At some point, the Mongol military leader Kublai Khan (1215–94) realized that his empire had grown so vast that he would never be able to see what it contained. To remedy this, he commissioned emissaries to travel to the empire’s distant reaches and convey back news of what he owned. Since his messengers returned with information from different distances and traveled at different rates (depending on weather, conflicts, and their fitness), the messages arrived at different times. Although no historians have addressed this issue, I imagine that the Great Khan was constantly forced to solve the same problem a human brain has to solve: what events in the empire occurred in which order?

Your brain, after all, is encased in darkness and silence in the vault of the skull. Its only contact with the outside world is via the electrical signals exiting and entering along the super-highways of nerve bundles. Because different types of sensory information (hearing, seeing, touch, and so on) are processed at different speeds by different neural architectures, your brain faces an enormous challenge: what is the best story that can be constructed about the outside world?

The days of thinking of time as a river—evenly flowing, always advancing—are over. Time perception, just like vision, is a construction of the brain and is shockingly easy to manipulate experimentally. We all know about optical illusions, in which things appear different from how they really are; less well known is the world of temporal illusions. When you begin to look for temporal illusions, they appear everywhere. In the movie theater, you perceive a series of static images as a smoothly flowing scene. Or perhaps you’ve noticed when glancing at a clock that the second hand sometimes appears to take longer than normal to move to its next position—as though the clock were momentarily frozen. (…)

Like vision, time perception is underpinned by a collaboration of separate neural mechanisms that usually work in concert but can be teased apart under the right circumstances. (…)

In the early days of television broadcasting, engineers worried about the problem of keeping audio and video signals synchronized. Then they accidentally discovered that they had around a hundred milliseconds of slop: As long as the signals arrived within this window, viewers’ brains would automatically resynchronize the signals; outside that tenth-of-a-second window, it suddenly looked like a badly dubbed movie.

This brief waiting period allows the visual system to discount the various delays imposed by the early stages; however, it has the disadvantage of pushing perception into the past. (…)

If I touch your toe and your nose at the same time, you will feel those touches as simultaneous. This is surprising, because the signal from your nose reaches your brain well before the signal from your toe. Why didn’t you feel the nose-touch when it first arrived? Did your brain wait to see what else might be coming up in the pipeline of the spinal cord unti lit was sure it had waited long enough for the slower signal from the toe? Strange as that sounds, it may be correct.

It may be that a unified polysensory perception of the world has to wait for the slowest overall information. Given conduction times along limbs, this leads to the bizarre but testable suggestion that tall people may live further in the past than short people. The consequence of waiting for temporally spread signals is that perception becomes something like the airing of a live television show. Such shows are not truly live but are delayed by a small window of time, in case editing becomes necessary.

Waiting to collect all the information solves part of the temporal-binding problem, but not all of it. A second problem is this: if the brain collects information from different senses in different areas and at different speeds, how does it determine how the signals are supposed to line up with one another? To illustrate the problem, snap your fingers in front of your face. The sight of your fingers and the sound of the snap appear simultaneous. But it turns out that impression is laboriously constructed by your brain. After all, your hearing and your vision process information at different speeds.

{ David M. Eagleman/Edge | Continue reading }

photo { Camilla Akrans }

Youngsters tend to live for the moment whilst older folks are more concerned about their futures. But when in a person’s life does this change in perspective usually occur? A new study identifies a period between the ages of thirteen and sixteen as being critical.

Laurence Steinberg and colleagues asked 935 people between the ages of ten and thirty years to answer questions regarding how much they think about the future, and to complete a time-discounting task. (…)

A key difference emerged between participants who were aged thirteen and younger versus those aged sixteen and older, with the older group being more future oriented.

{ BPS | Continue reading }

Take for example, the question of Daffy vs. Donald-and, by extension, Disney vs. Looney Tunes. (…)

Nothing truly awful ever happens in a Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck cartoon. The protagonists are adorable. (…)

On the other hand, characters in Looney Tunes cartoons have every reason to be upset. Anything that can go badly in a Looney Tunes cartoon generally does, often in a spectacularly violent manner.

{ Jacob Kalish/Ducts | Continue reading }

{ Christopher Shultis plays an amplified cactus while reciting an excerpt from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake | Haverford | Watch the video | Thanks Tom }

For more than 200 years, buried deep within Thomas Jefferson’s correspondence and papers, there lay a mysterious cipher — a coded message that appears to have remained unsolved. Until now.

