Archive for the ‘weaponry’ Category

Focus: the Age of Distraction

'Our life is frittered away by detail … simplify, simplify.' ~Henry David Thoreau

We live in curious times. It's called the Age of Information, but in another light it can be called the Age of Distraction.

While humanity has never been free of distraction a from swatting those bothersome gnats around the fireplace to dealing with piles of paper mail and ringing telephones a never have the distractions been so voluminous, so overwhelming, so intense, so persistent as they are now. Ringing phones are one thing, but email notifications, Twitter and Facebook messages, an array of browser tabs open, and mobile devices that are always on and always beeping are quite another. More and more, we are connected, we are up to our necks in the stream of information, we are in the crossfire of the battle for our attention, and we are engaged in a harrying blur of multitasking activity.

When we're working, we have distractions coming from every direction. In front of us is the computer, with email notifications and other notifications of all kinds. Then there's the addicting lure of the browser, which contains not only an endless amount of reading material that can be a black hole into which we never escape, but unlimited opportunities for shopping, for chatting with other people, for gossip and news and lurid photos and so much more. All the while, several new emails have come in, waiting for a quick response. Several programs are open at once, each of them with tasks to complete. Several people would like to chat, dividing our attention even further.

.:focusmanifesto.com->

Stephen Fry : What I’d Wish I’d Known When I Was 18

The Counterintuitive World

Back during World War II, the RAF lost a lot of planes to German anti-aircraft fire. So they decided to armor them up. But where to put the armor? The obvious answer was to look at planes that returned from missions, count up all the bullet holes in various places, and then put extra armor in the areas that attracted the most fire.

Obvious but wrong. As Hungarian-born mathematician Abraham Wald explained at the time, if a plane makes it back safely even though it has, say, a bunch of bullet holes in its wings, it means that bullet holes in the wings aren’t very dangerous. What you really want to do is armor up the areas that, on average,Adon’t have any bullet holes.AWhy? Because planes with bullet holes in those places never made it back. That’s why you don’t see any bullet holes there on the ones that do return. Clever!

On a related note a related because it involves both an air force and some counterintuitive statistical reasoning a Henry Farrell writes about a passage from Justin Fox’sAMyth of the Rational Market involving the great behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman. Here is Kahneman reacting to an Israeli Air Force flight instructor who told him that whenever he chewed out a student he got better performance the next time out,Abut whenever he praised a student he got worse performance:

As a man trained in statistics, Kahneman saw thatAof course a student who had just brilliantly executed a maneuver (and was thus praised for it) was less likely to perform better the next time around than a student who had just screwed up. Abnormally good or bad performance is just that a abnormal, which means it is unlikely to be immediately repeated. But Kahneman could also see how the instructor had come to his conclusion that punishment worked. "Because we tend to reward others when they do well and punish them when they do badly, and because there is regression to the mean," he later lamented, "it is part of the human condition that we are statistically punished for rewarding others and rewarded for punishing them."

.:motherjones.com->

Speed-Reading Techniques

I was a Bible college student when one of our chapels featured a guest speaker who taught us how to speed-read. At the time I didn't need the skill since most collateral reading assignments in my courses were under 500 pages, but I started practicing just for the fun of it - sort of like a private parlor game. However all that changed when I wound up in graduate school at Princeton Seminary and several Profs. expected me to read several thousand pages of collateral along with the five or six textbooks. That's when I got serious about speed reading. Here is the collection of what I practiced then, and picked up since. The first thing I had to do was toss away the reading myths I had held so long.

.:pianoer.com->

The Language Construction Kit

This set of webpages (what’s a set of webpages? a webchapter?) is intended for anyone who wants to create artificial languagesa for a fantasy or an alien world, as a hobby, as an interlanguage. It presents linguistically sound methods for creating naturalistic languagesa which can be reversed to create non-naturalistic languages. It suggests further reading for those who want to know more, and shortcuts for those who want to know less.
aMark Rosenfelder

.:zompist.com->

London to Helsinki : Dictaphone Parcel

Animated short film, Royal College of Art, London, 2009

Dictaphone Parcel is an animation based on a sound recorded with a dictaphone travelling secretly inside a parcel. As the hidden recorder travels through the global mail system, from London to Helsinki, it captures the unexpected. We hear a mixture of abstract sounds, various types of transport and even discussions between the mail workers. The animation visualizes this journey by creating an imaginary documentary.

Dictaphone Parcel was awarded the Passion Pictures Prize in London, in February 2010.

.:cargocollective.com->

The Veiling of Paris - Grafitti

Babelgum Metropolis exclusively presents Princess Hijab, a documentary following the artist bringing veils to the faces of Paris.

As the French Senate approve a ban on burqas, we profile the anonymous Parisian graffiti artist whose work ‘hijabizing’ adverts raises the question of why hiding a face behind a veil is considered to be more of a repressive act than hiding one behind airbrushing and media gloss. ##Link##

MakerBot and the Rise of Libertarian Tech

Imagine instead of going to the store, simply downloading what you need from the Internet and printing it out on a 3D printer. That future is here.

"The time from a thought to a thing is short. You can just manifest something," explains MakerBot Industries co-founder Bre Pettis of a world for those with one of the stuff printers he helped create. There is much to be MakerBotted: practical stuff (a cup, a cooling fan), replacement stuff (a camera lense cover, a shower curtain hook), novel stuff (a tube squeezer, a clip-on reading LED) and the completely random (a miniature of your own head). We visit the Brooklyn (NY) wherehouse of MakerBot Industries where Bre Pettis shows us a future where we all can be our own manufacturers.

Real Onionz: Steve Jobs Isn’t a Ninja?

.:macnn.com->