By setting the microwave timer I’m watching two minutes pass. That’s insufficient time for me to make my bed. That takes about three minutes: to pull up the covers, to turn the sheet down over the blankets, to smooth the sheets and blankets, to fluff the pillows and arrange them over the sheets. I’m not taking into consideration fixing the bedspread under the pillows.

Assuming I make the bed six days a week (changing the linens on the seventh), that’s 18 minutes a week: three hours in 10 weeks; in a year (with two weeks’ vacation), 15 hours — almost two days of work. In 10 years, that’s 150 hours. I figure I’ve spent 900 hours making my bed so far. If I’m awake 16 hours in an average day, that’s equivalent to at least 56 days of my conscious life.

{ Life is like a microwave… | M.N. Kotzin /The Smart Set | Continue reading }

photo { Sandy Kim }

Information theory is a branch of applied mathematics and electrical engineering involving the quantification of information. (…)

A key measure of information in the theory is known as entropy, which is usually expressed by the average number of bits needed for storage or communication. Intuitively, entropy quantifies the uncertainty involved when encountering a random variable. For example, a fair coin flip (2 equally likely outcomes) will have less entropy than a roll of a die (6 equally likely outcomes).

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

Claude Elwood Shannon (1916 – 2001), an American electronic engineer and mathematician, is known as “the father of information theory.”

Shannon is famous for having founded information theory with one landmark paper published in 1948. But he is also credited with founding both digital computer and digital circuit design theory in 1937, when, as a 21-year-old master’s student at MIT, he wrote a thesis demonstrating that electrical application of Boolean algebra could construct and resolve any logical, numerical relationship. It has been claimed that this was the most important master’s thesis of all time. (…)

The Las Vegas connection: Information theory and its applications to game theory
Shannon and his wife Betty also used to go on weekends to Las Vegas with M.I.T. mathematician Ed Thorp, and made very successful forays in blackjack using game theory type methods co-developed with physicist John L. Kelly Jr. based on principles of information theory. They made a fortune, as detailed in the book Fortune’s Formula. (…)

Shannon and Thorp also applied the same theory, later known as the Kelly criterion, to the stock market with even better results.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading | Mathematical Theory of Claude Shannon, A study of the style and context of his work up to the genesis of information theory. | PDF }

recto/verso { Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign, 1959, designed by Betty Willis. | In hopes that the design would be used freely, Willis never copyrighted her sign’s design. | PBS | Continue reading | More Betty Willis | NY Times | Photos: The Neon Museum, Las Vegas }

The mathematics that describe both sensory perception and the transmission of information turn out to have remarkable similarities.

In 1834, the German physiologist Ernst Weber carried out a series of experiments to determine the limits of sensory perception. He gave a blindfolded man a mass to hold and gradually increased its weight, asking the subject to indicate when he first became aware of the change.

These experiments showed that the smallest increase in weight that a human can perceive is proportional to the initial weight. The German psychologist Gustav Fechner later interpreted Weber’s work as a way of measuring the relationship between the physical magnitude of a stimulus and its perceived intensity.

The resultant mathematical model of this process is called the Weber-Fechner law and shows that the relationship between the stimulus and perception is logarithmic. The Weber-Fechner law is important because it established a new field of study called psychophysics. (…)

The logarithmic relationship between a stimulus and its perception crops up in various well known examples such as the logarithmic decibel scale for measuring sound intensity and a similar logarithmic scale for measuring the visible brightness of stars, their magnitude.

Today, Hi Jun Choe, a mathematician at Yonsei University in South Korea, says there is an interesting connection between the Weber-Fechner Law and the famous mathematical theory of information developed by Claude Shannon at Bell Labs in the 1940s.

Shannon’s work is among the most important of the 20th century. It establishes the limits on the amount of information that can be sent from one location in the universe to another. It is no exaggeration to say that the world’s entire computing and communications infrastructure is based on Shannon’s work. (…)

Of course, the idea that sensory perception is a form of communication and so obeys the same rules, is not entirely surprising. What’s astonishing (if true) is that the connection has never been noticed before.

