People rarely say what they mean when targeting a goal because the indirect route is usually more efficient in the context of working within a collective where others have competing goals, and so selectively emphasizing process or results to the act or the rule, allows a great deal of rationalization.
In the latest edition of Mind Matters, Susan Whitfield-Gabrieli and John Gabrieli of MIT outline some interesting new research on the link between resting state activity - the performance of the brain when it’s lying still in a brain scanner, doing nothing but daydreaming - and general intelligence.
It turns out that cultivating an active idle mind, or teaching yourself how to daydream effectively, might actually encourage the sort of long-range neural connections that make us smart. At the very least, it’s time we stop discouraging kids from staring out the classroom window, because mind wandering isn’t a waste of time
photo { Christophe Kutner, Road trip 2 }
Ferdinand: Why do you look so sad?
Marianne: Because you speak to me in words and I look at you with feelings.
Ferdinand: I can never have a real conversation with you. You never have ideas, only feelings.
Marianne: That’s not true. There are ideas in feelings.
The real reason, I believe, most wealth is acquired is to gain status. You want to spend money, not just to obtain the material objects, but to signal to everyone else that you have the power to obtain them.
The desire to own doesn’t come just from intrinsic wants, but from what our friends want, and what society tells us we “should” have.
People tend to ignore the status benefits of wealth. Most obviously because seeking status is a low-status behavior. Anyone seen grubbing for fame or new toys to impress their friends becomes less impressive.
As a result, I believe many people delude themselves that they want material possessions for intrinsic reasons. This is an unconscious effort to seek material wealth for purely status-related motives, and at the same time, not appear interested in grubbing for status.
Here’s a curious paradox related to American Sign Language, the system of hand-based gestures used by around 2 million deaf people in the US and elsewhere to communicate.
Almost 40 years ago, researchers discovered that although it takes longer to make signs than to say the equivalent words, on average sentences can be completed in about the same time. How can that be possible?
Today, Andrew Chong and buddies at Princeton University in New Jersey give us the answer. They say that the information content of the 45 handshapes that make up sign language is higher than the information content of phonemes, the building blocks of the spoken word. In other words, there is greater redundancy in spoken English than signed English.
In a way, that’s a trivial explanation, a mere restatement of the problem. What’s impressive about the Princeton contribution is the way they have arrived at this conclusion.
Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic (absorbs heat)?
First, we must know how the mass of Hell is changing over time. So we need to know the rate at which souls are moving into Hell and the rate at which they are leaving. I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to Hell, it will not leave.
Therefore, no souls are leaving. As for how many souls are entering Hell, let’s look at the different religions that exist in the world today. Most of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell. Since there is more than one of these religions and since people do not belong to more than one religion, we can make the assumption that all souls go to Hell. With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially.
Next, we look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell because Boyle’s Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the volume of Hell has to expand proportionately as souls are added. This gives two possibilities:
(1) If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase until all Hell breaks loose.
(2) If Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in Hell, then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over. So which is it?
If we accept the postulate given to me by my Professor during my Freshman year that, “it will be a cold day in Hell before I pass you”, and take into account the fact that I passed his class, then number 2 must be true, and thus I am sure that Hell is exothermic and has already frozen over.
The corollary of this theory is that since Hell has frozen over, it follows that it is not accepting any more souls and is therefore, extinct…
{ via Albany.edu }
Is Heaven hotter than Hell?
The temperature of heaven can be rather accurately computed. Our authority is the Bible, Isaiah 30:26 reads, Moreover, the light of the moon shall be as the light of the sun and the light of the sun shall be sevenfold as the light of seven days. Thus, heaven receives from the moon as much radiation as the earth does from the sun, and in addition seven times seven (forty nine) times as much as the earth does from the sun, or fifty times in all. The light we receive from the moon is one ten-thousandth of the light we receive from the sun, so we can ignore that. With these data we can compute the temperature of heaven: The radiation falling on heaven will heat it to the point where the heat lost by radiation is just equal to the heat received by radiation. In other words, heaven loses fifty times as much heat as the earth by radiation. Using the Stefan-Boltzmann fourth power law for radiation
(H/E)4 = 50
where E is the absolute temperature of the earth, 300°K (273+27). This gives H the absolute temperature of heaven, as 798° absolute (525°C).
