And when once life asked me: ‘Who is she then, this Wisdom?’
{ Zoe Strauss }
Core of my heart, my country
Over break I went out with a buddy of mine and played some darts. This got me to thinking, where exactly should someone aim in order to get the largest expected number of points? (…)
Well, something that I didn’t quite realize before I started this adventure is that while the double bullseye in the center is worth 50 points, the triple 20 is worth more: 60 points.
For the uninitiated, in games like 501 you score points based on where the dart falls. The center is the bullseye, where the inner most circle is worth 50 and the ring around it is worth 25, after that you score depending on which of the pie slice things you fall in, the points being the number on the slice. The little ring around the outside is worth double points, and the little ring at about half the board radius is worth triple points.
So perhaps the triple 20 is where you should be aiming all the time.
In order to answer a question like that, we need to develop a model for dart throwing. In this case, I thought it was safe to assume that dart throws are normally distributed about the place you aim, with some sigma determined by your skill level.
artwork { Jasper Johns, Target with Four Faces , 1955 }
Toothpaste and two space(s)
Last month, Gawker published a series of messages that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange had once written to a 19-year-old girl he’d become infatuated with. Gawker called the e-mails “creepy,” “lovesick,” and “stalkery.”
(…) What really surprised me was his typography.
When he sits down to type, Julian Assange reverts to an antiquated habit that would not have been out of place in the secretarial pools of the 1950s: He uses two spaces after every period. Which—for the record—is totally, completely, utterly, and inarguably wrong.
Oh, Assange is by no means alone. Two-spacers are everywhere.
artwork { Karsten Konrad, Black eye, 2010 }
Like exude of margary!
{ Assistants at work in Takashi Murakami’s New York Studio. | Five art superstars in their studios | The Guardian | full story }
And goodnight to Mathilda too
When we cry, we may be doing more than expressing emotion. Our tears, according to striking new research, may be sending chemical signals that influence the behavior of other people.
The research, published on Thursday in the journal Science, could begin to explain something that has baffled scientists for generations: Why do humans, unlike seemingly any other species, cry emotional tears?
In several experiments, researchers found that men who sniffed drops of women’s emotional tears became less sexually aroused than when they sniffed a neutral saline solution that had been dribbled down women’s cheeks.
artwork { Jules Joseph Lefebvre, Mary Magdalene In The Cave, 1876 }
But I was afraid it might break and get lost up in me somewhere yes because they once took something down out of a woman that was up there for years covered with limesalts
The Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy, has come out with its list of Top Risks for 2011. (…)
1 — The G-Zero:
We are entering the era of G-Zero, a world order in which no country or bloc of countries has the political and economic leverage to drive an international agenda. The US lacks the resources to continue as primary provider of public goods, and rising powers are too preoccupied with problems at home to welcome the burdens that come with international leadership. As a result, economic efficiency will be reduced and serious conflicts will arise.2 — Europe:
While the eurozone will undoubtedly remain intact in 2011, the region’s political crises will become increasingly unmanageable. There’s a real concern that core European countries (such as Germany) will become less committed to the peripherals, in turn hurting policy coordination and undermining market confidence in the EU.3 — Cybersecurity and geopolitics:
In 2011, geopolitics and cybersecurity will collide. Whether attacks are waged for power (state versus state), profit (particularly among state capitalists), or pleasure (from info-anarchists, as in the recent WikiLeaks case), this is a key development to watch. Governments, corporations, and banks are all vulnerable to sudden, radical transparency, and a debilitating attack could be a long-term game changer.
Screenshot { Disney’s Cinderella, 1950 }
I wouldn’t mind being a man and get up on a lovely woman O Lord what a row you’re making like the jersey lily easy O how the waters come down at Lahore
Everyone already knows that romantic love requires sexual attraction, that’s a given. The second component is almost as well known. It’s called attachment, and its part of the show in both romantic and all other kinds of love, including love within families. Attachment is found in other mammal besides us humans: our cats Mischa and Wolfie have become attached to me and my wife, and we are attached to them.
