Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 07/30/2009

• Marathons and Memory : The Frontal Cortex

  At The Frontal Cortex Jonah Lehrer has a post on marathon running and memory. Stress, like the stress from running for 4 hours, is known to disrupt memory -- but all memory isn't disrupted equally. The study found that after a marathon, runners had reduced "explicit" memory (ability to remember specific words, facts, numbers, etc.) but improved "implicit" memory (the ability to remember actions, motions, processes, etc.).
  
  Fascinating! As someone who has run -- oh, is it 5? -- marathons I definitely felt a deterioration in my cognitive abilities as the races progressed. My ability to do simple math (like calculating mile splits) withered away. But it wasn't because I couldn't add anymore -- I could do that just fine. It was always because I couldn't remember what my watch said one mile earlier. That's a distinctly "explicit" memory function.

  tags: memory, cognition, marathon, running, stress, jonah lehrer

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 07/29/2009

• Re-Engineering the Earth - The Atlantic (July/August 2009)

  tags: no_tag

  • Dyson’s early geo-engineering vision addressed a central, and still daunting, problem: neither sulfur-aerosol injection nor an armada of cloud whiteners nor an array of space-shades would do much to reduce carbon-dioxide levels. As long as carbon emissions remain constant, the atmosphere will fill with more and more greenhouse gases. Blocking the sun does nothing to stop the buildup. It is not even like fighting obesity with liposuction: it’s like fighting obesity with a corset, and a diet of lard and doughnuts. Should the corset ever come off, the flab would burst out as if the corset had never been there at all. For this reason, nearly every climate scientist who spoke with me unhesitatingly advocated cutting carbon emissions over geo-engineering.

  • Ken Caldeira, of the Carnegie Institution for Science, thinks we ought to test the technology gradually. He suggests that we imagine the suite of geo-engineering projects like a knob that we can turn. “You can turn it gently or violently. The more gently it gets turned, the less disruptive the changes will be. Environmentally, the least risky thing to do is to slowly scale up small field experiments,” he says. “But politically that’s the riskiest thing to do.”

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 07/23/2009

• Unlocking the Mysteries of The Artistic Mind | Psychology Today

  Jonah Lehrer on how art heightens natural stiumlus-response. He uses this Picasso quote: "Art is the lie that reveals the truth." -- or, as neuroscience shows, art isn't a complete lie, but a deliberate exageration.

  tags: jonah lehrer, picasso, neuroscience, art, abstraction, symbols, hyperbole, peak-shift effect, herring gull, ramachandran, neuroaesthetics

  • Through careful distortion, he found a way to intensify reality. As Picasso put it, "Art is the lie that reveals the truth."

  • What's surprising is that such distortions often make it easier for us to decipher what we're looking at, particularly when they're executed by a master. Studies show we're able to recognize visual parodies of people—like a cartoon portrait of Richard Nixon—faster than an actual photograph. The fusiform gyrus, an area of the brain involved in facial recognition, responds more eagerly to caricatures than to real faces, since the cartoons emphasize the very features that we use to distinguish one face from another. In other words, the abstractions are like a peak-shift effect, turning the work of art or the political cartoon into a "super-stimulus."

  • the job of an artist is to take mundane forms of reality—whether a facial expression or a bowl of fruit—and make those forms irresistible to the human brain.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 07/22/2009

• Mind Hacks: Vision shift glasses alter time perception

  Whoa! Wearing prism glasses that shift vision to the left "shrinks" time, while wearing prism glasses that shift vision to the right "expands" time. I'm intrigued by the linguistic implications of this, since so many of our time/space/numeric perceptions are based on our language.

  tags: mind hacks, perception, time, space, vision, neuroscience, linguistics, prism glasses

• Scoring/Criteria | Smarter Cities

  (Ed. note: Gah! I wrote this already, then Diigo deleted it! Or I did by accident...)My pre-stated theme for the summer was "data visualization" -- although it kind of got pushed aside by the completely unrelated theme "fictiontion writing" -- so instead of commenting on the methodology behind NRDC's new "smarter cities" ranking, I'm going to comment on how they presented their data.Things I loved: the division of cities by size and the ease of moving between those groups; the division of the data by category/scoring criteria; the control the user has over the list (i.e., clicking on a category like "green spaces" and re-ranking the table); the use of size-graded circles to indicate scoring; the mouse-over titles combined with simple icons to display each category; the orange and teal color scheme (of course!)Things that I think could be improved: instead of just naming a category when you mouse over it, it would have been nice to have an easy link or pop up description of what that category means (instead of a hidden link at the bottom of the table); the sizes of the circles are discrete (small, medium or large) not actually reflective of the numberical score, and that's not indicated very clearly; the "city profiles" should list the scores in each category; although city profiles have maps, there is no map on the front page -- this would have been nice for looking at metro areas (i.e., Portland is in the large city category, Beaverton is in the small city category -- you have no way of knowing that those two cities are both ranked high and geographically adjacent unless you do some clicking)Also, this has nothing to do with data visualization, but isn't the preference for the term "smarter cities" over "smart cities" reminiscent of the recent shift in sex-ed-speak from "safe sex" to "safer sex"? Just saying ...

