breath straight kicking like cancer....,

thescientist | Fusobacterium nucleatum is a Gram-negative oral commensal microbe, but it has the potential to become pathogenic, occasionally causing periodontal disease. In October 2011, two separate teams from Canada’s BC Cancer Agency and the Broad Institute in Cambridge showed that the bacterium could also be found in the gut, where its abundance was associated with colorectal cancer. Now, two new studies present functional evidence to help explain how F. nucleatum spurs the development of cancer.

In papers published in Cell Host & Microbe today (August 13), teams led by Harvard Medical School’s Aleksandar Kostic and Case Western Reserve University’s Mara Roxana Rubinstein used a mouse model of intestinal tumorigenesis and human colon cancer cells, respectively, to show that F. nucleatum induces proinflammatory and oncogenic activities that promote the growth of colorectal cancer.

“It is usually impossible to infer whether microbes are causative or opportunistic colonizers without functional studies,” said Robert Holt, who led the BC Cancer Agency team that in 2011 reported an association between F. nucleatum in the gut and colorectal cancer but was not involved in the present studies. “Identifying an infectious origin for disease almost always starts with observing an association between the presence of a microbe and the presence of a particular pathology, but an understanding of causality—or lack thereof—requires the gradual accumulation of experimental and epidemiological evidence,” such as that reported today.

The Washington University School of Medicine’s Gautam Dantas agreed that the new work helps distinguish cause from consequence. “Is an observed altered microbiome state in a diseased individual the cause of the disease, or a symptom?” Dantas, who was not involved in the studies, wrote in an e-mail to The Scientist. The papers published today “report on significant strides towards . . . identifying the mechanisms by which a human commensal bacterium, Fusobacterium nucleatum, promotes colorectal cancer.”

frottage fever and a date with the reaver...,

visibleorigami | It becomes increasingly harder to know what to say; to find that there is anything to say. Obviously it has already been said and the same people not paying attention then are not paying attention now. It's not my alarm clock and it's not my world, that so many are attached to living in. I want the straightest route out of Dodge, too many people want a condo in the center of town. The town expands, intent on drowning the outskirts with its unbearable presence. Implosion looms. Empty rockers rock, in empty rooms.

The density of the spider's web, is conversely equivalent to the density of the web inside the victims heads. Shelob's and she hurls, inky darkness, to swallow the world in night and they're all curled up in their beds of doom, sleep tight. Sleep tight. Tight is the word, tightly wrapped and strapped down by the web. These are the things we dream about. These are the things we dread. It all seemed so nice in the Formica life, till the bombs went off in our heads.

So, it's like that, chattering on in unfortunate rhyme. It seems it amounts to no more than passing the time, while passing through. The same people keep assaulting their associates, like they think there's some light at the end of that tunnel, on that losing proposition. Where they think that is going to take them and what their payoff is, I can't guess. Seek and ye shall find it is the operative consideration but it appears simply finding what is already there, or fabricated to suit them will do. Diminishing returns doesn't seem to factor in. They just keep diminishing, until even the one they are returning to is gone. Maybe that's fitting in any case.

It just makes me tired to see it. Picayune wars, devoid of the conscience that would restrain them, seems to be the order of the day. If you can't come to terms with it or move past it, then you might as well kill it and off yourself in the bargain. I can't see the payoff, I really can't and my words fall on deaf ears, when seeking to reach the aggressive principals, no doubt making myself a target in the bargain. Any time I try to make the peacemaker I get a peacemaker stuck in my ribs, making anything but peace and accompanied by the sentiment that I rest in pieces.

the function of dreaming in the cycles of cognition

biogeneticstructuralism | In summary then, biogenetic structural theory holds (with Roffwarg et al. 1966, Robson 1988, and others) that the function of dreaming is essentially developmental. We have seen that the primary task of the higher brain centers is to construct a cognized environment from the nascent, neurognostic structures of the pre- and perinatal nervous system. The cognized environment is a vast system of models pertaining to the "real world," or operational environment, including him or herself as an organism. These models may be entrained to conscious network to produce our moment-by-moment flow of experience. The models mediating experience operate within the field of associations entrained in the dialogue between the prefrontal intentional processes and the sensorial processes, and become routinized in organization (form creodes) within cyclically recurring patterns of entrainment. These gross and recurring patterns of entrainment are recognized by their recurrent attributes, and are usually cognized as rucurrent by the individual, generally during enculturation by his or her society, and are experienced as phases of consciousness. Because our species has evolved as a diurnal primate phases of consciousness tend to take on a daily, or circadian rhythm of recurrence that alternates between those specialized to encounter and cognize events in the outer operational environment (we call these "being awake" in our culture) and those specialized to establish a transformative, reorganizational and homeomorphogenic interaction between models and other somatic processes (we call this "being asleep" in our culture).

