Amira

"Brodsky believed that a translator must replicate the exact meter and rhyme of the original: “verse meters in themselves are kinds of spiritual magnitudes for which nothing can be substituted. They cannot be replaced even by each other, let alone by free verse.” (...) Few translations in any century could be called “successful reinventions”—or what I would call great translations. (...) By translating, we learn how the limits of our minds can be stretched to absorb the foreign, and how thereby we are able to make our language beautiful in a new way. (...) Maybe we are best served when the translator is not a scholar but a plunderer, taking what he or she needs from the original and flinging aside the rest." - Amira

"As Pound puts it in “How to Read,” “English literature lives on translation, it is fed by translation; every new exuberance, every new heave is stimulated by translation, every allegedly great age is an age of translation.” Maybe our affinity for translation has to do with the fact that reading English is already a matter of translating, internally, between its Anglo-Saxon and Latinate elements. To appreciate Shakespeare, in particular, requires this sort of quasi-bilingualism: “No; this my hand will rather / The multitudinous seas incarnadine,/Making the green one red,” says Lady Macbeth, and the contrast between “incarnadine” and “red” brings home the disparity between the rhetoric of blood and its reality. (...)" - Amira

"50% of all the books in translation worldwide are translated from English, but less than 3% are translated into English. And that 3% figure includes all books in translation—in terms of literary fiction and poetry, the number is actually closer to 0.7%." - Amira

"A mosquito's tiny, low-weight body is the key to its ability to survive flying in the rain, according to scientists. A team from the Georgia Institute of Technology filmed the insects as they collided with raindrops. This showed that their bodies put up so little resistance that, rather than the drop of water stopping in a sudden, catastrophic splash, the mosquito simply combined with the drop and the two continued to fall together. (...) As well as helping explain how the insects thrive in damp, humid environments, the research could ultimately help researchers to design tiny, flying robots that are just as impervious to the elements. "I hope this will make people think a little bit differently about rain," (...) "If you're small, it can be very dangerous. But it seems that these mosquitoes are so small that they're safe." (...) After repeated attempts at what he described as the most difficult game of darts ever, he and his colleagues managed to hit flying mosquitoes with drops of water and capture footage of the result." - Amira

"Each droplet was between two and 50 times the weight of a mosquito, so what they saw surprised them. (...) "There is a philosophy that if you don't resist the force of your opponent, you won't feel it," (...) "That's why they don't feel the force; they simply join the drop, become one item and travel together." (...) The trick for a mosquito is that it hardly slows the raindrop down at all, and absorbs very little of its energy. Surviving the collision though, is not the end of the drama for a tiny insect. It has to escape from its watery cocoon before the droplet smashes the insect into the ground at more than 20mph. This is where the insect's body, which is covered in water-repellent hairs, seems to give it another crucial survival technique. Every mosquito studied in this experiment managed to separate itself from the water drop before it hit the ground." - Amira

"Northwestern University researchers are the first to discover that very different complex networks -- ranging from global air traffic to neural networks -- share very similar backbones. By stripping each network down to its essential nodes and links, they found each network possesses a skeleton and these skeletons share common features, much like vertebrates do. Mammals have evolved to look very different despite a common underlying structure (think of a human being and a bat), and now it appears real-world complex networks evolve in a similar way. The researchers studied a variety of biological, technological and social networks and found that all these networks have evolved according to basic growth mechanisms. The findings could be particularly useful in understanding how something -- a disease, a rumor or information -- spreads across a network. (...)" - Amira

"Infectious diseases such as H1N1 and SARS spread in a similar way, and it turns out the network's skeleton played an important role in shaping the global spread,"(...) "Now, with this new understanding and by looking at the skeleton, we should be able to use this knowledge in the future to predict how a new outbreak might spread." (...) Complex systems -- such as the Internet, Facebook, the power grid, human consciousness, even a termite colony -- generate complex behavior. A system's structure emerges locally; it is not designed or planned. Components of a network work together, interacting and influencing each other, driving the network's evolution. (...) By computing this consensus -- the overall strength, or importance, of each link in the network -- the researchers were able to produce a skeleton for each network consisting of all those links that every node considers important. And these skeletons are similar across networks." - Amira

And for a mere $32 this article can be yours. #paywallsuck - Todd Hoff

"High in Himalayan foothills, fearless Gurung men risk thier lives to harvest the massive nests of the world's largest honeybee." - Amira

