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

• Brainbows
• Evolutionary psychology bingo

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?)

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.

The title “keyword: evil” seems a tad hyperbolic here: although hydroelectric power is problematic in terms of its environmental impact, that’s true of pretty much every method of energy production, and although Google’s lobbying against energy privatization is self-interested, it’s not exactly sinister, either (since privatizing utilities actually is a terrible idea). Emphasizing Google’s behavior too much risks missing the point — it is true that Google’s actions will help set the bar for its competitors, but as I understand capitalist economics, it’s not really realistic to expect a market to fail to respond to financial incentives because of an individual company’s intent to be evil vs not be evil — a more systemic view is needed.

However, I really like the overarching point that the internet isn’t an “ethereal store of ideas shimmering overhead like the aurora borealis.” No one ever actually makes this argument explicitly (since it doesn’t cohere at all), but then again, people don’t often engage with the material substrates underlying their experience of the internet either, especially not when engaging in techno-utopian prognosticating.

This ties in with a broader conceptual shift in American discourses about goods and economies over the last half-century or so: a tendency to abstract away from the realities of manufacturing as much as possible in favor of focusing on emotional and cultural connotations of how consumers interact with commodities. You can see it very clearly in advertising — hype about how Product X is well-built and made to last has largely been replaced by elaborate appeals to how Product X is essential to a certain demographic’s sense of self-identity (broad overview here). Abstracting in this way is even easier when dealing with things like “the internet” which is already an abstraction, not an object with material heft that you can touch and hold in your hand.

..Although, the same issue definitely arises with tangible goods as well. Computers themselves are a prime example (along with basically everything else). The rapid spread of the computer as an essential household item has created a massive outflux of cast-off computer equipment that is full of hazardous toxins and becomes obsolete within a year or two of purchase. Computer parts are almost never recycled in environmentally sound ways even when they make it to ‘recyclers’ — instead they are shipped overseas and sold to raw-materials brokers who mine them for a single valuable component (e.g. copper) and then toss them in a landfill. Or, y’know, burned in irrigation canals.

(Freegeek is awesome because they attack this on two fronts — selling un-reusable parts to the most reputable recyclers they can find and selling/giving people refurbished computers made from the reusable parts and running Linux, which doesn’t get as bloated and bogged-down and thus makes computers seem to last longer.)

There’s a lot to say on this topic, but I have to leave work.

• What kinds of strategies address these issues best? I see a problem of transparency/information distribution and a problem of economics. People are not exposed to information about environmental realities underlying their stuff unless they actively seek it out, which makes it hard for them to “vote with their dollar.” Plus, there’s that pesky segment of the populace who can’t afford the luxury of voting with their dollar.
• Related: how green-ness has itself become a marketing strategy. I find this really interesting. For now I will just cite Exhibit A and Exhibit B.

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! The auditory cortex is organized into tonotopic maps. This means that each neuron will fire most rapidly in response to a particular acoustic frequency, and that neurons are arrayed in a spectrum that corresponds to the spectrum of audible frequencies (and to the corresponding regions of the cochlea), so neurons that respond most strongly to similar frequencies are located adjacently. This is similar to the visual and somatosensory cortices, where neural maps reflect the spatial layout of the structures that provide sensory input to them (eyes, body). You can observe this directly in animals by inserting electrodes into neurons (when the animal is anesthetized), playing tones, and seeing how rapidly they fire.

Normally the tuning of these maps is very stable over time — you can test the same organism over and over again and the neurons’ optimal frequencies won’t change. However, when particular tones are made behaviorally relevant through conditioning (i.e. when they signal an impending tail shock, or sweet, sweet electrical stimulation of the dopaminergic reward circuits in the ventral tegmental area) the tonotopic maps reorganize themselves and more neurons become optimally responsive to the tone. The effect can be induced with a small number of trials and remains stable over time periods as long as two weeks; in fact, it becomes stronger after a couple nights’ sleep (which makes sense since there’s a lot of other evidence that processing that takes place during sleep aids in the consolidation of memories).

My take is that this probably points towards a developmental account of why people are really good at making fine auditory distinctions at the frequencies used in human speech, or why bats are really good at hearing their own sonar tones etc. These sound sensitivities are basically ubiquitous and consistent among the species that display them, but they are probably not “hard-wired” – the only thing that’s innate is having neural networks that are sensitive to operant conditioning, and environment does the rest. Pretty slick.

