Monthly Archives: March 2009

Mar 31 2009

“When women stop reading the novel will be dead” — McEwan

Slowworm, photo taken in Sweden

‘ “Page Turners“, according to the research, are avid readers – 48% of the women surveyed fell into this category, while only 26% of men showed equal enthusiasm. In contrast, 32% of men were burdened with the “Slow Worm” label accorded to those who read only one or two books a year, while only 18% of women fell into that category. The research further labels some readers (or rather, book buyers) as “Serial Shelvers” – people who buy books because they look fetching in their lounges, not because they have any intention of reading them, and “Double Bookers”, who are either great multi-taskers or in possession of short attention spans, as they always have more than one book on the go at a time (they’re identifiable by the precarious stacks on their bedside tables). Gender didn’t play a significant role in these last two categories – with equal percentages of men and women being Double Bookers, it indicates there is gender equality when it comes to greedy readers, at least.’ via Guardian.UK Books.

By FmH • Tagged
Mar 31 2009

The Biggest of Puzzles Brought Down to Size

Fermi's ID badge photo from Los Alamos.
Enrico Fermi

I have always loved back-of-the-envelope calculations, whether I get into the right ballpark or not. I find that this kind of ‘guesstimating’ is an important factor in feeling comfortable knowing how the world works. Difficult to get some people into reasoning this way, though…

‘Here is how it works. You take a monster of a ponder like, What is the total volume of human blood in the world? or, If you put all the miles that Americans drive every year end to end, how far into space could you travel? and you try to estimate what the answer might be. You resist your impulse to run away or imprecate. Instead, you look for a wedge into the problem, and then you calmly, systematically, break it down into edible bits. Importantly, you are not looking for an exact figure but rather a ballpark approximation, something that would be within an order of magnitude, or a factor of 10, of the correct answer. If you got the answer 900, for example, and the real answer is 200, you’re good; if you got 9,000, or 20, you go back and try to find where you went astray.

“It’s really just critical thinking, breaking down seemingly complicated problems into simpler problems,” said John A. Adam, a professor of mathematics at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va. “Once you get over the hurdle and realize that, good grief, any question can be answered to this level of precision, to the nearest power of 10, it’s quite exciting, and you start looking for things to apply it to.” ‘ via NYTimes.

Mar 30 2009

Bicycle Built for Two Thousand

Hal 9000 D - Chrome

“Bicycle Built For 2,000 is comprised [sic] of 2,088 voice recordings collected via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk web service. Workers were prompted to listen to a short sound clip, then record themselves imitating what they heard.”

They were given no further information about the purpose of their recording, and were paid 0.06 USD each. The voices, originating in 71 countries, were assembled to create a portrait of humanity singing Daisy Bell (“Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do…”).

By FmH
Mar 29 2009

Vast Spy System Loots Computers in 103 Countries

Dalai Lama

Although not conclusive, evidence points to the Chinese government as the culprit in installing spyware on 1300 computers, a number of them considered high-value targets. The existence fo the network came to light after the office of the Dalai Lama asked Canadian cyber-espionage experts to examine its computers for evidence of compromise. ‘GhostNet’ focuses, in addition to the Tibetans, on Southeast Asian governments. There was no evidence that US computers had been compromised although a NATO machine had apparently briefly been monitored and the Indian Embassy in Washington had been penetrated. NYTimes.

Mar 28 2009

What’s So Hot About Chili Peppers?

This picture was taken by Gannon Anjo in Tezpu...

“Bolivia is believed to be the chili’s motherland, home to dozens of wild species that may be the ancestors of all the world’s chili varieties—from the mild bell pepper to the medium jalapeño to the rough-skinned naga jolokia, the hottest pepper ever tested. The heat-generating compound in chilies, capsaicin, has long been known to affect taste buds, nerve cells and nasal membranes (it puts the sting in pepper spray). But its function in wild chili plants has been mysterious.

Which is why Tewksbury and his colleagues have made multiple trips to Bolivia over the past four years. They’re most interested in mild chilies, especially those growing near hot ones of the same species—the idea being that a wild chili lacking capsaicin might serve as a kind of exception that proves the rule, betraying the secret purpose of this curiously beloved spice.” via Smithsonian Magazine.

Mar 28 2009

Disease Mongering or Medicalization

MIAMI - MARCH 22: Juan Ruiz (L) and Pablo Men...

