Compare
February 03, 2012

Via Vanity Fair: "For most of the last century, America’s cultural landscape—its fashion, art, music, design, entertainment—changed dramatically every 20 years or so. But these days, even as technological and scientific leaps have continued to revolutionize life, popular style has been stuck on repeat, consuming the past instead of creating the new. (...)
We seem to have trapped ourselves in a vicious cycle-economic progress and innovation stagnated, except in information technology; which leads us to embrace the past and turn the present into a pleasantly eclectic for-profit museum; which deprives the cultures of innovation of the fuel they need to conjure genuinely new ideas and forms; which deters radical change, reinforcing the economic (and political) stagnation."

vs.

Via Cyborgology: "And then there is war. Lots of war. Anderson briefly mentions Vietnam as a cultural touchstone of the 60s and 70s, but no mention of this generation’s indefinite warfare. No mention of drones becoming household words, no mention of the art that opposes the war, the record-setting protests that, while largely ignored by the media, definitely did actually happen. Also no mention of the video games as a form of media. Nothing about violent video games made by the American Army, no discussion of Hillary Clinton’s crusade to keep violent video games out of the hands of children, or the any of the similar discussions we have had, as a society, about interactive media.

Popular politics and protest are very influential in pop culture. But when such protest is ignored by the media, individuals are left to making their own media, and with it, their own culture. Anderson is looking for culture in all the wrong places. There are parts of our culture that definitely conform to Kurt Anderson’s critique. The GAP and Starbucks haven’t changed much in the past decade and, as Anderson correctly notes, Now that multi-billion-dollar enterprises have become style businesses…a massive damper has been placed on the genreal impetus for innovation and change. One thinks immediately of the first episode of Portlandia, in which Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein triumphantly declare that The dream of the 90s is alive in Portland. But even then, the very existence of a show like Portlandia, suggests that this subculture has reached such a level of self-referential awareness, that it is only a matter of time before it is all SO TOTALLY OVER."

One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry. —Oscar Wilde
January 29, 2012

Via Review of General Psychology: "This article examines the possibility that romantic love (with intensity, engagement, and sexual interest) can exist in long-term relationships. A review of taxonomies, theory, and research suggests that romantic love, without the obsession component typical of early stage romantic love, can and does exist in long-term marriages, and is associated with marital satisfaction, well-being, and high self-esteem. Supporting the separate roles of romantic love and obsession in long-term relationships, an analysis of a moderately large data set of community couples identified independent latent factors for romantic love and obsession and a subsample of individuals reporting very high levels of romantic love (but not obsession) even after controlling for social desirability. Finally, a meta-analysis of 25 relevant studies found that in long- and short-term relationships, romantic love (without obsession) was strongly associated with relationship satisfaction; but obsession was negatively correlated with it in long-term and positively in short-term relationships."

by Byron Katie
January 24, 2012

Via The Work: "In its most basic form, The Work consists of four questions and your turnarounds. For example, your statement might be '[Name] doesn't listen to me.' Find someone in your life about whom you have had that thought, take that statement and put it up against the four questions and turnarounds of The Work.

Step 1 Is it true?
Step 2 Can you absolutely know that it's true?
Step 3 How do you react, what happens, when you believe that thought?
Step 4 Who would you be without the thought?

Turn around the concept you are questioning, and be sure to find at least three genuine, specific examples of each turnaround.

After you have investigated your statement with the four questions, you’re ready to turn around the concept you’re questioning. (...)

Each turnaround is an opportunity to experience the opposite of what you originally believed.
A statement can be turned around to the opposite, to the other, and to the self (and sometimes to my thinking, when that feels appropriate). Find a minimum of three genuine, specific examples of how each turnaround is true in your life, and then allow yourself the time and presence to feel them deeply."

Examples here.

γνῶθι σεαυτόν
January 23, 2012

Via Wikipedia: "The Ancient Greek aphorism Know thyself, Greek: γνῶθι σεαυτόν, English phonetics pronunciation: gnōthi seauton (also ... σαυτόν ... sauton with the ε contracted), was inscribed in the pronaos (forecourt) of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi according to the Greek periegetic (travelogue) writer Pausanias (10.24.1).

The maxim, or aphorism, Know Thyself has had a variety of meanings attributed to it in literature. The Suda, a tenth century encyclopedia of Greek Knowledge, says: 'the proverb is applied to those whose boasts exceed what they are,' and that know thyself is a warning to pay no attention to the opinion of the multitude."

Intuition
January 22, 2012

Via Wikipedia: "Intuition is a priori knowledge or experiential belief characterized by its immediacy. Beyond this, the nature of intuition is debated. Roughly speaking, there are two main views. They are:

1. Intuitions are a priori. This view holds that distinctions are to be made between various sorts of intuition, roughly corresponding to their subject matter (see George Bealer). The only intuitions that are relevant in analytic philosophy are 'rational' intuitions. These are intellectual seemings that something is necessarily the case. They are directed exclusively towards statements that make some kind of necessity claim. For example, a rational intuition is what occurs when it seems to us that a mathematical statement (e.g. 2+2=4) must be true. Intuitions as this view characterizes them are to be distinguished from beliefs, since we can hold beliefs which are not intuitive, or have intuitions for propositions that we know to be false.

2. Intuitions are a species of belief, and based ultimately in experience. This view holds that intuitions are not especially different from beliefs, although they appear subjectively to be more unrevisable than other beliefs. Unlike the previous view, these intuitions are liable to differ between social groups. Evidence for this is shown in various psychological studies (e.g. the one by Stich, Weinburg and Nichols)."

Can we eat to starve cancer?
January 6, 2012

Via TED: "William Li presents a new way to think about treating cancer and other diseases: anti-angiogenesis, preventing the growth of blood vessels that feed a tumor. The crucial first (and best) step: Eating cancer-fighting foods that cut off the supply lines and beat cancer at its own game."

Glowing words by Kent Rogowski
January 5, 2012

Via Boston Globe: "But the real question, when it comes to predicting the future of forecasting, may not be whether we can or can’t forecast accurately — it’s whether we want to."

I want to know
January 3, 2012

Via EurekAlert!: "It may seem like a good thing to have a better memory, but people with excessively vivid memories have a difficult life. 'Memory is a double-edged sword,' Hills says. In post-traumatic stress disorder, for example, a person can’t stop remembering some awful episode. 'If something bad happens, you want to be able to forget it, to move on.'"

Via Neon Tommy: "The researchers found that trans fat (found in fried and many processed foods) contributed to more shrinkage of the brain in addition to less cognitive recognition."

Still my No 1 value: Openness
January 2, 2012

Via Wikipedia: "Serendipity means a happy accident or pleasant surprise; specifically, the accident of finding something good or useful without looking for it. The word has been voted one of the ten English words hardest to translate in June 2004 by a British translation company. However, due to its sociological use, the word has been exported into many other languages."

"One must Learn to Love. This is our experience in music: we must first learn in general to hear to hear fully, and to distinguish a theme or melody, we have to isolate and limit it as a life by itself; then we need to exercise effort and good will in order to endure it in spite of its strangeness we need patience towards its aspect and expression and indulgence towards what is odd in it in the end there comes a moment when we are accustomed to it, when we expect it, when it dawns upon us that we should miss it if it were lacking; and then it goes on to exercise its spell and charm more and more, and does not cease until we have become its humble and enraptured lovers, who want it and want it again, and ask for nothing better from the world. It is thus with us, however, not only in music: it is precisely thus that we have learned to love everything that we love. We are always silly recompensed for our good will, our patient reasonableness and gentleness towards what is unfamiliar, by the unfamiliar slowly throwing off its veil and presenting itself to us as a new, ineffable beauty: that is its thanks for our hospitality. He also who loves himself must have learned it in this way: there is no other way. Love also has to be learned." –Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science.

Thanks to Katharina Hauke!

Als wär's das letzte Mal
January 1, 2012

And there's a hand, my trusty fiere
And gie's a hand o'thine
And we'll tak a right gude willie-waughtm
for auld lang syne.

Und hier ist meine Hand, mein treuer Freund,
Und schlag ein mit der Deinen!
Und dann lass uns einen ordentlichen Schluck nehmen
Der alten Zeiten wegen.

Via Cantaria Folk Song Archive: "Robert Burns sent a copy of the original song to the British Museum with this comment: The following song, an old song, of the olden times, and which has never been in print, nor even in manuscript until I took it down from an old man's singing , is enough to recommend any air. (Gavin Grieg: Last Leaves of Traditional Ballads) He set it to a traditional Scottish air that is quite different than the popularized version.
Throughout the English-speaking world, Auld Lang Syne is traditionally sung on New Years Eve (known as Hogmanay in Scotland). That tradition does not hearken back to Burns but rather only to Canadian band leader Guy Lombardo who sang at midnight January 1, 1929 in the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City. Guy Lombardo's orchestra played the song every New Years Eve, in live broadcast from New York, until 1976. Since then, their recording has been played each year as part of the Times Square ball drop."

Ten in Eleven: That which is in the way is the way
December 31, 2011

Anticipation Sitting on my hotel bed right at Venice boardwalk and waiting for the wave from Japan. Watching the surfers trying to get into the pacific and listening to the police helicopters above yelling into their megaphone "Clear the beach".
Book Out of Our Heads – Why You Are Not Your Brain by Alva Noë. In this inventive work, Noë suggests that rather than being something that happens inside us, consciousness is something we do.
Emergence Quitting my Art Director Club's membership with reference to Exit Through The Giftshop.
Film Cave of Forgotten Dreams is a 2010 3-D documentary film by Werner Herzog, about the Chauvet Cave in southern France. Finally 3-D makes sense. Altogether a breathtaking treat including a hilarious end.
Exhibition All of This and Nothing at UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.
Letter The incredibly moving, detailed account of Aldous' last days was written by Laura Huxley just days after her husband's death and sent to his older brother Julian.
Quote If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight…. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all. –John Cage
Teaching tale Enter Zen from there.
To Do Write Cadavre Exquis workshop exposé.
Useful concept The six-faceted diamond of psychological flexibility.

So, here we are... And what is next?

By John Maeda and Becky Bermont
December 22, 2011

Via The European Business Review: "And though artistry doesn’t lend itself easily to a set of instructional principles, my hope is that the series of vignettes below help to show how artists and designers may have more of a place around the management table than often thought:

1. Build from foundations
2. Craft the team
3. Sense actively
4. Fail productively
5. Openly critiqued
6. Take leaps"

Thanks to Christian Schäfer!

by James Guppy
December 17, 2011

Happiness (is a warm gun)
Bang Bang Shoot Shoot

by positivity psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky
December 11, 2011

Via Marc and Angel Hack Life: "Studies conducted by positivity psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky point to 12 things happy people do differently to increase their levels of happiness. These are things that we can start doing today to feel the effects of more happiness in our lives. (...)

1. Express gratitude.
2. Cultivate optimism.
3. Avoid over-thinking and social comparison.
4. Practice acts of kindness.
5. Nurture social relationships.
6. Develop strategies for coping.
7. Learn to forgive.
8. Increase flow experiences.
9. Savor life’s joys.
10. Commit to your goals.
11. Practice spirituality.
12. Take care of your body."

Compiled by Golan Levin
December 10, 2011

Via Flong: "Slitscan imaging techniques are used to create static images of time-based phenomena. In traditional film photography, slit scan images are created by exposing film as it slides past a slit-shaped aperture. In the digital realm, thin slices are extracted from a sequence of video frames, and concatenated into a new image.
Recently I've seen many new-media projects based on slit-scan techniques. They range from student projects, to Java demonstrations on the Processing.org site, to works by recognized pioneers of video and interactive art. My inclination to make lists is irresistible, and so I've put together this catalogue as an aid to researchers and students. My aim is to be as inclusive as possible, rather than attempt to winnow the projects down to just a few ideal exemplars or the most significant historic precursors. Thus not all of the examples are even computational: some of the projects described below use motion-picture film, still photography, or analog video techniques. Please note that this page is not self-promotional; I have not produced any slit-scan based projects myself.
Eddie Elliott, one of the earliest researchers of digital slit-scan imaging, keeps a related list which is more oriented towards photography, early cinema and flipbooks. There is now a Flickr tag for slitscan images, and many of the latest and informal productions can be seen there."

Thanks to Katharina Hauke!

by Burt Bacharach
November 27, 2011

What the world needs now is love, sweet love
It's the only thing that there's just too little of
What the world needs now is love, sweet love,
No, not just for some but for everyone.
Lord, we don't need another mountain,
There are mountains and hillsides enough to climb
There are oceans and rivers enough to cross,
Enough to last till the end of time.
What the world needs now is love, sweet love
It's the only thing that there's just too little of
What the world needs now is love, sweet love,
No, not just for some but for everyone.
Lord, we don't need another meadow
There are cornfields and wheat fields enough to grow
There are sunbeams and moonbeams enough to shine
Oh listen, lord, if you want to know.
What the world needs now is love, sweet love
It's the only thing that there's just too little of
What the world needs now is love, sweet love,
No, not just for some but for everyone.

Listen here.

The bigger picture
November 12, 2011

Via Qualitative Sociology Review (PDF): "Is it possible to look at something without actually noticing it? Is it possible to see something in the picture that is not really there? The answers to these philosophical questions can be obtained by comparing the results of eye-tracking tests combined with interviews based on sociological theories. (…)
The respondents, in line with our expectations, turned out to be familiar with the catalogue investigated. All of them provided the correct name of the company. When asked to describe in their own words the situations presented, the respondents would stress the fact that they show the ideal world. (…)
While most attention should be given to watching the advertisements, we constitute our dreams of a perfect life, environment and the items that furnish it."

Via Hey, Whipple, Squeeze This: A Guide to Creating Great Advertising by Luke Sullivan: "People generally deny advertising has any effect on them. They’ll insist they’re immune to it. And perhaps, taken on a person-by- person basis, the effect of your ad is indeed modest. But over time, the results are undeniable. Try this on: 1980—Absolut Vodka is a little nothing brand. Selling 12,000 cases a year. That’s nothing. Ten years and one campaign later, this colorless, nearly tasteless, and odorless product is the preferred brand, selling nearly 3 million cases a year. All because of the advertising."

Thanks to the New Shelton wet/dry !

Dash
November 11, 2011

Via Wikipedia: "A dash is one of several kinds of punctuation mark. Dashes appear similar to hyphens, but differ from them primarily in length, and serve different functions. The most common versions of the dash are the en dash (–) and the em dash (—).
The en dash, n dash, n-rule, or nut (–) is traditionally half the width of an em dash. In modern fonts, the length of the en dash is not standardized, and the en dash is often more than half the width of the em dash. The widths of en and em dashes have also been specified as being equal to those of the upper-case letters N and M respectively, and at other times to the widths of the lower-case letters. (...)

Similarly, it can be used instead of an ellipsis to indicate aposiopesis, the rhetorical device by which a sentence is stopped short not because of interruption but because the speaker is too emotional to continue, such as Darth Vader’s line 'I sense something; a presence I’ve not felt since—' in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope."

by Mark Suster
October 27, 2011

Via Both Sides of the Table: "Here’s the deal. Busy execs hate lunches. They are time sucks. Sure, they like to occasionally meeting good friends for lunch, important contacts for them or group lunches. But somebody they don’t know? Not so much. (…)

So what can you do? And when is lunch or dinner OK?

1. First date, speculative meeting: I always recommend you ask for coffee. And better if it’s at their offices if you’re asking for the meeting. “Hey, can I bring you a coffee and get 30 minutes of your time at your offices next Tues or Wed? I promise I won’t overrun my time.” And don’t. You become an easy second date to accept.

2. First date, high intent: Let’s say you have a meeting with somebody you know wants to meet you. Let’s say it’s for biz dev purposes, or you’re pitching investors, recruiting, or it’s a sales meeting – whatever. Then you can more easily just say, “How about if I swing by your offices next Tues / Wed” and leave the shorter 30-minute time unit out. I wouldn’t mention length of time until you’re there. You might get an hour. Awesome. You don’t have to be sheepish about short time because you know they want to meet you."

Engraving
October 25, 2011

Via Wikipedia: "Memento mori is a Latin phrase translated as Remember your mortality, Remember you must die or Remember you will die. It names a genre of artistic work which varies widely, but which all share the same purpose: to remind people of their own mortality. The phrase has a tradition in art that dates back to antiquity."

Thanks to Jochen Kuhn!

by Georges Polti
October 12, 2011

Via Wikipedia: "The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations is a descriptive list which was created by Georges Polti to categorize every dramatic situation that might occur in a story or performance. To do this Polti analyzed classical Greek texts, plus classical and contemporaneous French works. He also analyzed a handful of non-French authors. In his introduction, Polti claims to be continuing the work of Carlo Gozzi, who also identified 36 situations. (...)

1. Supplication
2. Deliverance
3. Crime pursued by vengeance
4. Vengeance taken for kin upon kin
5. Pursuit
6. Disaster
7. Falling prey to cruelty/misfortune
8. Revolt
9. Daring enterprise
10. Abduction
11. The enigma
12. Obtaining
13. Enmity of kin
14. Rivalry of kin
15. Murderous adultery
16. Madness
17. Fatal imprudence
18. Involuntary crimes of love
19. Slaying of kin unrecognized
20. Self-sacrifice for an ideal
21. Self-sacrifice for kin
22. All sacrificed for passion
23. Necessity of sacrificing loved ones
24. Rivalry of superior vs. inferior
25. Adultery
26. Crimes of love
27. Discovery of the dishonour of a loved one
28. Obstacles to love
29. An enemy loved
30. Ambition
31. Conflict with a god
32. Mistaken jealousy
33. Erroneous judgement
34. Remorse
35. Recovery of a lost one
36. Loss of loved ones"

Via the New Shelton wet/dry: "Gozzi maintained that there can be but thirty-six tragic situations. Schiller took great pains to find more, but he was unable to find even so many as Gozzi. –Goethe"

Don't waste your money on alternative flu remedies
October 10th, 2011

"Chicken soup has long been regarded as a remedy for symptomatic upper respiratory tract infections. As it is likely that the clinical similarity of the diverse infectious processes that can result in colds is due to a shared inflammatory response, an effect of chicken soup in mitigating inflammation could account for its attested benefits. To evaluate this, a traditional chicken soup was tested for its ability to inhibit neutrophil migration using the standard Boyden blindwell chemotaxis chamber assay with zymosan-activated serum and fMet-Leu-Phe as chemoattractants. Chicken soup significantly inhibited neutrophil migration and did so in a concentration-dependent manner. The activity was present in a nonparticulate component of the chicken soup. All of the vegetables present in the soup and the chicken individually had inhibitory activity, although only the chicken lacked cytotoxic activity. Interestingly, the complete soup also lacked cytotoxic activity. Commercial soups varied greatly in their inhibitory activity. The present study, therefore, suggests that chicken soup may contain a number of substances with beneficial medicinal activity. A mild anti-inflammatory effect could be one mechanism by which the soup could result in the mitigation of symptomatic upper respiratory tract infections."

