Amira

"Brain Power: From Neurons to Networks is a 10-minute film and an accompanying TED Book. Based on new research on how to best nurture children’s brains from Harvard University’s Center on the Developing Child and University of Washington’s I-LABS, the film explores the parallels between a child’s brain development and the development of the global brain of Internet, offering insights into the best ways to shape both. The film and TEDBook launched at the California Academy of Sciences on November 8, 2012." http://bit.ly/QCcAnn - Amira

"What is the genesis of Funes the Memorious, the Jorge Luis Borges story about a mnemonist that fascinates neuroscientists, and is as famed a fictional treatise on memory as anything but Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past? (...) Funes the Memorious” tells the vicissitudes of Ireneo Funes, a peasant from Fray Bentos, who after falling off a horse and hitting his head hard recovers consciousness with the incredible skill—or perhaps curse—of remembering absolutely everything. (...) Borges again plays with the infinite in a context no less fascinating: the vast labyrinths of memory and the consequences of having an unlimited capacity to remember. (...)" - Amira

"Borges argues that “Funes the Memorious” is a long metaphor of insomnia. In fact, toward the end of the story he mentions that Funes found sleeping difficult, because to sleep is to get distracted from the world. Borges gives more details on the way he conceived Funes during his own sleepless nights. (...) Imagine the most extreme example, a human being who does not possess the power to forget, who is damned to see becoming everywhere; such a human being would no longer believe in his own being, would no longer believe in himself, would see everything flow apart in turbulent particles, and would lose himself in this stream of becoming; like the true student of Heraclitus, in the end he would hardly even dare to lift a finger. All action requires forgetting, just as the existence of all organic things requires not only light, but darkness as well." - Amira

"How did humans acquire language? In this lecture, best-selling author Steven Pinker introduces you to linguistics, the evolution of spoken language, and the debate over the existence of an innate universal grammar. He also explores why language is such a fundamental part of social relationships, human biology, and human evolution. Finally, Pinker touches on the wide variety of applications for linguistics, from improving how we teach reading and writing to how we interpret law, politics, and literature." - Amira

*bookmarked for when my brain is fully booted* - Eivind

voglio quella rete in ufficio. - nettarefrizzante

"Hyperphotos are to panoramic photos what Google Earth is to a globe. You can keep clicking and zooming and clicking and zooming, seemingly endlessly, until you find yourself on a dramatic balcony, looking up a statue’s nose. (...) At the foremost of this evolving genre is Paris-based photographer Jean-François Rauzier, who has spent the last decade building photos of unprecedented detail. His latest images, which you can see below, are around 10,000 times the resolution of a normal photograph. Even at 66 feet wide, around the size of two school buses, his images are incredibly crisp. As a fashion photographer in the 1970s Rauzier longed to break free from the constraints of advertising and film photography. Envious of moviemakers who engage viewers for hours, he wanted to capture everything before him in one image. But photographers had to choose: close-up or wide-angle. With digital photography he realized he could stitch together a grid of pictures, creating a far-flung panorama with a wealth of detail to rivet viewers." - Amira

"Reading is information control, just as a metadata tag is a bibliographic control. (...) Reading, like autobiography, is a subset of a search function. (…) So reading is a kind of integrated software or the frame technology that manufactures software, and a book is the software application that is manufactured. (...) People tend to forget that reading is a kind of all-over experience, and it takes place in a particular room or in a particular moment of childhood. So the idea was to not confine reading to a particular object (book) or platform (PowerPoint) but allow it to expand outwards into the social space around it. I was more interested in what might be called the general mood of reading: the overall atmosphere or medium in which we experience our daily thoughts and perform actions—what Heidegger termed Stimmung and the psychologist Daniel Stern calls affective or amodal attunements." - Amira

"Physicists have proposed an experiment that could force "us to make a choice between extremes to describe the behaviour of the Universe. (...) It is based on what the researchers call a 'hidden influence inequality'. This exposes how quantum predictions challenge our best understanding about the nature of space and time, Einstein's theory of relativity. "We are interested in whether we can explain the funky phenomena we observe without sacrificing our sense of things happening smoothly in space and time." (...) Mathematically (and mind-bogglingly), these constraints define an 80-dimensional object. The testable hidden influence inequality is the boundary of the shadow this 80-dimensional shape casts in 44 dimensions. The researchers showed that quantum predictions can lie outside this boundary, which means they are going against one of the assumptions. Outside the boundary, either the influences can't stay hidden, or they must have infinite speed." - Amira