Although the biological functions of sleep are manifold (Hobson 1988), the function of dreaming itself may be seen as the symbolic fulfilment or evocation within the sensorium of transformative processes occurring in the main outside the bounds of conscious network. The feedback relations (homeomorphogenesis) between the symbolic play of dreaming and extra-sensorial somatic processes is potentially a reciprocal one. But just how passive or active conscious network will be in intending the sensorial play will vary from dream to dream, from individual to individual, and from society to society.

The extent of awareness within dream phases varies enormously, and is the single most important variable in determining both (1) understanding in and of the dream, (2) and the locus of control of dream content. If awareness is hypointentional (weak involvement of prefrontal processes in conscious network), then the locus of control of dream experiences will lay with somatic processes largely outside the boundaries of conscious network. On the other extreme, if awareness is intentional (within the "normal" range of waking involvement of prefrontal processes in the conscious network mediating dreaming), then control of the dream experience may (but not necessarily) shift to conscious network. And, of course, entrainments mediating dreaming may range on a continuum of prefrontal involvement between these extremes.

In other words, hypointentional entrainment in a dream phase will produce little awareness, and the content may be relatively dull, unclear, confusing, perhaps producing little cross-phase influence or memory in a subsequent phase of consciousness. Increased intentionality will tend to produce the opposite experience, characterized by vividness of sensory content, active awareness of theme and continuity, lucidity (i.e., awareness of dreaming while within the dream), comprehension of meaning and perhaps active involvement of the "dream ego" in controlling the the dream content. Hyperintentionality (intense involvement of prefrontal processes) during dreaming may, for example, lead to the portalling experience (MacDonald, Cove, Laughlin and McManus 1989) in which intense concentration upon some element of a scene produces a "doorway" that "opens up" into an entirely different scene, a very common experience among meditators and dream yogis. Under hyperintentional entrainment, the dream ego ceases to be a passive point of view in the dream and becomes an active, questing locus of control (see Hillman 1987, LaBerge 1981) that may facilitate the capacity for advanced exploration of one's own unconscious processes (Malamud 1979).

The role of culture is enormous in preparing the individual to participate in and interpret experiences in multiple phases of consciousness (see e.g., Eggan 1955 on the Hopi). We have suggested that cultures may lie on a continuum from those tending to produce a monophasic orientation toward alternative phases to those that encourage transcendental exploration via alternative phases. Materialistic cultures tend to enculturate monophasic egos; that is, self-concepts informed primarily from memories accrued during waking phases of consciousness. Even when dream phases are not ignored as a source of experience, dreams are considered more like symbolic puzzles that must be decoded in terms comprehensible to the waking ego, than as experiences that are meaningful in their own right (James Hillman 1979). By contrast, more spiritually inclined cultures tend to enculturate polyphasic egos; i.e., those characterized by self-concepts informed from a variety of alternative phases of consciousness, including dream phases. In cultures that have developed advanced dream exploration as a means of verifying and vivifying their cosmology, experiences in the dream phase are meaningful to a polyphasic ego from within the dream itself, and may not require later interpretation in the waking phase for comprehension and integration into the ego complex.

what is charisma?

Video - Teaser for debate between Bayard Rustin and Malcolm X

NYTimes | Fully to capture what we mean by charisma we now rely on the language of physical forces — magnetism, electricity — but for the Greeks it was, simply, favor. Charis, whose name meant beauty and kindness, was an attendant to Aphrodite, the goddess of love.

The word appears throughout the New Testament, most often translated as “grace.” In Christian theology gifts from God are called “charismata.” These gifts can be as varied as knowledge, healing, miracles or prophecy and as grand as redemption itself. Charismata came to refer especially to the graces given to individuals specifically for the good of others: the gift that keeps on giving.

It wasn’t until the 20th century that the word acquired its modern secular meaning, when the influential sociologist Max Weber borrowed it to describe a key quality of leadership.

“Charisma,” he wrote, “is a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman or specifically exceptional powers. These qualities are not accessible to the ordinary person, but are regarded as of divine origin or as exemplary, and on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a leader.”

