What I see in different shades of gray, from behind my reading glasses
If you enjoy the site Improbable Research, and think the Ig Nobel Prizes are fun, mark your calendars for the live webcast on Sep 12 for the 2013 Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony & Lectures. Supported by Nobel Laureates:
in addition to the awarding of the 2013 Ig Nobel Prizes, the ceremony will include a variety of momentously inconsequential events. Among them: World premiere of “THE BLONSKY DEVICE“
Christopher Smith reviews a book by Isabel Hofmeyr, titled “Gandhi’s Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading”.
The selection and arrangement of extracts in the Indian Opinion, as well as the pamphlets that Gandhi published, served to create a rough surface—in contrast to the smooth macadam of industrialization—that would help readers slow down and contemplate what they were reading. The content that Gandhi offered in his publications was meaty and aimed at promoting the cause of satyagraha. News stories and excerpts from authors such as Ruskin, Tolstoy, and Thoreau, whose work Gandhi saw as essential to the ethics of satyagraha, served to form a slow, attentive community that could resist the empire’s industrial pressure for speed.
Hours of goodness on Kevin Ahern’s site – music, limericks & poems, if such things take your fancy. Videos like this make me think I would have loved to learn stuff such as Gluconeogenesis if a teacher had made it as interesting! 🙂 Who says education, music & fun can’t go together?
Take a look at this 34 minute documentary by Werner Herzog on the consequences of texting while driving.
A public service announcement, showing people how to use the new instruments, when rotary phones were introduced to replace operator services. [HT David Weinberger]
The easiest (and most common way) to discredit someone is to label them “delusional”. History is replete with such examples – you may even know someone. The implications can be devastating when applied in a medical context.
The new version of the psychiatrists’ diagnostic manual (DSM-5) has redefined “delusion”:
No longer are psychiatrists asked to decide whether the patient has “a false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained despite what almost everyone else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary”. A wordy and unhelpful definition that has so many logical holes you could drive a herd of unicorns through it.
Instead, the new definition of delusions describes them as fixed beliefs that are unswayed by clear or reasonable contradictory evidence, which are held with great conviction and are likely to share the common themes of psychosis: paranoia, grandiosity, bodily changes and so on.
Some people pay attention to the detail, & others to the bigger picture. Which one are you? Find out.
Christof Koch accompanied a team of physicists, psychologists, brain scientists and clinicians to the Drepung Monastery in the quiet town of Mundgod, Karwar, in southern India, at the invitation of the Dalai Lama. He compares the Western mode of education & life with what the Buddhist monks learn:
We prefer to be distracted by external stimuli, conversations, radio, television or newspapers. Desperate not to be left alone within our mind, to avoid having to think, we turn to our constant electronic companions to check for incoming messages.
Yet here we had His Holiness, a 77-year-old man, who sat during six days, ramrod straight for hours on end, his legs tucked under his body, attentively following our arcane scholarly arguments. I have never experienced a single man, and an entire community, who appeared so open, so content, so happy, constantly smiling, yet so humble, as these monks who, by First World standards, live a life of poverty, deprived of most of the things we believe are necessary to live a fully realized life. Their secret appears to be mind control.
Ricke Kress of Southern Gardens has high hopes for his secret plot of test orange trees, some of which are genetically modified. In five years or so, with regulatory approval, some modified trees could be the first to produce juice for sale.
+JP Rangaswami calls out the ungentlemanly conduct during the last Ashes test match, but his message is broader:
Spirit matters.. ….when change is brought about, it is important to remember the core values of that which is being changed, so that they don’t change.