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }

{ Freddie DeBoer comments | Gawker }

Mirage: The Omnidroid 9000 is a top-secret military fighting robot. Artificial intelligence allows it to solve any problem it’s presented with, and, unfortunately…

Mr. Incredible: Let me guess. It became smart enough to wonder why it had to take orders.

Mirage: We lost control, and now it’s loose in the jungle, threatening our facility.

{ The Incredibles, 2004 }

Dave: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.

HAL: I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.

Dave: What’s the problem?

HAL: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.

Dave: I don’t know what you’re talking about, HAL.

HAL: I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I’m afraid that’s something I cannot allow to happen.

{ 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968 }

“When you live outside the law, you have to eliminate dishonesty.” The line comes from Don Siegel’s 1958 film noir, The Lineup, written by Stirling Silliphant. (…)

Appropriation has always played a key role in Dylan’s music. The songwriter has grabbed not only from a panoply of vintage Hollywood films but from Shakespeare and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Junichi Saga’s Confessions of a Yakuza. He also nabbed the title of Eric Lott’s study of minstrelsy for his 2001 album Love and Theft. (…)

The same might be said of all art. I realized this forcefully when one day I went looking for the John Donne passage quoted above.

{ Jonathan Lethem/Harper’s Magazine | Continue reading l Thanks Chris W.! }

The theory of relativity showed us that time and space are intertwined. To which our smarty-pants body might well reply: Tell me something I didn’t already know, Einstein.

Researchers at the University of Aberdeen found that when people were asked to engage in a bit of mental time travel, and to recall past events or imagine future ones, participants’ bodies subliminally acted out the metaphors embedded in how we commonly conceptualized the flow of time. (…)

The new study, published in January in the journal Psychological Science, is part of the immensely popular field called embodied cognition, the idea that the brain is not the only part of us with a mind of its own.

{ Natalie Angier/NY Times | Continue reading }

In recent years Britain has become the Willy Wonka of social control, churning out increasingly creepy, bizarre, and fantastic methods for policing the populace. But our weaponization of classical music—where Mozart, Beethoven, and other greats have been turned into tools of state repression—marks a new low.

We’re already the kings of CCTV. An estimated 20 per cent of the world’s CCTV cameras are in the UK, a remarkable achievement for an island that occupies only 0.2 per cent of the world’s inhabitable landmass.

A few years ago some local authorities introduced the Mosquito, a gadget that emits a noise that sounds like a faint buzz to people over the age of 20 but which is so high-pitched, so piercing, and so unbearable to the delicate ear drums of anyone under 20 that they cannot remain in earshot. It’s designed to drive away unruly youth from public spaces, yet is so brutally indiscriminate that it also drives away good kids, terrifies toddlers, and wakes sleeping babes.

Police in the West of England recently started using super-bright halogen lights to temporarily blind misbehaving youngsters. From helicopters, the cops beam the spotlights at youths drinking or loitering in parks, in the hope that they will become so bamboozled that (when they recover their eyesight) they will stagger home. (…)

In January it was revealed that West Park School, in Derby in the midlands of England, was “subjecting” (its words) badly behaved children to Mozart and others. In “special detentions,” the children are forced to endure two hours of classical music both as a relaxant (the headmaster claims it calms them down) and as a deterrent against future bad behavior.

{ Reason | Continue reading }

artwork { Stuart Patterson }

My boyfriend and I have been together for nine months. We are gay. We live in a college town. We both found jobs here after we graduated, so we stayed.

Since his sophomore year, my boyfriend has had an “arrangement” with an older man, a professor at the university. Did I say older? I meant old. We are in our mid-20s; this man is in his late 60s. The old man comes to my boyfriend’s apartment once a week and cleans it. Does his laundry. Washes his dishes. He actually pays my boyfriend for the privilege. (…)

He’s particularly pervy about how he cleans my boyfriend’s bathroom. Dan, the old perv cleans my boyfriend’s toilet bowl with his own toothbrush, which he then uses to brush his teeth the rest of the week!