“The medicalization of many social facets of our lives, multitasking pharmaceuticals and disease mongering are problems we should face head on…” via Sciencebase.

Related:
Mar 28 2009

If there is any justice, Bobby Jindal’s national political career is over

{{w|Bobby Jindal}}, member of the United State...

“A month after Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal complained about wasteful spending in President Obama’s economic stimulus package, including money for “something called ‘volcano monitoring,’” Alaska pilots were grateful for such expenditures. The Alaska Volcano Observatory was ready with warnings to flight officials when Alaska’s Mount Redoubt blew five times Sunday night and Monday morning, sending potentially deadly ash clouds north of Anchorage.” via The Associated Press.

Mar 28 2009

Keep the Schoolbus Routes, Lose the Buses

View of Lake Como from Mount San Primo

“Each morning, about 450 students travel along 17 school bus routes to 10 elementary schools in this lakeside city at the southern tip of Lake Como. There are zero school buses.

In 2003, to confront the triple threats of childhood obesity, local traffic jams and — most important — a rise in global greenhouse gases abetted by car emissions, an environmental group here proposed a retro-radical concept: children should walk to school.” via NYTimes.

Mar 28 2009

Mugged by our genes?

Sylvia Plath's grave at Heptonstall church, We...
Grave of Sylvia Plath

“Last Monday, Nicholas Hughes, son of poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, killed himself. His mother was one of the world’s most famous suicides, and news stories have mentioned the tendency of suicide and depression to run in families. But this tragic inheritance is just part of a more complex story in which our lives are shaped by genes, environment — and unexpected connections between the two.” via International Herald Tribune opinion

Mar 28 2009

Levitation Toys Operated Directly by Brainwaves

‘With both Mattel’s “Mind Flex” and Uncle Milton’s “The Force Trainer,” the goal is to focus your thoughts in order to levitate a ball. There are no blinking lights or 3-D graphics -– just a wireless headset, a lightweight ball and a fan.

Both toys use a modified form of electroencephalography — or EEG — technology to measure electrical signals emitted by the brain, says Jim Sullivan of NeuroSky, the company that created the technology that makes the toys work.’ via NPR.

Related:
By FmH
2
Mar 28 2009

To Congress: Prohibit Selling Patients’ Private Medical Data

Google Health 17 - Import Medical records

“Electronic patient records legislation that will convert our health records from paper to data in electronic systems will put our personal medical records at risk of becoming a commodity that businesses can sell or trade.

Even Microsoft promises they won’t use health information in their database for commercial purposes. The Federal government needs to provide that basic level of protection and more.

Tell Congress we need real patient control of our health data and and that means prohibiting companies from selling or buying medical records or private information mined from records.” via American Civil Liberties Union.

Mar 28 2009

The Null Device

Margaret Thatcher, 1983

Every so often I remember to check in on The Null Device, and I am usually rewarded with a rich harvest of stimulation and idiosyncracy. For instance, right now, you’ll find:

  • a meditation on the reformation of Spandau Ballet and its relationship to Thatcherism;
  • a review of the state of the art in neo-Nazi haute couture;
  • a piece on anti-teenage lighting, the latest in Britain’s war on out-of-control youth;
  • a summary of Lord Whimsy’s essay on bizarre and grotesque fashions throughout history;
  • the revelation of the world’s most alienating airport;
  • how to tell how credit-worthy a person is by looking at their face;

and much more.

Mar 26 2009

Déjà vu again

deja vù

“Surprisingly, not only is déjà vu proving an interesting window on the peculiar ways that our memory works, it is also providing a few clues about how we tell the difference between what is real, imagined, dreamed and remembered – one of the true mysteries of consciousness.” via New Scientist

The takeaway message is that deja vu is composed of distinct but related elements — recognition, the sense of familiarity, the sense of the weirdness or bizarreness of the experience, and the recognition of its impossibility — each of which has its own circuitry and neurocognitive machinery.

Mar 26 2009

Day of the Dolphin

Swim twice as fast as Michael Phelps:

“The human body does many things well, but swimming isn't one of them. We're embarrassingly inefficient in the water, able to convert just 3 or 4 percent of our energy into forward motion. (Even with swim fins, we're only 10 to 15 percent more efficient.) But a new, dolphin-inspired fin promises to fuel the biggest change in human-powered swimming in decades, putting beyond-Olympian speeds within reach of just about anyone.

