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“We live at a time when friendship has become both all and nothing at all. (...) Facebook isn’t the whole of contemporary friendship, but it sure looks a lot like its future. (...) Inevitably, the classical ideal [of friendship] has faded. The image of the one true friend, a soul mate rare to find but dearly beloved, has completely disappeared from our culture. (...) We seem to be terribly fragile now. A friend fulfills her duty, we suppose, by taking our side—validating our feelings, supporting our decisions, helping us to feel good about ourselves. (...) We’re busy people; we want our friendships fun and friction-free. (...) Friendship is devolving, in other words, from a relationship to a feeling—from something people share to something each of us hugs privately to ourselves in the loneliness of our electronic caves, rearranging the tokens of connection like a lonely child playing with dolls. (...) Until a few years ago, you could share your thoughts with only one friend at a time... more... - Amira from Bookmarklet

Thank you Adriano! :-) I'm listening right now - Amira

thks for sharing this on the Global Brain - Wildcat

"Ideas are works of bricolage. They are, almost inevitably, networks of other ideas. We take the ideas we’ve inherited or stumbled across, and we jigger them together into some new shape. We like to think of our ideas as a $40,000 incubator, shipped direct from the factory, but in reality they’ve been cobbled together with spare parts that happened to be sitting in the garage. (…) Our bodies are also works of bricolage, old parts strung together to form something radically new. “The tires-to-sandals principle works at all scales and times,” (...) “The adjacent possible.” The phrase captures both the limits and the creative potential of change and innovation. In the case of prebiotic chemistry, the adjacent possible defines all those molecular reactions that were directly achievable in the primordial soup. Sunflowers and mosquitoes and brains exist outside that circle of possibility. The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself. (...)" - Amira from Bookmarklet

“‘It is obvious,’ says Hadamard, ‘that invention or discovery, be it in mathematics or anywhere else, takes place by combining ideas. (…) The Latin verb cogito for ‘to think’ etymologically means ‘to shake together.’ St. Augustine had already noticed that and also observed that intelligo means ‘to select among.’ The ‘ripeness’ of a culture for a new synthesis is reflected in the... more... - Amira

"Like pyramid-building itself, the work of the humanities is to create the vessels that store our culture. In this sense, the digitization of archives and collections holds the promise of a grand conclusion: nothing less than the unification of the human cultural record online, representing, in theory, an unprecedented democratization of access to human knowledge. Equally profound is the way that technology could change the way knowledge is created in the humanities. These fields, encompassing the study of languages, literature, history, jurisprudence, philosophy, archaeology, religion, ethics, the arts, and arguably the social sciences, are entering an experimental period of inventiveness and imagination that involves the creation of new kinds of vessels—be they databases, books, exhibits, or works of art—to gather, store, interpret, and transmit culture. Pioneering scholars are engaged in knowledge design and new modes of research and expression, as well as fresh reflection and... more... - Amira from Bookmarklet

"The ability to analyze a vast body of texts also implies a dramatic expansion of the field of questions humanities scholars can ask. (...) “Most literary historians work on a small corpus of texts where their expertise is manifest through the finesse with which they can demonstrate certain features of that corpus. Those noble skill sets are not about to disappear with a wave of the... more... - Amira

"“Where does that put us?” he asks. “Well, it puts us at a place where the boundary line between what we have traditionally called the humanities and what we have traditionally called the social sciences becomes awfully porous. For me that’s an expansion and enhancement of the humanities of the most creative and best sort.” (...) “I think the quality of scholarship that can be produced,... more... - Amira

"PhilPapers is a comprehensive directory of online philosophical articles and books by academic philosophers. We monitor journals in many areas of philosophy, as well as archives and personal pages." - Amira

"John Locke, the philosopher, who also argued that personal identity was really dependent on the autobiographical or episodic memories, and you are the sum of your memories, which, of course, is something that fractionates and fragments in various forms of dementia. (...) As we all know, memory is notoriously fallible. It’s not cast in stone. It’s not something that is stable. It’s constantly reshaping itself. So the fact that we have a multitude of unconscious processes which are generating this coherence of consciousness, which is the I experience, and the truth that our memories are very selective and ultimately corruptible, we tend to remember things which fit with our general characterization of what our self is. We tend to ignore all the information that is inconsistent. We have all these attribution biases. We have cognitive dissonance. The very thing psychology keeps telling us, that we have all these unconscious mechanisms that reframe information, to fit with a coherent... more... - Amira from Bookmarklet

