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:: Saturday, September 06, 2008 ::

Rorschach Toilet Blot Test

Green Eggs And Diarrhea
Originally uploaded by Kurt Christensen.


I'm ill. Or as one of my colleagues corrected, I'm sick. I came down with a fever last weekend. Shivering, sweating, chronic diarrhoea, all of that. No one else has caught it fortunately. So it's probably the result of something I ate or drank. Narrowing that down to things I had no one else did then it was either:
a) post work drinks last Friday
b) the glass of water I keep next to the bed at night that the cat likes to steal from me. I try to wash it when I know she's been at it but sometimes miss.
Basically, I've got cat's ass disease.

I had a couple of days of vomiting Lucozade out of my ass. Despite the fact they even write on the bottle "Lucozade is not suitable for replacing the fluid lost during diarrhoea." What sort of a reputation is that to have to try to live down! And why do I still buy it when I'm ill? It's psychosomatic now. Mentally Lucozade and diarrhoea go together in the same way Ealing comedies and "the sick bucket^TM" do.

I had to take a couple of days off of work. Even after the pure liquid form I still had a couple of days where I had only reached the viscosity to be able to create Rorschach Shit Blot tests on the back of the pan.


Déviation du test de Rorschach
Originally uploaded by Dominiq.


After that it turned in satay sauce. At least at that point I had energy enough to work from home for the rest of the week. I still haven't progressed past that point though. Time for some more rehydration salts. I've lost over 3kg (half a stone). That takes me from Light Welterweight to Super Featherweigh. At least, it would if I were a boxer.

I'm off all of this week anyway. On staycation. I hadn't heard that phrase until yesterday. Apparently even Radio 4 have used it. I feel like I'm jumping on a bandwagon. I have therefore decided to stay one step ahead of the pack and am declaring it an ironic post-staycation. Hopefully the rest will allow me to shit the rest of it through.

Labels: Humour, Personal, psychology

:: Dan 6.9.08 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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Fox News Caught Flashing Subliminal John McCain Image

Labels: Media, News, Politics, psychology

:: Dan 12.8.08 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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Sarcasm Seen as Evolutionary Survival Skill

Please forgive the lengthy quote:

"Evolutionary biologists claim that sociality is what has made humans such a successful species. We are masters at what anthropologists and others call "social intelligence." We recognize and keep track of hundreds of relationships, and we easily distinguish between enemies and friends.

More important, we run our lives by social calculation. A favor is mentally recorded and paid back, sometimes many years later. Likewise, insults are marked down on the mental score card in indelible ink. And we are constantly bickering and making up, even with people we love.

Sarcasm, then, is a verbal hammer that connects people in both a negative and positive way. We know that sense of humor is important to relationships; if someone doesn't get your jokes, they aren't likely to be your friend (or at least that's my bottom line about friendship). Sarcasm is simply humor's dark side, and it would be just as disconcerting if a friend didn’t get your snide remarks.

It's also easy to imagine how sarcasm might be selected over time as evolutionarily crucial. Imagine two ancient humans running across the savannah with a hungry lion in pursuit. One guy says to the other, "Are we having fun yet?" and the other just looks blank and stops to figure out what in the world his pal meant by that remark. End of friendship, end of one guy's contribution to the future of the human gene pool.

Fast forward a few million years and the network of human relationships is wider and more complex, and just as important to survival. The corporate chairman throws out a sarcastic remark and those who "get" it laugh, smile, and gain favor. In the same way, if the chair never makes a remark, sarcastic people are making them behind his or her back, forming a clique by their mutually negative, but funny, comments. Either way, sarcasm plays a role in making and breaking alliances and friendship."

[via sarcasmom]

Labels: Humour, psychology, science

:: Dan 17.7.08 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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As spotted by Bristle in the comments of the last post:

[amazon]

I'm also intrigued by this:


[amazon]

"Thanks for your reviews of our book,"A Field Guide to Demons, Fairies, Fallen Angels, and Other Subversive Spirits." This introduction to some of the world's most enchanting, weird and powerful spirits is intended to observe them in action in their natural habitats. Rather than separate the species by religious tradition, ethnicity, national boundaries or time, we opted to place them side-by-side and see how similar their fangs, talons, lore, and bad habits might be when in Forest, Mountain or Domicile anywhere in the history of humankind. We are a mother and daughter team, both writers, who share a love of mythology and who hold graduate degrees in Religious Studies and in Cultural Anthropology respectively. We hope that the readers of this work find these creatures as fabulous and informative as we did. For each entry, there is a "Dispelling and Disarming" section just in case! The universal cure is this: Hold them up to the light and see them for what they are, then show them Love and Compassion and the'll be blown away."

I don't believe in any of these fairy stories of demons or angles or gods or leprechauns or unicorns - yes, your God is in that list too - and a field guide to studying them seems ridiculous. I'm tempted to buy it for the Ecologists in the office so they can look out for them on site. File it along with all of their bat identification books as so on. Yet this sentence suddenly made it more interesting: "Rather than separate the species by religious tradition, ethnicity, national boundaries or time, we opted to place them side-by-side and see how similar their fangs, talons, lore, and bad habits might be." That's a very telling exercise that may help people see to the root of the psychology that created these theories in the first place.

Labels: Art, Literature, psychology

:: Dan 11.3.08 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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Garfield Minus Garfield
"Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolor disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life? Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against lonliness and methamphetamine addiction in a quiet American suburb."