The cryptic message was sent to President Jefferson in December 1801 by his friend and frequent correspondent, Robert Patterson, a mathematics professor at the University of Pennsylvania. (…)

In this message, Mr. Patterson set out to show the president and primary author of the Declaration of Independence what he deemed to be a nearly flawless cipher. “The art of secret writing,” or writing in cipher, has “engaged the attention both of the states-man & philosopher for many ages,” Mr. Patterson wrote. But, he added, most ciphers fall “far short of perfection.”

To Mr. Patterson’s view, a perfect code had four properties: It should be adaptable to all languages; it should be simple to learn and memorize; it should be easy to write and to read; and most important of all, “it should be absolutely inscrutable to all unacquainted with the particular key or secret for decyphering.”

Mr. Patterson then included in the letter an example of a message in his cipher, one that would be so difficult to decode that it would “defy the united ingenuity of the whole human race,” he wrote. (…)

The cipher finally met its match in Lawren Smithline, a 36-year-old mathematician. Dr. Smithline has a Ph.D. in mathematics and now works professionally with cryptology, or code-breaking, at the Center for Communications Research in Princeton, N.J., a division of the Institute for Defense Analyses. (…)

The code, Mr. Patterson made clear in his letter, was not a simple substitution cipher. That’s when you replace one letter of the alphabet with another. The problem with substitution ciphers is that they can be cracked by using what’s termed frequency analysis, or studying the number of times that a particular letter occurs in a message. For instance, the letter “e” is the most common letter in English, so if a code is sufficiently long, whatever letter appears most often is likely a substitute for “e.”

Because frequency analysis was already well known in the 19th century, cryptographers of the time turned to other techniques. One was called the nomenclator: a catalog of numbers, each standing for a word, syllable, phrase or letter. Mr. Jefferson’s correspondence shows that he used several code books of nomenclators. An issue with these tools, according to Mr. Patterson’s criteria, is that a nomenclator is too tough to memorize.

Mr. Patterson had a few more tricks up his sleeve. He wrote the message text vertically, in columns from left to right, using no capital letters or spaces. The writing formed a grid, in this case of about 40 lines of some 60 letters each.

Then, Mr. Patterson broke the grid into sections of up to nine lines, numbering each line in the section from one to nine. In the next step, Mr. Patterson transcribed each numbered line to form a new grid, scrambling the order of the numbered lines within each section. Every section, however, repeated the same jumbled order of lines.

The trick to solving the puzzle, as Mr. Patterson explained in his letter, meant knowing the following: the number of lines in each section, the order in which those lines were transcribed and the number of random letters added to each line.

{ Wall Street Journal | Continue reading }

Genie: Good afternoon! I am a genie. Mind you, I’m not your regular kind of genie. My friends say I’m a bit “eccentric.” But hey, what do you expect after being cooped up in a lamp for so long! Anyways, I would like the three of you to come up with a list of three wishes. Since there are three of you, why don’t you come up with one wish each? But there are two conditions you must adhere to.

Condition #1: Your wish must be for something that explicitly benefits humanity in general, not any named individual. I can’t stand egoists who wish riches for themselves!

Condition #2: You cannot wish for something that you believe is impossible to achieve in the real world. So no flying pigs or bringing people back from the grave.

If you violate one of these two conditions, your wish will be invalidated. So, what shall it be?

Student #1: Well, it might be tough to get all three of us to agree on our wishes since we are philosophers and love to debate. And there are many worthy causes. But without a doubt I think the most important thing would be to eradicate global poverty. I spent three months as a visiting student in a developing country last summer and I think it is tragic that so many people still live in severe poverty. So that is my wish.
 
Genie: Excellent! Very noble.
 
Student #2: My mother died of breast cancer at the age of 55. And I don’t want anyone else to lose a loved one like I did. My wish is to eradicate all human disease.
 
Genie: Very good! Another noble choice.

