presomnia

Mind Hacks’ creator Vaughan Bell contributes a fascinating investigation to The Atlantic that explores that liminal state between slumber and wakefulness called hypnagogia. Though the experience may be universally familiar, the mental landscape of lucid dreams, poetic idylls and unhinged realities, it is not a well-mapped one. If the state only manifested itself during those brief periods when we drift off to sleep, it might be understandably difficult to gain a purchase and examine the cognitive mechanisms at work, but researchers believe that trance and meditation could also be hypnagogic in nature, greatly prolonging the window for observance and study. Perhaps learning how the conscious mind dismantles itself can show us more about cognitive models and filters of perception in our waking hours.

voice and accountability indices

Broadcast on BBC Radio 4, professor and gadfly Timothy Garton Ash recently presented a series of sobering and important essays on the state of free speech, which distills the ideas and necessary dialogue found his comprehensive and engaging internet presence.
Positing that no subject should be taboo in the pursuit of knowledge, we see liberty of expression under assault not only—and paradoxically—by the synapses that an intimately connected world but also in those corridors of learning and ivory towers of educational institutions—also being the last place one would expect to find the aura of censorship and sophistry, Professor Garton Ash elucidates interlocutors with a treacherous trio of veto-powers that elegantly present the threat: the heckler’s veto—wherein in all dissent is lost in the noise and chaos, the assassin’s veto—the threat of violence or litigation, and the veto of the offended—the intimidating prospect of violating the safe-space of another group. What do you make of these mute-buttons and has the internet facilitated the creation of this sort of timorous bully-pulpit?

legal tender

The outstanding BLDGBlog is showcasing the cultured project of Bristol artist Heidi Hinder, entitled Financial Growth, that illustrates the way we exchange microbes is as much the common-currency as coin through petri-dish experiments.
As part of wider research into the meaning of cash in a digital age, where most transactions occur in the æther. Far from militantly advocating the end of coins and paper-notes and full integration into a cashless society or overly focused on hygiene, Money no Object examines what it means for something whose presence (and tangible reminders) has accompanied us all along to suddenly become immaterial, not just invisible like these bacterial landscapes that we keep in our pockets and purses, unseen until given the chance to be unfurled, and ritually exchanged to cultivate a more diverse garden. I wonder if the circulation of resistances and vulnerabilities is as important a social function as other forms of communication and what it might mean were that venue of expression to abruptly stop.

feu de joie and many happy returns

Happy birthday, your Majesty!  Of course, being queen has its privileges and in addition to her natural birthday, in June we will also be treated to the trooping of the colours and fanfare of the monarch’s official birthday, transported by long-standing tradition to a fair weekend in that month owing to the vagaries of English weather.

petsmart

Via the always interesting Super Punch, we find this clever, satirical internet start-up generator that delivers convincingly well-presented shells, frontages of so called tech unicorns—rare and majestic creatures that have attained a valuation of a billion dollars, on paper at least, but as the field gets crowded by copy-cats or vertical monopolies become less viable and hence a dead monoceros (this is an ex-unicorn). With testimonials and angel investors, one would be pardoned for mistaken these snowclone templates for actual start-ups with a similar naming-convention, which have surprisingly, as a cause for concern, achieved that prized status.