Why does the alphabet’s 24th letter designate the nameless?

[…]

It probably starts with the 17th-century French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes, who in his 1637 book “La Géometrie” first systematically used a lower-case “x,” together with “y” and “z,” to signify an unknown quantity in simple algebraic equations. […] We now jump […] from 1637 to 1895, when Wilhelm Röntgen discovered a new type of radiation. Röntgen, who wasn’t sure just what he had come across, named his find in German X-Strahlen, using the algebraic symbol for something unknown. […] “X-ray” has remained our English word and has also contributed, with the help of the term “X-ray vision,” to x’s ability to evoke the uncanny.

{ Forward | Continue reading }

previously { XXX, XXY, XYY }

photo { Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin }

What we know is that the consumption of shoes in the UK has undergone radical change during the last decade. A 2006 survey of attitudes and practices around shoes by the magazine Harper’s Bazaar revealed among its findings that 25% of British women would buy shoes before paying bills.

{ Sociological Research Online | Continue reading }

It seems to me that MFA programs have become a tool of indoctrination that has had an unprecedented homogenizing effect on artistic practices worldwide, an effect that is now being replicated with curatorial and critical writing programs. […]

The market of art is not merely a bunch of dealers and cigar-smoking connoisseurs trading exquisite objects for money behind closed doors. Rather, it is a vast and complex international industry of overlapping institutions which jointly produce artworks’ economic value and support a wide range of activities and occupations including training, research, development, production, display, documentation, criticism, marketing, promotion, financing, historicizing, publishing, and so forth. The standardization of art greatly simplifies all of these transactions. For a few years now I have experienced a certain sense of déjà vu while walking through art fairs or biennials, a feeling that many other people have also commented on: that we have already seen all these works that are supposedly brand new. We are experiencing the impact of contemporary art as a globally traded commodity that is produced, displayed, and circulated by an industry of specially trained professionals. […] This is not a new observation: I think Marcel Duchamp already fully understood this danger a hundred year ago. […]

Today it would be rather futile to try to reconstitute bohemia—the free-flowing, organic creative space—because it never really existed within the constellation of institutions of art, the art market, and the art academy. If Warhol’s Factory was an entry into art that enabled a group of people of very different backgrounds to enter a certain kind of productive modality (both within and in spite of the surrounding economy), it was a space of free play that no longer exists. Instead, what we have now are MFA programs: a standardization not even of bohemia, but only its promise. […]

As artists, curators, and writers, we are increasingly forced to market ourselves by developing a consistent product, a concise presentation, a statement that can be communicated in thirty seconds or less—and oftentimes this alone passes for professionalism.

{ Anton Vidokle/e-flux | Continue reading }

photo { Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin }

Ultimately, the most structured society will be a society in which every action has to comply with some rules, i.e. its citizens will de facto be robots with no brains. Why does brain/mind want to get rid of brain/mind?

{ IEET | Continue reading }

Medical and health journals have a bias towards publishing findings which are statistically significant, even when they may not also be clinically relevant. This results in authors describing their non significant findings with creative language, to try and make them seem more interesting.

{ Annie Bruton | Continue reading }

Turning to Foucault, of course we see that power is not simply the ability to dominate. Rather, power

is a set of actions on possible actions; it incites, it induces, it seduces, it makes easier or more difficult; it releases or contrives, makes more probable or less; in the extreme, it constrains or forbids absolutely, but it is always a way of acting upon one or more acting subjects by virtue of their acting or being capable of action. A set of actions upon other actions.

In other words, anyone subject to power is free to act, is an acting subject, but the power relationship either subtly or explicitly contains the subject’s possible courses of action. There is freedom in power, because freedom operates within power.

{ First Monday | Continue reading | Thanks Rob | Michel Foucault, The Subject and Power, 1982 }

[T]here is nothing bad about never being born. Therefore, having a child creates suffering that wouldn’t otherwise exist.

