Loosely Assembled » 9>∞

If you do what you have always done

fekaylius — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 17:50:59 +0000

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

In fact, just read a NewScientist story about how our brains thrive right at the edge of chaos:
CHAOTIC thinking is rarely a recipe for success, but evidence is emerging that operating at the edge of chaos may drive our brain’s astonishing capabilities.
I definitely see a connection between these two items.

Links for April 2nd

fekaylius — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 06:59:00 +0000

Stuff that found me today

Links for March 24th

fekaylius — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 06:59:00 +0000

Links for March 24th through March 26th:

The Number Nine

fekaylius — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 18:57:29 +0000

Obviously, we know the number 9 is special. Find out why other people also think so.

(Via Tommy Devine’s Cosmos Report: Number Nine.)

Links for March 22nd

fekaylius — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 06:59:10 +0000

Links for March 22nd through March 24th:

Lovely Decay

fekaylius — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 23:14:01 +0000

I can’t ever get enough of this kind of thing.

(Via portland ground: A.A. Auto Repair – Chevron Specialty – Garage Storage – Ghost Sign.)

Paleo-fantasies

fekaylius — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 23:50:48 +0000

Zuk draws on Leslie Aiello’s concept of ‘paleofantasies,’ stories about our past spun from thin evidence, to label the nostalgia some people seem to express for prehistoric conditions that they see as somehow healthier. In my research on sports and masculinity, I frequently see paleofantasies come up around fight sports, the idea that, before civilization hemmed us in and blunted our instincts, we would just punch each other if we got angry, and somehow this was healthier, freer and more natural (the problems with this view being so many that I refuse to even begin to enumerate them). It’s an odd inversion on the usual Myth of Progress, the idea that things always get better and better; instead, paleofantasies are a kind of long range projection of Grumpy Old Man Syndrome (’Things were so much better in MY day…’), spinning fantasies of ‘life before’ everything we have built up around us.

Interesting setup for an article that goes beyond the traditional rhetoric we find ourselves wrapped up in.

More Monkey Tools

fekaylius — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 23:09:09 +0000

Just have to love it when animals use tools.

via new scientist

The CitAC Shop

fekaylius — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 07:19:34 +0000

As many of you know, CitAC is a dangerous and violent militia group dedicated to preventing and reversing many forms of “change” (as their name implies: Citizens Against Change). They seem to think that all the problems we encounter as humans have arisen from the blind rush into the future, and that all solutions must therefore be found in the past.

NINE has had a few run ins with CitAC in the past, but it now seems that they are moving outside their comfort zone and selling recruitment/membership gear online!

I just thought I should duly warn all my readers about this.

the CitAC store is here

Object Linguistics

fekaylius — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 01:33:31 +0000

Contextuality, its symbolic value seems to be getting some scientific props.

Kristian Tylén from the University of Southern Denmark in Odense and colleagues wanted to know which part of the brain was used to understand the meaning behind items placed in a symbolic manner. They used fMRI to scan the brains of volunteers as they viewed pictures of everyday objects arranged to communicate meaning, such as flowers left on a doorstep, followed by the same objects in less meaningful settings, such as flowers growing in the wild.

The symbolic arrangements prompted more activity in regions associated with verbal communication, such as the left fusiform gyrus, used in reading, and the inferior frontal cortex, linked to semantic meaning (Brain and Language, DOI: 10.1016/j.bandl.2008.07.002).

Less conventional arrangements, like an art installation, also affected a “verbal” area – producing a pattern of brain activity previously associated with unusual verbal metaphors.

Previous research shows that the brain processes body language and facial expressions in a similar way to verbal communication. “It shows that language is more than just the processing of words – it pervades many of our activities,” says Tylén.

space collective gallery

fekaylius — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 07:18:12 +0000

just found a stimulating new thing to look at, scroll through, and share:
http://spacecollective.org/gallery/

Trains that Actually Stop are so 20th Century

fekaylius — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 04:43:37 +0000

- related post – musical choo choo

The role of linguistics in the rise of individualism

fekaylius — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 06:29:43 +0000

What does it mean that English, and other subject-verb-object languages, might have veered off-course from the dominant (hard wired? or simply ancient?) subject-object-verb model? A recent study shows that despite one’s native linguistic model, non-verbal communication will follow the subject-object-verb format, both gesturally, and diagrammatically. Basically, when people try to communicate with just their hands, they will create “sentences” following the “mice cheese eat” model even if their spoken language would follow a “mice eat cheese” format. The study seems to indicate that the English model is a variant of something more automatic. Why would this kind of change happen?

Could this “promotion” of the verb (and the subsequent “demotion” of the subject) be tied to a cultural deficiency in empathy, our imperialist tendencies or even the rise of individualism? The latter being specifically an effect of object/subject polarization. This same polarization can also be tied to differences between Eastern and Western perceptions of “subject in context” images. The Western description being along the lines of, “a fish in a pond”, while the Eastern version would be more like, “a pond with a fish”.

I guess this still leaves us short when it comes to unravelling Master Yoda’s verb-object-subject format, or whatever he does.