The exact temperature of hell cannot be computed but it must be less than 444.6°C, the temperature at which brimstone or sulfur changes from a liquid to a gas. Revelations 21:8: But the fearful and unbelieving… shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone.” A lake of molten brimstone [sulfur] means that its temperature must be at or below the boiling point, which is 444.6°C. (Above that point, it would be a vapor, not a lake.)
We have then, temperature of heaven, 525°C (977°F). Temperature of hell, less than 445°F). Therefore heaven is hotter than hell.
photo { Mark Thiessen }
The success of many attacks on computer systems can be traced back to the security engineers not understanding the psychology of the system users they meant to protect. We examine a variety of scams and “short cons” that were investigated, documented and recreated for the BBC TV programme The Real Hustle and we extract from them some general principles about the recurring behavioural patterns of victims that hustlers have learnt to exploit.
We argue that an understanding of these inherent “human factors” vulnerabilities, and the necessity to take them into account during design rather than naïvely shifting the blame onto the “gullible users”, is a fundamental paradigm shift for the security engineer which, if adopted, will lead to stronger and more resilient systems security.
{ Understanding scam victims: Seven principles for systems security | University of Cambridge | PDF }
illustration { Richard Wilkinson }
I had been mistaken in thinking that I could see clearly into my own heart. But this knowledge which had not been given me by the finest mental perceptions had now been brought to me, hard, glittering, strange, like a crystallised salt, by the abrupt reaction of grief.
Je m’étais trompé en croyant voir clair dans mon cœur. Mais cette connaissance que ne m’avaient pas donnée les plus fines perceptions de l’esprit venait de m’être apportée, dure, éclatante, étrange, comme un sel cristallisé par la brusque réaction de la douleur.
{ Marcel Proust, Albertine Disparue, 1925 | Continue reading | Poursuivez la lecture | Wikipedia }
I would estimate that I spend a good two hours per day reading, writing and commenting on internet content, with absolutely no tangible, material benefit to my life at all.
{ 2Blowhards | Continue reading }
…Beryl Schlossman’s suggestion that in Joyce’s works language is the “hero” and is “at once center and decentering.”
{ Male and Female Creativity in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake | PDF }
It is language which speaks, not the author.
{ Stéphane Mallarmé quoted by Roland Barthes }
Like most interesting words, “maturity” is hard to define. The most literal definition is just “how much you act like an adult.” But since adult behavior varies widely, and we often call some adults “immature,” that’s not very helpful. As far as I can tell, the most important components of maturity are:
1. Orientation toward work rather than play.
2. Taking a long-run view rather than acting impulsively or spontaneously.
3. Being serious rather than silly.
4. Identifying with - and taking the side of - older people.
A colleague disputed a more primitive version of #3. In his view, what people do in their free time can’t affect their “maturity.” I say he’s wrong. I’m quite open to the view that maturity is over-rated, but in ordinary usage there is definitely such a thing as “immature humor.” The Three Stooges is immature, and if you enjoy it, so are you.
So who’s mature, and who’s not? The most obvious generalization is that maturity increases with age. By my criteria, it’s not a necessary truth, but nonetheless hard to deny. Further conjectures:
Higher-IQ people probably tend to be a little more mature, but primarily because they score higher on #2.
“This wizard has a crystal ball which unerringly reads people’s minds,” I said. “All it needs is a psychic whiff of you over the phone.”
“That’s impossible,” he said, “Show me.”
“No problem,” I said, “we can call him right now. Think of a three-digit number.”
“758,” Skep said.
I called the Wizard right away. Here’s what I said over the phone:
“Hello? Is this the Wizard?”
“Well, could I speak to him please?”
“O.K.”
“Hello, Wizard? I have someone here who wants you to guess his number.”
I handed the phone to Skep.
Skep: “Yes, you’re right. The number is 758.”