Labels: Art, Humour, psychology

:: Dan 28.2.08 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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The Right Brain vs Left Brain



"The Right Brain vs Left Brain test ... do you see the dancer turning clockwise or anti-clockwise?

"If clockwise, then you use more of the right side of the brain and vice versa.

"Most of us would see the dancer turning anti-clockwise though you can try to focus and change the direction; see if you can do it.

LEFT BRAIN FUNCTIONS	RIGHT BRAIN FUNCTIONS
uses logic detail oriented facts rule words and language present and past math and science can comprehend knowing acknowledges order/pattern perception knows object name reality based forms strategies practical safe	uses feeling "big picture" oriented imagination rules symbols and images present and future philosophy & religion can "get it" (i.e. meaning) believes appreciates spatial perception knows object function fantasy based presents possibilities impetuous risk taking

I can switch it and will, or make it only move back and forth in the front 180 or back 180. What does that mean?

Labels: psychology

:: Dan 10.10.07 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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Andy Farnell recently asked me, "Do you know about the work of the Barrons (Forbidden Planet) I'm trying to get hold of any research material on these kooky pioneers of "snuff audio". If you know of anyone who has schematics of their self-destructing synthesisers please gimme a shout."

If you can jump in here please do so.

Now, my knowledge of the Forbidden Planet soundtrack extended to knowing that it was a pioneering piece of work in electronic music and that it still sounds amazing today. Unfortunately I don't even own a copy, although I do have Jack Dangers brilliant reworking. After an initial google the first place to go looking is of course Wikipedia. Here I find a page about the couple, Louis and Bebe, and their work.

It's a fascinating story and by the time I'd read that I was just as interested to know about how they worked as Andy. I noticed the reference in there to a book Lewis took his circuit building inspiration from; Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (MIT Press, 1948). A quick search on this and I found that it is still in print, see Amazon link below. Wanting to keep it authentic (and cheep) I bought a second hand copy of the second edition (1961) and awaited its arrival. (In the mean time the Forbidden Planet DVD and OST CD were added to my wishlist.)




When it arrived I found a book absolutely packed with the level of mathematics I thought I'd left behind at university and nothing in the way of circuit diagrams. I still read it in the hope of finding some insight, and struggled through the maths, which although I could just about follow and found it difficult to derive meaning from. There is still interesting material in there but something aimed at a more novice audience would have been better.

Below I've typed up my notes from reading it. They will probably only be of interest to someone reading a copy of the book themselves, someone who wants to know how much it would tell them about electronics and audio, and myself as there are a few things I wanted to research further. Page numbers refer to the 1961 edition.

Blurb: "...as readable by the layman as the trained scientist..." John B. Thurston, The Saturday Review of Literature.
p72. "We now wish to define [the intergral from minus infinity to infinity of K(tor) d epsilon (t, gamma)] The obvious thing to do would be to define this as a Stieltjes' integral, but [epsilon] is a very irregular fuction of t and does not make such a definition possible." Ha. Of course! Why didn't I see that?
Do you see what I'm up against here?
p86. On electronic circuits: "The details of its construction are more for the specialist in electrical engineering than for the reader of this book. They may be found elsewhere.¹
"1. We refer especially to recent papers by Dr Y.W.Lee."
'Recent' in this case is thought to refer to 1948.
p98 "In this book, we have avoided mathematical symbolism and mathematical technique as far as possible" Lies!
p102. Fig 2 shows a block diagram of a simple feedback circuit, much as you would find in any analogue electronics textbook.
p112. Figs 3 & 4, as above.
p114. Fig 6, as above with addition of interesting filter system. [Will add scan, please check back]
p145. Explanation and definition of a minority report as a fault finding system within parallel computing systems.
p142 a. Reference to correspondence with Bristol University (also on p199)
p142 b. Contains a lobotomy joke! You don't hear those everyday.
p146. Quotes Lewis Carol.
p154. Section about people with red hair and stutters (would this by PC today!?) plus musing on extinction.
pp158-161. Thoughts on free markets and game theory (although it is not referred to as such), and the problem with capitalism.
p162. Refers to Western exploitation of the "flesh-pot of Egypt." Funny how things don't change.
p164 & 171. Notes on chess computers. Predictions seem to have been accurate.

Incidentally, I didn't only start taking notes half way through. There really wasn't anything worth noting in the first half apart from a disparaging remark about scientific fields becoming too specialised and acoustics given as an example.

Frequently used terms I decided I ought to look up:
Gestalt
A priori
A fortiori

And finally, a reference to the Rorschach Ink Blot test inspired me to have a look for the images, as even when studying psychology I can't recall actually seeing them. The disclaimer on the above site explains why (scroll down the images if you're still curious).

Labels: Cybernetics, Electronic Music, Electronics, Literature, psychology, science

:: Dan 12.6.07 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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"We like to think it's our choice to help an old lady across the road or push her into the traffic. But an increasing number of scientists say we’re fooling ourselves. Are some of us just hard-wired to be bad?"

Labels: psychology, science

:: Dan 15.5.07 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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Wired: "See with your tongue. Navigate with your skin. Fly by the seat of your pants (literally). How researchers can tap the plasticity of the brain to hack our 5 senses — and build a few new ones."
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"We humans get just the five. But why? Can our senses be modified? Expanded? Given the right prosthetics, could we feel electromagnetic fields or hear ultrasound? The answers to these questions, according to researchers at a handful of labs around the world, appear to be yes."
[via dev.null]

Labels: psychology, science

:: Dan 3.4.07 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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