Culminating decades of research, engineer and inventor Ted Ciamillo, an inventor and engineer in Athens, Ga., who made his name (and fortune) building high-performance bicycle brakes, created what he has dubbed the Lunocet, a 2.5-pound (1.1-kilogram) monofin made of carbon fiber and fiberglass that attaches to an aluminum foot plate at a precise 30-degree angle. With almost three times the surface area of conventional swim fins, the semiflexible Lunocet provides plenty of propulsion. The key to the 42-inch- (one-meter-) wide fin's speed: its shape and angle, both of which are modeled with scientific precision on a dolphin's tail.” via Scientific American.

Mar 24 2009

The nuts and bolts of chess

[Image 'http://blog.makezine.com/hardwarestorechessmen.jpg' cannot be displayed]
My friend Julia Suits wrote me that a chess set she and her sons made from hardware has been featured at the Make blog and also Boing Boing’d. As Julia describes,

“Headed toward the light-bulb aisle in my local hardware store a few years ago,I stopped to admire the bins of nuts,bolts and the like. This is not unusual for me who likens this kind of scene to a candy store. I love metal,and have cast and welded all types as a sculpture major in graduate school. When I saw the little bin containing two different types of castle nuts,I immediately thought of rooks. At the time my three sons and I hosted a weekly chess club,so chess was on my mind a lot. With my boys in tow,I returned with graph paper and we computed what sorts of bits we might want (we didn't know for sure) for each type of piece and how many in total. An hour later, after poring over numerous bins and waiting for the clerk to saw the threaded rod into measured lengths (for kings, rooks,and bishops), we went home with about fifteen pounds of loot, including spray paint for the black pieces. We created a set not far different from what is pictured here. Since then we've added washers to some and added a flanged hex nut to each of the bases to make the set uniform and even more stable. The hardware chessmen were a huge hit and the other boys built their own sets.

Make sure you add felt or cork to the bases if you plan on using a board whose finish you wish to protect. If you do this, you will need to glue the flanged hex nut base to the shaft before you glue your padding as the nut and shaft tend to screw up or down with use. Otherwise, note: none of the pieces are glued!! This is so they jingle (yes,they jingle, like cowboy spurs!) and so you can take them apart and rearrange them.” via Make.

Mar 23 2009

Tips for the Sophisticated Fugitive

“Why not take the ill-gotten money and run?

A touch of plastic surgery and a discreet payoff might purchase a sun-tanned life on an Indian Ocean archipelago, a number of which have no extradition treaties with the United States. Even a down-market move, manning an outboard motor for a skiff full of Somali pirates, seems preferable to a life term in a maximum-security federal prison.

Yet as more plutocrats face criminal investigations, few seem to view flight as an option. Perhaps it is a failure of nerve. Or perhaps, in this age of Facebook and “America’s Most Wanted,” the globe suffers a shortage of corners where a rogue might comfortably hide.” via NYTimes.

Mar 23 2009

How Do You Amputate A Phantom Limb?

The Sensory Homunculus

Robert Krulwich and Jad Abumrad, of NPR’s Radiolab (addictive podcast, by the way) interview neurologist V.S. Ramachandran about his ingenious and effective solution to the vexing and mysterious phenomenon of phantom limb pain. Via NPR.

The illustration to the left is the famous “sensory homunculus” described by Penrose, the representation of the body mapped onto the sensory cortex. This is, of course, the root of the problem of phantom limbs, because although the limb is gone, the representation persists, maing it hard to convince the sensory cortex otherwise. Thank heaven for Ramachandran’s tricky take on neural plasticity.

By FmH
1
Mar 23 2009

What a Ride!

[Image 'http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/319335main_batontank226x.jpg' cannot be displayed]

“A bat that was clinging to space shuttle Discovery’s external fuel tank during the countdown to launch the STS-119 mission remained with the spacecraft as it cleared the tower, analysts at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center concluded.

Based on images and video, a wildlife expert who provides support to the center said the small creature was a free tail bat that likely had a broken left wing and some problem with its right shoulder or wrist. The animal likely perished quickly during Discovery’s climb into orbit.” via NASA.

