May 2009

The Perceptional Exile from Synaesthesia

by Ben Atlas on 05.31.2009.7:32am · 0 comments

Wassily Kandinsky, Railroad at Murnau, 1908, Lenbachhaus Museum, Munich

Synaesthesia is phenomenon when people react across the perceptual range. For example, people see colors associated with different letters. There is a reference in Nero Philosophy to the genetic study of Synaesthesia by Simon Baron-Cohen but also this interesting historic speculation:

“There are several different kinds of synaesthesia, and the condition is now known to be far more common than was previously thought. Galton was describing a specific type of synaesthesia, called grapheme-colour synaesthesia, in which printed numbers or letters elicit the sensation of specific colours. The Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, who reported seeing equations in colour, was a grapheme-colour synaesthete, while the expressionist artist Wassily Kandinsky, in whom musical tones elicited specific colours, was a tone-colour synaesthete. Kandinsky used his synaesthesia to inform the artisitic process – he tried to capture on canvass the visual equivalent of a symphony. There is also a type of synaesthesia called mirror-touch synaesthesia, which was discovered only very recently.”

There is a new claim in Mind Hacks – Synaesthesia in Frankenstein:

“It seems most children might start with naturally mixed senses before perception becomes segregated through pruning of the fuzzy neural pathways.”

I just Google this and I was right, the famous mnemonist Solomon Veniaminovitch Shereshevsky described by Dr. Alexander Luria had Synaesthesia. I recalled from reading the book years ago that Shereshevsky used to see images associated with words. How many wonderful things we learn ourselves out of?

Image Credit Sharon Mollerus on Flicker

Radical Rebranding of Arts and Sciences

by Ben Atlas on 05.29.2009.2:39am · 0 comments

Thomas Stothard, Diagrams of book-shelves in the Royal Academy of Arts Library: Bays X & Y, 1814-18?

Seth Godin asks is marketing an art or a science? He naturally concludes it’s both and suggests that: “We need hats. The hat of the scientist and the hat of the artist. You can only wear one hat at a time, which is why I didn’t suggest that we need gloves. Figure out what sort of marketing you’re going to do today and go do that.”

Renaissance is known as the high time for art. Yet the art was based on the discoveries and the science of the perspective drawing. Philosophers still argue, what was first the idea of a “point of view” of the artistic illustrations. But no one represents the blurred lines between sciences and arts as much as the high priest of the Renaissance Leonardo. Fast-forward to quantum physics, the high achievement of the modern science, also a profound art, the products of intense abstractions and imagination.

I had a conversation with a friend about our disciplined Eastern European concept of art, while in the west art is a “state of mind”. Perhaps we need to revisit the labels instead of trying to classify our multidimensional creativity. Even Doug Bowman who left Google because they were crunching design, still would agree that in the end it’s all about methodology not about the demarcation between arts are sciences.

Image license courtesy Royal Academy of Arts

The New Socialism – or better – Suprematism

by Ben Atlas on 05.29.2009.1:19am · 0 comments

Two prominent articles signal the coming rhetorical and perhaps practical wave. David Cameron, the leader of the Conservative opposition in London, writes in The Guardian – A new politics: We need a massive, radical redistribution of power:

“…reverse the collapse in personal responsibility that inevitably follows this leeching of control away from the individual and the community into the hands of political and bureaucratic elites. We can reverse our social atomisation by giving people the power to work collectively with their peers to solve common problems. We can reverse our society’s infantilisation by inviting people to look to themselves, their communities and wider society for answers, instead of just the state. Above all, we can encourage people to behave responsibly if they know that doing the right thing and taking responsibility will be recognised and will make a difference.

So I believe the central objective of the new politics we need should be a massive, sweeping, radical redistribution of power: from the state to citizens; from the government to parliament; from Whitehall to communities; from the EU to Britain; from judges to the people; from bureaucracy to democracy. Through decentralisation, transparency and accountability we must take power from the elite and hand it to the man and woman in the street. Yes, as many Guardian commentators in their contributions to A New Politics have argued, that means reforming parliament. But it means much more besides. The reform that’s now required – this radical redistribution of power – must go through every public institution, not just parliament.”

Who is writing for Cameron? I mean “central objective” is “decentralization”- for real! But you get the drift. Kevin Kelly chimes in – Wired – The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online:

“I recognize that the word socialism is bound to make many readers twitch. It carries tremendous cultural baggage, as do the related terms communal, communitarian, and collective. I use socialism because technically it is the best word to indicate a range of technologies that rely for their power on social interactions. Broadly, collective action is what Web sites and Net-connected apps generate when they harness input from the global audience. Of course, there’s rhetorical danger in lumping so many types of organization under such an inflammatory heading. But there are no unsoiled terms available, so we might as well redeem this one.

