I hate to tell you

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.'"

[ Wunderkammer ]

Unconditional basic income

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."

[ Wunderkammer ]

Murder your darlings

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."

[ Wunderkammer ]

Are we living in the end times?

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!

[ Wunderkammer ]

Ambivalence or Thinking in shades of gray

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."

[ Wunderkammer ]

The Corporation

Documentary

October 30th, 2010

 

From Wikipedia: "The Corporation is a 2003Canadiandocumentary 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!

[ Wunderkammer ]

Paradoxical fusion of submission and subversion

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)

[ Wunderkammer ]

At home

Inspiring photo blogs

October 10th, 2010

 

Inside

Outside

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Collective intelligence

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."

[ Wunderkammer ]

Nights in white satin

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."

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