Mar 23 2009

A Little Stress May Be Good for You

“A lot of stress can turn your hair gray, but a little stress can actually delay aging. A protein tied to protecting cells from stress also helps slow aging, a new study finds. The research, published February 20 in Science, identifies a key regulator of a mechanism cells use to prevent protein damage from stress.

Exposure to heat, cold or heavy metals can damage proteins and unravel them from their usual conformations — trauma that can cause cell death. But cells have a damage-limiting mechanism called the heat shock response to combat these and other stresses. As part of the heat shock response, special protein repair molecules patch up the damaged proteins and refold them correctly, preventing death and extending the life of the cell.” via Science News.

Mar 22 2009

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By FmH
1
Mar 22 2009

The Daily Me

“When we go online, each of us is our own editor, our own gatekeeper. We select the kind of news and opinions that we care most about.

Nicholas Negroponte of M.I.T. has called this emerging news product The Daily Me. And if that’s the trend, God save us from ourselves.

That’s because there’s pretty good evidence that we generally don’t truly want good information — but rather information that confirms our prejudices. We may believe intellectually in the clash of opinions, but in practice we like to embed ourselves in the reassuring womb of an echo chamber.” — Nicholas Kristoff via NYTimes op-ed.

Although Kristoff has seemingly only just discovered the ‘echo chamber’ effect, it has been a longstanding preoccupation of thoughtful observers of internet sociology. As newspapers morph into lesser online versions of themselves with less pretense to completeness and objectivity, however, is the situation about to get much worse?

Mar 22 2009

Philosophy’s great experiment

“A dynamic new school of thought is emerging that wants to kick down the walls of recent philosophy and place experimentation back at its centre. It has a name to delight an advertising executive: x-phi. It has blogs and books devoted to it, and boasts an expanding body of researchers in elite universities. It even has an icon: an armchair in flames. If philosophy ever can be, x-phi is trendy. But, increasingly, it is also attracting hostility.” via Prospect.

Mar 22 2009

What is narcissistic personality disorder, and why does everyone seem to have it?

This is the cultural moment of the narcissist. In a New Yorker cartoon, Roz Chast suggests a line of narcissist greeting cards (“Wow! Your Birthday’s Really Close to Mine!”). John Edwards outed himself as one when forced to confess an adulterous affair. (Given his comical vanity, the deceitful way he used his marriage for his advancement, and his self-elevation as an embodiment of the common man while living in a house the size of an arena, it sounds like a pretty good diagnosis.) New York Times critic Alessandra Stanley wrote of journalists who Twitter, “it’s beginning to look more like yet another gateway drug to full-blown media narcissism.” And what other malady could explain the simultaneous phenomena of Blago and the Octomom?” — Emily Yoffe via Slate.

Mar 22 2009

Why Not Boo?

Toneelbeeld Lucia di Lammermoor van Bagnara ui...

“It goes without saying that the frequency of standing ovations devalues their significance. As Gilbert and Sullivan put it in “The Gondoliers,” When everyone is somebodee/Then no one’s anybody! Just as important, it also points to a lack of true engagement on the part of the spectators. At a preview performance of “Blithe Spirit” last week, I sat next to a man who laughed loudly and mechanically at every line in the play. Whenever an actor said something really funny, he raised his hands above his head and clapped. It was as though I were sitting next to a living laugh track — except that the man’s tic-like reaction to the show was anything but alive.

Booing, on the other hand, sends a different message, one that isn’t necessarily all bad. Francesca Zambello‘s deliberately provocative Met production of “Lucia di Lammermoor” was booed when it opened in 1992. “It isn’t fun to be booed,” Ms. Zambello later told me, “but sometimes it’s also a badge of success.” Why? Because the people who booed Ms. Zambello’s “Lucia” and Ms. Zimmerman’s “Sonnambula,” unlike the ones who spring to their feet at the end of a third-rate musical, were making it clear that they’d paid attention to what they saw and heard. No, they didn’t care for it, but at least they were involved with it, and such involvement can be the first step toward a deeper, more thoughtful response. “As soon as I detest something,” the music critic Hans Keller once said, “I ask myself why I like it.” Keller’s words may seem paradoxical, but in fact they’re wise. While anger may turn out to be love in disguise, indifference is rarely anything more than indifference.” — Terry Teachout via WSJ

By FmH • Tagged
Mar 22 2009

Could box office bonanza dry up?