When masses of people who own the means of production work toward a common goal and share their products in common, when they contribute labor without wages and enjoy the fruits free of charge, it’s not unreasonable to call that socialism.”

These people are doing great disservice to their idea by calling this “socialism”, as they themselves pointed out, the very brand for the extreme centralized command and control. In truth, as Douglas Rushkoff argued, these ideas predate Renaissance. See the first volley for his upcoming book:

I have an untainted name for the new movement. Let’s brand this Suprematism. The name was invented by Kasimir Malevich for his art, to my knowledge has not etymological meaning and even contains a subliminal reference to the Dark Ages. Malevich said: “I felt only night within me and it was then that I conceived the new art, which I called Suprematism.”

7 Reasons why 7 Thin Cows swallowed 7 Fat Cows

by Ben Atlas on 05.27.2009.8:15pm · 0 comments

toyotacowrolla To my friends at the 7fatcow.com

Anonymity is the plague of the frum word. Web sites where anonymity prevails, quickly turn into a depository of the cow pies instead of content.
Multiple bloggers personality disorder. If you change names you can’t develop a character (even an anonymous character) and people can’t relate. Remember it’s all about who is writing not what is being written.
People who grow up frum can’t even think of creating a new sentence (everything important was already said), so they post exclusively either but quoting (stealing) or linking. 7FC is the prime example of that wretched culture.
Excessive use of Yinglish and Yeshivish.
There is no attempt to built a community beyond the inside shtible.
Just like the abuse victims, the group that nominally escaped the abuse can only speak and think about the culture of the abusers.
Juvenile humor is not a substitute to being vulnerable.

20090511-400

Credits: Toyota Cowrolla via afrigadget; illustration by Hugh MacLeod

Shrinks are cooking the Books on Mental Disorders

by Ben Atlas on 05.27.2009.5:17pm · 1 comment

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, A Lunatic behind Bars, 1824-28, Black chalk, National Gallery of Art, Washington

There is a story about the imminent release of the 5th edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, AKA DSM-V, first published in 1952! The American Psychological Association: Major Changes Loom for Bible of Mental Health (via Mind Hacks).

Schizoaffective disorder, a psychiatric diagnosis that stops short of schizophrenia is likely to be eliminated. There is a push for the introduction of “at risk for schizophrenia”. Schizophrenia is being refined, doctors may be able to use “dimensional assessments — on such features as depression, anxiety, cognitive impairment, and reality distortion”. So rating on these four mood disorders may be introduced in addition to the base diagnosis of schizophrenia.

Catatonia is being removed as a variant of schizophrenia.

Genetic links to mental illness to remains outside of the diagnostic realm, despite recent advances in the field.

Gender identity disorder is to be “reclassified as a sexual dysfunction alongside pedophilia and sexual sadism.” While transgendered individuals and groups lobby aggressively to have it dropped entirely.

Yet the most amazing admission comes from Psych central:

“Despite the PR spin that “no limits” were placed on this revision of the DSM, the reality is that there will be very few significant changes from the existing edition of the DSM-IV. While virtually all disorders will be revised, the revisions will, for the most part, be incremental and small. Why? Because the APA recognizes that you can’t retrain 300,000 mental health professionals (not to mention the 500,000 general physicians) in the field to completely relearn their way of diagnosing common mental disorders such as depression, bipolar disorder, ADHD and schizophrenia.”

Did you get that? Its like saying that the profession has been misdiagnosing thousands of people with crushing, debilitating lifelong labels, and now they will continue to diagnose people with lifelong debilitating labels because it’s too hard to retrain the “professionals.”

Humans are a Large Animal with a Very Small Gut

by Ben Atlas on 05.26.2009.10:16am · 0 comments

In his post The evolutionary origins of human nature Razib writes about the new book by Richard Wrangham – Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human:

“Humans are a large animal with a very small gut, so we need to maximize the bang for the buck when it comes to what we eat. Unlike gorillas and to a lesser extent chimpanzees we just aren’t able to process enough low quality vegetable matter to keep ourselves going. Part of this also might be due to the fact that we have some serious energetic needs, our outsized brains require a lot of energy to keep them chugging along (as anyone with low blood sugar can tell you), and I also recall that our bipedal locomotion isn’t quite as efficient as that of the typical mammal’s at high speeds. Due to the content of the book it’s no surprise that they spend a fair time talking about the Raw Food movement. Wrangham’s thesis that we’re primed to consume cooked food because of our evolutionary background is obviously at odds with the theories which Raw Foodists propose (i.e., that in our “natural” state we didn’t cook foods). This is similar to some vegetarians who assert that man is naturally a plant eater. The very fact that we tend to crave meat and cooked foods would tend to argue against that, but there is plenty of evidence that humans have been omnivores who used fire to preprocess their food for a long time. But, the very difficulty of consumption of raw foods, or a high vegetable diet, is probably what makes them often a good choice for someone who wants to lose weight in an affluent society. In world with a surfeit of nutritional intakes putting foods on your plate which are relatively hard to digest (high fiber, etc.) and have a lower caloric intake per unit is a way to modulate consumption naturally (taking advantage of the very unnaturalness of what one is consuming).”