Full recipe here: Chicken Soup Inhibits Neutrophil Chemotaxis In Vitro by Barbara O. Rennard, BA, Ronald F. Ertl, BS, Gail L. Gossman, BS, Richard A. Robbins, MD, FCCP and Stephen I. Rennard, MD, FCCP

That Bohemian Girl
October 4, 2011

Great hippie interior.

"We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;—
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.

Ode by Arthur O'Shaughnessy, 1874"

...are you?
September 28, 2011

Via PsyBlog: "When a person meets you for the first time they ask themselves two questions. The answers to these two questions will have all sorts of knock-on effects for how they think about you and how they behave towards you.

Professor Susan Fiske of Princeton University has shown that all social judgements can be boiled down to these two dimensions (Fiske et al., 2007):

How warm is this person?
The idea of warmth includes things like trustworthiness, friendliness, helpfulness, sociability and so on. Initial warmth judgements are made within a few seconds of meeting you.

How competent is this person?
Competency judgements take longer to form and include things like intelligence, creativity, perceived ability and so on."

Reconstructed
September 25, 2011

Via Try Nerdy: "UC Berkeley scientists who have developed a decoder that can measure our brain activity and reconstruct our visual experiences. In other words, 20 years from now we might not ask eye-witnesses to describe a suspect…we’ll just analyze their brain activity and reconstruct the suspect’s image for ourselves. (...)

The decoder algorithm developed by these researchers can describe how temporal and spatial information are represented by fMRI data. Five thousand hours of random YouTube video clips were fed into the computer and this same algorithm predicted the types of fMRI responses these clips would elicit. From this, the researchers were able to take the fMRI data generated while movie trailers were viewed, then reconstruct the images seen by the person using composites of YouTube videos that had the most similar predicted fMRI signature to the real data. The results I’m showing below may look crude, but the fact that they’re just based on an algorithmic analysis of fMRI data is incredible."

Related: Until the End of the World by Wim Wenders

Re-imagining the Pirandellian Identity Dilemma
September 24, 2011

Via the News Shelton wet/dry: "With the growing permeation of online social networks in our everyday life, scholars have become interested in the study of novel forms of identity construction, performance, spectatorship and self-presentation onto the networked medium. This body of research builds upon a rich theoretical tradition on identity constructivism, performance and (re)presentation of self. With this article we attempt to integrate the work of Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello into this tradition. (...)

The popular social networking site Facebook is interesting to analyze in this context. With its sheer population size (over half billion users at the time of writing) and an unprecedented monopoly over users’ personal data, Facebook is a forum in which multiple communities and societal roles necessarily meet: these days, your parents, your children, your colleagues, and your friends are all on Facebook. In such a diverse and highly populated environment, constructing, tweaking, and curating one’s online representation is of crucial importance."

(Alberto Pepe, Spencer Wolff & Karen Van Godtsenhoven, Re-imagining the Pirandellian Identity Dilemma in the Era of Online Social Networks | PDF)

Do not think about it
September 8, 2011

Via Wikipedia: "Elephant in the room is an English metaphorical idiom for an obvious truth that is being ignored or goes unaddressed. The idiomatic expression also applies to an obvious problem or risk no one wants to discuss.
It is based on the idea that an elephant in a room would be impossible to overlook; thus, people in the room who pretend the elephant is not there have chosen to avoid dealing with the looming big issue. (…)
In 1927 Ernest Hemingway wrote a short story Hills Like White Elephants in which a young couple have a tense conversation then after the mountain's elephant like appearance is brought up, a prolonged discussion about an operation (assumed as an abortion) is argued which leads to the story's conflict. (…)
The term refers to a question, problem, solution, or controversial issue that is obvious, but which is ignored by a group of people, generally because it causes embarrassment or is taboo. The idiom can imply a value judgment that the issue ought to be discussed openly, or it can simply be an acknowledgment that the issue is there and not going to go away by itself.
The term is often used to describe an issue that involves a social taboo, such as race, religion, or even suicide. This idiomatic phrase is applicable when a subject is emotionally charged; and the people who might have spoken up decide that it is probably best avoided.

How long has this been going on?
August 21, 2011

Via DoloTest: "No person can feel exactly how another person feels. No matter how much training in communication you might have and how much attention and time you spend listening to another person you will never fully be able to grasp all the aspects of the other person’s inner experience. By listening to the other person you might get an idea, a feeling of understanding. But what you feel will always in some way be referenced to your own experiences. By consciously and subconsciously observing the other person’s body language you might add another aspect to the understanding of the situation. However the perception will always be interpreted in your own complex framework of feelings and expectations – and as such the other person’s feelings could be misunderstood. These be the feelings about religion, political views, love, child rearing – or pain."

Compass of Pleasure
August 12th, 2011

Via Salon: "Recent science has found that different kinds of pleasure are surprisingly similar in terms of brain chemistry and physiology. The buzz derived from a yoga class or a bump of cocaine look almost exactly the same on a neurological level. Perhaps unsurprisingly, our brains are also susceptible to liking pleasure a little bit too much, leading to behaviors we characterize as addiction. (…)

When you think about it, a lot of our laws are dopamine laws. Our jails and legal system are full of people who have broken certain laws related to pleasure. Societies love to regulate pleasure because it is transgressive; it is anti-authoritarian. We have these ideas, 'pleasure is best in moderation,' 'pleasure must be earned,' 'if you deny pleasure it can lead to spiritual growth,' that are not just Western or American. But we also have these incredible mixed messages. We have a hyper-sexualized media, for instance. (…)

We have access to so much, and it's so inexpensive. If you want to have a snort of crystal meth or a dose of ecstasy, that's not going to cost more than a large cappuccino at Starbucks. We simultaneously are telling people that you have to be very careful about pleasure, that you should not overindulge, and yet our media celebrates overindulgence, whether it is sexual or alcoholic or nicotine or what have you. There are enormous corporate interests involved in the dopamine world."

Discipline
August 11th, 2011

Via Online Etymology Dictionary: "early 13c., penitential chastisement; punishment, from O.Fr. descepline (11c.) discipline, physical punishment; teaching; suffering; martyrdom, and directly from L. disciplina instruction given, teaching, learning, knowledge, also object of instruction, knowledge, science, military discipline, from discipulus (see disciple). Sense of treatment that corrects or punishes is from notion of order necessary for instruction. The Latin word is glossed in O.E. by þeodscipe. Meaning branch of instruction or education is first recorded late 14c. Meaning military training is from late 15c.; that of orderly conduct as a result of training is from c.1500."

Via Merriam-Webster: "Middle English, from Anglo-French & Latin; Anglo-French, from Latin disciplina teaching, learning, from discipulus pupil. First Known Use: 13th century."

Via Wikipedia: "In its original sense, discipline is referred to systematic instruction given to a disciples to train them as students in a craft or trade, or to follow a particular code of conduct or order. Often, the phrase to discipline carries a negative connotation. This is because enforcement of order – that is, ensuring instructions are carried out – is often regulated through punishment."

5 Scientific Reasons
August 8th, 2011

Via Cracked.com: "Go back to ancient Greece and it's very simple: Happiness = Luck. Either the gods dribbled their joy juice on you or didn't; either way, there was nothing you could do about it. And that was it, end of conversation. It was nothing to get upset about. In fact, in every European language, the root of the word for happiness is some older word that meant luck. Ours comes from the old Norse and Old English word hap, and hap simply means luck.
Flash forward to Aristotle's day, 335-ish B.C. Philosophers of the time considered happiness to be synonymous with virtue. In other words, do good to feel good. If you didn't feel good, it meant you weren't being virtuous enough. Now, we don't want to come off as cynical here, but it almost sounds like this was when they started using this elusive idea of happiness as a motivational tool. Happiness is the carrot on the stick that makes you do all of the things that keep society running smoothly. (…)
But the new definition of happiness seemed to be you feel like you're playing with a puppy, all the time. Then the Enlightenment declared that everyone had a right to be happy, and by the time the American Declaration of Independence was written in 1776, the pursuit of happiness was declared an inalienable right, endowed by the creator. That's a damned 180-degree turn from what the ancient Greeks thought. And if we're defining happiness as 24/7 puppy time, then it doesn't work.(…)
The very act of trying to achieve happiness made people unhappy because of the anxiety they felt when they failed. They were happier when they weren't trying. You know, like if somebody had told them it was out of their hands, or that they should focus on doing good things and declare the result to be happiness, regardless of what it looked like."

Thanks to Helen Schneider!

Measuring and visualizing movie data
August 1st, 2011

Via cinemetrics: "cinemetrics is about measuring and visualizing movie data, in order to reveal the characteristics of films and to create a visual fingerprint for them. Information such as the editing structure, color, speech or motion are extracted, analyzed and transformed into graphic representations so that movies can be seen as a whole and easily interpreted or compared side by side. (...)
cinemetrics is an experiment to find out if the data that is inherent in the movie can be used to make something visible that otherwise would remain unnoticed."

Thanks to Beren Baumgartner!

Considering: Emotion vs Structure (Metaphor vs Tangibility)
July 30th, 2011

Via Wikipedia: "Structure is a fundamental, tangible or intangible notion referring to the recognition, observation, nature, and permanence of patterns and relationships of entities. This notion may itself be an object, such as a built structure, or an attribute, such as the structure of society. (...)
The description of structure implicitly offers an account of what a system is made of: a configuration of items, a collection of inter-related components or services. A structure may be a hierarchy (a cascade of one-to-many relationships), a network featuring many-to-many links, or a lattice featuring connections between components that are neighbors in space.
A formalized interpretation of the structure is compiled as semiotics of the structure."

Via Wikipedia: "Emotion is the complex psychophysiological experience of an individual's state of mind as interacting with biochemical (internal) and environmental (external) influences. In humans, emotion fundamentally involves 'physiological arousal, expressive behaviors, and conscious experience.' Emotion is associated with mood, temperament, personality and disposition, and motivation. Motivations direct and energize behavior, while emotions provide the affective component to motivation, positive or negative. (…)
The English word emotion is derived from the French word émouvoir. This is based on the Latin emovere, where e- (variant of ex-) means out and movere means move."

"You are stuck in a metaphor!" (The Trip)

Thanks to Johanna Dombois for inspiring thoughts and conversations!

4 Ways Technology Can Enable Your Inner Introvert
July 29th, 2011

Via The Atlantic: "Email is often fingered as a key factor in the lamentable perpetual accessibility characterizing modern American communication. But it isn't. It allows you to respond when you're ready to do so. In fact, sometimes not responding to email in a timely fashion can give the impression that you're already busy doing other things. Which helps create the space that introverts need. (…)
First popularized by Carl Jung, the word introversion describes exactly what you'd assume: a tendency be focused inwards (intro-) as opposed to the external focus of extraverts. As Wikipedia states, introversion is 'the state of okay I think that's enough pretending.' (…)
I speak of the struggle between introverts and extroverts in antagonistic terms. But it shouldn't be considered that way. Extroverts, we love you. We just don't want to talk to you all the time. Happily, we live in a time when the expectation that we do so is much lower."


Via Wikipedia: "Introversion is 'the state of or tendency toward being wholly or predominantly concerned with and interested in one's own mental life'. Introverts are people whose energy tends to expand through reflection and dwindle during interaction. Introverts tend to be more reserved and less outspoken in large groups. They often take pleasure in solitary activities such as reading, writing, music, drawing, tinkering, playing video games, watching movies and plays, and using computers, along with some more reserved outdoor activities such as fishing. In fact, social networking sites have been a thriving home for introverts in the 21st century, where introverts are free from the formalities of social conduct and may become more comfortable blogging about personal feelings they would not otherwise disclose. The archetypal artist, writer, sculptor, engineer, composer, and inventor are all highly introverted. An introvert is likely to enjoy time spent alone and find less reward in time spent with large groups of people, though he or she may enjoy interactions with close friends. Trust is usually an issue of significance: a virtue of utmost importance to an introvert choosing a worthy companion. (…)
Introversion is not the same as being shy or being a social outcast. Introverts prefer solitary activities over social ones, whereas shy people (who may be extraverts at heart) avoid social encounters out of fear, and the social outcast has little choice in the matter of his or her solitude."

Quick Practical, Tactical Tips for Presentations
July 28th, 2011

Via Mark Suster: "Today’s post is a subtle one about positioning yourself in a presentation. This might be a VC meeting but also might just be a sales or biz dev meeting. It’s any meeting where you are in a small room and are being called on to present on some form of overhead slides
1. Sit closest to the projection screen
2. Avoid a home team & away team (unless you’re in Japan)
3. Work the entire room, don’t fixate
4. Don’t have hand outs
5. Never present eye charts
6. If you have detailed slides you can hand them out in real time."

We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are. –Anaïs Nin
July 26th, 2011

Via Brain Blogger: "We are all familiar with the fuzzy feelings that accompany falling in love. You and your partner become emotionally connected, supported, and complete. Although human love is a complicated and long journey, scientists consistently find that the release of a specific neuropetide – oxytocin – may kick start these feelings right away in courtship. In fact, for the past few decades researchers have referred to oxytocin as the love hormone, and credit its release as the glue that ties humans to their loved ones. (…)

While oxytocin may enhance positive emotions and pro-sociality with the people we care about, it may also contribute to negative views and behaviors towards people to whom we are not close. Research in social psychology finds that humans simultaneously show favoritism for the people in their social circle (ingroup) and derogation of people in social groups that are different from their own (outgroup). Although not conclusive, recent findings suggest that administering oxytocin to males not only enhances their in-group favoritism, but in some cases, also increases defensiveness towards outgroup members.

Every metaphor starts out as a wild beast, waiting to be tamed by usage
July 25th, 2011

Via The Chronicle of Higher Education: "Further undermining those who seek an Archimedean spot from which to analyze metaphor is that even the words metaphor and figure are metaphors. Derrida, in White Mythology, mocks Aristotle's famous full definition: 'Metaphor consists in giving the thing a name that belongs to something else; the transference being either from genus to species, or from species to genus, or from species to species, or on grounds of analogy.' Derrida writes that, in the original, every word of the definition is a metaphor. Paul Ricoeur describes the situation in his study, The Rule of Metaphor: 'There is no nonmetaphorical standpoint from which one could look upon metaphor.'

Of all philosophical writers on metaphor, Nietzsche probably draws the strongest conclusions from this situation. 'Tropes,' he writes, 'are not something that can be added or abstracted from language at will—they are its truest nature.' He argues that there is 'no real knowing apart from metaphor,' by which he means that we experience reality through metaphors, and our notion of literal meaning simply reflects the ossification of language, as figures of speech lose their vitality. He emphasizes in The Genealogy of Morals how metaphor tends to extend its sway, to bring wider ranges of experience under its wing. He goes so far as to say that 'the drive toward the formation of metaphor is the fundamental human drive.' For him, literal and figurative meaning are not stable categories, but historical ones determined by their social context.

The Nietzschean big picture of metaphor's role in language and culture lends support to Derrida's point in White Mythology that the evolution of abstractions is always a case of going from the physical and sensible to the abstract. Derrida is critical, like Nietzsche, of the automatic distinction of the sensory and nonsensory in Western thought, believing that it shows a lack of self-consciousness in thinkers about the roots of their language. He thinks a key question in looking at a supposed abstraction is whether the memory of its sensory origin remains in its usage."

10 Psychological Keys to Job Satisfaction
July 23rd, 2011

Via Psyblog: "If some job satisfaction surveys are to be believed then as many as a third of us are considering a change of job. Clearly many are finding it hard to get that feeling of satisfaction from work.
Job satisfaction is important not just because it boosts work performance but also because it increases our quality of life. Many people spend so much time at work that when it becomes dissatisfying, the rest of their life soon follows.
Everyone's job is different but here are 10 factors that psychologists regularly find are important in how satisfied people are with their jobs.

1. Little hassles
2. Perception of fair pay
3. Achievement
4. Feedback
5. Complexity and variety
6. Control
7. Organisational support
8. Work-home overflow
9. Honeymoons and hangovers
10. Easily pleased?"

Evening people may find the traditional work schedule a constant battle with the snooze button
July 15th, 2011

Via Psych Your Mind: "Every night owl you meet will tell you the same thing: there is something magical about those late night hours when the rest of the world is sleeping. It's your time, unscheduled and undisturbed, to spend as you wish. To some, this perspective may seem lazy and immature, a luxury afforded only to those who don't have real adult responsibilities. And this may be partially true - many would-be night owls have few opportunities to enjoy the later evening hours because of work, kids, and other demands. But new research suggests that even these non-practicing night owls may be hard-wired to want to stay up late. Though sleep preferences are due in part to non-biological factors like culture, and family environment, at least 50% of the variance seems to be driven by genes, specifically something called the after-hours mutant which appears to prolong the circadian rhythm. As a result, evening people may find the traditional work schedule a constant battle with the snooze button, regardless of how much sleep they get.

You probably already know whether you're a morning or evening person, but if you're not sure, here are two ways to figure it out:

1) On weekends, or when you don't have to wake up at any particular time, when do you naturally wake up? If the answer is more than an hour or so different from when you wake up on weekdays, chances are you're an evening person by nature. Morning people tend to wake up just as early on weekends as they do during the week.

2) Regardless of how much sleep you've gotten, when do you find that you have the most energy? If your energy peaks in the morning and dwindles by late afternoon, you're a morning person. If it peaks later in the evening - you guessed it - you're an evening person.

The debate over whether it's better to be a night owl or an early bird has been going on for centuries, and more often than not the early birds have indeed gotten the worm, as their natural sleep schedule corresponds with traditional business hours. The stereotypical morning person arrive at the office chipper and energized, while the evening person stumbles in, coffee in hand, and stares at the computer screen for an hour before getting to work."

Vice is nice
July 10th, 2011

Panopticon
July 9th, 2011

Via Wikipedia: "The Panopticon is a type of building designed by English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the late eighteenth century. The concept of the design is to allow an observer to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) inmates of an institution without them being able to tell whether or not they are being watched. The design comprises a circular structure with an inspection house at its centre, from which the managers or staff of the institution are able to watch the inmates, who are stationed around the perimeter. Bentham conceived the basic plan as being equally applicable to hospitals, schools, poorhouses and madhouses, but he devoted most of his efforts to developing a design for a Panopticon prison, and it is his prison which is most widely understood by the term."

