On 21 October 1984, François Truffaut dies of brain cancer. He is 52 years old. Jean-Luc Godard does not attend the funeral, which, in Montmartre Cemetery, brings together the whole family of French Cinema. For ten years the two filmmakers have been enemies. Since 1973 the two former friends, leaders of the New Wave, have not seen each other. (…)
Letter from Jean-Luc Godard to Truffaut end of May 1973: “Probably nobody will call you a liar. Well, I will. It’s not more of an insult than ‘fascist.’ It’s a critique. And it’s the absence of critique in such films, your film, and in the films of Chabrol, Ferreri, Verneuil, Delannoy, Renoir, etc., which I complain about.” (…)
Truffaut’s answer to Jean-Luc Godard, June 1973: (…) Fake! Dandy! Show off! You’ve always been a show off and a fake, like when you sent a telegram to de Gaulle for his prostate. Fake, when you accused Chauvet of being corrupt because he was the last, the only one to resist you! Fake when you practice the amalgam, when you treat Renoir and Verneuil as the same, as equivalent.
Several studies suggest that memories can be pharmaceutically dampened. For example, researchers recently showed that a drug called ZIP causes cocaine-addicted rats to forget the locations where they had regularly been receiving cocaine. Other drugs, already tested in humans, may ease the emotional pain associated with memories of traumatic events.
Many are alarmed by the prospect of pharmaceutical memory manipulation. In this brief comment, I argue that these fears are overblown. Thoughtful regulation may someday be appropriate, but excessive hand-wringing now over the ethics of tampering with memory could stall research into promising methods of preventing and treating post-traumatic stress.
Defamiliarization or ostranenie is the artistic technique of forcing the audience to see common things in an unfamiliar or strange way, in order to enhance perception of the familiar.
Neuroscientists know that the brain contains some 100 billion neurons and that the neurons are joined together via an estimated quadrillion (one million billion) connections. It’s through those links that the brain does the remarkable work of learning and storing memory. Yet scientists have never mapped that whole web of neural contact, known as the connectome. It would be as if doctors knew about each of our bones in isolation but had never seen an entire skeleton. The sheer complexity of the connectome has put such a map out of reach until now.
The problem with the web is that it largely began as a world separate from meatspace. Today, most people use their real names, but this wasn’t always the case. When I started going online in the mid-90s, no one even knew my gender. I preferred that, not because I was hiding, but because I feel very strongly that I should be judged by my thoughts, not who people assume I am by seeing I am a woman, by attaching a handful of preconceived notions to what I am saying because they see my photo and think I’m too young or too old or attractive or unattractive. (…)
There is nothing wrong with wishing that it were possible to compartmentalize your digital conversations in the same way you do your meatspace exchanges. Unfortunately for us, this is not the direction the web is going, which is why pseudonymous accounts and the networks who accept them are so very, very important.
A Christian missionary sets out to convert a remote Amazonian tribe. He lives with them for years in primitive conditions, learns their extremely difficult language, risks his life battling malaria, giant anacondas, and sometimes the tribe itself. In a plot twist, instead of converting them he loses his faith, morphing from an evangelist trying to translate the Bible into an academic determined to understand the people he’s come to respect and love.
Along the way, the former missionary discovers that the language these people speak doesn’t follow one of the fundamental tenets of linguistics, a finding that would seem to turn the field on its head, undermine basic assumptions about how children learn to communicate, and dethrone the discipline’s long-reigning king, who also happens to be among the most well-known and influential intellectuals of the 20th century.
Philosophically, a realist is someone who holds that our theories are descriptions of how the world really is. Yet realist explanations of the behaviour of elementary particles face a fundamental challenge. Although electrons, for example, would seem to be simple entities – they have no internal structure – a satisfactory description of their behaviour in classical Newtonian terms, as if they were little balls, proved impossible. Theorists therefore turned to building mathematical models which could predict electron behaviour rather than explain electrons in realist terms.
Instrumentalism is this view that theories are useful for explaining and predicting phenomena, rather than that they necessarly describe the world. Yet the mathematical apparatus underpinning such instrumentalism, such as Dirac’s use of infinite-dimensional Hilbert [abstract mathematical] spaces, and Feynman’s sums-over-all-possible-histories, are so powerful, and so beautiful, that the lack of a convincing realist alternative has so far not proved to be a significant handicap in the development of quantum physics and its technological applications. In fact, quantum theory in its instrumental form has provided the most successful explanation of all time, by being the most powerful of all scientific theories. But Deutsch wants a realist quantum theory.
People with autism have a greater than normal capacity for processing information even from rapid presentations and are better able to detect information defined as ‘critical’, according to a study published today in the ‘Journal of Abnormal Psychology’. The research may help to explain the apparently higher than average prevalence of people with autism spectrum disorders in the IT industry.
Codex Seraphinianus, originally published in 1981, is an illustrated encyclopedia of an imaginary world, created by the Italian artist, architect and industrial designer Luigi Serafini during thirty months, from 1976 to 1978. The book is approximately 360 pages long (depending on edition), and written in a strange, generally unintelligible alphabet. (…)
The book is an encyclopedia in manuscript with copious hand-drawn colored-pencil illustrations of bizarre and fantastical flora, fauna, anatomies, fashions, and foods. It has been compared to the Voynich manuscript,[3] “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, and the works of M.C. Escher[6] and Hieronymus Bosch. (…)
In a talk at the Oxford University Society of Bibliophiles held on 12 May 2009, Serafini stated that there is no meaning hidden behind the script of the Codex, which is asemic; that his own experience in writing it was closely similar to automatic writing; and that what he wanted his alphabet to convey to the reader is the sensation that children feel in front of books they cannot yet understand, although they see that their writing does make sense for grown-ups.
{ Barneys New York logo by Chermayeff & Geismar | “Barney’s” was a long-established New York institution known for medium-priced clothing for men and boys. When the ownership decided to upgrade to a high-fashion, high-priced emporium for women’s as well as men’s wear, an elegant new logo was developed. By eliminating the apostrophe, adding the words New York, and using a classic typestyle, the store’s graphic and verbal identity was transformed. | Chermayeff & Geismar | more }
A Star Trek-style cloaking technique allows people to spy on your Facebook account in a way that is difficult to spot and even harder to stop, say computer scientists.
{ 1. Medical drawing of a cross-section of President Kennedy’s neck and chest, showing the trajectory of the projectile from back to throat. | 2. Diagram showing the trajectory of the missile through President Kennedy’s skull. The skull fragments are shown exploded for illustrative purposes; most stayed attached to the skull by skin flaps. | John F. Kennedy autopsy | Wikipedia }
Love is an alien invasion coordinated with sleeper cell revolts. Someone penetrates you and leaves behind a colony that allows the monster inside them to ventriloquize your thoughts. It’s the opportunity that that part of us which cries out to be dominated and longs to be victimized has been waiting for ever since we were born. Everyone knows the best scene in The Manchurian Candidate is the one where Frank Sinatra and Janet Leigh meet on the train. It captures the indistinguishabilty of love from brainwashing, even and especially at its inception. Love is a cancer. You can’t just cut it out. You have to poison your whole body to beat it, kill yourself just enough to keep on living. Love is White Power. Love is Vichy France.
–-Rick Santorum, National Association of Women Against Women, inaugural address
