Time has branded them and fettered they are lodged in the room of the infinite
{ Brandon Pavan }
With a little tre douche is like pop, pop
It is not surprising that theologians and artists clashed over the Last Supper. Common meals were the center of social life in Renaissance Europe, everywhere from ascetic, remote monasteries to bankers’ and cardinals’ lush gardens in the middle of Trastevere. And they were always a battleground of opposing ideals of austerity and consumption. (…)
But what should a Last Supper look like? What did Christ and the Apostles eat? And how much? When Jesus distributed pieces of bread, was it leavened or unleavened? What other foodstuffs had been on the table? Did the followers of Jesus eat lamb, as Jews normally did at Passover? Over the centuries—as an article in the International Journal of Obesity recently showed—artists made many different choices. Sometimes they put lamb on the table. But they also served fish, beef, and even pork in portions that grew over the centuries.
painting { Dirck van Baburen, Roman Charity, Cimon and Peres, ca. 1623 }
Jada fuckin punchlines, my serp went platinum
Repetition is used everywhere—advertising, politics and the media—but does it really persuade us?
It seems too simplistic that just repeating a persuasive message should increase its effect, but that’s exactly what psychological research finds (again and again). Repetition is one of the easiest and most widespread methods of persuasion. In fact it’s so obvious that we sometimes forget how powerful it is.
People rate statements that have been repeated just once as more valid or true than things they’ve heard for the first time. (…)
Easy to understand = true
This is what psychologists call the illusion of truth effect and it arises at least partly because familiarity breeds liking. As we are exposed to a message again and again, it becomes more familiar. Because of the way our minds work, what is familiar is also true. Familiar things require less effort to process and that feeling of ease unconsciously signals truth (this is called cognitive fluency). (…)
Repetition is effective almost across the board when people are paying little attention, but when they are concentrating and the argument is weak, the effect disappears (Moons et al., 2008). In other words, it’s no good repeating a weak argument to people who are listening carefully.
‘Certain flaws are necessary for the whole.’ –Goethe
Many procrastinators do not realize that they are perfectionists, for the simple reason that they have never done anything perfectly, or even nearly so. They have never been told that something they did was perfect. (…)
Perfectionism is a matter of fantasy, not reality. Here’s how it works in my case. I am assigned some task, say, refereeing a manuscript for a publisher. I accept the task. (…) Immediately my fantasy life kicks in. I imagine myself writing the most wonderful referees report. (…)
This is perfectionism in the relevant sense. It’s not a matter of really ever doing anything that is perfect or even comes close. It is a matter of using tasks you accept to feed your fantasy of doing things perfectly, or at any rate extremely well. (…)
Well, seven or eight hours later I am done setting up the proxy server. (…)
Then what happens? I go on to other things. Most likely, the manuscript slowly disappears under subsequent memos, mail, half-eaten sandwiches, piles of files, and other things. (See the essay on “Horizontal Organization”.) I put it on my to do list, but I never look at my to do list. Then, in about six weeks, I get an email from the publisher, asking when she can expect the referee report. Maybe, if she has dealt with me before, this email arrives a bit before I promised the report. Maybe if she hasn’t, it arrives a few days after the deadline.
At this point, finally, I snap into action. My fantasy structure changes. I no longer fantasize writing the world’s best referee job ever. (…) At this point, I dig through the files, sandwiches, unopened correspondence, and, after a bit of panic (…) I find it. I take a couple of hours, read it, write a perfectly adequate report, and send it off.
How do you spell cat? K-a-t-t. That’s not how the dictionary spells it. You didn’t ask me how the dictionary spelt it!
{ Brett Fryzuk }
And Will Smith and Jada ass down in Miami
The brain may manage anger differently depending on whether we’re lying down or sitting up, according to a study published in Psychological Science. (…)
A field of study called ‘embodied cognition‘ has found lots of curious interactions between how the mind and brain manage our responses depending on the possibilities for action.
For example, we perceive distances as shorter when we have a tool in our hand and intend to use it, and wearing a heavy backpack causes hills to appear steeper.
Anger is a prime example where we feel motivated to ‘do something’. In the sitting position we’re much more ready to approach whatever’s annoying us than when we’re flat on our backs, and the researchers wondered whether these body positions were interacting with our motivations to change the brain’s response.
photo { Tierney Gearon }
L + IB = ♡ for ever
{ Will initials carved on the side of a tree always remain at the same height? Yup. | The Straight Dope | Continue reading }
you rockin to the beat w/ out a kerr hair
The effects of red hair in surgical practice
Traditionally, surgeons and anaesthetists regard red haired patients with some trepidation because of their reputation for excessive bleeding, a reduced pain threshold, and an, albeit anecdotal, increased tendency to develop hernias.
Had Pyrrhus not fallen by a beldam’s hand in Argos or Julius Caesar
The Fundamental Rights Agency said the Czech Republic was the only EU country still using a “sexual arousal” test.
Gay asylum seekers are hooked up to a machine that monitors blood-flow to the penis and are then shown straight porn.
Those applicants who become aroused are denied asylum.
photo { Markel Redond }
Where do cows go when they want a night out? To the moo-vies.