Related: La notte che le cose ci nasconde

ORGON, a 4-way Spherical Wave Horn System
July 3rd, 2011

Via Martion Audiosystems: "The Orgon effortlessly demonstrates the tiniest variations in the acoustic chain. It has an unbelievable presence, even when listening quietly (very important) and is certainly bettered by no other system in terms of dynamics and power. It delivers a smooth and simple sound, just as one would want.
The Orgon is always individually matched to the spatial characteristics and/or to the customer's wishes. Here there is a broad range of implementation possibilities, particularly when there is no corner available to accommodate the bass. The Orgon is fitted and calibrated anywhere in the world by the developer in person. Any exchange of components onsite is extremely simple and at the works there is a team of technicians that is constantly available. Further developments in future can, therefore, easily be retrofitted. According to all owners so far, the Orgon is a lifetime investment."

The Orgon build by Heiner Basil Martion finally made it into a club in Cologne: Gewölbe im Westbahnhof. There are still a few adjustments to be made but the potential is overwhelming.

"Rythmic, systemic and world control
Magnetic, genetic, dement your soul
Put the needle on the record
When the song beats go like this
Pump up the volume
Dance dance
Mars
Needs
Women"

When we remember that we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained. –Mark Twain
June 26th, 2011

Now here you go again
You say you want your freedom
Well who am I to keep you down
It's only right that you should
Play the way you feel it
But listen carefully to the sound
Of your loneliness
Like a heartbeat.. drives you mad
In the stillness of remembering what you had
And what you lost...
And what you had...
And what you lost
Thunder only happens when it's raining
Players only love you when they're playing
Say... Women... they will come and they will go
When the rain washes you clean... you'll know
Now here I go again, I see the crystal visions
–Fleetwood Mac

Being committed
June 25th, 2011

Openness
Sensuality
Liveliness
Self-awareness
Serenity
Attentiveness
Modesty
Imagination
Cheerfulness
Intelligence

Figure yours.

...be started in the same subject, a change must necessarily take place, either in both, or in one of the two, and continue until they cease to be contrary. –Spinoza
June 24th, 2011

Thanks to The New Sheldon wet/dry!

by Anna Garforth
June 20th, 2011

Mashin' it all up

Will I see you give
more than I can take?
Will I only harvest some?
As the days fly past
will we lose our grasp
Or fuse it in the sun?
But now it's gettin' late
And the moon is climbin' high
I want to see you dance again
On this harvest moon.

Painting by Tran Nguyen
June 18th, 2011

"Oh dancing with myself
Well there's nothing to lose
And there's nothing to prove
I'll be dancing with myself"
–Billy Idol

by Peter Delpeut
June 15th, 2011

Via Zeitgeist Films: "A harrowing adventure story in the tradition of Melville and Conrad. The Forbidden Quest brilliantly weaves together astonishing actual film from early polar expeditions with an outlandish tale of obsession, murder, cannibalism and mystical redemption, leading the spectator into a magical landscape of unimaginable extremes."

Via Movie Reviews: "In his The Forbidden Quest, Delpeut begins with spectacular images of polar expeditions—probably shot between 1905 and 1925—and adds a soundtrack, actors, and newly staged scenes to create a hybrid, fake 'documentary' in which the old genuine footage becomes part of the new, fictitious tale. Sounds crazy, but it works. Delpeut has an extraordinary flair for capturing the feel of isolation and dread that can be found only the most wide-open of spaces, and the incredibly beautiful, color-tinted archival footage is incorporated into his story in a genuinely chilling manner; it gives his whole absurd tale—about an underground passage to Antarctica—the flavor of a classic ghost story. Delpeut's films (he also made the extraordinary Lyrical Nitrate) aren't for everyone, but for those who can be awestruck by rare old film footage of places that we normally visit only in dreams, there's nothing like them."

Thanks to Jörg Follert!

Filed under: Wunderkammer

by Robin Dunbar
June 9th, 2011

From The LA Review of Books: "Our big brains — in particular our species’ inordinately large neocortex — evolved, Dunbar argues, in lockstep with our ability to manage increasingly large social groups: to read motives, to keep track of who is doing what with whom, of who is a reliable sharer, who a likely freeloader, and so on. Many evolutionary biologists have made this point over the years, of course. Where Dunbar is unique is in having assigned a definite number to what constitutes a stable human group or community. The Dunbar’s number of his title is (drum roll…) 150. Extrapolating from the estimated size of Neolithic villages, of Amish and other communities, of companies in most armies, and other such data, Dunbar argues that this number is, more or less, the limit of stable social networks because it represents the limit, more or less, of our cognitive capacities.

The number is highly debatable, but it turns out that, Facebook aside, the average person has about 150 friends — people he or she might actually recognize and be recognized by at a random airport, 150 people he or she might feel comfortable borrowing five dollars from. As for how many friends we have evolved to need in a more intimate sense, that is a different matter. According to Dunbar, most of us have, on average, about 3-5 intimate friends whom we speak to at least weekly, and about 10-15 more friends whose deaths would greatly distress us."

What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, although puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture. —Sir Thomas Browne
June 5th, 2011

From Cabinet Magazine: "In the first years of the twenty-first century, New York City police officers had six different siren noises at their fingertips to alternate and overdub as they attempted to bore through stagnant traffic.
The Yelp is a high-pitched, rapidly oscillating, jumpy sound that suggests a small dog with large teeth has hold of your thigh and is not about to let go.
The Wail is the classic keening noise that the Furies might release while pursuing vengeance.
The Hi-Lo, or European, is whiney, forlorn—prone to depression, but undeniably civilized.
The Air-Horn is vulgarity incarnate—a burp, a rasp, an all-out bursty blast.
The Fast or Priority resembles a hysteric who’s just mainlined crystal meth.
The Manual is an outcast loner raising its rifle in a solitary low-to-high pulse."

Listen to them here.

Violent Past by Low
June 1st, 2011

All I can do is fight
Even if I know you're right
All I can do is fight
Pretty fingers holding fast
Maybe it's your violent past
Maybe it's your violent past
All you can do is hide
God bless the darkness of the night
All you can do is hide
Pretty fingers, the golden calf
Maybe it's your violent past

Great concert last night after a not so great day.

An online curiosity shop of extraordinary things by John Foster
May 26th, 2011

by Michael Bierut
May 19th, 2011

Via Design Observer:

"1. It's all about the basics.
2. Once you've mastered the basics, make your work your own.
3. Respect your audience.
4. Know your tools.
5. Honor your craft.
6. Don't be afraid of failure.
7. Finally, never forget you have a special gift. (...)

Near the end of the show, Chris Rock talks about what a pleasure it is to watch anyone do anything really well, even a great truck driver. 'I just saw this guy park an 18-wheeler into this narrow space,' he says. 'And I said I guarantee you there's heart surgery that's not as hard as what this guy just did.' Louis agreed. 'I watched a guy pull into a loading dock, and I stopped and said, 'That was amazing.' And he was like, 'Yeah, I know, I know.'' If you're a designer, it's easy to forget that what you do is, in so many ways, amazing. Appreciate that gift in yourself. Appreciate the gifts of others. And look for lessons wherever you can find them."

ECoG detects electrical signals coming from the brain itself
May 15th, 2011

Via NPR: "Schalk is showing me the results of experiments he did using ECoG to monitor people listening to The Wall. He points toward two waveforms on the computer screen. One shows the mountains and valleys that represent changes in the music volume; the second waveform looks very similar, but it represents the electrical signals generated by the brain in response to the music.
'There's a very close correlation between the actual loudness in the music that is just playing right now and the intensity of the music that we're decoding or inferring from the person's brain,' Schalk says. 'Isn't that pretty awesome?'
The brain signal is so distinctive you could almost recognize the music from the waveform alone, Schalk says.
In the second part of the music experiment, volunteers listened to Pink Floyd for about 10 seconds, then the music was interrupted by about a second of complete silence.
The experiment shows that while it may have been silent in the room during the test, it was not silent in the volunteers' brains.
Schalk's computer screen shows that even when the music stops, the waveform from the brain continues as if the music were still playing. What we're seeing is the brain's attempt to fill in the missing sounds, Schalk says.
'The brain basically tells us a lot of information about the music in the times when there is really no music,' he says.

Heil Discordia!
April 23rd, 2011

Via Wikipedia: "Discordianism is a 'Ha Ha, Only Serious' joke, using humor to subversively spread what its members regard as a valid philosophy. To keep said beliefs from becoming dangerous fanaticism, they rely on self-subverting Dada-Zen humor, with varying degrees of success. It is regarded as a joke religion, though to what degree is disputed.
It has been likened to Zen, based on similarities with absurdist interpretations of the Rinzai school. Discordianism is centered on the idea that chaos is all that there is, and that disorder and order are both illusions that are imposed on chaos. These are referred to, respectively, as the Eristic and Aneristic illusions. Discordianism recognizes the positive aspects of chaos, discord, and dissent as valid and desirable qualities, in contrast with most religions, which idealize harmony and order.

Via Wikipedia: "The 23 enigma refers to the belief that most incidents and events are directly connected to the number 23, some modification of the number 23, or a number related to the number 23."

David Eagleman about the mysteries of time and the brain
April 20th, 2011

Via The New Yorker: "'Try this exercise,' he suggests in a recent essay. 'Put this book down and go look in a mirror. Now move your eyes back and forth, so that you’re looking at your left eye, then at your right eye, then at your left eye again. When your eyes shift from one position to the other, they take time to move and land on the other location. But here’s the kicker: you never see your eyes move.' There’s no evidence of any gaps in your perception—no darkened stretches like bits of blank film—yet much of what you see has been edited out. Your brain has taken a complicated scene of eyes darting back and forth and recut it as a simple one: your eyes stare straight ahead. Where did the missing moments go?

The question raises a fundamental issue of consciousness: how much of what we perceive exists outside of us and how much is a product of our minds? Time is a dimension like any other, fixed and defined down to its tiniest increments: millennia to microseconds, aeons to quartz oscillations. Yet the data rarely matches our reality. The rapid eye movements in the mirror, known as saccades, aren’t the only things that get edited out. The jittery camera shake of everyday vision is similarly smoothed over, and our memories are often radically revised. What else are we missing?"

Psychological Flexibility
April 15th, 2011

Via Russ Harris, MD (PDF): "Psychological flexibility is the ability to be in the present moment with full awareness and openness to our experience, and to take action guided by our values. Put more simply, it’s the ability to be present, open up, and do what matters. Technically speaking, the primary aim of ACT is to increase psychological flexibility. The greater our ability to be fully conscious, to be open to our experience, and to act on our values, the greater our quality of life because we can respond far more effectively to the problems and challenges life inevitably brings. Furthermore, through engaging fully in our life and allowing our values to guide us, we develop a sense of meaning and purpose, and we experience a sense of vitality. We use the word vitality a lot in ACT, and it’s important to recognize that vitality is not a feeling; it is a sense of being fully alive and embracing the here and now, regardless of how we may be feeling in this moment."

Fort Boyard
April 9th, 2011

Via Wikipedia: "Fort Boyard is a fort located between the Île-d'Aix and the Île d'Oléron in the Pertuis d'Antioche straits, on the west coast of France. It is 61 metres long, 31 metres wide, and its walls are 20 metres high.

The construction of the fort was first considered during a build-up of the French armed forces undertaken by Louis XIV between 1661 and 1667, but Vauban, his leading military engineer, famously advised against it, saying 'Sire, it would be easier to catch the moon with the teeth than take on such an endeavour in such a location'. Fort Boyard was to form a line of fortification with Fort Enet and Fort de la Rade on Île-d'Aix to protect the arsenal of Rochefort from Royal Navy incursions.

Construction of the fort did not begin in earnest until 1801, under orders from Napoleon, when laborers were brought to Boyardville. It was designed and constructed to protect the coast and the arsenal of Rochefort from possible incursions by foreign (and especially British) navies. At that time, cannons only had a limited range, and the distance between the two islands of Aix and Oleron was too large to block the passage. (...)

In 1961 the Commune sold the fort to the département of Charente-Maritime. Six years later, the final scene of the French film Les Aventuriers was filmed at the remains of the fort."

Thanks to Karin @ Traumathek!

Rendering the 20th century
April 8th, 2011

RNDRD is a frequently updated feed of high-quality images from published architectural projects of the 20th century. RNDRD does not publish photographs of completed work, only renderings: hand-drawing, collage, models and graphics of all sorts. RNDRD uses out-of-print academic and trade journals as its source of images, culling the most striking renderings from thousands of pages of print that will not be available online. RNDRD aims to provide a clearer image of the evolution of architectural rendering, from turn-of-the-century beaux-arts drawings and 60s collage to the emergence of computer graphics and renderings in the 1980s. As the internet increasingly becomes the main source for architects to engage with precedence in architectural rendering, RNDRD hope to provide a broader array of images and methods of image-making, simply by trudging through the dusty bookshelves of now un-read and un-referenced work.

The 17 Stages of the Monomyth
April 3rd, 2011

Departure
The Call to Adventure
Refusal of the Call
Supernatural Aid
The Crossing of the First Threshold
Belly of The Whale

Initiation
The Road of Trials
The Meeting With the Goddess
Woman as Temptress
Atonement with the Father
Apotheosis
The Ultimate Boon

Return
Refusal of the Return
The Magic Flight
Rescue from Without
The Crossing of the Return Threshold
Master of Two Worlds
Freedom to Live

Altruism has 3 degrees of separation
April 1st, 2011

Via Epiphenom: "One of the mysteries of human behaviour is why we sometimes act with completely selfless altruism. When asked to play totally anonymous games in which we can cheat without anyone else ever finding out, very often we don't.

Instead, we play the game fairly, which results in a cost to ourselves (compared with what we could've had) and a benefit to the stranger. That's a mystery because evolution says that organisms which don't act to maximise benefit to themselves - whatever the cost to others - should die out.

Several explanations have been put forward, but one of the most intriguing stems from the fact that we live in social networks. In a network like this, we depend critically on the kindness of others.

A new study has looked at how altruistic behaviour can be transmitted between players in the kinds of anonymous games that social psychologists are so fond of. The data were from some earlier experiments in which 240 people played the games over six rounds, each time with different partners (all anonymous).

What they found was that the amount individuals contributed in one round was affected by how generous their partners were in previous rounds. If they played with generous people in round 1, then they would be more generous to the new partners they had in round 2.

In fact, they showed that this effect was propagated through new partners. As you can see in the figure, if Eleni was generous to Lucas, then Lucas would be generous to Erika, and Erika more generous to Jay.

Unselfish acts propagated out to 3 degrees of separation. When you remember that only 6 degrees of separation stand between you and every other person on the planet, you can understand how powerful and important this effect is."

The effect of looks and musical preference on trait inference
March 16th, 2011

Via SAGE (PDF): "When forming first impressions about individuals, we often categorize them as belonging to a specific social group, based on very little information. Certain aspects in the way a person looks, or information about a certain trait they possess, may lead us to identify them as belonging to a high- or low-status social group. (…)

Listening to music is an activity that plays an important role in people's lives, especially in adolescence and young adulthood. Individuals consider the music they like as an important part of themselves, and believe their taste in music reveals aspects of their own personality, more than preferences for books, clothing, food, movies and television shows. The idea that personal musical taste is related to other aspects of personality has in fact received further confirmation in various studies relating musical preferences and particular personality traits. Thus, for example, liking for rock, heavy metal and punk were found to be positively related to sensation-seeking; extraversion and psychoticism were found to be related to liking for music with exaggerated bass such as rap and dance music, and to stimulating music such as rock-and-roll and pop; rebelliousness was found to be related to liking for defiant music. (…)

Studies suggest that knowing a person's musical taste has a powerful effect on how they are perceived and evaluated."

Science for a changing world
March 12th, 2011

From Wikipedia: "Civilization (or civilisation) is a sometimes controversial term which has been used in several related ways. Primarily, the term has been used to refer to human cultures which are complex in terms of technology, science, politics and division of labour. Such civilizations are generally urbanized. In classical contexts civilized peoples were called this in contrast to barbarian peoples, while in modern contexts civilized peoples have been contrasted to primitive peoples."

From USGS: "The USGS is a science organization that provides impartial information on the health of our ecosystems and environment, the natural hazards that threaten us, the natural resources we rely on, the impacts of climate and land-use change, and the core science systems that help us provide timely, relevant, and useable information."

Fernando Ortega, 2006
March 11th, 2011

Via Los Angeles Times: "As John Cage famously remarked, 'If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight…. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.'"
Side note: Don't miss the comments for this article – beyond believe.

Music—Immateriality—Value by Diedrich Diederichsen
February 12th, 2011

Via e-flux: "What is to be done? Pop music cannot be rescued; something new must be invented to take its place, and music may or may not have a role to play in whatever that turns out to be. One cannot set out to invent such a thing, just as pop music itself simply emerged, as it were, in places far from the forward march of progress, in a development that was historically necessary, as we know today, but was unpredictable for its contemporaries. It did not arise where enlightened people tried something new, but where others acted quickly and from a sense of spiritual urgency. We must remain open to the possibility of something similar happening again. But pop music was only able to come into being by repeatedly coming into contact with radical artistic forces, as when John Cale and La Monte Young developed The Dream Syndicate from the spirit of the Everly Brothers, or Tony Conrad suspected that the solipsistic drone might be used as an anticapitalist weapon. So while one can no longer reconstruct pop music in a purposeful and systematic way, one can still move forward with the neo-neo-avant-garde work of utopian practices or their derivatives—perhaps in a more complex and radical manner, while touching on other arts that have similar problems—at the admittedly high price of creating niches, provided that one also remain in contact with the world of cheap and worn-out forms that have preserved something of people’s actual lives, however unrecognizable they may have become. These do not necessarily have to be musical forms. What is needed, however—not for economic reasons, but for political and cultural ones—are reference points for everyone. The niche has become neither a utopia nor a permanent state of affairs, but rather the end."

Thanks to Marcus Schmickler!

I don't know what you mean
February 5th, 2011

Via Wikipedia: "Ignosticism, or igtheism, is the theological position that every other theological position (including agnosticism) assumes too much about the concept of God and many other theological concepts. (…)
An ignostic maintains that they cannot even say whether he/she is a theist or an atheist until a sufficient definition of theism is put forth. (…)

A simplified maxim on the subject states: An atheist would say, 'I don't believe God exists'; an agnostic would say, 'I don't know whether or not God exists'; and an ignostic would say, 'I don't know what you mean when you say, "God exists" '."

Above: Incredible porcelain doll by Marina Bychkova.

by David Cain
January 29th, 2010

Via Raptitude: "The big money isn't in creating products, it's in creating customers. A single, lifelong customer who lives his life spending the way you want him to is worth six or seven figures. A single one. Creating millions of these is the only way to make trillions.

