Eye movements reveal readers' wandering minds (Kafka: too engaging)
It's not just you…everybody zones out when they're reading. For a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, scientists recorded eye movements during reading and found that the eyes keep moving when the mind wanders—but they don't move in the same way as they do when you're paying attention.
[...]
Four undergraduate students at the University of Pittsburgh volunteered for the project. Each one came to the lab for a dozen or more one-hour reading sessions of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, chosen because it's "fairly easy but a little bit dry," says Reichle. "We started with Kafka's The Trial, but people found it too engaging.” While the student read the book on a screen, a computer tracked their eye movements. They were asked to push a button marked "Z" when they noticed themselves "zoning out." The computer also asked every few minutes if they'd just been paying attention or zoning out.
Pirates of Barbary: Corsairs, Conquests and Captivity in the Seventeenth-Century Mediterranean
Henrik Bering on Pirates of Barbary: Corsairs, Conquests and Captivity in the Seventeenth-Century Mediterranean by Adrian Tinniswood.
As career officers will tell you, drive, determination, and a willingness to try something new are the key requirements in a competitive world. This lesson has certainly been taken to heart by the Somali fishermen who, armed with Kalashnikovs and rpgs, have made a career switch to piracy. Starting out modestly around 2005, they are no longer content just to use small craft operating from the coast, but now employ mother ships which range as far from their home waters as the Seychelles.
In 2008, they captured a Ukrainian ship, the MV Faina, loaded with tanks and antiaircraft guns, which brought in a $3.2 million ransom. Soon after came the supertanker, the Sirius Star, which netted them $3 million. And one of President Obama's early actions in office in April 2009 was to order Navy Seals to kill three pirates who were holding hostage the captain of cargo ship Maersk Alabama in one of its lifeboats. Ironically, the ship was carrying relief supplies for Somalia.
In 2009, there were 217 pirate attacks, resulting in 47 captured ships and 867 captured crewmembers. The ransom business amounts to around $100 million a year.
On shore, a stock exchange operates where investors can put up the money for future operations. Backers abroad help designate what ships to attack, assess the value of the cargo, and supply the pirates' destination and course. The pirates also have access to sophisticated equipment. To check the genuineness of the air-dropped ransom money, they have counting machines of the same type used by Western banks.
As a result of their activities, insurance premiums have shot up. Many shipping companies avoid the Suez Canal and now send their vessels around the Horn of Africa, which adds to fuel costs. Others hire private security firms to go with their ships. A multinational force patrols the Gulf of Aden. But on several occasions, when patrol ships have captured pirates, they have had to release them again because no one wants to prosecute them, as they are likely to be stuck with them, once they have served their time (Somalia is regarded as too dangerous a place to which to repatriate them). This, in the words of Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, "sends the wrong signal." As a result of American pressure, in the first piracy case to come to trial in Europe, a Dutch court in June sentenced five Somali pirates to five years in jail, which shipping analysts see as unlikely to deter future attacks. Predictably, the pirates have asked for asylum and to have their families sent over upon their release. More sensible efforts to set up regional courts to prosecute captured pirates are ongoing.
An Amoral Manifesto: A Philosopher's Counter-Conversion
In a word, this philosopher has long been laboring under an unexamined assumption, namely, that there is such a thing as right and wrong. I now believe there isn't. … The long and the short of it is that I became convinced that atheism implies amorality; and since I am an atheist, I must therefore embrace amorality.
Impressive video of asteroid discovery from 1980-2010
This rules.
View of the solar system showing the locations of all the asteroids starting in 1980, as asteroids are discovered they are added to the map and highlighted white so you can pick out the new ones.
The final colour of an asteroids indicates how closely it comes to the inner solar system.
- Earth crossers are red
- Earth approachers (perihelion less than 1.3AU) are yellow
- All others are green
WWII air raids on Japan were so successful that it was hard to find suitable targets for the A-bombs
In World War I, it was the trenches that captured the imagination of poets. In World War II, it was aerial combat.
