In his three volume work Obliscence, Theories of Forgetting and the Problem of Matter, Geoffrey Sonnabend departed from all previous memory research with the premise that memory is an illusion. Forgetting, he believed, not remembering is the inevitable outcome of all experience. From this perspective,

We, amnesiacs all, condemned to live in an eternally fleeting present, have created the most elaborate of human constructions, memory, to buffer ourselves against the intolerable knowledge of the irreversible passage of time and the irretrieveability of its moments and events.

Sonnabend believed that long term or “distant” memory was illusion, but similarly he questioned short term or “immediate” memory. On a number of occasions Sonnabend wrote, “there is only experience and its decay” by which he meant to suggest that what we typically call short term memory is, in fact, our experiencing the decay of an experience. Interestingly, however, Sonnabend employed the term true memory, to describe this process of decay which, he held, was, in actuality, not memory at all.

Sonnabend believed that this phenomenon of true memory was our only connection to the past, if only the immediate past, and, as a result, he became obsessed with understanding the mechanisms of true memory by which experience decays. In an effort to illustrate his understanding of this process, Sonnabend, over the next several years, constructed an elaborate Model of Obliscence (or model of forgetting) which, in its simplest form, can be seen as the intersection of a plane and cone.

{ Lawrence Weschler, Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet Of Wonder | Google Books | Continue reading | Amazon }

painting { left: Linnea Strid }

Is it Easy to be an Urban New York Ant?

If scientists learn how critters adapt to difficult-to-colonize locations (especially ants, which colonize just about every available habitat, and are able to make quick decisions), they will be more likely to learn how to maintain biodiversity in more readily habitable locations.

With this goal in mind, Marko Pecarevic and coworkers have studied ant life on street medians in New York City.

Why study ant life on street medians?

Current hypotheses state that wider street medians should host more species. This is an extrapolation from analogous studies in natural environments.

However, there’s good reason to suspect that unique features of urban life may result in different ecological adaptations. Human disturbance, for example, may be more prevalent on wider street medians, disrupting the local urban ecology.

Furthermore, it’s possible that ants treat street medians either as habitable islands (surrounded by inhabitable pavement), or a connecting patchwork linking more habitable environments (e.g. plants in sidewalk cracks). These are the kinds of questions probed by Pecarevic and coworkers.

The scientists sampled ants from 44 street medians in New York City in July 2006. (…) The scientists collected over 6600 ants from 13 species and 11 genera (the next highest classification above species). Ninety-four percent of the ants were from one of three species. The first is non-native, and the latter two are native.

{ NASW | Continue reading }

photo { Sotheby’s Divine Comedy billboard featuring Maurizio Cattelan, Him, 2001 + cab door, 10 Ave, between W 28th and W 29th st, Thursday, October 7, 2010 }

A startup called Recorded Future has developed a tool that scrapes real-time data from the Internet to find hints of what will happen in the future. The company’s search tool spits out results on a timeline that stretches into the future as well as the past.

The 18-month-old company gained attention earlier this year after receiving money from the venture capital arms of both Google and the CIA. Now the company has offered a glimpse of how its technology works.

Conventional search engines like Google use links to rank and connect different Web pages. Recorded Future’s software goes a level deeper by analyzing the content of pages to track the “invisible” connections between people, places, and events described online.

“That makes it possible for me to look for specific patterns, like product releases expected from Apple in the near future, or to identify when a company plans to invest or expand into India,” says Christopher Ahlberg, founder of the Boston-based firm.

A search for information about drug company Merck, for example, generates a timeline showing not only recent news on earnings but also when various drug trials registered with the website clinicaltrials.gov will end in coming years. Another search revealed when various news outlets predict that Facebook will make its initial public offering.

{ Technology Review | Continue reading }

quote { Melville, Benito Cereno, 1856 | Continue reading }

{ Possible Cause of Bee Die-Off Is Found | Photo }

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, are challenging long-held beliefs that human beings are wired to be selfish. In a wide range of studies, social scientists are amassing a growing body of evidence to show we are evolving to become more compassionate and collaborative in our quest to survive and thrive.