  tags: NRDC, urban planning, smart growth, smarter cities, rankings, data visualization

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 07/21/2009

• SEEDMAGAZINE.COM § MATHEMATICIANS: An Outer View of the Inner World

  Audio slide show of mathematicians describing their craft -- which, as many of them note, has as much in common with creative arts than with hard sciences.

  tags: math, SEED, science, art, abstract thinking, visualization, slideshow, audio

• Joel Makower: Two Steps Forward: GreenXchange: Sustainable Innovation Meets the Creative Commons

  Although Joel Makower's writing could, as always, use some serious editing, there's some good info here about GreenXchange. It's a meeting of two of my favorite ideas: open source and sustainable design!

  tags: GreenXchange, creative commons, nike, open source, joel makower, best buy, sustainability, design

  • A small group of companies spearheaded by Nike have partnered with the nonprofit Creative Commons to try to change that. Their novel initiative, called GreenXchange, aims to allow companies to share intellectual property for green product design, packaging, manufacturing, and other uses. If it succeeds, this budding coalition could accelerate innovation across companies and sectors. At minimum, it stands to rewrite the rules about how companies share.

• Meatloaf : The New Yorker

  Poem by Donald Hall ...
  "In August Lauren climbs Mt. Kearsarge,
  
  where I last clambered in middle age,
  
  while I sit in my idle body
  
  in the car, in the cool parking lot,
  
  revising these lines for Kurt Schwitters,
  
  counting nine syllables on fingers
  
  discolored by old age and felt pens,
  
  my stanzas like ballplayers sent down
  
  to Triple A, too slow for the bigs."
  

  tags: poetry, donald hall, new yorker, baseball

  • In August Lauren climbs Mt. Kearsarge,

    where I last clambered in middle age,

    while I sit in my idle body

    in the car, in the cool parking lot,

    revising these lines for Kurt Schwitters,

    counting nine syllables on fingers

    discolored by old age and felt pens,

    my stanzas like ballplayers sent down

    to Triple A, too slow for the bigs.

  • In August Lauren climbs Mt. Kearsarge,

    where I last clambered in middle age,

    while I sit in my idle body

    in the car, in the cool parking lot,

    revising these lines for Kurt Schwitters,

    counting nine syllables on fingers

    discolored by old age and felt pens,

    my stanzas like ballplayers sent down

    to Triple A, too slow for the bigs.

  • In August Lauren climbs Mt. Kearsarge,

    where I last clambered in middle age,

    while I sit in my idle body

    in the car, in the cool parking lot,

    revising these lines for Kurt Schwitters,

    counting nine syllables on fingers

    discolored by old age and felt pens,

    my stanzas like ballplayers sent down

    to Triple A, too slow for the bigs.

• The Neuroscience of McGriddles : The Frontal Cortex

  This blog post from Jonah Lehrer is an ode -- or anti-ode, as in this case they amount to the same thing -- to the McGriddle and the greasy, fatty, energy-filled satisfaction it brings mankind. He quotes Elizabeth Kolbert's recent round-up in the New Yorker of obesity books and research (http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/07/20/090720crbo_books_kolbert?currentPage=all which I read yesterday...) and adds in a Duke study. The money quote: "Let's imagine, for instance, that some genius invented a reduced calorie bacon product that tasted exactly like bacon, except it had 50 percent fewer calories. It would obviously be a great day for civilization. But this research suggests that such a pseudo-bacon product, even though it tasted identical to real bacon, would actually give us much less pleasure. Why? Because it made us less fat. Because energy is inherently delicious. Because we are programmed to enjoy calories."

  tags: jonah lehrer, obesity, fat, calories, dopamine, elizabeth kolbert, mcgriddle, psychology

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 07/20/2009

(Note 7/21/09: Oops, didn't realize Diigo was going to stick these "highlights" into my blog. Anyways...they are my favorite parts of my favorite writer's "fat" article. Oh, and a bonus quote from Ian Frazier's "Shouts and Murmurs.")