It is a question that Mr. Swift asks repeatedly in "Bomber County." The U.S. and Britain dropped 1.6 million tons of bombs on Germany, causing civilian casualties of more than one million and rendering as many as 7.5 million people homeless. The seven-month B-29 firebombing campaign against Japan organized by Curtis LeMay is estimated to have killed a half-million people and to have left five million more homeless. It was so successful that the Air Force had trouble finding suitable targets for the atomic bombings at the end of the war. The Japanese, it should be noted, had used strategic bombing as early as 1938 in China, and Germany launched its own vast air assault on England in 1940.
Jennifer Edwards: "I hate to be a kill-joy, but the vast majority of classical art pieces were designed as product placement ads paid for by monarchs and religious institutions. The Sistine Chapel is an advertisement, just like Shakespearean plays and Swan Lake - all were bought and paid for by the wealthy for a purpose."
"Two things fill my mind with ever renewed wonder and awe the more often and deeper I dwell on them," wrote Immanuel Kant, "the starry skies above me, and the moral law within me."
Where does moral law come from? What lies behind our sense of right and wrong? For millennia, there have been two available answers. To the devoutly religious, morality is the word of God, handed down to holy men in groves or on mountaintops. To moral philosophers like Kant, it is a set of rules to be worked out by reason, chin on fist like Rodin's thinker.
But what if neither is correct? What if our moral judgments are driven instead by more visceral human considerations? And what if one of those is not divine commandment or inductive reasoning, but simply whether a situation, in some small way, makes us feel like throwing up?
This is the argument that some behavioral scientists have begun to make: That a significant slice of morality can be explained by our innate feelings of disgust. A growing number of provocative and clever studies appear to show that disgust has the power to shape our moral judgments. Research has shown that people who are more easily disgusted by bugs are more likely to see gay marriage and abortion as wrong. Putting people in a foul-smelling room makes them stricter judges of a controversial film or of a person who doesn't return a lost wallet. Washing their hands makes people feel less guilty about their own moral transgressions, and hypnotically priming them to feel disgust reliably induces them to see wrongdoing in utterly innocuous stories.
Sartre: Conversations with a 'Bourgeois Revolutionary'
John Gerassi, Talking with Sartre: Conversations and Debates, edited and translated by John Gerassi (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 336 pages, $20.00, paperback.
"I want to know, Sartre, how a bourgeois like you—and you, Sartre, no matter how much you hate the bourgeoisie are still a bourgeois through and through—became a revolutionary." In this way, John Gerassi once informed an audience of Jean-Paul Sartre scholars and aficionados about what to expect from the 2,000-plus pages of edited transcripts of his conversations with Sartre, taped from 1970 to 1974 and recently deposited in the Yale University library. Although this remark is not included, Talking with Sartre distills those interviews into similar challenges from Gerassi, followed by Sartre's direct, spontaneous responses. No major political and literary figure was interviewed as often as was Sartre. And nothing else, including Simone de Beauvoir's 1974 interviews with Sartre, comes close to matching the vitality and intensity here.
It is difficult to imagine anyone other than Gerassi recording encounters like these with Sartre. They range over the whole of Sartre's life and work—literary, philosophical, political, and personal. Beneath their candor and intensity lie decades of familial loyalties (Gerassi’s father, Fernando, was a renowned painter in France and a Spanish Civil War Republican general much admired by Sartre), and there were political associations as well. In the mid-1960s, Gerassi persuaded Sartre to join the International War Crimes Tribunal, hosted by Bertrand Russell's Peace Foundation to investigate U.S.-sponsored atrocities in the Vietnam War. And in 1968, Gerassi, inspired by the earlier takeover of the University of Paris—a harbinger of revolution for both Sartre and Gerassi—led the student takeover of San Francisco State University.
