Ramblings & ephemera
From Sander Duivestein’s “Penny Thoughts on the Technium” (The Technium: 1 December 2009):
I‘m interested in how people personally decide to refuse a technology. I’m interested in that process, because I think that will happen more and more as the number of technologies keep increasing. The only way we can sort our identity is by not [...]
Posted on December 15th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: religion, science, social software, tech in changing society, technology | No Comments »
From Patsy McGarry’s “Church ‘lied without lying’” (Irish Times: 26 November 2009):
One of the most fascinating discoveries in the Dublin Archdiocese report was that of the concept of “mental reservation” which allows clerics mislead people without believing they are lying.
According to the Commission of Investigation report, “mental reservation is a concept developed and much discussed [...]
Posted on December 1st, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, language & literature, law, religion, security, word of the day | No Comments »
From Wikipedia’s “Gruen transfer” (28 September 2009):
In shopping mall design, the Gruen transfer refers to the moment when consumers respond to “scripted disorientation” cues in the environment. It is named for Austrian architect Victor Gruen (who disavowed such manipulative techniques) …
The Gruen transfer refers to the moment when a consumer enters a shopping mall, and, [...]
Posted on October 30th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Bruce Schneier’s “The Psychology of Con Men” (Crypto-Gram: 15 November 2008):
Great story: “My all-time favourite [short con] only makes the con artist a few dollars every time he does it, but I absolutely love it. These guys used to go door-to-door in the 1970s selling lightbulbs and they would offer to replace every single [...]
Posted on June 27th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Bruce Schneier’s “Second SHB Workshop Liveblogging (5)” (Schneier on Security: 11 June 2009):
Angela Sasse, University College London …, has been working on usable security for over a dozen years. As part of a project called “Trust Economics,” she looked at whether people comply with security policies and why they either do or do not. [...]
Posted on June 20th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Operator No. 9’s “That decorating touch” (Interactive Week: 24 April 2000): 100:
Dan Sweeney, general manager of Intel’s Home Networking division, says that when the company showed consumer focus groups the AnyPoint Wireless home networking system …, people became very confused, because there wasn’t a visible antenna. The desktop version of the wireless adapter — [...]
Posted on May 30th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Larry McCaffery’s “Conversation with David Foster Wallace” (Dalkey Archive Press at the University of Illinois: Summer 1993):
Minimalism’s just the other side of metafictional recursion. The basic problem’s still the one of the mediating narrative consciousness. Both minimalism and metafiction try to resolve the problem in radical ways. Opposed, but both so extreme they end [...]
Posted on May 23rd, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, language & literature, on writing | No Comments »
From Larry McCaffery’s “Conversation with David Foster Wallace” (Dalkey Archive Press at the University of Illinois: Summer 1993):
One thing TV does is help us deny that we’re lonely. With televised images, we can have the facsimile of a relationship without the work of a real relationship. It’s an anesthesia of “form.” The interesting thing is [...]
Posted on May 23rd, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Milton Glaser’s “Ten Things I Have Learned” (Milton Glaser: 22 November 2001):
… the important thing that I can tell you is that there is a test to determine whether someone is toxic or nourishing in your relationship with them. Here is the test: You have spent some time with this person, either you have [...]
Posted on May 22nd, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Rich Gossweiler, Maryam Kamvar, & Shumeet Baluja’s “What’s Up CAPTCHA?: A CAPTCHA Based On Image Orientation” (Google: 20-24 April 2009):
There are several classes of images which can be successfully oriented by computers. Some objects, such as faces, cars, pedestrians, sky, grass etc.
…
Many images, however, are difficult for computers to orient. For example, indoor scenes [...]
Posted on May 19th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Joe Clark’s “The extreme Google brain” (Fawny: 26 April 2009):
… Susan Pinker’s The Sexual Paradox, which explains, using scientific findings, why large majorities of girls and women behave almost identically at different stages of their lives – while large minorities of boys and men show vast variability compared to each other and to male [...]
Posted on April 28th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Steven Weinberg’s “Without God” (The New York Review of Books: 25 September 2008):
Worse, the worldview of science is rather chilling. Not only do we not find any point to life laid out for us in nature, no objective basis for our moral principles, no correspondence between what we think is the moral law and [...]
Posted on April 18th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: religion, science | No Comments »
From Damon Linker’s “The Future of Christian America” (The New Republic: 7 April 2009):
hat will provide the theological content of the nation’s civil religion now that the “mere orthodoxy” of the evangelical-Catholic alliance has proven unsuitable for a pluralistic nation of 300 million people? To my mind, the most likely and salutary option is moralistic [...]
Posted on April 14th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, politics, religion | No Comments »
From Natalie Angier’s “In One Ear and Out the Other” (The New York Times: 16 March 2009):
In understanding human memory and its tics, Scott A. Small, a neurologist and memory researcher at Columbia, suggests the familiar analogy with computer memory.
We have our version of a buffer, he said, a short-term working memory of limited scope [...]
Posted on March 17th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, language & literature, science | No Comments »
From Allen Abel And Madeleine Czigler’s “Tangerine trees and marmalade skies” (National Post: 24 June 2008):
… it was [marketing sage & Chicago scientist Louis Cheskin] who turned Marlboro cigarettes from a woman’s brand — originally red-tipped to hide lipstick smears — into the cowboy-themed cancer sticks of universal renown.
Related posts
What in our brains invest memories [...]
Posted on March 8th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, history, science | No Comments »
From Alex Koppelman’s “Why the stories about Obama’s birth certificate will never die” (Salon: 5 December 2008):
But according to several experts in conspiracy theories, and in the psychology of people who believe in conspiracy theories, there’s little chance those people who think Obama is barred from the presidency will ever be convinced otherwise. “There’s no [...]
Posted on March 6th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, politics, science | No Comments »
From ScienceDaily’s “Brain Differences Found Between Believers In God And Non-believers” (5 March 2009):
In two studies led by Assistant Psychology Professor Michael Inzlicht, participants performed a Stroop task – a well-known test of cognitive control – while hooked up to electrodes that measured their brain activity.
Compared to non-believers, the religious participants showed significantly less activity [...]
Posted on March 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: science | No Comments »
From Damien Carrick’s interview with Nicholas Johnson, “The psychology of conmen” (The Law Report: 30 September 2008):
Nicholas Johnson: I think what I love most about con artists and the world of scammers is that they’re criminals who manage to get their victims to hand over their possessions freely. Most thieves and robbers and the like, [...]
Posted on February 12th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, law, security | No Comments »
From Richard Alleyne’s “Black and white TV generation have monochrome dreams” (The Telegraph: 17 October 2008):
New research suggests that the type of television you watched as a child has a profound effect on the colour of your dreams.
While almost all under 25s dream in colour, thousands of over 55s, all of whom were brought up [...]
Posted on February 12th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: cool stuff, science | No Comments »
From Nicholas Carr’s “Remembering to forget” (Rough Type: 22 October 2008):
Slowly but surely, scientists are getting closer to developing a drug that will allow people to eliminate unpleasant memories. The new issue of Neuron features a report from a group of Chinese scientists who were able to use a chemical – the protein alpha-CaM kinase [...]
Posted on February 12th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: education, politics, science, tech in changing society, technology | No Comments »
