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Author: tom
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links for march 09
- Archive of old posts on psychology and advertising on mindhacks.com
- Moonrise and moonset times for UK
- E-prime and the imperialist razor, part I, Part II
- YouTube: Lowkey – Live Palestine
- xkcd correlation
- mindhacks.com Patient scanned while in PVS wakes up and tell’s her story
- Nick Hunt Scrutiny
- Nick Hunt on the Freak Diaspora
- 5m sea level rise and then its Sheffield-on-Sea?
- YouTube: Dude transports 22 bricks on his head
- YouTube: Sad Kermit – Creep
- At the introductory of newspapers: “complaints of the “sullen silence” in coffee houses, because everyone was reading newspapers rather than talking to each other” (from comments on ‘Facebook causes Cancer’ scare on mindhacks.com)
- ‘The interoceptive Pavlovian stimulus effects of caffeine.’
- cheatneutral.com (watch the video)
- Sourceforge AGG photo gallery generator does batch resizing
- Clay Shirky on the future of newspapers (they haven’t got one)
- ‘I can’t see anything when I close my eyes. Apparently, other people can. I didn’t realize that I was weird in this respect until I was 29.’
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Technology and mental states
Tanya Gold gave up computers and mobile phones for a week. She reports ‘Life seemed slower, and slightly more rewarding’.
These electronic toys are skilled at making you believe you are achieving things – working or interacting with those strange things I think are called other people. They give you the illusion of occupation and purpose. But it is false. You do nothing. You fritter and buzz and beep and shout “I’m in Swindon!”, all the way to the grave.
But she picked back up her mobile phone, and logged back on to facebook I’m sure. Maybe, like Oliver Burkeman says, we like feeling busy and the self-importance (and distraction) that it brings.
I also like being busy, and without a certain amount of freneticism I don’t get as much done. But I also like the mental breathing space of not having a mobile phone, or not feeling like I need to check my email. I think technology can make us smarter and happier, and if people constantly twitter or check their email or whatever I think it is probably because they like things like that. But there is a trade-off, a state of mind that is lost when you adopt the continuous partial attention mode. The conundrum is how to get the benefits of energy withouty the costs of loss-of-focus (or, from the other perspective, how to keep the benefits of calm while still being in touch and efficient). Answers on a postcard please…
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The psychology of coffee
I do not do research on why people have a favourite coffee mug. I do research on fundamental mechanisms of learning and decision making, and how they are built into our brains. I was on the Today programme discussing the psychology of coffee last week and I mentioned favourite mugs (you can listen to what I said here, or read it in this Telegraph article which quotes me from that programme). I was asked to be on the Today programme because of an article I wrote in 2003, Psychology in the Coffee Shop. This was a light review and opinion piece about all the ways in which psychological theory intersects with the experience of drinking a cup of coffee. It is this article that comes up as the first hit if you google “psychology” and “coffee”.
This is my opinion, briefly, on favourite mugs: coffee and tea contain caffeine, which promotes dopamine release. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter, a chemical messenger in the brain, known to be intimately connected with learning and reward. The dopamine release brought about by a caffeinated drink hacks our natural learning mechanisms, causing them to seek to identify and repeat whatever is consistently associated with that dopamine release. This is why rituals, such as favourite coffee mugs, develop.
Before appearing on the Today programme I did ask myself if I should really be speaking to the media about something which is really no more than an entertaining opinion. I decided I should, partly because my research does cover the wider topics of learning and the development of preferences, partly because although it is just an opinion it is my professional, theory-motivated, opinion as a psychologist, and partly because I wanted my grandmother to be able to listen to me on radio 4.
I’ve been surprised by how much interest there is in the “why you have a favourite mug” aspect of what I’ve said. Several people have got in touch to ask about “my research into how coffee tastes out of favourite mugs”, or to find out how I “proved that coffee tastes better from your favourite mug”.
I have done no research into whether coffee does or does not taste better in your favourite mug. I am taking this as an accepted fact, for which I have offered a theoretical explanation. I regard the taste of the coffee from a favourite mug as something people can verify for themselves, without needing a psychologist to tell them. We all know that the drink is chemically the same from whatever mug it is served in, but yet people develop preferences. This is because taste and enjoyment are not merely about objective measurements, such as temperature, chemical composition and whatnot, but about psychological factors as well, such as the history of learning experiences that each individual has had.