• Why are Americans fat? : The New Yorker

  tags: no_tag

  • Undeniably, the fat—the authors of “The Reader” are adamant advocates for the “f” word—are subject to prejudice and even cruelty. A 2008 report by the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, at Yale, noted that teachers consistently hold lower expectations of overweight children
  • To claim that some people are just meant to be fat is not quite the same as arguing that some people are just meant to be poor, but it comes uncomfortably close.
  • it’s those living just above the poverty level who appear to be gaining weight most rapidly.
  • in the new world order, it is possible to be overweight and malnourished at the same time
  • Collecting the maximum number of calories with the least amount of effort is, after all, the dream of every creature, including those too primitive to dream.

• Why are Americans fat? : The New Yorker

  tags: no_tag

  • The movement known variously as “size acceptance,” “fat acceptance,” “fat liberation,” and “fat power” has been around for more than four decades; in 1967, at a “fat-in” staged in Central Park, participants vilified Twiggy, burned diet books, and handed out candy. More recently, fat studies has emerged as a field of scholarly inquiry; four years ago, the Popular Culture Association/American Cultural Association added a fat-studies component to its national conferences, and in 2006 Smith College hosted a three-day seminar titled “Fat and the Academy.”

• XXXL : The New Yorker

  tags: no_tag

  • Today, soft drinks account for about seven per cent of all the calories ingested in the United States, making them “the number one food consumed in the American diet.”
  • Kessler spends a lot of time meeting with (often anonymous) consultants who describe how they are trying to fashion products that offer what’s become known in the food industry as “eatertainment.” Fat, sugar, and salt turn out to be the crucial elements in this quest: different “eatertaining” items mix these ingredients in different but invariably highly caloric combinations. A food scientist for Frito-Lay relates how the company is seeking to create “a lot of fun in your mouth” with products like Nacho Cheese Doritos, which meld “three different cheese notes” with lots of salt and oil. Another product-development expert talks about how she is trying to “unlock the code of craveability,” and a third about the effort to “cram as much hedonics as you can in one dish.”

• Shouts & Murmurs: The Temperature of Hell: A Colloquium : The New Yorker

  tags: no_tag

  • So when you look at your kids asleep in their beds after you return to your homes this evening, I want you to ask yourselves, “What kind of Hell am I leaving for them, and for my grandchildren?”

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 07/17/2009

• The New Ambassadors of Science § SEEDMAGAZINE.COM

  Evan Lerner's even-headed week in review contemplates the intersection of science and faith: what (if anything) does it mean that the future head of the NIH, Francis Collins, is deeply religious?

  tags: seed, evan lerner, francis collins, NIH, BigLogos, Obama, unscientific america, science, faith, religion, policy, space-x, NASA

• At Wal-Mart, Labels to Reflect Green Intent - NYTimes.com

  Wal-mart is going after the holy grail (Edit 7/21/09: Wired's science cliche # 1! Sorry...) of green: a universal sustainability index. I'm pulling for them, truly. They've started by boiling all of sustainability down to these fiften questions (http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/07/16/business/WalmartSlide.pdf)

  tags: nytimes, walmart, sustainability, products, consumer information, green

  • “Nobody else could pull this off,” said Michelle Harvey at Environmental Defense Fund, one of the groups involved in the creation of the index.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Tuesday night was my third (and penultimate) summer writing class. My instructor, and the class, has a stealthy way of understating themselves. I somehow came out with so much -- and I'm not sure how.

Last week's book was The Spy Who Came in From the Cold by John Le Carre. It wasn't my favorite book ever, but not being a spy person (I haven't even seen a James Bond movie all the way through), I can confidently say it's my favorite spy book. So far, that is...

After receiving probably one of the best comments ever (that my writing reminded everyone of Raymond Chandler), I'm going to be reading a few more spy books. For next week's class, we're reading Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana. I also have a personal assignment to read (at some point) James M. Cain's Double Indemnity.

But...I ramble. Here's what you really want, a glimpse at my stab at fiction. I finally have a direction and a plot in mind (astonishing!), and more important a project that I can't wait to work on, but for now I'll just give you this. The set-up is that Greg is on an airplane:

Finally, Greg’s eyes rested on the woman next to him in the aisle seat. Greg guessed that she was 66, maybe a young 67, judging from her orange hair, orthopedic sandals and too-small Club Med Turks and Caicos T-shirt. She had two glossy bottles of sickly sweet liquid enamel. It was a cheesy brand like “Slick and Hard” or “Wet and Fine.” She took the bottle between her glistening left thumb and index finger and gave it two hard violent shakes like she was snapping the neck of a fatally wounded animal. With a taxidermist’s precision, she applied a third coat, giving each nail exactly two and a half strokes. Then she placed all ten fuchsia fingertips flat on her tray-table, leaned forward and blew.