"By rejecting the notion of a core self and considering how we are a multitude of competing urges and impulses, I think it is easier to understand why we suddenly go off the rails. It explains why we act, often unconsciously, in a way that is inconsistent with our self image – or the image of our self as we believe others see us. That said, the self illusion is probably an inescapable... more... - Amira

"Manuel Lima is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a Senior UX Design Lead at Microsoft Bing and founder of VisualComplexity.com - A visual exploration on mapping complex networks." See also: The Story of Networks http://aminotes.tumblr.com/post... - Amira from Bookmarklet

"Humans devote 30–40% of speech output solely to informing others of their own subjective experiences. What drives this propensity for disclosure? We test recent theories that individuals place high subjective value on opportunities to communicate their thoughts and feelings to others and that doing so engages neural and cognitive mechanisms associated with reward. Self-disclosure was strongly associated with increased activation in brain regions that form the mesolimbic dopamine system, including the nucleus accumbens and ventral tegmental area. Moreover, individuals were willing to forgo money to disclose about the self ["penny for your thought" study]. Additional studies demonstrated that these effects stemmed from the independent value that individuals placed on self-referential thought and on simply sharing information with others." - Adriano

"Two studies published online today in Cell1, 2 suggest that DNA duplication errors that happened millions of years ago might have had a pivotal role in the evolution of the complexity of the human brain. The duplications — which created new versions of a gene active in the brains of other mammals — may have endowed humans with brains that could create more neuronal connections, perhaps leading to greater computational power. The enzymes that copy DNA sometimes slip extra copies of a gene into a chromosome, and scientists estimate that such genetic replicas make up about 5% of the human genome. (...) “Ten years after the human genome was sequenced and declared done, we’re still finding new genes in new places that are really important to human brain function and evolution,” Eichler’s team calculates that SRGAP2C appeared roughly 2.4 million years ago, around the time that big-brained species of Homo evolved in Africa from smaller-skulled Australopithecines, and around the time that... more... - Amira from Bookmarklet

"Researchers at the Vienna University of Technology have created the first complex works of nanoarchitecture. Using their own custom made high-precision 3-D printer, the team recreated models of Vienna’s St. Stephen’s Cathedral and London’s Tower Bridge at the scale of a dust mite. The feat was made possible through two-photon lithography, whereby a laser is guided by a chain of controllable mirrors through a liquid resin to form a solid polymer line only several hundred nanometers wide. The resin solidifies only when the initiator molecules within in have absorbed two photons of the spent laser beam at once, or when the polymer molecules fall directly under the laser’s central focal point. The experiment’s achievement, however, lay in the rapid rate at which the printer laid down material lines. Whereas “the printing speed [of similar printers] used to be measured in millimeters per second,” says Professor Jürgen Stampfl of TU Vienna, ”our device can do five meters in one second.”... more... - Amira from Bookmarklet

Kinda reminds me of Superman's microscopic/bottled city of Kandor - CarlC, spelling expert

"In this paper I attempt to sketch a preliminary framework for understanding the cognitive basis of the engagement of the mind with the material world. I advance the hypothesis that contrary to some of our most deeply-entrenched assumptions the relationship between the world and human cognition is not one of abstract representation or some other form of action at a distance but one of ontological inseparability. That is, what we have traditionally construed as an active or passive but always clearly separated external stimulus for setting an internal cognitive mechanism into motion, may be after all a continuous part of the machinery itself; at least, ex hypothesi." - Amira from Bookmarklet

"Awakening from anesthesia is often associated with an initial phase of delirious struggle before the full restoration of awareness and orientation to one's surroundings. Scientists now know why this may occur: primitive consciousness emerges first. Using brain imaging techniques in healthy volunteers, a team of scientists led by Adjunct Professor Harry Scheinin, M.D. from the University of Turku, Turku, Finland in collaboration with investigators from the University of California, Irvine, USA, have now imaged the process of returning consciousness after general anesthesia. The emergence of consciousness was found to be associated with activations of deep, primitive brain structures rather than the evolutionary younger neocortex. These results may represent an important step forward in the scientific explanation of human consciousness. The study was part of the Research Programme on Neuroscience by the Academy of Finland. "We expected to see the outer bits of brain, the cerebral... more... - Todd Hoff from Bookmarklet

