Month: January 2013

Adam Baer notes that slime mold “is surprisingly adept at making maps.” Above is an experiment by computer scientists Andy Adam­atzky and Selim Akl:

[T]hey took a map of Canada, dropped oat flakes (slime-mold food) on the nation’s major cities, and placed the mold on Toronto. It oozed forth to form the most efficient paths to the cities, creating networks of “roads” that almost perfectly mimicked the actual Canadian highway system.

Kevin Hartnett adds:

Compared to static circuit boards, living organisms make great computers because they’re good at learning as they go along (slime mold can find increasingly efficient routes between two points with each iteration of an experiment). They’re also a lot heartier than silicon chips which buckle at the idea of a drop of water, opening the possibility of installing computers in environments like the bottom of the ocean or inside the human body.

That’s the term for our tendency to “remember more events from late adolescence and early adulthood than from any other stage of our lives.” Katy Waldman describes it further:

Autobiographical memories are not distributed equally across the lifespan. Instead, people tend to experience a period of childhood amnesia between birth and age 5, a reminiscence bump between age 10 and age 30 (with a particular concentration of memories in the early 20s), and at any age, a vivid period of recency from the present waning back to the end of the reminiscence bump.

She spoke with Joshua Foer, author of Moonwalking With Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything:

[Foer] describes a study in which researchers found that most movie adaptations and remakes occur exactly 20 years after the originals come out. Apparently, whatever touches people as young adults looms so large for the rest of their lives that when they reach the age at which their generation starts to create the culture—around 40—books and screens fill up with the arcana of 20 years ago. “So look out for a new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film any day now,” Foer finished.

A reader adds to the surprisingly resilient thread:

May I offer another perspective on the “piggy bank” discussion: Proponents of the ‘pygg’ theory may need to explain why the German and Dutch words for piggy bank are ‘Sparschwein’ and ‘spaarvarken’; the first part being derived from the verb ‘to save’, and ‘Schwein’ and ‘varken’ meaning ‘pig’. The animal. The words have nothing to do with any type of clay. The meaning here is very clear, in German, Dutch and English: a pig is a store of wealth. Pigs, both when living and after they are slaughtered, act as a store of energy and proteins. The high fat content of pork means that bacon and ham, for example, keep very well, making it ideal to save for winter time, or when harvests fail.
For centuries, pork was used as a buffer to dampen the fluctuations of the food supply. Just as today you dip into the savings in your, yes, piggy bank, when money is tight.

I’ve always thought the ‘pygg’ theory is being promoted by overzealous vegetarians who have a hard time accepting that anything positive can be associated with the consumption of meat.

Adam Mansbach criticizes NYC’s treatment of graffiti artists:

[The War on Graffiti] midwifed today’s era of epic incarceration, quality of life offenses, zero tolerance policies, prejudicial gang databases, and three-strike laws. The War on Graffiti turned misdemeanors into felonies, community service into jail time. It put German Shepherds to work patrolling the train yards; Mayor Koch once suggested an upgrade to wolves. Today, the city prosecutes hundreds of graffiti cases each year, and maintains a dedicated Citywide Vandals Task Force. Nationally, writers have been sentenced to prison terms as long as eight years, and ordered to pay six-figure restitutions. In other words, the war rages on.

In an interview about his new book Rage Is Back, Mansbach reveals the roots of his fascination with graffiti:

As a kid, during the time I was coming up in hip hop, you were expected to be conversant with all the art forms — the sonic, the kinetic, and the visual — and to be proficient in at least a couple in order to fully “be” hip hop. I was an MC and a DJ, but I also wrote graffiti. I wasn’t great, but the thrill of it was captivating, and I quickly discovered that graffiti writers were the mad geniuses and eccentrics of hip hop, the guys whose relationship to their craft was the most fraught and intense, the guys who labored in the dark, literally, whose lives were a discourse between fame and anonymity, who used “beautify” and “destroy” almost interchangeably when they talked about their work. And when I first got into hip hop around 1987, graffiti was already being forced off the New York subway trains, which had been its canvas since the beginning. So there was this sense of a death throe, and of guys outliving the form they’d created, which was weird and tragic, even though graffiti had already gone worldwide by then.

(Image from Banksy)

Giles Fraser notices where Augustine and Freud converge – their descriptions of our rebellion against dependency on others, what Fraser calls our “striving for omnipotence”:

The reason I see Augustine and Freud as intellectual cousins is that both recognise the foundational nature of dependency and that, as Freud put it, “the original helplessness of human beings is the primal source of all moral motives”. … What I have begun to learn in therapy, though it takes a lot of learning, is how not to find my own helplessness intolerable. To live with the wound of original helplessness, and even, at moments of strength, not to regard it as a wound but as the very means by which I am porous to the world and others.