"As the Austrian logician Kurt Gödel proved (...) any system as complicated as arithmetic contains true statements that cannot be proved within the system. (...) You can take the number describing a formula and insert that number into the formula, which then becomes a statement about itself. Such a self-referential capability introduces a certain “loopiness” into mathematics. (...) But consciousness is more than just an ordinary feedback loop. It’s a strange loop, which Hofstadter describes as a loop capable of perceiving patterns in its environment and assigning common symbolic meanings to sufficiently similar patterns. (...) Human brains create vast repertoires of these symbols, conferring the “power to represent phenomena of unlimited complexity and thus to twist back and to engulf themselves via a strange loop.” Consciousness itself occurs when a system with such ability creates a higher-level symbol, a symbol for the ability to create symbols. That symbol is the self. The I. Consciousness. “You and I are mirages that perceive themselves,” (...) This self-generated symbol of the self operates only on the level of symbols." - Amira

"Perceptual systems able to symbolize themselves — self-referential minds — can’t be explained just by understanding the parts that compose them. (...) Gödel’s proof showed that math is “incomplete”; it contains truths that can’t be proven. And consciousness is a truth of a sort that can’t be comprehended within a system of molecules and cells alone. (...) It’s the brain’s information processing powers that allow the mind to symbolize itself. Koch believes that focusing on information could sharpen science’s understanding of consciousness. (...) “We … draw conceptual boundaries around entities that we easily perceive, and in so doing we carve out what seems to us to be reality,” Hofstadter wrote. “The ‘I’ we create for each of us is a quintessential example of such a perceived or invented reality, and it does such a good job of explaining our behavior that it becomes the hub around which the rest of the world seems to rotate.” - Amira

"The world’s first stereoscopic reconstruction of a painting. 67 unique characters, each rendered as three-dimensional models, come together to form a clear spatial composition. Depth and perspective appear "within arm’s reach", inviting the viewer into the canvas to experience it from a new perspective. The project posed a challenge to animators, who were required to meticulously interpret and recreate the 1878 original and find solutions to problems such as how to depict figures who were partially obscured by those next to them." http://www.behance.net/gallery... "The Battle of Grunwald is a painting by Jan Matejko that portrays the Battle of Grunwald http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki..., depicting the victory of the allied Kingdom of Poland and Grand Duchy of Lithuania over the Teutonic Order in 1410." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Amira

"Scientists at the Joint Quantum Institute have stored not one but two letters of the alphabet in a tiny cell filled with rubidium (Rb) atoms which are tailored to absorb and later re-emit messages on demand. This is the first time two images have simultaneously been reliably stored in a non-solid medium and then played back. In effect, this is the first stored and replayed atomic movie. Because the JQI researchers are able to store and replay two separate images, or "frames," a few micro-seconds apart, the whole sequence can qualify as a feat of cinematography. (...) The atomic storage medium is a narrow cell some 20 centimeters long, which seems pretty large for a quantum device. That's how much room is needed to accommodate a quantum process called gradient echo memory (GEM). (...) " - Amira

"The image is stored in this extended way, by being absorbed in atoms at any one particular place in the cell, depending on whether those atoms are exposed to three carefully tailored fields: the electric field of the signal light, the electric field of another "control" laser pulse, and a magnetic field (adjusted to be different along the length of the cell) which makes the Rb atoms (each behaving like a magnet itself) precess about. When the image is absorbed into the atoms in the cell, the control beam is turned off. Because this process requires the simultaneous action of two particular photons---one putting the atom in an excited state, the other sending it back down to a slightly different ground state---it cannot easily be undone by atoms subsequently randomly emitting light and returning to the original ground state. That's how the image is stored. Image readout occurs in a sort of reverse process. The magnetic field is flipped to a contrary orientation, the control beam turned back on, and the atoms start to precess in the opposite direction. Eventually those atoms reemit light, thus reconstituting the image pulse, which proceeds on its way out of the cell." - Amira

