Links With Your Coffee - Sunday
- Maud Newton: Blog
Below writer Jean Thompson (Throw Like a Girl) offers a rejoinder to Stephen King’s charge that short story writers are hastening the decline of the form with airless and insular tales. “When circulation falters,” says King, “the air in the room gets stale.”
- New Evidence That Blackwater Guards Took No Fire - New York Times
The three witnesses, Kurds on a rooftop overlooking the scene, said they had observed no gunfire that could have provoked the shooting by Blackwater guards. American soldiers who arrived minutes later found shell casings from guns used normally by American contractors, as well as by the American military.
The Kurdish witnesses are important because they had the advantage of an unobstructed view and because, collectively, they observed the shooting at Nisour Square from start to finish, free from the terror and confusion that might have clouded accounts of witnesses at street level. Moreover, because they are pro-American, their accounts have a credibility not always extended to Iraqi Arabs, who have been more hostile to the American presence. - globeandmail.com: Bye-bye (or is it byebye?) to 16,000 silly hyphens
And now I – and you, and all the copy editors – have to worry about these vagaries even less. That's because the new edition of The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary has done away with about 16,000 hyphens. The editors of the dictionary have decided, in an awesome display of ruthless language modification, that the conventions of hyphenation were arbitrary and needed simplification. They changed most of the hyphenated words – such as leap-frog and ice-cream – by turning them into one word (leapfrog) or two distinct words (ice cream).
- Daily Kos: Contraception Matters
The Guttmacher Institute and the World Health Organization have done a major new study of abortion patterns throughout the world. The broad lesson is that abortion rates are not much affected by the legality or illegality of the procedure. Instead, the availability of contraception has a greater effect; as the New York Times reports
- Shipping containers as housing - Boing Boing
- The Right Brain vs Left Brain test | PerthNow
Are you a lefty or a righty, or do you spin both ways?
- YouTube - Ayaan Hirsi Ali at AAI 07: Part 1 of 2
- YouTube - Ayaan Hirsi Ali at AAI 07: Part 2 of 2 (Q&A)
Comments
Are you saying the dancer doesn't change direction. For a while she was going to the right and then, she changed direction and went to the left and v.v. I think it's a put on. Isn't it?
I just looked again - she's changing legs at a certain point....
This rotating dancer thing is pretty strange. The interpretation given on the site is that one is "right-brained" if one sees the dancer movig clockwise, and left-brained if you see her moving counterclockwise. Objectively, if you view the dancer from above, she is rotating clockwise, and if your mind's eye is at her feet looking upwards, she is rotating counterclockwise.
How many people actually adopt the second viewpoint?
Jill, as for your perception, that she changes direction or changes legs, you and I must be on different drugs. I'm on caffeine and either don't have patience to wait until I think I see her change directions or I'm just too sober.
Jill, it was just your perception that she was changing legs.
If you perceive her as standing on her left leg, she moves clockwise. If you perceive her as standing her right leg, then she moves counter clockwise.
If you take the animation and split the frames and freeze them, you'll see that in the positions where she's not obviously facing to the right or to the left, you can't tell whether you're looking at her front or her back.
Here is one of the still shots. Depending upon how you look at it, she could be facing towards you or facing away from you.
Jo Ann,
The still shots can't convey any sense of rotation direction - only the sequence of the 34 shots that make up this animated gif file can do that.
That notwithstanding: I showed this to my 31-year old daughter, and she sees it switching direction too - and last night's alcohol has dissapated. So I stared long enough from a side angle and I too saw the direction switch - and I'm still only on caffeine. Very interesting!
If it matters, according to conventional wisdom categorizations, anyone who knows me would have said I was just about the most left-brained person they know.
While it's fun to think about, I see no reason to think that it's true. The article that it comes from barely has a sentence in it and just lists some putative "left brain" and "right brain" functions. One of the left brain descriptions is "reality based." What's that supposed to mean? I'm very very skeptical that this has anything to do with which hemisphere is dominant. Can anyone back up this claim?
Tim,
The still shot can't convey any sense of rotation direction, of course not. I was attempting to explain that if you look at the still shots you will see the optical illusion.
For example, if you look at the still shot that I linked to, what do you see?
She could be standing on her left foot and lifting her right leg if you are perceiving her as seeing her from the front.
However, she could also be standing on her right foot and liefter her left leg if you are perceiving her as seeng her from the back.
Mike, I agree with you that I don't think that this has anything at all to do with left brain or right brain. It's simply an optical illusion.
Hasn't the left-brain/right-brain concept been largely debunked?
From Wikipedia:
Hines (1987) states that the research on brain lateralization is valid as a research program, though commercial promoters have applied it to promote subjects and products far out of the implications of the research. For example, the implications of the research have no bearing on psychological interventions such as EMDR, brain training equipment, or management training. One explanation for being so prone to exaggeration and false application is that the left-right brain dichotomy is an easy-to-understand notion, yet is often grossly oversimplified and misused for promotion in the guise of science (Sala et al 1999). The research on lateralization of brain functioning is ongoing, and its implications are always tightly delineated, whereas the pseudoscientific applications are exaggerated, and applied to an extremely wide range of situations.
In any case, I don't think you can attribute the qualities listed on that site based solely on your perception of a crudely animated dancer.
Big Daddy,
I don't know about "crudely animated". This was very cleverly done in a way that created an optical illusion in such a manner that one can either see the figure as spinning clockwise our counter clockwise. The problem is that few people understand the concept, so they think that there is some "trick" to it.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali was interesting and eloquent - I wonder how she handles the new dogma she is exposed to at the American Enterprise institute.
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