I really shouldn’t post this . . .
You might actually look at it, and that will be bad. Worse, posting may generate more attention and more traffic. But I’m thinking that maybe Christmas light-lookers aren’t hanging out here with us.
This is the spectacle that nearly blinded us as we turned onto the block for Pam’s and Jam’s Christmas Eve party.
They’ve been living near this since Thanksgiving.
I am thinking they would rather have Carole for their neighbor.
dear clusterflock
In what contexts, if any, are sanctity or the idea or possibility of sanctity valuable?
image out of context
from the moderated comments
she’s dyslexic that’s why she have this problem…and I understand every word she says…she’s a good woman…and if this crazy did this fkn comment about Cher is cause don’t have a life…if people wouldn’t understand what she says she wouldn’t have so many followers…and she have around all the people that love her so I guess….that comment…is nothing for her…
tweet of the day
Jeff Altman: Las Vegas 1962
via Devour
Did Dropping Acid Make Steve Jobs More Creative?
Slate Magazine is discussing the question, citing several experiments during the 50′s and 60′s that seem to point to LSD as a catalyst for innovation and creative thinking:
Taken as a whole, the studies suggested that people who are creative to begin with may experience a slight increase in inspiration or insight during and after an acid trip. That’s not true for non-artistic types, although psychologists did find that most participants thought they got more creative on LSD, regardless of what the tests actually showed…
Despite the relative paucity of rigorous scientific data, Steve Jobs—who once suggested that Microsoft products would be better if Bill Gates “had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger“—is far from alone in his belief. Francis Crick reportedly claimed to have envisioned the structure of DNA during an acid trip. John Lennon attributed the Beatles’ album Revolver to the group’s acid use.
Connecting the dots, the author doesn’t seem convinced by the studies, but it’s still a fascinating idea. Jobs was obviously a visionary, predicting technologies years or sometimes decades before they would be fully realized by Apple (this 1996 interview on NPR’s Fresh Air seems to include prediction for both the iPad and Apple TV). That’s either serendipitous prescience or the product of some very constructive acid trips (or more probably, a combination of both). Either way, it reminded me of something Deron once shared (or maybe a book he was reading) that discussed the proposition that human culture evolved through the use of hallucinogens. Humans have had the same DNA for something like 250,000 years, yet only developed complex societies and culture in the last 15,000 or so – Steve Jobs just took it all a massive step further.
from the archives: April 28, 2006
I always wondered why Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown decided to visit Israel and hang out with Ariel Sharon. Tonight, while eating Country Fried Kalebone™ at phATLanta’s Soul Vegetarian restaurant on N. Highland Avenue, I finally found the answer.
headline of the day
Humans and Neanderthals had sex, but not very often
‘In this study, all they had to do was introduce competition for resources and summer camp became Lord of the Flies’
Some of the Eagles boys discovered the Rattlers’ flag standing unguarded on the baseball field. They discussed what to do and decided it should be ripped from the ground. Once they had it, a possession of the enemy, a symbol of their tribe, they decided to burn it. They then put its scorched remains back in place and sang Taps. Later, the Rattlers saw the atrocity and organized a raid in which they stole the Eagles’ flag and burned it as payback. When the Eagles discovered the revenge burning, the leader issued a challenge – a face off. The two leaders then met with their followers watching and prepared to fight, but the scientists intervened. That night, the Rattlers dressed in war paint and raided the Eagles’ cabins, turning over beds and tearing apart mosquito netting. The staff again intervened when the two groups started circling and gathering rocks. The next day, the Rattlers painted one of the Eagle boy’s stolen blue jeans with insults and paraded it in front of the enemy’s camp like a flag. The Eagles waited until the Rattlers were eating and conducted a retaliatory raid and then ran back to their cabin to set up defenses. They filled socks with rocks and waited. The camp staff, once again, intervened and convinced the Rattlers not to counterattack. The raids continued, and the interventions too, and eventually the Rattlers stole the Eagles knives and medals. The Eagles, determined to retrieve them, formed an organized war party with assigned roles and planned tactical maneuvers. The two groups finally fought in open combat. The scientists broke up the fights. Fearing the two tribes might murder someone, they moved the groups’ camps away from each other.