You can make millions by selling a great product to people who need it, but you make billions and trillions by conditioning an entire nation of people to react to every inconvenience, every whim, and every passing desire or fear by buying something. (…)

You are being encouraged, from virtually every angle, to become or remain unhealthy and unfulfilled, because then you will buy more. Not to make you paranoid, but that's the primary purpose of the glowing rectangle in your living room — to encourage poor (but not quite failing) health, general complacency, and an unconscious reflex for parting with money."

by Jonah Lehrer
January 27th, 2011

Via Wired: "A new paper in Nature Neuroscience by a team of Montreal researchers marks an important step in revealing the precise underpinnings of the potent pleasurable stimulus that is music. (…)

Mindfulness meditation training changes brain structure
January 26th, 2011

Via Boing Boing: "A Massachusetts General Hospital study in next week's Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging shows marked brain changes over an eight-week practice of mindfulness meditation. Of course, by definition, every experience you have makes changes in your brain (that's pretty much the definition of experience: something that changes your brain), but in this case, the changes point to deep and lasting effects as a result of meditation that correspond to the reported experience of meditators. (This confirms earlier research from the hospital, like this study from 2005). (…)

Mindfulness with Jon Kabat-Zinn (Google Video)"

Via UC Television: "Renowned mindfulness meditation teacher and best-selling author Jon Kabat-Zinn speaks at UCSD Medical Center on the topic of Coming to Our Senses, which is also the name of his new book, subtitled Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness. A pioneer in the application of ancient Buddhist practices to healing in modern medical settings, Kabat-Zinn expounds upon the value of 'resting in awareness' not only to facilitate clarity in ourselves, but also as a means of relating to and healing the 'dis-ease' in politics, society and the world.
Series: Health Sciences Journal 11/1999"

Documentary
January 15th, 2011

Via Wikipedia: "Let's Make Money is an anti-capitalist Austrian documentary by Erwin Wagenhofer released in 2008. It is about aspects of the development of the world wide financial system, focussing on how elitists economically exploit the rest of society, especially in the developing world, but also in western nations. (...)

Writing in the The Financial Times, Christopher Caldwell praises the film's beauty, going on to state that Wagenhofer has a perfect sense for pictorial composition and even for sound. Though he also writes that film is an imperfect medium for providing an accurate view of complex economic developments. Caldwell opines that rather than providing a coherent argument, the film 'resembles an art film such as Koyaanisqatsi (1982), Godfrey Reggio's haunting, wordless indictment of the frenzy of modern life'."

Thanks to Lena Willikens!

Without an Alarm Clock
January 12th, 2011

Via wikiHow: "Scientists have discovered that about an hour before a person expects to wake up, the body begins releasing a relatively high concentration of the hormone adrenocorticotropin into the blood. They believe that this may prepare the person to wake up. If this is true, you need only prompt the release of this hormone at the right time. (…)

If possible, try to sleep for a multiple of about 90 minutes; your sleep cycle repeats in approximately 90 minute intervals (this will differ from person to person). You can use this to your advantage, as it's easier to awaken from the lighter part (the end) of your sleep cycle."

7 Billion
January 10th, 2010

From National Geographic: "Before the 20th century, no human had lived through a doubling of the human population, but there are people alive today who have seen it triple. Sometime in late 2011, according to the UN Population Division, there will be seven billion of us. (…)

The annual meeting of the Population Association of America (PAA) is one of the premier gatherings of the world's demographers. Last April the global population explosion was not on the agenda. 'The problem has become a bit passé,' Hervé Le Bras says. Demographers are generally confident that by the second half of this century we will be ending one unique era in history—the population explosion—and entering another, in which population will level out or even fall. (…)

But one can also draw a different conclusion – that fixating on population numbers is not the best way to confront the future. People packed into slums need help, but the problem that needs solving is poverty and lack of infrastructure, not overpopulation. Giving every woman access to family planning services is a good idea – 'the one strategy that can make the biggest difference to women's lives,' Chandra calls it. But the most aggressive population control program imaginable will not save Bangladesh from sea level rise, Rwanda from another genocide, or all of us from our enormous environmental problems. (…)

The number of people does matter, of course. But how people consume resources matters a lot more. Some of us leave much bigger footprints than others. The central challenge for the future of people and the planet is how to raise more of us out of poverty – the slum dwellers in Delhi, the subsistence farmers in Rwanda – while reducing the impact each of us has on the planet. (…)

How many people can the Earth support? Cohen spent years reviewing all the research, from Leeuwenhoek on. 'I wrote the book thinking I would answer the question,' he says. 'I found out it's unanswerable in the present state of knowledge.' What he found instead was an enormous range of  'political numbers, intended to persuade people' one way or the other. (…)

Seven billion of us soon, nine billion in 2045. Let's hope that Malthus was right about our ingenuity."

A bucket full of Top 10 lists
January 4th, 2011

This page by Rex Sorgatz aggregates all of the lists related to 2010. Be prepared to get lost for hours. Totally amazing stuff.

FOUND magazine
January 2nd, 2011

My last present in 2010 represents everything I like: Sampling, collages and archiving. Also, it reminds me of my love for the analog in general.
Via Found Magazine: "We collect found stuff: love letters, birthday cards, kids' homework, to-do lists, ticket stubs, poetry on napkins, doodles – anything that gives a glimpse into someone else's life. Anything goes."

Thanks to Helen Schneider!

Summary in Ten
December 31st, 2010

Book The Ego Tunnel by Thomas Metzinger provides a stunningly original take on the mystery of the mind in a time when the science of cognition is becoming as controversial as evolution.
Concert The mindblowing audiovisual Bonner Durchmusterung at Institute For Music And Media by Marcus Schmickler (composition), Carsten Goertz/ farn (visuals) and Alberto de Camp (sonification).
Had the dish best served cold at Feedmee (pun intended) and let it go. The bliss kept me up all night and I just could not stop rejoicing. Was also one of those beautiful first days of summer. Thanks for the support, Nicola.
Perfume Black Afgano by Nasomatto, which is almost sold out worldwide. Thanks to my wonderful cousin for getting me another bottle in London.
Position Down Dog and four deep gasps. 
Quote "It ain't what they call you, it's what you answer to." – W. C. Fields.
Recource I love the New Shelton wet/dry for the witty assembly of headline, photo and text always creating something much bigger than the sum of its parts – a Gestalt, in the true sense of its meaning.
Talk Jiddu Krishnamurti's (1995-1986) seven talks and five Q&A meetings, Saanen, Switzerland in 1980 allow an impressive introduction to his radical thinking.
Unbearable loss Christoph Schlingensief (1960–2010). "He encompassed everything we hope of our heroes: virtue, magnetism and the absolute belief in his chosen mission. He had the ability to mobilize the outcast, and the gifted, instilling all with the strength and confidence that he possessed in abundance." – Patti Smith
Useful concept ACT – in short: Mindfulness and acceptance.

So, here we are... And what is next?

by James Burke
December 24th, 2010

Via kottge.org: "Connections is a ten-episode documentary television series created, written and presented by science historian James Burke. The series was produced and directed by Mick Jackson of the BBC Science & Features Department and first aired in 1978 (UK) and 1979 (USA). It took an interdisciplinary approach to the history of science and invention and demonstrated how various discoveries, scientific achievements, and historical world events were built from one another successively in an interconnected way to bring about particular aspects of modern technology.

Connections explores an Alternative View of Change (the subtitle of the series) that rejects the conventional linear and teleological view of historical progress. Burke contends that one cannot consider the development of any particular piece of the modern world in isolation. Rather, the entire gestalt of the modern world is the result of a web of interconnected events, each one consisting of a person or group acting for reasons of their own motivations (e.g. profit, curiosity, religious) with no concept of the final, modern result of what either their or their contemporaries' actions finally led to. The interplay of the results of these isolated events is what drives history and innovation, and is also the main focus of the series and its sequels.

Here's the first episode to get you started. Warning: you may not be able to stop. If you'd like to watch the series in a less irritating format, you can always purchase it on DVD."

by Dmitri Siegel
December 21st, 2010

Via Design Observer: "The last decade of litigation has brought similar and chilling trends in a every media. It is disconcerting to realize that creative pursuits like music, filmmaking and graphic design are shaped to some degree by unromantic things like copyright law. But if we scan down the history of collage and appropriation we can see the constant influence of political and socio-economic context: Sergey Eisenstein connected his idea of intellectual montage directly to the Bolshevik Revolution, Dada artists like Hannah Höch harnessed the brut power of collage in reaction to war and fascism, and in the late-sixties Guy Debord formulated detournement — a form of transgressive appropriation — as part of a widespread social movement. This history casts a revealing light on the Smithsonian/Showtime deal, and the diminution of sampling in general. It may be gratifying to imagine that our field is animated by an evolving aesthetic consensus, but the fact is that larger social and economic forces exert an immense and often invisible influence over creative practice."

From the comments: "One person who is providing a model for how to deal in archival footage without generating more restrictive copyrights is Rick Prelinger. The Prelinger Archive offers thousands of clips for free download and has demonstrated that this drives business to the clips he sells through Getty Images. Another organization working to create an alternative copyright reality is Creative Commons which offers a range of voluntary 'some rights reserved' licenses. A great general resource on this topic is Stay Free magazine which I relied on heavily while researching this article."

Organized needly
December 20th, 2010

Via Wikipedia: "Knolling is the process of arranging like objects in parallel or 90 degree angles as a method of organization.
The term was first used in 1987 by Andrew Kromelow, a janitor at Frank Gehry's furniture fabrication shop. At the time, Gehry was designing chairs for Knoll, a company famously known for Florence Knoll's angular furniture. Kromelow would arrange any displaced tools at right angles on all surfaces, and called this routine knolling, in that the tools were arranged in right angles — similar to Knoll furniture. The result was an organized surface that allowed the user to see all objects at once."

Why, beyond middle age, people get happier as they get older
December 19th, 2010

From The Economist: "When people start out on adult life, they are, on average, pretty cheerful. Things go downhill from youth to middle age until they reach a nadir commonly known as the mid-life crisis. So far, so familiar. The surprising part happens after that. Although as people move towards old age they lose things they treasure — vitality, mental sharpness and looks — they also gain what people spend their lives pursuing: happiness.

This curious finding has emerged from a new branch of economics that seeks a more satisfactory measure than money of human well-being. Conventional economics uses money as a proxy for utility — the dismal way in which the discipline talks about happiness. But some economists, unconvinced that there is a direct relationship between money and well-being, have decided to go to the nub of the matter and measure happiness itself."

Play your mind
December 11th, 2010

Via the New Shelton wet/dry: "We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us." Marcel Proust

Via Neuroskeptic: "What's the best way to overcome depression? Antidepressant drugs, or Buddhist meditation?
A new trial has examined this question. The short answer is that 8 weeks of mindfulness mediation training was just as good as prolonged antidepressant treatment over 18 months. But like all clinical trials, there are some catches."

Solitude and Leadership
December 5th, 2010

Via The American Scholar: "Multitasking, in short, is not only not thinking, it impairs your ability to think. Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people's ideas, or memorizing a body of information, however much those may sometimes be useful. Developing your own ideas. In short, thinking for yourself. You simply cannot do that in bursts of 20 seconds at a time, constantly interrupted by Facebook messages or Twitter tweets, or fiddling with your iPod, or watching something on YouTube.

I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else's; it's always what I've already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom. It's only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea. By giving my brain a chance to make associations, draw connections, take me by surprise. And often even that idea doesn't turn out to be very good. I need time to think about it, too, to make mistakes and recognize them, to make false starts and correct them, to outlast my impulses, to defeat my desire to declare the job done and move on to the next thing."

On but-heads
December 2nd, 2010

Via The Boston Globe: "These contrary-to-fact phrases have been dubbed (by the Twitter user GrammarHulk and others) but-heads, because they're at the head of the sentence, and usually followed by but. They’ve also been dubbed false fronts, wishwashers, and, less cutely, lying qualifiers.

The point of a but-head is to preemptively deny a charge that has yet to be made, with a kind of 'best offense is a good defense' strategy. This technique has a distinguished relative in classical rhetoric: the device of procatalepsis, in which the speaker brings up and immediately refutes the anticipated objections of his or her hearer. (...)

Once you start looking for these but-heads, you see them everywhere, and you see how much they reveal about the speaker. When someone says 'It's not about the money, but…', it's almost always about the money. If you hear 'It really doesn't matter to me, but…', odds are it does matter, and quite a bit. Someone who begins a sentence with 'Confidentially' is nearly always betraying a confidence; someone who starts out 'Frankly,' or 'Honestly,' 'To be (completely) honest with you,' or 'Let me give it to you straight' brings to mind Ralph Waldo Emerson's quip: 'The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.'"

Film
November 28th, 2010

Via Bijan Kafi: "The film with a length of more than one and a half hours has been produced by Enno Schmidt and Daniel Häni and is also available via the thematic portal grundeinkommen.tv. It provides a comprehensive and emotional introduction to the topic and is certainly worth the time for anyone interested in the issue."

Thanks to Manfred Waffender!

Via Wikipedia: "A basic income guarantee (or basic income) is a proposed system of social security, that periodically provides each citizen with a sum of money. In contrast to income redistribution between nations themselves, the phrase basic income defines payments to individuals rather than households, groups, or nations, in order to provide for individual basic human needs. Except for citizenship, a basic income is entirely unconditional. Furthermore, there is no means test; the richest as well as the poorest citizens would receive it."

Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (1863–1944)
November 25th, 2010

Arthur Quiller-Couch's Cambridge inaugural lecture series, published as On the Art of Writing, is the source of the popular writers' adage murder your darlings.
Via Bartleby.com: "...if you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it — whole-heartedly — and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings."

Slavoj Žižek on AlJazeeraa
November 21st, 2010

Via AlJazeeraEnglish: "Is the world ignoring the signs of the so-called end times? Renowned philosopher and critic, Slavoj Žižek, explains what he thinks is causing the downhill slide, and points to the faltering economy, global warming and deteriorating ethnic relations as evidence."

Thanks to Marcus Schmickler!

...might get left behind.
November 19th, 2010

Via Fast Company: "Like a beetle preserved in amber, the practice of advertising has sat virtually unchanged for the last half-century. Before 1960, ad making was a solitary practice. Copywriters toiled away on words to pitch a product, then handed them off to an art director who translated them into an illustration or photograph. Creative director Bill Bernbach (the B in DDB) changed all that when he recognized that pairing wordsmith and artist could spark genius. That simple move ignited the industry's creative revolution, raising the practice of advertising from sleazy salesmanship to some permutation of art.

The ad business became an assembly line as predictable as Henry Ford's. The client (whose goal was to get the word out about a product) paid an agency's account executive (whose job was to lure the client and then keep him happy), who briefed the brand planner (whose research uncovered the big consumer insight), who briefed the media planner (who decided which channel – radio, print, outdoor, direct mail, or TV – to advertise in). Then the copywriter/art director team would pass on its work (a big idea typically represented by storyboards for a 30-second TV commercial) to the producer (who worked with a director and editors to film and edit the commercial). Thanks to the media buyer (whose job was to wine-and-dine media companies to lower the price of TV spots, print pages, or radio slots), the ad would get funneled, like relatively fresh sausage, into some combination of those five mass media, which were anything but equal. TV ruled the world. After all, it not only reached a mass audience but was also the most expensive medium – and the more the client spent, the more money the ad agency made.

That was then. Over the past few years, because of a combination of Internet disintermediation, recession, and corporate blindness, the assembly line has been obliterated – economically, organizationally, and culturally. In the ad business, the relatively good life of 2007 is as remote as the whiskey highs of 1962. 'Here we go again,' moans Andy Nibley, the former CEO of ad agency Marsteller who, over the past decade, has also been the CEO of the digital arms of both Reuters and Universal Music. 'First the news business, then the music business, then advertising. Is there any industry I get involved in that doesn't get destroyed by digital technology?'"

The Carpet Crawlers
November 1st, 2010

Mild mannered supermen are held in kryptonite,
And the wise and foolish virgins giggle with their bodies glowing bright.
Through a door a harvest feast is lit by candlelight;
It's the bottom of a staircase that spirals out of sight.
The carpet crawlers heed their callers:
"We've got to get in to get out."

The porcelain mannikin with shattered skin fears attack.
The eager pack lift up their pitchers - they carry all they lack.
The liquid has congealed, which has seeped out through the crack,
And the tickler takes his stickleback.
The carpet crawlers heed their callers:
"We've got to get in to get out."

Documentary
October 30th, 2010

From Wikipedia: "The Corporation is a 2003 Canadian documentary film written by Joel Bakan, and directed by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott. The documentary is critical of the modern-day corporation, considering its legal status as a class of person and evaluating its behaviour towards society and the world at large as a psychiatrist might evaluate an ordinary person. This is explored through specific examples. The Corporation has been shown worldwide, on television, and via DVD, file sharing, and free download. Bakan wrote the book, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, during the filming of the documentary."

Thanks to Ralf Neubauer!

...does not exist.
October 22nd, 2010

From Wiring the Brain: "Colour does not exist. Not out in the world at any rate. All that exists in the world is a smooth continuum of light of different wavelengths. Colour is a construction of our brains. A lot is known about how the brain does this, beginning with complicated circuits in the retina itself.

Thanks to a new paper from Greg Field and colleagues we now have an even more detailed picture of how retinal circuits are wired to enable light to be categorized into different colours. This study illustrates a dramatic and fundamental principle of brain wiring – namely that cells that fire together, wire together."

What Does It Mean To Be Cool?
October 14th, 2010

From Philosophy Now: "In principle, to be cool means to remain calm even under stress. But this doesn't explain why there is now a global culture of cool. What is cool?

The aesthetics of cool developed mainly as a behavioral attitude practiced by black men in the United States at the time of slavery. Slavery made necessary the cultivation of special defense mechanisms which employed emotional detachment and irony. A cool attitude helped slaves and former slaves to cope with exploitation or simply made it possible to walk the streets at night. During slavery, and long afterwards, overt aggression by blacks was punishable by death. Provocation had to remain relatively inoffensive, and any level of serious intent had to be disguised or suppressed. So cool represents a paradoxical fusion of submission and subversion. It’s a classic case of resistance to authority through creativity and innovation. (…)

In spite of the ambiguity, it seems that we remain capable of distinguishing cool attitudes from uncool ones. So what is cool? Let me say that cool resists linear structures. Thus a straightforward, linear search for power is not cool. Constant loss of power is not cool either. Winning is cool; but being ready to do anything to win is not. Both moralists and totally immoral people are uncool, while people who maintain moral standards in straightforwardly immoral environments are most likely to be cool. A CEO is not cool, unless he is a reasonable risk-taker and refrains from pursuing success in a predictable fashion. Coolness is a nonconformist balance that manages to square circles and to personify paradoxes. This has been well known since at least the time of cool jazz. This paradoxical nature has much to do with cool's origins being the fusion of submission and subversion. (…)

In ancient Greece, the Stoic philosophers supported a vision of coolness in a turbulent world. The Stoic indifference to fate can be interpreted as the supreme principle of coolness, and has even been been viewed as such in the context of African American culture. The style of the jazz musician Lester Young, for example, was credible mostly because Young was neither proud nor ashamed."