Post Freudian Language Contamination

by Ben Atlas on 05.25.2009.8:38pm · 1 comment

There is nothing that we humans love as much as sticking labels. Over the past century psychiatric, mythological and pop psychology concepts seeped into the common language. Next thing you know people through around contemptuous names like neurotic, bipolar, narcissistic, etc. without any idea what it means. Take classical Freudian neurosis for starters, it is no longer taken seriously by the so called “professionals”. Yet the tag is now firmly planted in the vernacular vocabulary of the malcontent. This is all a pure language contamination to conceal any meaning. People are desperate in their search for the oblique. So if quoting and referencing is not helping in the valiant quest to avoid an opinion and a genuine reaction, then there is a second line of defenses, lobbing pseudo lingo into a conversation. The contaminated tags betray real genuine reaction; steer clear of attention and escape empathy like a plague.

Top 5 Reasons Your Friend is Very, Very Old

by Ben Atlas on 05.25.2009.4:23pm · 0 comments

So what’s with all the talk about the new participatory media? Let me bring this down to you, buddy! So you got a friend who is cool with email, gasp, maybe even has a blog, has 500K followers on Twitter, he shares his digital pics, etc. Yet this very friend is actually very, very old.

Your friend’s formative years were spent when a conversation was framed by newspaper editorials. Your friend blogs by linking to the above the fold story in the New York Times or some distilled version of the same from the 10 o’clock news.
You friend finds it comforting that everyone reads the same article at approximately the same time in the morning. He might have discontinued the actual paper delivery but he is fairly certain online and offline everybody wants to talk about the same article.
This common information denominator provides proven and convenient shield for the dangers of an individual opinion. Your friend’s idea of interesting conversation depends in his successful use of cascading and elaborate quotes; the citations provide a tried and true trick for escaping a personal opinion and a delightful joy for the listeners to boot.
When your friend is at a lecture or in a conversation he thinks his clever reputation is proportionate to his ability to tie anything that he just heard to an article in the New York Times.
You friends ideas about the new media is how we can take the MSM message and make it available on all mobile devices and generally make it easier to share and amplify the centralized thinking and feeling.

Memorial – Sir Laurence Olivier Reads WWII Russian Poem

by Ben Atlas on 05.25.2009.10:33am · 2 comments

This is an episode from The World at War series narrated by Sir Laurence Olivier. The poem “Son” was written by the Russian Jewish poet Pavel Antokolsky (1896-1978) a year after the death of his 18-year-old son Lieutenant Vladimir Antokolovsky, killed in action on June 6th, 1942.

(Son to father…)

Do not call me, father. Do not seek me.
Do not call me. Do not wish me back.

We’re on a route uncharted, fire and blood erase our track.
On we fly, on wings of thunder, never more to sheath our swords.
All of us in battle fallen – not to be brought back by words.

Will there be a rendezvous? I know not. I only know we still must fight.
We are sand grains in infinity, never to meet, nevermore see light.

(Father to son…)

Farewell then my son. Farewell then my conscience.
My youth, and my solace my one and my only.

And let this farewell be the end of a story
Of solitude vast and which none is more lonely.
In which you remain, barred forever and ever
From light and from air, with your death pangs untold.
Untold and unsoothed, not to be resurrected.
Forever and ever, an 18 year old.

Farewell then. No trains ever come from those regions
Unscheduled or scheduled. No aeroplanes fly there.
Farewell then my son, for no miracles happen,
As in this world dreams do not come true.

Farewell…

I will dream of you still as a baby,
Treading the earth with little strong toes,
The earth where already so many lie buried.
This song to my son, is come to its close.

Vladimir Antokolsky

The excerpt from the poem read by Sir Laurence Olivier is a small part of the 10 chapter poem dedicated to his son by Pavel Antokolsky.

Из поэмы «Сын» [начало и конец]

Павел Антокольский: Памяти младшего лейтенанта
Владимира Павловича Антокольского,
павшего смертью храбрых 6 июля 1942 года

1
Вова! Я не опоздал! Ты слышишь?
Мы сегодня рядом встанем в строй.
Почему ты писем нам не пишешь,
Ни отцу, ни матери с сестрой?