{ Rhys Southan/TNI | Continue reading }

He has devised an algorithm which can look at someone’s mobile-phone records and predict with an average of 93% accuracy where that person is at any moment of any day. Given most people’s regular habits (sleep, commute, work, commute, sleep), this might not seem too hard. What is impressive is that his accuracy was never lower than 80% for any of the 50,000 people he looked at. […]

Politics, too, is falling to the new psychohistorians. Boleslaw Szymanski of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York state studies how societies change their collective minds. By studying simulated networks of people he can predict the point at which a committed minority can convert almost everyone else to its way of thinking.

{ The Economist | Continue reading }

The concept “superiority illusion” refers to the fact that people tend to judge themselves as being superior to the average person when it comes to positive traits such as intelligence, desirability or other personality traits. This is mathematically not possible, because in a normally distributed population, most people cannot be above average. The “superiority illusion” belongs to a family of positive illusions, such as the “optimism bias,” which is characterized by an unrealistic positive outlook regarding our future. It is thought that such positive illusions may help ward off depressive symptoms and promote mental health. […]

[A recent study suggests] that the degree of superiority illusion correlates negatively with functional connectivity between two parts of the brain (the anterior cingulate cortex and the striatum) and that the proposed mediator is the neurotransmitter dopamine. This would mean that increasing dopamine levels in the striatum could promote a person’s superiority illusion.

One limitation of the study was that the findings were purely associative and did not prove an actual causal link between dopamine levels and the superiority illusion.

{ Fragments of Truth | Continue reading }

Government secrecy frequently fails. […] The effort to control government information requires human, bureaucratic, technological, and textual mechanisms that regularly founder or collapse in an administrative state, sometimes immediately and sometimes after an interval. Leaks, mistakes, open sources—each of these constitutes a path out of the government’s informational clutches. As a result, permanent, long-lasting secrecy of any sort and to any degree is costly and difficult to accomplish.

This Article argues that information control is an implausible goal. […]

[E]vents that are kept in deep secrecy become known as their details leak out over time, whether through formal or informal channels. Most events exist in a gray world of partial secrecy and partial disclosure, where even information about events whose existence the government denies is available from open sources, and where even events about which the government has made broad disclosures remain somewhat secret and mysterious. Government information is not subject to control via an on-off switch; instead, it appears incrementally over time, both around and in spite of the literal and figurative black marks of government efforts to control its spread.

{ Mark Fenster /SSRN | Continue reading }

Last August, a book titled “Leapfrogging” hit The Wall Street Journal’s list of best-selling business titles upon its debut. The following week, sales of the book, written by first-time author Soren Kaplan, plunged 99% and it fell off the list.

Something similar happened when the hardcover edition of “Networking is Dead,” was published in mid-December. A week after selling enough copies to make it onto the Journal’s business best-seller list, more hardcover copies of the book were returned than sold, says book-sales tracker Nielsen BookScan.

It isn’t uncommon for a business book to land on best-seller lists only to quickly drop off. But even a brief appearance adds permanent luster to an author’s reputation, greasing the skids for speaking and consulting engagements.

Mr. Kaplan says the best-seller status of “Leapfrogging” has “become part of my position as a speaker and consultant.”

But the short moment of glory doesn’t always occur by luck alone. In the cases mentioned above, the authors hired a marketing firm that purchased books ahead of publication date, creating a spike in sales that landed titles on the lists. The marketing firm, San Diego-based ResultSource, charges thousands of dollars for its services in addition to the cost of the books, according to authors interviewed.

{ WSJ | Continue reading | via Forbes }

installation { Tom Sachs }

One in four of us will struggle with a mental illness this year, the most common being depression and anxiety. The upcoming publication of the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM) will expand the list of psychiatric classifications, further increasing the number of people who meet criteria for disorder. But will this increase in diagnoses really mean more people are getting the help they need? And to what extent are we pathologising normal human behaviours, reactions and mood swings?