"Experimental groups can already entangle four particles, so a test is feasible in the near future (though the precision of experiments will need to improve to make the difference measurable). Such a test will boil down to measuring a single number. In a Universe following the standard relativistic laws we are used to, 7 is the limit. If nature behaves as quantum physics predicts, the result can go up to 7.3. (...) Either way, it would mean that the Universe is fundamentally nonlocal, in the sense that every bit of the Universe can be connected to any other bit anywhere, instantly. That such connections are possible defies our everyday intuition and represents another extreme solution, but arguably preferable to faster-than-light communication. "Our result gives weight to the idea that quantum correlations somehow arise from outside spacetime, in the sense that no story in space and time can describe them."" - Amira

“The moment one thinks of the matter, one sees how false a notion of experience that is which would make it tantamount to the mere presence to the senses of an outward order. Millions of items of the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind—without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos. Interest alone gives accent and emphasis, light and shade, background and foreground —intelligible perspective, in a word.” — William James, American philosopher and psychologist who had trained as a physician. He was the first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States (1842-1910), The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1, (1890), Cosimo, Inc., Apr 30, 2007, p.402. - Amira

"The question of whether we live in a real world or a simulated one has plagued philosophers for centuries - but now scientists believe they finally have found a way to test the theory. Professor Silas Beane, a theoretical physicist at the University of Bonn in Germany said that his group of scientists have developed a way to test the 'simulation hypothesis'. (...) But now more than two thousand years since Plato suggested that our senses only give us a poor reflection of objective reality, experts believe they have cracked the riddle. (...) The test would see scientists using mathetical models known as the lattice QCD approach in an attempt to recreate - on a theoretical level - a simulated reality. To identify what these constraints would be, scientists would have to build their own simulation of the universe. (...) Lattice QCD is a complex approach that that looks at how particles known as quarks and gluons relate in three dimensions." - Amira

Silas Beane discusses evidence of pixelation in terms of lattice spacing via Quantum Chromodynamics, "Constraints on the Universe as a Numerical Simulation" (2012) http://goo.gl/Gpo1f -- assuming the classical limit of a quantum computer, the lattice spacing should be non-zero if we are in a simulation, and orders of magnitude finer than Planck scale. (Think of a believable discretization of the Feynman-Kac path integral :-) - Adriano

"While it may be useful to reason about the averages, social phenomena are really made up of millions of small transactions between individuals. There are patterns in those individual transactions that are not just averages, they're the things that are responsible for the flash crash and the Arab spring. You need to get down into these new patterns, these micro-patterns, because they don't just average out to the classical way of understanding society. We're entering a new era of social physics, where it's the details of all the particles—the you and me—that actually determine the outcome. Reasoning about markets and classes may get you half of the way there, but it's this new capability of looking at the details, which is only possible through Big Data, that will give us the other 50 percent of the story. We can potentially design companies, organizations, and societies that are more fair, stable and efficient as we get to really understand human physics at this fine-grain scale. This new computational social science offers incredible possibilities." - Amira

"This is the first time in human history that we have the ability to see enough about ourselves that we can hope to actually build social systems that work qualitatively better than the systems we've always had. That's a remarkable change. It's like the phase transition that happened when writing was developed or when education became ubiquitous, or perhaps when people began being tied together via the Internet. The fact that we can now begin to actually look at the dynamics of social interactions and how they play out, and are not just limited to reasoning about averages like market indices is for me simply astonishing. To be able to see the details of variations in the market and the beginnings of political revolutions, to predict them, and even control them, is definitely a case of Promethean fire. Big Data can be used for good or bad, but either way it brings us to interesting times. We're going to reinvent what it means to have a human society." - Amira

"A fifth sort of argument concludes that defining art is philosophically unnecessary, on the grounds that the problem of defining art reduces to a pair of easier sorts of problems: the problem of giving an account of each individual artform, and the problem of defining what it is to be an artform. That is, given definitions of the individual artforms, and a definition of what it is to be an artform, and given, crucially, that every artwork belongs to some artform, a definition of art falls out: x is a work of art if and only if x is a work in activity P, and P is one of the artforms (Lopes, 2008). Every artwork belongs to an artform, on this view, because every artwork either belongs to an existing artwork or else pioneers a new artform. The key claim that every work of art belonging to no extant artform pioneers a new one may be defended on the grounds that any reason to say that a work belonging to no extant artform is an artwork is an artwork is a reason to say that it pioneers a new artform. In response, it is noted that an activity might be ruled out as an artform on the grounds that no artworks belong to it, and that the question of whether or not a thing belongs to an artform arises only because there is a prior reason for thinking that the thing is an artwork. (...)" - Amira