{ Colin Farrelly/Journal of Evolution and Technology | Continue reading }

What might be deemed frivolous aspects of language can have far-reaching subconscious effects on how we see the world. Take grammatical gender. In Spanish and other Romance languages, nouns are either masculine or feminine. In many other languages, nouns are divided into many more genders (”gender” in this context meaning class or kind). For example, some Australian Aboriginal languages have up to sixteen genders, including classes of hunting weapons, canines, things that are shiny, or, in the phrase made famous by cognitive linguist George Lakoff, “women, fire, and dangerous things.”

What it means for a language to have grammatical gender is that words belonging to different genders get treated differently grammatically and words belonging to the same grammatical gender get treated the same grammatically. Languages can require speakers to change pronouns, adjective and verb endings, possessives, numerals, and so on, depending on the noun’s gender. For example, to say something like “my chair was old” in Russian (moy stul bil’ stariy), you’d need to make every word in the sentence agree in gender with “chair” (stul), which is masculine in Russian. So you’d use the masculine form of “my,” “was,” and “old.” These are the same forms you’d use in speaking of a biological male, as in “my grandfather was old.” If, instead of speaking of a chair, you were speaking of a bed (krovat’), which is feminine in Russian, or about your grandmother, you would use the feminine form of “my,” “was,” and “old.”

Does treating chairs as masculine and beds as feminine in the grammar make Russian speakers think of chairs as being more like men and beds as more like women in some way? It turns out that it does. In one study, we asked German and Spanish speakers to describe objects having opposite gender assignment in those two languages. The descriptions they gave differed in a way predicted by grammatical gender. For example, when asked to describe a “key” — a word that is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish — the German speakers were more likely to use words like “hard,” “heavy,” “jagged,” “metal,” “serrated,” and “useful,” whereas Spanish speakers were more likely to say “golden,” “intricate,” “little,” “lovely,” “shiny,” and “tiny.” To describe a “bridge,” which is feminine in German and masculine in Spanish, the German speakers said “beautiful,” “elegant,” “fragile,” “peaceful,” “pretty,” and “slender,” and the Spanish speakers said “big,” “dangerous,” “long,” “strong,” “sturdy,” and “towering.” This was true even though all testing was done in English, a language without grammatical gender. The same pattern of results also emerged in entirely nonlinguistic tasks (e.g., rating similarity between pictures). And we can also show that it is aspects of language per se that shape how people think: teaching English speakers new grammatical gender systems influences mental representations of objects in the same way it does with German and Spanish speakers. Apparently even small flukes of grammar, like the seemingly arbitrary assignment of gender to a noun, can have an effect on people’s ideas of concrete objects in the world.

{ Lera Boroditsky/Edge | Continue reading }

I don’t know where to begin. I didn’t read Homer’s Iliad. But i read “the Odyssey,” the sequel. A long time ago. I believe that at the end of the Iliad, Ulysses leaves Troy to return home to Ithaca, where his family and his fans are waiting. The trip (the “odyssey”) takes almost 10 years during which he meets (a) junkies, (b) Circe who turns men into swines, (c) alluring rowdy creatures who turn out to be killers (half bird half lesbian internationally known as “the sirens”), (d) john rambo-esque giants with unpronounceable names, (e) etc, and (f) Calypso, a sea-nymph interested in witchcraft who used to have a career in porn jacking off sea elephants before focusing on wanabe heroes. All bitches when not creeps, with the notable exception of (g) Nausicaa, who is awesome and will ultimately save Ulysses.

I got interested in Calypso (from the Greek kalupso, “i will conceal”)—technically the second main character of the book given the arithmetic fact that on a 9 year-trip, Ulysses spends 7 years in captivity on Calypso’s island.

Calypso falls in love with Ulysses, and like Terence Stamp in The Collector, she entertains and tries to seduce him, to force his love. It doesn’t work. Ulysses isn’t interested. “I want to move the hell out” are the only words he knows. It seems it’ll take a bigger effort to have him for ever, and to be loved in return.

Notwithstanding the lack of reciprocity, and, even more depressing, Ulysses’ bad graces, Calypso’s libido doesn’t fade, or even plateau, she wants him so bad, he’s so handsome and veiny…

By the way, for his trip back home, Ulysses would have to sail and face the crowded seas, the lures and troubles and dangers and attacking freaks, he would have to risk his life, to get into a lot of “does god exist?” kind of games. On the other hand, on Calypso’s island, he’s safe.

