“J’commence le countdown pese ca clutch” <– I found this on Said the Gramaphone, a music blog that comes out with two weird reviews (a la Peters’ Pick) every day or two. He finds some diamonds now and again but this one–I’m not sure what to call this one. It’s a cover of Space Oddity by Lucien Midnight–but in Quebecois French. Things like, “planet earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do,” get translated to, “la planet terre est bleue que c’est tu veux que ca me calisse.” Or, “tell my wife I love her very much,” turns into, “dites a ma blonde que je l’aimais en ostie.”

Photoshop of Horrors <– As if they weren’t screw ups enough. A week or so ago, BP posted photos to their site that were obviously poorly photoshopped. Wired decided to get their readers to show BP how it’s done. Check out all the photos here.

The natural reaction is to blame Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and everything else old people don’t understand. I’m sure all those things play a part but I also think that the art of storytelling is being lost. People just don’t have ability to tell good stories anymore. It happens to me at least once a day a where someone tries to tell me an story that’s longer than the social norm and they bungle it completely by including too much detail where it wasn’t needed or by completely foregoing any sort or flow or rhythm to their story.

If you’re looking to rekindle your ability to tell stories or just want to listen to a good one, I’d suggest checking out George Dawes Green’s website/podcast/live event called The Moth. The name comes from Green’s inspiration: a moth circling the kitchen lamp while people told stories when he was a kid.

I do find it surprising in the sense that it’s a sign of how disconnected and isolated we’re becoming with respect to the natural world. Knowing the names of plants and animals is only one way out of many to be connected to the natural world, but the fact that most people (I’m extending the conjecture to everyone now, not just kids) could identify more kinds of cars than plants says something about which way we’re headed. Pamela Ronald, of Tomorrow’s Table, wonders:

Can we draw a link with this disconnect and the loss of biodiversity at an unprecedented rate? By 2050, the majority of our citizens will consist of the young people where that disconnect is most profound.

Would those responsible for destruction of entire species think twice if they knew the names of some of the species they were affecting? Would the CEO of BP invest more money in blowout prevention if he knew a bit more about marine biology? I’m not convinced but it’s definitely something worth thinking about.

Bonus points if you can name both cars and the plants in the photo above. I’ll be impressed if anyone can do both. I definitely couldn’t do the cars if I didn’t already know what they were.

He argues that the time Americans once spent watching television has been redirected toward activities that are less about consuming and more about engaging—from Flickr and Facebook to powerful forms of online political action. And these efforts aren’t fueled by external rewards but by intrinsic motivation—the joy of doing something for its own sake.

So people, Shirky says, are getting up off the couch and doing things. All sorts of things. Here’s an example Shirky gives in the same Wired article:

We can do a back-of-the-envelope calculation, for example, using Wikipedia, to see how far we still have to go. All the articles, edits, and arguments about articles and edits represent around 100 million hours of human labor. That’s a lot of time. But remember: Americans watch about 200 billion hours of TV every year.

The human mind, as we all know, has a lot of trouble thinking about numbers that big so Information is Beautiful gives it to us as a visual:

Not what you were expecting? Suddenly, the amount of time required to accomplish something huge (I think Wikipedia can safely be described as huge) seems small compared to the time people dedicate to a leisure activity. Imagine, if a small portion of that 200 billion hours was dedicated toward creative thinking about important problems or issues, we might hear about stories like this more often:

Six weeks ago, Robert Bea, an engineering professor at the University of California, Berkeley, received a late-night call from an apologetic “mystery plumber.” The caller said he had a sketch for how to solve the problem at the bottom of the Gulf. It was a design for a containment cap that would fit snugly over the top of the failed blowout preventer at the heart of the Gulf oil spill.

Professor Bea, a former Shell executive and well-regarded researcher, thought the idea looked good and sent the sketches directly to the US Coast Guard and to a clearinghouse set up to glean ideas from outside sources for how to cap the stubborn Macondo well.

When Bea saw the design of the containment cap lowered onto the well last week, he marveled at its similarity to the sketches from the late-night caller, whose humble refusal to give his name at the time nearly brought Bea to tears. (read the rest of this story at the Christian Science Monitor here)

Check out Clay Shirky’s TED talk:

Part of the problem with meritocracy is that it homogenizes in the name of diversity: It skims the cream from every race and class and population, puts all of the best and brightest through the same educational conveyor belt, and comes out with a ruling class that’s cosmetically diverse but intellectually conformist, and that tends to huddle together rather than spreading out to enrich the country as a whole. This is Christopher Lasch’s lament in “The Revolt of the Elites” — that meritocracy co-opts people who might otherwise become its critics, sapping local communities of their intellectual vitality and preventing any kind of rival power centers from emerging.

It raises an interesting point. We take our best an brightest and train them all in the same place or at least in places that share a somewhat similar ideology. What does that do to diversity of opinion or ideas? It’s interesting to think about how this differs from music and art. Yes, there are musicians and artists who go through formal training to become orchestra conductors or–I’m not sure what someone with a higher degree in art would do, feel free to cure my ignorance. But the musicians and artists we know best are often those who have transcended boundaries rather than those who excelled within boundaries. I’m not sure how you would go about doing this type of thing with business, humanities or science graduates but it’s something to think about.

A quick note about our living in a meritocracy: I have problems with that too. It’s supposed to be that who ever wants to attend university, to use that as an example, can. Theoretically, that’s true. But then I start thinking about how children from families of high socioeconomic status (a term used often in these types of studies, Wikipedia definition: an economic and sociological combined total measure of a person’s work experience and of an individual’s or family’s economic and social position relative to others, based on income, education, and occupation) will hear millions more instances of words, not different words but instances of words, than children of low SES families by the time they get to kindergarten. Do you really expect these two children to be equal? Probably not. Is it because one child worked harder than the other? Probably not. Is that a meritocracy? Probably not. There are many other instances where what we think is fair and meritocratic is far from it but these are extremely complex social problems that there are no easy fixes for. I guess we’ll just wait for the non-diversified best and brightest to come up with an answer.

The idea was simple. Put students in a classroom and give them either a two or seven digit number to memorize. At that point, the students are asked to leave, one at a time, and go to a second room. On their way to the second room, they’re asked if, as a thank you for participating, they would like either a bowl of fruit salad or a piece of chocolate cake.

Seems simple enough. When I first heard the description of this experiment, I couldn’t figure out what the trick was. I’ll let Wired editor and author of How We Decide Jonah Lehrer explain:

“Here’s where the results get weird. The students with seven digits to remember were nearly twice as likely to choose the cake as students given two digits. The reason, according to Professor Shiv, is that those extra numbers took up valuable space in the brain — they were a “cognitive load” — making it that much harder to resist a decadent dessert. In other words, willpower is so weak, and the prefrontal cortex is so overtaxed, that all it takes is five extra bits of information before the brain starts to give in to temptation.”

Although the students in the experiment were from Standford, they’re really no different than you or me. That could be you in the experiment getting your snack choice influenced by how many number you’ve been asked to remember. Part of me still thinks that my choice between cake and fruit salad wouldn’t be influenced by something as simple how many numbers I’m trying to remember but I know I’m probable just deluding myself.

Another consequence of this experiment is, couldn’t fast food restaurants and all sorts of junk food makers take advantage of this? They couldn’t really ask you to remember seven-digit numbers, but they could find other ways of increasing your cognitive load in order making it more difficult for you to resist that bacon double cheeseburger. After all this talk of psychology, a bacon double cheeseburger sounds pretty good right now.

You can hear an audio description of this experiment from Radiolab and for more examples of irrational decisions check out this Dan Ariely video.

This is an idea that I think about often but have never put it out there. I’ve read a lot about the continuous debate about the role of religion in society and day to day life. One of the most common objections to letting go of religion is that, without religion, life has no meaning. But there are so many other things out there that we seem perfectly happy to enjoy with out asking about its meaning. No one ever asks, “what is the meaning of music?” or “what is the meaning of art?” We are perfectly happy to enjoy these things without meaning (or at least I can–do music and art need meaning in order to be enjoyed?). Why can’t we enjoy life without meaning? Why are we so obsessed with this question?