"The most prominent and influential institutionalism is that of George Dickie. Dickie's institutionalism has evolved over time. According to an early version, a work of art is an artifact upon which some person(s) acting on behalf of the artworld has conferred the status of candidate for appreciation (Dickie 1971)." :-) - Amira

“Aleppo located in northwestern Syria 310 kilometres from Damascus, is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world; it has been inhabited since perhaps as early as the 6th millennium BC. (...) What it had was tradition, heritage and incredible diversity. Five hundred years after Shakespeare made Aleppo souk the epitome of a distant cornucopia, you could still buy almost anything here, eat and drink a vast range of dishes, and even bathe in the traditional Hammam Nahasin. (...) When I first wandered in via the gate near the citadel, I discovered that there was only one thing I could not find in there: the desire to leave. It was just too diverting and fascinating. Every shopkeeper seemed to want to have a chat over a glass of red tea. (...) Architecturally and culturally, Aleppo carries the genetic imprint of a succession of ruling powers and invaders including Hittites, Assyrians, Arabs, Greeks, Romans, crusading European Christians, Mamelukes and Ottomans." - Amira

Photo: "The Pianist" [Warsaw city after WW2] vs Syria 2013 https://twitter.com/LineHol... - Amira

"An origami artist from Japan, Wataru Itou, has spent four years crafting an incredible model city from paper. The entire piece – which measures 2.4m by 1.8m and is 1m high – has been crafted using only paper, which Wataru stuck together using craft glue, an art knife and hole puncher. Wataru Itou, a young student of a major art university in Tokyo spent over four years over on this city named “Castle on the Ocean”. complete with electrical lights and a moving train, all made of paper. The finished piece is now being displayed for the first time at an exhibition on the artificial island of Umihotaru, near Tokyo." - Amira

"In a world full of cheap, mass-produced but relatively shoddy furniture made from engineered woods, it's nice to see designers persevering in making pieces from sturdier, solid woods, but also having a bit of fun with it. In creating their handcrafted furniture, architect-designers Gunnar Rönsch and Stephen Molloy of Fundamental obviously love geometry, as one can see with their intricately designed pieces that are based on the "poetry of mathematics." Visually appealing and tactilely inviting, their "Atlas" table is features interlocked cubes that rotated 45 degrees on two of its axes and sectionally cut or "planed" to reveal triangular patterns. The designers say that Informed by a fascination with form and repetition, ATLAS is a play on the three meanings that spring to mind, the mountains bordering the sahara, the image of the geographical features on the surface of the planet, and the titan bearing the globe on his shoulders. It's kind of a heoric piece, there's a lot of labour involved, and it's real old fashioned craftsmanship." - Amira

"The hotel chain ibis is offering guests a unique experience that combines technology and art. A mattress embedded with 80 sensors transmits data about patron’s temperature, movements and sound while they sleep. A robot then transforms these signals into brush strokes live throughout the night to create a work of ‘Sleep Art’." - Amira

Source: Stephenson, G. R. (1967). Cultural acquisition of a specific learned response among rhesus monkeys. In: Starek, D., Schneider, R., and Kuhn, H. J. (eds.), Progress in Primatology, Stuttgart: Fischer, pp. 279-288. - Amira

Wow, first the nicely illustrated experiment ... then your smug "comprehension" -- followed by *your cold shower* at http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog... -- then the realization that, "perhaps the most mind-blowing fact about social psychology is that fables which make people smile will always be widely read." Bravo for Quora comments! - Adriano

"Artist Serena Malyon adds tilt-shift photography effects to Van Gogh’s famous paintings, they look amazing! Using Photoshop, they manipulated the light and adjusted the focus to make us see these paintings in ways we could have never imagined. Amazingly, nothing in these paintings was changed, added or removed." - Amira