Daily Variety's logo

“…[Studio] output has hit a serious speed bump, thanks to a number of factors: The economic crash and retreat of private equity money, a protracted writers walkout, a production slowdown over fear of an actors strike and the dismantling of studio specialty labels.” via Variety.

By FmH • Tagged
Mar 22 2009

Does Death Sell?

Philippe de Champaigne (1602-1674): Still-Life...

A recent study by University of Wisconsin and University of Virginia consumer researchers… examined how individuals relate to objects they have purchased when they think about death. The result, strikingly, is that thinking about one’s demise motivates people to form a strong connection to their material possessions, specifically to the brands that they have purchased. In the face of the great unknown, people develop, “strong brand identity,” a melding of their personalities and their possessions.” via Obit Magazine.

This school of research originated with Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death (1974), which argued that the entirety of human culture is an attempt to manage our terror at the prospect of our mortality.

Mar 22 2009

No Speech, Please…We’re British

Ashkar - Hét antwoord op Fitna

Britain’s politicians care so much about constitutional protections for human rights that they have two sets of them–the centuries-old traditions laid out by parliament and precedent and the newfangled European Convention on Human Rights, written into British law in 1998. Neither of these stopped Britain from becoming the first European Union country to bar an elected European legislator from its territory for his political opinions on February 12.

The Dutch MP Geert Wilders heads the Freedom party, which holds 9 of the 150 seats in the Second Chamber in The Hague. He has been preoccupied with militant Islam at least since November 2004, when the filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered by a Muslim fanatic in Amsterdam, and Wilders’s own name turned up on a jihadist hit list. In March 2008, Wilders released Fitna, a 15-minute film, on the Internet. It details contemporary Islamist outrages and locates their inspiration not in any perversion of Islam but in specific suras of the Koran itself, which Wilders likens to Mein Kampf and urges authorities to ban.” via The Weekly Standard.

Related:
Mar 22 2009

Why do people cook?

“…[W]ith Homo sapiens, what makes the species unique in Dr Wrangham’s opinion is that its food is so often cooked.

Cooking is a human universal. No society is without it. No one other than a few faddists tries to survive on raw food alone. And the consumption of a cooked meal in the evening, usually in the company of family and friends, is normal in every known society. Moreover, without cooking, the human brain (which consumes 20-25% of the body’s energy) could not keep running. Dr Wrangham thus believes that cooking and humanity are coeval.

In fact, as he outlined to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), in Chicago, he thinks that cooking and other forms of preparing food are humanity’s “killer app”: the evolutionary change that underpins all of the other—and subsequent—changes that have made people such unusual animals.” via The Economist.

One more in the myriad attempted definitions of being human that go, “Man is the only animal who…” Here is a Google search on the meme of human uniqueness.

Related:
Mar 22 2009

The Roar of the Crowd

football player || larger than life || covers ...

Marx was wrong: The opiate of the masses isn’t religion, but spectator sports. What else explains the astounding fact that millions of seemingly intelligent human beings feel that the athletic exertions of total strangers are somehow consequential for themselves? The real question we should be asking during the madness surrounding this month’s collegiate basketball championship season is not who will win, but why anyone cares.” via TThe Chronicle of Higher Education.

Mar 22 2009

Wikileaks needs your support

Wikileaks is currently overloaded by readers. This is a regular difficulty that can only be resolved by deploying additional resources. If you support our mission, then show it in the way that is most needed. On average, each donation catalyzes the publication of around 150 mainstream press articles, exposing human rights abuses and corrupt government around the world.Wikileaks is overloaded. We need your support for more servers.”

Mar 22 2009

Japan’s ‘suicide forest’

Map of Japan with Tokyo highlighted

“[He]bought a one-way ticket to the forest, west of Tokyo, Japan. When he got there, he slashed his wrists, though the cut wasn’t enough to kill him quickly.

He started to wander, he said. He collapsed after days and lay in the bushes, nearly dead from dehydration, starvation and frostbite. He would lose his toes on his right foot from the frostbite. But he didn’t lose his life, because a hiker stumbled upon his nearly dead body and raised the alarm.

[His] story is just one of hundreds logged at Aokigahara Forest every year, a place known throughout Japan as the “suicide forest.” The area is home to the highest number of suicides in the entire country.” via CNN.