Alienated Cog Syndrome

fekaylius — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 21:52:23 +0000

Some people feel tiny, small and insignificant while working on projects that are so huge they require thousands of people (think Chaplin’s Modern Times).

Others feel empowered and proud to be part of something so much larger, they feel grand themselves by association (think WPA).

I’m wrestling with ways to think about microblogging and/or lightning talks (microconferences?) in light of these varying paradigms/responses. Should the individual data nuggets be considered autonomous? or instead as bricks that build up something tremendously massive? Could microblogging be seen as a step towards the ultimate datafication of everything into shuffleable bits? Is this the gateway to the singularity?

eye candy

fekaylius — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 23:09:46 +0000

Written Mimeria

fekaylius — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 08:58:26 +0000

Chinosaurus Wrecks

fekaylius — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 17:42:01 +0000

So you’re saying that the Chinese believed in dinosaurs before the discovery of fossils because they had discovered fossils? (quoted from a conversation on atheism over at goodreads.com) Related posts:Telekinesis Gene (erm. placebo gene) Found Related posts:

Telekinesis Gene (erm. placebo gene) Found

sibling sing a long

fekaylius — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 01:36:48 +0000

just wanted to take a minute to mention how proud i am of my little brother jacob’s musical prowess:

their space

Changed Minds

fekaylius — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 20:19:39 +0000

Get 165 influential people to talk about the first-person experience of a mind changing moment, and you get a fascinating example of flux, wrapped with stimulating personalities and cultural milestones.

The authors include:

Daniel Kahneman, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, W. Daniel Hillis, David Goodhart, Mark Henderson, David Gelernter, Bart Kosko, Randolph M. Nesse, Linda S. Gottfredson, Kai Krause, Clay Shirky, Denis Dutton, Jamshed Bharucha, Lera Boroditsky, Gregory Benford, Richard Dawkins, Roger Bingham, Jesse Bering, Barry Smith, Steve Connor, Geoffrey Miller, George Johnson, Stephon Alexander, Beatrice Golomb, Chris DiBona, Jordan Pollack, Alison Gopnik, Paul Saffo, Neil Gershenfeld, J. Craig Venter, David Sloan Wilson, Simon Baron-Cohen, Austin Dacey, Daniel Engber, Roger Highfield, Francesco De Pretis, Dimitar Sasselov, Jaron Lanier, Janna Levin, Martin Rees, Esther Dyson, Anton Zeilinger, Gerd Gigerenzer, PZ Myers, Susan Blackmore, Adam Bly, Nicholas Humphrey, Paul Ewald, Seirian Sumner, Brian Eno, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Robert Shapiro, Sam Harris, Yossi Vardi, David Buss, Andrian Kreye, Daniel Goleman, James Geary, Tim O’Reilly, Philip Campbell, Frank Wilczek, Chris Anderson, Rupert Sheldrake Nicholas A. Christakis, Daniel C. Dennett, Helena Cronin, Aubrey de Grey, Nicholas Carr, Lisa Randall, Brian Goodwin, Carolyn Porco, William H. Calvin, Mary Catherine Bateson, Stanislas Dehaene, Linda Stone, Sean Carroll, Richard Wrangham, Marco Iacoboni, Scott Atran, Leo Chalupa, John Allen Paulos, Eduardo Punset, Rebecca Goldstein, Juan Enriquez, George Dyson, Paul Davies, Steven Pinker, Alan Alda, Patrick Bateson, Jon Haidt, George Church, Terrence Sejnowski, Judith Rich Harris, Oliver Morton, Stewart Brand, Daniel Gilbert, Sherry Turkle, John Horgan, Roger Schank, Carlo Rovelli, Xeni Jardin, Stephen Schneider, Diane Halpern, Alan Kay, Marti Hearst, Kevin Kelly, Marcel Kinsbourne, Peter Schwartz, Scott Sampson, Ernst Pöppel, John McCarthy, Seth Lloyd, Gary Klein, Stephen Kosslyn,Lawrence Krauss,Jeffrey Epstein, Ken Ford, John Baez, A. Garrett Lisi, Lee Smolin, Gary Marcus, Lee Silver, Laurence Smith, Robert Trivers, Rodney Brooks, Paul Steinhardt, Helen Fisher, Steve Nadis, Tor Nørretranders, Robert Sapolsky, Max Tegmark, David Dalrymple, Daniel Everett, David Myers, Keith Devlin, Todd Feinberg, Robert Provine, Marc D. Hauser, Thomas Metzinger, Dan Sperber, Leon Lederman, Timothy Taylor, Haim Harari, David Bodanis, Charles Seife, Mark Pagel, Arnold Trehub, Gino Segre, Nick Bostrom, Rudy Rucker, David Brin, Ed Regis, Freeman Dyson, Marcelo Gleiser, Irene Pepperberg, Colin Tudge, James O’Donnell, Michael Shermer, Donald Hoffman, Howard Gardner, Piet Hut, Douglas Rushkoff, Karl Sabbagh, Joseph LeDoux, Martin Seligman

New Ideas for a New Era!

train market

fekaylius — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 05:11:38 +0000