Arguably, it might be something of a waste of public money if I spent my professional life asking people about their favourite coffee mugs. It is not clear that things such as this are interesting in themselves, or that anyone needs to have their choice of beverage receptacle validated by the latest research in psychological science. Despite the impression formed by some in the media, this is not what psychologists do. We investigate the fundamental principles of the operation of the mind, how they are played out in behaviour and how they are based in the brain. Sometimes we even make some progress in our understanding, and then are in the position to give a deeper perspective on some phenomenon with which everyone is familiar. This, I hope, is the case with the favourite coffee mug example.
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links for feb 2009
- Winograd, E., Peluso, J. P., & Glover, T. A. (1998). Individual differences in susceptibility to memory illusions. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 12(7), S5 – S27
- Panic over: Malthus was wrong (the Economist)
- aerial photo of inaugeration day
- YouTube The Sling Shot Man
- ‘Rather than trying to boil these truths down into something simple enough to be communicated scientifically, let’s use artistic tools to communicate a more complex and engaging truth, and celebrate our minds as the messy, mysterious, beautiful things they really are’
- ‘Expropriation of the commons was, in other words, not a one-time event at the dawn of capitalism. And Malthus was the economist rationalizing and justifying the cutting off, or another way to put it is the rendering scarce, of the means of subsistence for the laboring poor, in the name of thrift and self-control and the efficiency of private property.’
- ‘fevered commitment – perceived failure – diagnosis – acceptance – return to core – re-dedication. If I were to look back at the 1200+ blog posts I’ve written over the past three years, I am pretty sure that I’d see the same cycle repeated, fractal-like, in everything I do.’
- Drug addiction isn’t just phramacology, even in rats
- Wikipedia: Mind Hacks
- Cory Doctorow: Writing in the Age of Distraction
- pictures for sad children
- Prison life: control and restraint techniques
- ‘authentic tidings of invisible things’ From ‘The Excursion’
By William Wordsworth - Why climate change isn’t about the environment (via dan)
- Potlatch: the rise of the economic playground
- Sir Humphrey teaches questionnaire design
- alittlepoison.com: edith (a beautiful song)
- Edward Sterton called me ‘depressingly reductive’ on the today programme
There is a fundamental power asymmetry in education. Teachers understand what they are teaching, learners do not. Learners, by definition, cannot have a full appreciation of what they are about to learn, of its value and of how it will change them. If they did, they would not be in the position of learners. The only way you can ignore this is if you are mislead into accepting the banking metaphor of education (education as information transmission, teachers as content providers, students as receptacles to be filled).
One implication of this power asymmetry is that the authority and responsibility of the teacher cannot be abdicated. Students should not be left to ‘decide for themselves’. Sure, students can pursue their own path of inquiry, but teachers should be there to persuade and guide them. For a teacher to pretend that they are letting students ‘make up their own minds’ is simply a denial of their role, an obfuscation. Of course it is important that people can decide for themselves, but students’ autonomy is not icreased by a lack of teacher manipulation of their choices. All our choices are conditioned by our past, our environment and by other people. Free choices are still conditioned choices.
A discussion of this in relation to the morality of manipulation is provided by Buss, S. (2005). Valuing Autonomy and Respecting Persons: Manipulation, Seduction, and the Basis of Moral Constraints. Ethics, 115(2), 195-235. doi: 10.1086/426304. Buss only touches on the topic of education in a footnote (no. 71) but the implications of the general argument for education are clear: we cannot avoid affecting other people, manipulation without informed consent of their free chocies is inevitable, and so we cannot pretend that it is possible for teachers to avoid making choices for their students, or that full informed consent of students in the content of their education is desirable or possible.
Now Then is an independent Sheffield-based arts and community magazine. They are monthly, good chaps and have an out of date website. It is part of the Opus Productions media empire. For the first issue of the magazine, last year, I wrote them an article about something that has interested me for a long time: small worlds. Specifically I’d been thinking about social networks and what the Watts and Strogatz small-world result had to tell us about them. The article is now here, should you wish to read it. It is pretty upbeat. I think if I had more room and less inclination to try to be positive I would include something about how we tend to organise our social worlds so that it seems, from the ‘ground-level’, that we are talking to everyone important, but in actually fact we are ignoring — completely estranged from — most of the people we are physically close to, insulated in comforting small worlds.