Вова! Ты рукой не в силах двинуть,
Слёз не в силах с личика смахнуть,
Голову не в силах запрокинуть,
Глубже всеми лёгкими вздохнуть.

Почему в глазах твоих навеки
Только синий, синий, синий цвет?
Или сквозь обугленные веки
Не пробьётся никакой рассвет?

Видишь – вот сквозь вьющуюся зелень
Светлый дом в прохладе и в тени,
Вот мосты над кручами расселин.
Ты мечтал их строить. Вот они.

Чувствуешь ли ты, что в это утро
Будешь рядом с ней, плечо к плечу.
С самой лучшей, с самой златокудрой,
С той, кого назвать я не хочу?

Слышишь, слышишь, слышишь канонаду?
Это наши к западу пошли.
Значит, наступленье. Значит, надо
Подыматься, встать с сырой земли.

И тогда из дали неоглядной,
Из далёкой дали фронтовой,
Отвечает сын мой ненаглядный
С мёртвою горящей головой:

«Не зови меня, отец, не трогай,
Не зови меня – о, не зови!
Мы идём нехоженой дорогой,
Мы летим в пожарах и в крови.

Мы летим и бьём крылами в тучи,
Боевые павшие друзья.
Так сплотился наш отряд летучий,
Что назад вернуться нам нельзя.

Я не знаю, будет ли свиданье.
Знаю только, что не кончен бой.
Оба мы – песчинки в мирозданье.
Больше мы не встретимся с тобой»

10
Прощай, моё солнце. Прощай, моя совесть.
Прощай, моя молодость, милый сыночек.
Пусть этим прощаньем окончится повесть
О самой глухой из глухих одиночек.

Ты в ней остаёшься. Один. Отрешённый
От света и воздуха. В муке последней,
Никем не рассказанный. Не воскрешённый.
На веки веков восемнадцатилетний.

О, как далеки между нами дороги.
Идущие через столетья и через
Прибрежные те травяные отроги,
Где сломанный череп пылится, ощерясь.

Прощай. Поезда не приходят оттуда.
Прощай. Самолёты туда не летают.
Прощай. Никакого не сбудется чуда.
А сны только снятся нам. Снятся и тают.

Мне снится, что ты ещё малый ребёнок,
И счастлив, и ножками топчешь босыми
Ту землю, где столько лежит погребённых.

На этом кончается повесть о сыне.

Michael Tyznik Proposal for a New Greenback

by Ben Atlas on 05.24.2009.7:10pm · 16 comments

5-redesigned

Richard Smith started Dollar ReDe$ign Project on posterous to crowd-source the redesign of the American currency. The one entry that is getting everyone’s attention is the proposal by the young architect designer Michael Tyznik (image remix via doobybrain). The proposal seems to solve several fundamental challenges in the redesign of the iconic currency:

The greenback is still green;
The founding presidents are still looking over the transactions;
The introduction of color with the ingenuous stripes.

Michael Tyznik goes one step further to suggest a sensible change in coin and paper denominations. He writes:

“I think we need to get rid of the penny, because they’ve gotten to the point that they’re more expensive to produce than they’re worth. Instead, the coins would be 5¢, 10¢, 25¢, 50¢, $1, and $2. The coins can keep their current design, and the $2 would be slightly thicker and larger than the $1, with a shape similar to the UK 50p coin. I’ve added a $200 bill because the $500 is entirely impractical, but the 200 € banknote is in general circulation and I think a $200 could be useful.”

The founding presidents themselves would have protested vociferously about the removal of the Masonic symbols from the currency.

10-redesigned Enjoy the images ►click to continue

Between a Rock and a Hard Place in Setenil De Las Bodegas

by Ben Atlas on 05.23.2009.4:59pm · 0 comments

South East of Seville in Andalucia there is a town called Setenil De Las Bodegas. Many of the structures are built in and around the rock. The white Stucco is a striking contrast with the earthy tones of the rock.

Photo on Flickr by José Luis Sánchez Mesa
Video of Setenil De Las Bodegas on YouTube

Clay Shirky on the History of Cognitive Analgesics

by Ben Atlas on 05.23.2009.2:40pm · 0 comments

Clay Shirky introduces the term “cognitive surplus” in his remarkable talk at the Web 2.0 conference last year in New York. He claims gin (alcohol) was the coping mechanism to sooth the pain of urbanization and dislocations of the industrial revolution. He then jumps to the era of sitcoms to manage the “cognitive surplus” of time in the 50s and describes new participatory paradigm. One of the best 15 min lectures ever.

Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Blip.tv video.

(via gapingvoid: Dreck Intolerance) Shirky’s own recap: Gin, Television, and Social Surplus.

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