(via: the New Shelton wet/dry)

Inspiring photo blogs
October 10th, 2010

Inside
Outside

Tendency to cooperate effectively is linked to the number of women in a group
October 2nd, 2010

From Eurek Alert: "New study finds groups demonstrate distinctive collective intelligence when facing difficult tasks. (…)

That collective intelligence, the researchers believe, stems from how well the group works together. For instance, groups whose members had higher levels of social sensitivity were more collectively intelligent. 'Social sensitivity has to do with how well group members perceive each other's emotions,' says Christopher Chabris. (…)

The average and maximum intelligence of individual group members did not significantly predict the performance of their groups overall. (…)

Only when analyzing the data did the co-authors suspect that the number of women in a group had significant predictive power. 'We didn't design this study to focus on the gender effect,' Malone says. 'That was a surprise to us.' However, further analysis revealed that the effect seemed to be explained by the higher social sensitivity exhibited by females, on average."

Memory as a resource
September 28th, 2010

From Thoughts on Thoughts: "Some people are surprised, even disturbed, by the idea that our vision does not give us an accurate picture of what we look at. For example, the colours we experience are not a measure of the wavelength of the light entering our eyes. But accuracy is not the point of vision; the function is to be useful and colour consistency is far more useful then fidelity to wavelength spectra. The same surprise is shown in the reaction to the idea that our memories are reworked continuously so that over time they lose their accuracy. This is not a fault in memory. Again the reason we store memories is to have a useful resource, not necessarily one with detailed accuracy. A great deal of biological energy is used to create memories and to re-consolidate them and therefore we can assume that they have a very important biological role. (...)

A rapidly growing number of recent studies show the imagining the future depends on much of the same neural machinery that is needed for remembering the past. These findings have led to the concept of the prospective brain; an idea that a critical function of the brain is to use stored information to imagine, simulate and predict possible future events. We suggest that processes such as memory can be productively re-conceptualized in light of this idea."

Building language skills more critical for boys than girls
September 25th, 2010

From Michigan State University News: "Developing language skills appears to be more important for boys than girls in helping them to develop self-control and, ultimately, succeed in school, according to a study led by a Michigan State University researcher. (...)

What was surprising, Vallotton said, was that language skills seemed so much more important to the regulation of boys' behavior. While girls overall seemed to have a more natural ability to control themselves and focus, boys with a strong vocabulary showed a dramatic increase in this ability to self-regulate – even doing as well in this regard as girls with a strong vocabulary."

Flow
September 17th, 2010

From Wikipedia: "Flow is the mental state of operation in which a person in an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity. Proposed by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, the positive psychology concept has been widely referenced across a variety of fields.

According to Csíkszentmihályi, flow is completely focused motivation. It is a single-minded immersion and represents perhaps the ultimate in harnessing the emotions in the service of performing and learning. In flow the emotions are not just contained and channeled, but positive, energized, and aligned with the task at hand. To be caught in the ennui of depression or the agitation of anxiety is to be barred from flow. The hallmark of flow is a feeling of spontaneous joy, even rapture, while performing a task.

Colloquial terms for this or similar mental states include: to be on the ball, in the moment, present, in the zone, in the groove, or keeping your head in the game."

Adam Phillips on the happiness myth
September 16th, 2010

From the Guardian: "We all want to be happy, we want our children to be happy, and there are countless books advising us how to achieve happiness. But is this really what we should be aiming for? (...)

It is not surprising, in other words, that happiness has always had rather a mixed reception. No one in their right minds we might think, especially now, would be promoting unhappiness; and yet the promotion, the preferring of happiness – the assumption of a right to happiness – brings with it a lot of things we might not like. And the desire for happiness may reveal things about ourselves that we like even less. 'A people who conceive life to be the pursuit of happiness must be chronically unhappy,' the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins wrote. (...)

I want to begin with three fairly obvious propositions that are also misgivings about the right to happiness or its pursuit. And I'd like to suggest that the right to frustration may be more useful and interesting – more enlivening – than the right to happiness. That's to say I want to waylay the common, all-too-plausible idea that the solution to frustration is satisfaction, or that happiness is the answer to unhappiness, or that if we get rid of the bad things, the good things will start happening. Happiness and the right to pursue it are sometimes wildly unrealistic as ideals; and, because wildly unrealistic, unconsciously self-destructive. (...)

Indeed we might end up thinking that a right to irresolvable conflict might be the most realistic right we could come up with. That the attempt to resolve at least some conflicts was a distraction from finding better ways of living them; that the right to pursue happiness has seduced us into pursuing happiness when we could have been doing something better. (...)

For better and for worse, being able to feel our frustration is the precondition for becoming absorbed. When this is impossible the pursuit of happiness tends to take over. The right to pursue happiness may be, at its worst, the right not to feel frustrated. And if frustration is not allowed to take its course, to take its time, there is no absorption, only refuges from unhappiness. (...)"

by Christian S
September 15th, 2010

Christian says: "Digimix made for power increasement while jogging with 160 steps per minute. For Heike, september 2010..." I say: It works and I am loving it. You might be lucky too, count your steps.

Thanks to Christian Schäfer!

by Adam Curtis
September 11th, 2010

From Dangerous Minds: "Fascinating think piece about advertising in the 1960s (and a little beyond) from Century of the Self documentarian Adam Curtis that sheds some interesting light on the actual historical Madison Avenue figures that certain characters from Mad Men seem to be based on."

From the above mentioned Experiments in the Laboratory of Consumerism 1959-67 by Adam Curtis: "The widespread fascination with the Mad Men series is far more than just simple nostalgia. It is about how we feel about ourselves and our society today.
In Mad Men we watch a group of people who live in a prosperous society that offers happiness and order like never before in history and yet are full of anxiety and unease. They feel there is something more, something beyond. And they feel stuck.
I think we are fascinated because we have a lurking feeling that we are living in a very similar time. A time that, despite all the great forces of history whirling around in the world outside, somehow feels stuck. And above all has no real vision of the future.
And as we watch the group of characters from 50 years ago, we get reassurance because we know that they are on the edge of a vast change that will transform their world and lead them out of their stifling technocratic order and back into the giant onrush of history.
The question is whether we might be at a similar point, waiting for something to happen. But we have no idea what it is going to be."

by Brian Reffin Smith
September 10th, 2010

1. The sadness of most art is that it does not know its future. The sadness of computer art is that it does not know its past.
2. Constraint is liberty; reduce to the maximum.
3. If it looks just like, you know, art… it probably isn't.
4. Using state-of-the-art technology merely produces state-of-the-technology art.
5. Those who use computers to make art need to understand art as well as computers.
6. Most participative art is deeply authoritarian.
7. The computer is best characterised not as an information processor but as a general-purpose representation processor.
8. Marshall McLuhan, at least as filtered through his sound-bites, was often wrong. The medium is not the message, which is more often determined socially and psychologically by the recipient.
9. If your system costs 10 000 € and mine 30 000 €, it does not follow that my art is thrice as good as yours.
10. In an ideal world, New Media institutions would employ at least one non-technological artist.
11. Are you pushing the frontiers of computational representation, or of contemporary art? Confusion rarely leads to success.
12. 99% of computer art is meretricious nonsense. But then 99% of everything is meretricious nonsense.
13. Self-imposed formal requirements are not inhibitive of expression.
14. Post Modernism has never said that everything is of equal value, just that the contexts in which we identify or attribute value should be open to analysis.
15. You know your amazing new computer art, rich in metaphors and analogies? It's been done. Years ago. Without a computer.
16. We lose dimensions and scale. The computer in art is immediate and almost always, however "global", local. Just as no well-found art school would be complete without computers, so every such institution should have a telescope and a microscope, connected to the computer or not.
17. Making computer art too dangerous to sponsor would be a good way to go.
18. Just as everyone has a novel inside them, many believe they have an artwork. The purpose of a good art school is to seek out these people and stop them.
19. Using a computer merely to access the web is like using a Bugatti Veyron to deliver the papers.
20. Many people think that graphic design is art. Art is undertaken for art-like reasons, graphic design for graphic design-like reasons. There may of course be overlap. There should never be confusion.
21. Making the (arts) information revolution consists not only in enabling the control of the means of computer art production by art workers, but also in being kind, non-gouging and relatively honest. Without the latter, one may doubt commitment to the former.
22. The best interactive art always makes you look at the participants.
23. There is only one thing worse than studying art for the budding computer artist, and that is to study computers. Or vice versa.
24. Art is not craft.
25. What would be pretentious or nonsensical if one said it oneself does not become more worthy when spoken by a computer-generated avatar.
26. Seen in the light of Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle, computer art is very spectacular indeed.
27. Beware of computer art as farce repeating itself as history.
28. There is no normal computer art, in the Kuhnian sense. It is in constant revolution, hence constantly evading scrutiny.
29. When the first solitary Metro station was built in Paris, where could people travel to? They just admired the station.
30. Bugs are good; as with fireflies, the fertile ones shed light.
31. The Prix Pierre Gutzman, 100 000 Francs, was offered by the Institut de France in 1906 to the first person who could establish contact with extra-terrestrials; except with Martians, which would be too easy.
32. "All that is solid melts into air" is not a celebration of virtuality, but Marx 'n' Engels' prediction for late capitalism.
33. A half developed Polaroid photo is different to half a digital photo. A half-finished pen-plotter drawing is different to a half-finished inkjet print.
34. When art processes happen near-instantaneously, doing art becomes synonymous with correction and selection, later with celebration; rarely with creativity.
35. Art is visual philosophy. But computer art is not visual computer philosophy.
36. Revolutionary modes of interaction between humans and normative structures do not a revolution make.
37. "i", the imaginary square root of minus 1, is to the real numbers as the computer is — or should be — to art.
38. The purpose of the computer in art is to render it difficult and problematic, not easy.
39. We do not admire Picasso's Guernica or Goya's The Third of May 1808 solely because of the techniques used, yet we are often invited to admire computer art for just that reason. Art that is deliberately content-free is one thing. Art that is accidentally, lumpenly content-free is another.
40. Computer artist: the unemployable producing the unsaleable for the uninterested.
41. Of course computers and other devices will never fully understand flowing, allusive conversation. But they won't care.
42. Many of the objects of computer art are instances, illustrations, of some less tangible, invisible process. But it may be that the waveform should remain uncollapsed, the artwork staying undecideable, problematic, unobjectified. Lucy R. Lippard described the "dematerialization of the art object" nearly 40 years ago.
43. Never throw away any computer or peripheral equipment that is more than 15 years old. You may well come to need it.

Thanks to Sebastian Oschatz!

The eight domains of self-integration
September 5th, 2010

From Psychotherapy Networker: "What is a healthy mind? Is it simply the absence of symptoms and dysfunctions, or is there something more to a life well lived? How can we embrace the diversity of behavior, temperament, values, and orientation across a wide range of cultures and still come up with a coherent definition of health? Just as some scientists are reluctant to define the mind, some people say that we shouldn't define mental health at all, because it is authoritarian to do so — we shouldn't tell others how to be healthy. But how do we account for the universal striving for happiness? How do we understand the cross-culturally recognizable ease of well-being? Positive psychology has offered an important corrective to the disease model by identifying the characteristics of happy people, such as gratitude, compassion, open-mindedness, and curiosity, but is there some unnamed quality that underlies all of these individual strengths?

Over the last twenty years, I've come to believe that integration is the key mechanism beneath both the absence of illness and the presence of well-being. Integration — the linkage of differentiated elements of a system — illuminates a direct pathway toward health. It's the way we avoid a life of dull, boring rigidity on the one hand, or explosive chaos on the other. We can learn to detect when integration is absent or insufficient and develop effective strategies to promote differentiation and then linkage. The key to this transformation is cultivating the capacity for mindsight."

Wang Gang-Feng. An Hui Province, 1982. The People's Republic of China.
August 17th, 2010

What is it?
August 2nd, 2010

From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: "Friendship essentially involves a distinctive kind of concern for your friend, a concern which might reasonably be understood as a kind of love. Philosophers from the ancient Greeks on have traditionally distinguished three notions that can properly be called love: agape, eros, and philia. Agape is a kind of love that does not respond to the antecedent value of its object but instead is thought to create value in the beloved; it has come through the Christian tradition to mean the sort of love God has for us persons as well as, by extension, our love for God and our love for humankind in general. By contrast, em>eros and philia are generally understood to be responsive to the merits of their objects—to the beloved's properties, especially his goodness or beauty. The difference is that eros is a kind of passionate desire for an object, typically sexual in nature, whereas 'philia' originally meant a kind of affectionate regard or friendly feeling towards not just one's friends but also possibly towards family members, business partners, and one's country at large (Liddell et al., 1940; Cooper, 1977a). Given this classification of kinds of love, philia seems to be that which is most clearly relevant to friendship (though just what philia amounts to needs to be clarified in more detail).

For this reason, love and friendship often get lumped together as a single topic; nonetheless, there are significant differences between them. As understood here, love is an evaluative attitude directed at particular persons as such, an attitude which we might take towards someone whether or not that love is reciprocated and whether or not we have an established relationship with her. Friendship, by contrast, is essentially a kind of relationship grounded in a particular kind of special concern each has for the other as the person she is; and whereas we must make conceptual room for the idea of unrequited love, unrequited friendship is senseless. Consequently, accounts of friendship tend to understand it not merely as a case of reciprocal love of some form (together with mutual acknowledgment of this love), but as essentially involving significant interactions between the friends — as being in this sense a certain kind of relationship.

Nonetheless, questions can be raised about precisely how to distinguish romantic relationships, grounded in eros, from relationships of friendship, grounded in philia, insofar as each involves significant interactions between the involved parties that stem from a kind of reciprocal love that is responsive to merit. Clearly the two differ insofar as romantic love normally has a kind of sexual involvement that friendship lacks; yet, as Thomas (1989) asks, is that enough to explain the real differences between them? Badhwar (2003, 65–66) seems to think so, claiming that the sexual involvement enters into romantic love in part through a passion and yearning for physical union, whereas friendship involves instead a desire for a more psychological identification. Yet it is not clear exactly how to understand this: precisely what kind of "psychological identification" or intimacy is characteristic of friendship? (For further discussion, see Section 1.2.)

In philosophical discussions of friendship, it is common to follow Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics, Book VIII) in distinguishing three kinds of friendship: friendships of pleasure, of utility, and of virtue. Although it is a bit unclear how to understand these distinctions, the basic idea seems to be that pleasure, utility, and virtue are the reasons we have in these various kinds of relationships for loving our friend. That is, I may love my friend because of the pleasure I get out of her, or because of the ways in which she is useful to me, or because I find her to have a virtuous character. Given the involvement of love in each case, all three kinds of friendship seem to involve a concern for your friend for his sake and not for your own.

There is an apparent tension here between the idea that friendship essentially involves being concerned for your friend for his sake and the idea of pleasure and utility friendships: how can you be concerned for him for his sake if you do that only because of the pleasure or utility you get out of it? If you benefit your friend because, ultimately, of the benefits you receive, it would seem that you do not properly love your friend for his sake, and so your relationship is not fully one of friendship after all. So it looks like pleasure and utility friendships are at best deficient modes of friendship; by contrast, virtue friendships, because they are motivated by the excellences of your friend's character, are genuine, non-deficient friendships. For this reason, most contemporary accounts, by focusing their attention on the non-deficient forms of friendship, ignore pleasure and utility friendships."

by The Wolfgang Press
July 25th, 2010

"It felt so good, you know."

by Joe Quirk
July 21st, 2010

"We Homo sapiens are very good at thinking clearly and surviving in a social context, until it's time to trade genes, at which point we go mad. The stupidity of our overwhelming passions comes from a deeper wisdom than anything the wise can control. The definition of passion: when you become animated by an ancient imperative that transcends your mortal life. Passion comes from before you were born, and it reaches out beyond your death. To a gene, your passions are more important than you. We celebrate that ecstatic agony in our art and gossip, because there is no state achievable by humans that is more self-transcendent."

Thanks to William Bennett!

Surrender!
July 18th, 2010

In this life-time you are being asked to release and surrender. Surrender is the opposite of giving up. It is freeing yourself from the desire to be in control, letting go of how you think things should be. Surrender is freedom. You are being invited to release yourself from the bondage of preconceived action, to let everything be all right as it is, so that you can live a more inspired life in the moment!

You are being asked to take action in the process of surrender and release. You are requested to die a symbolic death, to surrender your limiting beliefs. Symbolic death unveils the self by cutting away the outgrown parts of yourself that no longer serve you. In such death, ego structures fall away to reveal the garden of the true self. Look for new ways of being, new people, new ideas, and new directions that will move into the vacuum created through surrender and release. 

Holding on to past patterns and grievances only limits the possibilities. Forgive yourself. Forgive others. Let go. Surrender whatever limits you. Face whatever you are resisting. In the experience of any loss, it is never too late to complete. Through your willingness to walk in the dark forest, insights and revelations will naturally emerge.

Accept the truth of your present situation. Through accepting what is, you are free to go forward. Change and growth become easier and more natural. 

Thanks to Nicola Richer!

Mental hiccup
June 27th, 2010

From ScienceBlogs: "…one of the most impressive talents of the human mind. We don't just know things - we know we know them, which leads to feelings of knowing. I've written about this before, but one of my favorite examples of such feelings is when a word is on the tip of the tongue. Perhaps it occurs when you run into an old acquaintance whose name you can't remember, although you know that it begins with the letter J. Or perhaps you struggle to recall the title of a recent movie, even though you can describe the plot in perfect detail.

What's interesting about this mental hiccup is that, even though the mind can't remember the information, it's convinced that it knows it. We have a vague feeling that, if we continue to search for the missing word, we'll be able to find it. (This is a universal experience: The vast majority of languages, from Afrikaans to Hindi to Arabic, even rely on tongue metaphors to describe the tip-of-the-tongue moment.) But here's the mystery: If we've forgotten a person's name, then why are we so convinced that we remember it? What does it mean to know something without being able to access it?