See also bridging and bonding social capital, ‘60 Million People You’d Never Talk To Voting For Other Guy’, We Live in Small Worlds
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A journey to the Sinking Lands
Dan Box is travelling to Carteret, a set of island in the south pacific. This year the islands are being evacuated due to sea-level rises. You can read about his trip and the world’s first climate change refugees at journeytothesinkinglands.wordpress.com.
Sociological and political attention to what is actually happening on the ground has invariably located the causes of hunger not in an absolute scarcity but in socially-generated scarcity arising from imbalances of power that deny people access to food and water…However such is the power of “scarcity” to colonise the future that even those who, quite properly, locate today’s scarcities in political conflict, frequently crumble when confronted with projections of future population growth, setting aside the insights of political economy in favour of Malthusian metaphors that emphasise numbers over power relations as the explanation for future shortages. In doing so, they grant Malthusianism an explanatory power that they would actively deny it when applied to the present and the past. Instead of the past being a guide to
future action, the future (implausibly) becomes a guide to the present…Yet future crises are likely to be rooted in the same dynamics in which they are rooted today…If society wants to prepare for future resource crises, it would therefore be more prudent to look to the present rather than to some theoretical Malthusian model of the future. The future will grow out of the present, not out of society suddenly turning Malthusian. The better way of dealing with “future crisis” is not imagining a future Malthusian world which bears no relationship to what exists now or ever has existed, and then imagining how to stave off that hypothetical Malthusian world, but rather dealing with current scarcities now on the realistic assumption that what causes scarcity today is going to go on causing scarcity in the future
From “Scarcity” as Political Strategy Reflections on Three Hanging Children by Nicholas Hildyard, paper presented at “Scarcity and the Politics of Allocation” conference, Institute of Development Studies, University of Brighton, UK, 6-7 June 2005 (thanks Josie!)
From: complaintresponse@bbc.co.uk
To: tom [at] idiolect.org.uk
Thank you for your e-mail.
We note your disappointment at our decision not to broadcast an appeal by the Disasters Emergency Committee to raise funds for Gaza.
We decided not to broadcast the DEC’s public appeal because we wished to avoid any risk of compromising public confidence in the BBC’s impartiality in the context of covering a continuing news story where issues of responsibility for civilian suffering and distress are intrinsic to the story and remain highly contentious. We also could not be confident that the aid resulting from audience donations could reach those it was intended for at a time of a fragile ceasefire and sporadic border access. We will of course continue to report the humanitarian story in Gaza.
The BBC’s director-general Mark Thompson has therefore explained the decision in more detail in a number of television and radio broadcasts and online at our Editors’ blog. Please follow the link to read his explanation in full:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2009/01/bbc_and_the_gaza_appeal.html
Please be assured that we have registered your comments on our audience log. This is the internal report of audience feedback which we compile daily for all programme makers and commissioning executives within the BBC, and also their senior management. It ensures that your points, and all other comments we receive, are circulated and considered across the BBC.
Once again, thank you for taking the time to contact us.
Regards
BBC Complaints
____________________________www.bbc.co.uk/complaints
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Guest-blogging on Learning
I am guest-blogging about learning over at schoolofeverything.com. Here is my introductory post, and posts so far:
#1 Learning makes itself invisible.
#2 Learning Should be Fun
#3 The Straight Dope on Learning Styles
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Decline and Fall
‘Decline and Fall’ is the latest computer game from DO Arts. It’s a sim/civilisation game, but with a twist.
The game is half massively multiplayer on-line role playing game, half resource management, sim-city/Civilisation empire-building. Teams of players manage their way through the running of virtual civilisations, choosing to cooperate or compete as they so desire. They found colonies, invent new technologies, build monuments and foster communities as they balance the demands of their population’s desires with the threats and opportunities of contact with their neighbours.
The twist comes after approximately 10 hours of game play-time, when the resources of the virtual world begin to run out, and all the player’s civilisations face extinction.
Warnings of the radical shift in the game’s parameters are built into the game, but many players choose not to heed them, preferring to continue to expand and compete according to the boundless growth model that the start of the game seems to accord to. Typical game-world scenarios move through a depressing sequence of ignorance -> denial -> resource-wars -> massive population decline. Players recriminate each other, report dissatisfaction with the design of the game-world and the inherant unfairness of the game’s parameters.
