Writing for BBC Future Magazine, Michael Bond presents an engrossing feature article exploring the human mind’s resiliency and fragility through the lens of deprivation and isolation. From time to time, everyone craves peace and quiet and everyone has a different social threshold and defines interactions differently but no one wants or ought to feel secluded and lonesome. Citing several extreme cases, experimentally self-imposed and on long, solitary adventures or with imprisonment and ransom, Bond examines the physical and especially the mental toll that lack of human contact causes. The metrics have already been established when it comes to the inability to focus and concentrate properly as well as degraded immune and slower rates of healing when it comes to bodily health and performance, but the psychological yardstick is something that was only measured in feats too brave or too dangerous and cruel to be repeated—mostly.
Monday 19 May 2014
social contact, social-contract
catagories: ๐, ๐ง , networking and blogging
the internet is leaking
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐ฌ, networking and blogging
Sunday 18 May 2014
adrifters
An older but enlightening and reassuring post from the archives of Today I Found Out was really something to assuage the fears of silent-worriers, explaining the nature of those strange and sometimes persistent odd shapes that glide over ones field of vision. I always thought that these transparent zeppelins were microbes darting around ones eyeball (always there but easier to discern when focused on infinity—blue or grey skies—or in any visual landscape of low-contrast), which usually receding just to the periphery if one tried to focus on them, only to return to the centre of ones eye when not looking.
TIFO informs readers, as a public service it seems since there were quite a lot of people relieved to find out it was not some dread sign of the onset of blindness, poisoning or the effects of staring at the sun too long as a kid during long car trips, that the phenomenon is common to everyone, even if they are loath to discuss such optical figments as they are hard to articulate—and besides, it sounds a bit crazy and may be a sign that something is seriously wrong with them—and goes by the name mydesopsia (eye-floaters—or en france, mouches volantes und auf Deutsch, fliegende Mรผcke, flying flies) and are gelatinous bits of the vitreous humour coming loose from the rear of ones eyeball and then floating around inside of it. The squiggly flashes that avert themselves from ones gaze and cannot be studied (or fretted over directly) are usually the electric impulses released as bits of the vitreous humour detach and bump against the receptors and nerves of the eye, the discharge interpreted by the sense of vision as flashes. The article has some bonus facts and some warnings and disclaimers, as no one should take this or any accounting as a substitute for a professional diagnosis, nor be afraid to share ones own weird mirages.
wild-vines or foilage
Researches in the jungles of Chile have discovered a species of ivy that has advanced chameleon-like abilities to blend into its surroundings—hitherto a trait almost exclusively reserved to select members of the animal kingdom.
nomenclature or child-like princess
Not very long ago, we had a newborn come into the community and the mother named her Voilร , which I think is pretty cute—ta-da! Presto—here I am! There is a young adult here called uniquely Atreu, after the alter-ego hero of The Never-Ending Story.
There are no shortage, as well, of unfortunately chosen names, but many countries place few restrictions on what parents can call their children or what individuals can call themselves—unlike our host country Germany, which prudently denied new parents the right right to call their children “Google” or “Osama bin Laden.” Of those parents who are called out on this listing of outrageous baby names of the past year, I think the most tragic (but who am I to judge, since those all may have been intentionally picked) are those six baby girls named Charlemagne, not a feminine name at all but rather the French version of Karolus Magnus (Karl der Groรe), emperor and unifying force of medieval Europe after the fall of Rome.
Saturday 17 May 2014
refrain or power glove
sting, where is thy death?
Kottke shares an intriguing review of a new book out by marine biologist Lisa-ann Gershwin on the curious lifestyle of jellyfish and increasing success in the world's oceans.
These creatures have been around for a half a billion years, at least, and such longevity certainly affords some evolutionary luxuries. Further, jellyfish could not only be considered to have attained a certain biological immortality, one type even re-emerging like a phoenix as a polyp from its own decomposing body, but also when faced with hard-times, hunger and starvation, jellyfish merely respond by shrinking (and in proportion) to a small-scale version of their former size, until food becomes available again.
catagories: ๐, environment
ticker-tape or news you can use
Several companies world-wide, including the Frauenhofer Institute in Germany, are developing applications that can process unfiltered data through algorithms which the program can fetch autonomously from the รฆther (with apparently little mentorship, apprenticeship or copy-editing) to formulate news articles, written in natural language.
catagories: ๐, language, lifestyle, networking and blogging, technology and innovation