i suck at substantive blogging

But I sure can regurgitate links from other blogs! You should look at these:

• Brainbows
• Evolutionary psychology bingo

hot and smoky, almost irreverent

This is a totally halfassed post, since it’s a wikipedia link and was on boingboing like a month ago, but nevertheless, it’s awesome and made me happy. The Schmidt Sting Pain Index is without a doubt my new favorite classification system.

Specialized vocabularies are interesting, especially when they accompany actual increased sensory sensitivity to certain dimensions of an experience. (Can I tie this in with neural plasticity? Or, how about with a fantasy subculture of bee sting connoisseurs who go to stinging parties reminiscent of wine tastings and wile away the hours passing around jars filled with angry exotic insects and waxing snootily rhapsodic about the sensations they inspire?)

ethereal ideas shimmering overhead

There was a short article in last month’s Harper’s (which I just found in my kitchen a few days ago) about a data center that Google is building in The Dalles, Oregon, a dessicated industrial town situated on the Columbia right around where the desert starts. (It’s kind of jarring to drive into it along the I-84: you go from majestic tree-lined hills to flat hot rolling nothingness and the skeletons of old factories.)

The energy consumption of the server farm will be approximately equal to the energy consumption of the city of Tacoma, and Google’s purchase of the property was contingent on an assurance of access to cheap hydroelectric power. The article also talks about how many other energy-intensive processing facilities like this are being built in countries with weak or non-existent environmental protections to keep energy costs down.

auditory plasticity

The paper I’m currently trying to read is depressingly incomprehensible to me, so I’m gonna cheat and backtrack a few weeks to something with fewer undefined mathematical terms. This [pdf] is a review paper about learning-induced plasticity in the auditory cortex.

Ok, so!

multiplying superfluous gestures

Errol Morris has a blog! The last two entries are about re-enactment, how we construct coherent narratives of reality, and how these processes in film interrelate with visual attention and memory. They’re pretty cool, albeit general. The first one is more about issues of authenticity in documentary film-making, and the second one has an interview with the dude who did some of the classic research on change blindness (which is good reading if you haven’t read it already).

I especially like this older entry, though. It fleshes out many of the same themes by painstakingly walking us through a detective story, trying to reconstruct which of two versions of the famous war photograph “in the valley of the shadow of death” was staged and which was not. By examining different accounts, he highlights the kinds of evidence and psychological assumptions that people use to make the determination. Reading the comments section is great — he challenges the reader to generate definitive evidence for the “true” placement of the cannonballs, and hundreds of people eagerly attempt to deliver, even though I think it’s supposed to be some sort of Socratic exercise intended to make everyone realize that the endeavor is impossible. (But then again, maybe not, given that he devotes two increasingly pedantic articles to the issue!)

Random quote I am totally stealing: “Experience is not unlike history – just closer to us in time.”

However! Hopefully you all read this far down the page, because the real reason I’m bringing this up is because his blog prompted me to reread Funes, the Memorious.

for SCIENCE!

I’m belatedly realizing that this wasn’t the best time to start a reading blog, since I also just started a programming class at PSU and now have even less time to read than I did before. I’ll try to write something later about a couple of cognitive imaging papers. In the meantime, I’ll fall back on the beloved Hollywood trick of glossing over a lack of content or depth by talking about sex!

I thought about this article yesterday while in the MRI scanner for the first time: Magnetic resonance imaging of male and female genitals during coitus and female sexual arousal. I’m amazed they pulled it off — it’s pretty cramped in there! I guess they did remove the table to make it more spacious. This testimonial by one of the women involved is pretty awesome.

A search for “MRI orgasm” on Medline turned up a paltry 7 results, one of which was this: Tooth-brushing epilepsy with ictal orgasms. Vast untapped potential for study here, people! Get it together!

Oregon’s healthcare lottery

Ugh. This is horrible in so many subtle and multifaceted ways. For me, it immediately brings up flashbacks of doing options counseling and helping broke women and girls figure out how they were going to pay for an abortion.

tidbits from Fast Food Nation

I’ve been meaning to read this for years, and thanks to a “no new books until you read all your old ones” ultimatum, I’m finally doing it! I already know a lot of this stuff, but it’s still an enjoyable read – he pads his analyses pretty heavily with anecdotes about individuals involved in the systems he’s describing (which I like, at least in this case), and although his tone is critical, it isn’t righteously judgmental (which I also like).

Here are a couple things I didn’t know:

1. McDonalds is one of the world’s leading purchasers of satellite photography. They have sophisticated software that uses the photos (along with demographic information and sales statistics from nearby stores) to predict future urban sprawl and traffic congestion, and thereby select future locations of new restaurants.
2. Fast food restaurants claim tax credits worth up to 2k/employee that are designed to compensate companies that hire and train impoverished and unskilled workers. However, they also spend tons of money and effort creating “zero-training workplaces” where the work procedures are as standardized as possible so employees don’t actually require any training. (Apparently ‘deskilling’ is the relevant creepy managerial jargon here.)

elegant variations and all that

Here’s an article I found while reading about the guy whose quote inspired my blog title. It’s a review of his revised edition of Fowler’s guide to modern english usage, which was originally one of the most staunchly prescriptivist style guides in existence, and which Burchfield substantially (and controversially) reworked in accordance with his more descriptivist philosophy.

Based on this article, Fowler sounds fucking hilarious, often unintentionally so. Just check out this melodramatic list of fire-and-brimstone adjectives culled from this article alone: linguistic errors are absurd! Ludicrous! Wrong! Ugly! Needless! Barbaric! Worse than electrocution! Inexcusable! Fit for parrots!

…fit for parrots is definitely my favorite. I’m stealing that.

Hello world!

“The English language is rather like a monster accordion, stretchable at the whim of the editor, compressible ad lib.”

–Robert Burchfield

I am going to attempt to chronicle everything I read. Actually, I’m lying: that’s an impossible idea which would produce a really boring blog. I’ll settle for trying to chronicle everything that I read which I find interesting or substantive.

This endeavor is partially based on a narcissistic desire to share my internal monologue with the world (it is a blog, after all) and partially a weapon in my Sisyphean struggle to chisel as much knowledge as possible into the shifting, fragmentary surface of my own memory. This will help me maintain the illusion that the time I spend slacking during my workday is actually part of some grand autodidactic endeavor. Yesss!