“How many legs does a dog have, if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.” — Abraham Lincoln *

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[*Note: Lincoln never said this. He liked a similar, more long-winded anecdote about a cow, but the dog version? Nope. Still, the quote is credited to Abe on some 11,000 different Web pages, including quote resources Brainy Quote and World of Quotes.

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“When someone alters a Wikipedia article to win a specific argument, anyone who reads the false article before the ‘error’ is corrected suffers from collateral misinformation.”

And a scholar at the Hoover Institution performed an experiment with totally unsurprising results: When 100 terms from U.S. history books were entered into Google, the topics’ Wikipedia articles were the first hits 87 times.

All of these examples are signs of the times.

And all of them get at a big question: For the Google generation, what happens to the concepts of truth and knowledge in a user-generated world of information saturation?

{ Washington Post | Continue reading }

photo { lastnightsparty }

French philosopher Clément Rosset said that most scientists, philosophers, mathematicians, or any intellectual who spends his time thinking, are actually people trying to deal with their angst, to divert their mind from an angst whirlpool, because they couldn’t deal with it otherwise (certainly at a subconscious level). They create theorems or philosophic systems to answer questions like “why are we on planet earth?” or “what is death?” to actually screen out the fact that there’s no answer. It’s a fear-driven process, said Rosset, to think/overthink is healing our fear of angst. Then Rosset said that there’s a theory that dolphins have never been affraid of anything, they had no predators and knew where to find food, etc. They were very intelligent, but as they had no fear, no angst, they didn’t need to make up theories about what’s what to develop their intelligence. Maybe if they did, they’d be smarter than human beings.

Intellectuals aren’t the only ones who fear reality as it is. moralizers and religious people do too. They’re actually worse because they invent other worlds, like heaven, and build lies that makes no sense at all like at the top of the list: the purpose of your life is to live a shitty existence (try to have babies without orgasms, etc). They can’t stand the tragic nature of reality, the angst, the obvious fact that we’re here for no reason, that there’s no after-world, no god, that a big percentage of the population, anywhere, anytime, is evil, or stupid, or both, that death is the final frontier, that in billions of years all of this we call the world and its history, will be dust engulfed by the sun, etc). I mean, things are what they are, get over it.

{ stereohell }

photo { Skye Parrott, Tali, New York, 2007 | via the exciting new Dossier }

photo { mi-zo | more }

related { Somewhat oddly, when you break 5 figures in a night, you don’t mind the butt pain. }

Humans are exceptionally good at recognizing faces they’ve seen before. It doesn’t take much study to accurately recall whether or not you’ve seen a particular face. However, this pattern breaks down when faces come from unfamiliar races. A white person who lives primarily among other whites will have more difficulty recognizing Asian faces, and vice versa.

But how engrained is this difference? How much experience with other-race faces do we need to have before we can recognize them as well as same-race faces? (…)

Memory for different-race faces can be trained to work in the same way it does for same-race faces, even in a difficult peripheral-vision test, in a relatively short period of time. It doesn’t take years of immersion in a foreign culture, just an hour or so studying pictures. (…)

This suggests that humans have a general pattern for recognizing faces that is adaptable even to unfamiliar faces.

{ Cognitive Daily | Continue reading }

photo { Julia Fullerton-Batten }

Polyhex — An analog of the polyominoes and polyiamonds in which collections of regular hexagons are arranged with adjacent sides. They are also called hexes, hexas, or polyfrobs.

For the 4-hexes (tetrahexes), the possible arrangements are known as the bee, bar, pistol, propeller, worm, arch, and wave.