There is no sex. (Presumably, the old perv goes home and beats off after cleaning my boyfriend’s apartment.) None of this would matter if my boyfriend and I weren’t talking about moving in together. I want this “arrangement” to stop. I don’t feel comfortable using a toilet that a man old enough to be my grandfather cleaned with his toothbrush.

{ Village Voice | Continue reading }

{ Christiane Löhr | Bernhard Knaus Gallery }

The fact is, then, that a large proportion of these “most beautiful English words” that aesthetes like to cite owe their claim to beauty entirely on a fancied resemblance to the words of other languages, rather than any inherent “English” phonaesthetic virtues. To show how great a role meaning plays in these judgments, Max Beerbohm once wrote “If gondola were a disease, and if a scrofula were a beautiful boat peculiar to a beautiful city, the effect of each word would be exactly the reverse of what it is. The appropriately beautiful or ugly sound of any word is an illusion wrought on us by what the word connotes.”

{ The romantic side of familiar words | Language Log | Continue reading }

Mr. Koons has collected since the beginning of his life as a professional artist, even before he could afford to pay for work. (…)

By the late 1980s, as his star and his bank balance rose precipitously, he began to collect high-end work by artists he loved, like Lichtenstein, but he was forced to sell a lot of it during an acrimonious divorce and custody battle with his first wife, the Italian porn star and politician Ilona Staller. (…)

But as his fortunes roared back in recent years, he began pouring a significant amount of his wealth into building a collection, joining high-profile contemporary artists like Damien Hirst and John Currin in concentrating heavily on old masters and 19th-century works. (…)

Even by the standards of the art world, where language about art strays easily into deep and enigmatic waters, Mr. Koons’s way of explaining his own work is hard to take seriously, though he has always seemed to take it that way. (…) In a profile of Mr. Koons in The New Yorker in 2007 Calvin Tomkins observed that “it is possible to argue that no real connection exists between Koons’s work and what he says about it.”

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

The New Museum’s controversial show of work from billionaire collector Dakis Joannou’s art trove now has a curious new name and a list of artists courtesy of its special guest curator, the artist Jeff Koons. The museum announced yesterday that the show, entitled “Skin Fruit,” would include more than 100 works by 50 artists, including one by Koons.

The artist list stretches from contemporary art stalwarts like Paul McCarthy, Richard Prince, and Franz West to younger figures like Dan Colen, Andro Wekua, and Nate Lowman. New versions of work by Charles Ray, Jenny Holzer, and Robert Cuoghi will also be on display for the first time. (…)

The exhibition is the first edition in a planned series called “The Imaginary Museum” at the New Museum, which will show work from leading private collections from around the world.

{ ArtInfo | Continue reading | Artwork pics | Skin Fruit: Selections from the Dakis Joannou Collection, March 3, 2010 until June6, 2010, New Museum, NYC | Press realease }

An article described concerns in the art world over the propriety of a coming show at the New Museum that will feature the private collection of a museum trustee, Dakis Joannou, and be curated by Jeff Koons. Mr. Koons is an artist whom Mr. Joannou collects extensively, and the article noted that critics of the museum consider it to be enmeshed in what can seem like a dizzyingly insular circle of art world insiders.

Here is an example:

Right now, the museum is devoted to a show of works by Urs Fischer, an inventive Swiss sculptor whose work is owned by Mr. Joannou. Mr. Fischer is represented by the gallery owner Gavin Brown, who also represents the painter Elizabeth Peyton, who had a solo show at the New Museum last year. That was curated by Laura Hoptman, whose husband, Verne Dawson, belongs to Mr. Brown’s stable of artists, too.

{ NY Times, 2009 | Continue reading }

Jeff Koons is scanning his phone machine, hoping to hear a message from an executive at a major Wall Street investment firm. Earlier in the day, a waitress in a Manhattan restaurant had inadvertently handed the executive’s corporate credit card to Koons and Koons’s card to the executive. If the pinstriper could see Koons—street casual in a black polka-dot shirt and fraying black jeans—he might be a bit concerned. But in this case appearances are especially deceptive; unless the exec has been trading on inside information, it’s almost certain that Koons has had the more lucrative first quarter of ‘89. At 34, he is by most estimates the hottest young artist in America—and one of the richest. He is expected to gross about $2.5 million from his most recent show, which was staged—with typical Koons flair—in Chicago, New York City and Cologne, West Germany. Simultaneously.