However, this assured safety proved insufficient to decide Ulysses’ love, as were the entertaining sessions. Perhaps a bonus package would make matters easier? One dreaded sunny day, Calypso stakes it all and offers immortality to Ulysses, and she adds eternal youth, on top of abundance of love, seaside dinners, star gazing, music… (clearly Homer had access to decent mdma.)

Are you starting to get the picture? (maybe someone’s going to read this and think, “I can totally relate”) (1) staying young for ever, but staying with Calypso for ever too (you gotta be in it to win it!), or (2) risking your life to go back home, and reunite with your wife.

What needs to be underlined here is that as soon as Ulysses gets back to Ithaca, he’ll be celebrated as a hero, he’ll be worshiped (for his victory over Troy, the trojan horse, etc). And we know that the laws of megalomania suggest that being admired by a crowd is a strong plus.

Now, draw a line in the sand. Immortality/mortality. In the current context, accepting immortality means staying on that island, which means being hidden from the world, “concealed” (hence Calypso’s name), which equals being invincible and eternally young, maybe happy, but with nobody except Calypso knowing about it. It means being forgotten, ending up Nobody. Goodbye hero’s career (heroes’ exploits must be known in order to be praised). It’s starting to look like a really bad deal. And so of course Ulysses refuses, and chooses death (one day he’ll die) over being immortal. What matters to him, is being immortal in people’s mind, in books, in History. Not on that island, not only in Calypso’s eyes.

Celebrity the new drug.

It sounds weird, but if you want to be eternal, accepting immortality from a sea-slut should be at the very bottom of your list.

Ulysses: “I’m glad someone invented death.”

Personally, I wouldn’t mind being dead to the entire universe if instead i was immortal on my little island, in total boredom with my calypso-loving-dude. But maybe that’s just me.

{ stereohell }

photo { Dennis Stenild | S Magazine, 1 }

… if everything that exists has a place, place too will have a place, and so on ad infinitum.

{ Zeno’s Paradoxes | Continue reading }

photos { Grore Images }

San Francisco conceptual artist and journalist Jonathon Keats is trying to rejuvenate literature in the age of hyperspeed media by writing a story that will take a millennium to tell.

The catch? The story, printed on the cover of the recently released Infinity issue of Opium Magazine, is only nine words long.

“Given the printing process I’ve used, you can’t take in more than one word per century. That’s even slower than reading Proust,” said Keats, who has copyrighted his mind, tried to pass a Law of Identity and attempted to genetically engineer God. (…)

The cover is printed in a double layer of standard black ink, with an incrementally screened overlay masking the nine words. Exposed over time to ultraviolet light, the words will appear at different rates, supposedly one per century.

“The precise quantity of ink covering each word is different, so that the words will appear one at a time,” Keats said. “Provided that your copy of Opium is kept out in the open, and regularly exposed to sunlight over 1,000 years to be read progressively by the next dozen or so generations. Or very, very slowly if you happen to be Ray Kurzweil.”

{ Wired | Continue reading | Opium Magazine }

photo { Grant Willing }

A 16th-century lawyer, Hippolytus de Marsiliis, noticed how water slowly dripping onto a rock eventually created a hollow in the stone. It got him thinking: What would happen if a human being’s forehead was subjected to the same treatment?

Legend claims it eventually drives the person crazy. For reasons unclear, the procedure came to be known as “Chinese water torture.”

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

photo { Swimming Pools photographed by J Bennett Fitts | more }

I begin my day reading the news and listening to Finneran’s Forum, a local, early-morning broadcast concerning all things Boston politics here on Boston’s WRKO. I then work my way through the CNN, The Huffington Post, Politico, New York Times, Boston Globe, Wall Street Journal, and Boston Herald websites—in that order. I listen to NPR’s late morning shows and then switch to Rush Limbaugh. After Rush, it’s back to NPR while I read whatever magazines I have delivered: Time, Improper Bostonian, The Atlantic, Wired, Newsweek…

I think you get the point: I’m well-informed. And by “well-informed,” I mean that I get my information from a myriad of sources in order to keep myself Zen.

So would someone please tell me why I know absolutely nothing about almost everything? Sure, I’m able to digest and metabolize the information I receive on a daily basis, but by the end of the day, I’m no better off for it.

{ BlogCritics | Continue reading }

illustration { FlipFlopFlyin }