artwork { Agnes Martin, White Flower, 1960 | oil on canvas | Guggenheim Museum }

Why do we — along with 75 other countries — alternate between standard time and daylight time? Although many people believe it has an agricultural provenance, daylight time has always been a policy meant to save energy. As Benjamin Franklin argued, if people moved up their summer schedules by an hour, they could live by “sunshine rather than candles” in the evenings.

Energy conservation was the motivation for daylight time during World Wars I and II and the oil embargo of the 1970s, and it remains so today — even though there has been little scientific evidence to suggest daylight time actually helps us cut back on electricity use.
Recently, however, we were able to conduct a study in Indiana, where daylight time was instituted statewide only in 2006. (…)

We found that daylight time caused a 1 percent overall increase in residential electricity use, though the effect varied from month to month. The greatest increase occurred in late summer and early fall, when electricity use rose by 2 percent to 4 percent.

Daylight time costs Indiana households an average of $3.29 a year in higher electricity bills, or about $9 million for the whole state.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

During the past few decades, a mounting body of evidence has shown that animals possess a number of cognitive traits once thought to be uniquely human. Bees “talk” through complex dances and sounds [Note: in Problems in General Linguistics, Benveniste explained that the so-called languages of bees is not a language but a signal code.]; birds act as “social tutors,” teaching song repertoires to their young; monkeys use tools and can sort abstract symbols into categories. Yet the more scientists learn about the similarities between human and animal thought, the greater the need to explain the dramatic divide. Are the human faculties associated with language simply an advanced version of capacities that are found in animals, or do they represent something that is qualitatively new? (…)

Hauser describes animals as having “laser-beam” intelligence, in which each cognitive capacity is locked into a specific function. Humans, by contrast, have “floodlight” intelligence, he says: they can use a single system of thought in multiple ways and can translate information from one context to another. “Animals,” he elaborates, “live in a world in which the systems don’t talk to each other.”

Take tool use, for example. In 1960, when Jane Goodall discovered a chimpanzee using a grass stalk to catch termites, a long-held theory about human uniqueness fell apart. “But the significance of tool use doesn’t lie in the fact of tools,” Hauser explains, “but rather in how they’re conceived and used.” Animal tools consist of only one material and have only one functional part, while human tools have evolved over time to be made of various materials and have multiple functions. A knife can be used to cut food, open a box, or stab an intruder. Forty years of research, he reports, have not revealed any evidence that animals can use one tool for multiple purposes.

Hauser summarizes the distinguishing characteristics of human thought under four broad capacities. These include: the ability to combine and recombine different types of knowledge and information in order to gain new understanding; the ability to apply the solution for one problem to a new and different situation; the ability to create and easily understand symbolic representation of computation and sensory input; and the ability to detach modes of thought from raw sensory and perceptual input.

{ Harvard Magazine | Continue reading }

{ via jiji }

There’s an old saying that inside every 70-year-old is a 35-year-old wondering, “What happened?”
What happened is that countless days, nights, meetings, commutes and other unremarkable events went by, well, unremarked. They didn’t make a lasting impression on the brain or they were overwritten by so many similar experiences that they are hard to retrieve. In short, they’ve been forgotten.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Neuroscientists say forgetting is crucial to the efficient functioning of the mind, to learning, adapting and recalling more significant things.

“We focus so much on memory that forgetting has been maligned,” says Gayatri Devi, a neuro-psychiatrist and memory expert in New York City. “But if you didn’t forget, you’d recall all kinds of extraneous information from your life that would drown you in a sea of inefficiency.” (…)

Memories of singular, significant events — say, last week’s historic election — are generally easy to recall; people typically store them in long-term memory with many associations attached.

Memories of mundane, recurring events compete to be recalled, and scientists say the brain appears to be programmed to forget those that aren’t important.

{ Wall Street Journal | Continue reading }

photo { Thobias Fäldt }

What is National Ammo Day?

November 19 is National Ammo Day.

It is a nationwide BUYcott of ammunition. You buy ammunition. 100 Rounds a person.