This is where feelings of knowing prove essential. The feeling is a signal that we can find the answer, if only we keep on thinking about the question. And these feelings aren't just relevant when we can't remember someone's name. Think, for instance, about the last time you raised your hand to speak in a group setting: Did you know exactly what you were going to say when you decided to open your mouth? Probably not. Instead, you had a funny hunch that you had something worthwhile to say, and so you began talking without knowing how the sentence would end. Likewise, those players on Jeopardy are able to ring the buzzer before they can actually articulate the answer. All they have is a feeling, and that feeling is enough.

These feelings of knowing illustrate the power of our emotions. The first thing to note is that these feelings are often extremely accurate."

by John Naughton
June 22nd, 2010

From Guardian: "In spite of all the answers the internet has given us, its full potential to transform our lives remains the great unknown. Here are the nine key steps to understanding the most powerful tool of our age – and where it's taking us."

...and it is not a test.
June 21st, 2010

Colors / Black
June 13th, 2010

From Cabinet: "The contemporary philosopher Giorgio Agamben, following Aristotle, remarks that the fact that we see darkness means that our eyes have not only the potential to see, but also the potential not to see. (If we had only the potential to see, we would never have the experience of not-seeing.) This twofold potential, to do and not to do, is not only a feature of our sight, Agamben argues; it is the essence of our humanity: 'The greatness — and also the abyss — of human potentiality is that it is first of all potential not to act, potential for darkness.' Because we are capable of inaction, we know that we have the ability to act, and also the choice of whether to act or not. Black, the color of not seeing, not doing, is in that sense the color of freedom."

Who says staying at the world's best hotels has to cost a fortune?
June 7th, 2010

Who's taking me?

Bodies are composed of an infinity of infinitely small parts
June 5th, 2010

From the New Shelton wet/dry: "we think we know everything through our mind, but (spinoza:) the human mind has no knowledge of the body.

there are no fewer things in the mind that exceed our consciousness than there are things in the body that exceed our knowledge. (deleuze)

4) other sets of small parts (others bodies) have an effect on me. they can modify or destroy the relation which characterises my body. like the cold water on my skin, the food that i eat, a bullet, etc.

5) there's another kind of relation between bodies. this time it is not about the effect of a body on another body, but about the agreement or disagreement of the relations between two bodies. it's about the composition of the relations between two bodies.
like the water and my body, when i swim.

6) for each kind of relation between bodies, there's a kind of knowledge. (...)

7) wondering what it's like when it gets interesting? look at the relations between people, same as the relations between water and bodies. the beauty of spinoza's mechanism."

Predict.
May 27th, 2010

From The School Of Life: "We like to think of our introspected motivations as predictive facts that will tell us what we will do. However, as Wilson  demonstrates, our inner reflections discover not facts but a story we tell to ourselves about ourselves. These stories tend to be rose-tinted. We see ourselves as more consistent, admirable and steadfast than we turn out to be. We forget contrary behaviour and previous weakness and focus on being better.
(...) Consequently, if we want to know what you will do next, it is often better to ask others than it is to ask yourself. Friends and family can know you better than you know yourself. Even strangers, who can see a situation more clearly than you, can make better predictions. Which also means that, despite our wish to be flies-on-the-wall as negotiations unfold, and our urge to see inside the minds of the protagonists, it turns out we may well know what our leaders will do next better than they do."

From the last draft
May 24th, 2010

At that moment, a great oldie-but-goodie BLASTS from the jukebox.

MIA: I wanna dance.

VINCENT: I'm not much of a dancer.

MIA: Now I'm the one gettin' gyped. I do believe Marsellus told you to take me out and do whatever I wanted. Well, now I want to dance.

Vincent smiles and begins taking off his boots. Mia triumphantly casts hers off.  He takes her hand, escorting her to the dance floor. The two face each other for that brief moment before you begin to dance, than they both break into a devilish twist. Mia's version of the twist is that of a sexy cat. Vincent is pure Mr. Cool as he gets into a hip-swivelling rhythm that would make Mr. Checker proud.

The OTHER DANCERS on the floor are trying to do the same thing, but Vincent and Mia seem to be strangely shaking their asses in sync. The two definitely share a rhythm and share smiles as they SING ALONG with the last verse of the Golden Oldie.

(They had a hi-fi phono, boy, did they let it blast
Seven hundred little records, all rock, rhythm and jazz
But when the sun went down, the rapid tempo of the music fell
"C'est la vie", say the old folks, it goes to show you can never tell)

You Probably Think This Perfume Is About You
May 22nd, 2010

"Come as you are, as you were, as I want you to be.
As a friend, as a friend, as an old enemy.
Take your time, hurry up, choice is yours, don't be late.
Take a rest, as a friend, as an old memory."

And here is the perfume: Black Afgano

"Nothing lasts. You can't count on anything but yourself." Dashiell Hammett
May 8th, 2010

From Wikipedia: "The question regarding personal identity has addressed the conditions under which a person at one time is the same person at another time, known as personal continuity. This sort of analysis of personal identity provides a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for the identity of the person over time. In the modern philosophy of mind, this concept of personal identity is sometimes referred to as the diachronic problem of personal identity. The synchronic problem is grounded in the question of what features or traits characterize a given person at one time."

10 antithetical traits often present in creative people
May 7th, 2010

From Psychology Today: "Creative individuals are remarkable for their ability to adapt to almost any situation and to make do with whatever is at hand to reach their goals. If I had to express in one word what makes their personalities different from others, it's complexity. They show tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated. They contain contradictory extremes; instead of being an individual, each of them is a multitude."

"It ain't what they call you, it's what you answer to." W. C. Fields
May 1st, 2010

From Wikipedia: "Walpurgis Night (Walpurgisnacht) is a traditional religious holiday of pre-Christian origin, celebrated today by Christian as well as non-Christian communities, on April 30 or May 1 in large parts of Central and Northern Europe.
The current festival is, in most countries that celebrate it, named after Saint Walpurga, born in Devon about 710. Due to the coincidence of her holy day falling on the same day as the pagan holiday on which it was based, her name became associated with the celebrations. Walpurga was honoured in the same way that Vikings had celebrated spring and as they spread throughout Europe, the two dates became mixed together and created the Walpurgis Night celebration. Early Christianity had a policy of Christianising pagan festivals so it is perhaps no accident that St. Walpurga's day was set to May 1."

Low-fat vs. low-carb
April 29th, 2010

From Scientific American: "'If you reduce saturated fat and replace it with high glycemic-index carbohydrates, you may not only not get benefits — you might actually produce harm,' Ludwig argues. The next time you eat a piece of buttered toast, he says, consider that 'butter is actually the more healthful component.'"

From The New York Times: "After 20 years steeped in a low-fat paradigm, I find it hard to see the nutritional world any other way. I have learned that low-fat diets fail in clinical trials and in real life, and they certainly have failed in my life. I have read the papers suggesting that 20 years of low-fat recommendations have not managed to lower the incidence of heart disease in this country, and may have led instead to the steep increase in obesity and Type 2 diabetes. I have interviewed researchers whose computer models have calculated that cutting back on the saturated fats in my diet to the levels recommended by the American Heart Association would not add more than a few months to my life, if that. I have even lost considerable weight with relative ease by giving up carbohydrates on my test diet, and yet I can look down at my eggs and sausage and still imagine the imminent onset of heart disease and obesity, the latter assuredly to be caused by some bizarre rebound phenomena the likes of which science has not yet begun to describe. The fact that Atkins himself has had heart trouble recently does not ease my anxiety, despite his assurance that it is not diet-related."

About Women
April 27th, 2010

No. 732: We'll take nice forearms over six-pack abs any day.

Nifty necklace above: Balançoire (swing) from Calourette. 3,5 cm of varnished wood on an 80cm silver chain.

Amor fati
April 24th, 2010

From Wikipedia: "Nachum of Gamzu was a Tanna of the 2nd generation (1st century). In the Talmud he is called Ish Gam Zu (the man of gam zu), and this name is explained as referring to Nahum's motto: on every occasion, no matter how unpleasant the circumstance, he exclaimed gam zu letovah (this, too, will be for the best)."

Mind the gap
April 23rd, 2010

Because I Got High
Magic
No Lollipop No Sweet So
It's my Party
That's Life
Friends Will Be Friends

Acceptance and mindfulness
April 18th, 2010

From Wikipedia: "ACT commonly employs six core principles to help clients develop psychological flexibility:
1. Cognitive defusion: Learning to perceive thoughts, images, emotions, and memories as what they are, not what they appear to be.
2. Acceptance: Allowing them to come and go without struggling with them.
3. Contact with the present moment: Awareness of the here and now, experienced with openness, interest, and receptiveness.
4. Observing the self: Accessing a transcendent sense of self, a continuity of consciousness which is changing.
5. Values: Discovering what is most important to one's true self.
6. Committed action: Setting goals according to values and carrying them out responsibly."

Funkadelic "Into You" (1978)
April 17th, 2010

I can't get into the neutron bomb
I can't get into something that will do me some harm
I can't get into a drug addict principle
I can't get into something that would close the door
If it's right, it's all right for you now
If it's right, it's all right for me now, yo-ho
Any night you'll be uptight until you find
That the wrong and the right are within your mind

Into you now
Into you, my people

Into you now
Imagine me
Into you now
Into you
Into you now
My heart
Into you, my people

I can't get into the poisoned land
I can't get into something I don't understand
I can't into a bad romance
I can't get into a love that ends in a chance
If it's right, it's all right with you now
If it's right, it's all right for me now, yo-ho
Any night you'll be uptight until you find
That the wrong and the right are within your mind

Into you now
Into you, my people
And you into me 

Oldies in the morning
March 14th, 2010

Chestnut brown canary
Ruby throated sparrow
Sing a song don't be long
Thrill me to the marrow
Voices of the angels ring around the moonlight
Asking me, said she so free
How can you catch the sparrow?

(from Suite: Judy Blue Eyes by Stephen Stills)

Ten Timeless Influencers
March 11, 2010

From Psyblog: "Conformity is such a strong influence in society that it's impossible to understand human behaviour without it. Psychological experiments show that people will deny the evidence of their own eyes in order to conform with other people. (...)
Understanding when we conform has all kinds of practical real-world benefits, depending on your aims: it can help you understand your own behaviour as well as understand how others will behave under a variety of different situational pressures. Everyone should be aware of these factors and how they affect the most important areas of their social life."

These are the influencers: Group size, Dissent, Are they one of us?, Your mood, Need for structure, Social approval, Culture, Authority, Social norms and Reciprocation.

Natural anti-depressant
March 10th, 2010

From BBC News: "Once nostalgia was considered a sickness - the word derives from the Greek nostos (return) and algos (pain), suggesting suffering due to a desire to return to a place of origin. (...)
Studies by Mr Routledge, along with colleagues at the University of Southampton, have found that remembering past times improves mood, increases self-esteem, strengthens social bonds and imbues life with meaning. (...)
Nostalgia is usually involuntary and triggered by negative feelings - most commonly loneliness - against which it acts as a sort of natural anti-depressant by countering those feelings."

Also, don't hesitate to see Nostalghia (1983) directed by Andrei Tarkovsky - one of my favorite directors of all time.

What Matter Who's Speaking?
March 7th, 2010

the New Shelton wet/dry blog by JC from Brooklyn, New York, is simply brilliant. I am very grateful for its deepness, intelligence and obscurity.

Found the illustration on Sofía Stefanich's wonderful Tumblr site.

Directed by James Frost, OK Go and Syyn Labs
March 5th, 2010

From Dangerous Minds: "Let's face it, with all of the many, many entertainment choices we have facing us, every minute of every single day, when it comes to the matter of what we choose to give our precious attention to, music videos tend to rank pretty low on the totem pole. There's probably a pretty compelling reason MTV is no longer calling itself a music channel. So '80s, isn't it? A three-minute music video? Who has the time?

So when you hear about some cool new music video — maybe your tweeps told you about it — it had, well, better be good. Chicago-based indie rockers OK Go know this. Their 2006 video, Here It Goes Again, featuring the group doing a synchronized dance routine on treadmills, has been viewed by about 50 million people, so the follow-up had, well, better be good too.

Trust me, it's great. I could describe for you the Rube Goldberg-inspired centerpiece of the new This Too Shall Pass video, but since their record company finally relented and allowed the piece to be embedded (I mean, what was that all about?), you can simply press play and see for yourself.

Engineered with help from CalTech and MIT, and built by Syyn Labs, the video — and its kinetic sculpture centerpiece — is nothing short of astonishing. Like its predecessor, it's bound to snag all kinds of kudos and awards."

Also, don't hesitate to review Fischli & Weiss' Der Lauf der Dinge.

or (Radical) Constructivism
February 25th, 2010

From Wikipedia: "Constructivism criticizes objectivism, which embraces the belief that a human can come to know external reality (the reality that exists beyond one's own mind). Constructivism holds the opposite view, that the only reality we can know is that which is represented by human thought (assuming a disbelief or lack of faith in a superhuman God). Reality is independent of human thought, but meaning or knowledge is always a human construction. (...)
Constructivism proposes new definitions for knowledge and truth that forms a new paradigm, based on inter-subjectivity instead of the classical objectivity and viability instead of truth. The constructivist point of view is pragmatic as Vico said: 'the truth is to have made it'. (...)

'And, irrespective of what one might assume, in the life of a science, problems do not arise by themselves. It is precisely this that marks out a problem as being of the true scientific spirit: all knowledge is in response to a question. If there were no question, there would be no scientific knowledge. Nothing proceeds from itself. Nothing is given. All is constructed.' (Gaston Bachelard, La formation de l'esprit scientifique, 1934)

'My hand feels touched as well as it touches; that's reality, and nothing more.' (Paul Valéry)"

Also check out this Radical Constructivism and Daily Life video by Ernst von Glasersfeld.

Nothing at all
February 18th, 2010

From Wikipedia: "The director and producer Alfred Hitchcock popularized both the term MacGuffin and the technique. (...)
A MacGuffin (sometimes McGuffin) is 'a plot element that catches the viewers' attention or drives the plot of a work of fiction.'
Sometimes, the specific nature of the MacGuffin is not important to the plot such that anything that serves as a motivation serves its purpose. The MacGuffin can sometimes be ambiguous, completely undefined, generic or left open to interpretation."

From The Colombus Dispatch: "The best way to spot a true MacGuffin is to substitute anything else for it and ask whether the movie would change. If the microfilm in North by Northwest were papers or jewels or a safe-deposit box key, would the rest of the movie change? Not at all.
While the MacGuffin propels the story, it shouldn't be mistaken for an essential plot device. The shark in Jaws isn't a MacGuffin but a key character. It has to be a shark, or the story can't be told. (...)
As Hitchcock said of the microfilm in North by Northwest: 'Here, you see, the MacGuffin has been boiled down to its purest expression: nothing at all!'"

Valentine's Day
February 14th, 2010

"Ada's letters breathed, writhed, lived; Van's Letters from Terra, 'a philosophical novel,' showed no sign of life whatsoever."
"Finito! It was now the forming of soft black pits (yamï, yamishchi) in her mind, between the dimming sculptures of thought and recollection, that tormented her phenomenally; mental panic and physical pain joined black-ruby hands, one making her pray for sanity, the other, plead for death."
(from "Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle" by Vladimir Nabokov)

If you are interested in my favourite book, the one above all others, check out this fantastic online resource.

(Painting by Eric Fischl)

by Matthew Hoffman (2009)
February 11th, 2010

at the Philip Johnson Glass House
February 7th, 2010

From Design Observer: "Since it reopened last year, the Philip Johnson Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, has been the venue of a series of intimate conversations. They've been moderated by, among others, Roger Mandle, Laurie Beckelman, Maurice Cox, and John Maeda; the themes have included Breaking the Rules, Transparency, and Design and Civic Leadership."

Keep those tears hid out of sight, let it loose, let it all come down.
January 29th, 2010

to disengage
to loose
to release
to relinquish
to unclasp
to unhand
to lay so. to rest
to let go
to let loose
to let sth. loose
to loose one's hold on sth.
to lose one's hold of
to release a load

A practice of mindfulness
January 21st, 2010

Jim Gagné: "The practice of mindfulness is growing in popularity among psychotherapists as a means to deal with painful emotion. It consists of deliberately taking the time to notice and acknowledge whatever you're thinking and feeling. You don't do anything with thoughts or feelings; you simply notice them. When you react emotionally, notice that. If you're upset, notice that. Ditto if you're happy or content. When you judge or evaluate your experience, notice that. Notice whatever. (...)
I have a mental image of leaning back in a chair, feet propped up on the desk, munching popcorn as I observe my experience. Kind of like watching a movie. This is a particularly useful image when your experience is upsetting. Maybe it's a horror movie, or a suspense drama!
Whenever you can just hang out with your experience, and with whatever reactions you have to it, the sting of painful memories begins to dissipate. Your judgments and evaluations are just thoughts; actually they aren't any more real than anything else. You don't always have to be right. All those rules you learned from your parents are just that, rules. You begin to appreciate the humor in your self-righteousness. You stop struggling and begin to relax. You no longer feel overwhelmed or pursued. You're alert and present in the moment, not spaced out or numb.
When a particular emotion or experience is particularly troubling, you can address it directly, with an even more powerful technique than mindfulness: what I'm calling radical acceptance. If mindfulness is watching the monster chase you in the dream, radical acceptance is hugging the monster and inviting it for tea. (...)
Strong emotion brings all sorts of cognitive distortions you can learn to recognize and not take seriously.
Radical acceptance is choosing to accept the experience you are having this moment, no matter what. You accept without believing them whatever judgments and evaluations come to mind. Like it, hate it, fear it, whatever happens, you accept it."

by Orson Welles (1915-1985)
January 11th, 2009

From bright lights: "When we get to a late film in Welles' career, the documentary F for Fake (1976), he formulates his most explicit statement about contemporary reality, leaving little room for greatness, let alone tragedy. And if F for Fake seems a superficial film, we will then have experienced the first lesson of postmodernism: playfulness, conscious illusions, and an undisguised reflexiveness about making movies. Put another way, what is seen in the film that seems real is not as real as it appears — but most especially we can't trust the filmmaker Welles himself, he will lie to us and deceive us, if only to get at the heart of the movie's main contention: you cannot trust anyone, especially anyone who asserts his or her authority without any basis or proof." ("F for Fake, The Ultimate Mirror of Orson Welles, In which Welles deflates expectations of greatness — and transcends them" by Robert Castle).
(Thanks to Nina Juric!)

