Is it “Ms.” or “Miss”?

A rare occurrence of “Ms.” in 1885 suggests that the term is an abbreviation of “Miss.”

Ever since “Ms.” emerged as a marriage-neutral alternative to “Miss” and “Mrs.” in the 1970s, linguists have been trying to trace the origins of this new honorific. It turns out that “Ms.” is not so new after all. The form goes back at least to the 1760s, when it served as an abbreviation for “Mistress” (remember Shakespeare’s Mistress Quickly?) and for “Miss,” already a shortened form of “Mistress,” which was also sometimes spelled “Mis.” The few early instances of “Ms.” carried no particular information about matrimonial status (it was used for single or for married women) and no political statement about gender equality. Eventually “Miss” and “Mrs.” emerged as the standard honorifics for women, just as “Mr.” was used for men (“Master,” from which “Mr.” derives, was often used for boys, though it’s not common today). While “Miss” was often prefixed to the names of unmarried women or used for young women or girls, it could also refer to married women. And “Mrs.,” typically reserved for married women, did not always signal marital status (for example, widows and divorced women often continued to use “Mrs.”). The spread of “Ms.” over the past forty years both simplifies and complicates the title paradigm.

{ OUP | Continue reading }

Italian scientists are to try to establish whether there really is such a phenomenon as Stendhal Syndrome — the giddiness, sweaty state of confusion and even hallucinations that are supposedly aroused when one looks at great works of art.

The condition is named after the 19th-Century French author Stendhal, who wrote of feeling utterly overwhelmed by the Renaissance masterpieces he saw during a trip to Florence in 1817.

{ Independent.ie | Continue reading | Thanks Tim }

photo { Tookie Smith photographed by Jean-Paul Goude, 70s }

I feel coming between you and me still a difference. You tend very quickly to stress an authentically Spinozist concept, that of the tendency to persevere in being. The last time, you spoke to me about the conatus, i.e. the tendency to persevere in being, and you asked me: what don’t you do it? I responded that for the moment I cannot introduce it because, in my reading, I am stressing other Spinozist concepts, and the tendency to persevere in being, I will derive it from other concepts which are for me the essential concepts, those of power (puissance) and affect. Today, you return to the same theme. There is not even room for a discussion, you would propose another reading, i.e. a differently accentuated reading. As for the problem of the reasonable man and the insane man, I will respond exactly thus: what distinguishes the insane person and the reasonable one according to Spinoza, and conversely at the same time, there is: what doesn’t distinguish them? From which point of view can they not be distinguished, from which point of view do they have to be distinguished? I would say, for my reading, that Spinoza‚s response is very rigorous.

If I summarize Spinoza’s response, it seems to me that this summary would be this: from a certain point of view, there is no reason to make a distinction between the reasonable man and the insane person. From another point of view, there is a reason to make a distinction.


Firstly, from the point of view of power, there is no reason to introduce a distinction between the reasonable man and the insane man. What does that mean? Does that mean that they have the same power? No, it doesn‚t mean that they have the same power, but it means that each one, as much as there is in him, realises or exercises his power. I.e. each one, as much as there is in him, endeavours [s‚efforce] to persevere in his being. Therefore, from the point of view of power, insofar as each, according to natural right, endeavours to persevere in his being, i.e. exercise his power — you see I always put effort‚ between brackets — it is not that he tries to persevere, in any way, he perseveres in his being as much as there is in him, this is why I do not like the idea of conatus, the idea of effort, which does not translate Spinoza‚s thought because what it calls an effort to persevere in being is the fact that I exercise my power at each moment, as much as there is in me. It is not an effort, but from the point of view of power, therefore, I can not at all say what each one is worth, because each one would have the same power, in effect the power of the insane man is not the same as that of the reasonable one, but what there is in common between the two is that, whatever the power, each exercises his own. Therefore, from this point of view, I would not say that the reasonable man is better than the insane one. I cannot, I have no way of saying that: each has a power, each exercises as much power as there is in him. It is natural right, it is the world of nature. From this point of view, I could not establish any difference in quality between the reasonable man and the insane one.