[thanks to Boing Boing]

Mar 22 2009

A Perfect Crime?

Diamond Heist

Twins suspected in a spectacular multimillion-euro jewel heist in Berlin have been released. Despite DNA evidence from the crime scene, their genetic indistinguishability thwarted the requirement of German law that a suspect be linked exclusively. The twins, both of whom have criminal records and who may have committed the crime together, have steadfastly refused to comment, except to send a message that they were “proud of the German constitutional state and gave it their thanks.” via Der Spiegel [thanks to kottke].

One of the perils of modern crimefighting’s reliance on genetic evidence?

By FmH
Mar 21 2009

Teens capture images of space with £56 camera and balloon

Close up of a hydrogen filled balloon at Cambr...

Proving that you don’t need Google’s billions or the BBC weather centre’s resources, the four Spanish students managed to send a camera-operated weather balloon into the stratosphere.

Taking atmospheric readings and photographs 20 miles above the ground, the Meteotek team of IES La Bisbal school in Catalonia completed their incredible experiment at the end of February this year.

Building the electronic sensor components from scratch, Gerard Marull Paretas, Sergi Saballs Vila, Marta­ Gasull Morcillo and Jaume Puigmiquel Casamort managed to send their heavy duty £43 latex balloon to the edge of space and take readings of its ascent.” via Telegraph UK [thanks, abby].

Related:
By FmH • Tagged
Mar 21 2009

When It Comes To Shampoo, Less Is More

Private collection.

“Americans love to shampoo. We lather up an average of 4.59 times a week, twice as much as Italians and Spaniards, according to shampoo-maker Procter & Gamble.

But that’s way too often, say hair stylists and dermatologists. Daily washing, they say, strips the hair of beneficial oil (called sebum) and can damage our locks.” via NPR.

Mar 21 2009

Medical Marijuana Back From The Shadows

Medical Cannabis Club

“When Attorney General Eric Holder announced that drug enforcement authorities will end raids on medical marijuana suppliers in California, patients and activists cheered. Thirteen states, including Maine, have adopted medicinal marijuana laws similar to California’s.” via Medical Marijuana Back From The Shadows : NPR.

Related:
Mar 20 2009

The human brain is on the edge of chaos

A human brain.

“Cambridge-based researchers provide new evidence that the human brain lives “on the edge of chaos”, at a critical transition point between randomness and order. The study, published March 20 in the open-access journal PLoS Computational Biology, provides experimental data on an idea previously fraught with theoretical speculation.

Self-organized criticality (where systems spontaneously organize themselves to operate at a critical point between order and randomness), can emerge from complex interactions in many different physical systems, including avalanches, forest fires, earthquakes, and heartbeat rhythms.

According to this study, conducted by a team from the University of Cambridge, the Medical Research Council Cognition & Brain Sciences Unit, and the GlaxoSmithKline Clinical Unit Cambridge, the dynamics of human brain networks have something important in common with some superficially very different systems in nature. Computational networks showing these characteristics have also been shown to have optimal memory (data storage) and information-processing capacity. In particular, critical systems are able to respond very rapidly and extensively to minor changes in their inputs.” via PhysOrg.

Mar 20 2009

In One Ear and Out the Other

Cover of "Laughter: A Scientific Investig...

Thank heavens someone is thinking about one of the most troublesome experiences I have — my inability to remember a joke I have heard, no matter how funny and no matter how determined I am to retain it to share with others later.

“Really great jokes… work not by conforming to pattern recognition routines but by subverting them. “Jokes work because they deal with the unexpected, starting in one direction and then veering off into another,” said Robert Provine, a professor of psychology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and the author of Laughter: A Scientific Investigation. “What makes a joke successful are the same properties that can make it difficult to remember.”

This may also explain why the jokes we tend to remember are often the most clichéd ones. A mother-in-law joke? Yes, I have the slot ready and labeled.

Memory researchers suggest additional reasons that great jokes may elude common capture. Daniel L. Schacter, a professor of psychology at Harvard and the author of The Seven Sins of Memory, says there is a big difference between verbatim recall of all the details of an event and gist recall of its general meaning.