(The paper discusses possible mechanisms for this conditioning, but sadly my knowledge of the 15ish candidate brain regions and their connectivity is too half-assed to say anything substantive about them. They have a nice flowchart in Figure 5, though!)

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.

Oh man, Borges is so fucking good, and I could easily go through this paragraph-by-paragraph because there’s so much there. Here’s something new I noticed this time, something small:

Littérateur, slicker, Buenos Airean: Funes did not use these insulting phrases, but I am sufficiently aware that for him I represented these unfortunate categories.

However, he goes on to discuss how the all-encompassing acuity of Funes’ memory prevents him from abstracting categories — because his perceptions are attuned to minute differences between instances of objects, he has trouble even accepting the stable identity of a single object across time, much less grouping sets of (infinitely disparate) entities together into classes. Would Funes really label someone a littérateur, or reduce their personality characteristics to a function of their city of origin? Or is Borges giving us a neat little demonstration of the near-irresistible unconscious tendency to understand others’ mental states and methods of cognition by analogy to our own, even in cases where it leads us awry?

Also, as always, loving the narrator’s commentary on his own memories (which I think require no commentary):

“I remember (I believe) the strong delicate fingers of the plainsman who can braid leather.”

I am so absentminded that the dialogue which I have just cited would not have penetrated my attention if it had not been repeated by my cousin, who was stimulated, I think, by a certain local pride and by a desire to show himself indifferent to the other’s three-sided reply.

For the entire story has no other point (the reader might as well know it by now) than this dialogue of almost a half-century ago. I shall not attempt to reproduce his words, now irrecoverable. I prefer truthfully to make a résumé of the many things Ireneo told me. The indirect style is remote and weak; I know that I sacrifice the effectiveness of my narrative; but let my readers imagine the nebulous sentences which coulded that night.

Also, “I was benumbed by the fear of multiplying superfluous gestures” = best penultimate sentence ever?

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!

PS: I have very shapely and well-developed basal ganglia. Also, my mind-reading paranoia was (faintly) justified: apparently when you ponder probability distributions for an experimental task and/or try to force yourself to stop thinking about sex in the middle of a functional scan, the associated blood flow to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is readily observable!

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.

Four hundred and thirty dollars is the (already heavily discounted) rate. PP has an abortion fund, but it’s limited, so they impose restrictions to keep the money from running out — the fund pays $215 at most, and you must first be rejected from OHP (or DSHS medical in Washington) to qualify.

Thus, we referred a lot of unemployed women to OHP…and women dependent on abusive partners…and scared and bewildered teenagers who didn’t even understand what health insurance was, much less how to effectively navigate tangled social service bureaucracies…the list goes on. Some of their applications were accepted. If they were denied, they could come into our clinics and fill out still more paperwork to apply for the PP fund; however, many never made it that far.

A key insight about social services: Every extra step imposed between a person and a service they need — every confusing piece of paperwork, every delayed or redirected telephone call, every demand for documentation — decreases the chance they will actually get the service. The barriers may appear trivial, but they are often effectively insurmountable for the people who are deepest in crisis. Many people do not have the education, or the persistence, or the optimism to make it through. People give up. Often they feel that their lives are unmanageable and don’t have faith in the government’s ability to help.

Anyway, I’m curious what will happen now that OHP is going to a lottery system — will the PP fund buckle under increased demand, or will it remain semi-unscathed because people will be too discouraged to even apply for it? Awesome options there! HIGH FIVE, PEOPLE!

—————————–

The thing that’s really fucked is that the citizens of Oregon (and Washington) still have it far better than many other US states, where Medicaid is legally prohibited from funding abortion services and where abortion clinics are scattered 500 miles apart. A woman five hours’ drive from the nearest abortion clinic who’s working for minimum wage can’t get any financial help to end an unwanted pregnancy in many states…but all 50 of them will cheerfully sink hundreds of thousands of dollars into 18 years of health care for her and her future child!

