Le pop art dépersonnalise, mais il ne rend pas anonyme : rien de plus identifiable que Marilyn, la chaise électrique, un pneu ou une robe, vus par le pop art ; ils ne sont même que cela : immédiatement et exhaustivement identifiables, nous enseignant par là que l’identité n’est pas la personne : le monde futur risque d’être un monde d’identités, mais non de personnes.
We must realize that if Pop Art depersonalized, it does not make anonymous: noting is more identifiable than Marilyn, the electric chair, a tire, or a dress, as seen by Pop Art; they are in fact nothing but that: immediately and exhaustively identifiable, thereby teaching us that identify is not the person: the future world risks being a world of identities, but not of persons.
{ Roland Barthes, Cette vieille chose, l’art, 1980 }
art { Andy Warhol, Foot and Tire, 1963-64 }
related { David Cronenberg on Foot and Tire }
art, roland barthes, warhol |
March 8th, 2014
At Kean University, students are dying (as it were) to get into Norma Bowe’s class “Death in Perspective,” which has sometimes carried a three-year waiting list. On one one field trip to a local coroner’s office, Dr. Bowe’s students were shown three naked cadavers on metal tables. One person had died from a gunshot, the other from suicide and the third by drowning.
The last corpse appeared overweight but wasn’t; he had expanded like a water balloon. A suspect in a hit-and-run case, he had fled the scene, been chased by police, abandoned his car and jumped into the Passaic River. On the autopsy table, he looked surprised, his mouth splayed open, as if he realized he had made a mistake. As the class clustered around, a technician began to carve his torso open. Some students gagged or scurried out, unable to stand the sight or the smell.
This grim visit was just one of the excursions for Dr. Bowe’s class. Every semester, students also leave the campus in Union, New Jersey, to visit a cemetery, a maximum-security prison (to meet murderers), a hospice, a crematory and a funeral home, where they pick out caskets for themselves. The homework is also unusual: Students are required to write goodbye letters to dead loved ones and to compose their own eulogies and wills.
{ WSJ | Continue reading }
weirdos |
March 7th, 2014
Both men and women erred in estimating what the opposite sex would find attractive. Men thought women would like a heavier stature than females reported they like, and women thought men would like women thinner than men reported they like.
Results suggest that, overall, men’s perceptions serve to keep them satisfied with their figures, whereas women’s perceptions place pressure on them to lose weight.
{ APA/PsycNET | Continue reading }
psychology, relationships |
March 7th, 2014
Our brains show more activity in their emotional regions when the music we are listening to is familiar, regardless of whether or not we actually like it.
{ Aeon | Continue reading }
related { Young Musicians Reap Long-Term Neuro Benefits }
and { By Licking These Electric Ice Cream Cones, You Can Make Music }
photo { Nina Simone by Alfred Wertheimer, December 1964 }
music, neurosciences |
March 7th, 2014
psychology |
March 7th, 2014
‘Too drunk’ gambler sues Las Vegas casino over $500,000 debt
Fortune Teller Scams Young Woman Out Of $200K
A woman in Canada claims to have out-of-body experiences at will. Scientists put her in an MRI machine
Wealthier people are more musical, research
5% of people have “no real response to music,” study
Early treatment ‘cures’ second US HIV-positive baby
“exposure to an unstructured, uniform stimulation field, elicits in most observers pseudo-hallucinatory percepts” Hallucinating without drugs, the profundity of silence, and the thalamocortical circuit
The Reality Behind the Stock-Picking Prowess of S.E.C. Staff Members
The man who discovered the Stroop effect never realised the massive impact he had on psychology.
Clifford Michael Irving (born November 5, 1930) is best known for a fake “autobiography” of Howard Hughes in the early 1970s.
Scotland, one of the four countries that make up the United Kingdom (along with England, Northern Ireland, and Wales), will hold a referendum on independence this September. If it succeeds, Britain’s iconic flag may need a makeover.
Study: More Children Growing Up In Single-Parrot Households
During the chase, Nakamoto was seen throwing bitcoins out the window to deter his pursuers
everyday |
March 6th, 2014
everyday |
March 5th, 2014
It’s a concept that had become universally understood: humans experience six basic emotions—happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and surprise—and use the same set of facial movements to express them. What’s more, we can recognize emotions on another’s face, whether that person hails from Boston or Borneo.
The only problem with this concept, according to Northeastern University Distinguished Professor of Psychology Lisa Feldman Barrett, is that it isn’t true at all.
{ Northeastern | Continue reading }
art { Richard Hamilton, Swingeing London 67 (f), 1968-9 | Acrylic paint, screenprint, paper, aluminium and metalised acetate on canvas }
faces, psychology |
March 5th, 2014
Quantum physics is famously weird, counterintuitive and hard to understand; there’s just no getting around this. So it is very reassuring that many of the greatest physicists and mathematicians have also struggled with the subject. The legendary quantum physicist Richard Feynman famously said that if someone tells you that they understand quantum mechanics, then you can be sure that they are lying. And Conway too says that he didn’t understand the quantum physics lectures he took during his undergraduate degree at Cambridge.
The key to this confusion is that quantum physics is fundamentally different to any of the previous theories explaining how the physical world works. In the great rush of discoveries of new quantum theory in the 1920s, the most surprising was that quantum physics would never be able to exactly predict what was going to happen. In all previous physical theories, such as Newton’s classical mechanics or Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity, if you knew the current state of the physical system accurately enough, you could predict what would happen next. “Newtonian gravitation has this property,” says Conway. “If I take a ball and I throw it vertically upwards, and I know its mass and I know its velocity (suppose I’m a very good judge of speed!) then from Newton’s theories I know exactly how high it will go. And if it doesn’t do exactly as I expect then that’s because of some slight inaccuracy in my measurements.”
Instead quantum physics only offers probabilistic predictions: it can tell you that your quantum particle will behave in one way with a particular probability, but it could also behave in another way with another particular probability. “Suppose there’s this little particle and you’re going to put it in a magnetic field and it’s going to come out at A or come out at B,” says Conway, imagining an experiment, such as the Stern Gerlach experiment, where a magnetic field diverts an electron’s path. “Even if you knew exactly where the particles were and what the magnetic fields were and so on, you could only predict the probabilities. A particle could go along path A or path B, with perhaps 2/3 probability it will arrive at A and 1/3 at B. And if you don’t believe me then you could repeat the experiment 1000 times and you’ll find that 669 times, say, it will be at A and 331 times it will be at B.”
{ The Free Will Theorem, Part I | Continue reading | Part II | Part III }
Physics, theory |
March 4th, 2014
When a coin falls in water, its trajectory is one of four types determined by its dimensionless moment of inertia I∗ and Reynolds number Re: (A) steady; (B) fluttering; (C) chaotic; or (D) tumbling. The dynamics induced by the interaction of the water with the surface of the coin, however, makes the exact landing site difficult to predict a priori.
Here, we describe a carefully designed experiment in which a coin is dropped repeatedly in water to determine the probability density functions (pdf) associated with the landing positions for each of the four trajectory types, all of which are radially symmetric about the centre drop-line
{ arXiv | PDF }
Uncategorized |
March 4th, 2014