But how is a performer a leader? Other writers have built on Weber’s work in the social sciences, but much less attention has been paid to charisma in culture. The problem is that when it comes to the arts, the uses of charisma become harder to pin down. When Bill Clinton is charismatic, you vote for him. When an obscure carpenter’s son in ancient Galilee is charismatic, you join his ministry. But when the violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter is charismatic, or Callas or Mr. Amidon, what are you supposed to do? What happens? Is our applause enough?

To some, charisma has lost its power as descriptive. It connotes flash, smoke and mirrors. (You could slightly change my sentence about Mr. Tetzlaff to turn it into praise: “He may not be charismatic, but he is a searchingly creative, technically flawless violinist.”) Even when used as a compliment, “charismatic” is often taken for granted. Just look at Mr. Tommasini’s and my takes on Mr. Daniels: his charisma is “no surprise” and “expected.” Charisma is a given, we imply, so let’s move on to the real stuff.

Let’s assume for a moment that charisma is the real stuff, less a means than an end in itself. What we generally consider the “content” of the arts — the notes, the libretto, the bowings, the plot — is actually just the structure that makes possible the crucial thing: watching a performer who is able to connect with fundamental realities. It is not that a singer’s charisma makes a colorful aria sound even better but that the aria provides a platform, a vessel, for us to experience the charisma.

If charisma were recognized as the central experience of performance, then that experience would take on a ritualistic aspect. Art as we know it, centered on rigorously conceived structures and intricately deployed catharses, would become more inchoate, less an appeal to our intelligence or taste than to instincts that we barely acknowledge.

Charisma is the essential quality of our moment because it fits so well in a culture in which the connoisseurship of artistic technique — whether singing or instrumental playing or conducting — has declined, but institutions are still seeking new audiences for these complex, demanding art forms. It is a quality that requires no knowledge or preparation. Even if you know little about the technicalities of music, when you attend a performance by the pianist Evgeny Kissin, you are swept up by his power and presence.

The question is whether people want to be swept up. Charisma can be exhilarating but also frightening. Our surrender to it demands a trust that is not easily conceded. If our desire from performance is only for comfort and reassurance, charisma will repel us. It is about revealing scope, and it raises the stakes dangerously high.

Recently I was in the Met Opera Shop, and a video clip came on the screen above the CD racks. The longtime Met soprano Aprile Millo was singing “La mamma morta,” the ecstatic aria from Giordano’s “Andrea Chenier,” with burning intensity. The sales clerk and I both watched raptly. Later I e-mailed Ms. Millo to ask her what charisma is.

“Hemingway gave us a haunting clue to it,” she replied. “In his obsession with the Spanish bullfights, he spoke of the lust of the crowd and its desire to feel something special, a raw authenticity, even in so brutal a setting. What he mentions is the hush that would come over the crowd at the entrance of the toreadors. The people could sense the difference between those who did it for the fame, the paycheck, and those who had the old spirit: the nobility, bravery, heart, ‘duende.’ I believe this also happens in the theater. The crowd can sense the one with the authentic message, the connection to the truth.”

honey money: the power of erotic capital

Video - Elvis Presley Money Honey 1956

Guardian | In a typically razor-sharp exchange of dialogue which establishes – yet again – that The Simpsons provides the most coruscating illumination of contemporary mores, Lisa says to her grade school teacher that "Good looks don't really matter", to which Ms Hoover replies: "Nonsense, that's just something ugly people tell their children." Stripping away the layers of irony from this statement we can reveal the central premise of Catherine Hakim's book, which is that not only do looks matter, but that they should matter a great deal more. Furthermore, the people who tell young people – and in particular young women – that their beauty and sex appeal are of little importance are themselves ugly, if not physically then at least morally. For, as Hakim sees it, it is an "unholy alliance" of wannabe patriarchs, religious fundamentalists and radical feminists who have – in Anglo-Saxon countries especially – acted to devalue what she terms "erotic capital". In Hakim's estimation, for all young women, and in particular those who are without other benefits – financial, intellectual, situational – an entirely legitimate form of self-advancement should consist in their getting the best out of – if you'll forgive the pun – their assets.

