{ Jeff Luker }
On the day his country exploded, Santiago Bilinkis stayed at home and watched the riots on television with his wife and infant son. It was painful. In Buenos Aires, one of the world’s great cities, looters were attacking grocery stores. Bilinkis’s bank account—along with every other account in the country—had been frozen by executive decree three weeks earlier. Argentina was out of money.
This was December 20, 2001, a Thursday. (…)
The meltdown of 2008—which nearly destroyed the world’s banking system, sent the United States into its worst recession in 80 years, and put half of Western Europe on the brink of economic collapse—barely registered in Argentina. Andy Freire, Bilinkis’s co-founder at Officenet, told me that he finds it hard not to laugh when his American friends complain about their problems. “Retail sales fall 5 percent in the U.S., and people say it’s a major crisis,” Freire says. “Our sales went down 65 percent in a single month. That’s a crisis.”
The number of people we can truly be friends with is constant, regardless of social networking services like Twitter, according to a new study of the network.
Back in early 90s, the British anthropologist Robin Dunbar began studying the social groups of various kinds of primates. Before long, he noticed something odd.
Primates tend to maintain social contact with a limited number of individuals within their group. But here’s the thing: primates with bigger brains tended to have a bigger circle of friends. Dunbar reasoned that this was because the number of individuals a primate could track was limited by brain volume.
Then he did something interesting. He plotted brain size against number of contacts and extrapolated to see how many friends a human ought to be able to handle. The number turned out to be about 150.
Since then, various studies have actually measured the number of people an individual can maintain regular contact with. These all show that Dunbar was just about spot on (although there is a fair spread in the results).
What’s more, this number appears to have been constant throughout human history–from the size of neolithic villages to military units to 20th century contact books.
But in the last decade or so, social networking technology has had a profound influence on the way people connect. Twitter, for example, vastly increases the ease with which we can communicate with and follow others. It’s not uncommon for tweeters to follow and be followed by thousands of others.
So it’s easy to imagine that social networking technology finally allows humans to surpass the Dunbar number. Not so say Bruno Goncalves and buddies at Indiana University.
related { What Do People Actually Tweet About? }
photo { Isaac McKay-Randozz }
In the four billion years since life on Earth began, there have been five times when there was a sudden mass extinction of life-forms. The last time was 65 million years ago, when the dinosaurs were killed, probably by a meteor. But now the world’s scientists agree that the sixth mass extinction is at hand. Humans have accelerated the rate of species extinction by a factor of at least 100, and the great Harvard biologist EO Wilson warns that it could reach a factor of 10,000 within the next 20 years. We are doing this largely by stripping species of their habitats. We are destroying the planet’s biodiversity, and so we are making the natural chains that keep us alive much more vulnerable to collapse. This time, we are the meteor.
At the same time, we are dramatically warming the atmosphere. I know it has become terribly passé to listen to virtually all the world’s scientists, but I remember the collapsing glaciers I saw in the Arctic, the drying-out I saw in Darfur, and the rising salt water I saw in Bangladesh. 2010 was the joint-hottest year ever recorded, according to Nasa. The best scientific prediction is that we are now on course for a 3ft rise in global sea levels this century. That means goodbye London, Cairo, Bangkok, Venice and Shanghai. Doubt it if you want, but the US National Academy of Sciences – the most distinguished scientific body in the world – just found that 97 per cent of scientific experts agree with the evidence.
painting { Jean-Léon Gérôme }
Let me toss out the idea that, as our markets discover and respond to what consumers most want, our technology has become extremely adept at creating products that correspond to our fantasy ideal of an erotic relationship, in which the beloved object asks for nothing and gives everything, instantly, and makes us feel all powerful, and doesn’t throw terrible scenes when it’s replaced by an even sexier object and is consigned to a drawer.
If art is a kind of lying, then lying is a form of art, albeit of a lower order—as Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain have observed. Both liars and artists refuse to accept the tyranny of reality. Both carefully craft stories that are worthy of belief—a skill requiring intellectual sophistication, emotional sensitivity and physical self-control (liars are writers and performers of their own work). Such parallels are hardly coincidental, as I discovered while researching my book on lying. Indeed, lying and artistic storytelling spring from a common neurological root—one that is exposed in the cases of psychiatric patients who suffer from a particular kind of impairment.
A case study published in 1985 by Antonio Damasio, a neurologist, tells the story of a middle-aged woman with brain damage caused by a series of strokes. She retained cognitive abilities, including coherent speech, but what she actually said was rather unpredictable. Checking her knowledge of contemporary events, Damasio asked her about the Falklands War. This patient spontaneously described a blissful holiday she had taken in the islands, involving long strolls with her husband and the purchase of local trinkets from a shop. Asked what language was spoken there, she replied, “Falklandese. What else?”