But ‘Decline and Fall’ was never designed to be fair. It was produced in Italy, a collaboration between award-winning game designers DO Arts and Edwardo Gibbone, a social-psychologist at the University of Bologna. Gibbone’s team are now studying the game outcomes as teams of players sign up from around the world.
“We wanted to investigate how the players managed the collective impact of enforced energy-use restriction. To do this we had to get them hooked on one way of managing their societies, and then see how they reacted to a change in this environment.” says Gibbone
“We designed the game-play to be open enough to afford multiple different strategies in response to shortages in fossil fuels, clean air and water, and food simultaneously with catastrophic climate change and a population explosion large enough to tax environmental carrying capacity even without the other pressures. In doing so we hope to study the psychology of groups in crisis.”
Existing research on the psychology of trust has been restricted to relatively unrealistic experimental situations on the one hand, and non-repeatable real-life observation on the other. The ‘Decline and Fall’ project aims to established exactly what conditions or behaviours are required to allow groups of people facing individual threats to cooperate.
Specific theories to be tested by Gibbone’s research include the importance of trade links, democratic political organisation, free media, cultural exchange and technological development.
“The dynamics of the game are designed so as that painless transition to low-energy use societies is possible at all points of the game, even the final hours. Winning strategies aren’t hard to identify, in theory there are multiple routes to success — but the level of coordination required stops most groups of players from achieving it”
The project is due to complete in 2012, when an estimated 400,000 players from around the world will have played ‘Decline and Fall’. Gibbone is due to make a presentation of the results and the implications for real world civilisation at the World Climate Change Conference in Geneva that year.
Early reports from teams playing the game have been unpromising. When asked how successful teams of players have faced down their global crisis Gibbone just says “We’ll let you know when it happens”.
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links for january 09
- Kinki acrobats
- ‘The Island In the Wind’ how one danish island community was mobilised to become carbon neutral’
- ‘disappointed by corduroy’
- ‘Men’s sexual orientation recognised in a fraction of a second’
- Times Higher: the six purposes of referencing: ‘acknowledgement; attribution; tracing; validation; protection against accusations of misconduct; and tangential substantive commentary’
- ‘the visual system has access to its own noisiness and sets thresholds accordingly’
- Evidence that perception and categorisation by race is not innate nor inevitable
- David Seah’s The Printable CEO (productivity/motivation aid)
- YouTube footage of the 2004 tsunami in Thailand (more here)
- Using the force in visual search (where force approximates to pre-attentive perception, I guess)
- Jay Cross talks on informal learning speaking truth about learning, knowledge and e-education
- Economist: Detecting earthquakes with laptops
- Mindhacks.com Better Living Through Neuroscience: The Adaptive Stereo
- New Yorker aticle by Malcolm Gladwell In the air – who says big ideas are rare
- Woody Allen short story: The Whore of Mensa
- ‘minimising the political impact of energy descent is going to be as big a job as getting to a carbon-free future’
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books read in 2005
As requested by Cat, the books I read in 2005. Strong recommendations in bold.
An Ordinary Person’s Guide To Empire. Arundhati Roy (2004). Jan
A Thousand Years of Non-linear history. Manuel de Landa (1997). Feb
(presumably I read some other books Feb-May but I’ve lost the list)
The Origins of Virtue, Matt Ridley (1994) 18 June
Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi (2003) 20 June
Beyond the Ballot: 57 Democratic Innovations From Around the World, Graham Smith (2005) 29 June
The Great Divorce, CS Lewis (1946) 30 June
The Amber Spyglass, Philip Pullman (2000) 3 July
Iron in the Soul, J.P. Sartre (1949) 21 July
Fountain at the Centre of the World, Rob Newman (2003) 4 August
Things Can Only Get Better, John O’Farrell (1999) 5 August
Fierce Dancing, CJ Stone (1996) 7 August
It’s a Lot Like Dancing: Aikido Journey, Terry Dobson, Riki Moss, and Jan E. Watso (1994) 8 August
Broke Through Britain, Peter Montimer (1999) 20 August
The Perfect Storm, Sebastian Junger (1998) 26 August
Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell (1933) 2 Sept
The No-nonsense guide to the arms trade, Gideon Burrows (2002) 2 Sept
The Corporation, Joel Baklan (2005)
Toxic Sludge is Good for You, John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton (2004)
We Know What You Want, Martin Howard (2005)
The Hidden Persuaders, Vance Packard (1959)
The Thought Gang, Tibor Fischer (1994) 8 Nov
Diary, Chuck Palahniuk (2003) 9 Nov
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami (1997) 17 Nov
The Next Fifty Year, John Brokman (ed, 2003) 29 Nov
Willing Slaves, Madeleine Bunting (2004)
Liar’s Poker, Michael Lewis (1990)
Cassini Division, Ken McLeod (1998) 23 Dec
The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz (2004)
Party’s Over – Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies, Richard Heinberg (2005)
List for 2008 here. Top three from 2005: The Corporation, Paradox of Choice, A Thousand Years of Non-linear History.