Ten points - Dix point - Zehn Punkte
December 31st, 2009

Coffee In 2009 I celebrated my addiction to coffee. Had the best in Milan, right across from the hotel where I stayed for a week while teaching at NABA. The lady who made it was in her 80s. 7am in the morning, the air clean and the heat still asleep.
Film Keep The River On Your Right is a fascinating movie because its subject is so fascinating. Calm, pleasant, self-deprecating, Schneebaum manages to draw you in to his obsessions and joys.
Insight The results of my Five Factor Model or FFM test. In contemporary psychology, the "Big Five" factors of personality are five broad domains or dimensions of personality which have been scientifically discovered to define human personality at the highest level of organization. Who beats my 97% openness?
Occupation One song, repeat mode, glue, scissors, three scraps of paper.
Quote "When the shadow of your house would be your home, the moment of arrival would determine where home is" by Tomas Schats.
Role model for coming of age Maryanne Amacher (1938-2009) 
Song Murphy's Law, sure out to get you!
Talk "Joseph Campbell - Transformations of Myth Through Time" consists of 14 hour-long programs selected from over 50 hours of Campbell lectures and is introduced by "THE HERO'S JOURNEY," an award-winning biographical film.
TV series Big Love, a fair portrayal of polygamy without being judgmental. The series' theme song is God Only Knows by The Beach Boys.
Website I check out This isn't happiness nearly every day and it nevver fails to surprise, irritate and delight me.

So, here we are... And what is next?

Minnie Riperton performs "Loving You" on Soul Train
December 24th, 2009

Lovin' you I see your soul come shinin' through.

...not to be understood.
December 17th, 2009

Via This isn't Happiness.

songs from the past
December 15th, 2009

Every time I think of you
I feel shot right through with a bolt of blue
It's no problem of mine
But it's a problem I find
Living a life that I can't leave behind
But there's no sense in telling me
The wisdom of the fool won't set you free
But that's the way that it goes
And it's what nobody knows
well every day my confusion grows

Every time I see you falling
I get down on my knees and pray
I'm waiting for that final moment
You say the words that I can't say

I feel fine and I feel good
I'm feeling like I never should
Whenever I get this way
I just don't know what to say
Why can't we be ourselves like we were yesterday
I'm not sure what this could mean
I don't think you're what you seem
I do admit to myself
That if I hurt someone else
Then I'll never see just what we're meant to be

The fixed-schedule productivity
November 23rd, 2009

Just found this helpful ideas via boing boing on how you get meaningful things done using "fixed-schedule productivity". From Cal Newport's, who is a post-doc at MIT, blog Study hacks:

"The system work as follows:
1. Choose a schedule of work hours that you think provides the ideal balance of effort and relaxation.
2. Do whatever it takes to avoid violating this schedule.

This sounds simple. But think about it for a moment. Satisfying rule 2 is not easy. If you took your current projects, obligations, and work habits, you'd probably fall well short of satisfying your ideal work schedule. Here's a simple truth: to stick to your ideal schedule will require some drastic actions. For example, you may have to:
> Dramatically cut back on the number of projects you are working on.
> Ruthlessly cull inefficient habits from your daily schedule.
> Risk mildly annoying or upsetting some people in exchange for large gains in time freedom.
> Stop procrastinating.
In the abstract, these all seem like hard things to do. But when you have the focus of a specific goal — 'I do not want to work past 5 on week days!' — you'd be surprised by how much easier it becomes deploy these strategies in your daily life."

or Le Rayon vert by Éric Rohmer
November 17th, 2009

From Astronomy Picture of the Day: "Many think it is just a myth. Others think it is true but its cause isn't known. Adventurers pride themselves on having seen it. It's a green flash from the Sun. The truth is the green flash does exist and its cause is well understood. Just as the setting Sun disappears completely from view, a last glimmer appears startlingly green. The effect is typically visible only from locations with a low, distant horizon, and lasts just a few seconds. A green flash is also visible for a rising Sun, but takes better timing to spot. A dramatic green flash was caught in the above photograph in 1992 from Finland. The Sun itself does not turn partly green, the effect is caused by layers of the Earth's atmosphere acting like a prism."

From Film - Think: "According to Jules Verne, those lucky enough to see this happen will also for that moment be granted supernatural clarity into their own hearts and the hearts of those around them. Delphine realizes that this sort of clarity is exactly what she has been looking for. She needs just a glimmer of certainty about herself and a companion, just one moment in which she can safely align herself with something other than loneliness. And eventually it happens. She meets a man in the Biarritz train station, and on an uncharacteristic whim, Delphine joins him on the next train out of town. They stand together facing the sea at sunset. They wait as the sun slowly drops towards the distant water. We wait with them. And then it happens.
Rohmer reportedly waited quite a long time until he could actually catch the green ray on film. If he couldn’t actually find the atmospheric conditions at the right time with his camera rolling, then the film wouldn’t have worked. Or else the film would have ended with Delphine never finding that magical moment that Rohmer had so studiously prepared for her. But we wait there with Delphine and her companion, and the sun flashes brilliantly green but for a moment before it vanishes below the curvature of the earth."

Robert Sapolsky's outstanding Stanford lecture
November 11th, 2009

Here is another inspiring talk by this fantastic storyteller. Especially enjoyed the part on dopamine... (around 26'30").
From BoingBoing: "Stanford primatologist and anthropologist Robert Sapolsky scores big with this grad lecture on The Uniqueness of Humans, a humbling, inspiring and sweet 30 minutes on what it is about humans that makes us unique from our animal cousins, and how many of the seemingly unique features of humanity can be found elsewhere."

Weekly visualisation
November 8th, 2009

David McCandless is doing a regular weekly visualisation for the excellent Guardian Datablog, the front-end for an amazing library of statistics and data, lovingly hand-gathered by The Guardian.
Also check out his scrapbook on Flickr.
(Thanks to Claudio Becker-Foss!)

Gazebo: I Like Chopin
November 4th, 2009

Tell me where's my way
Imagine your face
In a sunshine reflection
A vision of blue skies
Forever distractions

(Illustration by Gizem Vural)

Murphy's Law, sure out to get you
October 25th, 2009

I need a reminder: Today is... Bangle by Hong Kong designer Yellowgoat and available at esty. 

Fantastic Gifford Lectures by Michael Gazzaniga
October 22nd, 2009

From The University of Edinburgh's College of Humanities and Social Science: "The fourth in a series of Gifford Lectures by Professor Michael Gazzaniga. Recorded 19 October, 2009 at the Playfair Library Hall, the University of Edinburgh.
So what does free will mean? It has become a catch-all term and means several things.
In many ways the concept is fundamental to human thought and societal institutions.
For example, our system of justice is built on the idea that we are all practical reasoners, working in a normal brain environment to produce coherent and ethical behaviours.
We are held to be personally responsible for those decisions. Questioning the core concept, free will, necessitates rethinking many cherished notions of human institutions."
Watch the fourth lecture here.
(Thanks to Mary DeBlois!)

by Sylvester (1979)
October 18th, 2009

Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to arise

Black bird singing in the dead of night
Take these sunken eyes and learn to see
all your life
you were only waiting for this moment to be free

Blackbird fly, Blackbird fly
Into the light of the dark black night.

Listen here

♥ ♥ ♥
October 13th, 2009

From Wikipedia:
1. syād-asti – "in some ways it is"
2. syād-nāsti - "in some ways it is not"
3. syād-asti-nāsti - "in some ways it is and it is not"
4. syād-asti-avaktavyaḥ - "in some ways it is and it is indescribable"
5. syād-nāsti-avaktavyaḥ - "in some ways it is not and it is indescribable"
6. syād-asti-nāsti-avaktavyaḥ - "in some ways it is, it is not and it is indescribable"
7. syād-avaktavyaḥ - "in some ways it is indescribable"

From Tender is the night by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940): "The drink made past happy things contemporary with the present, as if they were still going on, contemporary even with the future as if they were about to happen again."
(Archival pigment print by Clifton Burt)

...you still don't understand about yourself
October 6th, 2009

From British Psychological Society's Research Digest: "The Digest editor has invited some of the world's leading psychologists to look inwards and share, in 150 words, one nagging thing they still don't understand about themselves. Their responses are by turns candid, witty and thought-provoking. Here's what they had to say"

In case you have been wondering too
September 30th, 2009

From BBC: "...marketing psychologist, Paul Buckley, of the Cardiff School of Management, said there was no evidence that subliminal messages work in the real world: 'From a practical point of view this probably doesn't reflect what would happen in real life. Certainly lots of countries around the world have legislation to ban subliminal messages being used on television and nobody has yet been able to point to any instance where a subliminal message has worked.'" (via boingboing)

by Peter Russell
September 29th, 2009

"A human being is a part of the whole called by us 'Universe', a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest. - A kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty." (Albert Einstein)
Despite the weird soundtrack watch the movie here or read the book.

It's yesterday once more.
September 27th, 2009

Always wondered why I enjoy train rides so much. Have been taken to a very special location last night: Kind of a secret train museum in Cologne. Never heard of it before. People were dancing between those old industrial trains and it was so dark that I could hardly recognize any of the faces. Later, walking back to the car in the middle of night on some old tracks outside of the city I recognized that those tracks are the answer. Trains do never get lost. And sometimes they even pass adorable little fir trees.

Big five
September 21st, 2009

Had a wonderful day co-teaching 25 students with Ralf Neubauer at Basel's prestigious Hyperwerk. On this first day of the workshop we looked at various kinds of self-portraits and on Friday the students will present their final considerations in an exhibition.
Here is my contribution seen through the lens of the Big Five personality traits:
Openness - appreciation for art, emotion, adventure, unusual ideas, curiosity, and variety of experience: 97%
Conscientiousness - a tendency to show self-discipline, act dutifully, and aim for achievement; planned rather than spontaneous behavior: 91%
Extraversion - energy, positive emotions, urgency, and the tendency to seek stimulation in the company of others: 67%
Agreeableness - a tendency to be compassionate and cooperative rather than suspicious and antagonistic towards others: 16%
Neuroticism - a tendency to experience unpleasant emotions easily, such as anger, anxiety, depression, or vulnerability; sometimes called emotional instability: 21%

by Mike Radcliffe
August 19th, 2009

From Eye blog: "First of all, view your initial contact as the opportunity to get a meeting, nothing else, just a meeting. Once you have the meeting then it's your responsibility to win over your interviewer with your wit, charm and amazing portfolio. But before you get the meeting, I would create the simplest and most effective CV to send out, and a small work presentation to send out with it; don't mess up before you've even got in there. Personally, I think CVs are an exercise in cutting the information back to the bare minimum, especially if you are a graphic designer. . (...) All we need to know is where you've been, what you've done and if there was anything significant that happened along the way to make you employable! It's your job as a designer to make information clear, accessible and enjoyable to read."

Television drama and further
August 3rd, 2009

Had an intense weekend with Big Love - amongst other things. Left me stunning. What an amazing script or is just my perspective on the story - and some wild associations?
From Wikipedia: "The show was co-created by Mark Olsen and Will Scheffer, who also serve as executive producers. Olsen and Scheffer spent almost three years researching the premise of the show, with the intent of creating a fair portrayal of polygamy in America without being judgmental. The series' theme song is "God Only Knows" by The Beach Boys; the musical score for the series is composed by David Byrne."

which means "to stroll"
July 27th, 2009

From Wikipedia: "There is no English equivalent for the French word flâneur. Cassell's dictionary defines flâneur as a stroller, saunterer, drifter but none of these terms seems quite accurate. There is no English equivalent for the term, just as there is no Anglo-Saxon counterpart of that essentially Gallic individual, the deliberately aimless pedestrian, unencumbered by any obligation or sense of urgency, who, being French and therefore frugal, wastes nothing, including his time which he spends with the leisurely discrimination of a gourmet, savoring the multiple flavors of his city. (Cornelia Otis Skinner, Elegant Wits and Grand Horizontals, 1962, Houghton Mifflin, New York)" 

To be combined
July 13th, 2009

Awesome conglomeration of pictures found on the web. I go there nearly every day and it nevver fails to surprise me...
And if you are looking for quotes to go along with or reinterpret those images, read Tom Stafford's challenging blog idiolect.
For the image above I chose: "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." by Samuel Beckett.

A Stanford lecture
June 6th, 2009

From boingboing.com: "Stanford's Robert Sapolsky, one of the most interesting anthropologists I've heard lecture, gives us 90 minutes on the evolutionary basis for literal religious belief, 'metamagical thinking', schizotypal personality and so on, explaining how evolutionarily, the mild schizophrenic expression we called 'schizotypal personality' have enjoyed increased reproductive opportunities."

via boingboing.net
May 10th, 2009

record envelopes
old 45s
vanguard covers
inspired by blue note
knockoff project
lp cover lover
worst album covers
cover heaven
museum of bad covers
unusual cover art
bizarre records
sleeveface

The object of desire which we seek in the other
May 3rd, 2009

From Wikipedia: "In the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, objet petit a (object little-a) stands for the unattainable object of desire. It is sometimes called the object cause of desire. Lacan always insisted for it to remain untranslated 'thus acquiring the status of an algebraic sign.' (Écrits).
In 1957, in his Seminar Les formations de l'inconscient, Lacan introduces the concept of objet petit a as the imaginary part-object (see Melanie Klein), an element which is imagined as separable from the rest of the body. In the Seminar Le transfert (1960-1961) he articulates objet a with the term agalma (Greek, an ornament). Just as the agalma is a precious object hidden in a worthless box, so objet petit a is the object of desire which we seek in the other. (...)
Slavoj Žižek explains this objet petit a in relation to Alfred Hitchcock's MacGuffin: '[The] MacGuffin is objet petit a pure and simple: the lack, the remainder of the real that sets in motion the symbolic movement of interpretation, a hole at the center of the symbolic order, the mere appearance of some secret to be explained, interpreted, etc.' (Love thy symptom as thyself)."

by Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn
April 4th, 2009

From their website: "The Graveyard is a very short computer game. You play an old lady who visits a graveyard. You walk around, sit on a bench and listen to a song. It's more like an explorable painting than an actual game. An experiment with realtime poetry, with storytelling without words. Buying the full version of The Graveyard adds only one feature, the possibility of death. The full version of the game is exactly the same as the trial, except, every time you play she may die."
Sit on the bench and listen carefully to the beautifully strange lyrics!

Note to self
March 28th, 2009

From William Bennett's blog: "I'm not a nothing thing and neither are you, and I want you and not some thing you have, people do things with me and not to me, any thing is possible and crossing the barriers in between is always exciting."

Another view on the 100 best fonts
March 11th, 2009

From the Behance site: "As with traditional periodic tables, this table presents the subject matter grouped categorically. The Table of Typefaces groups by families and classes of typefaces: sans-serif, serif, script, blackletter, glyphic, display, grotesque, realist, didone, garalde, geometric, humanist, slab-serif and mixed. (...) The final overall ranking was achieved depending on how many lists the particular typeface was presented on and it's ranking on the lists..." (via Design Observer)

by Adam Curtis
February 27th, 2009

Been watching this excellent BBC documentary with the students of the Motion Design program at Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg yesterday. From Wikipedia: "Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, changed the perception of the human mind and its workings profoundly. His influence on the 20th century is widely regarded as massive. The documentary describes the impact of Freud's theories on the perception of the human mind, and the ways public relations agencies and politicians have used this during the last 100 years for their engineering of consent. (...) The Century of the Self asks deeper questions about the roots and methods of modern consumerism, representative democracy and its implications. It also questions the modern way we see ourselves, the attitude to fashion and superficiality."

by Emily Oberman and Bonnie Siegler
February 23rd, 2009

From New York Times: "There's an Oscar for pretty much every aspect of filmmaking, except one: the title sequences. Titles, though, have always played a significant part in motion pictures. They may have started out as simple black-and-white cards. But in the days before sound, they already did more than identify key players: they communicated dialogue and advanced plot. And as filmmaking evolved, so did title design. Titles have become wonderful bridges from reality into the cinematic world and back out again. At their very best, they are themselves innovative, emotional experiences, microcosms of their movies."
Until April 19th the Berlin KW host an extensive exhibition on the subject. Read the review (German) in art magazine.

Music
February 11th, 2009

From Thomas Geissmann's Gibbon Research Lab: "All species of gibbons are known to produce elaborate, species-specific and sex-specific patterns of vocalisation often referred to as songs. Songs are loud and complex and are mainly uttered at specifically established times of day. In most species, mated pairs may characteristically combine their songs in a relatively rigid pattern to produce coordinated duet songs. Gibbon song vocalisations are typically of pure tone, with the energy concentrated in the fundamental frequency. Depending on species, the fundamental frequency of song vocalisations ranges between 0.2 and 5 kHz." Go to the sound gallery and listen!

Dropular
February 6th, 2009

"Dropular is a media bookmarking service loosely based on the idea of a droplet contributing to a pool, filling it ever-so slightly one by one. This amazing tool lets you discover, remember and share images, videos and links - all in one place." Dropular is in it's early beta, but already worth checking out. Thanks to Hans C. Schultheiss!

Another archive
February 3rd, 2009

The Journal of Urban Typography (TJOUT) is a wonderful documentation and study of signs, word fragments, and typography created with utilitarian intent in urban environments. (via Design Observer)

Note to self
January 13th, 2009

William Bennett: "My own definition is a relatively simple one, yet within it there is incredible potential for creativity and exploration. It's the realisation (or actualisation if you prefer) of something you used to think was utterly impossible and unachievable. That's it.
Doesn't sound like much, except the more you begin to contemplate those words the more you begin to come to terms with how very much that truly encompasses. How many pleasures have you never experienced because you thought you never would? And indeed, how much of it can or could you stand? What in fact are your limitations?
Wherever you choose to set that is the boundary between the you and magic. And that's where I want to go."

...to save yourself from messing up your life
January 11th, 2009

"1. Stop taking so much notice of how you feel.
2. Let go of worrying. It often makes things worse.
3. Ease up on the internal life commentary.
4. Take no notice of your inner critic.
5. Give up on feeling guilty.
6. Stop being concerned what the rest of the world says about you.
7. Stop keeping score.
8. Don't be concerned that your life and career aren't working out the way you planned.
9. Don't let others use you to avoid being responsible for their own decisions.
10. Don't worry about about your personality."
See the full text by Adrian Savage.

Yes.
January 8th, 2009

i LOVE TYPOGRAPHY, a stimulating blog and amazing archive, selected their favourite Typefaces of 2008.

