"The most unintentionally profound thing you've ever heard"

1. Reddit, what is the most unintentionally profound thing you've heard? : AskReddit

My dream last night

My dream last night:

Walk into a Best Buy. Realize I can't leave. The only exit is a ladder/shelf thing that is four stories tall and unstable. I climb the ladder shelf, and it falls over--spilling movie cases and discs everywhere. Spend a few minutes cleaning up discs and realize most of them are pirated or knock-offs. Talk with cashier who didn't seem to be fazed by any of it, and she offers to get someone to hold the ladder-shelf for me. I climb, climb, climb, climb, make a TDKR-style leap from the ladder to the exit ledge. Talk for quite a while with a mellow guy sitting up there and then leave. Outside, I notice there was an easier ground-level exit.

Dang it, brain.
(Also, I haven't set foot inside a Best Buy for years.)

Banksy on advertising

From Cut It Out:

People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.

You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.

Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.

You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.

German word of the day: kummerspeck

German word of the day:

kummerspeck (n.) -- excess weight gained from emotional overeating (literally: grief bacon).

Dadgum super-sad cartoons...

The two saddest animated scenes I've ever seen. No dialogue necessary.

Ellie and Carl in Up:


Seymour the dog from Futurama (based on a real-life dog named Hachiko):

"UBC study finds happy smiling men least sexually attractive to women"

Happy smiling men are consistently rated least attractive by women when compared to proud or brooding men, according to a new study from the University of British Columbia.

The finding, published today (Tuesday) in the journal Emotion, goes a long way toward explaining the sexual allure of dark characters such as the brooding Twilight vampire Edward Cullen or the tortured and shamed Jim Stark in James Dean’s Rebel Without a Cause.

1. Full article

Campbell's Law

"The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."

—Donald T. Campbell

Dr. Berliner discusses some examples of Campbell's law:

Victory... therefore pornography.

A friend of mine just posted this on facebook, speculating that Bin Laden's recent death may have had a similar effect:

Title: Pornography-seeking behaviors following midterm political elections in the United States: A replication of the challenge hypothesis

Authors: Patrick and Charlotte Markey

Published in: Computers in Human Behavior
Volume 27 Issue 3, May, 2011

Abstract: The current study examined a prediction derived from the challenge hypothesis; individuals who viciously win a competition of rank order will seek out pornography relatively more often than individuals who viciously lose a competition. By examining Google keyword searches during the 2006 and 2010 midterm elections in the United States, the relative popularity of various pornography keyword searches was computed for each state and the District of Columbia the week after each midterm election. Consistent with previous research examining presidential elections and the challenge hypothesis, individuals located in traditionally Republican states tended to search for pornography keywords relatively more often after the 2010 midterm election (a Republican victory) than after the 2006 midterm election (a Democratic victory). Conversely, individuals located in traditionally Democratic states tended to search for pornography relatively less often following the 2010 midterm election than they did following the 2006 midterm election.

If I

"..." 34 (two kinds of lifelong readers)

To the extent that novelists think about audience at all, we like to imagine a "general audience"—a large, eclectic pool of decently educated people who can be induced, by strong enough reviews or aggressive enough marketing, to treat themselves to a good, serious book. We do our best not to notice that, among adults with similar educations and similarly complicated lives, some read a lot of novels while others read few or none.

[Shirly Brice] Heath has noticed this circumstance, and although she emphasized to me that she has not polled everybody in America, her research effectively demolishes the myth of the general audience. For a person to sustain an interest in literature, she told me, two things have to be in place. First, the habit of reading works of substance must have been "heavily modeled" when he or she was very young. In other words, one or both of the parents must have been reading serious books and must have encouraged the child to do the same. [...]

Simply having a parent who reads is not enough, however, to produce a lifelong dedicated reader. According to Heath, young readers also need to find a person with whom they can share their interest. "A child who's got the habit will start reading under the covers with a flashlight," she said. "If the parents are smart, they'll forbid the child to do this, and thereby encourage her. Otherwise she'll find a peer who also has the habit, and the two of them will keep it a secret between them. Finding a peer can take place as late as college. In high school, especially, there's a social penalty to be paid for being a reader. Lots of kids who have been lone readers get to college and suddenly discover, 'Oh my God, there are other people here who read.'"

As Heath unpacked her findings for me, I was remembering the joy with which I'd discovered two friends in junior high with whom I could talk about J. R. R. Tolkien. I was also considering that for me, today, there is nothing sexier than a reader. But then it occurred to me that I didn't even meet Heath's first precondition. I told her I didn't remember either of my parents ever reading a book when I was a child, except aloud to me.

Without missing a beat Heath replied: "Yes, but there's a second kind of reader. There's the social isolate—the child who from an early age felt very different from everyone around him. This is very, very difficult to uncover in an interview. People don't like to admit that they were social isolates as children. What happens is you take that sense of being different into an imaginary world. But that world, then, is a world you can't share with the people around you—because it's imaginary. And so the important dialogue in your life is with the authors of the books you read. Though they aren't present, they become your community."

