August 30, 2011
The term anal retentive, commonly abbreviated to anal, is used conversationally to describe a person who pays such attention to detail that the obsession becomes an annoyance to others, and can be carried out to the detriment of the anal-retentive person. The term derives from Freudian psychoanalysis. People who are said to be anal retentive usually suffer from obsessive–compulsive personality disorder. In the psychology of Freud, the anal stage is said to follow the oral stage of infant or early-childhood development. This is a time when an infant’s attention moves from oral stimulation to anal stimulation (usually the bowels but occasionally the bladder), usually synchronous with learning to control his or her excretory functions, a time of toilet training.
Freud theorized that children who experience conflicts during this period of time may develop ‘anal’ personality traits, namely those associated with a child’s efforts at excretory control: orderliness, stubbornness, a compulsion for control. If these qualities continue into later life, the person is said to be ‘anal retentive.’ Conversely, those who reject anal characteristics are said to have ‘anal expulsive’ personality types. Although Freud’s theories on early childhood have been influential on the psychological community, research suggests that the overall pattern of parental attitudes has a much more concrete effect on how an infant will grow up. There is no conclusive research linking anal stage conflicts with ‘anal’ personality types.
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August 26, 2011
The Venus Project is an organization that advocates American futurist Jacque Fresco’s visions of the future with the aim of improving society by moving towards a global sustainable social design that they call a ‘resource-based economy.’ Such a system incorporates sustainable cities and values, energy efficiency, collective farms, natural resource management and advanced automation, focusing on the benefits they claim it will bring to humanity.
The name of the organization originates from Venus, Florida, where its research center is located, near Lake Okeechobee. Within the center are ten buildings, designed by Fresco, which showcase the architecture of the project.
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August 26, 2011
The matching hypothesis is a popular psychology and social psychology theory, proposed by Elaine Hatfield and her colleagues in 1966, which suggests why people become attracted to their partner. It claims that people are more likely to form long standing relationships with someone who is as equally physically attractive as they are. This is influenced by realistic choices, desire of the match and good probability of obtaining the date.
In successful couples in which the partners differ greatly in physical attractiveness, it is likely that the less attractive partner has compensating qualities to offer. For instance, some men with wealth and status desire younger, more attractive women, and some women are more likely to overlook physical attractiveness for men who possess wealth and status.
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August 26, 2011
Assortative mating is the phenomenon where a sexually reproducing organism chooses to mate with individuals that are similar (positive assortative mating) or dissimilar (negative assortative mating) to itself in some specific manner. In evolution, these two types of assortative mating have the effect, respectively, of increasing or reducing the range of variation (trait variance), when the assorting is cued on heritable traits. Positive assortative mating, therefore, results in disruptive natural selection, and negative assortative mating results in stabilized natural selection.
Assortative mating has been invoked to explain sympatric speciation (the process through which new species evolve from a single ancestral species while inhabiting the same geographic region). For some populations there are two different resources for which different phenotypes (genetic traits) are optimum. Intermediates between these two phenotypes are less favorable. It is then favorable if the organisms can recognize mates that are optimized for the same resources as they are themselves. If mutations that make such recognition possible appear, these will be selected for.
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August 26, 2011
Cyanotype [sahy-an-uh-tahyp] is a photographic printing process that gives a cyan-blue print. The process was popular in engineering circles well into the 20th century. The simple and low-cost process enabled them to produce large-scale copies of their work, referred to as blueprints. Two chemicals are used in the process: Ammonium iron(III) citrate and Potassium ferricyanide.
The English scientist and astronomer Sir John Herschel discovered this procedure in 1842. Though the process was developed by Herschel, he considered it as mainly a means of reproducing notes and diagrams, as in blueprints. It was Anna Atkins who brought this to photography. She created a limited series of cyanotype books that documented ferns and other plant life from her extensive seaweed collection. Atkins placed specimens directly onto coated paper, allowing the action of light to create a silhouette effect. By using this photogram process, Anna Atkins is regarded as the first female photographer.
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August 26, 2011
Père Lachaise Cemetery [peyr /luh-shez] is the largest cemetery in the city of Paris, France, and is reputed to be the world’s most-visited cemetery, attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors annually to the graves of those who have enhanced French life over the past 200 years. It is also the site of three World War I memorials. Notable residents include Georges Bizet, Maria Callas, Frédéric Chopin, Marcel Marceau, Jim Morrison, Marcel Proust, and Oscar Wilde.
The cemetery is on Boulevard de Ménilmontant. The Paris Métro station Philippe Auguste is next to the main entrance, while the station called Père Lachaise, on line 3, is 500 meters away near a side entrance. Many tourists prefer the Gambetta station as it allows them to enter near the tomb of Oscar Wilde and then walk downhill to visit the rest of the cemetery.
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August 25, 2011
In decision making and psychology, decision fatigue refers to the deteriorating quality of decisions made by an individual, after a long session of decision making. It is now understood as one of the causes of irrational trade-offs in decision making. For instance, judges have been shown to make poorer decisions later in the day. Decision fatigue can not only results in fast and careless decisions, but even in decision paralysis where no decision is made at all. In the formal approach to decision quality management, specific techniques have been devised to help managers cope with decision fatigue.
