April 2011
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The Psychology of Light
The Arctic Circle is a patient traveler, but a traveler nonetheless. Every year, it travels fifteen meters north, and once it has completed its itinerary, it will pivot and head south again. The Arctic Cycle takes 40,000 years. At its southernmost, the Circle lies slightly south of my hometown, which is conveniently situated at exactly 66 degrees north; at the moment, the Circle is about 34...
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Week 16
Appearance discrimination is pervasive, unfair and impossible to eliminate. But what if you could just switch off people’s ability to recognize and react emotionally to beauty? What if there were a procedure to modify someone’s cognition so that “he or she can tell the difference between a pointed chin and a receding one, a straight nose and a crooked one, clear skin and...
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“I kept running, and Brenin kept running with me; and we both got fitter, and...”
– From The Philosopher and the Wolf by Mark Rowlands, an old favorite.
Week 15
Back in 1972, David Rosenhan did a famous experiment on being sane in insane places. The experiment had two aspects: in one, a number of healthy individuals without any history of mental illness faked hearing voices in order to get themselves admitted to mental hospitals, but immediately ceased faking when they were admitted and started acting as they had outside the hospital, i.e., sanely, as far...
2 tags
“Form is all that humans manifest themselves through; actions, facial...”
– Norwegian author Dag Solstad comments on Witold Gombrowicz in the essay The Necessity of Living Inauthentically (1968). I haven’t read Gombrowicz, but commenting purely on the philosophy expounded in the above paragraphs, it sounds like both a liberating and a horrifying position to take. On...
“‘This is me in front of the Parthenon,’ you will say later,...”
– Marc Augé, Non-places.
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If you can explain it simply, you aren't ambitious...
“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” Supposedly Albert Einstein said it. I don’t care if Aristotle, Plato, Kant, Descartes, Newton, Hume, Wittgenstein, Frege, Bohr, Feynman and Hawking had all stamped and signed the statement. I don’t agree with it and I don’t want to live in a world where it’s true. I think it’s the...
Week 14
Majority Of Americans Just Gotta, You Know, Get Motivated And Do It. “The report added that it was ‘sorry if that came out harsh’ and that it was ‘just saying.’”
Georgian woman cuts off internet access to all of Armenia.
Stories that modern science has made impossible, from 1911:
It is lucky for us that Poe, Hoffman, Andersen, and other chroniclers of the...
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“When you’re dealing with a subject that’s so vital to human well-being as art,...”
– Lewis Baltz.
Being a socially awkward kid, the thing that always eluded me was that everything is a language. Clothes are a language. Body language, obviously, is a language. Belief systems are a language which piggybacks on natural language. Commodities are a language. Property is a language. Everything you say, do, own or are is and most likely will be interpreted according to one of a handful of cultural...
Statistics
Three years ago, I wrote a little ruby script that generated statistics for Tumblr-hosted blogs. Someone recently asked for the script, but I’ve lost the original file. Well, I thought, I’d like some new stats anyway, so I rewrote the lost script. You can find it here. The output looks like this:
Total posts: 3063. Of those, there were 1 audio post. 1111 photo posts. 3 conversation...
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Week 13
I have a very clear dichotomy in my mind between “out there” and “in here”. Right now, for instance, I’m clearly not “out there” in the world. I’m sitting at my computer, mind focused on abstract symbols, not engaged with the concrete world. On one level, this is obviously a lie. As always, I’m located in concrete spacetime right now....
The Man was pleased. The masses were subdued. Nobody was sticking it to him. Bureaucracy was so complex, he had hidden the Fibonacci sequence and pi to fifty-three decimals in its procedures. Soulless drudgery was the norm. Anhedonia the dominant emotion. Everyone was cubicle-bound and every cubicle lit with fluorescent lights flickering at a frequency designed to disturb the hindbrain. Taxes were...