The revamping of the DSM – an essential tool for mental health practitioners and researchers alike, often referred to as the ‘psychiatry bible’ – is long overdue; the previous version was published in 1994. This revision provides an excellent opportunity to scrutinise what qualifies as psychiatric illness and the criteria used to make these diagnoses. But will the experts make the right calls?

The complete list of new diagnoses was released recently and included controversial disorders such as ‘excessive bereavement after a loss’ and ‘internet use gaming disorder’. The inclusion of these syndromes raises the important question of what actually qualifies as pathology.

{ King’s Review | Continue reading }

photo { Francesca Woodman, Untitled, Providence, Rhode Island (Self-portrait on the telephone), 1975-1976 }

I’m interested in how the languages we speak shape the way we think. […]

Let me give you an example. Suppose you want to say even the simplest thing, like “Humpty Dumpty sat on a …” Well, even with a snippet of a nursery rhyme, if you try to translate it to other languages, you’d immediately run into trouble. Let’s focus on the verb for a moment. Sat. To say this in English, if this was something that happened in the past, then you’d have to say “sat.” You wouldn’t say, “will sit” or “sitting.” You have to mark tense. In some languages like in Indonesian you couldn’t change the verb. The verb would always stay the same regardless of whether this is a past or future event. In some languages, like in Russian, my native language, you would have to change the verb for tense, but you would also have to include gender. So if this was Mrs. Dumpty that sat on the wall, you’d use a different form of the verb than if it was Mr. Dumpty.

In Russian, quite inconveniently, you have to mark the verb for whether the event was completed or not. So if Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall for the entire amount of time that he was meant to sit on it, that would be one form of the verb. But if he were to say “have a great fall” that would be a different form of the verb.

In Turkish, and this is one of my favorite examples, you have to change the verb depending on how you came to know this information. If you actually witnessed this event with your own eyes, you were walking along and you saw this chubby, ovoid character sitting on a wall, that would be one form of the verb. But if this was something you just heard about, or you inferred, from say broken Humpty Dumpty pieces, then you would have to use a different form of the verb.

When people have looked at differences like this across languages, one first response has been “Wow, languages really require different things from their speakers, therefore people who speak different languages must think differently.” On the other side, people have argued, “Not so fast. Just because languages differ in what their speakers are required to say, doesn’t mean that people have to think differently. The differences could be just on the surface, just in how people talk, not in how they think.”

Here’s an argument that lends that point of view some weight. Whenever we talk, whenever we say anything, we’re only reporting a very small proportion of what we know. For example, if you were to say, “It’s raining today,” you can say that without having to say “It’s raining today, but only outside and not inside,” even though you very well know that it’s only raining outside and not inside. The person hearing you also knows that you know that. You don’t have to report everything that you know, and the sentence that you do say contains only a small proportion of the information that you actually know. Some people have argued just because Turkish, Korean, Japanese, and Russian speakers say different stuff and include different information in their sentences, doesn’t mean they actually know different stuff. They could know the same things, remember the same things, see the world the same way, and just include different things in their sentences. That is, people could all think the same ways, but talk differently.

{ Lera Boroditsky/Edge | Continue reading }

photo { Ruth Bernhard, The Film Guild Cinema, Greenwich Village, NY, 1946 }

In school they tell you time is an illusion, but the profs over-complicate it if you ask me. There’s no such thing as before and after, just a big mash of now. “Time” is something our brains make up to help us get from point A to point B. Like the long path up to Stacy Adams’ house. Someone put it there so you wouldn’t walk around the woods in circles, not getting anywhere. Soon as scientists figured that out, they knew you could make time your bitch. You can stretch it and squash it and reshape it. You just need the right drugs and hardware.

Someday we’ll tell our kids about the night we saw our first Quantum Condenser, that’s what my Lou says on the path up to Stacy Adams’ house. Lou’s into the steevy new gear. I tend to wait for the third or fourth gen when shit actually gets good. But I have to admit I’m excited to see a real life QC. Stacy’s family was the first in the boro to get one. Her dad works at Bubble Labs, where they invented the thing.