In the language of psychiatry, this woman was ‘confabulating’. Chronic confabulation is a rare type of memory problem that affects a small proportion of brain-damaged people. In the literature it is defined as “the production of fabricated, distorted or misinterpreted memories about oneself or the world, without the conscious intention to deceive”. Whereas amnesiacs make errors of omission—there are gaps in their recollections they find impossible to fill—confabulators make errors of commission: they make things up. Rather than forgetting, they are inventing.
In recent years, nightlife has been increasingly recognized as an important resource for the enhancement of the post-industrial profile of the city and for the promotion of gentrification in derelict neighborhoods. It projects an image of a vibrant social and cultural life, considered particularly appealing to the young professional labour force of post-industrial sectors, the members of whom are particularly apt to consider moving to the city. However, the advocates of this ‘nightlife fix’ thesis ignore tensions that have emerged between residents in gentrifying neighborhoods and nightlife businesses due to the nuisance effects of the latter. Using the example of New York City, this paper examines how conflicts over nightlife in gentrifying neighborhoods have resulted in the gentrification of nightlife and have thus transformed the nature of the city’s nightlife itself.
video { Gil Scott-Heron died this afternoon in New York. He was 62. }
{ screenshot from SubUrbia, 1996 }
Both neuroscience and social science suggest that we are more optimistic than realistic. On average, we expect things to turn out better than they wind up being. People hugely underestimate their chances of getting divorced, losing their job or being diagnosed with cancer; expect their children to be extraordinarily gifted; envision themselves achieving more than their peers; and overestimate their likely life span (sometimes by 20 years or more).
The belief that the future will be much better than the past and present is known as the optimism bias. It abides in every race, region and socioeconomic bracket. (…)
A growing body of scientific evidence points to the conclusion that optimism may be hardwired by evolution into the human brain. (…)
Scientists who study memory proposed an intriguing answer: memories are susceptible to inaccuracies partly because the neural system responsible for remembering episodes from our past might not have evolved for memory alone. Rather, the core function of the memory system could in fact be to imagine the future — to enable us to prepare for what has yet to come. The system is not designed to perfectly replay past events, the researchers claimed. It is designed to flexibly construct future scenarios in our minds. As a result, memory also ends up being a reconstructive process, and occasionally, details are deleted and others inserted.
{ The ten-member teenage rap collective Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All, led by Tyler the Creator, and including Earl Sweatshirt, Hodgy Beats, Mike G, Left Brain, Domo Genesis, Syd the Kid, Frank Ocean, Taco Bennet, and Jasper Dolphin, with their propensity for punk-inspired beats and obscene lyrics. | Malcolm Harris/The New Inquiry | full story | Plus: Where’s Earl? | The New Yorker | Thanks Daniel }
In 1986, a young nurse named Sherri Rasmussen was murdered in Los Angeles. Police pinned down no suspects, and the case gradually went cold. It took 23 years—and revolutionary breakthroughs in forensic science—before LAPD detectives could finally assemble the pieces of the puzzle. When they did, they found themselves facing one of the unlikeliest murder suspects in the city’s history.
artwork { Roy Lichtenstein, Finger Pointing, 1973 }
{ via Colleen Nika }
Have too many foreclosed properties? Why not give them away?
That’s what Bank of America plans to do with as many as 150 vacant and abandoned properties in and around Chicago through a new “collaboration” with the city that’s intended to address the problem of abandoned properties.
{ Bankrate | Continue reading }
The psychologist Jens Rasmussen talks about three kinds of error: slips, mistakes, and violations. So, a slip is: you just do something you immediately realize wasn’t what you meant to do–pushed the wrong button, locked yourself out of your house, forgot your car keys. Mistakes are things you do because your view of the world is wrong. So, you took out a subprime mortgage and bought a house because you thought house prices would continue to rise and you would be able to remortgage your house. Then there’s a violation–something you know is against the rules but you did it anyway, for whatever reason. So, maybe you falsified your income.
photo { Tim Geoghegan }
Scientists have found that you can double your chances of reaching your target weight if you get between six and eight hours sleep a night.
If you have any more, you will become too inactive and if you have any less your stress levels will increase along with cravings for unhealthy food.
artwork { Gerhard Richter }
{ Craigslist’s traffic seems to be plateau-ing. Why? This graphic by VC Andrew Parker shows why. Could the same thing happen to Facebook? | Business Insider | full story }