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books read in 2008
Following Matt, and after being asked by Tom, here is the list of books I read in 2008. The ones I strongly recommend are in bold.
Middlemarch, George Eliot (1871) 17 Jan
The Improvisation Game, Chris Johnston (2005) 26 Jan
Prisoner’s Dilemma, William Poundstone (1992) 2 Feb
Secrets of Creation: Vol 1: The Mystery of the Prime Numbers, Matthew Watkins (2008, proofs) 5 Feb
Brainwashing: The Science of Thought Control, Kathleen Taylor (2004) 7 Feb
The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein (2007) 17 Feb
Breakdown of Will, George Ainslie (2001) 12 March
Meditations, Marcus Aurelius (180) March
Kluge, Gary Marcus (2008) 8 April
V, Thomas Pynchon (1963) April
The Map of Love, Ahdaf Soueif (2000) 23 May
Permutation City, Greg Egan (1994) 10 June
Meaning Medicine and the “Placebo Effect”, Daniel Moerman (2002) 8 June
Fragile Things, Neil Gaiman (2006) 15 June
Wonder Boys, Michael Chabon (1995) 21 June
Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance, Atul Gawande (2007) 28 June
My Uncle Oswald, Roald Dahl (1979) 28 June
Sin City: Hell and Back, Frank Miller (2005) 6 July
Divided Kingdom, Rupert Thomson (2005) 18 July
Micromotives and Macrobehaviour, Thomas Schelling (1978) 15 July
Nights at the Circus, Angela Carter (1984) 25 July
Standloper, Alan Garner (1996) 17 August
Impro for Storytellers, Kieth Johnstone (1994/99) 18 August
Sight Unseen, Goodale & Milner (2004) 24 August
The Wretched of the Earth, Franz Fannon (1963) 23 August
Neither Victims Nor Executioners, Albert Camus (1946) 24 August, r.
The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon (1965) 30 August
The Virago Book of Fairy Tales, Ed. Angela Carter (1990) 31 August
The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami (1994) 7 September, r.
Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktore E. Frankl (1945/1959) 8 September
The Science of Self-Control, Howard Rachlin (2000) 18 September
Al Qaeda and What it Means to be Modern, John Grey (2003) 5 October
A Scanner Darkly, Philip K. Dick (1977) 16 October, r.
Full Facts Book of Cold Reading, Ian Rowland (2002), 20 October
The Elfish Gene, Mark Barrowcliffe (2007), 25 October
Moominvalley in November, Tove Jansson (1971), 30 October
Nixon Under the Bodhi Tree, Kate Wheeler (ed., 2004), Nov
All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCathy (1992), 11 December
Active Vision, Findlay & Gilchrist (2003), 28 December
39 is a lot less that Matt’s 104, but I reckon my commute is about fifty minutes less than his, and its hard to read while cycling 🙂
It’s about 50-50 fiction/non-fiction, but I reckon I spent most of the time on non-fiction since it is slower going. My top two would be ‘The Shock Doctrine’ and ‘Sight-Unseen’. A top three is too hard.
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Waiting for the miracle
Baby, I’ve been waiting,
I’ve been waiting
Night and day
I didn’t see the time,
I waited half my life away
There were lots of invitations
And I know you sent me some,
But I was waiting
For the miracle,
For the miracle to come
Waiting for the Miracle, Leonard Cohen
Sometimes I don’t know where this dirty road is taking me
Sometimes I can’t even see the reason why
I guess I keep on gamblin’, lots of booze and lots of ramblin’
It’s easier than just a-waitin’ ’round to die
Waitin round to die, Townes Van Zandt (and the Be Good Tanyas)
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Living in London until February
I am living in London, around Russell Square, until the end of January. I will be desk-surfing two days a week at School of Everything in Bethnal Green, and I’m hoping to sort out three days a week at Birkbeck. My survival tactics for this stint in London are a) not to rush anywhere and b) ride a bike. If you’re about, get in touch.