:) - avatar8

"I think that if I were required to spend the rest of my life on a desert island, and to listen to or play the music of any one composer during all that time, that composer would almost certainly be Bach. I really can't think of any other music which is so all-encompassing, which moves me so deeply and so consistently, and which, to use a rather imprecise word, is valuable beyond all of its skill and brilliance for something more meaningful than that -- its humanity." -- Glenn Gould, Gramophone - Amira

"The trouble begins when we start to be so impressed by the strategies of our systematized thought that we forget that it does relate to an obverse, that it is hewn from negation, that it is but very small security against the void of negation which surrounds it. And when that happens, when we forget these things, all sorts of mechanical failures begin to disrupt the functions of the human personality. When people who practice an art like music become captives of those positive assumptions of system, when they forget to credit that happening against negation which system is, and when they become disrespectful of the immensity of negation compared to system — then they put themselves out of reach of that replenishment of invention upon which creative ideas depend, because invention is, in fact, a cautious dipping into the negation that lies outside system from a position firmly ensconced in system." -- Glenn Gould, Reader p.5 - Amira

“The first thing I look at each morning is a picture of Albert Einstein I keep on the table right beside my bed. The personal inscription reads “A person first starts to live when he can live outside of himself.” In other words, when he can have as much regard for his fellow man as he does for himself. I believe we are here to do good. It is the responsibility, of every human being to aspire to do something worthwhile, to make this world a better place than the one he found. Life is a gift, and if we agree to accept it, we must contribute in return. When we fail to contribute, we fail to adequately answer why we are here.” — Armand Hammer // “I find the question “Why are we here?” typically human. I’d suggest “Are we here?” would be the more logical choice.” — Leonard Nimoy - Amira

See also 'What is the meaning of life?' -- answers at Quora http://www.quora.com/The-Big... - Amira

"A Pythagorean cup (also known as a Pythagoras cup, a Greedy Cup or a Tantalus cup) is a form of drinking cup which forces its user to imbibe only in moderation. Credited to Pythagoras of Samos, it allows the user to fill the cup with wine up to a certain level. If the user fills the cup only to that level, the imbiber may enjoy a drink in peace. If the imbiber exhibits gluttony, however, the cup spills its entire contents out the bottom (onto the lap of the immodest drinker). (...) Water supply was evidently a problem in Pythagoras' time in Samos, as demonstrated by the 1,036 m (3,399 ft) Tunnel of Eupalinos that the ruler Polycrates had dug through rock to serve as an aqueduct bringing water to the city." - Amira

My Cuisinart seems to work on this same principle. - Spidra Webster

"All the world’s major religions, with their emphasis on love, compassion, patience, tolerance, and forgiveness can and do promote inner values. But the reality of the world today is that grounding ethics in religion is no longer adequate. This is why I am increasingly convinced that the time has come to find a way of thinking about spirituality and ethics beyond religion altogether." - Amira

"My confidence in venturing into science lies in my basic belief that as in science so in Buddhism, understanding the nature of reality is pursued by means of critical investigation: if scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims." http://io9.com/5942616... - Amira

It was never adequate, Mr. Lama. - Eivind

Isn't this just the Dalai Lama saying he's a Buddhist? - Pete's Got To Go

Norman Rockwell's Triple Self-Portrait (1960): “I couldn’t actually see what I looked like—a homely, lanky fellow—and therefore, I could stretch the truth just a bit and paint myself looking more suave and debonair than I actually am.” // René Magritte // Salvador Dali. - Amira

“In the eighteenth century, philosophers considered the whole of human knowledge, including science, to be their field and discussed questions such as: did the universe have a beginning? However, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, science became too technical and mathematical for the philosophers, or anyone else except a few specialists. Philosophers reduced the scope of their inquiries so much that Wittgenstein, the most famous philosopher of this century, said, “The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language.” (…) However, if we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist.” — Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time - Amira

It seems to me that philosophy, for all its interest value, has very little of value to say about how or why we are here. - Winckel

Charles Darwin - “The notebooks were filled with memorandum to himself on things to look further into, questions he wanted to answer, scientific speculations, notes on the many books he was currently reading, natural observations, sketches, and lists of the books he had read and wanted to read. But the progression is far from orderly: the entries are chaotically arranged and wide-ranging; they jump from one scientific subject to the next and are interspersed with notes on correspondences and conversations. He would rest the notebook on his desk and write horizontally down the page with a pen, and, like Isaac Newton, he would sometimes start in from both ends of the notebook at once and work towards the middle." - Amira

