Month: July 2010

A list. As We May Think by Vannevar Bush from the July 1945 issue of the Atlantic is the first candidate. An excerpt:

Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, "memex" will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.

Jonah Lehrer classifies types of stress:

The recurring theme in the self-reports of people like Marjorie isn’t the sheer amount of stress — it’s the total absence of control. Researchers call it the “demand-control” model of stress, in which the damage caused by chronic stress depends not just on the demands of the job but on the extent to which we can control our response to those demands. “The man or woman with all the emails, the city lawyer who works through the night has high demands,” Marmot writes. “But if he or she has a high degree of control over work, it is less stressful and will have less impact on health.” (This helps explain why the women with mean bosses and menial work showed the highest incidence of heart disease.) The Whitehall data backs up this model of workplace stress: While a relentlessly intense job like a senior executive position leads to a slightly increased risk of heart disease and death, a job with no control is significantly more dangerous

A reader writes:

This is not really a Mental Health Break because it's actually a bit disturbing, but the Man from UNCLE video you posted made me think of it.

Janet Fang poses the question to various researchers. She finds that their removal would be unlikely to significantly disrupt the ecosystem:

In many cases, scientists acknowledge that the ecological scar left by a missing mosquito would heal quickly as the niche was filled by other organisms. Life would continue as before — or even better. When it comes to the major disease vectors, "it's difficult to see what the downside would be to removal, except for collateral damage", says insect ecologist Steven Juliano, of Illinois State University in Normal. A world without mosquitoes would be "more secure for us", says medical entomologist Carlos Brisola Marcondes from the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Brazil. "The elimination of Anopheles would be very significant for mankind."

Greg Beato rehashes the internet addiction debate:

On a pound-for-pound basis, the average World of Warcraft junkie undoubtedly represents a much less destructive social force than the average meth head. But it’s not extreme anecdotes that make the specter of Internet addiction so threatening; it’s the fact that Internet overuse has the potential to scale in a way that few other addictions do. Even if Steve Jobs designed a really cool-looking syringe and started distributing free heroin on street corners, not everyone would try it. But who among us doesn’t already check his email more often than necessary? As the Internet weaves itself more and more tightly into our lives, only the Amish are completely safe.

There’s a difference between loneliness and solitude:

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry complicates a recent post by Douthat:

What Shirky says, I think — or at least what I think — is that the MySpace and lolcats sphere of the internet is useful not necessarily (or not only) in itself but as a gateway drug to a culture of consuming and producing content. Content that, like content through all of human history, will be 99% dreck and 1% genius, the only difference between now and the 19th (or 9th) century being that most of the dreck (though certainly not all, and certainly large bits of the genius) weren’t published because of the limits of technology.

What Shirky says (or at least what I believe) is that MySpace and lolcats make you more likely not less to go on, through serendipitous link-wanderings, to read, say, The American Scene, which in turn makes you more likely to read, say, Dos Passos. And because lolcats and MySpace are participative — you don’t just consume content, you create it —, these people are also more likely to write interesting things. Because they’re already writing every day. And I think it’s potentially equally Marie-Antoinettish to respond “Well, the kind of people who read lolcats aren’t going to want to read real culture!” Says who? Why not? Because they’re part of the lolcats-and-MySpace set?