You think she’ll let us use it? Lou asks.

I shrug. Then I tickle him because he’s obviously so excited. He shoves me away and then pulls me in and we go arms-around-waists, bumping against each other up the path. Me and my Lou.

Up the hill we go Hi Ho, up to Stacy’s big glass house at the top of the town like Mount Olympus (we just did that mod in Ancient History), and when we ring the bell Stacy’s there in her green double-breasted party suit.

Boys, she goes. Party’s in the back. Come on in.

{ John M. Cusick | Continue reading }

photos { Lorenzo Sala | Inez Van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin }

UFO reports have been evaluated in terms of the supposed reliability of eyewitness accounts and questionable photographic evidence. The constraints that interstellar distances, time and the conservation of energy impose on interstellar space travel for these supposed alien craft seem never to be considered by UFO proponents. Since they do provide descriptions of spacecraft of circular disks, cylinders and triangles that move strangely and rapidly and vary in size from 50 feet in diameter to 300 feet long, I undertake here to apply these constraints to the design of a hypothetical spacecraft in order to determine the feasibility of such craft and their use for interstellar travel. As a physicist and astronomer I think it important to consider not just the accounts of alien contact, but the physics of such a possibility as well.

For my model I have chosen a spacecraft with a crew of six that will leave its planet for a planet in the habitable zone of a star 10 light years away. It will be accelerated at a rate of 10 m/s² (10 meters per second squared) to a velocity of 0.5 times the velocity of light (0.5c, where c is the velocity of light). The time for it to reach this velocity is given by this equation:

t = v/a = 1.5×10⁸/10 = 3.06×10⁷s = 174 days

(a = acceleration in meters/second squared; v = velocity in meters/second; s = time seconds)

This is remarkably short compared to the nonrelativistic time of 20 years for the trip to the destination star. I have chosen 0.5c to minimize the relativistic mass increase of the spacecraft and to minimize travel time. The acceleration rate is approximately equal to the gravity the crew would experience on an earth-like home planet.

The spacecraft would be constructed in orbit from components delivered by shuttles. It would include, in addition to engines and fuel, an internal power supply for all the operational systems as well as life support systems and sustenance for the crew. For a 20-year trip this would necessarily be a small nuclear reactor. A mechanism for rotating the crew’s quarters to provide artificial gravity would be essential. I have chosen a live crew rather than robots or androids because all of the alien encounter and abduction stories indicate their presence. A shuttle for transporting the crew to the surface of the destination planet would also have to be on board.

Our current space shuttles have an unloaded mass of 10⁵ kg. Consequently, considering all of the requirements, a mass of 10⁷ kg is not unreasonable for our model. The kinetic energy of the spacecraft, defined as the energy any object has by virtue of its motion, at 0.5c is

E = ½mv2 = 0.5×10⁷×2.25×10¹⁶ = 1.13×10²³ joules

(m is the mass of the spacecraft and v is the velocity equal to 0.5c).

This is the energy that must be supplied by engine thrust to reach 0.5c

The only source that can supply energy of this magnitude is thermonuclear fusion. […] This energy would be expended over the 174 days of acceleration and is equal to 1.8 megatons per second during acceleration. […] For propulsion of the hypothetical spacecraft the blast energy would have to be converted, with near 100% efficiency, to a constrained unidirectional particle beam with thrust pulses of 1.8 megatons per second for 174 days. For a round trip to a star 10 light years distant this rate of energy expenditure would be needed for slowing down at the destination, leaving, and slowing down again when returning to the home planet after a 40 year expedition.

A lesser source than thermonuclear fusion would be inadequate to provide the required energy for traveling at 0.5c. A lower velocity would mean travel times of hundreds to thousands of years. A lower acceleration rate would greatly increase the time to reach the desired velocity. […]

There is no possible material construction that can constrain and direct the thermal and blast energy of the nuclear fusion rate required for interstellar travel. Consequently, I conclude that alien spacecraft cannot exist.

