Fear and trembling
Retrocausality is any of several hypothetical phenomena or processes that reverse causality, allowing an effect to occur before its cause.
related { Quantum decision affects results of measurements taken earlier in time }
ideas
And therefore cannot have an eternal past
Some scientists argue that the purpose of sleep may not be restorative. In fact, they argue that the very question “why do we sleep?” is mistaken, and that the real question should be “why are we awake?” (…)
The world record for going without sleep is eleven days.
photo { Adrienne Grunwald }
Did they say they give a delightful figure line 11/6 obviating that unsightly broad appearance across the lower back to reduce flesh (wink)
Many crimes are generally performed by using language. Among them are solicitation, conspiracy, perjury, threatening, and bribery. In this chapter, we look at these crimes as acts of speech, and find that they have much in common – and a few interesting differences. For one thing, they involve different acts of speech, ranging from promises to orders. For another, most language crimes can be committed through indirect speech. Few criminals will say, “I hereby offer you a bribe,” or “I hereby engage you to kill my spouse.” Thus, many of the legal battles involve the extent to which courts may draw inferences of communicative intent from language that does not literally appear to be criminal. Yet the legal system draws a line in the sand when it comes to perjury, a crime that can only be committed through a direct fabrication. We provide a structured discussion of these various crimes that should serve to explain the similarities and difference among them.
I am a theater and nothing more than a theater
Both scientists and artists have suggested that sleep facilitates creativity, and this idea has received substantial empirical support. In the current study, we investigate whether one can actively enhance the beneficial effect of sleep on creativity by covertly reactivating the creativity task during sleep.
Individuals’ creative performance was compared after three different conditions: sleep-with-conditioned-odor; sleep-with-control-odor; or sleep-with-no-odor. In the evening prior to sleep, all participants were presented with a problem that required a creative solution. In the two odor conditions, a hidden scent-diffuser spread an odor while the problem was presented. In the sleep-with-conditioned-odor condition, task reactivation during sleep was induced by means of the odor that was also presented while participants were informed about the problem. In the sleep-with-control-odor condition, participants were exposed to a different odor during sleep than the one diffused during problem presentation. In the no odor condition, no odor was presented.
After a night of sleep with the conditioned odor, participants were found to be: (i) more creative; and (ii) better able to select their most creative idea than participants who had been exposed to a control odor or no odor while sleeping.
These findings suggest that we do not have to passively wait until we are hit by our creative muse while sleeping. Task reactivation during sleep can actively trigger creativity-related processes during sleep and thereby boost the beneficial effect of sleep on creativity.
On the right (smaller) hob a blue enamelled saucepan: on the left (larger) hob a black iron kettle.
Historically, the book, almost alone, has resisted that great colonizing form of our age, the ad. That, in turn, meant you could be assured of one thing when you opened its covers: that you were alone in the book’s world and time. No longer. Sooner or later, the one thing the coming successor generations of e-book are guaranteed to do is smash the traditional reading experience, that sense — when you step inside those covers — of having plunged into another universe. You can’t really remain in another universe long with your email pinging in the background. So the book, enveloped in our busy world and the barrage of images, information, and so much else that comes our way incessantly, is bound to morph into something different, as is the experience of reading it.
artwork { Chad Person }
‘Les momies qu’on a dans le coeur ne tombent jamais en poussière et, quand on penche la tête par le soupirail, on les voit en bas, qui vous regardent avec leurs yeux ouverts, immobiles.’ –Flaubert
Would you make the same decisions in a foreign language as you would in your native tongue? It may be intuitive that people would make the same choices regardless of the language they are using, or that the difficulty of using a foreign language would make decisions less systematic. We discovered, however, that the opposite is true: Using a foreign language reduces decision-making biases. (…) We propose that these effects arise because a foreign language provides greater cognitive and emotional distance than a native tongue does.
