Thursday, March 11, 2004

OK, so I don't get this either, but it is LeGuin... The question is a pose. An exchange in an online question-and-answer session with the writer Ursula Le Guin: Question: As opposed to the standard model of time travellers projected into previously lived cultural patterns, what do you make of the concept "collective experience of temporal variation," such as stalled, recursive or redundant sequences of year sets. I am thinking of collective delusion or the social construction of reality, wherein mere participation in humanity's elaborated schedules makes distance between avowed temporal judgments and an undercurrent of more objective time. For instance, what would happen if global culture lost track of the passage of the years due to the complexity of information elaborating its rote performance? I am thinking of this not so much from a narrative science fiction perspective as an anthropological dissonance between (world) culture and context. Le Guin: Sorry, the more I read your question the stupider I feel. From Pseuds' Corner by way of Ansible, two publications that have perfected the art of mockery. [Workbench] 7:30:44 AM  comment []  Trackback []     Who knew, indeed... Science Proves That People Avoid Thinking. Apparently when you ask someone a question they don't really think about the answer. Who knew? Straight from Techdirt's Posting: Roland Piquepaille writes "Researchers have shown that our brains might cheat when learning, switching to 'automatic pilot' mode whenever it's possible. Instead of trying to answer a question by reasoning, our brain explore a catalog of previous answers to similar questions just to save time and avoid thinking. They also made a fascinating discovery. This cheating mechanism also exists in people suffering from amnesia. More details and references are available on my blog including a spectacular image of a cut-away view of the brain taken with the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology used by the researchers to detect regions where brain activity was reduced when performing repetitive tasks, a concept named 'neural priming.'" Now here comes the ironic part: [What Do YOU Think? Comment on this Post!] [Testify!] [Father Dan] 7:29:57 AM  comment []  Trackback []     New insights from Tufte. More fascinating examples from Tufte about how to squeeze more meaning into data displays. The interesting tradeoff to be managed here is between design time to find compelling and meaningful representations and interpretation/decision time by those who will use the representations. As a gross generalization, design time gets short shrift at the expense of increased problems with interpretation and decision. A bad cost/benefit tradeoff. Spaklines. Edward Tufte: Sparklines or Wordgraphs--some draft pages from Beautiful Evidence... [Emptybottle : Coasters] [McGee's Musings] 7:29:08 AM  comment []  Trackback []

© Copyright 2004 Gail Marsella. Last update: 6/27/2004; 7:21:28 PM.

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