[...]

According to Heath, readers of the social-isolate variety (she calls them "resistant" readers) are much more likely to become writers than those of the modeled-habit variety. If writing was the medium of communication within the community of childhood, it makes sense that when writers grow up they continue to find writing vital to their sense of connectedness. What's perceived as the antisocial nature of "substantive" authors, whether it's James Joyce's exile or J. D. Salinger's reclusion, derives in large part from the social isolation that's necessary for inhabiting a imagined world. Looking me in the eye, Heath said: "You are a socially isolated individual who desperately wants to communicate with a substantive imaginary world."

Source: Franzen, Jonathan. "Why Bother?" How to Be Alone. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002: 74-78. Print. [My emphasis]

"..." 31

[Marshall] McLuhan wrote that our tools end up "numbing" whatever part of our body they "amplify." When we extend some part of ourselves artificially, we also distance ourselves from the amplified part of its natural functions. When the power loom was invented, weavers could manufacture far more cloth during the course of a workday than they'd been able to make by hand, but they sacrificed some of their manual dexterity, not to mention some of their "feel" for fabric. Their fingers, in McLuhan's terms, became numb. Farmers, similarly, lost some of their feel for the soil when they began using mechanical harrows and plows. Today's industrial farm worker, sitting in his air-conditioned cage atop a gargantuan tractor, rarely touches the soil at all—though in a single day he can till a field that his hoe-wielding forebear could not have turned in a month. When we're behind the wheel of our car, we can go a far greater distance than we could cover on foot, but we lose the walker's intimate connection to the land.
[...]
    The price we pay to assume technology's power is alienation. The toll can be particularly high with our intellectual technologies. The tools of the mind amplify and in turn numb the most intimate, the most human, of our natural capacities—those for reason, perception, memory, and emotion. The mechanical clock, for all the blessings it bestowed, removed us from the natural flow of time. When Lewis Mumford described how modern clocks helped "create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences," he also stressed that, as a consequence, clocks "disassociated time from human events." [...] In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to wake up, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock. We became a lot more scientific, but we became a bit more mechanical as well.
[...]
    In explaining how technologies numb the very faculties they amplify [...] McLuhan was not trying to romanticize society as it existed before the invention of maps or clocks or power looms. Alienation, he understood, is an inevitable by-product of the use of technology. Whenever we use a tool to exert greater control over the outside world, we change our relationship with that world. Control can be wielded only from a psychological distance.

From: The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr, 2010, pp. 210-212.

Deprogramming

Not a lot of posts lately, but I've been contributing to another blog that finally got up and going. Just four days since its inception and over 100 posts. Check it out at de-program.blogspot.com.

Patchwork Nation

I've mentioned this to a few dozen people but never got around to posting it. It's a brilliant idea: The CS Monitor created an alternative to the oversimplistic "red state"/"blue state" maps that are so popular on cable news networks. Instead of two categories, they have 12; and instead of coloring states, they color districts.

There are also some interesting overlays. You can look at which districts have Cracker Barrel restaurants or Whole Foods grocers, as well as many useful statistics related to income, population, military service, education, etc., etc.

Check it out at http://patchworknation.csmonitor.com/

"..." 28

"Education is the acquisition of the art of the utilisation of knowledge. This is an art very difficult to impart. Whenever a textbook is written of real educational worth, you may be quite certain that some reviewer will say that it will be difficult to teach from it. Of course it will be difficult to teach from it. If it were easy, the book ought to be burned; for it cannot be educational."

—Alfred North Whitehead, "The Aims of Education"

The problem with freshmen

They'd rather...


The graph supposedly cites data from:

Pryor, J. H., Hurtado, S., Saenz, V. B., Lindholm, J. A., Korn, W. S., & Mahoney, K. M. (2005). The American freshman: National norms for fall 2005. Los Angeles: Higher Education Research Institute, UCLA.

"..." 27

Our society resembles the ultimate machine which I once saw in a New York toy shop. It was a metal casket which, when you touched a switch, snapped open to reveal a mechanical hand. Chromed fingers reached out for the lid, pulled it down, and locked it from the inside. It was a box; you expected to be able to take something out of it; yet all it contained was a mechanism for closing the cover. This contraption is the opposite of Pandora's "box."

—Ivan Illich

"Last Lecture," Randy Pausch

Notebook doodles II

When I first came to college I was an art student dipping his fingers in philosophy and a few other classes.

I had a tendency to draw in my notes sometimes (which is still there), and I thought I'd post some of these doodles—maybe as emblems to show my "education" or at least some of my time spent in the classroom—both learning and not.

So I rummaged through my old notebooks, and here they are. (Not all of them, but a few of the good ones.) Enjoy.