Turbulence, a film by Prof. Nitzan Ben Shaul of Tel Aviv University, uses complicated video coding procedures that allow the viewer to change the course of a movie in mid-plot. In theory, that means each new theater audience can see its very own version of a film. Turbulence recently won a prize at the Berkeley Video and Film Festival for its technological innovation.
I understand about the food, Baby Bubba
Gamers, as video-game players are known, thrill to “the pull,” that mysterious ability that good games have of making you want to play them, and keep playing them.
Miyamoto’s games are widely considered to be among the greatest. He has been called the father of modern video games. The best known, and most influential, is Super Mario Bros., which débuted a quarter of a century ago and, depending on your point of view, created an industry or resuscitated a comatose one. It spawned dozens of sequels and spinoffs. Miyamoto has designed or overseen the development of many other blockbusters, among them the Legend of Zelda series, Star Fox, and Pikmin. Their success, in both commercial and cultural terms, suggests that he has a peerless feel for the pull, that he is a master of play—of its components and poetics—in the way that Walt Disney, to whom he is often compared, was of sentiment and wonder. (…)
What he hasn’t created is a company in his own name, or a vast fortune to go along with it. He is a salaryman. Miyamoto’s business card says that he is the senior managing director and the general manager of the entertainment-analysis and -development division at Nintendo Company Ltd., the video-game giant. What it does not say is that he is Nintendo’s guiding spirit, its meal ticket, and its playful public face. Miyamoto has said that his main job at Nintendo is ningen kougaku—human engineering. He has been at the company since 1977 and has worked for no other.
New new, New York, sittin’ here
Over the past decade the neighbourhood, which sits just over the East River from Manhattan, has been transformed from a sleepy, poor, residential area of Jewish, eastern European and Hispanic working-class immigrants to one where most denizens appear to have beards, piercings, lots of tattoos and belong to at least one band. Most also tend to write a blog and spend all night drinking or involved in art projects. Brooklyn’s Williamsburg becomes new front line of the gentrification battle.
Man Jumps In Front Of G Train After Stabbings. Man Crushed By #4 Train At Union Square Station.
Cops bust seven men playing chess in upper Manhattan park. Related: Why chess may be an ideal laboratory for investigating gender gaps in science and beyond.
Peter Plagens on the MoMA Abstract Expressionism Show.
Museum Revives Time Square’s Peep Show Past.
A posse ad esse
William James Sidis (1898-19444) showed astonishing intellectual qualities from an exceptionally early age. By the age of one he had learned to spell in English. He taught himself to type in French and German at four and by the age of six had added Russian, Hebrew, Turkish and Armenian to his repertoire. At five he devised a system which could enable him to name the day of the week on which any date in history fell. Hot-housed by his pushy father, Sidis entered Harvard at eleven, and was soon lecturing on 4 dimensional bodies to the University’s Maths Society.
At twelve he suffered his first nervous breakdown, but recovered at his father’s sanatorium, and after returning to Harvard, graduated with first class honours in 1914, aged just sixteen. Law School followed and by the age of twenty Sidis had become a professor of maths at Texas Rice Institute. (…)
Sidis was just 27 when he predicted the existence of what we now know as ‘black holes.’
{ Bookride | Continue reading }
In his adult years, it was estimated that he could speak more than forty languages, and learn a new language in a day. (…)
Sidis created a constructed language called Vendergood in his second book, entitled Book of Vendergood, which he wrote at the age of eight. The language was mostly based on Latin and Greek, but also drew on German and French and other Romance languages. (…)
Sidis was also a “peridromophile,” a term he coined for people fascinated with transportation research and streetcar systems.
{ Wikipedia }
photo { Aaron Feaver }
A replica of the universe
“The Library of Babel” is a short story by Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), conceiving of a universe in the form of a vast library containing all possible 410-page books of a certain format.
Borges’s narrator describes how his universe consists of an enormous expanse of interlocking hexagonal rooms, each of which contains the bare necessities for human survival—and four walls of bookshelves. Though the order and content of the books is random and apparently completely meaningless, the inhabitants believe that the books contain every possible ordering of just a few basic characters (letters, spaces and punctuation marks). Though the majority of the books in this universe are pure gibberish, the library also must contain, somewhere, every coherent book ever written, or that might ever be written, and every possible permutation or slightly erroneous version of every one of those books. The narrator notes that the library must contain all useful information, including predictions of the future, biographies of any person, and translations of every book in all languages.
{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }
Helbing’s list of websites that are potential sources of data for an Earth Simulator (…)
Internet and historical snapshots
The Internet Archive / Wayback machine offers permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format. Founded in 1996, now the Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived
The Knowledge Centers is a collection of links to other resources for finding Web pages as they used to exist in the past.
Whenago provides quick access to historical information about what happened in the past on a given day.
(…)
Text mining on the Web
The Observatorium project focuses on complex network dynamics in the Internet, proposing to monitor its evolution in real-time, with the general objective of better understanding the processes of knowledge generation and opinion dynamics.
We Feel Fine is a database of several million human feelings, harvested from blogs and social pages in the Web. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices. Web api available as well.
CyberEmotions focuses on the role of collective emotions in creating, forming and breaking-up ecommunities. It makes available for download three datasets containing news and comments from the BBC News forum, Digg and MySpace, only for academic research and only after the submission of an application form.
