If you can be sure of one thing, then surely it is that you exist. Even if the world were a dream or a hallucination, it would still need you to be dreaming or hallucinating it. (…)

There is a wide range of scientific evidence that is used to deny “I think, therefore I am”. In René Descartes’ famous deduction, a coherent, structured experience of the world is inextricably linked with a sense of a self at the heart of it. But as the clinical neuropsychologist Paul Broks explained to me, we now know the two can in fact be separated.

People with Cotard’s syndrome, for instance, can think that they don’t exist, an impossibility for Descartes. Broks describes it as a kind of “nihilistic delusion” in which they “have no sense of being alive in the moment, but they’ll give you their life history”. They think, but they do not have sense that therefore they are.

Then there is temporal lobe epilepsy, which can give sufferers an experience called transient epileptic amnesia. “The world around them stays just as real and vivid – in fact, even more vivid sometimes – but they have no sense of who they are,” Broks explains. This reminds me of Georg Lichtenberg’s correction of Descartes, who he claims was entitled to deduce from “I think” only the conclusion that “there is thought”. This is precisely how it can seem to people with temporal lobe epilepsy: there is thought, but they have no idea whose thought it is.

{ The Independent | Continue reading }

photo { Noritoshi Hirakawa }

In the 2006 movie, Borat: Cutural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, English comedian Sacha Baron Cohen plays the role of an outrageously inappropriate Kazakh television reporter who journeys across the United States to film a documentary about American culture. In the course of his travels, the title character uses his bizarre persona to elicit offensive statements and behavior from, as well as to generally humiliate, a number of ordinary Americans who are clearly not in on the joke. How did the producers convince these unfortunate stooges to participate in the project? According to several who later sued, the producers lied about the identity of Borat and the nature of the movie when setting up the encounters in advance over the telephone, and they then contradicted and disclaimed the lies in a waiver that the stooges signed without reading just before the cameras began to roll.

This talk article explains the doctrinal and normative reasons that the Borat problem, which arises frequently, although usually in more mundane contexts, divides courts. It then suggests an approach for courts to use when facing the problem that minimizes risks of exploitation and costs of contracting.

{ The ‘Borat’ Problem and the Law of Negotiation | Continue reading }

photo { Alpines, the Night Drive EP, 500 individually numbered 10″ Vinyl Discs }

The upper 1 percent of Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income every year. In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1 percent control 40 percent. Their lot in life has improved considerably. Twenty-five years ago, the corresponding figures were 12 percent and 33 percent. One response might be to celebrate the ingenuity and drive that brought good fortune to these people, and to contend that a rising tide lifts all boats. That response would be misguided. While the top 1 percent have seen their incomes rise 18 percent over the past decade, those in the middle have actually seen their incomes fall. For men with only high-school degrees, the decline has been precipitous—12 percent in the last quarter-century alone. All the growth in recent decades—and more—has gone to those at the top. In terms of income equality, America lags behind any country in the old, ossified Europe that President George W. Bush used to deride. Among our closest counterparts are Russia with its oligarchs and Iran.

{ Vanity Fair | Continue reading }

photo { Keith Arnatt }

{ Arseni Khamzin }

During the late Victorian period British women maintained a significant numerical advantage over men such that “almost one in three of all adult women were single and one in four would never marry.” Therefore it is no coincidence that spinsters “provided the backbone” of the women’s suffrage movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. These spinster-led feminists opposed patriarchal exploitation and challenged “the idea that male sexuality was a powerful and uncontrollable urge,” and in the course of their activism drew much needed attention to other related problems such as prostitution and the abuse of girls. But by presenting such resistance to the status quo their rising success roused an equally powerful countervailing enemy whose rise to power was intimately connected to the proponents of the “sexual revolution” that came to fruition in the 1920s.

{ Swans| Continue reading }

The annals of business history are full of tales of companies that once dominated their industries but fell into decline. The usual reasons offered don’t fully explain how the leaders who had steered these firms to greatness lost their touch.

In this article we argue that success can breed failure by hindering learning at both the individual and the organizational level. We all know that learning from failure is one of the most important capacities for people and companies to develop. Yet surprisingly, learning from success can present even greater challenges.

{ Harvard Business Review | Continue reading }

photo { Horace Vernet, Mazeppa and the Wolves, 1826 }

I have always suffered with having a (my girlfriend calls it) gi-normous penis. Imagine have two soda cans duct tapped together in your pants. I have always had a hard time sitting down and forget about it if I have an erection. (…) Have you ever been asked to GO HOME from your boss because you were distracting co-workers?

{ Amazon.com | Comments }

On June 30, 1999, sheriff’s officers in St. Louis, Missouri discovered the body of 41-year-old Ricky McCormick. He had been murdered and dumped in a field. The only clues regarding the homicide were two encrypted notes found in the victim’s pants pockets.

Despite extensive work by our Cryptanalysis and Racketeering Records Unit (CRRU), as well as help from the American Cryptogram Association, the meanings of those two coded notes remain a mystery to this day, and Ricky McCormick’s murderer has yet to face justice. (…)

The more than 30 lines of coded material use a maddening variety of letters, numbers, dashes, and parentheses.

