Totems without taboos
A lasting marriage does not always signal a happy marriage. Plenty of miserable couples have stayed together for children, religion or other practical reasons. But for many couples, it’s just not enough to stay together. They want a relationship that is meaningful and satisfying. In short, they want a sustainable marriage.
“The things that make a marriage last have more to do with communication skills, mental health, social support, stress — those are the things that allow it to last or not,” says Arthur Aron, a psychology professor. “But those things don’t necessarily make it meaningful or enjoyable or sustaining to the individual.”
The notion that the best marriages are those that bring satisfaction to the individual may seem counterintuitive. After all, isn’t marriage supposed to be about putting the relationship first?
Not anymore.
For centuries, marriage was viewed as an economic and social institution, and the emotional and intellectual needs of the spouses were secondary to the survival of the marriage itself. But in modern relationships, people are looking for a partnership, and they want partners who make their lives more interesting.
photo { Garry Winogrand | Marriage was never a success for Winogrand because he was too self-centered to make it work. After his divorce he single-mindedly devoted himself to pushing the boundaries of photography. | The Year in Pictures }
More matter with less art
This article is based on a talk I gave at the recent John Cage exhibition in the Kettles Yard gallery in Cambridge. Cage is perhaps best known for his avant-garde music, particularly his silent 1952 composition 4′33″ but also for his use of randomness in aleatory music.
But Cage also used randomness in his art. The Kettles Yard exhibition featured wonderful film of assistants reading computer-generated random numbers off a list, which determined which of a row of stones were to be chosen, which brush to use, and the position of the stone on the paper; Cage finally paints around the stone, stands back and announces the results as “beautiful.” He also dictated the use of chance in the form of the exhibition, and Kettles Yard used computer-generated coordinates to determine the heights and positions of the pictures, removing and adding pieces during the exhibition using a random process.
And first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes
A good reason not to try sex in space. Yet.
One of the dominant ideas for getting to another solar system within the next few centuries involves the generation ship, vast spacecraft designed to function as their own, self-contained colonies and housing thousands of humans for very long stretches of time, ideally with all the comforts of home. And one of those comforts better be gravity because it turns out that if humans were to start reproducing without that familiar acceleration of 9.8 m/s/s or pretty close to it, their children are likely to be born with cranial defects, collapsed jaws, and buckled spines, among some of the other pleasantries of embryos’ inability to cope with a lack of gravity during the development process.
photo { James O’Mahoney}
Such is the language of all fish
{ 1. issuu | 2. Jaimie Warren }
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 }
