September 2nd, 2010 by Wil
Here’s interesting passage about magnets interacting with the brain from the National Geographic Brain book.
The brain creates its own tiny magnetic fields. A new, noninvasive process called transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS, subtly alters the brain’s magnetic processes without resorting to drugs or surgery.
…
When applied to the prefrontal lobes, TMS has been shown to enhance the speed and agility of cognitive processing.
In the past, I’ve commented to friends that my generation is probably the last generation right before the era in which technology and bioengineering enable humans to live vastly longer and more powerful lives. I’ll be 85, in some hospital room hooked up to dialysis, and the nurse will come in and say, “Boy, if you’d only been born 20 years later we could have used nanobots and magnetic therapy to clean up your blocked arteries and enhance your mental function as well as making you look 50 years younger. As it is, you’re just a dejected, degenerate old man with a flaccid penis that everyone laughs about back at the nursing station.”
September 1st, 2010 by Wil
There’s an interesting experiment described in the National Geographic science book, “Brain — The Complete Mind.”
In an experiment, photographs of political candidates were digitally morphed to incorporate some features from the faces of test subjects who were asked their reactions to the candidates. The photos, which included 60% of the politicians’ faces and 40% of the respondents’ faces, received favorable reviews. When combined with detailed demographic databases that can personalize appeals for money and votes, morphed images are predicted to have an increased role in political advertising.
For instance, Democratic organizations sending out campaign donation requests to South Central Los Angeles could say, “Hmmm, that’s a heavily black neighborhood, let’s make Obama’s skin in this picture a shade darker.” Or, Republicans targeting Irish districts in Boston might try and make Sarah Palin appear more “Irish” (perhaps by using Photoshop to place discarded bottles of whiskey in her lap.)
As time goes on, things could get even more nefarious. Political operatives sending advertising to a specific person — let’s say, Bob Jones of Long Beach, California — might spider the web looking for pictures of Bob, then subtly morph some of Bob’s features into the picture of their candidate. Bob would receive the advertising and on a subconscious level think, “I like the looks of this guy.”
On one hand, there’s something decidedly undemocratic about the idea that we consider a candidate’s looks — and particularly how similar their looks are to ours — when weighing political decisions. On the other hand, I think we’ve suspected this all along. In a way, this helps explain the success of Barack Obama. His ethnicity is a bit vague; we know he’s half black, but he could pass for being half Indian, or half Arab, or even half Latino. Like Michael Jackson and Prince, his looks are generic enough to give him a wide kind of appeal. If people vote for candidates who look a bit like them, Obama casts a wide net.
I think there’s another factor at work here. Let’s use the term “vibrancy” to encompass the attributes of general health, charisma, sex appeal and intellectual vigor. Certainly Obama was more vibrant than McCain, who had a bad arm, what I believe is a cancer scar on his face, and a kind of frozen demeanor.
How does this vibrancy theory hold up in previous elections?
Bush/Kerry — I think Bush comes out ahead here. Kerry had a stilted presence (I think Mickey Kaus once referred to him as an “animatronic Abraham Lincoln.”) and he looked like Ichabod Crane.
Bush/Gore — This one’s a little tough to call, as was the election itself. Bush was more of your “buddy,” whereas Gore was more of an “idea man.”
Clinton/Dole — Not even close. Dole has been a member of the walking undead since the 80s.
Clinton/Bush Sr. — Again, I’m going to give it to Clinton. Bush was pretty vibrant for his age, but he couldn’t compete with Clinton’s Southern charm.
Reagan/Dukakis, Carter, or pretty much anybody — Reagan, with his matinee idol past and easy smile, was almost the definition of vibrant.
Carter/Ford — Well, Carter wasn’t especially vibrant, but the bar’s pretty low when you’re running up against Ford.
So, as I think you can see, my vibrancy theory holds up pretty well. If anyone from either the Republican or Democratic National Committees would like to contact me for some consulting work, you know where to find me.
(Note: I am not saying looks, and looks similar to our own, are the only things that matter. I doubt your average black person would vote for someone who looked like Barack Obama but advocated the policies of Adolf Hitler. Looks are one factor in a complex web of factors.)
August 31st, 2010 by Wil
In an earlier blog post, I rambled on incoherently about the idea of conceptual synesthesia. This is the idea that certain people assign colors and gender and even personalities to letters and numbers. This recent article about language makes the point that gender assignment for objects is often integral to languages, and different languages assign different genders to the same object.
In the 1990s, for example, psychologists compared associations between speakers of German and Spanish. There are many inanimate nouns whose genders in the two languages are reversed. A German bridge is feminine (die Brücke), for instance, but el puente is masculine in Spanish; and the same goes for clocks, apartments, forks, newspapers, pockets, shoulders, stamps, tickets, violins, the sun, the world and love. On the other hand, an apple is masculine for Germans but feminine in Spanish, and so are chairs, brooms, butterflies, keys, mountains, stars, tables, wars, rain and garbage. When speakers were asked to grade various objects on a range of characteristics, Spanish speakers deemed bridges, clocks and violins to have more “manly properties” like strength, but Germans tended to think of them as more slender or elegant. With objects like mountains or chairs, which are “he” in German but “she” in Spanish, the effect was reversed.