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love with honour
The persecution of people because of their sexual orientation is every bit as unjust as that crime against humanity, apartheid. We must all be allowed to love with honour.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu
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links from november 2008
- ‘Are 21st century skills a solution to a problem that may not exist?’
- ‘Matt Webb’s 100 Head Cattle Drive 2008’
- Burmese blogger gets 20 years in jail
- Linda Stone’s notes on continuous partial attention
- ‘This “solargraph” shows the path taken by the sun as it travelled across the sky above the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol, UK, between 19 December 2007 and 21 June 2008’
- Action on climate change: Why Bother? ‘But there are sweeter reasons to plant that garden, to bother. At least in this one corner of your yard and life, you will have begun to heal the split between what you think and what you do, to commingle your identities as consumer and producer and citizen’
- Spoof New York Times from a better future
- ‘No matter how often is it repeated that religious faith is uniquely and by definition a matter of assent to propositions for which there is no evidence, this simply won’t do as a description’
- Jaron Lanier on homunculuis flexibility
- ‘And when did you last see your father?’ 1878
- I didn’t realise they had institutionalised this kind of regret
- Awesome fMRI wooden block puzzle (via Mindhacks.com)
The rust inside this kettle shows an emergent pattern that is typical of the self-organising dynamics of reaction-diffusion systems.
One example of self-organising dynamics is in the topographic map of ocular dominance columns in the visual cortex. These intricate maps display a fascinating combination and interplay of regularity and irregularity. Such patterns have been modelled by computational neuroscientists using the Kohonen algorithm and variants
Thanks for the picture Cat!
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Quote #233 “Whence then is evil?”
Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
David Hume, in Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1779), reporting an argument that he credits to Epicurus
I gave a talk on Wednesday at UFI in Sheffield entitled “Email: the technology and psychology of continuous partial attention”, which was a brief little intro to some of my thoughts about the psychology of email use (the phrase ‘continuous partial attention’ I owe to Linda Stone, whose thoughts on the matter are far more considered than mine). Here is the abstract from my talk:
What did you interrupt to read this? Chances are you were in the middle of something, or maybe several things, which you put on hold to find out what I’m going to talk about. I’m a research psychologist with an interest in technology, learning and communication. In my talk I’ll tell you why email has such a compulsive hold on people’s attention, how to spot true email addiction, why technology which helps you know less actually makes you smarter, and how there’s both good and bad in the multitasking habit. Now – what were you doing again?
Taking Liberties is an excellent documentary about the erosion of fundamental human rights under the Blair government. In the film, a surveillance systems sales person brings out the classic “If you’ve got nothing to hide you’ve got nothing to fear”. Now one of the many things wrong with this idea is that it focuses on the person about which things are known and obfuscates the entities that are doing the knowing. “nothing to hide” assumes that you are hiding your knowledge from a single, legitimate, authority, but the truth of the matter is that with privacy you will want to hide different things from different people. The problem with the “If you’ve got nothing to hide” argument is that it makes an assumption of guilt unless you can prove yourself innocent (by having nothing to hide), while simultaneously removing from the individual the ability to decide what defines guilt and innocence. It assumes a legitimate authority while simultaneously being part of dynamic that diminishes accountability, and thus legitimacy. There’s another form of this argument “If you’ve done nothing wrong you’ve nothing to fear”, which again sounds fair enough from the perspective of an authority, but if remember the history of crimes done by those in authority we need to see it from the perspective of the individual “If they do nothing wrong, you’ve nothing to fear!”. Why give government powers on the presumption that we can, and always, will be able to trust them not to abuse them? The recent history of these so called anti-terror laws shows that once powers these powers are given they will be used for quite different purposes from those which were invoked to justify their introduction.
Previously here: An open letter to Omar Deghayes, Why I want a charter for terrorists and criminals
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Quote #232
If only there were evil people somewhere committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago
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42 writers
www.42writers.com is “a powerful collection of essays, poems, and stories by 42 contemporary writers, including Ian Rankin, Philip Pullman and Ali Smith.”
