... one man cannot practise many arts with success.

Plato. The Republic.

nutlet

бывают люди неотвязные будто ангина, после их ухода становится прохладно и на языке свинцовый привкус, бывают жаркие и быстрые как прилив крови к голове – после них тело липкое и перед глазами танцуют цветные полосы, бывают люди, поговорив с которыми, хочешь закрыть глаза, сесть по-турецки и долго раскачиваться из стороны в сторону.
одна моя подруга была похожа на корь – от нее у меня слезились глаза и поднималась температура, один мой виртуальный знакомый похож на тревожный просвет в облаках, другой похож на совершенного читателя, но это наверняка неправда, третий же пишет о чужих книгах, как о немытых упрямых сожителях, и похож на лилового замученного быка на деревенской корриде

nature_wonder

Proposals to tax the flatulence of cows and other livestock have been denounced by farming groups in the Irish Republic and Denmark.

A cow tax of €13 per animal has been mooted in Ireland, while Denmark is discussing a levy as high as €80 per cow to offset the potential penalties each country faces from European Union legislation aimed at combating global warming.

Now, a proposal to force rich people everywhere to stick to personal emissions targets offers hope for a fairer climate deal.

"The idea of introducing individual emission targets is a good one," says Saleemul Huq, a developing nation policy expert at the International Institute for the Environment and Development in the UK, adding that the responsibilities of rich people and needs of poor people in all countries need to be considered. However, he is not sure how practical it would be to implement the proposal.

The account of perception that’s starting to emerge is what we might call the “brain’s best guess” theory of perception: perception is the brain’s best guess about what is happening in the outside world. The mind integrates scattered, weak, rudimentary signals from a variety of sensory channels, information from past experiences, and hard-wired processes, and produces a sensory experience full of brain-provided color, sound, texture, and meaning. We see a friendly yellow Labrador bounding behind a picket fence not because that is the transmission we receive but because this is the perception our weaver-brain assembles as its best hypothesis of what is out there from the slivers of information we get. Perception is inference.

In a series of elegant experiments, starting in the early 1980s, Nottebohm and his colleagues
showed that , indeed, thousands of new neurons are added every day to the avian brain. They did so by, first, showing the production of new cells with thymidine labelling42; second, producing ultrastructural evidence that the new cells were neurons receiving synapses43; and last, in a technical tour de force, showing that the putative neurons responded to sound with action potentials44.In subsequent studies, they showed that the
axons of new neurons extended over long distances, that neuronal birth and death proceeded in parallel, that in both singing and nonsinging species neurogenesis was widespread throughout the avian forebrain — including
the hippocampus — and that in the latter structure it was modulated by environmental complexity and learning experience39–47. Charles G. Gross. Neurogenesis in the adult brain: death of a dogma. Science. Volume 1. Oct. 2000. http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v1/n1/pdf/nrn1000_067a.pdf

Rationality is a property of equilibrium. By this I mean that rationality is habitual and experience-based and it becomes effective as it becomes embedded in the rules of thumb and collective wisdom of market participants. Rules of thumb approximate rational decision rules as market participants become familiar with an economic environment. Individuals per se are not very rational; shift the equilibrium enough so that the old rules of thumb no longer apply and we are likely to see bubbles, manias, panics and crashes. Significant innovation is thus almost always going to come accompanied with a wave of irrationality. When we shift to a significant, new equilibrium rationality itself is not strong enough to tie down behavior and unmoored by either reason or experience individuals flail about liked naked apes - this is the realm of behavioral economics. Given time, however, new rules of thumb evolve and rationality once again rules but only until the next big innovation arrives.

vi_z

[Daniel] Weissman [of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor] asked volunteers to spend a tedious hour in a functional-MRI brain scanner, identifying letters that flashed on a screen. At times, their reactions slowed, showing that attention was wavering. During these lapses, communication between regions related to self-control, vision and language processing died down. "Attention failed to grease the connections in the brain," says Weissman.