This is why many people are pissed off and alienated by middle-class feminism’s arguably-myopic focus on upholding Roe v. Wade. I don’t think anyone would claim that Roe v Wade isn’t important, but it’s also crucial to recognize that many women in this country are effectively barred from safe legal abortion regardless of supreme court precedent because of economic/geographical constraints. In order to promote reproductive freedom for everyone, including the people who are most likely to be financially crippled by unwanted kids, we need to focus on access as well as legality. Of course that’s way more difficult, since it implicates the entire set of safety nets our country provides (or, y’know, fails to provide).

Sigh. I really need to find a more productive way to channel this. In the meantime, I will leave you with this other article, Why I am an Abortion Doctor, which got me all choked up when I read it soon after quitting PP (although YMMV).

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.)

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.

I view the prescriptivism vs descriptivism debate as a problem of finding the appropriate balance on a continuum, not as a binary question. On some level you can’t deny that clear convention-abiding speech tends to be more expressive and easily interpretable by a broader swath of society. However, there’s a difference between “ME NO CONJUGATE VERBS”-level of ungrammatical speech and things like using ‘impact’ as a verb.* Plus, prescriptivism is often tied up with oodles of latent class bias — in its strong form it often strikes me as a way of conferring false legitimacy on not taking marginalized people’s viewpoints seriously (since dialect and education are pretty strongly tied to other forms of social stratification). Fowler’s alarmist rhetoric about bastions of civilization being corrupted by the unwashed masses seems to align with this.

…Although, I’m intrigued by how Fowler reconciles his moral outrage with this (also pretty awesome) quote:

The English-speaking world may be divided into (1) those who neither know nor care what a split infinitive is; (2) those who do not know, but care very much; (3) those who know & condemn; (4) those who know & approve; & (5) those who know & distinguish. . . . Those who neither know nor care are the vast majority, & are a happy folk, to be envied by most of the minority classes.

Intuitively it does seem that not all speech is equally clear and effective, but crystallizing these hazy notions of clarity into a book about how to use words is really tricky, since ‘English grammar’ is really more a set of emergent regularities than a unified static entity. Plus, since language shifts are non-linear, there’s often no good way to evaluate synchronically whether a linguistic quirk will end up becoming an integral part of future-English and is thus “OK” or will fade into ungrammatical obscurity. So, Fowler and Burchfied are both in a difficult position, given that their endeavor is basically impossible!

Burchfield was also, apparently, an editor of the OED, and was instrumental in bringing about several changes in its editorial policy along similar lines, such as allowing profanities, racial slurs and newly coined words that weren’t yet well-entrenched in the lexicon. I read another article about him that I lost the link to (and it was a pdf, anyway) that discussed the objectivity of his editorial comments (e.g. ‘-colloq.’, ‘-obscene’, etc), observed that he was often subjective and inconsistent, quoted him frankly discussing the arbitrary nature of his inclusions, and then concluded that a degree of inconsistency was inevitable because purely objective lexography doesn’t exist. Honestly, that’s probably about the best we can hope for!

This post is disjointed because I have to leave work…and GO!

*Yes, I’m still bitter that I wasn’t allowed to do this in my senior thesis in college.

“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!

Although, honestly, there’s a bit more to it than that. The truth is that the idea of forgetting makes me uneasy — maybe even scares me. I can monologue at length about how the malleability and selectivity of memory is an inevitable feature (and a huge functional asset!) of our neurocognitive architecture…and yet, on some pre-analytic level, I still subscribe to a naive solipsism that makes me feel that if I read something and then forget it, it didn’t happen. (Which, coupled with a healthy dose of neurotic perfectionism, leads me to conclude that by reading and forgetting I’m wasting my life on nothing, erasing myself by squandering time. Yay!)

Let’s ignore the fact that this line of thinking, taken to its logical conclusion, would require me to spend all my time documenting everything that happened to me in order to make it real. Let’s definitely ignore the fact that spending all my time documenting would force me to start documenting my documenting, leading me into a morass of infinite self-reflexive banality haunted by botched algorithms, undergraduate lit theory majors and social networking websites. (No, seriously, let’s not go there. I will TURN THIS CAR AROUND.)

Instead, let’s all just read my writing about reading others’ writing…and maybe spend a warm fuzzy minute reflecting on the ways that we really do define and create ourselves through narratives, albeit narratives of the unconscious internal sort.