‘Ne dites pas: Elle jouit comme une jument qui pisse. Dites: C’est une exaltée.’ –Pierre Louÿs
{ 1.Francesco Ercolini | 2. Calla }
quote { Pierre Louÿs, Manuel de civilité pour les petites filles à l’usage des maisons d’éducation, 1926-1927 | full text | Wikipedia }
‘The needy animal knows how much it needs, but the needy man does not.’ –Democritus
Universal mind uploading is the concept (…) that the technology of mind uploading will eventually become universally adopted by all who can afford it, similar to the adoption of modern agriculture, hygiene, and permanent dwellings. The concept is rather infrequently discussed, due to a combination of 1) its supposedly speculative nature and 2) its “far future” time frame. Yet some futurists, such as myself, see the eventuality as plausible by as early as 2050. (…)
Mind uploading would involve simulating a human brain in a computer in enough detail that the “simulation” becomes, for all practical purposes, a perfect copy and experiences consciousness, just like protein-based human minds. If functionalism is true, as many cognitive scientists and philosophers believe, then all the features of human consciousness that we know and love — including all our memories, personality, and sexual quirks — would be preserved through the transition. By simultaneously disassembling the protein brain as the computer brain is constructed, only one implementation of the person in question would exist at any one time, eliminating any unnecessary philosophical confusion. Whether the computer upload is “the same person” is up for the person and his/her family and friends to decide. (…)
An upload of you with all your memories and personality intact is no different from you than the person you are today is different than the person you were yesterday when you went to sleep, or the person you were 10-30 seconds ago when quantum fluctuations momentarily destroyed and recreated all the particles in your brain.
And think no more about it why can’t you kiss a man without going and marrying him first
Oh, Sallie Mae. Like a foxy country girl in some daisy dukes. Healthy and sun-kissed Miss Sallie Mae from Georgia, from that bountiful South where time moves slow and the fields just can’t help but produce.
‘Never have so many been manipulated so much by so few.’ –Aldous Huxley
The instruments of critical theory can take down any piece of contemporary art by treating it as a symptom of the inequalities of the society that produced it. The art objects don’t become racist, sexist, or classist, but are revealed as inevitably so as superstructural products of a capitalist society. I don’t mean to make it sound like that means this line of critique isn’t valuable, because I think it’s right-on nearly all the time. But does that mean so-called “fine art” is fully subsumed by control society?
I don’t think so, lately I’ve been feeling like we’re about to see art (and not just individual artists) sprint ahead of its criticism for the first time in decades. And watching the critical side in denial as art whooshes past is painful.
I suppose it must be the highest rock in existence the galleries and casemates and those frightful rocks
‘Quantified pure existentials’ are sentences (e.g., ‘Some things do not exist’) which meet these conditions: (i) the verb EXIST is contained in, and is, apart from quantificational BE, the only full (as against auxiliary) verb in the sentence; (ii) no (other) logical predicate features in the sentence; (iii) no name or other sub-sentential referring expression features in the sentence; (iv) the sentence contains a quantifier that is not an occurrence of EXIST.
Colin McGinn and Rod Girle have alleged that stan- dard first-order logic cannot adequately deal with some such existen- tials. The article defends the view that it can.
{ Disputatio | PDF }
unrelated { A few new words: Doxing, Errbody, Grok, Muppies… }
A husky fifenote blew. Blew.
I write as I await the birth of my second son. If trends about fatherhood continue as they have over the last several decades, the chances are that he will have children in his 40s, and (some of) my grandchildren will be in their 40s or 50s in the year 2112. What sort of world will they inhabit? (…)
The last century has been the age of political rights. Never in our history have so many people taken part in choosing their leaders and having a say in how their societies are governed. To be sure, this unparalleled expansion of civil and political rights remains incomplete. Yet it is profoundly significant, not only due to its transformative impact on the lives of billions, but also because so many other phenomena in recent history are connected to it. The rights revolution is intertwined with diverse trends such as the development of technology; sustained yet uneven economic growth; a general decline in war within recent decades; and a population explosion placing new pressures on our resources and environment.
In this essay I will first outline the 10 most important trends, starting with the rights revolution itself, that have defined our economic, social, and political lives over the last 100 years. Then I will discuss how the rights revolution has helped shape the other nine trends.