The goals of Ammo Day:

The goal of National Ammo Day is to empty the ammunition from the shelves of your local gun store, sporting goods, or hardware store and put that ammunition in the hands of law-abiding citizens.

Make your support of the Second Amendment known–by voting with your dollars! 



There are an estimated 75 MILLION gun owners in the United States of America.  If each gun owner or Second Amendment supporter buys 100 rounds of ammunition, that’s 7.5 BILLION rounds in the hands of law-abiding citizens!

The gun/ammunition manufacturers have been taking the brunt of all the frivolous lawsuits, trying to put these folks out of business. Well, not if we can help it!  And we CAN help it by buying ammunition on November 19!

{ nationalammoday.com | Continue reading }

Maggots, the larval stage of certain flies, are already a federally approved treatment for people with nasty bed sores, chronic post-surgical wounds and diabetic foot ulcers.

Now, maggot therapy has received a boost from the medical establishment that could make it easier for patients and doctors to get insurance reimbursement for this treatment, which was noticed as effective against war wounds by Napoleon’s surgeon general as well as by orthopedic surgeon Dr. William S. Baer during WWI, among others.

Today, specially prepared maggots, typically of the green bottle fly, are used to “debride” wounds, feeding on sick tissue so healthy cells can move in and further infection is avoided. Maggot therapy was common in the United States in the 1930s but was replaced by antibiotics in the following decade or so. Now, with the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria including MRSA or methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, maggot therapy is getting a second look.

The new boost came last week when the American Medical Association and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services clarified its reimbursement guidelines to the wound care community for medicinal maggots and maggot therapy. (…)

“It’s strange, but some insurance companies will pay tens of thousands of dollars for an amputation, probably because it is so common nowadays, but will hesitate or object to paying $100 for a course of maggot therapy,” said Sherman, “even though studies repeatedly demonstrate that medicinal maggots have saved 40 to 50 percent of limbs otherwise scheduled for amputation due to non-healing wounds.”

{ LiveScience | Continue reading }

related { She went to a Brooklyn emergency room suffering from what she thought was just a kidney stone, but a medical nightmare left her partly blind and a quadruple amputee. | NY Daily News | Continue reading }

Proprioception (from Latin proprius, meaning “one’s own” and perception) is the sense of the relative position of neighbouring parts of the body. Unlike the six exteroceptive senses (sight, taste, smell, touch, hearing, and balance) by which we perceive the outside world, and interoceptive senses, by which we perceive the pain and the stretching of internal organs, proprioception is a third distinct sensory modality that provides feedback solely on the status of the body internally. It is the sense that indicates whether the body is moving with required effort, as well as where the various parts of the body are located in relation to each other.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

By now you have probably heard the warning: Playing Mirror’s Edge will make you vomit. The hot new videogame is a sort of “first-person runner”: You’re a courier who travels across the rooftops of a locked-down, police-state city, delivering black-market messages by using acrobatic feats of parkour. (…)

Only 15 minutes into the game, my mouth began overproducing saliva, and I had to pause the action for a few seconds to avoid carsickness. I would feel like a total lamer, but apparently even the Penny Arcade guys wrestled with nausea.

Why does this game get its hooks into my brain so effectively? Why does it feel so much more visceral?

I think it’s because Mirror’s Edge is the first game to hack your proprioception.

That’s a fancy word for your body’s sense of its own physicality — its “map” of itself. Proprioception is how you know where your various body parts are — and what they’re doing — even when you’re not looking at them. It’s why you can pass a baseball from one hand to another behind your back; it’s how you can climb stairs without looking down at your feet.

{ Wired | Continue reading }

According to a new study, women who drink lightly while pregnant are less likely to have children with behavioral and cognitive problems.

The research, led by a team at the University College of London, analyzed thousands of pregnancies drawn from a large British government survey. As expected, heavy drinking mothers put their offspring at serious risk for a wide variety of mental problems, including hyperactivity and conduct disorders. But avoiding alcohol altogether wasn’t ideal, either: the children who performed best on the battery of cognitive tests came from mothers who had 1-2 drinks per week (the light drinking cohort.)