Trade-offs, where either of two choices have positive and negative elements, are an advanced and energy consuming form of decision making. A person who is mentally depleted becomes reluctant to make trade-offs, or makes very poor choices. Jonathan Levav at Stanford University designed experiments showing how decision fatigue can leave a person vulnerable to sales and marketing strategies designed to time the sale.
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August 25, 2011
Ego depletion refers to the idea that self-control or willpower is an exhaustible resource that can be used up. When that energy is low, mental activity that requires self-control is impaired. In other words, using one’s self-control impairs the ability to control one’s self later on. In an illustrative experiment on ego depletion, participants who controlled themselves by trying not to laugh while watching a comedian did worse on a later task that required self-control compared to participants who watching the video and were free to laugh.
Much of the early research on ego depletion was performed by social psychologists Roy Baumeister, Mark Muraven, and their colleagues. In a recent series of studies, they suggest that a positive mood stimulus could help restore the depleted energy. For example, watching short clips of stand-up comedy by Robin Williams and Eddie Murphy can restores the capacity to self-regulate. The work is experimental and does not consider in depth the mechanisms by which performance is restored. Whether it is because of an actual restoration of self-regulatory resources or provides an additional motivation to press on with a depleted self remains an open question., and a study from Carol Dweck and other researchers from Stanford University, questions the ego depletion theory, and presents evidence that ‘a person’s mindset and personal beliefs about willpower determine how long and how well they’ll be able to work on a tough mental exercise.’
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August 25, 2011
Persistence hunting is a hunting technique in which hunters use a combination of running and tracking to pursue prey to the point of exhaustion. While humans can sweat to reduce body heat their quadruped prey would need to slow from a gallop to pant. Today, it is very rare and seen only in a few groups such as Kalahari bushmen and the Tarahumara or Raramuri people of Northern Mexico. Persistence hunting requires endurance running – running many miles for extended periods of time. Among primates, endurance running is only seen in humans, and persistence hunting is thought to have been one of the earliest forms of human hunting, having evolved 2 million years ago.
The persistence hunt may well have been the first form of hunting practiced by hominids. It is likely that this method of hunting evolved before humans invented projectile weapons, such as darts, spears, or slings. Since they could not kill their prey from a distance and were not fast enough to catch the animal, one reliable way to kill it would have been to run it down over a long distance.
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August 25, 2011
Magic satchel is a term often used in reference to role-playing video games. It refers to the use of a character’s inventory in the game, which can often contain more items (or items of too large a size) than is physically possible for the character to carry without any visible means to hold or transport them. The concept is so common in fantasy fiction that it is parodied by the character The Luggage in Terry Pratchett’s ‘Discworld’ series, a semi-sentient, bottomless treasure chest that follows its owner around.
The term ‘hammerspace’ describes the seemingly invisible place from which fictional characters, such as cartoon characters, pull out very large objects, such as mallets. Technically the term hammerspace is not used to refer to a magic satchel itself, but rather the area or pocket of space that a magic satchel occupies; a magic satchel is like a door to hammerspace. The ‘bag of holding’ is a similar concept in the role-playing game ‘Dungeons & Dragons.’ A real-world example is the clown car which often is used in the circus, in which numerous clowns clamber out of a tiny automobile.
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August 25, 2011
Hammerspace (also known as malletspace) is a fan-envisioned extradimensional, instantly accessible storage area in fiction, which is used to explain how animated, comic and game characters can produce objects out of thin air. Inexplicable production of items dates back to the very beginning of animated shorts and was a fairly common occurrence during the golden age of animation. Warner Bros. cartoon characters are particularly well-known for often pulling all sorts of things — guns, disguises, bombs, anvils, mallets— from behind their backs or just offscreen. However, the explanation for this phenomenon was mostly just left to suspension of disbelief.
The term ‘Hammerspace’ itself originates from a gag common in certain anime and manga. A typical example would be when a male character would anger or otherwise offend a female character, who would proceed to produce, out of thin air, an oversized wooden rice mallet (saizuchi) and hit him on the head with it in an exaggerated manner. The strike would be purely for comic effect, and would not have any long-lasting effects. The term was largely popularized first by fans of ‘Urusei Yatsura’ (a comedic manga, popular in the 1980s).
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August 25, 2011
Snow Crash is Neal Stephenson’s third novel, published in 1992. Like many of Stephenson’s other novels it covers a large range of topics including: history, linguistics, anthropology, archaeology, religion, computer science, politics, cryptography, memetics, and philosophy. Stephenson explained the title of the novel in his 1999 essay ‘In the Beginning… was the Command Line’ as his term for a particular software failure mode on the early Apple Macintosh computer, ‘When the computer crashed and wrote gibberish into the bitmap, the result was something that looked vaguely like static on a broken television set — a ‘snow crash.”
The book presents the Sumerian language as the firmware programming language for the brainstem, which is supposedly functioning as the BIOS for the human brain. According to characters in the book, the semetic goddess Asherah is the personification of a ‘linguistic virus,’ similar to a computer virus. The Sumerian god Enki created a counter-program which he called a ‘nam-shub’ that caused all of humanity to speak different languages as a protection against Asherah (a re-interpretation of the ancient Near Eastern story of the Tower of Babel).
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