labels: Barack Obama, CBS, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Language
How I Am
by Jason Shinder
When I talk to my friends I pretend I am standing on the wings
of a flying plane. I cannot be trusted to tell them how I am.
Or if I am falling to earth weighing less
than a dozen roses. Sometimes I dream they have broken up
with their lovers and are carrying food to my house.
When I open the mailbox I hear their voices
like the long upward-winding curve of a train whistle
passing through the tall grasses and ferns
after the train has passed. I never get ahead of their shadows.
I embrace them in front of moving cars. I keep them away
from my miseries because to say I am miserable is to say I am like them.
Looking Around, Believing
by Gary Soto:
How strange that we can begin at any time.
With two feet we get down the street.
With a hand we undo the rose.
With an eye we lift up the peach tree
And hold it up to the wind — white blossoms
At our feet. Like today. I started
In the yard with my daughter,
With my wife poking at a potted geranium,
And now I am walking down the street,
Amazed that the sun is only so high,
Just over the roof, and a child
Is singing through a rolled newspaper
And a terrier is leaping like a flea
And at the bakery I pass, a palm,
Like a suctioning starfish, is pressed
To the window. We're keeping busy —
This way, that way, we're making shadows
Where sunlight was, making words
Where there was only noise in the trees.
Grand Old Book Party
What to read about John McCain and the future of the GOP: "By the time party conventions roll around, we're told, many Americans are just tuning in to the presidential race. If you're just gearing up for the GOP Convention, here's a rundown of the best literature on John McCain and the future of the Republican Party." (Slate)Labels: 2008 Elections, John McCain, Politics, Republican
Friday, August 29
Americans Show Little Tolerance For Mental Illness
...Despite Growing Belief In Genetic Cause: (Science Daily)
WORLD'S FIRST (LIVING) GRASS FLIP FLOPS
Labels: Flip-flop, Footwear, Krispy Kreme
The epitome of tokenism
Joe COnason: "Suddenly all anyone needs to qualify as a potential commander in chief is to be a religious ideologue with female gender characteristics?" (Salon)Labels: Joe Conason
Sarah Palin’s Wikipedia Page Altered One Day Before Nomination
"Sarah Palin is the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party for Vice President of the United States in the 2008 presidential election. Yesterday, someone close to Palin made a whole bunch of edits to her Wikipedia entry making it a little more palatable for the centrists. For those who are interested in the old page, check Google’s cached version or download screenshots (might be slow to load due to file size) from August 21st 2008 and August 29th 2008 and compare the notes for yourself." (Headsetoptions)Labels: Campaigns/Elections, John McCain, Politics, republicans, Sarah Palin, United States, United States presidential election 2008
Governor Sarah Palin Has What It Takes To Be The Next Dick Cheney
"With Sen. McCain's selection of Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential running mate, the Huffington Post is re-featuring Chris Kelly's May 2008 piece on the Alaska Governor" (thanks to walker)
Facial Frontier
The human face can reveal much about a person — whether they like it or not: "In his new book, The Kingdom of Infinite Space: A Fantastical Journey Around Your Head (Yale University Press), [Raymond] Tallis sets out to make his readers into 'astonished tourists of the piece of the world that is closest to them, so they never again take for granted the head that looks at them from the mirror.' He begins his examination with the face." (National Post)...including what is likely the first analysis of harrumphing.
God and Jerk at Yale
Getting over it: "The difference between having a college degree and not having one is far greater than where you go to college. But where you go can determine, to a large extent, who you become. Some of us become jerks. And others spend our lives trying to figure out what it meant to have been there — and how to get over it." (Chronicle of Higher Education)
Childhood’s End
Inestimable curmudgeon Theordore Dalrymple comments on the recent UNESCO report on childhood:
"...[T]he childhood that many British parents give to their offspring is so awful that it is hard to conceive of worse, at least on a mass scale. The two poles of contemporary British child rearing are neglect and overindulgence." (City Journal)
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