{ Skeptic | Continue reading }

Any spacecraft, whether from present or future technology, would have a significant inertial mass. Ten thousand years from now conservation of energy will apply anywhere in the galaxy as well as it does today. […]

In point of fact we do have proof of the effects of two megaton unconstrained nuclear fusion reactions, and because of the maximum cohesive force that electrons can create between protons no substance will remain solid above 5000ºC.

{ Skeptic | Continue reading }

The tension between experience for its own sake and experience we pursue just to put on Facebook is reaching its breaking point. That breaking point is called Snapchat. […]

The temporary photograph’s abbreviated lifespan changes how it is made and seen, and what it comes to mean. Snaps could be likened to other temporary art such as ice sculptures or decay art (e.g., Yoko Ono’s famous rotting apple) that takes seriously the process of disappearance, or the One Hour Photo project from 2010 that has as its premise to “project a photograph for one hour, then ensure that it will never be seen again.” However, whatever changes in the aesthetics of photographic vision Snapchat is effecting are difficult to assess, given that no one really knows what its self-deleting photos collectively look like. In many ways, this is exactly the point.

{ Nathan Jurgenson/TNI | Continue reading }

— It’s hard to think of God dying a mortal death.

— Not for me. Actually, I take that back, it’s hard for me to think of him living.

— Right. Well, it’s hard for me to think of him dying. (Laughs.)

{ The Dish | Continue reading }

The pursuit of honors and riches is likewise very absorbing, especially if such objects be sought simply for their own sake, inasmuch as they are then supposed to constitute the highest good. In the case of fame the mind is still more absorbed, for fame is conceived as always good for its own sake, and as the ultimate end to which all actions are directed. […] The more we acquire, the greater is our delight, and, consequently, the more are we incited to increase both the one and the other; on the other hand, if our hopes happen to be frustrated we are plunged into the deepest sadness. Fame has the further drawback that it compels its votaries to order their lives according to the opinions of their fellow-men, shunning what they usually shun, and seeking what they usually seek.

{ Spinoza, On the Improvement of the Understanding | PDF }

photo { Richard Learoyd }

The jobs wai­ting for me after I finished college, simply aren’t there anymore. And yet the schools still act like they are.

{ Hugh MacLeod | Continue reading }

images { 1. Guy Bourdin | 2 }

Modern physics deals with some ridiculously non-intuitive stuff. Objects act as though they gain mass the faster they move. An electron can’t decide if it’s a particle, a wave or both. However, there is one statement that takes the cake on sounding like crazy talk: Empty space isn’t empty.

If you take a container, pump all the air out of it, shield it from electric fields and plop it in the deepest of intergalactic space to get it away from gravitational fields, that container should contain absolutely nothing. However, that’s not what happens.

At the quantum scale, space is a writhing, frantic, ever-changing foam, with particles popping into existence and disappearing in the wink of an eye. This is not just a theoretical idea—it’s confirmed. How can this bizarre idea be true?

Even though in classical physics we are taught that energy is conserved, which means it cannot change, one of the tenets of quantum mechanics says that energy doesn’t have to be conserved if the change happens for a short enough time. So even if space had zero energy, it would be perfectly OK for a little energy to pop into existence for a tiny split second and then disappear—and that’s what happens in empty space. And since energy and matter are the same (thank Einstein for teaching us that E=mc2 thing), matter can also appear and disappear.

And this appears everywhere. At the quantum level, matter and antimatter particles are constantly popping into existence and popping back out, with an electron-positron pair here and a top quark-antiquark pair there. This behavior is the reason that scientists call these ephemeral particles “quantum foam”: It’s similar to how bubbles in foam form and then pop.

{ Fermilab | Continue reading }

photo { Robert Adams }