But from another point of view, I know very well that the reasonable man is better‚ than the insane one. Better, what does that mean? More powerful, in the Spinozist sense of the word. Therefore, from this second point of view, I must make and I do make a distinction between the reasonable man and the insane one. What is this point of view? My response, according to Spinoza, would be exactly this: from the point of view of power, you have no reason to distinguish the reasonable man and the insane one, but from the other point of view, namely that of the affects, you distinguish the reasonable man and the insane one.

From where does this other point of view come? You remember that power is always actual, it is always exercised. It is the affects that exercise them. The affects are the exercises of power, what I experience in action or passion, it is this which exercises my power, at every moment. If the reasonable man and the insane one are distinguished, it is not by means of power, each one realises his power, it is by means of the affects. The affects of the reasonable man are not the same as those of the insane one. Hence the whole problem of reason will be converted by Spinoza into a special case of the more general problem of the affects. Reason indicates a certain type of affect.

{ Gilles Deleuze, Course on Spinoza, 1980 | Continue reading }

photo { Matthu Placek }

The future of humanity is often viewed as a topic for idle speculation. Yet our beliefs and assumptions on this subject matter shape decisions in both our personal lives and public policy – decisions that have very real and sometimes unfortunate consequences. It is therefore practically important to try to develop a realistic mode of futuristic thought about big picture questions for humanity.

This paper sketches an overview of some recent attempts in this direction, and it offers a brief discussion of four families of scenarios for humanity’s future: extinction, recurrent collapse, plateau, and posthumanity. (…)

Predictability does not necessarily fall off with temporal distance. It may be highly unpredictable where a traveler will be one hour after the start of her journey, yet predictable that after five hours she will be at her destination. The very long-term future of humanity may be relatively easy to predict, being a matter amenable to study by the natural sciences, particularly cosmology (physical eschatology). And for there to be a degree of predictability, it is not necessary that it be possible to identify one specific scenario as what will definitely happen. If there is at least some scenario that can be ruled out, that is also a degree of predictability. (…)

Most differences between our lives and the lives of our hunter-gatherer forebears are ultimately tied to technology, especially if we understand “technology” in its broadest sense, to include not only gadgets and machines but also techniques, processes, and institutions. In this wide sense we could say that technology is the sum total of instrumentally useful culturally-transmissible information. Language is a technology in this sense, along with tractors, machine guns, sorting algorithms, double-entry bookkeeping, and Robert’s Rules of Order. (…)

Supposing that some perceptive observer in the past had noticed some instance of directionality – be it a technological, cultural, or social trend – the question would have remained whether the detected directionality was a global feature or a mere local pattern. In a cyclical view of history, for example, there can be long stretches of steady cumulative development of technology or other factors. Within a period, there is clear directionality; yet each flood of growth is followed by an ebb of decay, returning things to where they stood at the beginning of the cycle. Strong local directionality is thus compatible with the view that, globally, history moves in circles and never really gets anywhere. If the periodicity is assumed to go on forever, a form of eternal recurrence would follow.

{ Nick Bostrom, The Future of Humanity, 2007 | Continue reading | Related: How unlikely is a doomsday catastrophe? }

Neil deGrasse Tyson’s talk was called either “Adventures in Science Illiteracy” or “Brain Droppings of a Skeptic” (a title cribbed from George Carlin). He began by saying that he had something to do with Pluto’s demotion from being a planet, and that anybody who didn’t like it should “get over it.” The rest of his talk wandered over a large range of topics. (…)

Jury Duty I: Tyson described being called for jury duty. He was asked what he did, he said that he was an astrophysicist. When asked what he teaches, he said “a course on evaluating evidence and the unreliability of eyewitness testimony,” at which point he was promptly dismissed.