In contrast to “every man for himself” interpretations of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, Dacher Keltner, a UC Berkeley psychologist and author of “Born to be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life,” and his fellow social scientists are building the case that humans are successful as a species precisely because of our nurturing, altruistic and compassionate traits.

They call it “survival of the kindest.”

{ UC Berkeley | Continue reading }

photo { Daido Moriyama }

Losing weight can be described at its simplest as a matter of counting calories during the daytime. Consume fewer calories and burn more through activity and exercise, and you’re likely to lose weight. Eat more high-calorie foods and sit on the couch all day watching football, and you get the opposite effect. But according to a new study from University of Chicago Medical Center researchers, another number should be taken into account by dieters: hours of sleep. (…)

“If your goal is to lose fat, skipping sleep is like poking sticks in your bicycle wheels,” Penev said. “Cutting back on sleep, a behavior that is ubiquitous in modern society, appears to compromise efforts to lose fat through dieting. In our study it reduced fat loss by 55 percent.”

{ University of Chicago Medical Center | Continue reading }

artwork { Left: Robert Blake | Right: Katie Rhody | Nosh: Food Art Show curated by Kady Grant and Anthony Iacono, Opening Friday, October 8th, 7-10pm | Culture Fix, NYC }

How Hunter S. Thompson applied for a job at The Vancouver Sun

TO JACK SCOTT, VANCOUVER SUN
October 1, 1958
57 Perry Street New York City

Sir,

I got a hell of a kick reading the piece Time magazine did this week on The Sun. In addition to wishing you the best of luck, I’d also like to offer my services.

Since I haven’t seen a copy of the “new” Sun yet, I’ll have to make this a tentative offer. I stepped into a dung-hole the last time I took a job with a paper I didn’t know anything about (see enclosed clippings) and I’m not quite ready to go charging up another blind alley.

By the time you get this letter, I’ll have gotten hold of some of the recent issues of The Sun. Unless it looks totally worthless, I’ll let my offer stand. And don’t think that my arrogance is unintentional: it’s just that I’d rather offend you now than after I started working for you.

I didn’t make myself clear to the last man I worked for until after I took the job. It was as if the Marquis de Sade had suddenly found himself working for Billy Graham. The man despised me, of course, and I had nothing but contempt for him and everything he stood for. If you asked him, he’d tell you that I’m “not very likable, (that I) hate people, (that I) just want to be left alone, and (that I) feel too superior to mingle with the average person.” (That’s a direct quote from a memo he sent to the publisher.)

Nothing beats having good references.

Of course if you asked some of the other people I’ve worked for, you’d get a different set of answers.If you’re interested enough to answer this letter, I’ll be glad to furnish you with a list of references — including the lad I work for now.

The enclosed clippings should give you a rough idea of who I am. It’s a year old, however, and I’ve changed a bit since it was written. I’ve taken some writing courses from Columbia in my spare time, learned a hell of a lot about the newspaper business, and developed a healthy contempt for journalism as a profession.

As far as I’m concerned, it’s a damned shame that a field as potentially dynamic and vital as journalism should be overrun with dullards, bums, and hacks, hag-ridden with myopia, apathy, and complacence, and generally stuck in a bog of stagnant mediocrity. If this is what you’re trying to get The Sun away from, then I think I’d like to work for you.

Most of my experience has been in sports writing, but I can write everything from warmongering propaganda to learned book reviews.

I can work 25 hours a day if necessary, live on any reasonable salary, and don’t give a black damn for job security, office politics, or adverse public relations.

I would rather be on the dole than work for a paper I was ashamed of.

It’s a long way from here to British Columbia, but I think I’d enjoy the trip.

If you think you can use me, drop me a line.

If not, good luck anyway.