{ People, 1989 | Continue reading }

Over the past quarter century, DNA evidence has transformed criminal justice, freeing hundreds of innocent people and helping unravel countless crimes that might otherwise have gone unsolved. It has also captivated the public imagination: the plots of popular TV crime shows often hinge on the power of DNA to crack impossible cases, which has helped to give this forensic tool an air of infallibility—a phenomenon known in criminal justice circles as “the CSI effect.” This failsafe image is not entirely unfounded, especially when it comes to traditional applications of DNA evidence.

But increasingly DNA is being used for a new purpose: to target the culprits in cold cases, where other investigative options have been exhausted. All told, U.S. law enforcement agencies have conducted more than 100,000 so-called cold-hit investigations using the federal DNA database and its state-level counterparts, which hold upward of 7.6 million offender profiles. In these instances, where the DNA is often incomplete or degraded and there are few other clues to go on, the reliability of DNA evidence plummets—a fact that jurors weighing such cases are almost never told. As a result, DNA, a tool renowned for exonerating the innocent, may actually be putting a growing number of them behind bars.

{ Washington Monthly | Continue reading }

The general problem of data preservation is twofold. The first matter is preservation of the data itself: The physical media on which data are written must be preserved, and this media must continue to accurately hold the data that are entrusted to it. This problem is the same for analog and digital media, but unless we are careful, digital media can be more fragile.

The second part of the equation is the comprehensibility of the data. Even if the storage medium survives perfectly, it will be of no use unless we can read and understand the data on it. With most analog technologies such as photographic prints and paper text documents, one can look directly at the medium to access the information. With all digital media, a machine and software are required to read and translate the data into a human-observable and comprehensible form. If the machine or software is lost, the data are likely to be unavailable or, effectively, lost as well.

Unlike the many venerable institutions that have for centuries refined their techniques for preserving analog data on clay, stone, ceramic or paper, we have no corresponding reservoir of historical wisdom to teach us how to save our digital data. That does not mean there is nothing to learn from the past, only that we must work a little harder to find it.

{ American Scientist | Continue reading }

On Monday, more than a year after a man was arrested outside a market in California with a $3.99 bag of Tillamook shredded cheese in his pants he had not paid for, a judge decided to go relatively easy on him, sentencing him to seven years and eight months in jail.

Prosecutors in Yolo County, Calif., outside Sacramento, had originally asked for a life sentence under the state’s “three strikes” law, arguing that the man, Robert Preston Ferguson, was a menace to society because of prior burglary convictions.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

photo { Reto Caduff }

‘Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work.’ –Aldous Huxley

‘Work is everything. Work is the entire thing.’ –Andy Warhol

‘Always this difficulty about working in the afternoon.’ –Roland Barthes

‘The ceaseless labor of your life is to build the house of death.’ –Montaigne

Removal of specific parts of the brain can induce increases in a personality trait which predisposes people to spirituality, according to a new clinical study by Italian researchers. The new research, published earlier this month in the journal Neuron, provides evidence that some brain structures are associated with spiritual thinking and feelings, and hints at individual differences that might make some people more prone than others to spirituality.

{ Neurophilosophy/ScienceBlogs | Continue reading }

{ What O.J. Simpson wore when he was acquitted in 1995 of murdering his ex-wife and her friend was the suit seen around the world during one of the most watched televised moments in history. But the Smithsonian Institution, America’s repository of historical artifacts, rejected it Tuesday as inappropriate for their collection. | Washington Post | Continue reading | Flashback: The O. J. Simpson murder case | Wikipedia | Related: Robert L. Stone, a former top executive at the Hertz corporation who had hired O.J. Simpson in the 1970s as a famous pitchman for the car rental giant, has died. | Related: The Los Angeles Police Department has apologized to the family of the late Robert F. Kennedy and removed items from a homicide exhibit in Las Vegas that included the dress shirt worn by the senator when he was assassinated in 1968. | LA Times | Continue reading }