+ - Amir

“The Mind is a Metaphor, is an evolving work of reference, an ever more interactive, more solidly constructed collection of mental metaphorics. This collection of eighteenth-century metaphors of mind serves as the basis for a scholarly study of the metaphors and root-images appealed to by the novelists, poets, dramatists, essayists, philosophers, belle-lettrists, preachers, and pamphleteers of the long eighteenth century. While the database does include metaphors from classical sources, from Shakespeare and Milton, from the King James Bible, and from more recent texts, it does not pretend to any depth or density of coverage in literature other than that of the British eighteenth century.” - Amira from Bookmarklet

new version http://metaphors.lib.virginia.edu/ - Amira

See also James Geary, metaphorically speaking - TED talk http://www.ted.com/talks... - Amira

"Led by neurologists Daniel Levitin of McGill University and Vino Menon of Stanford, a team of researchers analyzed nearly 2,000 musical compositions by more than 40 composers over the last 400 years. The verdict? They discovered a mathematical formula for rhythm. (...) In the large swath of Western musical genres the researchers studied, they found that all compositions adhered to the same "fractal" quality. (...) "Mozart's notated rhythms were the least predictable, Beethoven's were the most, and Monteverdi and Joplin had nearly identical, overlapping rhythm distributions. But they each have their own distinctive rhythmic signature that you can capture. Our findings also suggest that rhythm may play an even greater role than pitch in conveying a composer’s distinctive style." - Amira from Bookmarklet

As Silbert spoke about her prom experience, the same areas lit up in her brain as in the brains of her listeners. In most brain regions, the activation pattern in the listeners’ brains came a few seconds after that seen in Silbert’s brain. But a few brain areas, including one in the frontal lobe, actually lit up before Silbert’s, perhaps representing listeners’ anticipating what she was going to say next, the team says. The study certainly comes with caveats: Its sample size is small, and scientists don’t know exactly what causes the synchronization, nor the exact function of the brain regions in question to any more specificity than “language.” But Stephens and Hasson argue that their findings speak to conceptual common ground people must meet to make conversation possible: “If I say, ‘Do you want a coffee?’ you say, ‘Yes please, two sugars.’ You don’t say, ‘Yes, please put two sugars in the cup of coffee that is between us,’” said Hasson. “You’re sharing the same lexical items, gram

"Turns out, somewhere between 130,000 to 190,000 years ago, the human species was reduced to less than 1000 breeding individuals--just a few thousand people in total. Ancient, naturally driven climate change pushed our species to the brink, said Curtis Marean, Ph.D., a professor with the Institute of Human Origins and the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University. What saved us? According to Marean, the answer may be "shellfish"." - Alexander Kruel from Bookmarklet

Shellfish & the human bottleneck posted by Razib @ 12/16/2009 06:02:00 PM http://www.gnxp.com/blog... , 2 -12 Toba catastrophe theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... , 2 -24 Toba volcano eruptions - 1.000 - 10,000 breeding pairsunb http://www.physicsforums.com/showthr... , 6 -19 Can our DNA be traced to see that we... more... - Thomas Page

"Mind perception entails ascribing mental capacities to other entities, while moral judgment entails labeling entities as good or bad or actions as right or wrong. We suggest that mind perception is the essence of moral judgment. In particular, we suggest that moral judgment is rooted in a cognitive template of two perceived minds – a moral dyad of an intentional agent and a suffering moral patient. Diverse lines of research support dyadic morality. First, perceptions of mind are linked to moral judgments: dimensions of mind perception (agency and experience) map onto moral types (agents and patient), and deficits of mind perception correspond to difficulties with moral judgment. Second, not only are moral judgments sensitive to perceived agency and experience, but all moral transgressions are fundamentally understood as agency plus experienced suffering – i.e., interpersonal harm – even ostensibly harmless acts such as purity violations. Third, dyadic morality uniquely accounts for th