Month: February 2010

Why does time appear to move faster the older you get?:

Have you noticed, [Neuroscientist David Eagleman] says, that when you recall your first kisses, early birthdays, your earliest summer vacations, they seem to be in slow motion? "I know when I look back on a childhood summer, it seems to have lasted forever," he says. That's because when it's the "first", there are so many things to remember. The list of encoded memories is so dense, reading them back gives you a feeling that they must have taken forever. But that's an illusion. "It's a construction of the brain," says Eagleman. "The more memory you have of something, you think, 'Wow, that really took a long time!'

Interesting:

Being very attractive reduces a young adult’s propensity for criminal activity and being unattractive increases it. Being very attractive is also positively associated with wages and with adult vocabulary test scores, which implies that beauty may have an impact on human capital formation. The results suggest that a labor market penalty provides a direct incentive for unattractive individuals toward criminal activity.

Miriam Markowitz reviews Christina Nehring’s A Vindication of Love:

It seems there are two possible ways love has developed from the beginning of time until now: either it is a universal passed down to us from the first generations–the passion of Adam for Eve–or it is a cultural manifestation of lust, a kind of expressive outpouring that, if it roils the soul, does so only in the ways that our hearts have lately been conditioned. The question of love's universality is not only unanswerable but untranslatable, lost in the slippage between our understanding of the English word "love" and the meanings of the Greeks' eros, agape, philia and storge, the various Latinate iterations of amor, Hebrew's ahava and other near cognates of diverse languages and epochs.

Before we offer any plaudits, we should recall that this was his position as defense secretary in 1991, when he described the policy as an “old chestnut” and when his chief spokesman was my old friend Pete Williams, an openly gay man who is now a TV journalist. But, as with marriage rights, where he uttered pro forma – but carefully parsed – support, Cheney never moved a finger to help on any of these issues as vice-president, and led a party whose homophobia has become more and more pronounced with every year that has passed.

But it is a good sign that this issue is finally, mercifully becoming a non-issue. I long for the day when we no longer have to debate or discuss it.

Dreher compares conversion experiences:

[N]ot all conversion stories are triumphal narratives in which the convert finds fulfillment and completion. That's the standard conversion story, the one that converts to a faith, and partisans of a faith, love to hear. But that's not how it is with all of us. Sometimes, at least for a while, the pain of what was renounced is more palpable than the pleasure of what was embraced. And that's just how it is. It can be hard to talk about, because one's old religious community doesn't want to hear it, and one's new religious community may not know what to do with it.

(Photo by Pedro Ramundo)

Salon interviews Lori Gottlieb. Her feelings about soul mates:

I mean, who wouldn't want to believe in that? But I like what Rabbi Wolpe said when I interviewed him, "This notion of soul mates is a nice one to believe in, but in truth, we could be happy with a lot of different people. It's not that there's one soul mate out there — it's that our soul develops differently with each person."

Allen and Vandehei write a piece in advance of the latest Cheney salvo at the commander-in-chief on ABC this morning. Money quote:

Cheney’s ability to influence policy — as opposed to influencing cable-news programming — may be dulled by his insensitivity to timing and penchant for rhetorical bombast, with such quotes as describing Obama as “a guy without much experience, who campaigned against much of what we put in place … and who now travels around the world apologizing.” …

“Listening to former Vice President Cheney attack President Obama’s strategic failures in the war on terror feels a little surreal; even from Cheney’s point of view, the Bush administration’s record was at best a very mixed bag,” responded Walter Russell Mead, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said in POLITICO’S “Arena” forum.

Several weeks earlier, after Cheney accused Obama of “dithering” during his review of U.S. policy in Afghanistan, Sen. Dick Lugar, an Indiana Republican with major influence on foreign policy, told Bloomberg TV that Cheney was being “unfair.”

Another Republican, former Rep. Mickey Edwards of Oklahoma, defended Obama’s approach to POLITICO and said, “Cheney was wrong — and outrageously so — to so cavalierly dismiss public opinion” in managing war policy when he was in power.

Stephen M. Walt, a professor of international affairs at Harvard University, was more succinct: “Have you, at long last, no shred of decency left? Oh, never mind. Silly question.”

And they even have a quote from me. Allen and VanDehei imply that my view of the origin of Cheney’s outrageous behavior is psychological. I don’t believe that. I believe it is very rational, an attempt to wrest the narrative away from the truth that he authorized horrifying war crimes, that he is criminally liable for them and will be described in history as the vice-president who made the US a symbol for torture throughout the world. 

(Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty.)

A former believer describes his “deconversion”:

A moving story out of Nashville:

On a cold and windy February night, a man who gave only his first name walked up to the Al-Farooq Islamic Center in south Nashville and handed a gallon of stain-blocker paint and a bag of brushes, rollers and rags to a Somali man standing in the parking lot. Tim, an East Nashville resident, said he did the first thing he could think of when he drove by the center Wednesday and saw the words “Muslims Go home” and a crusade-style cross spray-painted in red across the front of the center, which doubles as a mosque.

“When I saw it, I just broke down crying,” the self-described unemployed truck driver said. “I went straight to Home Depot and bought a gallon of paint.”

Sam Anderson investigates a new phenomenon called ChatRoulette, something John Heilemann just tipped me off about:

The site activates your webcam automatically; when you click “start” you’re suddenly staring at another human on your screen and they’re staring back at you, at which point you can either choose to chat (via text or voice) or just click “next,” instantly calling up someone else.

The result is surreal on many levels.

Early ChatRoulette users traded anecdotes on comment boards with the eerie intensity of shipwreck survivors, both excited and freaked out by what they’d seen. There was a man who wore a deer head and opened every conversation with “What up DOE!?” A guy from Sweden was reportedly speed-drawing strangers’ portraits. Someone with a guitar was improvising songs for anyone who’d give him a topic. One man popped up on people’s screens in the act of fornicating with a head of lettuce. Others dressed like ninjas, tried to persuade women to expose themselves, and played spontaneous transcontinental games of Connect Four.

The whole piece is a fascinating read. Money quote:

As Internet culture has grown, we’ve come to romanticize certain kinds of unmediated, old-fashioned “human” interactions. But this fantasy ignores how much of normal social interaction is fleeting, bite-size, instant, tweetlike. Humans have always talked to each other via a kind of analog Twitter. These new technologies just get us there with maximum efficiency. Meeting a new person is thrilling, in a primal way—your attention focuses completely, if only for a nanosecond, to see if the creature in front of you has the power to change your life for better or worse. ChatRoulette creates this moment over and over again; it privileges it over actual conversation.

Kottke spent a half-hour on the site:

During my session, the average “chat” lasted about 5 seconds and I observed several people drinking malt liquor, two girls making out, many many guys who disconnected as soon as they saw I wasn’t female, several girls who disconnected after seeing my face (but not before I caught the looks of disgust on theirs), 3 couples having sex, and 11 erect penises. In a Malkovichian moment, I was even connected to myself once…and then the other me quickly disconnected. In short, Chatroulette is pretty much the best site going on the internet right now.

(Screenshots captured by Richard Lawson)