Jury Duty II: Tyson was called for jury duty again, and made the first cut of jurors. The facts of the case were described–the defendant was charged with the possession of “2000 mg” of cocaine. When the jurors were asked if they had any questions, Tyson asked, “why did you describe it as 2000 mg instead of 2 g, about the weight of a postage stamp? Aren’t you trying to bias the jury by making it sound like a large quantity of drugs?” At which point he was promptly dismissed. (…)

Inept Aliens: They travel trillions of miles to get here, then crash.

Conspiracy Theory: They tend to tacitly admit insufficient data. If an argument lasts more than five minutes, both sides are wrong.

{ The Amazing Meeting 6 | The Lippard blog | Continue reading }

{ Jorge Luis Borges, Lectures at Harvard University, 1967-1968 | more }

{ Pierre Huyghe, Third Memory, 1999 | Third Memory takes as its point of departure a bank robbery committed by John Woytowicz in Brooklyn in 1972; three years later the crime became the subject of Sidney Lumet’s film Dog Day Afternoon, starring Al Pacino. Huyghe tracked down Woytowicz and asked him to retell the story. Using a two-channel video projection, a television interview, and posters, Huyghe builds from a “first memory” of the original crime to a “second memory” with the film’s recreation of that crime, to arrive at a “third memory,” a rich blurring of the documented and the imagined. | San Francisco Museum of Modern Art | University of Virginia | Art Museum }

When, well after Spinoza, Nietzsche will launch the concept of will to power… (…)

We cannot understand anything in Nietzsche if we believe that it is the operation by which each of us would tend towards power.

Power is not what I want, by definition, it is what I have. I have this or that power and it is this that situates me in the quantitative scale of Beings.

Making power the object of the will is a misunderstanding, it is just the opposite. It is according to power that I have, that I want this or that.

{ Deleuze on Spinoza | Continue reading }

…modern career theories (…) importance of personal meaning within career choice.

But what about meaninglessness?

Shouldn’t we be looking at that too? (…)

‘The Four-Roomed Apartment of Change’ is used to capture some of the things that happen to people and organisations when they experience change.

The four rooms represent four frames of mind that an individual may pass through as they encounter a change in their lives. (…)

The room of Contentment. In this room people feel relaxed and free from threat. (…)

When people do begin to perceive change they might  fall down the trapdoor into the Denial room. (…)

When they get there, they will find the room of Confusion. (…)

Eventually, the fog may clear and they will find the ladder which leads to the Renewal room. (…)

What room are you in at the moment?

{ Careers – in Theory | Continue reading }

What is a healthy mind? Is it simply the absence of symptoms and dysfunctions, or is there something more to a life well lived? How can we embrace the diversity of behavior, temperament, values, and orientation across a wide range of cultures and still come up with a coherent definition of health? Just as some scientists are reluctant to define the mind, some people say that we shouldn’t define mental health at all, because it is authoritarian to do so—we shouldn’t tell others how to be healthy. But how do we account for the universal striving for happiness?

Positive psychology has offered an important corrective to the disease model by identifying the characteristics of happy people, such as gratitude, compassion, open-mindedness, and curiosity, but is there some unnamed quality that underlies all of these individual strengths?

Over the last twenty years, I’ve come to believe that integration is the key mechanism beneath both the absence of illness and the presence of well-being.

Integration—the linkage of differentiated elements of a system—illuminates a direct pathway toward health. It’s the way we avoid a life of dull, boring rigidity on the one hand, or explosive chaos on the other. We can learn to detect when integration is absent or insufficient and develop effective strategies to promote differentiation and then linkage. The key to this transformation is cultivating the capacity for mindsight.

{ Daniel SiegelPsychotherapyNetworker | Continue reading }

photo { Scarlett Hooft Graafland }

We’re sure to disagree on many points today, but I think that we here all agree on a number of things. We all agree that, to understand morality, you’ve got to think about evolution and culture. You’ve got to know something about chimpanzees and bonobos and babies and psychopaths. You’ve got to know the differences between them. You’ve got to study the brain and the mind, and you’ve got to put it all together. (…)

We need metaphors and analogies to think about difficult topics, such as morality.  An analogy that Marc Hauser and John Mikhail have developed in recent years is that morality is like language. And I think it’s a very, very good metaphor. It illuminates many aspects of morality. It’s particularly good, I think, for sequences of actions that occur in time with varying aspects of intentionality.