[Risk intelligence] “it is the ability to estimate probabilities accurately, it’s about having the right amount of certainty to make educated guesses. That’s the simple definition. But this apparently simple skill turns out to be quite complex. It ends up being a rather deep thing about how to work on the basis of limited information and cope with an uncertain world, about knowing yourself and your limitations. (…) Q: What mistakes do we make in assessing risks? The need for closure is a really interesting one. If you have a great need for closure, it means you don’t like being in a state of uncertainty - you want an answer, any answer, even if it is the wrong one. On the other extreme, there is this need to avoid closure, where you are constantly seeking more information, so you get stuck in analysis paralysis. Q: Can we increase our risk quotient? Absolutely. One way is by being aware of different cognitive biases. Another is to play a personal prediction game. Bet against yourself and estimate probabilities of anything: whether your partner will get home before 6 o’clock, or whether it is going to rain, and keep track of them. Expert gamblers are constantly on the lookout for overconfidence, biases and so on. It is hard work, but it means they know themselves pretty well and they don’t have illusions. They know their weaknesses.” - Amira

"Shouryya Ray, who moved to Germany from India with his family at the age of 12, has baffled scientists and mathematicians by solving two fundamental particle dynamics problems posed by Sir Isaac Newton over 350 years ago. (...) Ray’s solutions make it possible to now calculate not only the flight path of a ball, but also predict how it will hit and bounce off a wall. Previously it had only been possible to estimate this using a computer, wrote the paper. Ray first came across the old problem when his secondary school, which specializes in science, set all their year-11 pupils a research project. On a visit to the Technical University in Dresden pupils received raw data to evaluate a direct numerical simulation – which can be used to describe the trajectory of a ball when it is thrown. When he realised the current method could not get an exact result, Ray decided to have a go at solving it. He puts the whole thing down to “schoolboy naivety” - he just refused to accept there was no answer to the problem. “I asked myself: why can’t it work?” he told the paper. Ray has been fascinated by what he calls the “intrinsic beauty“ of maths since an early age, according to the report. (...) He recently won a youth science competition at the state level in Saxony and won second place in the Maths and IT section at the national final. (...) Since then, he was moved up two classes in school and is currently sitting his Abitur exams two years early. But Ray doesn’t think he’s a genius, and told the paper he has weak points as a mathematician, as well as in sports and social sciences." - Amira

redditors are throwing a little cold water on the story: http://www.reddit.com/r... (loosely, he's found a better analytical approximation, but that's not the same as an analytical _solution_.) - Andrew C (✔)

That's amazing - Shevonne

I know Shevonne... It's a pimp mo - Johnny

"PhilPapers is a comprehensive directory of online philosophical articles and books by academic philosophers. We monitor journals in many areas of philosophy, as well as archives and personal pages." - Amira

"Life was nearly wiped out 250 million years ago, with only 10 per cent of plants and animals surviving. It is currently much debated how life recovered from this cataclysm, whether quickly or slowly. Recent evidence for a rapid bounce-back is evaluated in a new review article (...) They find that recovery from the crisis lasted some 10 million years (...). The end-Permian crisis, by far the most dramatic biological crisis to affect life on Earth, was triggered by a number of physical environmental shocks -- global warming, acid rain, ocean acidification and ocean anoxia. These were enough to kill off 90 per cent of living things on land and in the sea. Dr Chen said: "It is hard to imagine how so much of life could have been killed, but there is no doubt from some of the fantastic rock sections in China and elsewhere round the world that this was the biggest crisis ever faced by life." (...) - Amira

"Some groups of animals on the sea and land did recover quickly and began to rebuild their ecosystems, but they suffered further setbacks. Life had not really recovered in these early phases because permanent ecosystems were not established. Professor Benton, Professor of Vertebrate Palaeontology at the University of Bristol, said: "Life seemed to be getting back to normal when another crisis hit and set it back again. The carbon crises were repeated many times, and then finally conditions became normal again after five million years or so." Finally, after the environmental crises ceased to be so severe, more complex ecosystems emerged. In the sea, new groups, such as ancestral crabs and lobsters, as well as the first marine reptiles, came on the scene, and they formed the basis of future modern-style ecosystems." - Amira

See also: Anthropocene: “the recent age of man”. Mapping Human Influence on Planet Earth http://ff.im/ErRmb - Amira

"Science is about constructing visions of the world, about rearranging our conceptual structure, about creating new concepts which were not there before, and even more, about changing, challenging the a-priori that we have. So it’s nothing to do about the assembly of data and the way of organizing the assembly of data. It has everything to do about the way we think, and about our mental vision of the world. Science is a process in which we keep exploring ways of thinking, and changing our image of the world, our vision of the world, to find new ones that work a little bit better. (...) The deepest misunderstanding about science, which is the idea that science is about certainty. Science is not about certainty. Science is about finding the most reliable way of thinking, at the present level of knowledge. Science is extremely reliable; it’s not certain. In fact, not only it’s not certain, but it’s the lack of certainty that grounds it. Scientific ideas are credible not because they are sure, but because they are the ones that have survived all the possible past critiques, and they are the most credible because they were put on the table for everybody’s criticism." - Amira