Jays, that’s a good one. Glauber salts. O jays, into the men’s porter.
Happiness has long been regarded as one of the highest goals in human life. If our sense of happiness is closely connected to brain functions, future methods may allow us to control happiness through refined, effective brain manipulation. Can we regard such happiness as true happiness? In this paper I will make some remarks on the manipulation of the sense of happiness and illuminate the relationship between human dignity and happiness. (…)
The President’s Council on Bioethics’s 2003 report Beyond Therapy includes an extensive discussion of the morality of mood-improvement drugs such as SSRIs (Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors). The report argues that while SSRIs can help patients live a better life by inducing calm, providing a background of well-being, and changing personality, such drugs create some fundamental ethical problems. First, one might come to “feel happy for no good reason at all, or happy even when there remains much in one’s life to be truly unhappy about.” Second, “SSRIs may generally dull our capacity to feel [psychic pain], rendering us less capable of experiencing and learning from misfortune or tragedy or empathizing with the miseries of others.” And third, those drugs “might shrink our capacity for true human flourishing.” To conclude, the report recommends those drugs be “sparingly” used so that we “are able to feel joy at joyous events and sadness at sad ones.”
The Council’s argument was made from the perspective of conservative or communitarian ethics, and it has been harshly criticized by proponents of technological advances as being overly sentimental. (…)
In order to further develop their argument, here I would like to make a thought experiment. Suppose we have a perfect happiness drug without any side effects, and, having taken that drug, the user is filled with a sense of happiness for a couple of days regardless of his or her experiences. (…) “Today my child was killed, but how happy I am now!” (…) This is a typical example of Beyond Therapy’s case in which a person feels “happy when there remains much in one’s life to be truly unhappy about.”
‘Now that I’ve reached an age where I can feel my body is poised to fall apart, I think I should purchase my first Speedo.’ –Tim Geoghegan
Why should we deal with pornography from a feminist perspective? The answer to this question is straightforward. Pornography is the key mass media genre in which sexuality is made visible and performed. Sexuality, on the other hand, is one of the main areas where gender and gender relations are negotiated. In this article, I will examine different – and in particular conflicting – feminist positions with respect to pornography which have been developed from the 1970s until today. The focus will be on the issue of the construction of sexual and gender identities. I will analyze how these identities in regards to the pornographic body are negotiated or even shifted within these different feminist discourses and practices. Dildos and cyborgs will be discussed in the final part of this article, which deals with current queer-feminist debates in the field of so called post-porn.
At the beginning of the seventies, in a phase of almost complete legalization of pornography in most of the western countries, the pornographic movie left the underground and was allowed into new public spheres. Pornography as a film genre developed into a mass product and was increasingly available even in cinemas. It was during that period that the sexual revolution came to an end, or rather began to transform itself into something new.
image { James Victore }
Read something, twice. If it doesn’t read the same both times, you’re probably dreaming.
Waking up from surgery can be disorienting. One minute you’re in an operating room counting backwards from 10, the next you’re in the recovery ward sans appendix, tonsils, or wisdom teeth. And unlike getting up from a good night’s sleep, where you know that you’ve been out for hours, waking from anesthesia feels like hardly any time has passed. Now, thanks to the humble honeybee, scientists are starting to understand this sense of time loss. New research shows that general anesthetics disrupt the social insect’s circadian rhythm, or internal clock, delaying the onset of timed behaviors such as foraging and mucking up their sense of direction. (…)
Warman says his team is currently looking at whether shining bright light at someone under anesthesia—a well known way to alter the circadian clock—could also reduce the procedure’s disorienting effects.
A man’s attitude… a man’s attitude goes some ways.