Sincerely, Hunter S. Thompson

{ Vancouver Sun | Continue reading | via Alec Friedman }

A new logo for Gap that debuted to much criticism Wednesday might not be the perfect fit, Bill Chandler, vice president of corporate communications of Gap, tells Co.Design. “We love the design, but we’re open to other ideas and we want to move forward with the best logo possible,” he says.

Chandler confirmed last night’s message from Gap’s Facebook account (using the old logo as their avatar), which announced the new logo is actually part of a crowdsourcing project. He would not say when — before or after the tidal wave of criticism — Gap decided to participate in one of the most contentious practices in design, in which regular Joes and Janes compete to create a logo that’s better than the one made by a professional. The logo itself was not a PR stunt, Chandler says.

The new logo was designed by Trey Laird and his firm Laird and Partners, who have served as Gap’s creative directors for many years.

{ Fast Company | Continue reading | AdAge | Read more }

previously:

{ left to right: American Apparel ad 2005, Gap ad 2009, Laird+Partners About us page }

Couples develop their own language of love that ebbs and flows depending on the state of their relationship, scientists believe. (…)

The study suggests style matching has the potential to quickly and easily reveal whether any given pair of people — ranging from business rivals to romantic partners — are psychologically on the same page and what this means for their future together. (…)

The researchers extended their work by analysing friendships such as that between Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung who wrote to each other almost weekly over a seven-year period as their careers were developing.

Using style-matching statistics, the authors were able to chart the two men’s tempestuous relationship from their early days of joint admiration to their final days of mutual contempt.

{ Telegraph | Continue reading }

photo { Lee Friedlander }

According to the research, over 95% of males have masturbated to orgasm by age 20, compared to around 60% of women (with some studies suggesting an even larger gap).

The discrepancy with regard to masturbation is doubly problematic because masturbation, it turns out, is a particularly important predictor of sexual health and happiness for women, more so then for men. One of the best predictors of whether a woman will be able to achieve orgasm in her sexual relations is a history of masturbation in adolescence.

Why such a gap? One reason may be men’s higher sex drive. If you define sex drive as preoccupation with sexual behavior and thoughts, including sex crimes and paraphilias, then men routinely manifest higher levels of it than women. Such elevated interest may lead to higher masturbation rates. Structural differences may also play a role. A penis is highly accessible and regularly handled in the act of urination, which may lead to greater familiarity with its potential uses. (…)

According to Thomas W. Laqueur, a professor of history at the University of California at Berkeley, masturbation was not a topic of great interest to the powers that be until 1712, when a con man named John Marten anonymously published a book spectacularly entitled: Onania; or, The Heinous Sin of Self Pollution and all its Frightful Consequences, in both sexes Considered…

{ PsychologyToday | Continue reading }

photo { Nobuyoshi Araki }

As many households and small businesses are being turned away by bank loan officers, large corporations are borrowing vast sums of money for next to nothing — simply because they can.

Companies like Microsoft are raising billions of dollars by issuing bonds at ultra-low interest rates, but few of them are actually spending the money on new factories, equipment or jobs. Instead, they are stockpiling the cash until the economy improves.

The development presents something of a chicken-and-egg situation: Corporations keep saving, waiting for the economy to perk up — but the economy is unlikely to perk up if corporations keep saving.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

photo { Elinor Carucci }

Psychologists have long argued that people have a “set point” for happiness. Regardless of what life brings, the set-point theory goes, happiness levels tend to be stable. A big life event could create a boost of joy or a crush of sorrow, but within a few years, people return to a predetermined level of life satisfaction, according to the theory.

A new study, which used a nationally representative sample of almost 150,000 German adults, finds the opposite. (…) The study also echoed previous happiness research in finding that money doesn’t buy happiness. (…)

So what contributed to long-term happiness? The researchers found several correlations between life choices and life satisfaction:

• Marry well
• Focus on the family
• Go to church
• Work, but not too much (or too little)
• Social interaction and exercise

{ LiveScience | Continue reading }

You can’t really thank your parents for being more than parents without crying and making everyone uncomfortable. You have to tell them that you ran out of Benadryl and you’re congested but that if you were to think of your most beautiful memory, it might be thirty seconds outside a Burger King in 1994. And for a second they don’t know what you mean, but then they know what you mean, like they always have.

