Psychology

Like a tornado, online communities only form under certain conditions. If you're looking to build an online community, understand that they are very difficult to build artificially. They seem to only emerge from natural conditions. Indeed, you can help them emerge, but you can't *create* them in my experience.

The story that unfolded, from Harriet Miers to Alito... at everyone moment it seemed *strange*. I'm now -- personally at least -- certain that Miers was a prop, and that Rove is still very much at work.

Anyone with a background and sales will know exactly why Miers was a great failed nominee to proceed Alito. Without the contrast, Alito would have caused a storm. This Judge, my friends, is going to cause a lot of damage. He needs to be opposed violently -- or we will pay for many years.

When you watch news, always be looking for the puppet shows. The more elaborate and daring the puppet show, the more danger the situation poses to our well being.

Meandering wildly in all directions (I am so jealous of the name -- would have worked perfectly here), the blog of a cognitive scientist, wrote a great post about how to use caffine effectively:

It should be becoming clear to you that in order to use caffeine effectively, you have to use it in the context of your physiological arousal. If you are trying to study some topic far less engaging than cognitive science, and you feel yourself getting distracted and listening to the conversations outside your window, there is a strong indication that your arousal level is low and that caffeine will help get you moving and focusing and concentrating. If you are trying to study said material, and you are scanning back and forth between notes and textbook, furrowing your brow, and wishing your roommate would get off the phone so you could concentrate, you sound like someone who is already at or above peak arousal and coffee will not help, in fact it will probably make things worse.

Read it again if you have to.

Modern psychology has often drawn, I suspect, a caricature rather than a portrait of man. As a result it has introduced a grave gap between itself and the knowledge of men that observation gives us and from which investigation must start. Those who are not psychologists ... speak of such strange things as fair play, justice and unjustice, even of dignity and the need for freedom. ... Yet not only are these ideas excluded from scientific discussion; the conceptual schemes with which psychology works today hardly leave room for them.

Solomon E.

Source: Scotsman(UK)In the largest scientific study ever conducted on humor, Scientists have announced that the below joke is "The world's funniest joke".

"Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn’t seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed.

"The other guy whips out his phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps: ‘My friend is dead! What can I do?’ The operator says: ‘Calm down, I can help. First, let’s make sure he’s dead.’

"There is a silence, then a shot is heard. Back on the phone, the guy says: ‘OK, now what?’"

I hate jokes...

Am I the only one who is creeped out by this latest development in neuroscience?

When volunteers were shown a plaid pattern made up of two different sets of stripes but asked to pay attention to only one set, the program was able to tell which one the subjects were thinking about.

Dr Rees said: "This is the first basic step to reading somebody's mind. If our approach could be expanded upon, it might be possible to predict what someone was thinking or seeing from their brain activity alone." - BBC: Brain scan 'sees hidden thoughts'

Excerpted from: Can Socialists Be Happy? | By George Orwell

It would seem that human beings are not able to describe, nor perhaps to imagine, happiness except in terms of contrast. That is why the conception of Heaven or Utopia varies from age to age. In pre-industrial society.

Heaven was described as a place of endless rest, and as being paved with gold, because the experience of the average human being was overwork and poverty. The houris of the Muslim Paradise reflected a polygamous society where most of the women disappeared into the harems of the rich.

The inability of mankind to imagine happiness except in the form of relief, either from effort or pain, presents Socialists with a serious problem. The Socialist objective is not a society where everything comes right in the end, because kind old gentlemen give away turkeys. What are we aiming at, if not a society in which 'charity' would be unnecessary? But does that mean we are aiming at some painless, effortless Utopia? At the risk of saying something which the editors of Tribune may not endorse, I suggest that the real objective of Socialism is not happiness. Happiness hitherto has been a by-product, and for all we know it may always remain so. The real objective of Socialism is human brotherhood. This is widely felt to be the case, though it is not usually said, or not said loudly enough. Men use up their lives in heart-breaking political struggles, or get themselves killed in civil wars, or tortured in the secret prisons of the Gestapo, not in order to establish some central-heated, air-conditioned, strip-lighted Paradise, but because they want a world in which human beings love one another instead of swindling and murdering one another. And they want that world as a first step. Where they go from there is not so certain, and the attempt to foresee it in detail merely confuses the issue.

So I had a dream last night that I was back at my old elementry school. I was the same age as I was now, but everyone around me was in sixth grade. My teacher was Ms. Lowenthal -- who was the hottest damn teacher that I ever had (don't worry it wasn't one of those dreams). She asked me to hand out books. She then left the room and started loudly yelling obscenities in the halls. I took a look at the book cover, and it was Asimov's Chronology of the World , for whatever reason. I threw the copies at the students, and they perfectly landed on every students desk. I was very proud of this, for some reason.

As my teacher continued to yell obsenities in the halls, I started doing a skit for the class. It was a Mr. Show skit where a bunch of italian gangsters sit around and say, "24 is the highest number". If you've seen the skit, you'll know what I'm talking about. The class loved it; so like any rock star, I said, "and now I'm out". I got a bathroom pass, and headed to the dingy elementry school bathroom. In the stall, I noticed something dripping on me, I looked up and it was blood leeking from the ceiling. Then I woke up...

Now I'm wondering, what the hell my subconcious was trying to tell me?  

By Jamie Talan | Psychology Today

Cave art is graphic and energetic, but its pictographs of animals and peopleare, in a word, primitive. Maybe, as anthropologists have surmised, the untrained artists simply couldn't draw more true-to-life representations. Now, though, a Harvard psychiatrist is offering another explanation. Stone Age people lived under such constant fear--of marauding animals, hostile tribes, even evil spirits--that it literally changed the way they saw their subjects, suggests Anneliese Pontius, M.D. To stay alert to danger, their brains worked faster, processing spatial information through a neural shortcut. [read full article]

I had a strange experience tonight. I rediscovered a piece that I learned sometimes during 10th grade (I think while I was grounded for being a pothead). Its sounds terrible, on the one hand, yet I feel like their is something very firey and beautiful that needs to be released -- like a half done sculpture that is destined to become a master piece. Take a listen[mp3] to a 1:30 seconds, if you're feeling like forgiving me for couple of mushed keys, and mistakes. Its really strange... basically, my hands seem attached to my 10th grade self-taught (read:wrong) fingerings with my wrists rock solid wrists (which is dangerous for me, I got carpal tunnel a few years ago). Its as though, when my brain sends the message to my hands that "Its time to play appassionata", my muscles think I'm still in high school. Nevertheless, I think there is some real potential in this piece. I think I ought to learn it all, and learn it right this time.