Attachment gives a physical sense of a connection to the beloved. The most obvious cues to attachment are missing the beloved when they are away, and contentment when they return. Loss of that person invokes deep sadness and grief. Another less reliable cue is the sense of having always known a person whom we have just met. This feeling can be intense when it occurs, but it also may be completely absent.
Attachment accounts for an otherwise puzzling aspect of “love”: one can “love” someone that one doesn’t even like. (…)
Finally, there is a third component that is much more complex and subtle than attraction or attachment. It has to do with the lover sharing the thoughts and feelings of the beloved. The lover identifies with the loved person at times, to the point of actually sharing their thoughts their feelings. He or she feels their pain at these times, or joy, or any other feeling, as if it were her or his own. Two people can be attuned, at least at times, to each others’ thoughts and feeling.
It is important to note however, that to qualify as genuine love, the sharing need be balanced between self and other. One shares the others thoughts and feelings as much as one’s own, no more and no less. (…)
The definition of romantic love proposed here involves three components, the three A’s: Attraction, Attachment, and Attunement.
bonus:
‘I make this chief distinction between religion and superstition, that the latter is founded on ignorance, the former on knowledge; this, I take it, is the reason why Christians are distinguished from the rest of the world, not by faith, nor by charity, nor by the other fruits of the Holy Spirit, but solely by their opinions, inasmuch as they defend their cause, like everyone else, by miracles, that is by ignorance, which is the source of all malice; thus they turn a faith, which may be true, into superstition.’ –Spinoza
{ Study: Wind May Have Helped Moses Part Red Sea | NPR | full story }
‘What experience and history teach is this — that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.’ –Hegel
Our study of more than 2,600 ads found that—contrary to popular wisdom—celebrity ads do not perform any better than non-celebrity ads, and in some cases they perform much worse.
{ Ace Metrix | PDF }
photo { Paul Rodriguez }
Blew. Blue bloom is on the. Gold pinnacled hair.
Statistics is what people think math is. Statistics is about patterns and that’s what people think math is about. The difference is that in math, you have to get very complicated before you get to interesting patterns. The math that we can all easily do – things like circles and triangles and squares – doesn’t really describe reality that much. Mandelbrot, when he wrote about fractals and talked about the general idea of self-similar processes, made it clear that if you want to describe nature, or social reality, you need very complicated mathematical constructions. The math that we can all understand from high school is just not going to be enough to capture the interesting features of real world patterns. Statistics, however, can capture a lot more patterns at a less technical level, because statistics, unlike mathematics, is all about uncertainty and variation. (…)
Bill James once said that you can lie in statistics just like you can lie in English or French or any other language. Sure, the more powerful a language is the more ways you can lie using it. There are a bunch of great quotes about statistics. There’s another one, sometimes attributed to Mark Twain: ‘It ain’t what you don’t know that hurts you, it’s what you don’t know you don’t know.’
photo { Flemming Ove Bech }
Two. Else there is danger of.
Serial killers just aren’t the sensation they used to be. They haven’t disappeared, of course. But the number of serial murders seems to be dwindling, as does the public’s fascination with them. the data we do have suggests serial murders peaked in the 1980s and have been declining ever since.
There are plenty of structural explanations for the rise of reported serial murders through the 1980s. Data collection and record-keeping improved, making it easier to find cases of serial murder. Law enforcement developed more sophisticated methods of investigation, enabling police to identify linkages between cases—especially across states—that they would have otherwise ignored. The media’s growing obsession with serial killers in the 1970s and ’80s may have created a minor snowball effect, offering a short path to celebrity.
But those factors don’t explain away the decline in serial murders since 1990.
photo { Stephen Shore }
Diapsalmata is the plural Greek form for the Hebrew selah, a word that recurs in the Psalms of David at the end of a verse, and which can easily acquire the meaning of ‘refrains,’ i.e. something (for example a mood) repeated over and over again
The Web hasn’t been designed to do anything. And so it doesn’t do anything, much less anything smart, creative, or suggesting awareness.
Twenty years ago one would have expected something like the Web to have liberated the creative spirits inside tremendous numbers of people who had not previously had such an outlet. Instead, Lanier argues, the Web has caused the evolution of creativity to stagnate.
