Month: November 2011

Adam Frank savorsthe mystery of life:

Day after day we wake again to find the world still here, waiting for us as we play out our own small dramas with their small triumphs and terrible heartbreaks. And then, remarkably, astonishingly, just here just ends. For me that is the mystery. No amount of explanation, be it a "Theory of Everything" or a religious theology, will reduce the power of its experience. The primitive quality of feeling, the presence of life and its luminosity, is the mystery and I am damn thankful for it.

Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Acute Dialysis Unit, 2.04 pm

Mark Vernon delineates some:

Empathy too is often taken to be an unalloyed good thing. And yet, as Colin Frith, emeritus professor at UCL, recently told me, an empathic feeling might as easily lead to an unkind response of fight or flight as a good response of compassion. Feeling viscerally upset by someone else's pain might make you turn your back. Alternatively, collective empathy with my in-group can lead to collective animosity towards those perceived as others. Such empathy powers war. The risk is that my compassion for some leads to self-righteous anger at others.

The Vatican is cracking down:

A team has been set up, to put a stop to garage style churches, boldly shaped structures that risk denaturing modern places for Catholic worship. … Cardinal Antonio Cañizares Llovera, Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and Benedict XVI, consider this work as “very urgent”. The reality is staring everyone in the eyes: in recent decades, churches have been substituted by buildings that resemble multi purpose halls.

(Photo by Clinton Steeds)

How Rabbi Geoffrey Mitelman views the process:

[T]he problem with psychics, hucksters, and religious fundamentalists is that they try to prevent the reader from creating their own interpretations. They encourage a top-down approach to meaning, and lead people to say, "This is what God/the universe/the Bible means." But a bottom-up approach of creating meaning may be able to prevent that system from going haywire, since we can later edit or revise our interpretations.

We will always be looking for patterns and meaning—but I think there’s a big difference between thinking we "discover" meaning and realizing that we "create" meaning, since one implies an eternal, unchanging truth, and the other implies an ability to rewrite as need be.

Susannah Breslin is collecting them. A sample:

I've gone to strip clubs because my life lacks intimacy. There we go. Might as well just come out with it. Nobody talks to me, nobody cares what I say. I'm a 24-year-old drone who wastes his days sitting at a computer reviewing spreadsheets that don't really matter. … The reason I go to places like this is for those moments when they stay and talk. That's all I wanted. They don't have to be naked. They could be wearing a suit of armor for all I care; I just want to talk to someone who cares, and $1 every 3 minutes is a lot less than $250 an hour for a therapist.

Tracy Clark-Flory interviewed Breslin on why she wanted to look at the sex industry from a male perspective:

When you’re on the set of a gang bang and there’s a hundred guys all fucking one woman, you actually see that it’s not just a bunch of animals. You see how complicated it is to be a man — you know, you’re supposed to be big and strong, but you also have these desires and conflicted feelings. Ideally, anything laid bare will invoke compassion, and that’s what it made me feel.

(Photo by Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images)

"Last Kiss," a digital piece by Adam Martinakis:

Laika Yaz reviewed Martinakis's work a couple months ago:

He calls his work "digital sculptures", though in reality it's hard to place them in either the scale of sculpture or architecture. He threads human forms through the facades of buildings. Smaller figures serve as scale markers as they gawk at the partial giants before them. Hands reach up out of platforms. Bodies–seemingly made of granite, with visible seams–protrude from soaring walls. The giants, always headless, reach to each other through what appears to be a structural entrapment. They're stuck in our cities, offering hands to each other, trying to find a way to connect through the hard lines of concrete that make up the scaffolding of our everyday lives. 

More work by Martinakis here.

A medieval device for men somewhat overly-endowed. Yep, Rumi was a gangsta.

A forthcoming study on online dating from the Journal of Evolution and Human Behavior finds that few participants share their political beliefs with potential dates: 

Even among the subset of people that were willing to explicitly state their political preference on their dating profile, the vast majority (57%) stated that their political belief is "middle of the road". … So among the roughly 50% of users who were willing to state a political belief, a very small number were willing to actually be definitive about what that belief was.

Pamela Haag's top ten.