"The very expression ‘scientifically proven’ is a contradiction in terms. There is nothing that is scientifically proven. The core of science is the deep awareness that we have wrong ideas, we have prejudices. We have ingrained prejudices. In our conceptual structure for grasping reality there might be something not appropriate, something we may have to revise to understand better. So at any moment, we have a vision of reality that is effective, it’s good, it’s the best we have found so far. It’s the most credible we have found so far, its mostly correct. (...) It’s about overcoming our own ideas, and about going beyond common sense continuously. Science is a continuous challenge of common sense, and the core of science is not certainty, it’s continuous uncertainty. I would even say the joy of taking what we think, being aware that in everything we think, there are probably still an enormous amount of prejudices and mistakes, and try to learn to look a little bit larger, knowing that there is always a larger point of view that we’ll expect in the future." - Amira

Thanks Adriano http://ff.im/XhQQ1 for the link to this brilliant article. - Amira

"He challenged us to criticize him and laughed when he realized how strongly we believed in the excellence of say, Maxwell’s equations without having calculated and tested specific effects." http://kebikec.tumblr.com/post... - Ahmet Yükseltürk

"The puzzle would be solved in the same way but instead of using colors, sound/music would be used. Any ideas on how this might be done? What would the end result, or "Success Factor" be? Could it be done with the current 3x3 model or would it require 4x4? Would it use light or an internal metronome to keep a beat? Would the music involve the entire cube, or simply one side at a time? Could it be done without requiring power? Could it be used simply as a fun music-making toy, or strictly a puzzle to solve?" - Amira

See also: Music Sequencing as Bicycle Wheels, Rubik’s Cubes at Fest in Argentina "Cubie is a software instrument which provides innovative idea of musical performance, differs from existing musical performance system such as musical notation, DJ systems, DAW systems, etc… It has a novel concept incorporating a new interactive technique based on puzzle games. Music is represented from highly saturated colored letters on a 3D cube. Almost unlimited number of melodies and rhythms can be created from a combination of those letters, and it can be changed on real-time by operations based on puzzle game. Those playful operations push a performer to play repeatedly and get the skill of performing with Cubie." http://createdigitalmusic.com/2009... - Amira

"Some of the world's first musicians may have been flautists. Archaeologists reanalyzing artifacts from a cave in southern Germany have determined that two prehistoric flutes — one fashioned from bird bone, the other mammoth ivory — are somewhere between 42,000 and 43,000 years old. (...) "Modern humans during [this] period were in central Europe at least 2,000-3,000 years before this climatic deterioration, when huge icebergs calved from ice sheets in the northern Atlantic and temperatures plummeted," explains Higham." http://io9.com/5913322... "The bone flutes push back the date researchers think human creativity evolved. (...) The flutes are the earliest record of technological and artistic innovations that are characteristic of the Aurignacian period. This culture also created the oldest known example of art meant to represent a person, found in the same cave system in 2008 (that statue seems to be about 35,000 years old). The musical instruments indicate that these early humans were sharing songs and showing artistic creativity even earlier than previously thought." http://www.mnn.com/lifesty... - Amira

"Incredible video by Evan Shinners, Julliard-trained pianist and "best Bach player around." In the video, Shinners shows the world the colors he sees when he plays: he has synesthesia." http://boingboing.net/2012... "The video features a hallucinogenic sequence of flashing colors as Shinners romps through a Bach fugue on a creaky upright piano. Synesthesia, the association of colors with particular sounds or harmonies, has been claimed by classical musicians from Liszt and Messiaen to the pianist Helene Grimaud." http://www.wqxr.org/#!... See also: Synesthesia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Amira

"[Sergio Cittolin] has sketched his way through school lectures and professional meetings. (...) In 1992 the first of Cittolin’s da Vinci-style drawings appeared on the cover of a CMS experiment design report. With collider operations still years away and key technologies not yet invented, “I thought that the Leonardo style was suitable to give the feeling of anticipation of new ideas,” he says. (...) As a naturalist, da Vinci probed, prodded, and tested his way to a deeper understanding of how organisms work and why, often dissecting his object of study with this aim. “I thought, why not present the idea of data analysis to the world within the naturalist world of Leonardo?” Cittolin says. In the drawing below, the CMS detector is the organism to be opened; the particles passing through it and the tracks they leave behind are organs exposed for further investigation. (...)" - Amira