But, once we expand the moral domain beyond harm, I find that metaphors drawn from perception become more illuminating, more useful. I’m not trying to say that the language analogy is wrong or deficient. I’m just saying, let’s think of another analogy, a perceptual analogy.

So if you think about vision, touch, and taste, for all three senses, our bodies are built with a small number of specialized receptors. So, in the eye, we’ve got  four kinds of cells in the retina to detect different frequencies of light. In our skin, we’ve got three kinds of receptors for temperature and pressure and tissue damage or pain. And on our tongues, we have these five kinds of taste receptor.

I think taste offers the closest, the richest, source domain for understanding morality. First, the links between taste, affect, and behavior are as clear as could be. Tastes are either good or bad. The good tastes, sweet and savory, and salt to some extent, these make us feel “I want more.”  They make us want to approach. They say, “this is good.”  Whereas, sour and bitter tell us, “whoa, pull back, stop.”

Second, the taste metaphor fits with our intuitive morality so well that we often use it in our everyday moral language. We refer to acts as “tasteless,” as “leaving a bad taste” in our mouths. We make disgust faces in response to certain violations.

Third, every culture constructs its own particular cuisine, its own way of pleasing those taste receptors. The taste analogy gets at what’s universal—that is, the taste receptors of the moral mind—while it leaves plenty of room for cultural variation. Each culture comes up with its own particular way of pleasing these receptors, using local ingredients, drawing on historical traditions.

And fourth, the metaphor has an excellent pedigree. It was used 2,300 years ago in China by Mencius, who wrote, “Moral principles please our minds as beef and mutton and pork please our mouths.”  It was also a favorite of David Hume, but I’ll come back to that.

So, my goal in this talk is to develop the idea that moral psychology is like the psychology of taste in some important ways.

{ Jonathan Haidt/Edge | Continue reading }

It made me wonder if genius can be defined by the degree to which something intellectual can be felt as a physical experience.

For example, most people feel something when they listen to music. But I suspect gifted musicians feel it in an entirely different way than I do. I could never memorize all the notes in a song because for me it would be an exercise in rote memorization. For someone gifted in music, memorizing a song is easier because such a person would remember how each part felt. Feelings create memories more easily than intellectual experiences. The stronger the feeling, the easier the memory.

{ Scott Adams | Continue reading }

photo { Romain B. James, Rental Elvis in Las Vegas }

Psychologists and philosophers have long debated whether language shapes the way we think. While the most drastic viewpoint – that thought can’t exist without language — has fallen out of favor, psychologists still study more subtle effects.

The first study has to do with gender in language. Many languages assign genders to words. For example, in Spanish, the word for “key” is feminine, while the German word for” key” is masculine. Gender for the most part is arbitrary and varies from language to language, which allows for some interesting experiments. (…) German speakers described keys as hard, heavy, jagged, metal, and useful, while Spanish speakers described them as golden, intricate, little, lovely, and shiny. (…)

In a second experiment, Boroditsky looked at language and the conception of time. English speakers primarily speak of time in horizontal terms. For example, we talk about moving meetings forward, or pushing deadlines back. Mandarin speakers, on the other hand, use up/down metaphors as well. So a Mandarin speaker would refer to the previous week as “up week” and next week as “down week.”

{ Livia Blackburne | Continue reading }

When you say “I’m not going to participate in your art because I think it’s obscene” on the one hand you’re slapping someone in the face — what you think of as beautiful, I think should not be seen but, to be honest, on the other hand you’re often validating them. If people in the main-stream hadn’t freaked out about Robert Maplethorpe you’d probably have no idea who he was, unless you were prone to reading the fine print on the backs of Patti Smith albums. So complaints about art help define it. In part you know if you should like it because of who hates it. And it’s also free advertising.

{ Kyle Cassidy | Continue reading | Thanks Richard! }

Lancey Howard: Gets down to what it’s all about, doesn’t it? Making the wrong move at the right time.

Cincinnati Kid: Is that what it’s all about?

Lancey Howard: Like life, I guess.

{ The Cincinnati Kid, 1965 }

Where does moral law come from? What lies behind our sense of right and wrong? For millennia, there have been two available answers. To the devoutly religious, morality is the word of God, handed down to holy men in groves or on mountaintops. To moral philosophers like Kant, it is a set of rules to be worked out by reason, chin on fist like Rodin’s thinker.

But what if neither is correct? What if our moral judgments are driven instead by more visceral human considerations? And what if one of those is not divine commandment or inductive reasoning, but simply whether a situation, in some small way, makes us feel like throwing up?

This is the argument that some behavioral scientists have begun to make: That a significant slice of morality can be explained by our innate feelings of disgust. A growing number of provocative and clever studies appear to show that disgust has the power to shape our moral judgments. Research has shown that people who are more easily disgusted by bugs are more likely to see gay marriage and abortion as wrong. Putting people in a foul-smelling room makes them stricter judges of a controversial film or of a person who doesn’t return a lost wallet. Washing their hands makes people feel less guilty about their own moral transgressions, and hypnotically priming them to feel disgust reliably induces them to see wrongdoing in utterly innocuous stories.

Today, psychologists and philosophers are piecing these findings together into a theory of disgust’s moral role and the evolutionary forces that determined it: Just as our teeth and tongue first evolved to process food, then were enlisted for complex communication, disgust first arose as an emotional response to ensure that our ancestors steered clear of rancid meat and contagion. But over time, that response was co-opted by the social brain to help police the boundaries of acceptable behavior. Today, some psychologists argue, we recoil at the wrong just as we do at the rancid, and when someone says that a politician’s chronic dishonesty makes her sick, she is feeling the same revulsion she might get from a brimming plate of cockroaches.

{ Boston Globe | Continue reading }

Central banks usually strengthen the economy through a single, vastly powerful tool — lowering interest rates. When the Federal Reserve makes it cheaper for banks to borrow money, that stimulus generally flows through the entire economy, as the banks make loans that in turn stimulate economic activity.

But when times are so dire that banks are reluctant to lend whatever the cost, interest rate cuts lose their punch. That happened in Japan after the bursting of its real-estate bubble in 1991, and happened again in the wake of the credit crisis that upended Wall Street in the fall of 2008. In those circumstances, central banks turn to what economists call “quantitative easing” — unorthodox methods of pumping money into an economy and working to lower interest rates that central bankers do not usually control. Their effect is the same as printing money in vast quantities, but without ever turning on the printing presses.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing (1840–1902) was an Austro-German sexologist and psychiatrist.

He wrote Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) [book cover], a notable series of case studies of the varieties of human sexual behaviour. The book remains well known for his coinage of the terms sadism (from Marquis de Sade whose fictional writings often include brutal sexual practices) and masochism (from writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, whose partly autobiographical novel Venus in Furs tells of the protagonist’s desire to be whipped and enslaved by a beautiful woman). (…)

In the first edition of Psychopathia Sexualis, Krafft-Ebing divided “cerebral neuroses” into four categories:

• paradoxia: Sexual desire at the wrong time of life, i.e. childhood or old age

• anesthesia: Insufficient sexual desire

• hyperesthesia: Excessive sexual desire

• paraesthesia: Sexual desire for the wrong goal or object, including homosexuality (”contrary sexual desire”), sexual fetishism, sadism, masochism, paedophilia , etc.

Krafft-Ebing believed that the purpose of sexual desire was procreation, and that any form of desire that did not go towards that ultimate goal was a perversion. Rape, for instance, was an aberrant act, but not a perversion, because pregnancy could result.

He saw women as sexually passive, and recorded no female sadists or fetishists in his case studies. Behaviour that would be classified as masochism in men was categorized in women as “sexual bondage,” which, because it did not interfere with procreation, was not a perversion.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }