TIFI

In this Harvard University photograph released October 8th, 2008, brain cells of a laboratory mouse are shown glowing with multicolor fluorescent proteins at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. The Nobel prize in chemistry was awarded to two Americans and a U.S.-based Japanese scientist for research on a glowing jellyfish protein that revolutionized the ability to study disease and normal development in living organisms. (AP Photo/Harvard University, Livett-Weissman-Sanes-Lichtman)

Posted at The Big Picture.

Down in Antarctica, November marks the end of spring, the beginning of austral summer, and the beginning of Antarctica’s cruise season. The Sun just rose for the first time in 6 months on September 22nd, and is now visible in the sky all the time. Recent studies in Antarctica have brought new insights into the origins of deep sea octopus species (a 30 million-year-old ancestor from Antarctic waters), volcanic contributions to disappearing antarctic ice, and the effects of increasing numbers of icebergs scouring the seafloor. Collected here are 32 photographs of Antarctica from the past several years.

Posted at The Big Picture.

Click through for more.

Via Nick Fuller.

Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, talks about the economics of organizations with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. The conversation centers on Shirky’s book. Topics include Coase on the theory of the firm, the power of sharing information on the internet, the economics of altruism, and the creation of Wikipedia.

And a great bit of discussion on representative vs. direct democracy and the possibility that networks can enable direct democracy.

Via EconLog.

Contemporary scholars of American cultural history have begun writing that Sha Na Na’s greatest achievement was the invention of a new American era: the “Fifties.” The whole notion of how artists can change the way a historical era is viewed, and relatively quickly, is interesting on its own.

Via Arts & Letters Daily.

Boy those DJ’s sure look happy don’t they?

Here you can see a good example of the dutch “tekno” dance.

Check the girl rocking out at 4:10.

TimeTwist from Herbert Spencer on Vimeo.

Via Bruce Sterling at Beyond the Beyond.

The Near Future Laboratory Top-15 Criteria for New or Interactive Media Art are…

15. It doesn’t work

14. It doesn’t work because you couldn’t get a hold of a 220-to-110 volt converter/110-to-220 volt converter/PAL-to-NTSC/NTSC-to-PAL scan converter/serial-to-usb adapter/”dongle” of any sort..and the town you’re in is simply not the kind of place that has/cares about such things

13. Your audience looks under/behind your table/pedestal/false wall/drop ceiling or follows wires to find out “where the camera is”

12. Someone either on their blog or across the room is prattling on about the shifting relations between producers and consumers..and mentions your project

11. Your audience “interacts” by clapping/hooting/making bird calls/flapping their arms like a duck or waving their arms wildly while standing in front of a wall onto which is projected squiggly lines

10. Your audience asks amongst themselves, “how does it work?”

9. The exhibition curators insist that you spend hours standing by your own wall text so that you can explain to attendees “how it works”

8. It’s just like using your own normal, human, perfectly good eyeballs, only the resolution sucks and the colors are really lousy..plus the heat from the CPU fan is blowing on your forehead which makes you really uncomfortable and schvitz-y

7. Someone in your audience wearing a Crumpler bag, slinging a fancy digital SLR and/or standing with their arms folded smugly says, “Yeah..yeah, I could’ve done that too..c’mon dude..some Perlin Noise? And Processing/Ruby-on-Rails/AJAX/Blue LEDs/MaxMSP/An Infrared Camera/Lots of Free Time/etc.? Pfft..It’s so easy…”

6. Someone in your audience, maybe the same guy with the Crumpler bag and digital SLR excitedly says, “Oh, dude. That should totally be a Facebook app!”

5. It’s called a “project” and not a “piece of art”

4. You saw the “project” years ago…and here it is again…now with multi-touch interaction and other fancy digital bells and Web 2.0-y whistles

3. Your audience cups their hands over various proturbances/orifices at or nearby your project attempting to confuse/interact with the camera/sensor/laser beam, even if it uses no such technology

2. There’s a noticeable preponderance of smoothly shifting red, green and blue lighting effects

1. People wonder if it wasn’t all really done in Photoshop, anyway

Via Bruce Sterling at Beyond the Beyond.

Bruce Sterling at Beyond the Beyond:

*This French guy is serenely hand-manufacturing his own vacuum tubes.

*This video is seventeen minutes long. I’d also be guessing this gentleman has invested about seventeen years in acquiring that vacuum-tube zen.

Fabrication d’une lampe triode
by F2FO

Robert Stickgold and Jeffrey M. Ellenbogen in Scientific American Mind

In 2007 one of us (Ellenbogen) showed that the brain learns while we are asleep. The study used a transitive inference task; for example, if Bill is older than Carol and Carol is older than Pierre, the laws of transitivity make it clear that Bill is older than Pierre. Making this inference requires stitching those two fragments of information together. People and animals tend to make these transitive inferences without much conscious thought, and the ability to do so serves as an enormously helpful cognitive skill: we discover new information (Bill is older than Pierre) without ever learning it directly.

The inference seems obvious in Bill and Pierre’s case, but in the experiment, we used abstract colored shapes that have no intuitive relation to one another, making the task more challenging. We taught people so-called premise pairs—they learned to choose, for example, the orange oval over the turquoise one, turquoise over green, green over paisley, and so on. The premise pairs imply a hierarchy—if orange is a better choice than turquoise and turquoise is preferred to green, then orange should win over green. But when we tested the subjects on these novel pairings 20 minutes after they learned the premise pairs, they had not yet discovered these hidden relations. They chose green just as often as they chose orange, performing no better than chance.

When we tested subjects 12 hours later on the same day, however, they made the correct choice 70 percent of the time. Simply allowing time to pass enabled the brain to calculate and learn these transitive inferences. And people who slept during the 12 hours performed significantly better, linking the most distant pairs (such as orange versus paisley) with 90 percent accuracy. So it seems the brain needs time after we learn information to process it, connecting the dots, so to speak—and sleep provides the maximum benefit.

Via Arts & Letters Daily.