Hakim, a senior lecturer at the London School of Economics, is no tub-thumping provocateur, but a well-established sociologist with a string of publications to her name. And Honey Money, despite its somewhat racy title – which comes, apparently, from an expression employed by Jakarta prostitutes: "No money, no honey" – is configured as a serious academic exercise, complete with rather leaden prose, extensive annotation, reams of statistical evidence, appendices and tedious repetitions. Nevertheless, I envisage a blizzard of opprobrium enveloping Hakim, for she has set out here a thesis seemingly purpose-built to inflame the passions of a wide swathe of the opinionated. Taking as her starting point Pierre Bourdieu's well-established analysis of forms of individual capital – monetary capital itself, human capital (intelligence potentiated by education) and social capital (patronage, nepotism and other network benefits) – Hakim proposes another form: "erotic capital". She acknowledges that this term has been used by sociologists in the US to refer to physical appearance and sex appeal, but claims that her definition – widened to encompass other skills such as charm, sociability and actual sexual expertise – is both original and powerfully explicatory.

In some ways I think she's right. There's something altogether refreshing about Hakim's spade-calling, which recalls to mind Schopenhauer's infamous remarks in his essay "On Women": "With girls, Nature has had in view what is called in a dramatic sense a 'striking effect', for she endows them for a few years with a richness of beauty and a fullness of charm at the expense of the rest of their lives; so that they may during these years ensnare the fantasy of a man to such a degree as to make him rush into taking the honourable care of them, in some kind of form, for a lifetime – a step which would not seem sufficiently justified if he only considered the matter." Certainly the pessimistic philosopher's own dealings with women conformed to this view: a lifelong bachelor, he was not so much an enthusiastic as a dutiful customer of prostitutes – attending the brothel as regularly as other haute-bourgeois men visit their club.

Hakim endorses Schopenhauer's characterisation of the "striking effect" of young women's beauty and sex appeal, and gives us cross-cultural statistics to prove that not only is their "erotic capital" consistently greater than that of young men, but that it is also always undervalued: it is attractive young men who get the better jobs and secure the higher wages, attractive young men who end up being US president – regardless of their skin colour. This might seem counter-intuitive in a world seemingly plastered with images of this "striking effect", displayed in every possible state of dress and undress, but the strength of Hakim's analysis lies in the very crudeness of its metric. According to her, while young women may possess considerable charms, men's desire for them always vastly outstrips supply. The reverse is simply not the case: men are both less attractive to women, and markedly less desired by them, especially as those women grow older. What Hakim terms "the male sex-deficit" underlies both the ubiquity of female sexual imagery – as pornography, as marketing adjunct – and the persistent unwillingness of society at large to "valorise" women's good looks. It is, quite simply, not in the interests of all those priapic patriarchs to allow women to actualise their erotic capital, for to do so would seismically alter the balance of power between the sexes.

extrasensory perception of digital erotica...,

Video - 2 Live Crew - Me So Horny (Uncensored)

NYTimes | In an interview, Dr. Bem, the author of the original paper and one of the most prominent research psychologists of his generation, said he intended each experiment to mimic a well-known classic study, “only time-reversed.”

In one classic memory experiment, for example, participants study 48 words and then divide a subset of 24 of them into categories, like food or animal. The act of categorizing reinforces memory, and on subsequent tests people are more likely to remember the words they practiced than those they did not.

In his version, Dr. Bem gave 100 college students a memory test before they did the categorizing — and found they were significantly more likely to remember words that they practiced later. “The results show that practicing a set of words after the recall test does, in fact, reach back in time to facilitate the recall of those words,” the paper concludes.

In another experiment, Dr. Bem had subjects choose which of two curtains on a computer screen hid a photograph; the other curtain hid nothing but a blank screen.

A software program randomly posted a picture behind one curtain or the other — but only after the participant made a choice. Still, the participants beat chance, by 53 percent to 50 percent, at least when the photos being posted were erotic ones. They did not do better than chance on negative or neutral photos.

“What I showed was that unselected subjects could sense the erotic photos,” Dr. Bem said, “but my guess is that if you use more talented people, who are better at this, they could find any of the photos.”

how psychopaths choose their victims

Psychology Today | As my fellow Psychology Today blogger Marisa Mauro has pointed out, psychologists have long been known that the more psychopathic a person is, the more easily they can identify potential victims. Indeed, they can do so just by watching the way a person moves. In one study, test subjects watched videos of twelve individuals walking, shot from behind, and rated how easily they could be mugged. As it happened, some of the people in the videotapes really had been mugged -- and the most psychopathic of the subjects were able to tell which was which. Writes Mauro:

The [subjects] completed the Self-Report Psychopathy Scale: Version III, which measures interpersonal and affective traits associated with psychopathy as well as intra-personal instability and antisocial traits... Overall results confirmed a strong positive correlation between psychopathy scores and accuracy of victim identification. This means that individuals that score higher for psychopathy are better at selecting victims.

And what was it about these people that made them seem vulnerable? A later study found that the men were picking up on whole suite of nonverbal cues, including the length of their stride, how they shifted their weight, and how high they lifted their feet. Taken together, these cues gave the psychopathic men a rough gauge of how confident their potential victims were. Body language that implies a lack of confidence --- read: socially submissive --- includes lack of eye contact, fidgeting of the hands and feet, and the avoidance of large gestures when shifting posture.

The researchers' findings confirmed my own suspicions regarding the dubious fellow I mentioned above. The women who wound up on the receiving end of his attentions were individuals who, in their own description, were not very worldly, experienced, or outgoing. They were psychologically vulnerable and hence ill-equipped to either resist this fellow's predations or to deal with them emotionally after they had occurred. In the aftermath, they are so traumatized that even speaking about their experiences is extremely painful. And so the psychopath continues on his way. Fist tap Dale.

alternative realities...,

Video - Commercial from Confederate States of America.

FGF | Through no fault of their own, most Americans study American history in school. This is why they have so many misconceptions about American history.

One of these misconceptions is that the Civil War was a noble struggle against slavery and that Abraham Lincoln finally abolished slavery with the Emancipation Proclamation.

The United States and civilized warfare
If you accept this mythology, you have to wonder why some previous president didn’t just abolish slavery with a stroke of the presidential pen. In fact, Lincoln knew he had no such power; he merely claimed the power, as commander in chief of the armed forces, to strip rebels of their property. So he announced that slaves in the rebellious states were to be released.

Some observers gibed that Lincoln had freed all the slaves over whom he had no authority, while doing nothing for those over whom he did have authority. But this is to misunderstand what Lincoln thought he had authority to do, since he claimed authority over the “rebel” states. In his view, there had been no legal secession from the Union, and the so-called Confederate States were still subject to the United States.

Europe was shocked by Lincoln’s brutal treatment of the South, which violated traditional rules of civilized warfare, according to which civilians and their property were to be spared any molestation. But in Lincoln’s view, citizens of the Confederate States who were loyal to the Confederacy weren’t entitled to any such exemption. They were all “rebels” and “traitors” to the United States and could be justly treated as criminals.

Idealizers of Lincoln have blamed the brutality of the war on generals like William Tecumseh Sherman and Philip Sheridan, who devastated civilian areas, destroying crops and property. But they were merely executing Lincoln’s policy, with his full approval. Responsibility for Sherman’s March to the Sea and Sheridan’s Shenandoah Valley campaign rested with Lincoln.

By Lincoln’s Manichaean logic, it could have been much worse. Since most of the people of the South were guilty of the crimes of rebellion and treason, millions of them could have been executed after the war. But that would have been too much even for Lincoln.

The South, much more attuned to European culture than the North, had assumed that Lincoln would be inhibited by the rules of civilized warfare. They underestimated the factor and the fanatical logic of Northern ideology, according to which the holy end of “preserving the Union” justified nearly any means of subduing “rebels.”

When Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox, many war-crazed Northerners were furious that Lee wasn’t arrested, tried, and executed as a traitor. But Grant, to his credit, still adhered in part to the old code of honor. He had given his word to Lee, whom he deeply respected, and he kept it. The Southern officers and soldiers were allowed to go home in peace.

a glimpse into Big Don's id....,

Video - BD's avatar Captain Koons from Pulp Fiction.

FGF | During the early nineteenth century, a slave trader named Theophilus Conneau kept a journal of his experiences in Africa. On one occasion he witnessed a cannibal orgy, in which one tribe performed acts of torture and mutilation, including castration and decapitation, on another tribe which they had subdued.

Conneau was particularly struck by the ferocity of the women of the conquering tribe, who, their naked bodies decorated with chalk and red paint, gleefully led the gruesome festivities. The chief matron “bore an infant babe torn from its mother’s womb ... which she tossed high in the air, receiving it on the point of her knife” before eating it. During the ritual this same woman was “adorned with a string of men’s genital parts” while “collecting into a gourd the brains of the decapitated bodies.”