Greg is a fraud investigator, on his way to Las Vegas for the National Conference of Fraud Examiners. (Like a good journalist, I lifted this delicious detail from reality. As Jim Sheeler would say, "Reality is too good...you couldn't make this stuff up!") There, he'll end up on a case that he's completely ill-prepared for. I'll let you know how it develops...

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 07/14/2009

• On Hand for Space History, as Superpowers Spar - NYTimes.com

  Beautiful reflection on what Apollo means -- and what it means to be a journalist covering it -- from John Noble Wilford, reporter from the New York Times who wrote the original moon-landing story. It actually made me cry. Really.

  tags: nytimes, apollo, moon landing, john noble wilford, neil armstrong, NASA, space race, 40th anniversary, lunar, apollo11, apollo8

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 07/13/2009

• Book Review - 'You Are Here - Why We Can Find Our Way to the Moon but Get Lost in the Mall,' by Collin Ellard - Review - NYTimes.com

  I want to go there.

  tags: collin ellard, book, book review, jonah lehrer, nytimes, navigation, evolution, you are here, science writing, biology, space, urban design

  • He describes, for instance, the research of Rüdiger Wehner, a Swiss scientist who glued tiny stilts made of pig hair to the limbs of desert ants. Because the insects with longer legs consistently overshot the nest and got lost, Wehner demonstrated that ants have an internal odometer: they carefully count their steps when searching for food.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 07/10/2009

• Photo: Armadillo-like Crocodile Fossil Found in Brazil

  Pre-armadillo alligator! Rad! It's the perfect balance between cute and scary.

  tags: armadillo, alligator, national geographic, archaeology, fossil, evolution

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 07/09/2009

• ‘Unscientific America’: A Review | RealClimate

  A review of "Unscientific America" on Real Climate: "As they point out, we ‘eat our own’, when it comes to colleagues engaged in public outreach and science popularization. Case in point: Carl Sagan–a hero to many of us who value science outreach. One of the darker episodes in modern U.S. science history was the blocking by Sagan’s fellow scientists of his entry into the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. Evidently, a majority of his colleagues resented his having become a household name–something they presumably considered unbecoming for a scientist. What sort of message does it send when the most effective science communicator in modern history was shunned by his colleagues for his efforts? Certainly not a good one."

  tags: real climate, unscientific american, chris mooney, sheril kirshenbaum, war on science, science, culture, science literacy

• TheStar.com | GTA | Green bins: A wasted effort?

  The Toronto Star uncovers that its city's composting program "is a sham." Haven't you always wondered about that whenever you've recycled? Waste managers could just put it all in the same pile without anyone ever knowing...

  tags: trash, garbage, waste management, compost, toronto, toronto star, moira welsh

• Matt Nisbet responds to Pew survey of scientists & the public: Framing Science

  There are a lot of interesting things that came out of this Pew survey, but this jumped out at me:
  "When asked to evaluate various professions, roughly 70% of Americans answer that scientists "contribute a lot" to society compared to 38% for journalists, 23% for lawyers, 40% for clergy, and 21% for business executives. Only members of the military (84%) and teachers (77%) rate higher in public admiration and esteem."
  Wow, right? Didn't mention the stats for doctors, that'd be interesting to include.

  tags: nisbett, framing science, pew, pew research center, science, media, public, survey

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

On Running and Writing

So this summer I'm taking a writing class, Inspired by Literature, through the Writer's Center in Bethesda, Maryland.

Last week, we read Vladimir Nabokov's Pnin. Inspired by his counter-intuitive yet completely insightful descriptions and themes of exile and strangeness, I wrote this inkling of an essay (building on one paragraph that I had written before). Perhaps I'll expand it at some point. I really want to explore the idea of that, to run or write seriously, you can't simply do it in moderation -- even if that requires flirting with insanity.

Three years ago I lived in Gwangju, South Korea. More precisely, I lived between a slaughterhouse, a sawmill and an expressway, on the fifth floor of an apartment building with walls like soot-coated cardboard. The first time it rained – no, monsooned, they said – thick black sludge seeped through the roof, slithered down the stove and submerged the not quite custard colored linoleum kitchen floor.