The story of two groups of boys, under the supervision of psychologists, left to fend for themselves, in Oklahoma’s Robber’s Cave State Park in the 1950s.
(via Aaron Cohen at kottke, and the browser)
It was almost as if there was a secret world of pronouns that existed outside our awareness
COOK: What are some of the more unusual “texts” you have applied this technique to?
PENNEBAKER: Some of the more unusual texts have been my own. There is something almost creepy about analyzing your own emails, letters of recommendation, web pages, and natural conversations.
COOK: And what have you found?
PENNEBAKER: One of the most interesting results was part of a study my students and I conducted dealing with status in email correspondence. Basically, we discovered that in any interaction, the person with the higher status uses I-words less (yes, less) than people who are low in status. The effects were quite robust and, naturally, I wanted to test this on myself. I always assumed that I was a warm, egalitarian kind of guy who treated people pretty much the same.
I was the same as everyone else. When undergraduates wrote me, their emails were littered with I, me, and my. My response, although quite friendly, was remarkably detached — hardly an I-word graced the page. And then I analyzed my emails to the dean of my college. My emails looked like an I-word salad; his emails back to me were practically I-word free.
One of half a dozen subjects discussed in an interview with James Pennebaker, chair of the department of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, on his work with the hidden world of pronouns.
(thanks, Andrew)
from the comments
You know Alabama is in that mix. Old-timey Church of Christ preachers were sedate compared to Penecostal Holiness. I did a good bit of visiting when I was growing up. It scared me to death, thrillingly. I remember the summer swelter, a bare lightbulb on a long cord, speaking in tongues. Sweat-soaked shirts, thrashing, a man marking a blonde toddler’s head with “holy oil.” I held myself perfectly still, head bowed, hands clenched, watching. “Get me out of this,” I prayed. But the next day, I ran for the neighbor’s car. From sighs, disapproval, disappointment, from undone and unsaid. Toward the too blistering too much.
Racists now in need of a new set of jokes
If your heritage is non-African, you are part Neanderthal, according to a new study in the July issue of Molecular Biology and Evolution. Discovery News has been reporting on human/Neanderthal interbreeding for some time now, so this latest research confirms earlier findings.
Early morning conversation
Daryl: Germans like bananas.
Cindy: How do you know?
Daryl: I saw a show about Germans and bananas.
quote out of context
From this paper you can surmise a bit about the origins of religion, the seen and the unseen, and the demand for conspiracy theories, in addition to robot vacuum cleaners.
things I heard at A-Kon, day three
Don’t they all look so creepy?
Hey, trolls! Happy 6/12!
Do you know where there is a family restaurant?
Sleeping in the forest like a mother fucker
Man, that white girl ass to me grotesque, brother
He’s one of the only people who likes girls who’s ever been to our house
Yeah, pulling Fritos out of your pants is quite a feat
things I heard at A-Kon, day two
There’s a bathroom on every floor.
I’ll see you later, Sugar.
Sky bridge is this way.
I’m just chilling with some other badass cos players.
Just open your eyes, tilt your head back, and then you can shake until they are in.
If he’s really old he’s not going to.
Oh, she’s lost.
The new one is disgusting.
You just took all of the eggs.
Will you stop being gay?
I didn’t mean to be deceitful.
I hear people are talking about me everywhere, it’s weird.
That’s not normal but I’m not scared of it.
I’m not peeing, I’m blowing my load right now.
Don’t you see my lightsaber is really attracted to you?
things I heard at A-Kon, day one
Come into the light.
Now my t-shirt is worth something.
Well, it’s bad because I have red hair again.
Siam vs. Mexico
From The Saddest Music in the World. Guy Maddin (2003).
