{ The Great Pyramid, built for the Pharaoh Khufu in about 2570 B.C., sole survivor of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, and still arguably the most mysterious structure on the planet. | Inside the Great Pyramid | Smithsonian | The Secret Doors Inside the Great Pyramid | Guardians }
This article looks at how previous practice of portraiture prepared the way for self-presentation on social networking sites. A portrait is not simply an exercise in the skillful or “realistic” depiction of a subject. Rather, it is a rhetorical exercise in visual description and persuasion and a site of intricate communicative processes. A long evolution of visual culture, intimately intertwined with evolving notions of identity and society, was necessary to create the conditions for the particular forms of self-representation we encounter on Facebook. Many of these premodern strategies prefigure ones we encounter on Facebook. By delineating the ways current practices reflect earlier ones, we can set a baseline from which we can isolate the precise novelty of current practice in social networking sites. (…)
Although a Velasquez portrait does not look much like a Facebook page, it fulfills many of the same functions. A portrait by Velasquez, hanging in the grand palace of Madrid, articulates an image of royal power and privilege to those permitted to view it, and thus reinforces the sitter’s right to certain prerogatives and respects.
In a bizarre repeat of a high-profile incident last year, an Apple employee once again appears to have lost an unreleased iPhone in a bar.
Last year, an iPhone 4 prototype was bought by a gadget blog that paid $5,000 in cash. This year’s lost phone seems to have taken a more mundane path: it was taken from a Mexican restaurant and bar and may have been sold on Craigslist for $200. Still unclear are details about the device, what version of the iOS operating system it was running, and what it looks like.
Asian elephants have long been considered somewhat antisocial. Instead of living in large, tightly knit herds, as do female elephants on the African savanna, those in Asia were thought to have only small groups of friends and few outside connections. But a new study shows that many female Asian elephants are more like social butterflies, with numerous pals. And they’re able to maintain strong friendships even with those they have not seen in a year or more.
The study adds Asian elephants to a short list of other species, including dolphins, that are able to maintain complex social relationships despite not having daily contact, an ability regarded as being cognitively demanding.
{ Science | Continue reading | Read more: Elephant Research }
Elephants know the difference between good vibrations and bad, according to new research into the big animals’ low, rumbling alarm calls. They pay attention to seismic waves made by elephants they know and ignore those of strangers.
photo { Nick Brandt }
Teorema (1968) is an Italian language movie directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini and starring Terence Stamp. It was the first time Pasolini worked primarily with professional actors. (…)
Terence Stamp plays a mysterious figure who appears in the lives of a typical bourgeois Italian family. He engages in sexual affairs with all members of the household: the devoutly religious maid, the sensitive son, the sexually repressed mother, the timid daughter and, finally, the tormented father. The stranger gives unstintingly of himself, asking nothing in return. Then one day he leaves, as suddenly and mysteriously as he came.
Teorema means theorem in Italian. Its Greek root is theorima, meaning simultaneously “spectacle,” “intuition,” and “theorem.”
related:
Paraconsistent mathematics is a type of mathematics in which contradictions may be true. In such a system it is perfectly possible for a statement A and its negation not A to both be true.
How can this be, and be coherent? (…)
This statement is false.
To be true, the statement has to be false, and vice versa. Many brilliant minds have been afflicted with many agonising headaches over this problem, and there isn’t a single solution that is accepted by all. But perhaps the best-known solution (at least, among philosophers) is Tarski’s hierarchy, a consequence of Tarski’s undefinability theorem.
In a nutshell, Tarski’s hierarchy assigns semantic concepts (such as truth and falsity) a level. To discuss whether a statement is true, one has to switch into a higher level of language. Instead of merely making a statement, one is making a statement about a statement. A language may only meaningfully talk about semantic concepts from a level lower than it. Thus a sentence such as the liar’s sentence simply isn’t meaningful. By talking about itself, the sentence attempts unsuccessfully to make a claim about the truth of a sentence of its own level. (…)
How does a paraconsistent perspective address these paradoxes? The paraconsistent response to the classical paradoxes and contradictions is to say that these are interesting facts to study, instead of problems to solve.
The human cannonball is a performance in which a person (the “cannonball”) is ejected from a specially designed cannon. The impetus is provided not by gunpowder, but by either a spring or jet of compressed air. In a circus performance, gunpowder may be used to provide visual and auditory effects, but this is unrelated to the launching mechanism.
The first human cannonball, in 1877 at the Royal Aquarium in London, was a 14 year-old girl called Zazel.