---

HA 555: Art History Since 1945.

"[It's like an argument they have where they're] angrily shaking martini glasses at each other."






ANTH 160: The Varieties of Human Experience.







PHIL 292: The History of Modern Philosophy. Damn I was bored, by the looks of it...








SOC 104: Intro. to Sociology






PHIL 562: Kierkegaard. My only drawing in all my notes (and these aren't even lecture notes):


The full quote is:

With the aid of conclusion, one automatically and mendaciously takes credit for everything (I have heard people, so obtuse that they have nothing between the ears, say that one cannot stop with Socratic ignorance) and like all windbags finally ends up with having done even the impossible. Inwardness has become a matter of knowledge, to exist a waste of time. That is why the most mediocre person who concocts a book these days talks so one would believe he had experienced everything, and simply by paying attention to his intermediate clauses one sees that he is a rogue.

ENGL 312: British Writers to 1800.








ENGL 332: Shakespeare.






HSES 260: Personal and Community Health. My only full page of "notes":




PHIL 672: Philosophy of Law.




ENGL 580: The Rhetoric of Everyday Life.




The button reads: "I am a hardcore Marxist."


GEOG 104: Physical Geography.


The poem from the above reads:

Boredom is
a porous drum,
whose beat is deaf
and also dumb.

---

i. Notebook doodles I

"Calculating Machine"

by E.B. White [my emphasis]

    A publisher in Chicago sent us a pocket calculating machine by which we may test our writing to see whether it is intelligible. The calculator was developed by General Motors, who, not satisfied with giving the world a Cadillac, now dream of bringing perfect understanding to men. The machine (it is simply a celluloid card with a dial) is called the Reading-Ease Calculator and shows four grades of "reading ease"—Very Easy, Easy, Hard, and Very Hard. You count your words and syllables, set the dial, and an indicator lets you know whether anybody is going to understand what you have written. An instruction book came with it, and after mastering the simple rules we lost no time in running a test on the instruction book itself, to see how that writer was doing. The poor fellow! His leading essay, the one on the front cover, tested Very Hard.
    Our next step was to study the first phrase on the face of the calculator: "How to test Reading-Ease of written matter." There is, of course, no such thing as reading ease of written matter. There is the ease with which matter can be read, but that is a condition of the reader, not of the matter. Thus the inventors and distributors of this calculator get off to a poor start, with a Very Hard instruction book and a slovenly phrase. Already they have one foot caught in the brier patch of English usage.
    Not only did the author of the instruction book score badly on the front cover, but inside the book he used the word "personalize" in an essay on how to improve one's writing. A man who likes the word "personalize" is entitled to his choice, but we wonder whether he should be in the business of giving advice to writers. "Whenever possible," he wrote, "personalize your writing by directing it to the reader." As for us, we would as lief Simonize our grandmother as personalize our writing.
    In the same envelope with the calculator, we received another training aid for writers—a booklet called "How to Write Better," by Rudolf Flesch. This, too, we studied, and it quickly demonstrated the broncolike ability of the English language to throw whoever leaps cocksurely into the saddle. The language not only can toss a rider but knows a thousand tricks for tossing him, each more gay than the last. Under the heading "Think Before You Write," he wrote, "The main thing to consider is your purpose in writing. Why are you sitting down to write?" And echo answered: Because, sir, it is more comfortable than standing up.
    Communication by the written word is a subtler (and more beautiful) thing than Dr. Flesch and General Motors imagine. They contend that the "average reader" is capable of reading only what tests Easy, and that the writer should write at or below this level. This is a presumptuous and degrading idea. There is no average reader, and to reach down toward this mythical character is to deny that each of us is on the way up, is ascending. ("Ascending," by the way, is a word Dr. Flesch advises writers to stay away from. Too unusual.)
    It is our belief that no writer can improve his work until he discards the dulcet notion that the reader is feeble-minded, for writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar. Ascent is at the heart of the matter. A country whose writers are following a calculating machine downstairs is not ascending—if you will pardon the expression—and a writer who questions the capacity of the person at the other end of the line is not a writer at all, merely a schemer. The movies long ago decided that a wider communication could be achieved by a deliberate descent to a lower level, and they walked proudly down until they reached the cellar. Now they are groping for the light switch, hoping to find the way out.
    We have studied Dr. Flesch's instructions diligently, but we return for guidance in these matters to an earlier American, who wrote with more patience, more confidence. "I fear chiefly," he wrote, "lest my expression may not be extra-vagant enough, may not wonder far enough beyond the narrow limits of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of which I have been convinced. . . . Why level downward to the dullest perception always, and praise that as common sense? The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring."
    Run that through your calculator! It may come out Hard, it may come out Easy. But it will come out whole, and it will last forever.

Conan the 'praying' chihuahua

"I think he saw me doing it all the time and got the idea to do it too."

1. 'Praying' dog at Japanese temple