{ Wolfram | Continue reading }

The New York Times has an interesting review of two new books that discuss the oft cited link between mental illness and artistic creativity. It’s all too easy to indulge in cliched overgeneralizations about the thin line separating madness and genius, but the reality is that true mental illness is rarely conducive to acts of creation. Virginia Woolf, for instance, couldn’t write when she was experiencing one of her “episodes”: the onset of depression was “like a death,” she wrote. Nevertheless, as Woolf’s journals make clear, her writing was still profoundly influenced by her mental illness. Here is I how describe Woolf in my book:

Woolf’s writing style was deeply rooted in her own experience of the brain. She was mentally ill. All her life, she suffered from periodic nervous breakdowns, those horrible moments when her depression became suffocating. As a result, Woolf lived in fear of her own mind, exquisitely sensitive to its fevered “vibrations.” Introspection was her only medicine. “My own psychology interests me,” she confessed to her journal. “I intend to keep full notes of my ups and downs for my private information. And thus objectified, the pain and shame become at once much less. (…)

Woolf never recovered. Her constant state of reflection, her wariness for hints of the return of her devastating depression, left an indelible scar on her writing. “Nerves” is one of her favorite words. Its medical varieties–neurosis, neurasthenia, nervous breakdown, neuroasthenic–continually enter her prose, their sharp, scientific pang contradicting the suppleness of her character’s internal soliloquies. In Woolf’s diary, notes on form were always interwoven with comments on headaches.

In other words, Woolf’s mental illness forced her to think about her mind, which fueled her modernist writing style. But the illness itself was an obstacle: she wrote in spite of it, not because of it.

That said, there are some interesting connections between schizotypal individuals - schizotypy is a mental condition that resembles schizophrenia, albeit with far less severe symptoms - and creativity, at least as measured in the psychology lab.

{ Jonah Lehrer/ScienceBlogs | Continue reading }

photo { Jackson Eaton }

People who score high on intelligence tests are also good at keeping time, new Swedish research shows. The team that carried out the study also suspect that accuracy in timing is important to the brain processes responsible for problem solving and reasoning.

Researchers have now demonstrated a correlation between general intelligence and the ability to tap out a simple regular rhythm. They stress that the task subjects performed had nothing to do with any musical rhythmic sense but simply measured the capacity for rhythmic accuracy. Those who scored highest on intelligence tests also had least variation in the regular rhythm they tapped out in the experiment.

{ ScienceDaily | Continue reading }

{ Tim Flach | more photos | interview }

It may look like a geologic find, but the three-pound red and white fossil heading for auction in New York is actually a pile of dinosaur dung.

Bonhams New York puts the prehistoric deposit up for sale Wednesday along with such items as a 30,000-year-old woolly mammoth tusk, a giant beaver skull and a skeleton of a Russian Cave Bear.

The dung looks like a rock on the outside and a colorful mineral inside. It’s 130 million years old and is expected to sell for between $350 and $450.

The auction house is selling some items that are more than 438 million years old.

The priciest item up for sale is the Fukang Meteorite, which weighs almost a ton, expected to sell for more than $2.25 million.

{ AP/1010 WINS | Continue reading }

new york craigslist > fairfield > missed connections
Danbury appliance installers - m4m - 35 (Danbury/Brookfield)
Date: 2008-04-29, 1:24PM EDT

You guys are the hottest things I ever saw in my kitchen–especially the boss. If you or your brother (or both) want a quick, discreet stress release during the daytime just get in touch.

Working alone may be the key to better productivity, new research suggests.

You may not be aware of it - they might not be aware of it, but the people in your work environment might be slowing you down.
New research by University of Calgary, Faculty of Kinesiology researcher Dr. Tim Welsh says that regardless of their intentions, having an individual working on a different task - within your field of vision - could be enough to slow down your performance.

“Imagine a situation like a complex assembly line,” said Welsh. If you are doing a particular task and the person across from you is doing a different task, you’ll be slowed down regardless of their performance.”

The reason for this is a built-in response-interpretation mechanism that is hard-wired into our central nervous systems. If we see someone performing a task we automatically imagine ourselves performing that task. This behaviour is part of our mirror neuron system.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

I have a rude coworker who does everything in a loud and abrasive manner. She constantly burps, gasps and sighs. She slams desk drawers and filing cabinet drawers very loudly. She even shuffles papers LOUDLY.

She also eats food with her mouth open and often will talk with food in her mouth. People in our department have changed their lunch hours to not be in the break room with her because it is so disgusting.

{ Ask Carmen Courtesy | Continue reading }