Gerassi is now a professor of political science at the City University of New York (in Queens) and is the author of twelve books, including Sartre's biography, Jean-Paul Sartre: Hated Conscience of His Century. His knowledge of French radicalism at the time he conducted these interviews with Sartre was probably unequalled by any American, and his in-person study of radical movements worldwide (The Coming of the New International: An Anthology, 1971) added to his unquestioned credibility with Sartre. Gerassi is personally intrigued by Sartre's persistence in identifying himself as a writer even after 1968, when he also began to identify as a revolutionary, for whom everything is political.
To chart Sartre’s political development, Gerassi takes him through his relative political indifference to the Nazis in 1933, while Sartre was studying in Berlin, and comparable disinterest in the 1936 Popular Front movement in France, arguably the most important progressive movement in twentieth century France before 1968. Sartre only entered the political battlefield for the first time after the Second World War. These war years nonetheless contributed to his political evolution in ways not often noted. For instance, Sartre describes the transformation of his "bourgeois individualism" at seeing himself and his fellow war prisoners "working together for each other’s well-being...under the heel of their German captors."
Eternal Fascinations with the End: Why We're Suckers for Stories of Our Own Demise
Our pattern-seeking brains and desire to be special help explain our fears of the apocalypse.
Once again, the world is about to end. The latest source of doomsday dread comes courtesy of the ancient Mayans, whose calendar runs out in 2012, as interpreted by a cadre of opportunistic authors and blockbuster movie directors. Not long before, three separate lawsuits charged that the Large Hadron Collider would seed a metastasizing black hole under Lake Geneva. Before that, captains of industry shelled out billions preparing for the appearance of two zeros in the date field of computer programs too numerous to count; left alone, this tick of the clock would surely have shaken modern civilization to its foundations.
You might think that the enterprise of science, with its method and its facts, would inoculate us against the most extravagant doomsday obsessions. But it doesn't. If anything, it just gives us more to worry about.
Some of the most fervent and convincing doomsayers, after all, are scientists. Bill Joy, co-founder and former chief scientist of Sun Microsystems, has warned that of out-of-control nanobots could consume everything on earth. Astronomer Royal Martin Rees has publicly offered a bet that a biological catastrophe—accidental or intentional—will kill at least one million people by 2020 (so far, no takers). Numerous climatologists sound the alarm about the possibility of runaway global warming. They all stand on the shoulders of giants: British economist Thomas Malthus predicted in the 19th century that the rise in population would lead to widespread famine and catastrophe. It never happened, but that didn't stop Stanford biologist Paul R. Ehrlich from renewing the warning in his 1968 book The Population Bomb when he predicted that global famine was less than two decades away. Catastrophe didn't arrive then, either, but does that mean it never will? Not necessarily. Still, people often worry disproportionately about disasters that are unlikely to occur.
As China and India rise in tandem, their relationship will shape world politics. Shame they do not get on better.
A hundred years ago it was perhaps already possible to discern the rising powers whose interaction and competition would shape the 20th century. The sun that shone on the British empire had passed midday. Vigorous new forces were flexing their muscles on the global stage, notably America, Japan and Germany. Their emergence brought undreamed-of prosperity; but also carnage on a scale hitherto unimaginable.
Now digest the main historical event of this week: China has officially become the world’s second-biggest economy, overtaking Japan. In the West this has prompted concerns about China overtaking the United States sooner than previously thought. But stand back a little farther, apply a more Asian perspective, and China’s longer-term contest is with that other recovering economic behemoth: India. These two Asian giants, which until 1800 used to make up half the world economy, are not, like Japan and Germany, mere nation states. In terms of size and population, each is a continent—and for all the glittering growth rates, a poor one.
Researchers detected 22-mile hydrocarbon plume in Gulf
Scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution said they detected a plume of hydrocarbons in June that was at least 22 miles long and more than 3,000 feet below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, a residue of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
According to the institution, the 1.2-mile-wide, 650-foot-high plume of trapped hydrocarbons provides at least a partial answer to recent questions asking where all the oil has gone as surface slicks shrink and disappear.
[...]
Whether the plume's existence poses a significant threat to the Gulf is not yet clear, the researchers say. "We don't know how toxic it is," Reddy said in a statement, "and we don't know how it formed, or why. But knowing the size, shape, depth, and heading of this plume will be vital for answering many of these questions."
Daniel Roth's article on the future of financial-data analysis in the latest Wired (Road Map for Financial Recovery: Radical Transparency Now!) is a must-read if only for the last few paragraphs, in which Christopher Cox,
outgoing SEC chairman and a card-carrying Orange County Reagan
Republican, starts getting all post-Marx/postmodern widdit like some
kind of white-shoed Baudrillard of the Beltway...
Understanding America's Class System: Honk If You Love Caviar!
How about them political elites, huh? Five million bucks for Chelsea Clinton's wedding, 15K just to rent the air-conditioned shitters -- huge chrome and glass babies with hot water and everything. No gas masks and waxy little squares of toilet paper for those guys.
Yes, it looks big time from the cheap seats. But the truth is that when we are looking at the political elite, we are looking at the dancing monkey, not the organ grinder who calls the tune. Washington's political class is about as upwardly removed from ordinary citizens as the ruling class is from the political class. For instance, they do not work for a living in the normal sense of a job, but rather obtain their income from abstractions such as investment and law, neither of which ever gave anybody a hernia or carpal tunnel. By comparison, the ruling class does not work at all.
Moneywise, Washington's political class is richer than the working class by the same orders of magnitude as the ruling class is richer than the political class. This gives the political class something to aim for. To that end, they have adopted the ruling elite's behaviors, tastes and lifestyles, with an eye on becoming members. Moreover, it is a molting process that begins with the right university and connections, and culminates in flying off to Washington with the rest of your generation's most privileged and ambitious young moths.
They make enough dough to at least fake it until they make it. Fifty-one of the 100 members of the US Senate are at the very least millionaires -- probably more than that, since multi-million million dollar residences and estates are exempt from the official tally. For instance in the House, Nancy Pelosi's net worth is either $13 million, or $92 million, depending upon who is counting. Why they bother to shave such large numbers is a mystery. Thirteen million, ninety two million, the difference is not gonna change our opinion of Nancy. Our opinion being that the broad is loaded. More than loaded. The comparatively poor members of Congress, like Barney Frank, are near millionaires. His publicly declared net worth is $976,000. For the life of me, I cannot see how they get by.
Along with the habits, the political class adopts the ruling class's social canon and presumptions, especially the one most necessary for acceptance: That the public has the collective intelligence of a chicken. OK, so it may be very hard to disprove that at the moment, but we must maintain at least some egalitarian semblance here. Anyway, as a group, the political elites think, look and act alike, and act toward their own interests. That makes them a class.
This article raises concerns about the degree to which potential donors are aware that their layman's understanding of death may not be the same as that enshrined in protocols employing the cri-terion of brain death. There would seem to be a need for greater public education of a kind which acknowledges the debate around the practical and conceptual difficulties associated with brain death, and makes clear what the implications of a diagnosis of brain death are for the donor and his or her relatives. The re-mainder of the article explores the discrepancy between the modern concept of brain death and the traditional Buddhist un-derstanding of death as the loss of the body's organic integrity as opposed to simply the loss of its cerebral functions.
monochrom is an art-technology-philosophy group having its seat in Vienna and Zeta Draconis. monochrom is an unpeculiar mixture of proto-aesthetic fringe work, pop attitude, subcultural science, context hacking and political activism. Our mission is conducted everywhere, but first and foremost in culture-archeological digs into the seats (and pockets) of ideology and entertainment. monochrom has existed in this (and almost every other) form since 1993. [more]