In a different experiment, French and Spanish speakers were asked to assign human voices to various objects in a cartoon. When French speakers saw a picture of a fork (la fourchette), most of them wanted it to speak in a woman’s voice, but Spanish speakers, for whom el tenedor is masculine, preferred a gravelly male voice for it.
August 31st, 2010 by Wil
I’ve mentioned that I’m currently working on a horror/suspense novel. I’m about 12,000 words in, and it’s coming along, but I’m realizing that the text I’m producing is going to need some work once the whole thing is completed. You see, as I write, if I find myself stuck searching for a certain word or phrase, I tend to just put down something to get the point across, with the intent of going back later and really finessing things. I’m starting to understand that after I’ve got everything down on the page, I’m going to need to go through the book paragraph by paragraph, or even sentence by sentence, and apply that finishing coat of paint. Thinking about this topic today led to a breakthrough in my understanding of the process of writing a novel.
Before I get into that, let me ask you question. Do you know how sometimes you go out at night and you pick up a prostitute and she angers you by reminding you of your mother, so you kill her and stuff her in a meat locker in your basement? And, every couple weeks or so, you go down there and open the locker, and see that she’s decayed just a bit more, until finally she’s just a bunch of bones? Well, now imagine if you could flip some kind of cosmic switch and cause time to happen in reverse. In this case, you would start out with a pile of dusty bones and slowly you would see flesh appear, followed by skin, and ultimately a perfectly normal dead prostitute. Well, I believe writing a novel is like watching a dead prostitute decay if time went in reverse.
Need me to clarify? Well, when you start our writing a novel, you have a basic concept of the story. I had a 20 page screenplay treatment. That’s the equivalent of the skeleton. Then you get in there and think through the detail that more, adding plot points and descriptive detail. This is like putting meat on the bones of the dead prostitute skeleton in your meat locker. Then you go in and take a pass at actually writing the novel, getting down to the nitty-gritty of sentences and paragraphs. This is comparable to having the body of a dead prostitute without skin. The final step, is of course applying that finishing touch — massaging the text so that the descriptions and metaphors make the point without being too cliché, finding the appropriate word where needed. This is the process of putting the skin back on the body. It seems minor — skin is a very small part of the human body — but it’s important. You can take a very attractive woman like Paris Hilton, but if you remove all her skin, she’s not so attractive anymore, is she?
So that’s my theory. A lot of authors will compare the process of writing a novel to giving birth to a child. That’s a legitimate comparison, but I don’t think it’s fully accurate. I think it’s more correct to say that writing a novel is a lot like watching the body of a dead prostitute reverse-decay after you flip a cosmic switch which causes time to go backwards.
I hope that’s helpful to any budding writers out there.
August 30th, 2010 by Wil
I was just wondering what the future of gun control, or “weapons control,” holds. Right now the arguments are about fairly mundane stuff — how many bullets a magazine can hold, the types of bullets a gun can fire etc. But we have to assume that, at some point, technology will radically expand the possible kinds of weapons a person can own. For example, maybe people could have a cybernetic eye that fires lasers, or some kind of genetic alteration that allows a bony knife to shoot out of their hands. The killing power of personal weapons could also greatly expand — maybe people could have their larynx biologically altered so that they can emit a scream that causes the brains of everyone within 20 feet to explode.
Some of the examples above are somewhat facetious, but it does seem possible that within 200 years or so we could have a situation where most people in first world countries will be capable of killing whoever pisses them off (using a cybernetic laser pistol implanted in their hand or something.) And even if these weapons were outlawed, there would doubtless be a healthy black market. How will we interact with each other knowing that one offhand comment, one perceived slight could cause the person we’re talking to to blow our heads off? Will comedians shy away from telling edgy jokes, concerned that someone in the crowd will take offense? Will bosses fail to impose discipline, worried that workers might seek revenge? These are the difficult questions I believe we need to start answering now.
August 29th, 2010 by Wil
In the past, I’ve proffered my theory of the digital vagabond — an individual who only owns what he can maintain in digital form on an iPad type device. This fellow, travels the world freely with no need for a house or excess goods.
As the spiraling housing market continues to destroy America’s fortunes, I return to this theory. Why is the house with a white picket fence the epitome of the American ideal? Is slaving away to earn yourself a measurable amount of square feet the best use of your time? Libertarian writer Will Wilkinson is often contemplating such questions, usually in an effort to decry housing subsidies. Here’s an example:
…American culture really does relentlessly assault Americans with the American idea that owning an American house is an essential American part of the best and most authentic American way of American living.
So then, how would the digital vagabond live? Well, we’ve all heard of these Japanese hotel cubicles. If you take a look here, you see they’re not that bad. I would compare them to the berths available on your standard sailboat. Plenty of room to move around, and even equipped with a television.
