Electrical Engineering professor Yannis Tsividis innocently asks, why is it that we very rarely see laughter depicted in ancient Greek sculpture? From the range of scholarly answers, you get the peculiar sense that we “moderns” are not in a position to give an answer.
No Heaven on Earth
Why are so many of us so skeptical when confronted with the overwhelming evidence for environmental consequences of destroying everything we come in contact with? In her review of American Earth, an anthology of American environmentalist views, Verlyn Klinkenborg has this reaction to the barrage of evidence and entreaties to reconnect with nature:
After a day or two, I found myself reading this anthology as if it were a series of reports from a distant planet in a distant time — as an appendix, perhaps, to Doris Lessing’s Canopus in Argos novels. Reading American Earth in that light helped make several things clear. First, each document in the volume is a minority report — sometimes a minority of one. The assumptions, the hopes, the arguments in nearly every one of these pieces, no matter when they were written, are contradicted by the way the vast majority of Americans live and by the political and economic structures that determine that lifestyle. Second, the fundamental environmentalist arguments — the fundamental perceptions — are unchanging over time; only the details vary. We are still catching up to Thoreau, still coming to terms with the outrage George Perkins Marsh expressed in 1864, his worries about “climatic excess” and our “restless love of change.” Third, writers in every generation take a crack at finding the crystalline argument that will induce an epiphany in skeptical readers — for nothing less than an epiphany will do to persuade them to change the way they go about living. Yet every generation fails, in part because skeptical readers so seldom pick up this kind of writing or submit to its evidence.
Her conclusion is also worth noting. She reaches for Kafka (There is infinite hope, but not for us.
) and writes regretfully: I would say something different if I could. I have every faith in nature’s recuperative powers.…What I doubt is our ability, as a species, to see and, having seen, to continue to pay attention.
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How To Succeed In Business Without Putting People Last
At some point in your surfing escapades you begin to grasp that the profound impact of the internet on learning is not its vast stores of content, but its ability to support the various facets of social learning. You begin to appreciate that knowledge is not just a lump of something that is passed on via various pedagogical tactics, and your attention begins to shift from the content of a subject to the learning activities and human interventions around which that content is situated. John Seely Brown identifies this as a shift from “learning about” to “learning to be.” And “learning to be” calls for interpersonal skills not easily acquired by textbook learning. It’s in this context I found myself reading back issues of In Character, which examines virtues within our communities our families and ourselves. The current issue delves into compassion; this observation from Howard Behar who emphasizes compassion as a vital component of acquiring personal leadership skills caught my attention:
People are not assets. Caring isn’t just about admiring the charismatic leaders, the people that everybody likes, or the in crowd. This is the big caring we do that shows we “care, like we really mean it.” It’s about words and actions that everybody sees and recognizes. There’s an old adage that says, “People don’t care how much you know, they want to know how much you care.”
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Memories, Emotion and the Nose
Natalie Angier reports from the International Symposium on Olfaction and Taste held in San Francisco, including this insight into how smells, feelings and memories become so easily and intimately entangled: “With a phone number, if you get a new one, a week later you may have forgotten the old one,” Dr. Herz said. “With smells, it’s the other way around. The first association is better than the second.”
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Making Decisions Tires Your Brain
Marketing research involving making choices reveals the brain as a muscle: when depleted it comes less effective. Making choices exhausts what is known as executive resources, and “downstream” decisions are affected adversely when we are forced to choose with a fatigued brain. Not only does this explain why I always pick plain yogurt in the refrigerator isle, but suggests that if we’ve just spent lots of time focusing on a particular task, exercising self-control or even if we’ve just made lots of seemingly minor choices, then we probably shouldn’t try to make a major decision.
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How To Write With Style
“Pity the readers,” advises Kurt Vonnegut, whom he calls “imperfect artists,” struggling to master the difficult task of making sense of thousands of scribbles on the page. This is my favourite bit advice from Kurt Vonnegut’s “How to Write With Style” (originally published in Palm Sunday, 1981) that remains relevant in the networked age: “Our audience requires us to be sympathetic and patient readers, ever willing to simplify and clarify — whereas we would rather soar high above the crowd, singing like nightingales. This is the bad news.” The good news? We can write about whatever we please.
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The Weird Science of Stock Photography
Advertising deconstructed: Stock photography suppliers must be able to guess which abstract concepts clients want to illustrate, and then have photos and video on hand that resonates. So,what can we glean from the ubiquitous “Everywhere Girl” and mid-ocean oil rig in a storm?
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Shortening the Tail of Scientific Expertise?
Is the web narrowing scientists’ expertise? Sociologist James Evans’ work identifies that as more journals become available online, dramatically fewer articles are being cited in the research papers within them. “Rather than measuring the length of the tail, it seems that modern science is actually focusing on a tiny bit of it.” The reasons for this phenomenon are unclear, but he does suggest that online databases make it less likely now than in the past for researchers to integrate serendipitous gems of discoveries into their research. Perhaps proving the old adage that, an “expert is someone who knows more and more about less and less until, eventually, he knows everything about nothing.”
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How do we measure our planet’s global mean temperature, and compare it to a record dating back hundreds of thousands of years, a comparison central to discussions about climate change? Jordan R. Raney’s description of the ingenious but impaired proxy measures from tree rings to coral reefs are meant to encourage skepticism for some of the more extreme claims that have been made. Unfortunately, we still need to make decisions about climate change, however incomplete, uncertain the data we have is. In fact, that is the challenge.