“We humans are pretty good at gist recall but have difficulty with being exact,” he said. Though anecdotes can be told in broad outline, jokes live or die by nuance, precision and timing. And while emotional arousal normally enhances memory, it ends up further eroding your attention to that one killer frill. “Emotionally arousing material calls your attention to a central object,” Dr. Schacter said, “but it can make it difficult to remember peripheral details.” via NYTimes.

This may be a special case of something over which I have more generally puzzled — what is the difference between those raconteurs, who always seem to have a moving story or stories (funny or dreadful) to tell on any occasion, and others who are at a loss for words in social settings. I’m not talking about people who are shy or painfully inhibited so much as those who seem to have the material and those who don’t.

Is there that much of a difference in the content of people’s lives? Is it something about how observant they are? Or, again, something about memory function? I am fascinated by storytelling (for instance, I love the Moth podcast) and have always been intrigued by advertisements about storytelling workshops promising to develop attendees’ skills.

To some extent, there is a cultural influence as well. I suspect storytelling is a dying art, along with letter-writing and reading fiction, a way we used to interact and divert ourselves which is progressively and inexorably being supplanted in modernity. But there are still enough good conversationalists around to astound me.

Of course, other people may find it far easier than I do to talk about what happened to them during their workday, one of the important sources of our stories. As a therapist, I am privileged to hear in detail about a broad range of the lives of others, but all of what I am told, I am told in confidence. Perhaps I gravitated toward psychotherapy because I sensed myself to be a far better listener to the stories of others than I am a storyteller myself. In fact, some construe the work of psychotherapy as training our clients to become better storytellers about their own lives, as largely a matter of imposing coherence and pattern on their recollections and observations about themselves, making better sense of their lives, consequently appreciating and tolerating the humor and the pathos in their lives better, and developing an empathic connection to the life stories of those around them.

Related?
Mar 20 2009

The Loon — James Tate

A loon woke me this morning. It was like waking up

in another world. I had no idea what was expected of me.

I waited for instructions. Someone called and asked me

if I wanted a free trip to Florida. I said, “Sure. Can

I go today?” A man in a uniform picked me up in a limousine,

and the next thing I know I’m being chased by an alligator

across a parking lot. A crowd gathers and cheers me on.

Of course, none of this really happened. I’m still sleeping.

I don’t want to go to work. I want to know what the loon is

saying. It sounds like ecstasy tinged with unfathomable

terror. One thing is certain: at least they are not speaking

of tax shelters. The phone rings. It’s my boss. She says,

“Where are you?” I say, “I don’t know. I don’t recognize

my surroundings. I think I’ve been kidnapped. If they make

demands of you, don’t give in. That’s my professional advice.”

Just then, the loon let out a tremendous looping, soaring,

swirling, quadruple whoop. “My god, are you alright?” my

boss said. “In case we do not meet again, I want you to know

that I’ve always loved you, Agnes,” I said. “What?” she said.

“What are you saying?” “Good-bye, my darling. Try to remember me

as your ever loyal servant,” I said. “Did you say you loved

me?” she said. I said, “Yes,” and hung up. I tried

to go back to sleep, but the idea of being kidnapped had me

quite worked up. I looked in the mirror for signs of torture.

Every time the loon cried, I screamed and contorted my face

in agony. They were going to cut off my head and place it on

a stake. I overheard them talking. They seemed like very

reasonable men, even, one might say, likeable.

“The Loon” by James Tate from Return to the City of White Donkeys. © Ecco Press, 2004. via a blind flaneur.

Mar 20 2009

R.I.P. Sal Salasin

And am pleased to inhabit the earth with this species. Goodbye and God bless you all. More of the evil work of Denise and her evil twin Denise, bleeding through my dreams. Man is the only animal that builds jails. He can also eat peanuts and chew tobacco. Let's go back to the phones where we'll discuss idempotent transactions in just a moment. Well, yes, I'm sorry I did the best I could which was obviously inadequate.

Fate and too many painkillers.

Recently I had the pleasure of driving alone in an American car on American roads listening to American radio from Perth Amboy to Seattle. And this had its rewards although it didn't do the planet any good.

And if it makes you feel any better, I didn't use my tongue. I'm also extremely good at removing the lint after each use and believe I should get some credit for that. “By the light of a thousand suns, I am become death.” I'd sympathize but all in all, I'd rather talk about me. Just get my butt back safe from the K-Mart and I'm yours forever.

via RealPolitik.