"Paris Sphicas, physics coordinator for the CMS experiment, says of Cittolin’s artwork, “The graphics are amazing in numerous ways. Foremost is the depiction of modern-day systems and actions in terms of medieval elements: the tons of data are drawn as piles of books; lasers become oil lamps; complicated systems, typically electronic, find mechanical analogs which are ingeniously conceived. Second, all these elements are combined in a way that the drawing gives, literally, a very short summary of what takes about 500 pages to describe. Third, it’s the art itself: it’s all drawn in the da Vinci style. From the text—which, of course, reads backwards and can only be deciphered in front of a mirror—to the line technique, the drawings look and feel like genuine works of Leonardo himself.” - Amira

More Cittolin's drawings at CERN Document Server: http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record... - Amira

beautiful ! - Adriano

"Using only a pencil, Robbie Cornelissen has filled three enormous sheets of paper with drawings, creating a work 13.2 metres long and 2.4 metres high. For six months, he challenged his physical stamina to complete this huge, virtuoso drawing, which draws the viewer into a world of illusion. Like most of Cornelissen’s work, it depicts an architectonic space consisting of cabinets, buildings and transitions between different levels. (...) Cornelissen, who initially trained as a biologist, did not start drawing until later in life, attending the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam in the 1980s. He believes his background in biology has benefited his art. His work depicts "inner worlds," taking the viewer on a journey through the artist’s memories and thoughts. Thanks to his knowledge of the human body, Cornelissen knows exactly how the complex cellular system inside us fits together. Though he uses this knowledge, his drawings do not refer to the human body. The spaces he depicts are mental spaces, metaphors for the human mind. (...) The fact that Cornelissen expresses his thoughts directly on paper gives his work a certain authenticity. Indeed, his body of work can be seen as one long story, an entire inner world in itself." - Amira

"Google’s algorithm doesn’t know a thing about doubled letters, transpositions, or the psychology of how humans type or spell, only what people tend to type after they make an error. The lesson, it seemed, was that with a big enough database and fast enough computers, human problems could be solved without much insight into the particulars of the human mind. (...) To deal with the “Paris” problem, Google Knowledge Search revives an idea first developed in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, known as semantic networks, that was a first guess at how the human mind might encode information in the brain. In place of simple associations between words, these networks encode relationships between unique entities. Paris the place and Paris the person get different unique I.D.s—sort of like bar codes or Social Security numbers—and simple associations are replaced by (or supplemented by) annotated taxonomies that encode relationships between entities. So, “Paris1” (the city) is connected to the Eiffel tower by a “contains” relationship, while “Paris2” (the person) is connected to various reality shows by a “cancelled” relationship. As all the places, persons, and relationships get connected to each other, these networks start to resemble vast spiderwebs. In essence, Google is now attempting to reshape the Internet and provide its spiders with a smarter Web to crawl." - Amira

"*Chinese* (Mandarin or Cantonese): Studies have found that doing math is more intuitive in Chinese than English for a variety of reasons. Firstly, counting in English is not intuitive. After the numbers 1-10, we have new names like "eleven" and "twelve", etc. In Chinese, eleven is literally ten-one (twenty is two ten and so on). Young children can count up to one hundred in Chinese much more quickly than can English speaking children". (...) // *Pormpuraaw* (aboriginal Australian): This language does not have equivalent terms for "left" and "right" so they rely on cardinal directions (i.e., east, west, etc) instead. Thus, no more confusing directions if you're a speaker of Pormpuraaw. (...) // *French* is the greatest source of words, advanced structures and cultural development in to English. French is a favorite with English majors. If you want to write better English learning French is good. *German* is the language most like the root of English. If you want to more solidly grasp the grammar and core words of English, say for linguistics or history. (...) German has some very deep concepts and distinctions, and seems well-designed for argumentation. (...) " - Amira

*Latin* is the language that established how a big language used by many different people in a vast area would work. In Latin the first forms of grammar and early word roots that English shares with all European family of languages. (...) In *Greek* our core framework of how western society thinks was first constructed. Greek is probably the ultimate westerns deep thinker language. Our concepts of drama, politics, law, grammar and philosophy were all first written in Greek." - Amira

