Pursuit of happiness
I need to take one week off, too much work! Normal service will resume on Feb 19. Sorry!
Until then:
{ Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is, 1888 }
Ecstasy–from Greek ekstasis, standing outside oneself
The long-term effects of short-term emotions
The heat of the moment is a powerful, dangerous thing. We all know this. If we’re happy, we may be overly generous. Maybe we leave a big tip, or buy a boat. If we’re irritated, we may snap. Maybe we rifle off that nasty e-mail to the boss, or punch someone. And for that fleeting second, we feel great. But the regret—and the consequences of that decision—may last years, a whole career, or even a lifetime.
At least the regret will serve us well, right? Lesson learned—maybe.
Maybe not. My friend Eduardo Andrade and I wondered if emotions could influence how people make decisions even after the heat or anxiety or exhilaration wears off. We suspected they could. As research going back to Festinger’s cognitive dissonance theory suggests, the problem with emotional decisions is that our actions loom larger than the conditions under which the decisions were made. When we confront a situation, our mind looks for a precedent among past actions without regard to whether a decision was made in emotional or unemotional circumstances. Which means we end up repeating our mistakes, even after we’ve cooled off.
‘Gonna dance ’til we burn this disco out.’ —Michael Jackson
My impossible ones. — Seneca: or the toreador of virtue. (…) Dante: or the hyena who writes poetry in tombs. (…) Victor Hugo: or the pharos at the sea of nonsense. (…) Michelet: or the enthusiasm which takes off its coat. Carlyle: or pessimism as a poorly digested dinner. (…) Zola: or “the delight in stinking.”
{ Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 1888 | Continue reading }
Variation: Dante=Damien Hirst, hugo=Malcom Dladwell, Michelet=Lindsay Loahn, Carlyle=Cioran, Zola=Dick Cheney.
Your turn (comment), I’m all ears.
So I’ll pull myself together
Who are the best spreaders of information in a social network? The answer may surprise you.
The study of social networks has thrown up more than a few surprises over the years. It’s easy to imagine that because the links that form between various individuals in a society are not governed by any overarching rules, they must have a random structure. So the discovery in the 1980s that social networks are very different came as something of a surprise. In a social network, most nodes are not linked to each other but can easily be reached by a small number of steps. This is the so-called small worlds network.
Today, there’s another surprise in store for network connoisseurs courtesy of Maksim Kitsak at Boston University and various buddies. One of the important observations from these networks is that certain individuals are much better connected than others. These so-called hubs ought to play a correspondingly greater role in the way information and viruses spread through society.
In fact, no small effort has gone into identifying these individuals and exploiting them to either spread information more effectively or prevent them from spreading disease.
The importance of hubs may have been overstated, say Kitsak and pals. “In contrast to common belief, the most influential spreaders in a social network do not correspond to the best connected people or to the most central people,” they say.
illustration { Martin Wong’s Ferocactus }
‘Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.’ –Kierkegaard
Imagine that your stockbroker - or the friend who’s always giving you stock tips - called and told you he had come up with a new investment strategy. Price-to-earnings ratios, debt levels, management, competition, what the company makes, and how well it makes it, all those considerations go out the window. The new strategy is this: Invest in companies with names that are very easy to pronounce.
This would probably not strike you as a great idea. But, if recent research is to be believed, it might just be brilliant.
One of the hottest topics in psychology today is something called “cognitive fluency.” Cognitive fluency is simply a measure of how easy it is to think about something, and it turns out that people prefer things that are easy to think about to those that are hard. On the face of it, it’s a rather intuitive idea. But psychologists are only beginning to uncover the surprising extent to which fluency guides our thinking, and in situations where we have no idea it is at work.
{ Boston Globe | Continue reading | Thanks James! }
photo { Helmut Newton, Nova magazine, Paris, 1973 }
The disco ball in my eyes insinuates I’m balling
“How we process information is related not just to our brains but to our entire body,” said Nils B. Jostmann of the University of Amsterdam. “We use every system available to us to come to a conclusion and make sense of what’s going on.”
Research in embodied cognition has revealed that the body takes language to heart and can be awfully literal-minded.
I can hear him rolling on down the lane
Why are people so blissfully ignorant of certain aspects of their personalities?
Take an everyday example: there are some infuriating people who are always late for appointments. A few of these people explain it by saying they are ‘laid-back’, while others seem unaware that they’re always late.
For laid-back people, their lateness is a part of their personality, they are aware of it and presumably not worried about appearing unconscientious. For the unaware it’s almost as if they don’t realise they’re always late. How is that possible?
It’s probably because they’ve never noticed or paid attention to the fact that they are always late so they never learn to think of themselves as lacking conscientiousness. Or so suggests a psychological theory describing how we think about ourselves called self-schema theory.
This theory says that we have developed ’schemas’, like internal maps of our personalities, which we use to understand and explain our current and future behaviour to ourselves, e.g. I’m always on time for meetings so I’m a conscientious person.
However schema theory also suggests that these maps have uncharted areas, leaving people with certain blind spots in their self-knowledge.
Let me tell you how I live… Like that?
YouMe: Control Real People In Real Time
An unusual new service called YouMe is being touted as the next generation of gaming, and a new way of sourcing help. The service will let users (”Yous”) control real people (”Mes”) in real time. Yous give instructions to the Mes via bluetooth headset or text message, and the Mes escapades are captured by video camera and streamed live. Almost anything is game as far as requests, barring illegal or sexual activity. YouMe is in private beta, and should launch later this year.
The doctrine of the virgin birth of Jesus is not to be confused with that of her Immaculate Conception, which concerns Mary’s conception by her mother
The patient was a 15-year-old girl employed in a local bar. She was admitted to hospital after a knife fight involving her, a former lover and a new boyfriend. Who stabbed whom was not quite clear but all three participants in the small war were admitted with knife injuries. (…)
Precisely 278 days later the patient was admitted again to hospital with acute, intermittent abdominal pain. Abdominal examination revealed a term pregnancy with a cephalic fetal presentation. The uterus was contracting regularly and the fetal heart was heard. Inspection of the vulva showed no vagina, only a shallow skin dimple was present below the external urethral meatus and between the labia minora. An emergency lower segment caesarean section was performed under spinal anaesthesia and a live male infant weighing 2800 g was born…
The patient was well aware of the fact that she had no vagina and she had started oral experiments after disappointing attempts at conventional intercourse. Just before she was stabbed in the abdomen she had practised fellatio with her new boyfriend and was caught in the act by her former lover. The fight with knives ensued. She had never had a period and there was no trace of lochia after the caesarean section. She had been worried about the increase in her abdominal size but could not believe she was pregnant
artwork { The Designers Republic }
Deciders for the lonely
Wolfie Blackheart is not an ordinary 18-year-old. She believes she is a wolf –technically, a werewolf– and so she wears a tail. She also wears a harness in case someone special wants to drag her around.
And last week, she used a pocketknife in her kitchen to decapitate a dog–already dead, according to Wolfie–that had been missing since Jan. 5.
