susan orlean on origami

Anatomy of boredom

It is possible that the roots of boredom lie in a fundamental breakdown in our understanding of what it is we want to do. Bored people tend to score low on measures of self-awareness. They find it difficult to accurately monitor their own moods and feelings and hence understand what they truly want.

Emotional robots

Emotion plays an important role in guiding attention towards what is important and away from distractions," said Professor Cynthia Breazeal, one of the world's leading roboticists based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "It allows the robot to make better decisions, learn more effectively and interact more appropriately."

Robot swarms 'evolve' communication

Robots that artificially evolve ways to communicate with one another have been demonstrated by Swiss researchers. The "genomes" of the bots that found food and avoided poison most efficiently were recombined, mimicking biological natural selection. "We saw colonies that used their lights to signal when they found food and others that used signals to communicate they had found poison," said biologist Laurent Keller from the University of Lausanne.

micheal Donaghy Interview

Wikipedia's meaning of life

monkeys hug

We all do it: Give friends and family a peck on the cheek, a quick hug, or maybe even a nose rub to say hello. It's a way of assuring each other that we have no hostile intent, anthropologists say. Now, primatologists report that spider monkeys embrace intensely after a period of separation for exactly the same reason.
Like humans and chimpanzees, spider monkeys (Ateles geoffroyi) live in small groups that split apart to feed or hunt (or shop at Saks) and then rejoin later in the day. For years, researchers have noticed that these monkey reunions are often accompanied by public displays of hugging. "They give a quick call and look intensely at each other, and then briefly wrap each other in their long arms in what's almost a passionate embrace," says Filippo Aureli, a primatologist at Liverpool John Moores University in the U.K. In some cases, the monkeys even curl their tails around one other.
Morehere.

from 3quarkdaily

The Evolution of Happiness

Cold, dark, dangerous, wet to the bone. Warm, light, safe and dry. What a difference a fire makes.


'An evolutionary perspective offers novel insights into some
major obstacles to achieving happiness. Impediments include
large discrepancies between modern and ancestral
environments, the existence of evolved mechanisms "designed"
to produce subjective distress, and the fact that
evolution by selection has produced competitive mechanisms
that function to benefit one person at the expense of
others.'

T'he lore of the Econ tribe

The Econ tribe occupies a vast territory in the far North. Their land
appears bleak and dismal to the outsider, and travelling through it makes
for rough sledding; but the Econ, through a long period of adaptation,
have learned to wrest a living of sorts from it. They are not without some
genuine and sometimes even fierce attachment to their ancestral grounds,
and their young are brought up to feel contempt for the softer living in
the warmer lands of their neighbours. such as the Polscis and the Sociogs.
Despite a common genetical heritage. relations with these tribes are
strained-the distrust and contempt that the average Econ feels for these
neighbours being heartily reciprocated by the latter-and social intercourse
with them is inhibited by numerous taboos. The extreme clannishness, not
to say xenophobia, of the Econ makes life among them difficult and perhaps
even somewhat dangerous for the outsider.

via marginal revolution

What have we learned about love?

As Theodora explained, “I’ve found that I act much as I do in real life, and my SecondLife relationships tend to fail the same way my real-life relationships do.”

Why power corrupts

In Adam D. Galinsky, Joe C. Magee, M. Ena Inesi, and Deborah H Gruenfeld, Power and Perspectives Not Taken, Psychological Science, 17:12, 1068-1074 2006 researchers primed a group of test subjects by asking them to write down a memory where they held power over other people, while another group were asked to write about a time when others had power over them. Then the subjects were asked to quickly write the letter 'E' on their forehead.
High-power subjects were about three times as likely as low-power subjects to draw the letter oriented so it would be readable by themselves rather than readable by others.
In follow-up experiments it was found that high-power subjects also tended to assume other people had the same information that they had (the "telepathic boss" problem - the boss assumes that everybody knows what he knows and want). They were also less accurate than low-power subjects at judging emotional expressions. There were also anticorrelations between reports of general feelings of being in power in one's life and tendency to take other's perspective. Overall high-power people seem to anchor too heavily on their own vantage point and this impairs their ability to consider what others see, think and feel.
People with less power likely have to consider other people’s intentions and views more strongly, so perhaps the power bias is actually the real baseline and powerless people concentrate more on mind reading. But given the increase in errors in emotion reading the power mode people had compared to people primed neither with being powerful or powerless, this seems unlikely.

from overcoming bias

Neolithic astronomy

A vast, shadowy circle sits in a flat wheat field near Goseck, Germany. No, it is not a pattern made by tipsy graduate students. The circle represents the remains of the world's oldest observatory, dating back 7,000 years. Coupled with an etched disk recovered last year, the observatory suggests that Neolithic and Bronze Age people measured the heavens far earlier and more accurately than scientists had imagined.