Where, Lanier asks, are the radically new musical genres since the 1990s? Technological change seems to be accelerating, and yet the development of novel forms of musical expression appears to have not merely slowed, but stalled altogether. We’re listening to non-radical variations on themes that existed two decades ago, Lanier argues. (…)
More generally, he challenges readers to point to the new generation of people living off their creativity on the Web. (…)
Contrary to the prevailing idea that consumers on the Web should not be obligated to pay individual human content-creators for their work, Lanier is adamant that music and human-created information should not be free. Creativity that goes unpaid leads to a novelty- and diversity-impoverished intellectual world dominated by material that takes minimal effort to produce—think LOLcats.
Yonder also are the graves of my youth
When an atomic bomb explodes, several things happen in short order. First is a flood of “prompt” radiation created by the nuclear fission that produces the explosion. The good news — if you can call it that — is that if you are close enough to get a lethal dose of prompt radiation, you’re close enough that you’re likely to be killed by other bomb effects before it becomes an issue. Next comes the “flash,” a brilliant pulse of light created as the air around the bomb is heated to millions of degrees; this starts out as ultraviolet, falls quickly into the visible light range, and then into the heat-ray infrared range within a few seconds. The flash can blind, or burn exposed skin, and start fires. Next comes the blast, as the superheated air expands outward, initially at supersonic speeds. The blast is dangerous on its own, and also because it crushes buildings and creates clouds of flying glass and debris.
Given that light travels almost instantaneously, for everyone outside the immediate vicinity of the bomb the flash will arrive before the blast. Furthermore, the fire-setting infrared part of the flash peaks a few seconds later than the initial burst of light. So those who see a brilliant flash of light — and know what it means — have a few seconds to get under some sort of cover to protect themselves from what comes next.
After these “prompt effects” of initial radiation, flash, and blast have passed, there is an additional hazard. A nuclear explosion sucks air, dust — and, if it’s close to the ground, vaporized soil, buildings, etc. — up into the fireball, where some components are transformed into radioactive isotopes that then fall out of the cloud and back to earth over the next few hours, hence the term “fallout.” (…)
So the Obama Administration wants to encourage people to shelter in place rather than head for the hills in the event of a nuclear attack. Even sheltering for a few hours, or a couple of days, lets radiation levels fall dramatically and avoids road tie-ups for later evacuation.
All the tondo gang bola del ruffo
{ It has long been true that California on its own would rank as one of the biggest economies of the world. These days, it would rank eighth, falling between Italy and Brazil on a nominal exchange-rate basis. But how do other American states compare with other countries? | The Economist }
‘What is happiness? The feeling that power increases–that resistance is overcome.’ –Nietzsche
The experience of pleasure is the result of mechanisms designed to bring about (outcomes that would have led to) fitness gains. When Jared Diamond asked Why is Sex Fun, the answer had to do with the fact that evolved motivational systems are designed to drive organisms to do fitness-enhancing things, like having sex.
Now, I want to emphasize that this is speculative, but it seems to me that a key piece here is that humans seem to benefit from discovering certain kinds of new information they didn’t previously know. One way we do this is to read blogs like this one, but there are any number of other ways. The pleasure we take in new information depends on a number of factors, perhaps including how hard it is to get (easier is generally better), how many other people might be able to get it easily (fewer is often better, which cuts against the previous factor), the value of the information, how confident we are that it’s true, and so on. Gossip and Wikileaks are both, in a sense, satisfying our evolved appetites for finding out secrets, previously unknown and possibly useful information.
There is (as I shall show in what follows) another, third kind
Scientists are reporting that so-called “thirdhand smoke” — the invisible remains of cigarette smoke that deposits on carpeting, clothing, furniture and other surfaces — may be even more of a health hazard than previously believed. (…)
Studies show that that nicotine in thirdhand smoke can react with the ozone in indoor air and surfaces like clothing and furniture, to form other pollutants. Exposure to them can occur to babies crawling on the carpet, people napping on the sofa, or people eating food tainted by thirdhand smoke.