“The singers are giving us a sad peek into child burial customs ‘down Mexico way’.”
“The Mexican mama is being very firm with her dead infant.
“Now go away, she wails
You are dead
Don’t sneak in at night
to nurse from my breast
That milk
is only for the living
“To Canadian ears, that may sound harsh.”
from the comments
I just have to comment on that speaker on the wall there–the kind with the fabric grill in it that looks like the front of those fucking ancient “furniture” TVs. I always think of dust pouring out of them with the sound. That’s why they have to put the flowers up on a pedestal that looks like “and a special thanks to Griffith Brothers’ Funeral Home for the lovely floral Ah-dornment brought to this Sunday Service.”
This here is scarecrow country
Since a few years ago, when I started properly trying to get to know the part of rural Britain where I live, instead of just repeatedly driving from my house to B&Q, Starbucks, Borders and Sainsbury’s and missing all the interesting bits, I’ve taken photographs of around 300 scarecrows – or “mawkins”, as they’re known here in Norfolk. In order to do this, I’ve got off trains before my scheduled stop and made myself late for meetings, almost been run over at least three times, and put my life at risk trespassing on a variety of East Anglian allotments. I’ve snapped scarecrows who look like floating ghosts, scarecrows who look like futuristic horse people from outer space, scarecrows with their own pet scarecrow foxes, chav scarecrows, disco scarecrows, scarecrows with drawn-on gnashing teeth that could haunt your dreams more than any George A Romero film.
Precession of the Equinoxes
The thing that caused everyone to freak out because their astrological signs had changed is one of the more fascinating stories in the history of intellectual evolution. That thing is called precession of the equinoxes, and precession is one of those phenomena that is simultaneously invisible and obvious, observable and hidden.
Let’s start with the technicalities and move to the history of it.
In astronomy, axial precession is a gravity-induced, slow and continuous change in the orientation of an astronomical body’s rotational axis. In particular, it refers to the gradual shift in the orientation of Earth’s axis of rotation, which, like a wobbling top, traces out a pair of cones joined at their apices in a cycle of approximately 26,000 years. The term “precession” typically refers only to this largest secular motion; other changes in the alignment of Earth’s axis — nutation and polar motion — are much smaller in magnitude.
So, precession is essentially the planetary equivalent of the wobble in a top as it spins.
If you carve the horizon into twelve roughly equivalent sections, each year, at the equinoxes, the sun will appear to rise in one and set in its opposite. Because of the wobble in the axis of the earth, the section of the sky the sun appears to rise and set in will shift very slowly over a period of roughly 2,160 years. This is the basis of astrology, as various civilizations applied meaning to the constellations they saw in each section. More interestingly, I think, our tracking of it appears to be the basis of astronomy.
To begin to notice that tracking takes time. To fully understand the cycle, and be able to project it forwards and backwards, to mark the passage of time in the relative movement of the stars, would take hundreds, if not thousands, of years — observation, measurement, notation. Once a culture had an awareness of that pattern, no matter on what scale, it could begin to find a place for itself, and make a story out of it, and because we are human, of course, that is what we did.
If you are interested in this subject, and are comfortable with an approach equal parts academic and poetic, you might enjoy Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechen’s Hamlet’s Mill. It shows glimpses of precession’s possible influence throughout the history of art, an astronomical code for our place in the universe embedded in language.
I’d buy that app.
Fuck it I’ve heard enough, I’m going to make some killer android app that listens to every word you hear and uses Google’s voice recognition shit and some semantic networks and logistic regression crap and fucking starts chirping at you whenever it detects someone is hitting on you, make it look like an incoming call from captain obvious or something. It make take a while to accumulate enough training data to detect every subtle hint but it should pick this one up pretty easily. #
One of the 5,661 comments on From Male Redditors: What are some hints females gave you, but you didn’t get them until after you had your chance?
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Easter ’66
“PBS will never be defunded.”
“Proof:”