Without the concept, the thing may not exist?

See Development idea of the day: Vocalary enhancement



'Arabic, for example, can convey business, merchant, etc., in a word, but it takes a lengthy explanation to capture ‘entrepreneur’. After the recent success in working with Ministries and linguistic experts to invent an Arabic word for “corporate governance”, which also did not exist until the recently approved “hawkamat ash-sharikat”, CIPE and its Egyptian partners are now raising the issue of creating Arabic terminology that captures the breadth of meaning in entrepreneurship. This is really a process of concept formation. It can be lengthy and seem esoteric, but it is essential to moving forward on these issues — if there is no common word or language for a topic, then the concept itself does not adequately exist in society.'

As something of a Wittgensteinian myself, I'm attracted by the implied argument here: all of our thoughts can be expressed in a public language, and if an important word does not exist in a given society's language, then the idea associated with that word can't really take off an that society. If there is no word for entrepeneurship in Arabic, then in some important sense there is no entrepeneurship in Arabic-speaking societies.

Ineqeuality news

Imagine a nanotech society where everyone has every single material possession they can imagine only for the period of time in which they want it (no need for storage). Also imagine that goods in scarse supply (Picassos, seaside villas in Antibes), are banned or somehow shared outright. A situation as close as conceptually possible to material equality.

Would the average citizen of a western society feel better off? Only if they did not take their sense of 'betteroffness' from their relative material wealth. If one removes material wealth as a means of measuring worth (happiness???) then non material things (looks, fashion sense, wits, achievements) will increase in demarkation value.

To live genuine equality we need to value each individual as a unique and intrinsically valuable amazing thing.

Bored?

The next time you find yourself lost in a fog of boredom during an endless, rainy Sunday afternoon, consider this new research by John Eastwood and colleagues, showing boredom has little to do with lack of external stimulation and everything to do with being out of touch with our emotions.

(via marginal revolutions)

100 alternative googles

Computer Program Writes Its Own Fiction

One day, I, Mexica, began to write. I wrote out of solitude, out of hundreds of billions of years of solitude, and they, the readers, didn't understand how I, a silicon intelligence, could have

moon panoramas with sound

Kurzweil introduces Gardner

For the first time, we can see the brain create our thoughts, and also see our thoughts create our brain (that is, we create new spines and synapses as we learn).

Gardner's Intelligent Universe

Yup, and here's Freeman Dyson:

'Mind, through the long course of biological evolution, has established itself as a moving force in our little corner of the universe. Here on this small planet, mind has infiltrated matter and has taken control. It appears to me that the tendency of mind to infiltrate and control matter is a law of nature.6'

I, pencil

My family tree begins with what in fact is a tree, a cedar of straight grain that grows in Northern California and Oregon. Now contemplate all the saws and trucks and rope and the countless other gear used in harvesting and carting the cedar logs to the railroad siding. Think of all the persons and the numberless skills that went into their fabrication: the mining of ore, the making of steel and its refinement into saws, axes, motors; the growing of hemp and bringing it through all the stages to heavy and strong rope; the logging camps with their beds and mess halls, the cookery and the raising of all the foods. Why, untold thousands of persons had a hand in every cup of coffee the loggers drink!

Kauffman on The Evolution of Future Wealth

Economists have so far not been able to offer much help to firms trying to be more adaptive. Although economists have been slow to realize it, the problem is that their attempts to model economic systems focus on those in market equilibrium or moving toward it. They have drawn their inspiration predominantly from the work of physicists in this respect (often with good results, of course). For instance, the Black-Scholes model used since the 1970s to predict the volatility of stock prices was developed by trained physicists and is related to the thermodynamic equation that describes heat.