I’m not saying this sort of lifestyle would be for everyone. I understand there’s a lot of sniveling wretches who demand their own poolroom and garage workshop. And, if they’re fine sacrificing 40 years of their life to get that*, more power to the idiots. But I think it is quite conceivable that someone could live a life without a house, and still be quite comfortable and happy. And I think we should look at how we live now — in apartments or houses that keep us generally routed to one area — and reconsider our reasons for doing so.
* Of course, the real reason your average guy decides that buying a house is important is because he realizes he needs to prove his ability to provide for whatever woman he’s hooked up with and the children they have sired. This offers still more evidence for my theory that women are the root of all the world’s problems.
August 29th, 2010 by Wil
I would just like to note that every time I flip over to watch a little bit of Glenn Beck (at last count, this has occurred around four times), the guy is either crying, or tearing up and about to cry. It’s always because he’s deeply moved by some quote made by the founding fathers. I can guarantee you that if George Washington walked into that studio he would look at Beck and say, “Man up, bitch! Real men don’t cry or express any kind of emotion. They repress their feelings until they well up inside them and explode, and then they get it all out by beating their wife or having an illicit homosexual relationship.”
I can’t believe liberals are so afraid of this guy.
August 27th, 2010 by Wil
From the obit:
Dr. Roy Walford, the free-spirited UCLA gerontologist who pioneered the idea of restricting food intake to extend life span and practiced the concept rigorously in an effort to live to 120, has died. He was 79.
I think I’m going to go out and get a supersized hamburger and fries.
August 26th, 2010 by Wil
I came across an interesting post over at the blog “DIY Musician” asking the question “are you too old to make it?” In my view, the piece never answered the question, but it did get me thinking about the subject. There’s some added resonance due to the fact that I’m close to 40, an age the music business considers to be the equivalent of being a dried up fossil suitable only for museum display.
So, can you get too old to make it? On one hand, I’ve seen or known a lot of people in their 50s or 60s (and beyond) who had thriving music careers. On the other hand, there’s clearly a lot more young people on the pop charts than geezers. Obviously audiences favor younger artists. Does this make sense? If music is a skill like any other, shouldn’t we prefer an experienced hand? If you have an appointment to meet your heart surgeon and it turns out he’s a 16-year-old kid, you get nervous. Why would we prefer 16-year-old musicians?
I think there’s a number of answers. For one thing, music is not a skill like any other. Frankly, it doesn’t take that much ability to play most rock music, and it’s certainly not comparable to cardiovascular surgery. Secondly, the ability and freedom to support live music is really specific to young people who have the energy, disposable income and don’t have children at home. When you’re 45 and playing music, most of your peer group can barely get off their Barcalounger’s. Thirdly, as I’ve commented on in the past, the process of a musical act pursuing fans is a bit like a courtship. The prettiest girl (or guy) gets more attention, and prettier usually means younger.
There are some exceptions to these rules. Certain styles — country, blues, jazz — tend to prefer older people, both as the audience and performers. I think bands are seen as more “authentic” if they feature more aged players. John Lee Hooker, for example, seemed like a far more legitimate blues act than Kenny Wayne Shepherd or any of those “young guns” that popped up in the 90s. (An interesting sidenote: it may not be so much age that appears to be a deficiency, as a lack of sexual potency. I remember reading a Rolling Stone article about Hooker close to when he died, and the reporter described walking into Hooker’s hotel bedroom and seeing him lying in bed next to two attractive, much younger women. Now, obviously this was staged — it’s unlikely that the then octogenarian Hooker had just satisfied two women the age of his granddaughters — but it was an important illusion. If this is the case, I have nothing to worry about. My vast sexual potency will doubtless last well into my 90s.)
August 25th, 2010 by Wil
Occasionally, I make note of interesting ideas and concepts that were historically believed to be true and are now thought of as absurd. For instance, just today I was reading that Aristotle thought the urge to sleep was brought on in the human body by the stomach’s digestion process causing heat to rise (don’t ask me to explain that one.) The fact that women were thought unfit to vote until fairly recently might stand as another example. (I’m resisting the innumerable jokes that could be made at this point.)
This forces an obvious consideration. What modern beliefs will be shown to be absurd in the light of the future? As I read more about the brain and its functions, I begin to suspect that the eight hour workday will fall into the dustbin of history. I’m not saying the idea of working eight hours a day will become outdated, but rather the idea of working eight consecutive hours. Your brain goes through various states during the day, some are very conducive to deep thinking, some are better for passive creativity, some are pretty much worthless for anything. The idea that you’re going to get eight quality hours out of a person in a consecutive period of time seems unlikely. It would make more sense to figure out the periods during the day a person is best suited for a particular type of work, and assign the appropriate work to the appropriate period. It also seems very likely that having people take a nap somewhere after lunchtime would increase their productivity.
Of course, people don’t live simply for their jobs. They need to have mental brainpower available for the challenges of family life, and their own hobbies and interests. This is why I propose we eliminate the modern family from the equation, and instead provide workers with completely servile but incredibly realistic sexual robots. We can also use brain drugs to ensure that people do not pursue activities outside of work, and exist solely to serve the corporate oligarchy. Only then can we truly be happy.