See also: The Paradox of the Alphabetic Literacy Narrative http://ff.im/AmBkV Life without language. Greg Downey on language, thought and time http://neuroanthropology.net/2010... - Amira

"Manuel Lima is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a Senior UX Design Lead at Microsoft Bing and founder of VisualComplexity.com - A visual exploration on mapping complex networks." See also: The Story of Networks http://aminotes.tumblr.com/post... - Amira

"During the previous generation or so, elites across Europe had moved their clocks forward by several hours. No longer a time reserved for sleep, the night time was now the right time for all manner of recreational and representational purposes. This is what Craig Koslofsky calls “nocturnalisation”, defined as “the ongoing expansion of the legitimate social and symbolic uses of the night”, a development to which he awards the status of “a revolution in early modern Europe”. (...) The shift from street to court and from day to night represented “the sharpest break in the history of celebrations in the West”. (...) By the time of Louis XIV, all the major events – ballets de cour, operas, balls, masquerades, firework displays – took place at night. (...) The kings, courtiers – and those who sought to emulate them – adjusted their daily timetable accordingly. Unlike Steele’s friend, they rose and went to bed later and later. Henry III of France, who was assassinated in 1589, usually had his last meal at 6 pm and was tucked up in bed by 8. Louis XIV’s day began with a lever at 9 and ended (officially) at around midnight. (...) As with so much else at Versailles, this was a development that served to distance the topmost elite from the rest of the population. (...)" - Amira

I saw your notification on Goodreads when I did the same today, now we are two! :-) - Amira

Abstract: "Recent research [Temporal construal effects on abstract and concrete thinking: Consequences for insight and creative cognition] has identified temporal distance as a situational moderator of creativity. According to Construal Level Theory, temporal distance is just one case of the broader construct of psychological distance. In the present research, we investigated the effect of another dimension of psychological distance, namely, spatial distance, on creative cognition and insight problem solving. In two studies, we demonstrate that when the creative task is portrayed as originating from a far rather than close location, participants provide more creative responses (Study 1) and perform better on a problem solving task that requires creative insight (Study 2). Both theoretical and practical implications of this finding are discussed." - Amira

"Even minimal cues of psychological distance can make us more creative. Although the geographical origin of the various tasks was completely irrelevant – it shouldn’t have mattered where the questions came from – simply telling subjects that they came from somewhere far away led to more creative thoughts." http://www.bigthink.com/ideas... - Amira

"Knowledge qua knowledge, Weinberger claims, is increasingly enmeshed in webs of discourse: culture-dependent and theory-free. (...) The existence of hyperlinks is enough to convince even the most stubborn positivist that there is always another side to the story. And on the web, fringe believers can always find each other and marinate in their own illusions. The “web world” is too big to ever know. There is always another link. In the era of the Internet, Weinberger argues, facts are not bricks. They are networks. (…) Human beings (or rather “Dasein,” “being-in-the-world”) are always thrown into a particular context, existing within already existing language structures and pre-determined meanings. In other words, the world is like the web, and we, Dasein, live inside the links. (…)" - Amira

"If knowledge has always been networked knowledge, than facts have never had stable containers. Most of the time, though, we more or less act as if they do. (...) Black boxes emerge out of actually-existing knowledge networks, stabilize for a time, and unravel, and our goal as thinkers and scholars ought to be understanding how these nodes emerge and disappear. (...) Done well, digital realism can sensitize us to the fact that all networked knowledge systems eventually become brick walls, that these brick walls are maintained through technological, political, cultural, economic, and organizational forms of power. (...) Our job is to understand how the wall gets built, and how we might try to build it differently." - Amira

David Weinberger: "I think the Net generation is beginning to see knowledge in a way that is closer to the truth about knowledge. (...) Knowing looks less like capturing truths in books than engaging in never-settled networks of discussion and argument. (...) This new topology of knowledge reflects the topology of the Net. The Net (and especially the Web) is constructed quite literally out of links, each of which expresses some human interest. (...) And that’s the sense in which I think networked knowledge is more “natural.” (…) To make a smart room — a knowledge network — you have to have just enough diversity. (...) There is no longer an imperative to squeeze the world into small, self-contained boxes. Hyperlinks remove the limitations that objectivity was invented to address. " - Amira