Historian A.H. Coxe says of 50 human cannonballs more than 30 have been killed, mostly by falling outside the net.
{ Wikipedia | The Straight Dope }
photo { Tereza Vlčková }
According to Descartes’ model, any real understanding of the body could only come from taking it apart, just as one takes apart a machine to discover its inner workings. If we wish to understand how a clock tells time, according to this model, our job is to disassemble it. Understanding a clock means understanding its springs and gears. And the same is true of living “machines.”
This notion of the body as a machine would clear away centuries of intellectual detritus: By arguing that the body was the sum of its interacting parts, and, more importantly, by suggesting that the study of those parts would reveal the workings of the body, Descartes shifted centuries of scientific and philosophical discussion about imponderable life forces and inexplicable animist vapors. (Lest we go overboard in praising Descartes, he clearly panicked at the last moment. He exempted human beings from the ground rules he set for other living organisms. In so doing, he sowed 400 years of confusion and discord with his notion that the mind and the body were separate phenomena, governed by separate rules.) (…)
But living systems are not really clocklike in their assembly, and organisms are not really machines. (…) The number of elements that compose any living system—an ecosystem, an organism, an organ or a cell—is enormous. In living systems, the specific identities of these component parts matter. Unlike chemistry, for instance, in which an electron in a lithium atom is identical to an electron in a gold atom, all proteins in a cell are not equivalent or interchangeable. Each protein is the result of its own evolutionary trajectory. We understand and exploit their similarities, but their differences matter to us just as much. Perhaps most importantly, the relations between the components of living systems are complex, context-dependent and weak. In mechanical machines, the conversation taking place between the parts involves clear and unambiguous interactions. These interactions result in simple causes and effects: They are instructions barked down a simple chain of command.
In living systems, by contrast, virtually every interesting bit of biological machinery is embedded in a very large web of weak interactions. And this network of interactions gives rise to a discussion among the parts that is less like a chain of command and more like a complex court intrigue: ambiguous whispers against a noisy and distracting background. As a result, the same interaction between a regulatory protein and a segment of DNA can lead to different (and sometimes opposite) outcomes depending on which other proteins are present in the vicinity. The firing of a neuron can act to amplify the signal coming from other neurons or act instead to suppress it, based solely on the network in which the neuron is embedded. (…)
We have revealed the elegant workings of neurons in exquisite detail, but the material understanding of consciousness remains elusive. We have sequenced human genomes in their entirety, but the process that leads from a genome to an organism is still poorly understood. We have captured the intricacies of photosynthesis, and yet the consequences of rising carbon-dioxide levels for the future of the rain forests remain frustratingly hazy.
Choice is a central tenet of a free society. From the brand of cereal we eat for breakfast, to the answers we give on a survey, or the people we select to be our leaders, we frequently define ourselves by the choices we make. Yet a recent study appearing in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology suggests that there are factors that can significantly influence our free will without us even knowing it.
In their article ‘Preferring the One in the Middle: Further Evidence for the Centre-stage Effect’, researchers Paul Rodway, Astrid Schepman and Jordana Lambert of the University of Chester, UK analyze three separate but related experiments in which they tested the association between the location of an item in a series and how often that item is selected as preferable over other choices. The results indicate a clear tendency toward favoring items located in the middle of a row – regardless of whether it runs horizontally or vertically. (…)
This research builds on previous studies showing that middle preference is applicable to non-identical items as well as items arranged vertically and those that appear in the form of a questionnaire. More broadly, Rodway concluded, “it’s possible that this preference applies in a range of social contexts, including televised political debates where being in the middle may convey an advantage.”
screenshot { Frederick Wiseman, The Store, 1983 }
The majority of people reading this sentence will, at some point in their lives, undergo a medical treatment that requires general anesthesia. Doctors will inject them with a drug, or have them breathe it in. For several hours, they will be unconscious. And almost all of them will wake up happy and healthy.
We know that the general anesthetics we use today are safe. But we know that because they’ve proven themselves to be safe, not because we understand the mechanisms behind how they work. The truth is, at that level, anesthetics are a big, fat question mark.
On a peninsula southeast of Beijing, developer Vincent Lee wants to copy New York City—literally.
Two years into its ten-year construction plan, Yujiapu is still a field of cranes, fenced along the perimeter and hazy behind the smog. The only thing that resembles New York City is a diorama in the lobby of Binhai New Area CBD Office, where bureaucrats like Vincent Lee of the Business Bureau, are working to deliver on their ambitious promise of making this 3.86 sq km area the “largest single financial center on the world.”
oil on board { Richard Estes, Staten Island Ferry Arriving Manhattan, 2011 }
The cataclysmic extinctions that scoured Earth 200 million years ago might have been easier to trigger than expected, with potentially troubling contemporary implications.