Skep’s eyebrow was twitching vigorously. “You’re obviously communicating the information in some way,” he said, “though I can’t figure out how.”
{ Tobacco Smoke Enema (1750s-1810s) | via Barry Ritholz | Read more: Wikipedia }
{ Botticelli, La Derelitta, c. 1495 } La Derelitta, ascribed first to Masaccio, then to Botticelli, then to that amiable fiction L’Amico di Sandro, and recently regarded as part of a series of cassone panels executed by the young Filippino Lippi after designs by Botticelli, is a source of discomfort not only to the connoisseur, but also to the student of iconography. The subject is as enigmatic as the authorship. A young woman, shut out of a palace, sits ‘derelict’ on the steps before the gate and weeps. This is the sort of pathetic scene which appealed to nineteenth-century novelists by arousing reflections as to what had happened before and what would happen after. In the mind of a fifteenth-century painter such a response would be, to say the least, an anachronism. At that time the themes of pictures were not meant to prompt flights of the imagination. They formed part of a precise set of ideas. An attempt to reconstruct the correct connotations of the picture called La Derelitta may help to dispel the false sentiment which the false title, most certainly of fairly recent invention, suggests. A decisive step towards finding the clue to the picture was made by Horne and Gamba when they discovered that it belonged to a set of six panels representing the story of Esther, which originally formed the decoration of two marriage chests. { The Subject of Botticelli’s Derelitta by Edgar Wind, 1940 } |
{ Collier and Higgs, I Married An Artist, 2008 } The work is a ’straight’ photograph of a book both artists purchased in Toronto. The book is the autobiography of a woman (Billy Button) who was married to a prominent mid-20th Century Canadian artist. The image has not been digitally altered in any way. { Re-title } |
vaguely related { The frescoes Ambrogio Lorenzetti executed for the city council of Siena in 1338–1339 mark what may be a unique achievement in the history of art: making Heaven, (or at least Heaven on earth), look infinitely more interesting than Hell. | NY Review of Books | Continue reading }
From: Richard Matthews
Date: Tuesday 6 May 2008 8.17pm
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: RoveFuck you coksucker you should be ashamed of what you wrote that was wrong ad you know it How wud you feel if you were rove? why dont you fuck off.
…………………………………………………………………………………….
From: David Thorne
Date: Tuesday 6 May 2008 8.42pm
To: Richard Matthews
Subject: Re: Re: Re: RoveYou’re correct Dick, my statements were uncalled for and unquantifiable in any manner. I apologise without reserve and ask for nothing but your understanding. I hope, in time, you can come to forgive me for such contemptible statements. If I could retract my statements I would but I do not have a time machine. I wish that I did have a time machine, I would take my Macbook Pro back to 1984 and visit Steve Jobs. After selling my laptop to him for millions I would return to the present. I could do this several times as each time the present technologies would have changed. It is a flawless plan, I am sure you will agree, lacking only the availability of time/dimension manipulation technologies.
artwork { Jay DeFeo, The Eyes, 1958 | graphite on paper }
previously { Party in apartment 3 }
The Voynich Manuscript has been dubbed “The Most Mysterious Manuscript in the World.” It is named after its discoverer, the American antique book dealer and collector, Wilfrid M. Voynich, who discovered it in 1912, amongst a collection of ancient manuscripts kept in villa Mondragone in Frascati, near Rome.
No one knows the origins of the manuscript. Experts believe it was written in between the 15th and 17th centuries. The manuscript is small, seven by ten inches, but thick, nearly 235 pages.
Its pages are filled with hand-written text and crudely drawn illustrations. The illustrations depict plants, astrological diagrams, and naked women. The women could represent creation and rebirth of consciousness.
These illustrations are strange, but much stranger is the text itself, because the manuscript is written entirely in a mysterious, unknown alphabet that has defied all attempts at translation.
It is an alphabetic script, but of an alphabet variously reckoned to have from nineteen to twenty-eight letters, none of which bear any relationship to any English or European letter system. The text has no apparent corrections. There is evidence for two different “languages” (investigated by Currier and D’Imperio) and more than one scribe, probably indicating an ambiguous coding scheme.