Psychotronic Titles 
January 2nd, 2009

"Mr. Bali Hai has compiled a fair-sized gallery of B-movie opening titles. I've seen a few of these movies, and it's probably safe to say that the titles are the best parts." (Mark Frauenfelder on boingboing.net)

Ten things - because it is a tradition I affirm.
December 31st, 2008

Book Tough topic, but if I had to pick one, it would probably be Austerlitz - for the concept.
City Cologne, indeed.
Concert DAF - it was such an energetic flashback.
Film Death Proof - by one of those men who understand women. And for everybody who disagrees, check out William Bennett's inspiring movie reviews.
Perfume Patchouli Patch, recommended by the fabulous blog of Theresa Duncan - RIP.
Present Silver necklace - yes, we do like to see feelings materialize.
Song O Superman - for all coincidences, which sometimes made me wonder if they were really coincidences and then pushed me to realize that, yes, they are just coincidences. Starting to enjoy it!
Talk Isabel Allende on Tales of passion.
Unsorted The six kilometres along the canal in rain, fog, snow, sun, wind, heat, light, dark and any other fucking weather condition, over and over again - thanks for keeping me company, Eva!
Website "UbuWeb was founded in November of 1996, initially as a repository for visual, concrete and, later, sound poetry. Over the years, UbuWeb has embraced all forms of the avant-garde and beyond." A goldmine. 

So, here we are... And what is next?

The more I see you
December 24th, 2008

Video from 1966 with wonderful music (via my daily treat: boingboing.net). Happy holidays!

Scientists extract images directly from brain
December 12th, 2008

Most of the people I know disagree with me on this one. For me Wim Wenders' Bis ans Ende der Welt (Until the end of the world) was a discovery that shook my feelings and perception fundamentally - back in 1991. I still listen to the soundtrack and watch the movie once in a while.
And today I found this quote on Pink Tentacle: "Researchers from Japan's ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories have developed new brain analysis technology that can reconstruct the images inside a person's mind and display them on a computer monitor, it was announced on December 11. According to the researchers, further development of the technology may soon make it possible to view other people's dreams while they sleep." This is exactly what the film was about. What an accuracy of forecast. Imagine watching the dreams of your next of kin. 

Dynamic spread of happiness in a large social network
December 7th, 2008

Quote from the British Medical Association: "People's happiness depends on the happiness of others with whom they are connected. This provides further justification for seeing happiness, like health, as a collective phenomenon, say James H Fowler and Nicholas A Christakis in a longitudinal analysis over 20 years in the Framingham Heart Study."

A workshop
December 5th, 2008

What would be your three favorite cover art works of all times? Wondering about mine and the criteria I am applying. Christian Schäfer and I have been considering a three-days-workshop on visualizing music into the square format of a vinyl cover for some time now. It would involve the students and us presenting and defending those three. Will the one above make it on that list?

My favorite flower
December 3rd, 2008

They also call Camomile plant doctor... and there are so many - we can play the prophecy game over and over and over. Right now, I just want to be sleeping in the middle of a friendly Camomile field.

by FontShop
December 2nd, 2008

Well, students keep asking. For starters and unfortunately only in German: Here are the 100 best fonts. Thanks Fabian!

in Le Mépris
December 1st, 2008

"Death is no conclusion", says Fritz Lang in Godard's Le Mépris - pan shot - slowly - the strings, the orchestra: swelling - and there it is - at 01h19 - for the first time we can see it, although it had been talked about all the time: Malaparte's villa on Capri. What a monster. How brutal and insistent.
This spring I read The Skin by Curzio Malaparte and tried to see as many pictures of the building as I could find. And only now the time came to see this disturbing masterpiece from 1963 starring breathtaking Brigitte Bardot.
As one review on imdb.com puts it: "One of the great masterpieces of the 20th century, a supreme synthesis of form, content and performance. Arguably the most beautiful too, with its found locations, sets, colour, lighting, music, decor and costume. The straightforward elegance of Godard's shooting masks a story of great complexity and formal rupture, but underneath the philosophy, semiotics and allusion is a portrait of marriage and its decline. The tension between icy irony and resigned emotion results in Godard's most perversely moving film. It is also very funny, which is too little remembered."

Photo above © Brian Dettmer
November 30th, 2008

Having a cold is something I very much dislike. Who doesn't ? Especially, since I was looking forward to a rare treat - one of the parties at Cologne's African Drum this weekend.
However, one gets more time than usually to catch up with books, films and research that have been piling up around the house. Feverish brainstorms included. And one stimulus for those was Philip Roth' short novella The Dying Animal. I read it in one sitting and it reminded me of the deep appreciation I have for the genius of Vladimir Nabokov - who has also been an entomologist and a synesthete.

The art of the title
November 25th, 2008

Been collecting title sequences for a long time. Here is another wonderful collection which I enjoy every other day...

Jaana Parviainen and Marja Eriksson
November 22nd, 2008

Last week 'unlearning', the value of failure and legitimate errors were part of almost all my conversations. My fellow student, excellent consultant and challenging strategic thinker Michael Dodt recommended this extremely inspiring paper by Jaana Parviainen and Marja Eriksson. They explain and discuss the new idea and term of Negative Knowledge.
"'Negative' is concerned with 'the reflective turn', which sees unlearning skills, bracketing knowledge, doubt, having failures and making errors as meaningful for expertise, not just as signals of ignorance or the lack of expertise. We have identified four features by which we describe negative knowing. First, we are usually aware of our own competence, but we must also know what we do not know. Second, we must know what we must do, but also know what not to do. Third, negative knowledge involves 'unlearning' or 'bracketing' skills and knowledge. The fourth aspect in negative knowledge is that in doing things, we have to regard the value of failures, disappointments and frustrations. (...) Knowing negatively is related to a new sensitivity at work. Through negative knowledge we may gain a 'reversal' path, which consists of seeing unconventional ways to face our problems in the organisation. As a non-deterministic, deconstructive process, negative knowledge calls upon cognition, but it also asks questions to which there are no answers at all or questions that are not accessible through knowledge. Thus, it goes beyond cognition itself towards intuition, experimentation and creativity. It beckons to give us understanding about which there has previously been no understanding. When we face difficult, problematic situations to which there is perhaps no simple answer, we should think about the limits of our cognition with a reflective turn. The reflective turn requires that we face up to our own attitudes and positions towards things and people to question our own fixed patterns of behaviour."

Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald
November 12th, 2008

"As the afternoon drew to a close I walked through the park, and finally went to see the Nocturama, which had first been opened only a few months earlier. It was some time before my eyes became used to its artificial dusk and I could make out different animals leading their sombrous lives behind the glass by the light of a pale moon. (...) The only animal which has remained lingering in my memory is the raccoon. I watched it for a long time as it sat beside a little stream with a serious expression on its face, washing the same piece of apple over and over again, as if it hoped that all this washing, which went far beyond any reasonable thoroughness, would help it to escape the unreal world in which it had arrived, so to speak, through no fault of its own. Otherwise, all I remember of the denizens of the Nocturama is that several of them had strikingly large eyes, and the fixed, inquiring gaze found in certain painters and philosophers who seek to penetrate the darkness which surrounds us purely by means of looking and thinking. I believe that my mind also dwelt on the question of whether the electric light was turned on for the creatures in the Nocturama when real night fell and the zoo was closed to the public, so that as day dawned over their topsy-turvy miniature universe they could fall asleep with some degree of reassurance."
(Photo © Christian Schäfer)

Steely Dan
November 8th, 2008

Son you better be ready for love
On this glory day
This is your chance to believe
What I've got to say
Keep your eyes on the sky
Put a dollar in the kitty
Don't the moon look pretty
Tonight when I chase the dragon
The water may change to cherry wine
And the silver will turn to gold
Time out of mind
I am holding the mystical sphere
It's direct from Lhasa
Where people are rolling in the snow
Far from the world we know
Children we have it right here
It's the light in my eyes
It's perfection and grace
It's the smile on my face

Sign of the horns
October 25th, 2008

ALICE "Only as sure as I am that the reality of one night, let alone that of a whole lifetime, can ever be the whole truth."
BILL "And no dream is ever just a dream." (Stanley Kubrick, Eyes Wide Shut)
And in the original text:
"So gewiß, als ich ahne, daß die Wirklichkeit einer Nacht, ja daß nicht einmal die eines ganzen Menschenlebens zugleich auch seine innerste Wahrheit bedeutet." "Und kein Traum", seufzte er leise, "ist völlig Traum." (Arthur Schnitzler, Traumnovelle)
"If Eyes Wide Shut has a theme song, it is the lilting "Waltz 2 from Jazz Suite" by Dmitri Shostakovich, which is heard under the opening credits, in the Harfords' apartment as they get ready for the Christmas ball, in the transitional scenes that portray the everyday activities of Bill and Alice, and again under the final credits. According to Chion, the "ternary rhythm" of Eyes Wide Shut can be seen as Kubrick's final homage to the film-maker he admired most of all, Max Ophuls, and especially to the waltz in The Earrings of Madame de . . . (165). In Eyes Wide Shut the waltz leads us back into the fin de siecle Viennese milieu of Schnitzler and Freud and, as far as the relationship of the doctor and his wife is concerned, into the world of the subconscious where the demarcation blurs between dream and reality." (Charles H. Helmetag, Dream Odysseys: Schnitzler's Traumnovelle and Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut)

Albrecht Dürer: Melencolia I
October 22nd, 2008

Seems that I know a lot of people who celebrate their birthday in the zodiac sign of Libra. And it might only be a coincidence that the subject of ambiguousness came up several times in the last few days. As much as I enjoy multiple layers of meanings in artwork, it is just another thing in personal relationships.
"The Oxford English Dictionary defines a double entendre as especially being used to 'convey an indelicate meaning'. In these cases, the first meaning is presumed to be the more innocent one, while the second meaning is risqué, or at least ironic, requiring the hearer to have some additional knowledge. Double entendres can also be a more deliberate form of an ambiguity." (Wikipedia)

Last words
October 17th, 2008

The last two days I found myself discussing this mind-blowing last film by Stanley Kubrick. Here is an elaborate review by Tim Kreider, who notices, "In the film's upbeat but dissonant denouement, the Harfords have taken their daughter Helena Christmas shopping, but they respond to her wishes only politely, distracted by their own inner children. Like many reviewers, they're still wrapped up in psychology and sex, missing the sociological implications of what's onscreen. But, as in so much of Kubrick's work, the dialogue is misdirection; the real story is being told visually. As poor Helena flits anxiously from one display to the next (already an avid little consumer) every item she fondles associates her with the women who have been exploited and destroyed by her father's circle. Helena's Christmas list includes a blue baby carriage (like the blue stroller seen twice outside Domino's apartment), an oversized teddy bear (next to a rack of tigers like the one on Domino's bed) and a Barbie doll (reminiscent of Milich's daughter) dressed in a diaphanous angel costume just like the one Helena herself wore in the film's first scene. She herself has already become a doll, a thing to be dressed up with cute costumes and accessories. Another toy, conspicuously displayed under a red ring of lights, is called "The Magic Circle"; the name is an allusion to the ring of ritual prostitutes at the orgy, and the bright red color of the box recalls the carpet on which they genuflected to the high priest, as well as the felt of the pool table over which Bill made his own bargain with the devil."

Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism
October 12th, 2008

"Since the early 1900s, advertisers have tied the purchase of beauty products, sports cars, diet drinks, and snack foods to success in love and happiness. Illouz reveals that, ultimately, every cliche of romance - from an intimate dinner to a dozen red roses - is constructed by advertising and media images that preach a democratic ethos of consumption: material goods and happiness are available to all. Engaging and witty, Illouz's study begins with readings of ads, songs, films, and other public representations of romance and concludes with individual interviews in order to analyze the ways in which mass messages are internalized."
The author of this important study, Eva Illouz, teaches sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is the Academic Director of the Program of Cultural Studies as well as a member of The Center for the Study of Rationality.

and hell's gate.
October 12th, 2008

The 20-year-old Franz Kafka, in a letter to his friend Oskar Pollak in November 1903: "We are as forlorn as children lost in the woods. When you stand in front of me and look at me, what do you know of the griefs that are in me and what do I know of yours? And if I were to cast myself down before you and weep and tell you, what more would you know about me than you know about hell when someone tells you it is hot and dreadful? For that reason alone we human beings ought to stand before one another as reverently, as reflectively, as lovingly, as we would before the entrance to hell."

by Edith Sitwell
October 11th, 2008

Said the Lion to the Lioness - "When you are amber dust -
No more a raging fire like the heat of the Sun
(No liking but all lust) -
Remember still the flowering of the amber blood and bone,
The rippling of bright muscles like a sea,
Remember the rose-prickles of bright paws,
Though we shall mate no more
Till the fire of that sun the heart and the moon-cold bone are one"

Said the Skeleton lying upon the sands of Time -
"The great gold planet that is the mourning heat of the Sun
Is greater than all gold, more powerful
Than the tawny body of a Lion that fire consumes
Like all that grows or leaps... so is the heart
More powerful than all dust. Once I was Hercules
Or Sampson, strong as the pillars of the seas:
But the flames of the heart consumed me, and the mind
Is but a foolish wind."

Said the Sun to the Moon - "When you are but a lonely white crone,
And I, a dead King in my golden armour somewhere in a dark wood,
Remember only this of our hopeless love:
That never till Time is done
Will the fire of the heart and the fire of the mind be one."

"Edith Sitwell was most interested by the distinction between poetry and music, a matter explored in Façade (1922), which was set to music by William Walton, a series of abstract poems the rhythms of which counterfeited those of music. Façade was performed behind a curtain with a hole in the mouth of a painted face and the words were recited through the hole with the aid of a megaphone." (answer.com)

Milton H. Erickson
October 5th, 2008

Watzlawick, Weakland and Fisch (1974) describe the gentle art of reframing thus: "To reframe, then, means to change the conceptual and/or emotional setting or viewpoint in relation to which a situation is experienced and to place it in another frame which fits the 'facts' of the same concrete situation equally well or even better, and thereby changing its entire meaning."
Highly recommended in this context: "My Voice Will Go with You: The Teaching Tales of Milton H. Erickson" edited and with commentary by Sidney Rosen.

Lesson learned
October 3rd, 2008

"In the fields of neuropsychology, personal development and education, Learning is one of the most important mental function of humans, animals and artificial cognitive systems. It relies on the acquisition of different types of knowledge supported by perceived information. It leads to the development of new capacities, skills, values, understanding, and preferences. Its goal is the increasing of individual and group experience. Learning functions can be performed by different brain learning processes, which depend on the mental capacities of learning subject, the type of knowledge which has to be acquitted, as well as on socio-cognitive and environmental circumstances." (Wikipedia)
"A cure is a substance or procedure that makes a sick or diseased person well. A cure can be a medication, a surgical operation, a change in lifestyle, or even a philosophical mindset that helps a person heal." (Wikipedia)
"Healing, assessed spiritually, emotionally, mentally or otherwise, is a process which involves more than just the action of cells." (Wikipedia)
Amongst others, thank you Alexander Shulgin.

...because we can not understand each other.
September 29th, 2008

The last few days I have been reminded of this quote ("Wir müssen kommunizieren, weil wir uns nicht verstehen können.") by my teacher at university, Bazon Brock.
Check out the passionate and compelling TED Talk video lecture by Wade Davis and learn about the rapidly continuing loss of languages. As one comment puts it: I am amazed and challenged to my core.

Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out
September 26th, 2008

Slavoj Zizek: "When a fantasy object, something imagined, an object from inner space, enters our ordinary reality the texture of reality is twisted, distorted. This is how desire inscribes itself into reality, distorting it. Desire is a wound of reality. The art of cinema consists in arousing desire, to play with desire, but at the same time keeping it at a safe distance - domesticating it, rendering it." (THE PERVERT'S GUIDE TO CINEMA)
Joseph Campbell: "People say that we all are seeking for the meaning of life. I don't think that this is what we are really seeking. I think what we are really seeking is an experience of being alive." (The Power of Myth)

lacanian ink magazine
September 5th, 2008

In this video the brilliant Josefina Ayerza, founder and editor of lacanian ink magazine, introduces philosopher Slavoj Zizek. lacanian ink's issue 21 was on love and Zizek's vivid talk on the subject is worth every minute. Is love evil as he suggests? Guess I have to think about this a bit longer...

Researching
August 2008

In the Guardian Andrew G. Marshall stated: "Every popular song is about it, half our books and films obsess over it, everybody wants it. But when we come to ask what love is, we are overwhelmed by a myriad different ideas and experiences. (...) Scientists have been trying to define love according to their frame of reference for a very long time."
Limerence, as posited by psychologist Dorothy Tennov is "an involuntary cognitive and emotional state in which a person feels an intense romantic desire for another person. The concept is an attempt at a scientific study into the nature of romantic love."(Wikipedia)
In her book Love and Limerence Tennov recognized that the term taboo could appropriately be used in connection with the study of romantic love - maybe because no one feels entirely comfortable with the subject. "It can be dangerous to stick your neck out on the subject of love - dangerous to your self-esteem and to your reputation. The existence of an irrational state that affects thinking, mood, and action among persons otherwise sane would lead to precisely the effect observed - a good deal of confusion and of logically incompatible descriptions."
Love has been called a madness and madness implies loss of control and inspires fear. "In its involuntariness, limerence conflicts with the fundamental position of the Judeo-Christian philosophy, which holds that human beings are free, rational, and therefore, responsible creatures." The "acceptance of normal 'insanity', of involuntary irrationality as an inherited pattern of thought and performance, has an unacceptable flavor. It is an idea so subversive to traditional belief systems that this may be an important reason why limerence and nonlimerence were not isolated and defined sooner. Visible as both states are in fiction and poetry, their existence in poetry and fiction does not force resolution of the philosophical problem they pose."
It has been reported that approximately 85% of popular music concerns love. The relationship between love and music is strong for most of us. Also, it is financially profitable to hold limerence as an ideal, not only for the music industry.
So, I am asking myself, what is the relationship between music and limerence? Started my research with three books as shown above. More to come...

Video Compilation
July 2008

Spent the week in Berlin. At tea time with an old friend we watched the DVD compilation "The Heart Of Germany" by Atatak. Early 80s music videos by Der Plan, Andreas Dorau and Holger Hiller. Intelligent concepts, wonderful craftsmanship and German humour at its best. Also, check out Palais Schaumburg's clip for "Wir bauen eine neue Stadt". 25 years old and still contemporary, imagine the CK logo in it... - thanks Titus!

Observatory Hoher List, Germany
June 2008

Have been invited to a private tour by enchanted astrophysicist Michael Geffert at the observatory near the town Daun on the 551 meter high Hoher List. It was almost a time travel to the 50s - furniture, smell and technology. Learned about the Bonner Durchmusterung and had an inspiring conversation with Michael Geffert, Carsten Görtz and Marcus Schmickler in the observatory's archive about the telephone book of the universe. Left with a photographic glass plate from 1902 that shows a negative image of the moon - friend in the distance.

Blog entry on their first on air design
January 2008

Read this charming article (German) about the 1993 version of VOX' on air design on Fernsehlexikon. It's been quite a while since I worked for VOX and produced with an international group of outstanding designers the audiovisual identity for the launch in January 1993. Thanks Stefan!