Diggin this…

(via Wooster Collective)

Human Pac Man

The escape from Crete

(pic from here)

Today on Twitter someone compared Michael Jackson to Icarus.

Icarus grew up in captivity. His father engineered the plan for his escape. And his mode of escape eventually led to his tragic demise.

The resonance is compelling:

At first there was a terror in the joy. The wide vacancy of the air dazed them-a glance downward made their brains reel. But when a great wind filled their wings, and Icarus felt himself sustained, like a halcyon bird in the hollow of a wave, like a child uplifted by his mother, he forgot everything in the world but joy. He forgot Crete and the other islands that he had passed over: he saw but vaguely that winged thing in the distance before him that was his father Daedalus. He longed for one draft of flight to quench the thirst of his captivity: he stretched out his arms to the sky and made toward the highest heavens.

Alas for him! Warmer and warmer grew the air. Those arms, that had seemed to uphold him, relaxed. His wings wavered, dropped. He fluttered his young hands vainly-he was falling-and in that terror he remembered. The heat of the sun had melted the wax from his wings; the feathers were falling, one by one, like snowflakes; and there was none to help.

He fell like a leaf tossed down by the wind, down, down, with one cry that overtook Daedalus far away. When he returned and sought high and low for the poor boy, he saw nothing but the birdlike feathers afloat on the water, and he knew that Icarus was drowned.

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RIP MJ…

Human stigmergy

Stigmergy is a form of self organization involving organisms and the encoding of information into their environment:

Stigmergy is a mechanism of spontaneous, indirect coordination between agents or actions, where the trace left in the environment by an action stimulates the performance of a subsequent action, by the same or a different agent.

Originally used to describe termite behavior, it has generally been the monopoly of social insects.

But this is changing.

Stigmergy scales up to human activities quite well.

One of the best examples of a stigmergic human practice is graffiti: the encoding of ephemeral messages into the environment as a kind of metadata about territory and identity…literally tagging.

The broken window theory is another example of stigmergy in an urban setting:

Consider a building with a few broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may even break into the building, and if it’s unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside.

Or consider a sidewalk. Some litter accumulates. Soon, more litter accumulates. Eventually, people even start leaving bags of trash from take-out restaurants there or breaking into cars.

The internet is also the backdrop for a number of stigmergic practices:

The massive structure of information available in a wiki, or an open source software project such as the Linux kernel could be compared to a termite nest; one initial user leaves a seed of an idea (a mudball) which attracts other users who then build upon and modify this initial concept, eventually constructing an elaborate structure of connected thoughts.

Now that the internet is a shared environment for close to 1/4 the world population, stigmergy contextualizes online collaborative behavior very effectively.

I’m starting to think Kafka was onto something…

Happy Father's Day Dad!

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Is Burning Man counter-cultural?

(image from here)

One dude interviewed for this academic paper about Burning Man had a pretty interesting answer to the question – is Burning Man counter-cultural:

No… I consider my day-to-day world counter-cultural. I think that society, the global-whatever you want to call this thing we live in, most of the time, going to work, it’s just… just so fragmented, so incongruent, that I think true culture is found in what we’re doing with Burning Man. I don’t get that same sense of community and cultural richness presented to me, or presented [at all]… It’s almost like you have to search for it outside of select few things, and Burning Man being one of those things. And the intentional communities that are forming through people having met one another at Burning Man, who started collaborating on projects, started to share their passion… that’s real culture. I think counter-culture is people getting numbed and going to work forty hours a week and losing their passion and sight of their dream and purpose, that’s counter-cultural.

It’s interesting to think about Burning man not as an arbitrary departure from modern culture but as a powerful restoration of premodern culture.

I think I have to agree with this guy.

The modern industrial project is counter-cultural.

Burning Man, to some degree, is the restoration of human culture.

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“Cultural Performances at Burning Man: Dramatizing the Postmodern Crisis of Affect”

Baha'i leader predicts social media in 1938

(via @pupakat)

The great grandson of Baha’i's founder Baha’u’llah, Shoghi Effendi spoke of a technology which eerily jives with social media (especially Twitter).

Check this out:

“A mechanism of world inter-communication will be devised, embracing the whole planet, freed from national hindrances and restrictions, and functioning with marvellous swiftness and perfect regularity…The press will, under such a system, while giving full scope to the expression of the diversified views and convictions of mankind, cease to be mischievously manipulated by vested interests, whether private or public, and will be liberated from the influence of contending governments and peoples.”

From Shoghi Effendi, The World Order of Baha’u’llah, p. 203-204

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If you’ve never heard of Baha’i, check out the teachings. They’re beautiful.

The things you can learn from speed dating

I keep hearing about studies that leverage speed dating events to research physical attraction, romance etiquette and the like.

This write up is pretty interesting.

Researchers found that something as simple as who physically approaches who can have a significant impact on desire:

“The mere act of physically approaching a potential partner, versus being approached, seemed to increase desire for that partner,” said Eli Finkel, associate professor of psychology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern and co-investigator of the study.

Regardless of gender, those who rotated experienced greater romantic desire for their partners, compared to those who sat throughout the event. The rotators, compared to the sitters, tended to have a greater interest in seeing their speed-dating partners again.

“Given that men generally are expected — and sometimes required – to approach a potential love interest, the implications are intriguing,” Finkel said.

“Let’s face it, even today, there is a huge difference in terms of who is expected to walk across the bar to say ‘hi,’” added Northwestern’s Paul Eastwick, the study’s other co-investigator.

It sounds like it would be in the organizers’ interest to make everyone get up and rotate. Wouldn’t that stimulate desire across the board?!

Next time I organize a speed dating event, I think I’ll have to give this a try.

How many senses do you have?

Although this is kind of a silly video, I think the dude has a point.

The 5 senses – especially touch – are extremely oversimplified.

Distinguishing proprioception (the ability to sense where you body parts are in space) as a separate sense seems very reasonable.

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The Octopus is an interesting reference.

While they have a great sense of touch, octopi have a poor sense of proprioception.

Meanwhile they can taste stuff they touch.

An octopus’ suction cups are equipped with chemoreceptors so that the octopus can taste what it is touching.

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Octopuses also don’t have stereognosis.

Meaning, they cannot “form a mental image of the overall shape of the object it is handling.”

They can “detect local texture variations, but cannot integrate the information into a larger picture.”

Maybe we should add this to the human tally as well…

We might learn a lot if the complexity of our senses was explained more thoroughly, and not in hard and fast categories.

And who’s to say out senses are a static reality. Evolution didn’t end with it’s discovery…

Curious

Lifecasting has a pretty robust Wikipedia entry:

Lifecasting is a continual broadcast of events in a person’s life through digital media. Typically, lifecasting is transmitted through the medium of the Internet and can involve wearable technology. Lifecasting reverses the concept of surveillance, giving rise to sousveillance through portability, personal experience capture, daily routines and interactive communication with viewers.

After reading this NPR blog post, I’m starting to wonder if somebody needs to start a wikipedia entry for afterlifecasting (?)…