{ FBI.gov | Continue reading }

related { Kryptos, a sculpture by Jim Sanborn commissioned by the CIA. Since its dedication on November 3, 1990, there has been much speculation about the meaning of the encrypted messages it bears. Of the four sections, three have been solved, with the fourth remaining one of the most famous unsolved codes in the world. | Wired | Wikipedia | Thanks Tim }

Waiting is the period we endure until the expected happens. We wait for all sorts of things: the bus, dinner, colleagues who are late for a meeting, the rain to stop, etc. Waiting is built into our social lives. And our waiting behavior is influenced by a fair number of variables. There isn’t a prescribed method for waiting, and yet waiting in certain contexts tends toward a similar pattern of group impatience leading to aggressive strategies that are meant to better position the waiting individual for the event.

It may be that people are responding to a need to defend their territory. Territories are defined as areas that are controlled through established boundaries that are defended as necessary. There are private and public territories. Homes are private territories that are largely controlled by residents with little to no challenge for ownership from outside parties. However public territories, such as waiting rooms and phone booths, are temporary territories where “ownership” or residence may be challenged simply by the presence of others.

Researchers Ruback, Pape, and Doriot report that traditionally people appear to leave an area more quickly when the space around them has been “invaded.” For example, people tend to cross the street faster when grouped with strangers (perhaps this explains New Yorkers’ tendency for speed walking?), and researchers have found that library patrons will change seats or leave if strangers sit at the same table.

{ Anthropology in Practice | Continue reading }

Many people like mathematics because it gives definite answers. Things are either true or false, and true things seem true in a very fundamental way.

The fact is, however, that mathematics has been moving on somewhat shaky philosophical ground for some time now. With the work of the logician Kurt Gödel and others in the 1930s it became clear that there are limits to the power of mathematics to pin down truth. In fact, it’s possible to build different versions of mathematics in which certain statements are true or false depending on your preference. This raises the possibility that mathematics is little more than a game in which we choose the rules to suit our purpose.

{ Plus mag | Continue reading }

related { Researchers have found a fractal pattern underlying everyday math. In the process, they’ve discovered a way to calculate partition numbers, a challenge that’s stymied mathematicians for centuries. | Wired | full story }

One of the mysteries of human behavior is why we sometimes act with completely selfless altruism. When asked to play totally anonymous games in which we can cheat without anyone else ever finding out, very often we don’t.

Instead, we play the game fairly, which results in a cost to ourselves (compared with what we could’ve had) and a benefit to the stranger. That’s a mystery because evolution says that organisms which don’t act to maximize benefit to themselves - whatever the cost to others - should die out.

Several explanations have been put forward, but one of the most intriguing stems from the fact that we live in social networks. In a network like this, we depend critically on the kindness of others.

A new study has looked at how altruistic behavior can be transmitted between players in the kinds of anonymous games that social psychologists are so fond of.

What they found was that the amount individuals contributed in one round was affected by how generous their partners were in previous rounds. If they played with generous people in round 1, then they would be more generous to the new partners they had in round 2. In fact, they showed that this effect was propagated through new partners.

Unselfish acts propagated out to 3 degrees of separation. When you remember that only 6 degrees of separation stand between you and every other person on the planet, you can understand how powerful and important this effect is.

{ Epiphenom | Continue reading }

Most people with an interest in evolution understand why selfish genes do not mean selfish individuals. It’s clear that selfish genes will benefit from co-operation (you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours, also known as reciprocity), and kin selection (as the biologist JBS Haldane famously put it, “I would lay down my life for two brothers or eight cousins”).

What most people may not know (I certainly didn’t before reading West’s article) is that these, in fact, are the sole genetic basis for altruism. But if that’s the case, how do you get from here to the apparently completely selfless altruism sometimes seen in humans?

Reciprocity doesn’t need to be direct to be effective. If, by sharing with you I help to set up a virtuous circle, that will likely result in some benefit to me down the line. This has been seen in practice, with virtuous deeds propagating out to at least three degrees of separation.

{ Epiphenom | Continue reading }

photo { Noah Kalina }

Magnetism remains the most developed way to store digital information. The giga and terabytes of computer hard drives as well as the magnetic stripes that still are used for credit cards or hotel room keys, all function with the help of magnetic fields. There, the direction of the magnetic fields, up or down, expresses the digital 0s and 1s that make up the computer bits and bytes.

As the amount of data we store on hard drives continues to increase, it is of course desirable that read and write speeds follow that trend. (…)

In a paper published in advance on the Nature website this week, Ilie Radu, Theo Rasing from Radboud University in Nijmegen and others have investigated the details of the optical switching proceeds for a particular class of magnets, antiferromagnets.

{ All that matters | Continue reading }

photo { James Bond’s Rolex activates a “Hyper intensified magnetic field” “powerful enough to even deflect the path of a bullet at long range in Live and Let Die, 1971 }

Language, according to Benveniste, is the only semiotic system capable of interpreting another semiotic system. How, then, does language manage when it has to interpret music? Alas, it seems, very badly. If one looks at the normal practice of music criticism (or, which is often the same thing, of conversations “on” music), it can readily be seen that a work (or its performance) is only ever translated into the poorest of linguistic categories: the adjective. Music, by natural bent, is that which at once receives an adjective.