Apparently, Voynich wanted to have the mysterious manuscript deciphered and provided photographic copies to a number of experts. However, despite the efforts of many well known cryptologists and scholars, the book remains unread. There are some claims of decipherment, but to date, none of these can be substantiated with a complete translation. (…)
The Voynich Manuscript first appears in 1586 at the court of Rudolph II of Bohemia, who was one of the most eccentric European monarchs of that or any other period. Rudolph collected dwarfs and had a regiment of giants in his army. He was surrounded by astrologers, and he was fascinated by games and codes and music. He was typical of the occult-oriented, Protestant noblemen of this period and epitomized the liberated northern European prince. He was a patron of alchemy and supported the printing of alchemical literature. (…)
Over its recorded existence, the Voynich manuscript has been the object of intense study by many professional and amateur cryptographers, including some top American and British codebreakers of World War II fame (all of whom failed to decipher a single word). This string of failures has turned the Voynich manuscript into a famous subject of historical cryptology, but it has also given weight to the theory that the book is simply an elaborate hoax - a meaningless sequence of arbitrary symbols. (…)
By current estimates, the book originally had 272 pages in 17 quires of 16 pages each. Only about 240 vellum pages remain today, and gaps in the page numbering (which seems to be later than the text) indicate that several pages were already missing by the time that Voynich acquired it. A quill pen was used for the text and figure outlines, and colored paint was applied (somewhat crudely) to the figures, possibly at a later date.
The illustrations of the manuscript shed little light on its contents, but imply that the book consists of six “sections”, with different styles and subject matter. Except for the last section, which contains only text, almost every page contains at least one illustration. The sections, and their conventional names, are: The “herbal” section, Astronomical, Cosmological, Pharmaceutical. (…)
The text was clearly written from left to right, with a slightly ragged right margin. Longer sections are broken into paragraphs, sometimes with “bullets” on the left margin. There is no obvious punctuation. The ductus (the speed, care, and cursiveness with which the letters are written) flows smoothly, as if the scribe understood what he was writing when it was written; the manuscript does not give the impression that each character had to be calculated before being put on the page.
The text consists of over 170,000 discrete glyphs, usually separated from each other by thin gaps. Most of the glyphs are written with one or two simple pen strokes. While there is some dispute as to whether certain glyphs are distinct or not, an alphabet with 20-30 glyphs would account for virtually all of the text; the exceptions are a few dozen “weird” characters that occur only once or twice each.
Wider gaps divide the text into about 35,000 “words” of varying length. These seem to follow phonetic or orthographic laws of some sort; e.g. certain characters must appear in each word (like the vowels in English), some characters never follow others, some may be doubled but others may not.
Statistical analysis of the text reveals patterns similar to natural languages. For instance, the word frequencies follow Zipf’s law, and the word entropy (about 10 bits per word) is similar to that of English or Latin texts. Some words occur only in certain sections, or in only a few pages; others occur throughout the manuscript. There are very few repetitions among the thousand or so “labels” attached to the illustrations. In the herbal section, the first word on each page occurs only on that page, and may be the name of the plant.
On the other hand, the Voynich manuscript’s “language” is quite unlike European languages in several aspects. For example, there are practically no words with more than ten “letters”, yet there are also few one or two-letter words.
The distribution of letters within the word is also rather peculiar: some characters only occur at the beginning of a word, some only at the end, and some always in the middle section.
The text seems to be more repetitious than typical European languages; there are instances where the same common word appears up to three times in a row. Words that differ only by one letter also repeat with unusual frequency.
There are only a few words in the manuscript written in a seemingly Latin script. In the last page there are four lines of writing which are written in (rather distorted) Latin letters, except for two words in the main script. The lettering resembles European alphabets of the 15th century, but the words do not seem to make sense in any language.
Also, a series of diagrams in the “astronomical” section has the names of ten of the months (from March to December) written in Latin script, with spelling suggestive of the medieval languages of France or the Iberian Peninsula. However, it is not known whether these bits of Latin script were part of the original text, or were added at a later time. (…)
Dr. Leonell Strong, a cancer research scientist and amateur cryptographer, tried to decipher the Voynich manuscript. Strong said that the solution to the Voynich manuscript was a “peculiar double system of arithmetical progressions of a multiple alphabet”. Strong claimed that the plaintext revealed the Voynich manuscript to be written by the 16th century English author Anthony Ascham, whose works include A Little Herbal, published in 1550. Although the Voynich manuscript does contain sections resembling an herbal, the main argument against this theory is that it is unknown where Anthony would have obtained such literary and cryptographic knowledge. (…)
The first section of the book is almost certainly an herbal, but attempts to identify the plants, either with actual specimens or with the stylized drawings of contemporary herbals, have largely failed. Only a couple of plants (including a wild pansy and the maidenhair fern) can be identified with some certainty. Those “herbal” pictures that match “pharmacological” sketches appear to be “clean copies” of these, except that missing parts were completed with improbable-looking details. In fact, many of the plants seem to be composite: the roots of one species have been fastened to the leaves of another, with flowers from a third.
{ Ellie Crystal | Continue reading | Images | Wikipedia }
Its language is unknown and unreadable, though some believe it bears a message from extraterrestrials. Others say it carries knowledge of a civilisation that is thousands of years old.
But now a British academic believes he has uncovered the secret of the Voynich manuscript, an Elizabethan volume of more than 200 pages that is filled with weird figures, symbols and writing that has defied the efforts of the twentieth century’s best codebreakers and most distinguished medieval scholars.
According to computer expert Gordon Rugg of Keele University, the manuscript represents one of the strangest acts of encryption ever undertaken, one that made its creator, Edward Kelley, an Elizabethan entrepreneur, a fortune before his handiwork was lost to the world for more than 300 years. (…)
But now the computer expert and his team believe they have found the secret of the Voynich manuscript.
They have shown that its various word, which appear regularly throughout the script, could have been created using table and grille techniques. The different syllables that make up words are written in columns, and a grille - a piece of cardboard with three squares cut out in a diagonal pattern - is slid along the columns.
The three syllables exposed form a word. The grille is pushed along to expose three new syllables, and a new word is exposed.
Rugg’s conclusion is that Voynichese - the language of the Voynich manuscript - is utter gibberish, put together as random assemblies of different syllables.
{ The Guardian | Wired }
artwork { Paul Klee, Pfeil im Garten (Arrow in the Garden), 1929 | oil and tempera on canvas }
Everywhere in the media, the former creators of mass consensus devoted themselves to contradicting the conventional wisdom. Here, a selection of the most unlikely ideas in a decade that was always looking to blow your mind.
Amateurs are better than experts. Disorganized crowds of people, so long as they have a diversity of experiences and viewpoints, make better decisions than individual experts. JAMES SUROWIECKI, THE WISDOM OF CROWDS.
Being smart doesn’t help you get ahead. Studies prove that “deliberate practice” fueled by “furious hard work” contributes far more to success in almost every field than innate intelligence or talent. MALCOLM GLADWELL, OUTLIERS: THE STORY OF SUCCESS.
Pimps are good for prostitutes.
Pimps allow prostitutes to earn more with less risk than they would working on their own, by providing protection and a steady client base, and the commission they take is more reasonable than commissions taken by real-estate agents.
LEVITT AND DUBNER, SUPERFREAKONOMICS.
How do you rank yourself among writers (living) and of the immediate past?
I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile– some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket, which I would now like to trace in reply to your question.
Bad Sex in Fiction Awards 2009
Let’s have sex, they think simultaneously, couples having strange mind-reading powers after months and months of trying to figure each other out. (…)
She holds him tight and squeezes her body to his, sending delightful sailing boats tacking to and fro across the ocean of his back. With her fingertips she sends foam-flecked waves scurrying over his skin. (…)
Their tongues met and he felt himself dissolve, like wax melting in the heat. She stepped back slightly and removed his clothes, one by one, and then led him to the thick fur rug in front of the fire. She moaned softly as he entered her.