Such practices may not justify European colonialism, but they do help explain why the Europeans thought they were bringing civilization to savage places. As G.K. Chesterton pointed out, regretting the white man’s arrogance need not mean idealizing the conquered natives. Chesterton also observed that cannibalism wasn’t a primitive practice but a highly decadent one.

The cannibals weren’t satisfying physical appetites, like carnivorous animals, but indulging a specifically human — or diabolical — malice. The historian Francis Parkman describes Iroquois Indians, having captured a party of Algonquins, roasting and devouring their infants “before the eyes of the agonized mothers, whose shrieks, supplications, and frantic efforts to break the cords that bound them were met with mockery and laughter.”

Mocking the suffering of the victims was part of the fun; the very essence of it, in fact. The lion doesn’t gloat over his prey, with a circle of his fellow felines whooping at the agony of a slowly dismembered antelope.

Inflicting and observing torture for amusement is a distinctively human delight. In the case of the African cannibals, it would be a feeble excuse to say that the unborn child was a mere “fetus,” and therefore somehow not “fully human,” as we say now; the woman who killed it obviously regarded it as human, which was more or less the point of the orgy.

Eating a fetus might strike even the National Abortion Rights Action League as a little unseemly; our enlightened society still retains a few irrational inhibitions, which may, however, eventually go the way of so many other taboos. Western man (including Western woman) has learned to justify abortion, if not yet to enjoy it. We still observe a certain nervous and clinical decorum about the subject. Fist tap Big Don. (The Francis Griffen Foundation and dead Joe Sobran are absolutely priceless - Thanks!)

lady gaga and the new world order?

Guardian | You might think that by know you've read more than enough online exegesis of Lady Gaga's videos but you haven't even scratched the surface until you've read the work of The Vigilant Citizen. This anonymous Canadian blogger explained last year's Paparazzi video with reference to the CIA's MK-ULTRA mind-control programme, Fritz Lang's Metropolis, the Eye of Horus and the goat-god Baphomet, concluding that Gaga was indubitably an "Illuminati puppet". Bad Romance apparently "offers a chilling description of a music industry ruled by the elite". In Alejandro, she "flashes in her fans' faces the symbols of their own oppression".

The Vigilant Citizen has a good claim to be the world's most distinctive music critic. On his website, vigilantcitizen.com, he describes himself as a graduate in communications and politics and a producer for "some fairly well-known 'urban' artists". He has spent five years researching "Theosophy, Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism, the Bavarian Illuminati and Western Occultism". All of these interests converge in his insanely detailed analyses of the symbolism of pop videos and lyrics. Thus Pink's MTV awards performance mimics a Masonic initiation; Jay-Z's Run This Town trumpets the coming of the New World Order (NWO); and the video for Black Eyed Peas' Imma Be Rocking That Body advances "the transhumanist and police state agenda".

What's surprising is the methodical, matter-of-fact, occasionally humorous tone of his essays. He does not write like a swivel-eyed loon rambling about Obamunism (although, inevitably, there's an unsavoury fascination with Jewish influence). To those who don't study occult symbolism, he concedes, it might all seem "totally far-fetched and ridiculous", but for those in the know "I was simply stating the obvious". His examinations are certainly exhaustive. Scrolling down his densely illustrated posts, you may find yourself thinking, "Say, Lady Gaga really does very often cover up one eye. And a lot of pop stars really do pretend to be robots."

But the Vigilant Citizen can't encounter a predictable pop trope without interpreting it as part of an occult music-industry plot to brainwash the masses. The ostensibly meaningless "Bum bum be-dum" refrain in Rihanna's Disturbia, for example, is decoded as: "You good-for-nothing, idiotic person, let yourself become dumb, stop thinking and let yourself be hypnotised and possessed." It's something of a stretch.

how words color your world

Guardian | This tale begins with a Liberal leader and his innovative exploration of the colour blue. Not Nick Clegg and the Tories, but William Gladstone and his concern about Homer's use of colour in The Iliad and The Odyssey. Gladstone was the first prominent intellectual to notice something awry with the Greek poet's sense of colour. Homer never described the sky as blue. In fact, Homer barely used colour terms at all and when he did they were just peculiar. The sea was "wine-looking". Oxen were also "wine-looking". And, to Gladstone, the sea and oxen were never of the same colour. His explanation was that the Ancient Greeks had not developed a colour sense, and instead saw the world in terms of black and white with only a dash of red.

