Not to disparage conventional wisdom since there is much to be culled from a rare quality called common-sense and knowing better, but folk-neuroscience has practically invaded all aspects of public dialogue and holds up a very inaccurate but tantalizing fun-house mirror to ourselves.
Wednesday 6 March 2013
street smarts
Tuesday 5 March 2013
heart on your sleeve or windowpane
catagories: ๐ฅธ, ๐ง , networking and blogging
Monday 4 March 2013
unmarked white van or deppenapostroph
Usually I am not one to rise above mild amusement and not call unnecessary use of quotation marks when I see them used liberally on signage (although there appears to be a certain fondness for this practice in Germany). When I see this superfluous punctuation I want to stoop and gesture and make those air apostrophes. I am not addressing that other practice that’s a terribly prevalent butchering of the genitive case—Gertie’s Pilsstube is more often seen than the correct Gerties.
I do believe that there is room for license, according to the Army book of style, there are actual rules, which cascade out like poetry or that Monty Python skit about woody words. One should omit the hyphen when words appear in regular order and the omission causes no confusion in sound or meaning: banking hours, blood pressure, book value, census taker, life cycle, living costs, mountain laurel, palm oil, patent right, real estate, time frame, violin teacher. Well, I want to connect all of these with a dash. Next, one should compound two or more words to express an idea that would not be as clearly expressed in separate words, as in: bookkeeping, follow-on, forget-me-not, indepth, in-house, gentlemen, man-hour, man-year, newsprint, offload, railcar, right-of-way, yearend. Restraint should be exercised in forming unnecessary combinations of words used in normal sequence: atomic energy power, child welfare plan, civil service examination, income tax form, parcel post delivery, per capita expenditure, real estate tax, social security pension, soil conservation measures, special delivery mail. I don’t know about all of that. It seems to me like something that someone saw on a sign once and took to heart.
Sunday 3 March 2013
mcdoof
The latest cover and theme of Der Spiegel magazine (which I think though available on-line a perhaps regaled with more premium advertizing space will never be something out-of-print or solely archived in waiting-rooms) really poses a message to consider, especially taking into account how convenience foods are engineered for endurance.
global hawk or pretty bird
There’s a very blurry line between hobby helicopters and aerial surveillance drones, and I fear that government agencies, wanting to protect their assets and bailiwick will probably begin severely restricting what hobbyists can and can’t do. Just as much as there is an already growing public resistance to and fear of sky-spying, home-made drones could be easily deployed as Rock ‘Em, Sock ‘Em Robots to jam the airspace. Technology can be a kill-joy and make things quickly accelerate.
catagories: ๐, ๐ก, ๐ญ, ๐ฅธ, foreign policy, revolution, transportation, Wikipedia
Saturday 2 March 2013
ab in beurlaubt
The US executive and legislative branches were unable to reach or fake a compromise, which triggers a count-down, sort of like a Rube Goldberg contraption, towards budgetary sequestration across most of America’s federal programmes, mandatorily paring funding and raising the spectre of furloughs (unpaid absences) for hundreds of thousands of government workers world-wide.
This fifth does is not a chuck out of the whole of the abstract US economy, mostly conjuring money out of the movement of money and pushing paper, but—and perhaps even more urgently, this reduction is a double-decimation, not just in terms of income and employment and delivery, but a realignment, like annexing twenty percent of the America’s smaller communities, absorbing them into larger neighbours with an even more massive yet over-burdened civil institutions. It is like the pettiness and gridlock of the Congress leaking out of the Beltway and set loose on all aspects of the American public. The wheels of government will continue to turn with skeleton-crews, more work pressed out of staff remaining, rotating singly through the work week with less continuity and more matters overcome in the transition because it will have to. Authorities, in spite or because of the knock-on effects, may realize that adjustments (austerity American-style) can be accommodated and can make do with a scaled back government—or, and probably heralded by flagging spending and all around timidity, essential and uniting services both will become untenable under a reorganization that excised too much stability, functional determination and assuredness, whether or not misplaced, out of communities too quickly.
catagories: America, economic policy, labour, Wikipedia
east-enders or construction-spree
Throughout the division of Germany the Wall was a pallette for graffiti and protest, and after Reunification international artists were invited to turn the remaining Wall into a canvas for free expression and personal liberties, here in particular on a section called the East Side Gallery running parallel to the Spree river, and it would be a tragic loss of culture and memory should it be made to tumble, especially for sake of real estate speculation. Protests continue as well but are now mobilized in the street and on-line, fixing solidarity, and hopefully will prevail.
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐, 1992, revolution
elective affinities or the boys from brazil
Neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis has recently brought experimentation to the scientific community and the public with much enthusiasm and a certain flair that demonstrates the possibility of a future forms of communication, suggestion, via pure thoughts with a brain-to-brain interface. The trial consisted of two laboratory rats, geographically separated: one, the transmitting rat in a facility in Nicolelis’ native Brazil was conditioned to associate certain cues with the chance to get a reward, sweetened water as opposed to plain water. The other rat in the States, the receiver, was in a similar environment and opportunities for the treat were precisely synchronized.
The rat in America, however, was not privy to any of the sending rat’s cues, except that the rats’ brains were wired with electrodes and the former could telegraph via cables in the facility and over the Internet a micro-stimulus to the latter when he anticipated getting the reward. Their coordinated responses resulted in the American rat going for the reward at the exact moment the Brazilian right got the cue nearly seventy percent of the time; the Brazilian rate was transmitting the same conditioned response, impulse practically every time. The success rate shows that some significant mental exchange was going on but also suggests the limitations of scientists to pin-point the exact same neurons in two different subjects and that while there may be over-arching similarities, no two brains—or though-processes for that matter, are exactly identical. This sort of tethering is not telepathy or even Bluetooth. Communication was not reciprocal and who knows what the strangers would have thought if they knew their roles? What do you think? Will such stuff of science-fiction be the twitterpation of the near future and should we pursue this route?
catagories: ๐ฅธ, ๐ง , language, networking and blogging, technology and innovation