I think what people really mean when they ask about the meaning of life is, “what is the meaning of suffering?” I know, I know. This is getting way deep. But think about it. You never worry about the meaning of a great song but you’d wonder about the meaning of being forced to listen to a terrible one. People never ask themselves about the meaning of life when they’re having a great time, only when they’re facing hardship or difficult times. People can live without meaning–people can’t suffer without meaning. So my question is, instead of worrying about meaning, why don’t we just get to the root of it and reduce suffering?

I’ll try and get back to something a little more superficial tomorrow. I promise.

All that to say that I can think of one way Google is making us smarter. Before Google and the internet, the only thing you had to do to win a playground or barroom argument was to intimidate whomever it was you were arguing with. I don’t even mean physically. You just had to sound confident or right without necessarily being right. Try to do that now. It’ll work for about 15 minutes until someone looks up whatever it is you’re arguning about on their IPhone. You can’t intimidate the internet.

There are people who still try and power their way through arguments but, if you’re keeping track, you’ll notice they’re all above a certain age. It’s a bygone era that left us in about 2002.

Think about how this shifts the balance of social power. People used to be able to get by on sounding smart–now they actually have to be smart. S’probably a good thing

But that doesn’t mean we can’t learn anything from these attempts to discover who scientists are and what they do. Steven Shapin has a long history of looking into scientific research as a social phenomenon, most famously in the book Leviathan and the Air Pump where he and co-author Simon Schaffer looked at the battle to define what knowledge was between English philosopher Thomas Hobbes and Irish scientist (or what would have been called natural philosopher in the day) Robert Boyle . Whenever I read Shapin I find things I disagree with and little nuggets of great ideas that I had never thought about before. Shapin put out an article a couple days ago in the now web-only Seed magazine called The identity of the modern scientist is, in every possible sense, a work in progress. Here’s a clip:

Scientists, perhaps to a greater degree than any other sector of society, get to define what the world is like. They may not always be the most highly rewarded people in our communities, but they are among the most influential: When reality speaks, it speaks through them, and what we know about the world, we know because we have found grounds to recognize their competence and to trust them or the institutions they represent.
Our understanding of who these men and women are is central to the authority of modern science, and if, as seems to be the case, there are emerging problems with that authority, then a clarification of the scientist’s identity is in order. It’s not so easy, however, to know exactly who the scientist is. Public perception of the scientist probably owes much to the idea of mastering something known as the “scientific method” (even though there is no consensus on what exactly this consists of), but we also define scientists through some notion of integrity — an independent voice speaking truth to power. So any perceived problems concerning scientists’ moral makeup are of great consequence: Scientists without credibility are culturally impotent, and science without credibility is a meaningless enterprise.

(you can read the rest here)

(image from Damned Good Technician)

• Dan Ariely, behaviour economist at Duke, wants you to participate in his new study. Though he describes it as “fun”, it’s more weird than anything else but I still like to participate in these things because, when the results come out (which is apparently in two weeks), I like that there’s a little part of me in the results. Click here to go to the study.
• Here’s a description in the Guardian about the fiasco at scienceblogs.com when the site sold PepsiCo (the makers of Pepsi, Frito-Lay, Gatorade, Tropicana etc.) the rights to create a blog on the site about nutrition. The issue is a little dry but it really got me thinking. The bottom line is that we don’t trust a word out of corporations mouth but we buy all their stuff. Something doesn’t seem right.  More on this next week.
• Lastly, the cover feature in the new Maisonneuve asks seven music critics to write about the bands they hate with only one rule: you can’t pick Nickelback. Here’s what they did pick: Animal Collective, Broken Social Scene, Joanna Newsom, Neon Indian, Radiohead, Sonic Youth and Sufjan Stevens. Not what you expected? Unfortunately, you can only read those essays in the print issue but they have an online supplement with a couple more band-blastings in their online supplement. And one of the interns picked Pavement. “Pavement’s music isn’t that good,” he writes. Hoping he’s not an editorial intern with deep and insightful passages like that. You had it coming intern.