“Imagine a timeline of the universe, complete with high-resolution videos and images, in which you could zoom from a chronology of Egypt’s dynasties and pyramids to the tale of a Japanese-American couple interned in a World War II relocation camp to a discussion of a mass extinction that occurred on Earth 200 million years ago – all in seconds. (…) The idea arose in a UC Berkeley course about Big History taught by Walter Alvarez, the campus geologist who first proposed that a comet or asteroid smashed into the Earth 65 million years ago and killed off the dinosaurs. Big History is a unified, interdisciplinary way of looking at and teaching the history of the cosmos, Earth, life and humanity: the history of everything. One of the difficulties of teaching history –- and teaching Big History, in particular –- is conveying a sense of the time scale, which ranges from the 50,000-year time span of modern humans to the 13.7 billion-year history of the universe, Alvarez said. Human history compared to cosmic history is like “a postage stamp relative to the whole size of the United States.” “With ChronoZoom, you are browsing history, not digging it out piece by piece,” said Alvarez, a Professor of the Graduate School in the Department of Earth and Planetary Science. (…) ChronoZoom is a visualization tool allowing for the first time people to mash up data from all sorts of different places in different formats enabling new insights that would never have been possible before.” - Amira

"The unique method of repeating kanji in a grid pattern in poem “Ame” (Rain). As part of the wave of modernism that swept over all fields of art in the 20th century, poets boldly began to analyze language structurally instead of merely concentrating on its semantic content." http://www.nmao.go.jp/english... "Concrete poetry or shape poetry is poetry in which the typographical arrangement of words is as important in conveying the intended effect as the conventional elements of the poem, such as meaning of words, rhythm, rhyme and so on. The French poet Pierre Guarnieri, collaborating with the Japanese poet Seiichi Niikuni, also used the term spatiality in relation to concrete poetry, implying that the white space between words also holds meaning. Poets emphasized that language is not only a means of communication, but that language also has a material dimension.” - Amira

"Without doubt the most influential American composer of the last half century, John Cage has had an enormous impact not only on music but on art, literature, the performing arts, and aesthetic thought in general. His insistent exploration of "nonintention" and his fruitful merging of Western and Eastern traditions have made him a powerful force in the world of the avant-garde. There have never been lectures like these: delivered at Harvard in 1988-89 as the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, they were more like performances, as the audience heard them. Cage calls them "mesostics," a literary form generated by chance (in this case computerized I-Ching chance) operations. Using the computer as an oracle in conjunction with a large source text, he happens upon ideas, which produce more ideas. Chance, and not Cage, makes the choices and central decisions. Such a form is rooted, Cage tells us in his introduction, in the belief that "all answers answer all questions." There are two sound files, one of Cage reading a mesostic (IV), allowing the listener to experience it as it was delivered, and one with a lively selection from the question-and-answer seminars that conveys the flavor of the event. I-VI is, in short, an experience of John Cage, where silences become words and words become silences, in arrangements that will disconcert and exercise our minds." - Amira

Sounds of Silence: John Cage’s 4’33″ performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra http://ff.im/OzdqA - Amira

"John Locke, the philosopher, who also argued that personal identity was really dependent on the autobiographical or episodic memories, and you are the sum of your memories, which, of course, is something that fractionates and fragments in various forms of dementia. (...) As we all know, memory is notoriously fallible. It’s not cast in stone. It’s not something that is stable. It’s constantly reshaping itself. So the fact that we have a multitude of unconscious processes which are generating this coherence of consciousness, which is the I experience, and the truth that our memories are very selective and ultimately corruptible, we tend to remember things which fit with our general characterization of what our self is. We tend to ignore all the information that is inconsistent. We have all these attribution biases. We have cognitive dissonance. The very thing psychology keeps telling us, that we have all these unconscious mechanisms that reframe information, to fit with a coherent story, then both the “I” and the “me”, to all intents and purposes, are generated narratives. The illusions I talk about often are this sense that there is an integrated individual, with a veridical notion of past. And there’s nothing at the center. We’re the product of the emergent property, I would argue, of the multitude of these processes that generate us. (...)" - Amira

The hierarchy of representations in the brain: "Representations are literally re-presentations. That’s the language of the brain, that’s the mode of thinking in the brain, it’s representation. It’s more than likely, in fact, it’s most likely that there is already representation wired into the brain. If you think about the sensory systems, the array of the eye, for example, is already laid out in a topographical representation of the external world, to which it has not yet been exposed. What happens is that this is general layout, arrangements that become fine-tuned. We know of a lot of work to show that the arrangements of the sensory mechanisms do have a spatial arrangement, so that’s not learned in any sense. But these can become changed through experiences, and that’s why the early work of Hubel and Weisel, about the effects of abnormal environments showed that the general pattern could be distorted, but the pattern was already in place in the first place." - Amira