Guy Deutscher's interest in the Homeric eye is less about evolution or optics than it is linguistic. Can we see something for which we have no word? Yes. The Greeks were able to distinguish shades of blue just as vividly as we can now, despite lacking a specific vocabulary for them. Yet, writes Deutscher, even though Gladstone was wrong about the Greeks' sense of perception, his hunch about the emergence of colour words was "so sharp and far-sighted that much of what he wrote . . . can hardly be bettered today".

It turned out that it wasn't just the Ancient Greeks who never said the sky was blue. None of the ancient languages had a proper word for blue. What we now call blue was once subsumed by older words for black or for green. (In fact, this is why in Japan green lights are actually a bluer shade of green than in the rest of the world. The word used for the green of traffic lights is ao, which used to mean "green and blue" but now means blue. Rather than change the word, they changed the colour.)

Deutscher has a lot of fun relating the discovery that colour words emerge in all languages in a predictable order. Black and white come first, then red, then yellow, then green and finally blue. (Although sometimes green is before yellow.) Red is probably first because it is the colour of blood and of the easiest dyes to make in the wild. Green and yellow are the colours of vegetation. And blue is last because – with the exception of the sky – few naturally occurring things are blue and blue dyes are very difficult to make.

It takes Deutscher half his book to tell the story of blue, and fascinating and well written though it is, the discussion is a diversion from the point he really wants to make, which is that language can affect how we perceive the world. Is it possible that two people may think about the world differently purely by dint of the language they speak? Deutscher believes that this is the case, and he provides three examples: Guugu Yimithirr is an indigenous Australian language – it gave us the word kangaroo – that does not have words for "left" and "right". Instead, all directions are given in terms of where the speaker is standing in relation to the points of the compass. Experiments have shown that Guugu Yimithirr speakers have "perfect-pitch for directions": regardless of visibility conditions, or whether they are stationary or moving, they know where north is. This is the most striking example, says Deutscher, of how speech habits can have "far-reaching consequences beyond speaking, as they affect orientation skills and even patterns of memory".

rubbing, rubbing, rubbing.....,

organelle | What transforms the relatively benign grasshopper into the apocalyptic swarms of soldiers we call locusts is a simple thing: proximity to other grasshoppers initiated by feeding behavior.

From Wikipedia (locust):

“Research at Oxford University has identified that swarming behaviour is a response to overcrowding. Increased tactile stimulation of the hind legs causes an increase in levels of serotonin. This causes the locust to change color, eat much more, and breed much more easily. The transformation of the locust to the swarming variety is induced by several contacts per minute over a four-hour period. It is estimated that the largest swarms have covered hundreds of square miles and consisted of many billions of locusts.” (italics added)

From WIkipedia (Desert Locust):

“When vegetation is distributed in such a way that the nymphs, usually called hoppers, have to congregate to feed, and there has been sufficient rain for a lot of eggs to hatch, the close physical contact causes the insects’ hind legs to bump up against one another. This stimulus triggers a cascade of metabolic and behavioral changes that cause the insects to transform from the solitary form to the gregarious form.”

From Arundhati Roy:
“It is not a coincidence that the political party that a carried out the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire was called the Committee for Union and Progress. “Union” (racial/ethnic/religious/national) and “Progress” (economic determinism) have long been the twin coordinates of genocide.

Armed with this reading of history, is it reasonable to worry about whether a country that is poised on the threshold of “progress” is also poised on the threshold of genocide? Could the India being celebrated all over the world as a miracle of progress and democracy possibly be poised on the verge of committing genocide?

The mere suggestion might sound outlandish and at this point in time, the use of the word genocide surely unwarranted. However, if we look to the future, and if the Tsars of Development believe in their own publicity, if they believe that There is No Alternative to their chosen model for Progress, then they will inevitably have to kill, and kill in large numbers, in order to get their way.

In bits and pieces, as the news trickles in, it seems clear that the killing and dying has already begun.”

— Field notes on Democracy
Listening to Grasshoppers
Arundhati Roy, Haymarket Books, 2009, pp 153

average insects and men...,

Video - cricket singing.

The average insect can easily generate a communications burst of less than 1 second which contains more information than the entire internet. Humans, it turns out, are made to receive these transmissions. The problem is that humans think that -representations- like text and video are interesting. They can no longer understand -the living media-. In point of fact, most of them cannot and (in order for their adopted creeds to retain authority) must not believe in it.

— organelle 03.04.10