{ The Frontal Cortex/ScienceBlogs | Continue reading }

image { Non-Alcoholic Beer ad }

Madonna wore a green Louis Vuitton dress to the Gucci UNICEF party last night.

{ NY mag | Continue reading }

LVMH Moët Hennessy/Louis Vuitton S.A., usually shortened to LVMH, is a French holding company and the world’s largest luxury goods conglomerates. The group is partly owned by French billionaire Bernard Arnault (France’s richest person).

LVMH brands:

Louis Vuitton
Loewe
Celine
Kenzo
Givenchy
Marc Jacobs
Fendi
Pucci
Donna Karan
Christian Dior
…

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

PPR is a French multinational holding company specializing in retail shops and luxury brands. The company was founded in 1963 by the French billionaire François Pinault and is now run by his son François-Henri Pinault.

PPR brands:

Gucci
Yves Saint Laurent
Sergio Rossi
Alexander McQueen
Stella McCartney
Balenciaga
Puma

François Pinault also owns Christie’s (auction house).

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

related { Madonna and bodyguard leaving the Gucci party }

France has never been shy about promoting its culture, so few were surprised when it took a close interest in a new digital library intended to showcase Europe’s history, literature, arts and science.

But when the new site, called Europeana, begins life on Thursday, more than half of its two million items will come from just one of the 27 countries in the European Union: France.

So comprehensive is France’s cultural dominance over this cyberspace outpost that other countries are having their own history written for them — in French, of course.

“I find the figures extraordinary,” said Viviane Reding, the European commissioner responsible for the project. “France has half the content — the collapse of the Berlin Wall is illustrated with a French TV documentary.”

She said that some countries that had been skeptical about the project changed their minds now that the library was a reality.

Europeana combines the digital resources of museums and libraries, and the information provided includes paintings, maps, videos and newspapers.

Material is free of copyright so it can be downloaded for blogs, research or schoolwork by anyone with an Internet connection.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

video { French singer Serge Gainsbourg burns a 500 franc bill on live TV to show how much he has left after taxes, 1984 | translation | stereohell }

Despite its reputation, Beijing’s autocracy is anything but absolute. The government long ago abandoned real communist ideology, and its current leader, Hu Jintao, a cipher with a background as a rural bureaucrat, has about as much revolutionary charisma as Bob Dole. And while China’s security apparatus is sophisticated, the country is too large, with too many educated, Internet-savvy people, for Beijing to brainwash its citizens the way Kim Jong-il has in North Korea. Most urban Chinese I’ve met are knowledgeable about their leaders’ strengths and flaws, and certainly don’t see them as some kind of gods, the way Mao was viewed in the 1950s and 1960s.

So, since the late 1970s, when China’s leaders began opening its economy, they have placed their bets on their ability to deliver continued economic growth. (…) For the most part, their gamble succeeded. For three decades, China has posted annual growth rates of over 10 percent, and this nominally communist country now seems more capitalist than Wall Street. Even in small provincial cities like Lanzhou, where I visited last year, massive malls, open-air markets, and new skyscrapers dot the downtown. (…)

Since the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, China’s urban middle classes have bought into this growth–and the regime.

Exports constitute nearly 40 percent of China’s GDP–far too high a figure. (By comparison, in the U.S., exports account for about 10 percent of GDP most years.) And the global financial slowdown is already taking a terrible toll. Some 10,000 factories in southern China’s Pearl River Delta area had closed by the summer of 2008. Gordon Chang, a leading China analyst, estimates that 20,000 more will shutter by the end of this year. In the third quarter of 2008, Beijing also reported its fifth consecutive quarterly drop in growth, and several private research firms expect a sharper slowdown next year. Additionally, unemployment is skyrocketing; in Wenzhou, one of the main exporting cities, about 20 percent of workers have lost their jobs, Reuters recently reported.

{ How the global economic crisis could bring down the Chinese government | The New Republic | Continue reading | Previously: Geopolitics of China }