[Update] "The Illusion of the Self" -- Bruce Hood interviewed by Sam Harris: "I think that both the “I” and the “me” are actually ever-changing narratives generated by our brain to provide a coherent framework to organize the output of all the factors that contribute to our thoughts and behaviors. I think it helps to compare the experience of self to subjective contours – illusions such as the Kanizsa pattern where you see an invisible shape that is really defined entirely by the surrounding context. People understand that it is a trick of the mind but what they may not appreciate is that the brain is actually generating the neural activation as if the illusory shape was really there. In other words, the brain is hallucinating the experience. There are now many studies revealing that illusions generate brain activity as if they existed. They are not real but the brain treats them as if they were. (...)" - Amira

"By rejecting the notion of a core self and considering how we are a multitude of competing urges and impulses, I think it is easier to understand why we suddenly go off the rails. It explains why we act, often unconsciously, in a way that is inconsistent with our self image – or the image of our self as we believe others see us. That said, the self illusion is probably an inescapable experience we need for interacting with others and the world, and indeed we cannot readily abandon or ignore its influence, but we should be skeptical that each of us is the coherent, integrated entity we assume we are.” - Amira

"The gap between outer langue and inner speech is greater than that between outer langue and outer speech. (...) We are little gods in the world of inner speech. We are the only ones, we run the show, we are the boss. This world is almost a little insane, for it lacks the usual social controls, and we can be as bad or as goofy as we want. On the other hand inner speech does have a job to do, it has to steer us through the world. That function sets up outer limits, even though within those limits we have a free rein to construct this language as we like. (...) Although inner speech is not idealism, in some ways it seems to be a more differentially defined universe than outer speech. Linguistic context is even more important than in outer speech. One reason is that meaning is so condensed on the two axes. But a second is that inner language is so pervaded with emotion. (...)" - Amira

"This language is so rooted in the unique self that an eavesdropper, could there be one, would not fully understand it. It has so much of one’s person in it, a listener would have to be another you to follow it. And if someone invented a window into consciousness, a mind-reading machine, that could invade one’s privacy, would they be able to understand the, now revealed, inner speech? I think not. They might be able to understand most of the words, but the non-linguistic or imagistic elements would be too much a personal script to follow. If this eavesdropper watched you, including your consciousness, for your whole life, had access to your memory and knew your way of combining non-linguistic representations with words, they might have your code, but this is another way of saying they would be another you. In practical terms inner speech would be inaccessible in its meaning even if it were accessible in its signifying forms. (...) " - Amira

"The importance of private language is that it sheds light on what a human being is. We are inherently private animals, and we become more so the more self-aware and internally communicative we are. This zone of privacy may well be the foundation for the moral (and legal) need people have for privacy. In any case the hidden individuality or uniqueness of each human being is closely related to the what the person says to him or her self. (...) Inner speech is both the locus and platform for agency. (...) We choose internally in the zone of inner speech, and then we choose externally in the zone of practical action and the outer world. The first choice leads to the second choice. (...) We could make and break habits by first modelling them in our internal theater." - Amira

"Right now we’re living in what Carl Sagan correctly termed a demon-haunted world. We have created a Star Wars civilization but we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. That’s dangerous. (…) Constant turmoil occurs in modern human societies and what I’m suggesting is that turmoil is endemic in the way human advanced social behavior originated in the first place. It’s by group selection that occurred favoring altruism versus individual level selection, which by and large, not exclusively, favor individual and selfish behavior. We’re hung in the balance. We’ll never reach either one extreme or the other. (...) I’ve also felt very strongly that we needed a much better understanding of who we are and where we came from. We need answers to those questions in order to get our bearings toward a successful long-term future, that means a future for ourselves, our species and for the rest of life. (...) We have a kind of resistance toward honest self-understanding as a species and I think that resistance is due in part to our genetic history. And now, can we overcome it? I think so.” - Amira

“There was this American physiologist who was asked if Mary’s bodily ascent from Earth to Heaven was possible. He said,“I wasn’t there; therefore, I’m not positive that it happened or didn’t happen; but of one thing I’m certain: She passed out at 10,000 meters.” - Amira

+1 for Feyerabend, anything goes: science as mythology within experimental constraints http://www.marxists.org/referen... - Adriano