We are relieved that the House of Lords have struck down the proposal to hold people without charge for 42 days, but the Home Secretary has made it clear that the Government may try to bring back this dangerous and unnecessary measure. Including new and published works, 42 Writers is a moving and thought-provoking anthology, and its themes of voicelessness, captivity and persecution will resonate with readers even after the political storm has passed
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links for October 2008
- ‘I gambled on my talent’
At 80, André Previn still has all the impish energy that won him four Oscars and five wives. - skrbl.com Online collaborative graffiti
- Alec Patton talks about the British Library exhibition he co-curated The Goldern Generation
- YouTube: Tim Minchin – If I Didn’t Have You
- YouTube: Tim Minchin – I am so fucking Rock (So Live)
- Windows Grep Search Utility search for text strings across multiple folders
- A clinical psychologists deals with true heartbreak
- Amy Mount has a blog: asmallamount.wordpress.com
- Programming Language Inventor OR serial killer?
- Gorden Brown uses anti-terror laws during banking crisis
- TED talk John Hodgman: A brief digression on matters of lost time
- Potlatch Representing a housing crash
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links for september 2008
- Clay Shirky says that our culture is just waking up from a TV bender
- Charlie Brooker is anhedonic
- Suw Charman
‘Breaking the email compulsion’ - Converting copy protected WMA to MP3 (actually I only did stage 1, then I put the burnt disk into iTunes and that was enough for me)
- ‘Video of Naomi Klein speech at Hands Off Iraqi Oil fundraiser’
- Dennett on the magic of consciousness ‘The tuned deck’
- ‘The man who outsmarted IQ’ Howard Gardner talks multiple intelligences with Harry Brighouse
- ‘Each one of us was harmed by being brought into existence….Creating new people is thus morally problematic.’
- The Big Huge Thesaurus
- two beautiful and alluring places
- classic NY Times article from 2004‘Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush’
- Merlin’s Charm of Making
- ‘The scam pulled by neo-liberals is very often to defend the market in normative terms (as the safeguard of freedom) and to analyse society in economic terms (as governed by rational self-interest).’
- ‘If you wanted to sum up the Enlightenment in one simple advance for humanity, it is that no civilised person now is expected to believe in witchcraft or to respect those who do.’
- ’60 Million People You’d Never Talk To Voting For Other Guy’
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Quote #231
A bit later, I remember, it seemed to me that I would die in the near future. In this critical situation, however, my concern was different from that of most of my comrades. Their question was, “Will we survive the camp? For, if not, all this suffering has no meaning.” The question which beset me was, “Has all this suffering, this dying around us, a meaning? For, if not, then ultimately there is no meaning to survival; for a life whose meaning depends upon such a happenstance – as whether one escapes or not – ultimately would not be worth living at all.
Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning (part 2, 1959)
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links for august 2008
- Irate emails from Giles Coren to subeditors
- Crookedtimber.org ‘the phrase “maximise profits” can’t be unpacked into a coherent decision rule’
- new yorker article about ancient european cave art
- unanswered questions about the 2001 anthrax scares
- I have solved the making DVDs out of AVIs problem and the solution is called DVD flick
- Optimise your journal article abstract for search engines
- Monbiot: ‘The US does not really have a foreign policy. It has a series of domestic policies which it projects beyond its borders’
- New Yorker: ‘Magic is the dramatization of explanation more than it is the engineering of effects.’
- Burke’s Law of Metadynamics (via interconnected)
- You Tube BBC interview with Philip Pullman about His Dark Materials and storytelling in general
- New Yorker ‘Pirahã undermines Noam Chomsky’s idea of a universal grammar’ (and is a good moral in the deep cultural biases that are worked into most of Western science’s behavioural tests)
- New Yorker: How ‘War and Peace’ works
- The Puzzle of Imaginative Resistence
- Turn on security in Gmail (via Ben Goldacre)
- Philippe Petit (“Man on Wire”) after the famous Twin Towers wirewalk
Categories
Chekhov’s Gun
If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don’t put it there
Anton Chekhov, from Gurlyand’s “Reminiscences of A. P. Chekhov”, in Teatr i iskusstvo 1904, No. 28, 11 July, p. 521