... those contributing to the digital commons perceive it as a private good, in which payment for their efforts is in the form of the attention that their content gathers in the form of media downloads or news clicked on. As it has been shown, attention is such a valued resource that people are often willing to forsake financial gain to obtain it.

In summary, by analyzing a massive data set from YouTube we have shown that the productivity exhibited in crowdsourcing exhibits a strong positive dependence on attention. Conversely, a lack of attention leads to a decrease in the number of videos uploaded and the consequent drop in productivity, which in many cases asymptotes to no uploads whatsoever.

reading The Time Paradox ( Zimbardo, Boyd)
among other things, they distinguish bw event and clock time.
It occrd to me that Genesis describes a situation whr this separation had been created.

Posted via LiveJournal.app.

"They have finished Phase One: reconnaissance," Lio concluded, "and yesterday began Phase Two: which is - who knows?"

"Actually doing something," Barb said.

Neal Stephenson, Anathem. 1st ed. p. 298.

For the commandment is a lamp, and the teaching is light, and reproofs of instruction are the way of life.

Psalms. 6:23

...in waking from dreamless sleep or even from a dream we are always certain we are the same person who went to sleep. There is a continuity of identity that remains constant through all states of consciousness, however weird or extreme. We may not know exactly who or what we are but we never think we have become someone else.

James P. Carse. Breakfast At The Victory. p. 93.

135-й мотострелковый полк, где капитан Сидристый служит и по сей день в качестве командира роты.
- Мы были на учениях, - начинает рассказ капитан Сидристый. - Это относительно недалеко от столицы Южной Осетии. Нижний Зарамах - природный заповедник Северной Осетии. Вот там после плановых учений и стояли лагерем, но 7 августа пришла команда на выдвижение к Цхинвалу. Подняли нас по тревоге - и на марш. Прибыли, разместились, а уже 8 августа там полыхнуло с такой силой, что многие даже растерялись.
http://www.redstar.ru/2008/09/03_09/2_03.html
via aillarionov

Elevated power increases the psychological distance one feels from others, and this distance, according to construal level theory (Y. Trope & N. Liberman, 2003), should lead to more abstract information processing. Thus, high power should be associated with more abstract thinking—focusing on primary aspects of stimuli and detecting patterns and structure to extract the gist, as well as categorizing stimuli at a higher level—relative to low power. In 6 experiments involving both conceptual and perceptual tasks, priming high power led to more abstract processing than did priming low power, even when this led to worse performance. Experiment 7 revealed that in line with past neuropsychological research on abstract thinking, priming high power also led to greater relative right-hemispheric activation.

Smith, P. K., & Trope, Y. (2006). You focus on the forest when you’re in charge of the trees: Power priming and abstract information processing. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90, 578-596.

mkay422

variation in a section of the gene called RS3 334 was linked to how men bond with their partners. Men can have none, one or two copies of the RS3 334 section, and the higher the number of copies, the worse men scored on a measure of pair bonding.

Not only that, men with two copies of RS3 334 were more likely to be unmarried than men with one or none, and if they were married, they were twice as likely to have a marital crisis.

RS3 334's social effects extend beyond bonding in couples. Earlier this year, the same gene section was shown to affect signalling in people's amygdalas, linked to trust. Another study found that people with autism, which is characterised by unusual social behaviour, often have multiple copies of RS3 334.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14641-monogamy-gene-found-in-people.html

the team's next task is to test how a nasal vasopressin spray affects altruism and jealousy.

Working memory capacity is severely limited in adults (1–6) and infants (7–11), with both groups able to remember only about three separate items at once. One reason that adults are rarely conscious of this constraint is that we can hierarchically reorganize the to-be-remembered stimuli, thereby increasing the total number of items we can store. For example, the letter string PBSBBCCNN is much easier to recall after recognizing the three familiar television acronyms PBS, BBC, and CNN that comprise it.

For several decades this limited number was thought to be 7 +/- 2 (16). However, more recent analyses show that 7 +/-2 overestimates working memory capacity. ( Read more... )