The adjective is inevitable: this music is this, this execution is that. No doubt the moment we turn an art into a subject (for an article, for a conversation) there is nothing left but to give it predicates; in the case of music, however, such predication unfailingly takes the most facile and trivial form, that of the epithet. Naturally, this epithet, to which we are constantly led by weakness or fascination (little parlour game: talk about a piece of music without using a single adjective), has an economic function: the predicate is always the bulwark with which the subject’s imaginary protects itself from the loss which threatens it. The man who provides himself or is provided with an adjective is now hurt, now pleased, but always constituted.

{ Roland Barthes, The Grain of the Voice, | Continue reading }

Microsoft’s recent takedown of the world’s largest spam engine offered tantalizing new clues to the identity and earnings of the Rustock botmasters. The data shows that Rustock’s curators made millions by pimping rogue Internet pharmacies, but also highlights the challenges that investigators still face in tracking down those responsible for building and profiting from this complex crime machine.

Earlier this month, Microsoft crippled Rustock by convincing a court to let it seize dozens of Rustock control servers that were scattered among several U.S.-based hosting providers. Shortly after that takedown, I began following the money trail to learn who ultimately paid the botnet controllers’ hosts for their services.

According to interviews with investigators involved in the Rustock takedown, approximately one-third of the control servers were rented from U.S. hosting providers by one entity: A small business in Eastern Europe that specializes in reselling hosting services to shadowy individuals who frequent underground hacker forums.

{ Brian Krebs | Continue reading }

The nature of complexity is different in the economic realm from that in physical systems because it can stem from people gaming, from changing the rules and assumptions of the system. Ironically, “game theory” is not suited to addressing this source of complexity. But military theory is. (…)

Game theory began with the insights of John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern in their book, The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. They defined a game as an interaction between agents governed by a set of rules that specified possible moves for each participant and the set of outcomes for each possible set of moves. The theory of games rests on defined rules and outcomes. It also assumes rationality. “Rational” means “logical.” (…)

The military theorist John Boyd used this phrase to convey the essential point that warfare is not a game. Or if you want to think of it as a game, it is a game that is ill-defined, with rules that are, put gently, subject to interpretation. Thus, he said, for any strategy, “if it works, it is obsolete. Yesterday’s rules won’t work today”. This point was also made by the great German Field Marshall Helmuth von Moltke: “In war as in art there exist no general rules; in neither can talent be replaced by precept.” That is, plans – and models – don’t work because the enemy does not cooperate with the assumptions on which they are based. In fact the enemy tries to discover and actively undermine any assumptions of his opponent.

{ Rick Bookstaber | Continue reading }

The art of the before-and-after photograph

In the first decade of the 20th century, Madame C.J. Walker — an African-American entrepreneur who made a fortune selling hair care products — demonstrated the dramatic results her wares could deliver via advertisements that used before-and-after photos of Madame Walker herself.

In Madame Walker’s “before” photo, her hair is short and kinky. In two “after” shots, it’s long, silky, and luxurious. In this regard, the sequence helped establish the parameters of the before-and-after format in the realm of advertising. The technique wasn’t just for showing incremental change. It was for showing fantastic, life-altering transformations, metamorphoses so amazing they’d be downright unbelievable were they not being depicted in a medium as ostensibly incapable of deceit as photography.

{ The Smartest | Continue reading }

{ Jean-Pierre Léaud in François Truffaut’s Domicile Conjugal, 1970 }

If photography is to be discussed on a serious level, it must be described in relation to death. It’s true that a photograph is a witness, but a witness of something that is no more. Even if the person in the picture is still alive, it’s a moment of this subject’s existence that was photographed, and this moment is gone. This is an enormous trauma for humanity, a trauma endlessly renewed. Each reading of a photo and there are billions worldwide in a day, each perception and reading of a photo is implicitly, in a repressed manner, a contract with what has ceased to exist, a contract with death.

{ Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida }

photo { John Gutmann }

Why is aspirin toxic to cats?

One animal’s cure can be another animal’s poison. Take aspirin – it’s one of the most popular drugs on the market and we readily use it as a painkiller. But cats are extremely sensitive to aspirin, and even a single extra-strength pill can trigger a fatal overdose. Vets will sometimes prescribe aspirin to cats but only under very controlled doses.

The problem is that cats can’t break down the drug effectively. They take a long time to clear it from their bodies, so it’s easy for them to build up harmful concentrations. This defect is unusual – humans clearly don’t suffer from it, and neither do dogs. All cats, however, seem to share the same problem, from house tabbies to African lions.

{ Discover | Continue reading }

The term big cat – which is not a biological classification – is used informally to distinguish the larger felid species from smaller ones. One definition of “big cat” includes the four members of the genus Panthera: the tiger, lion, jaguar, and leopard. Members of this genus are the only cats able to roar. A more expansive definition of “big cat” also includes the cheetah, snow leopard, clouded leopard, and cougar.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }