mostly I link.
From Wired, via maverickmath:
Two comprehensive analyses of antidepressant trials have uncovered a dramatic increase in placebo response since the 1980s. One estimated that the so-called effect size (a measure of statistical significance) in placebo groups had nearly doubled over that time.
It’s not that the old meds are getting weaker, drug developers say. It’s as if the placebo effect is somehow getting stronger.
The animal was clearly in distress, or perhaps berserk. The President confessed to having had limited experience with enraged rabbits. He was unable to reach a definite conclusion about its state of mind. What was obvious, however, was that this large, wet animal, making strange hissing noises and gnashing its teeth, was intent upon climbing into the Presidential boat.
The incident itself is hilarious, but this description (by then Press Secretary) is pure genius.
Ehm: A survey of teens and young adults released last week reported that 1 in 5 teens — and one-third of 20-somethings — have electronically sent or posted online nude or semi-nude pictures or video of themselves.
Of course, producing such pictures of minors amounts to child pornography, even if the photographer is himself underage and the victim, himself. So teens are being brought to court over such self-pics. If found guilty, they are, you know, child molesters. Besides the jail time, and the social stigma, they are forced, for example, to keep a certain distance from schools and other places minors dwell. Note that in most Western countries, possessing these pictures and videos is also in itself a crime.
Zany, isn’t it? And 1 in 5 teens, report says. But let us stop for a moment and consider: what exactly needs to be changed in the laws? What legislation would cope reasonably with this new situation? You see, that’s not such an easy question.
The MIT Press is having a winter white sale.
noindex, nofollow meta-tags: more necessary than ever.
A group of neuroscientists have come forward on Nature to call for the right of (responsible) use of nootropic medication. Their points are as follow:
1. Based on our considerations, we call for a presumption that mentally competent adults should be able to engage in cognitive enhancement using drugs.
2. We call for an evidence-based approach to the evaluation of the risks and benefits of cognitive enhancement.
3. We call for enforceable policies concerning the use of cognitive-enhancing drugs to support fairness, protect individuals from coercion and minimize enhancement-related socioeconomic disparities.
4. We call for a programme of research into the use and impacts of cognitive-enhancing drugs by healthy individuals.
5. We call for physicians, educators, regulators and others to collaborate in developing policies that address the use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by healthy individuals.
6. We call for information to be broadly disseminated concerning the risks, benefits and alternatives to pharmaceutical cognitive enhancement.
7. We call for careful and limited legislative action to channel cognitive-enhancement technologies into useful paths.
They list 4 drugs in the article (Ritalin, Adderall, Provigil, and something for Alzheimer I hadn’t heard of), but they should have gone into more - making a case for Adderall, which are amphetamine salts, is more troublesome than for Bupropion, which hits on the same receptors but is famous as smoking cessation medicine. Otherwise, it was about time this began to be heard. Hope the debate will be less stale than the one on recreational drugs. ^^
i made this. you play this. we are enemies., a, er, game-art work, is making the links rounds this week. Suffices to say that net-art pretty much started with dadaist collage, and it’s been a while since then, and I don’t get the what whole new excitement is all about. The oft-copied recipe now includes a ball you can move around, which I guess is why this is cool again.* And: screenshots, newspaper cuts, logos for large Internet corporations, self-reference, text about links: everything feels so dated!
Taking the opportunity to bitch some more: at least we are not seeing another offshoot of the weaker theories of Electronic Fiction. A misguided emphasis on interactivity - and, for some, even on immersion through interactivity - back in more innocent days eventually led theorists, Stuart Moulthrop all the way to Janet Murray, to shift interests from literature to videogames, where the stuff might find some practical use. Losing your scholars to Videogame Theory is quite a punch on the stomach. Poor e-lit.
* of course you could use just the same argument over the jodi link there.
high tech production of La Damnation de Faust in the Metropolitan
Trailer for Bill Viola’s “game-art”* The Night Journey
Transgendered man elected mayor in small Oaklahoma town
* (You see, I say “Digital Art” without a blink, and other such very silly things. But “Video Art” and “Game Art” never ceased to sound funny when I hear them.)
“I’ve tested Munich, Florence, Genoa—but nothing suits my old head like this Nice [20], minus a couple of months in Sils-Maria [1]. At all events, I am told that the summer here is more refreshing than at any place in the interior of Germany (the evenings with sea breeze, the nights cool). The air is incomparable, the strength it gives one (and also the light that fills the sky) not to be found anywhere else in Europe.
Finally I should mention that one can live here cheaply, very cheaply, and that the place is large enough in scope to permit every degree of concealment to a hermit. The altogether select things of nature, such as the forest paths on the closest hill, or on the St. Jean Peninsula, I have all to myself. Similarly the entire Promenade (about a forty-five minute walk) is splendidly free, inasmuch as people visit for only a few hours during the day. . . .
One is so ‘un-German’ here: I can’t emphasize that strongly enough”—Letter to Heinrich Köselitz, November 24, 1885
Nietzsche comments on divers locations throughout Europe. ^^
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Also: dress up! The Sartorialist is still roaming the streets of Rio.
Haunted libraries throughout the US
Everyone is linking this around, even far outside the Data Visualisation circles, so I’ll try not to be redundant. But let’s look at this one map, of books published / country:
Afaik, this is not averaged by population, which would make an even more eurocentric (and far-east-centric, except for China) map than this one already is. Not to be disingenuous, I’m surprised things haven’t changed so much on that front afterall.
I feel more and more of late that all the snobs might be correct, and we - we in Brazil, all excited over “Contemporary American Literature” and shit - are just distracted by the glitter of a second-rate tautological insularity. Quantity does not equate quality, sure. But how many of us can claim knowledge of what really is happening in the old continent and the east, beyond the handful of widely-publicized cliché authors? Maybe it’s my wishful thinking, but: things can’t be so bad that Dave Eggers actually has any relevance in World Literature whatsoever. Please say it isn’t so.
Mamihlapinatapai (a veces escrita incorrectamente como mamihlapinatapei) es una palabra del idioma de los indios yámanas de Tierra del Fuego, listada en el Libro Guinness de los Récords como la “palabra más sucinta del mundo”, y es considerada como uno de los términos más difíciles para traducir. Describe “una mirada entre dos personas, cada una de las cuales espera que la otra comience una acción que ambos desean pero que ninguno se anima a iniciar”.
(found in ehqcd, who also found it elsewhere)
I am 23.
It follows from that that a few years ago I was going through adolescence, and then through the sophomoric stage around 18-21. By then I experienced that urge, typical of those two phases, for newness; of being my own contemporary, of keeping a firm grip on the Zeitgeist (preferably by the balls), of being aware and maybe part of what was going on. (This led me - again pretty typically - to flirt with the works of some authors and artists I am terribly embarrassed about today. And in public, sometimes, to boot.)
Not that I don’t still care about these things. But I have realised of late how dated most of my, oh, adolescent/sub-21 Zeitgeist feels, looking from today. Milorad Pavic is still on the crush-list, for example, but as a grandfatherly figure, as someone whose high time was when I was a toddler. But if Paul Auster had published his New York Trilogy today, I would have just met it with a yawn. (Don’t ask me about Foster Wallace; I have no idea what I was thinking.)
I complain that Peter Greenaway has gone senile, from one of cinema’s last hopes to the director of Tulse Luper and the man responsible for that dreary Last Supper installation. But could we suffer The Pillow Book today? Text, body, inscription? The easy gimmicks of his non-narrative cinema promises?
And on the more popular front - which is where the Zeitgeist really is, I would inform you by the time - I find it funny how movies like Lola Rennt or bands like the Flaming Lips are intolerable now. Even the stuff that is still likeable, like Serial Experiments Lain (yeah, anime), again I can’t quite imagine happening today.
I was excited over Takashi Murakami when reports and pictures of the 2001 Los Angeles “Superflat” exhibition spread. Today I roll eyes most impatiently when the eager arts or design student mentions his name.
The list goes on. Sometimes I would feel there was something missing in the whole Zeitgeist thing, some story that was not being told, blame it on the sorry state of culture (it’s easier when you are in the Third World) and feel the need, like Alec Linderbergh, that someone sound a Call-to-Arms - this expectation itself dated, quite High Modernist. The irony is there is not really a Zeitgeist when you are young, it hasn’t quite formed yet, there is only the shadows of older people - who will either give you anxiety of influence or embarrass you shitless as you wise up. To make matters worse, ours was a post-modernist, post-structuralist shadow that makes the whole “Zeitgeist” concept troublesome (though I never really met a bona fide sub-21 po-mo kid. Of course a lot of us have tried.). So, what, it’s been less than a decade, which makes this then versus now talk sound funny. I don’t really know what “is going on right now”, but I think my grip now is tighter than when I was certain I had it mostly figured out.
I am reporting this because I just learned earlier tonight that there is a transhumanist friend-of-friend in my social network. Yes, a transhumanist in 2008, in Brazil, 2-step distance in my social bloody network. I’m baffled.
Mariana Manhães‘ Liquescer was the only artwork at FILE Installations exhibit I really liked.
Virtually everything exhibited in FILE is interactive, by which they mean the works have sensors, usually haptic or of some sort of computational vision. So when you walk past Mariana Manhães machines and they start yapping and rotating helices, you can only assume it is reacting to your presence. But as you look into these extravagant machines - with rubber and wood parts, and a display showing a jar gradually filling with water, or a glass - you fail to figure out exactly what it is that they are doing, in response to what, and you can’t find the sensors. Eventually you find (or read it in the walls) that the machines have no sensors whatsoever: they are operating and reacting to processes of their own, and they are not interactive, though they are made to look like they are.
In a festival that is allegedly about “electronic language”, this was the only work that actually adressed that core issue: machines work according to a logic of their own, a language that is strange and indifferent to that of humans - and when you realise the machine was /not/ interacting with you, you feel sort like an intruder. But would it have made any difference if in the end of this closed, inscrutable system (inscrutable beyond the technical, obviously, though her machines communicate a strong sense of strangeness even there) you had a sensor, the work inevitably asks.
This reading might be context-dependent - in a festival of sensorless artworks, this illusion of interaction (which most people had, at least at first.*) would probably be subdued, though the work would remain interesting. In FILE, however, its high-pitched, irritating yapping comes out like a hollow, phantasmatic mocking of the shallow promises of human-machine interaction of the other pieces; a machine eerily laughing at the travesty the entire exhibition at that point seems to entail, and our disregard of their utterly distinct nature.
* I’m fond of watching the crowds and their reactions to the works. This is often more fun and more compelling than the works themselves, at times more beautiful, even.
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On Saturday we went CCTV hacking with !mediengruppe bitnik. I’m one of the kids in this video:
CCTV Sniffing @ Sta. Ifigênia from b2kn on Vimeo.
Lately these days I have been reminiscing about what science fairs were like when I was in school. It worked like this: each project was associated with up to three class subjects, and the participants received extra marks on their grades in those. So kids gathered around and surveyed what subjects they most desperately needed extra marks on. “Ok, so we need a project about Mathematics, Biology… and Portuguese Grammar.” Or, say, “Chemistry, Geography, and English”. Or, I don’t know, “Physics, Informatics, and the Arts.”
Needless to say this process also yielded a list of the three classes the group collectively liked the least and cared the least about. But oh, not everybody was desperately looking for grades. Groups often managed to recruit a geek or two, who did the science fair thing for the pleasure of it, and who usually wanted to do something very scientific and mathy. And sometimes nerds would gather together in groups that really didn’t care about grades, and make projects about, oh, the Vampire: the Masquerade role playing game.
(No, I never participated in any of this. I was lazy, didn’t work well in groups, and had a keen sense of pointless.)
Most of the projects proposed an unfeasible challenge: they had to coordinate topics that were very difficult to associate in themselves, and which, except for the occasional nerd who knew the science part, they didn’t really like or know about. So most projects covered one or two of the classes on the list moderately well, and the remainder had to be weaseled through: “Ok, this is an interesting project, but what the Mercosur trade agreement has to do with Chemistry exactly?” “Ok, I see the Physics and the Informatics, but where is Art?” The half-arsed, absurd explanations were the best part of the whole event, and it was a good idea to follow some of the teachers around just to hear them.
But then again, teachers were very liberal and condescending with the explanations. They didn’t take these projects seriously - who did? - and wouldn’t deny the kids their one or two extra marks for the effort. And the students of course caught on to this real quick, and the weaseling became de rigueur. And that’s what a “Science Fair” scenario means to me: a place you don’t even fake it that you are faking it that your project has anything to do with Geography, Chemistry, or Art.
Graffiti (or “street art”) used to be subversive and mean some about redefining public space. But as the recent controversy over an accidentally erased graffiti in Sao Paulo shows, Street Art is the new equestrian statue: signed and authorial, curated, protected and endorsed by public authorities. When you take subversiveness, anonymity and transience away from graffiti, what remains are images that are always nauseatingly tacky.
Rock music used to be “the voice of [my] generation”, and we came to expect this from rock. It was a made-for-tv, morning news platitude to assert it. Nowadays, however, it is difficult to think a person with a guitar is on par with his times; the latest bands could just as well be playing jazz. Ok Computer might have been the last time rock mattered - and some people rushed in to say it was not rock anymore.
I never understood the thing between hipsters and knitting/stitching: it’s ironic, sure, but the joke wears thin pretty quickly. You people got over it, right? Right?
Nifty interview with Rosalind Williams, author of Notes on the Underground, a book about that which lies beneath our feet - as the article puts it, “how actual and imaginary underworlds shaped our attitudes toward the manufactured environments that we inhabit.”
The Nonist is the only wordsy, topic-inespecific blog I read nowadays. Check a few of the last posts: on the etiquette of the last supper, the history of the revolving door, and the Brockenspectre
hi. My feeds piled up and it will take a few days to catch up, so.
Web Zen tackles Processing
A whole new gallery of Damien Hirsts going on auction in September. Expect stock markets to crash.
And troubles in Hamburg, small town in Good Home Iowa: The town’s sheriff’s 17 year-old niece climbs up a stage and strips off her clothes, the art card is played on the behalf of those involved, and controversy ensues: Is stripping art? “Dance has been considered one of the arts, as is sculpture, painting and anything else like that. What Clarence has is a club where people can come and perform,” says laywer. “(…) While she was there, she felt like dancing so she got up and danced on the stage and then she took her clothes off. Trouble with that is she’s the sheriff’s niece.” (btw: no pictures)
This reminds me of another, more troublesome court case in Canada a few years back. I’ll see if I can google it later.