—
Here the soul sails through a sea of sweetness, / And finally dissolves into it in such a way / As not to feel nor hear any strange / Or wandering sensation
— Fray Luis de León, Oda a Francisco Sainis
[Translation: Kathleen Bulger-Barnett]
The May 19 Science News reports on new research which suggests that the priming research we’ve had fed to us constantly for the past year or so has been showing faulty results.
Psychologists are still divided, it says, as to whether unnoticed cues can influence behavior. Stéphane Doyen re-did a great number of the experiments which showed that priming changes behaviors, by speaking to what psychologist John Bargh calls ‘mental butlers’.
Doyen’s redone experiments suggest that the test subjects were responding to the testers behavioral cues, rather than primes.
Doyen is also the co-founder of a site, Psych Filedrawer, that posts redone psych experiments which have not been published. You can also request specific studies to be redone, to test their conclusions. Milgram, anyone?
I’ve flipped through Judith Schalansky’s book Atlas of Remote Islands. People who know me often recommend it to me, as I have a liking of remote islands. However, her subtitle, Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot on and Never Will just brings a sense of sadness to me. Why would anyone research fifty incredible places across the world and then refuse to go? It is a personality type I cannot begin to understand.
I would rather consider the book a travel guide of must go to places. (I have been to a few, in fact)
Reading about von Neumann and the Institute for Advanced Studies, and their destruction of the island Elugelab, I’d like to re-write her book and fill it with islands I will never visit because we have destroyed them.
“Place pour une oeuvre de sentiment moderne” (Le Corbusier) i.e. “Placeholder for a modern sentiment oeuvre”
I really just want to replace OEUVRE with OEUF. It means so much more to me that way…
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[a precursor is someone of whom we only know after that he came before…]
—Georges Canguilhem
pondering. ideas?
i’ve read e.l. doctorow with that sense that i am supposed to like what i am reading and i always feel as though i’ve missed something. he gets put on the shelf, over and over again, with a sense that someday, one day, i shall read him and it will have a sense of expansive bliss, some opening, blossoming sense of wonder that i’ve missed to date. he is one of those authors where i always think, ‘it’s me, not him’
his article in the nyrbs on 24 May 2012 reminds me again that this is likely the right thought. in four columns he makes me nod my head at faulkner’s famous remark that hemingway lacked courage. as a writer.
at the end of the article, doctorow writes this:
and so it is possible for us now to begin to understand what he meant in his criticism of his colleague ernest hemingway; not merely that hemingway was technically undaring, but that, in thrall to the romance of the self, he had never tapped the human psyche to the depth of its raw existence, or written of characters not defined by the familiar constructs of social reality.
it has been a significantly long time since i read As I Lay Dying. I rooted about a friends apartment the other day for a copy, mine long since having gone who knows where. doctorow having handed me a desire to open the book and be reminded of, in particular, ‘the stubborn domination of their cunningly passive father’.
my only concern is that doctorow’s well considered and beautifully written essay will taste better than the faulkner i can barely remember. yet a man who speaks of it with such admiration of the language and tone, for, as he says, ‘As I Lay Dying does not look up to its characters, or down, but maintains them at eye level, where we sense that a scrupulous dispassion gives faulkner access to the unmediated truth.’
go. read both.
This goes along with my collection of bizarre ‘artisan’ and ‘artisanal’ images. I find them bizarre on two vectors. First, hand-made was once bad, then good, now the bestest most supremest thing EVER. Second, if the opposite of hand-made is machine made, or robot made, or dropped in my mouth by aliens, the reality that this is NOT what happens doesn’t make you awesome, marketable, laudable. Hooray you don’t make pizza in machines! Let’s brand it and call it out and people will love us! No, because pizza, really, should never be machine made.
Also, Dunkin Donuts is offering ‘artisanal bagels’. Bet you can’t wait to get there.
[I hope to re-write this when I have a bit more time. Tracking thoughts, for now.]
I’ve been seeing quite a few versions of this map of Africa pop up across all the various flavors of social media in the past week.
Years ago I worked at National Geographic, so I know the difference between a cylindrical map projection, such as the Mercator, which looks like what is used to make this image.
Maps are always political and power related, I won’t argue that, I believe it is the history of the world, the history of mapmakers, and there are a lot of books to read about this.
Mercator’s map was created for sailing, its best use is nautical. But, flatting an oval onto a cylinder results in significant distortion, particularly on the edges. In the late 1600s this distortion was not really important.
Maps distort in area, direction, and distance. Pause for a moment to consider. This Winkel Tripel, which is the projection Geo switched to as standard when I was there (from the Robinson), tries to minimize all three of these (hence the Tripel). It was a good goal, for a map designed 350 or so years after the Mercator, and in a world that had changed.
Once, only adventurers needed maps, the crown, the insane, perhaps, who sailed off the edges. Now we have maps on all of our devices, and not only are they the Mercator projection, they are fixed (fire up the iphone and try to travel west from hawai’i to china). I sometimes express sadness at the limitations of what is on today’s maps, so standardized.
If you’ve gotten through all that noise I just wrote, here is what I am thinking about: why do I need a map that is true to area? or even distance? In this modern world, I don’t use these things. I do need to know direction, and direction, distorted on a mercator, its OK. Area surely has political concerns, from the days of the colonists to whose property is where and where crazy old mr brown’s yard starts. (But you know that, he has a fence.)
What do we, individuals, use maps for now, other than directions in the small sense, local directions? I use them for dreaming. I use them to figure out how to walk from here to there. Sometimes I use them to figure out how long it will take me to get from here to there.
So what is the purpose of that map I linked to above? I think it is to make you feel bad. I’m not sure why, or to what end, but that is the sense I get. Now that you know the area of Africa is Very Large, what now? I also think its interesting that Canada is not included. Maybe because it would have taken up about third?
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Deep Thought, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
The other day, in a meeting, we were drawing time series on the white board and discussing all the ways you could pivot in time from the present. Year over year, forward, backward, known, estimated, historical, historically changed because the data had been altered. For a while I said nothing, and then a colleague asked what I was thinking, and I said, I am thinking of how hard it will be to design software when we sort out the multiverse and time is no longer linear. Focus, he said. I am, said I. No, he said, on THIS.
I hope I don’t design software when time is not linear. There are so many better things to do with non-linear time and space.
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Beautiful Code, Oram & Wilson
The above strikes me as a beautiful consideration on the selves and identites that we cart about with our lives, on-line and off. The iterations we travel through, and the ways in which we locate and re-locate the selves we have had at different times and places. In effect, we each have our own set of regular expressions to bring forth the versions of ourselves that we want, or need, at certain times. [and some of my metacharacters *do* have special meaning]
