Mind Opener

Willy Chyr is a fine artist and designer interested in emergent properties and systems: and he sometimes works in balloons.

I’ll be presenting an interview with Chyr here on Symbiartic soon; we met recently over coffee and from such fun, complicated work, Willy is refreshingly unpretentious and creatively versatile.

As you watch the Patriots and Giants smash into each other Sunday, consider this.

A car accident, a rough tackle, an unexpected tumble. The number of ways to bang up the brain are almost as numerous as the people who sustain these injuries. And only recently has it become clear just how damaging a seemingly minor knock can be. Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is no longer just a condition acknowledged in military personnel or football players and other professional athletes. Each year some 1.7 million civilians will suffer an injury that disrupts the function of their brains, qualifying it as a TBI.

In Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1970 rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar , a skeptical Judas Iscariot questions with faux innocence (“Don’t you get me wrong/I only want to know”) the messiah’s deific nature: “Jesus Christ Superstar/Do you think you’re what they say you are?”

- Jennifer Ouellette – The Science of Mysteries: Leave Us the Counterpoint

But CAN they? Head over to Neurotic Physiology to find out whether bears really care if you’re on your period . [More]

Some Africans click, but English speakers don’t. That’s been the conventional wisdom about click sounds, which serve as regular consonants in Zulu and Xhosa and a few other African languages but which were presumed to just be used in English for encouraging a horse, imitating a kiss, or expressing emotions such as disapproval or amazement. But researchers have recently found that clicks are far more prevalent in the world’s lingua franca than had been thought.

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion [More]

- Harold Johnson – Tsunami Debris & North America: Is the Tail Wagging the Dog?

This year, To Kill a Mockingbird (the movie) turns 50 (the book itself celebrated its fiftieth birthday in 2010). I actually didn t seen the movie until late in college, when I came across the tape while rummaging through a cardboard box of my parents old films on a snowy evening in Vermont. But I read the book far earlier, when I was around eight years old. It s one of the first real book I remember reading.

Atticus and Tom Robinson, screenshot from 1962 film. Moni3, Public domain, Wikimedia commons.

Jordan Suchow came to three rapid-fire conclusions as he watched his Macintosh laptop plummet toward the floor. First, in approximately 300 milliseconds he was going to be in a heap of trouble--the machine had been given to him by his thesis adviser, George Alvarez of Harvard University. Second, hoping against all hope, he decided that Harvard could probably afford to buy him a new computer. Third, he realized that the most important observation of his life was unfolding right in front of him as his laptop accelerated toward the parquet: the onscreen doughnut that he had programmed to scintillate appeared to have stopped doing so.

Happy Groundhog Day! Today is the day each year in which we look towards a giant rodent to find out how much more winter we’ll have to endure. This year, we probably know the answer: winter hasn’t been very wintery, even for Los Angeles. Which, well, isn’t ever really wintery at all.

Kevin Turner was a premier athlete in the National Football League, a fullback who could run, catch and block. At 6' 1" and roughly 230 pounds, he was slightly undersized for his position, but he had tremendous thrust in his legs and used all of it to launch himself into players who were bigger than he was. He played for the New England Patriots from 1992 to 1994, then joined the Philadelphia Eagles, with whom he stayed until his abrupt retirement in 1999. Some called him “the Collision Expert”--a nickname he got because of the gouges he collected on his helmet.

Concussion, the most common among traumatic brain injuries, which occurs 1.7 million times a year in the U.S., represents a major public-health problem. It occurs when there is a sudden acceleration or deceleration of the head, a process depicted here in this animation.

                  "@BoraChimp" by Nathaniel Gold

Conferences are social grooming events for relatively hairless apes. A few will stand before the multitude, beaming with pride or shaking with nervousness (as the case may be), and present the latest research in contemporary ape thought. As their vocalizations reach a crescendo, those sitting demurely below will produce flesh-slapping noises that indicate they were paying attention (even if they weren t). Another ape will then rise and this process will continue repeatedly and at length. It looks a lot like the modern political stump speech.

Wednesday, the new Video of the Week day – have fun!

LOTS of good reading today:

When I was a kid, I used to spend hours listening to Adam Carolla and Dr. Drew Pinsky on their Sunday night call-in radio show Loveline . I listened so often that I began to incorporate one of their catchphrases – “good times” – into my daily conversations. Scientists have a name for this phenomenon: behavioral mimicry .

Autophobia: Love and Hate in the Automotive Age | Brian Ladd | University of Chicago Press | 236 pages | $15.00 (Softcover)

It’s an experience not at all unfamiliar to many of us: the flush of a first meeting, a growing attraction, a desire to spend every waking moment together, to visit new places and explore a world previously unknown, to create new memories together. In this blissful period of initial attraction, when the bloom is still on the rose, there are no shortcomings; everything is perfect. Enamourment drives us to passionate defenses and the abrupt dismissal of those who would impugn the virtue of the object of our affections.

Video of the Week #28 February 1st, 2012

Does it work? Well, according to this study, probably not . [More]