{ Wipe your feet | Continue reading }

photo { Agnes Thor }

{ James Rosenquist, Wild West World, 1996 | Related: Tennessee is one of four states, along with Arizona, Georgia and Virginia, that recently enacted laws explicitly allowing loaded guns in bars. | NY Times | full story }

related { What distinguishes groups like this one from a shooting club or re-enactment society is the prospect of actual bloodshed, which many Ohio Defense Force members see as real. As militias go, the Ohio Defense Force is on the moderate side. Scores of armed antigovernment groups, some of them far more radical, have formed or been revived during the Obama years, according to law-enforcement agencies and outside watchdogs. | The Secret World of Extreme Militias | Time | full story }

We realized recently that a lot of people don’t understand very well what Y Combinator does, so I wrote something explaining that in detail. Since YC has been shaped by the needs of hundreds of early stage startups, this should be interesting not just to potential applicants but to anyone curious about startups, because a portrait of YC is in some ways the complement of a portrait of the average startup.

Y Combinator runs two three-month funding cycles a year, one from January through March and one from June through August. We ask the founders of each startup we fund to move to the Bay Area for the duration of their cycle, during which we work intensively with them to get the company into the best shape possible. Each cycle culminates in an event called Demo Day, at which the startups present to an audience that now includes most of the world’s top startup investors. (…)

If the startup either hasn’t decided what to work on or wants to change their idea, then we talk about what the company should do. That usually means satisfying two constraints: something (1) users would want, that (2) the founders of this startup would be good at building. We have these types of conversations surprisingly often. Startups modify or even replace their ideas much more than outsiders realize.

{ Y Combinator | Continue reading }

illustration { House Industries }

Some people meet, fall in love and get married right away. Others can spend hours in the sock aisle at the department store, weighing the pros and cons of buying a pair of wool argyles instead of cotton striped. (…)

People who often have conflicting feelings about situations—the shades-of-gray thinkers—have more of what psychologists call ambivalence, while those who tend toward unequivocal views have less ambivalence. (…)

For decades psychologists largely ignored ambivalence because they didn’t think it was meaningful. Now, they have been investigating how ambivalence, or lack of it, affects people’s lives, and how they might be able to make better decisions. Overall, thinking in shades of gray is a sign of maturity, enabling people to see the world as it really is. (…)

If there isn’t an easy answer, ambivalent people, more than black-and-white thinkers, are likely to procrastinate and avoid making a choice, for instance about whether to take a new job, says Dr. Harreveld. But if after careful consideration an individual still can’t decide, one’s gut reaction may be the way to go.

{ WSJ | Continue reading | Thanks Tim }

Mathematical proofs feel both beautiful and inevitable. Once you understand a proof of, say, the Pythagorean theorem, you can be sure this knowledge won’t be contradicted by any future discovery nor changed by any new insight. So you can use your knowledge to measure distances or map people’s Netflix tastes with utter confidence. Unsurprisingly, as I heard the cosmologist Mario Livio say recently, “most working mathematicians are Platonists”—convinced their proofs and concepts exist independently of the human race, eternally out there, waiting to be discovered.

Biology isn’t like this. Evolution is accepted as the fundamental theory of life because we see evidence of it all around us. Not because it has been irrefutably, mathematically proved.

Gregory Chaitin: “it is scandalous that we do not have a mathematical proof that evolution works.” Hence one of his ongoing intellectual quests, described engagingly in this talk: The development of “metabiology.” Metabiology is to be a model of life that will let researchers “represent mathematically the fundamental biological principles of evolution in such a manner that we can prove that evolution must take place.”

{ Big Think | Continue reading }