“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 }

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 }

{ Tim Flach | more photos | interview }

{ Wendy Bevan }

{ Things mag }

A shadow is a region of darkness (absence). It occurs when some projection (usually of light) is partially blocked, leaving a silhouette pattern of distinct gaps in the direct illumination of a subsequent surface.

For a non-point source of light, the shadow is divided into the umbra and penumbra. The wider the light source, the more blurred the shadow.

If white light is produced by separate colored light sources, the shadows are coloured.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

photo { Kalle Gustafsson }

{ Will Steacy, Front Lawn, St. Bernard Parish, LA, 2005 }

{ Ana Borquez, Deer hideout }

{ unsourced image }

related { As soon as darkness has set in,
this blood finding agent will help you find the trail of the wounded animal }

{ Ryan Schude | full story | jpg magazine }

Between 30 and 45 paparazzi work Britney on any given night. The expensive cars they drive reflect the fact that Britney Spears—her marriages, custody battles, fights with her mom, new boyfriends, Starbucks runs, trips to the hospital—is a bigger and more lucrative story than Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton or John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

History’s best-publicized celebrity meltdown has helped fuel dozens of television shows, magazines, and Internet sites, the combined value of whose Britney-related product easily exceeds $100 million a year, and helped make Britney Spears the most popular search term on Yahoo once again in 2007, as it has been for six of the past seven years. (…)

X17 is the biggest agency in the Hollywood paparazzi business. Nearly every famous picture of the world’s most famous imploding pop star—Britney driving with her son on her lap, Britney in rehab, Britney without underwear, Britney shaving her head—was taken by X17’s “shooters,” or “paps,” who work in teams under the direction of X17’s owner, François Navarre, a graduate of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, who moved to Los Angeles in 1992 and covered the L.A. riots for Le Monde before embracing his destiny as a freelance celebrity photographer.

Navarre operates under his middle name, Regis. He is roundly despised by more traditional Hollywood paparazzi, who accuse him of having destroyed their highly individualistic business by hiring gangs of immigrant kids with digital cameras purchased on credit from Best Buy to do the work of the heroic lone photographers who once lay in wait with telephoto lenses, stalking Jackie O.

Most of X17’s paps, who number between 60 and 70, depending on the day and who quits or gets fired, are paid a stipend of $800 to $3,000 a week plus the occasional four- or low-five-figure bonus in exchange for global rights to their images, which Regis owns lock, stock, and barrel. X17 also pays weekly stipends to a dozen dedicated tipsters and occasional fees to 500 or 600 parking-lot attendants, club kids, and shop girls in and around L.A. X17 licenses its pictures to celebrity skin magazines like Us Weekly, People, Life & Style, and In Touch and their associated Web sites; to celebrity-oriented television programs like Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood, Inside Edition, and Extra; as well as to newspapers and magazines in England, Australia, Germany, Japan, Hong Kong, mainland China, Israel, Dubai, and dozens of other countries; to major television news networks like CNN, ABC, NBC, and CBS, and nearly everyone else in the media business who needs pictures and video clips of Paris Hilton’s arrest or Brad and Angelina’s kids or Britney’s latest courtroom drama, which is to say nearly every major news outlet on the planet.

{ The Atlantic | Continue reading }