Rather than 600,000 years of volcanic activity choking Earth’s atmosphere with carbon dioxide, just a few thousand years apparently sufficed to raise ocean temperatures so potent greenhouse gases trapped in seafloor mud came bubbling up.
Much of everything alive on Earth was soon wiped out. Another half-million years of vulcanism were just icing on the cake. The immediate question: What lessons, if any, can be drawn?
It wasn’t until the latter half of the 17th century that the first truly scientific account of female ejaculation would be presented, this by a Dutch gynecologist named Reinjier De Graaf, precisely distinguishing between vaginal lubrication, which facilitates intercourse, and female ejaculation, which is tantamount to seminal emission. “This liquid was clearly not designed by Nature to moisten the urethra (as some people think),” wrote De Graaf, describing the “pituito-serous juice” sometimes excreted around the time of female orgasm. (…)
Fast-forward to 1952, past the historical hordes of women secretly ejaculating in mass confusion, and we arrive at the offices of German-born gynecologist Ernest Gräfenberg, who, while the contributions of De Graaf and others are often overlooked, is credited with “discovering” an erotic zone on the anterior wall of the vagina running along the course of the urethra. Ernest, in other words, is the one who first christened your “G-spot.” (…)
It wasn’t until 1982 that female ejaculate was first chemically analyzed. If it’s not urine, and it’s not semen, then what, exactly, is it? (…) It’s rather odd that we still don’t have a name for this substance that 40 percent of women report having produced liberally at least once in their lives.
Annie Platoff, a librarian at UC Santa Barbara, is on a mission to find out what happened to the American flags that astronauts planted on the moon during the six lunar landings.
Platoff’s research pinpointed four of them, including the one from Apollo 17, the final lunar mission. At the very least, the nylon national symbols are “tattered” and have “darkened” over the years. She speculates that the other two, planted during Apollo 11 and Apollo 12, fell victim to the ignition gases emitted from the lunar module during blast-off.
artwork { Jasper Johns, Green Flag, 1956 | Graphite pencil, crayon and collage on paper }
Lisa and Louise Burns, the actresses who played the Grady daughters, are identical twins; however, the characters in the book and film script are merely sisters, not twins.
{ Wikipedia }
Stuart Ullman: My predecessor in this job left a man named Charles Grady as the Winter caretaker. And he came up here with his wife and two little girls, I think were eight and ten. And he had a good employment record, good references, and from what I’ve been told he seemed like a completely normal individual. But at some point during the winter, he must have suffered some kind of a complete mental breakdown. He ran amuck and killed his family with an axe. Stacked them neatly in one of the rooms in the West wing and then he, he put both barrels of a shot gun in his mouth.
Diane Arbus, Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey, 1967. The Grady Twins are a reference to Diane Arbus’s photo. Stanley Kubrick was a friend of the photographer.
{ Suicide methods differ between men and women. Men nearly twice as likely as women to use a method that disfigures the face or head when taking their own lives. | EurekAlert }
I’m having one of those days in which I never had a future. There is only a present, fixed and surrounded by a wall of anguish. (…)
I was abandoned in a corner where I could hear other children playing. I feel in my hands the broken toy I was given out of malicious irony.
{ Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet | Continue reading }
photo { Alexey Titarenko }
Every day we make thousands of tiny predictions — when the bus will arrive, who is knocking on the door, whether the dropped glass will break. Now, in one of the first studies of its kind, researchers at Washington University in St. Louis are beginning to unravel the process by which the brain makes these everyday prognostications. (…)
The researchers focused on the mid-brain dopamine system (MDS), an evolutionarily ancient system that provides signals to the rest of the brain when unexpected events occur. (…)
Zacks and his colleagues are building a theory of how predictive perception works. At the core of the theory is the belief that a good part of predicting the future is the maintenance of a mental model of what is happening now. Now and then, this model needs updating, especially when the environment changes unpredictably.
“When we watch everyday activity unfold around us, we make predictions about what will happen a few seconds out,” Zacks says. “Most of the time, our predictions are right.
“Successfull predictions are associated with the subjective experience of a smooth stream of consciousness. But a few times a minute, our predictions come out wrong and then we perceive a break in the stream of consciousness, accompanied by an uptick in activity of primitive parts of the brain involved with the MDS that regulate attention and adaptation to unpredicted changes.”