In psychology, this phenomenon is called “gaslighting,” a term that has its origins in a 1938 play (and a 1940 film) called Gas Light, where a man leads his wife to believe that she is insane in order to steal from her. (…)
A classic example of psychological gaslighting is the following: Spouse A has an extramarital affair and tries to cover it up. Spouse B finds a suspicious text message in A’s phone and expresses concern to A. A then accuses B of being paranoid, and this pattern repeats every time B raises concerns. Eventually B begins to question his or her own perceptions.
image { Steven Pippin }
‘Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.’ –Mike Tyson
It’s famously tough getting through the Google interview process. But now we can reveal just how strenuous are the mental acrobatics demanded from prospective employees. Job-seekers can expect to face open-ended riddles, seemingly impossible mathematical challenges and mind-boggling estimation puzzles. (…)
1. You are shrunk to the height of a 2p coin and thrown into a blender. Your mass is reduced so that your density is the same as usual. The blades start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do? (…)
3. Design an evacuation plan for San Francisco. (…)
5. Imagine a country where all the parents want to have a boy. Every family keeps having children until they have a boy; then they stop. What is the proportion of boys to girls in this country? (…)
6. Use a programming language to describe a chicken. (…)
7. What is the most beautiful equation you have ever seen? (…) Most would agree this is a lame answer:
E = MC2
It’s like a politician saying his favorite movie is Titanic.
You want Einstein? A better reply is:
G = 8πT (…)8. You want to make sure that Bob has your phone number. You can’t ask him directly. Instead you have to write a message to him on a card and hand it to Eve, who will act as a go-between. Eve will give the card to Bob and he will hand his message to Eve, who will hand it to you. You don’t want Eve to learn your phone number. What do you ask Bob? (…)
11. How much would you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle? (…)
14. Can you swim faster through water or syrup?
images, clockwise from top left { 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 }
quote { thanks Tim }
Daresay he writes him an odd shaky cheque or two on gale days. Windfall when he kicks out.
For several years now, the Fed has been making money available to the financial sector at near-zero interest rates. Big banks and hedge funds, among others, have taken this cheap money and invested it in securities with high yields. This type of profit-making, called the “carry trade,” has been enormously profitable for them. (…)
Under my plan, each American household could borrow $10 million from the Fed at zero interest. The more conservative among us can take that money and buy 10-year Treasury bonds. At the current 2 percent annual interest rate, we can pocket a nice $200,000 a year to live on. The more adventuresome can buy 10-year Greek debt at 21 percent, for an annual income of $2.1 million. Or if Greece is a little too risky for you, go with Portugal, at about 12 percent, or $1.2 million dollars a year. (No sense in getting greedy.) (…)
Because we will be making money in basically the same way as hedge fund managers, we should have to pay only 15 percent in taxes, just like they do.
photo { Felix Odell }
Chew? Toby Chew?
Baboons have mastered one of the basic elements of reading - identifying the difference between sequences of letters that make up actual words from nonsense sequences.
Although the animals have no linguistic skills, they were able to classify a four-letter sequence as either a real word or a random sequence. These findings challenge the long-held notion that the ability to recognise words in this way - as combinations of objects that appear visually in certain sequences - is fundamentally related to language.
It now appears that when humans read, we are partly drawing on an ancient ability, predating the evolution of our own species.
Linguists agree that language is needed during reading, but at which stage language becomes a necessity has come under debate. Past research has shown that animals have the ability to discriminate letters from one another, but previously experts thought the ability to recognise words was dependent on an ability to understand language.
photo { Robin Schwartz }
Of making many books there is no end
In my new book Drop Dead Healthy, I try to become the healthiest person alive. In doing so, I examine hundreds of activities to determine if they are healthy.
Is meditation healthy? Yes. Petting dogs? Yes, because it lowers the blood pressure. Sitting? Definitely not. Going to a noisy restaurant? No. Taking naps? Thank God yes.
One of the few activities I didn’t discuss: Reading. Is reading healthy? Or will it slowly murder you?
No doubt I’m a bit biased, but I’ve come to the conclusion that overall, books are, in fact, good for your health. (…)
More and more research shows that sitting is bad for you. It significantly increases your chances of heart disease and slows your metabolism.
This is why, for my book, I ignored the siren call of my chair and did a lot of reading standing up. Reading on your feet burns about 34 more calories per hour than reading while sitting. Eventually, I took it further. I bought a treadmill, converted it into a desk, and did all my reading and writing while walking. It took me about a thousand miles to write the book.