Ernest Hemingway - The notebook entry reads: “My name is Ernest Miller Hemingway I was born on July 21, 1899 My favorite authors are Kipling, O. Henry and Steuart Edward White. My favorite flower is lady slipper and tiger lily. My favorite sports are trout fishing, hiking, shooting, football and boxing. My favorite studies are English, zoology and chemistry. I intend to travel and write.” - Amira

"In 1995, 40 internationally-recognized directors took part in a collaborative film, Lumiere & Company, that celebrated the first hundred years of cinema. In making the film, each director had to agree to four rules. They had to shoot a short film 1.) using the original Cinématographe invented by the Lumière Brothers a century before — the same camera that shot Workers Leaving The Lumière Factory in Lyon (1895), one of the earliest motion pictures ever made. Their films 2.) had to be one continuous shot and couldn’t be longer than 52 seconds; 3.) they couldn’t use synchronized sound or artificial lights; and 4.) they were only allowed three takes, no more. As for the results? They ran the gamut." - Amira

[Zhang Yimou, Wim Wenders, David Lynch, Liv Ullmann, Abbas Kiarostami, Spike Lee] - Amira

"The World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) is a large database of structural (phonological, grammatical, lexical) properties of languages gathered from descriptive materials (such as reference grammars) by a team of 55 authors (many of them the leading authorities on the subject)." - Amira

This is a very useful tool indeed. I wish I had the time to explore more functions of it. :-) - Maitani

:-) - Amira

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll... - Maitani

"In the early part of the 20th century French-Jewish capitalist Albert Kahn set about to collect a photographic record of the world, the images were held in an 'Archive of the Planet'. Before the 1929 stock market crash he was able to amass a collection of 180,000 metres of b/w film and more than 72,000 autochrome plates, the first industrial process for true colour photography. Autochrome was the first industrial process for true colour photography. When the Lumière brothers launched it commercially in June 1907, it was a photograhic revolution - black and white came to life in colour. Autochromes consist of fine layers of microscopic grains of potato starch dyed either red-orange, green or violet blue combined with black carbon particles, spread over a glass plate where it is combined with a black and white photographic emulsion. All colours can be reproduced from three primary colours." - Amira

"The Devil's Dictionary is a satirical "reference" book written by Ambrose Bierce http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki.... The book offers reinterpretations of terms in the English language, lampooning cant and political doublespeak." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Amira

i have looked up wiki for Ambrose Bierce, something interesting has taken my attention: "He was the tenth of thirteen children whose father gave all of them names beginning with the letter "A". In order of birth, the Bierce siblings were Abigail, Amelia, Ann, Addison, Aurelius, Augustus, Almeda, Andrew, Albert, Ambrose, Arthur, Adelia, and Aurelia." very interesting, isn't it :)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Taha

"New York-based graphic designer Evan Robertson takes the cleverest lines written by his favorite writers such as Oscar Wilde and Ernest Hemingway and turns them into brilliant literary posters. “I took little snippets of text and ideas from some of my favorite authors (with some notable exceptions that I’m saving), and let the words be a springboard for an illustration. The illustrations incorporate and interact with the text and hopefully add up to something that engages the mind as much as the eye.” - Amira

More Robertson's illustrations: http://www.etsy.com/shop... - Amira

"In 1952, John Cage composed his most controversial piece, 4′33,″ a four-and-a-half minute reflection on the sound of silence. Now fast forward eight years. It’s February, 1960, and we find the composer teaching his famous Experimental Composition courses at The New School in NYC, and paying a visit to the CBS game show “I’ve Got a Secret.” The TV show offered Cage something of a teachable moment, a chance to introduce the broader public to his brand of avant-garde music. Cage’s piece is called Water Walk (1959), and it’s all performed with unconventional instruments, save a grand piano. A water pitcher, iron pipe, goose call, bathtub, rubber duckie, and five unplugged radios — they all make the music. And the audience doesn’t quite know how to react, except with nervous laughter. It wasn’t particularly courteous. But, as one scholar has noted, it’s equally remarkable that prime time TV gave ten minutes of uninterrupted airtime to avant-garde music." ["Water Walk" starts at 5:35] - Amira

See also Sounds of Silence: John Cage’s 4’33″ performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra http://ff.im/OzdqA John Cage's Norton Lectures, given at Harvard in 1989 [MP3] http://ff.im/WPK73 - Amira