Every night I left that apartment and ran. I ran past a charred brick bus stop. I ran past a dog, with a bark that sounded like rust, standing guard on a rooftop. Then I dropped into a series of rice fields. It was always colder there, and quiet. Once in the rice fields, I disappeared. There, under a brown or orange or olive sky, I was no more or less strange than anything or anyone else. The first night, as I tentatively high-stepped through a dark tunnel that underscored the expressway, I remember thinking that soon the location of each pothole would be instinctively mapped in my brain. After several weeks, I felt completely comfortable. I understood my surroundings. My confidence in my environment was a rare blessing for a foreigner living in Korea, but it was gone the instant I climbed the last dirt slope into the floodlit street.

Of course, I ran during the daytime, too. But the dark, and everything I saw or couldn’t see in it, felt safer. One night, the stalks of the rice plants, waist high the day before, were shorn at the ankles. A few nights later, the rice stubble was smoldering. Still, the glowing embers and cellulosic smoke felt more manageable than the throngs of uniformed school children who would giggle, shout and follow me, or the old men who would silently stare.

Running makes every place seem more familiar. Taking in strange streets and woods and crowds at seven miles an hour instead of three doesn’t make me any less lost. But when I run, getting lost is an imperative, not an accident. In Bangkok, I ran loops around a steaming hotel parking lot near the airport. In Ohio, I ran through lazy canyons. Sweat squelched between my toes and the air was like a full, dripping sponge. In Detroit, I sprinted across busy streets and through smudged glass walkways. In Hong Kong, I found myself alone, surrounded by thousands of people, running a marathon. In Big Sur, I pounded up sticky fire roads that caked my shoes in mud. Pounding back down, mud chunks the size of hockey pucks and quarters flew off my heels. In Washington, D.C., I failed to startle clusters of grazing deer with the sound of my feet. And I failed to evoke a smile, wave, or even nod from passing runners.

I never know, on any given day, quite how running will feel. Sometimes, despite all the right training, nutrition and sleep, my legs move like a spoon awkwardly clutched in a round, too-small fist, not delicately balanced between finger and thumb. And other times, despite all the wrong sickness, or partying, or lack of training, I run like bubbles easily escaping to the top of a tall glass of Brut. Even when I run in the places I call home, I can feel at odds with myself.

Running isn’t a zen-like state where I lose my mind, but a lucid state where I can finally find it. As I run, I often write. While my feet hit gravel or pavement or dirt, words bounce around my head, uninvited yet welcome, though they rarely touch a page. The last thing I want to do when I get home, dripping and exhausted, is sit down and type. So, instead, I read what two of my favorite author runners, Haruki Murakami and Robert Sullivan, have written about these curious sports. They know, too, that tying a pair of running shoes and smiting a blank screen is half the battle, though not the hard half. Like writing, running something that is perhaps healthy in moderation, but no doubt pathological in immersion. But there’s not a writer, or a runner, who would stop because of that.

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 07/06/2009

• Notes on Science Writing | Brandon Keim | Earthlab Notes

  Brandon Keim, freelance science writer, answers the question, "how do you handle the pressures of the job and what motivates you to get up in the morning?"

  tags: brandon keim, wired, science journalism, freelancing, motivation, writing

• On cheerleaders and watchdogs - the role of science journalism : Not Exactly Rocket Science

  I hope I ultimately become the type of science writer that Young describes:
  "To sum up, we have two possible ways of acting as a watchdog - uncovering the hidden stories behind scientific discoveries, and casting a critical eye on those discoveries either visibly through the actual text or invisibly through the process of selecting what to cover."
  But I also think I have a (possibly idealistic and flawed) dream of science writing that actually inclues some, well, science. I hope to combine data analysis of my own with story-telling ... is that futile? Or just off-limits for science journalists? If that's the case, then maybe I need to steer more towards investigative journalism, at least in name. And can journalism be both investigative and narrative? I sure hope so... Oh well, I've made kind of a habit of not fitting into intellectual boxes, so I'll just plan on making a career out of doing just that.

  tags: ed young, science journalism, media, watchdog

• Ruins of the Second Gilded Age - The New York Times > Magazine > Slide Show > Slide 1 of 13

  These photographs are amazing -- but what I find most interesting abou this series is how much it depends on context. If you didn't know the back-story of the credit/mortgage/real estate/economy crisis, you might think these were simple construction projects caught in progress, on their way to completion, as opposed to stunted buildings frozen forever in a state of never-ending gestation.

  tags: nytimes, edgar martins, housing, real estate, photography, construction

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 07/01/2009

• Judge Rules for Salinger in Copyright Suit - City Room Blog - NYTimes.com

  Seriously? I really can't see how this could be considered copyright infringement. If it is, then any reference or illusion to any fictional character could be considered copyright infringement as well. And...hasn't the Swedish author's lawyer heard of fair use?

  tags: jd salinger, copyright, catcher in the rye, nytimes, fair use

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.