Jon Stewart on Obama. On the O’Reilly Factor this week.
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a man murdered his girlfriend. He was on PCP and had no memory of it. Neither hypnosis nor drugs released any memory of the deed. The man served time in a psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane and accepted his punishment, though he likely was not insane but instead, under the influence of PCP, had violent reactions similar to that during a seizure.
Years later, he suffered a bike accident - a severe head injury. Massive bilateral subdural hematomas and a severe contusion of both frontal lobes. And after coming out of a coma, he came to remember, vividly, with ‘almost hallucinatory detail,’ the murder.
This and many other super fascinating clinical stories* are recounted in the book I’m reading, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, by Oliver Sacks.
*other fascinating clinical stories include:
Last night I hosted a group of my business school friends for our first Think and Drink - a bi-weekly meetup for those of us involved in our own businesses or side projects (that’s right, not all MBA’s are bankers). It turned into less of a collaborative workshop and more into a discussion of.. well a lot. Here’s what I learned/pondered.
What percent of our peers know who Muhammad Yunus is?
Female infanticide in China and India.
The ant death spriral - a whole swarm or army ants, who are blind and follow the scent of the ants before them, get misdirected and march in a circle until exhaustion and ultimately death.
Fordlandia - In 1928, Henry Ford built a whole city in the rainforest of Brazil where he intended to source and create rubber tires. It failed. Basically, it was Ford against nature/the indigenous, and nature won. Must read Fordlandia. And watch Crude.
The cinnamon that we typically eat is not actually cinnamon. It is cassia.
The cantaloupe we know is not actually cantaloupe. It is muskmelon.
The rise of the alphabet may have been what led to an increase in misogyny and decrease in woman’s standing in society. This is because the alphabet requires use of masculine left-brain thinking, over the feminine right-brain thinking. Must read The Alphabet versus the Goddess.
Must read Godel, Escher, Bach by Hofstadter. I can’t even begin to describe what it is about.
A city in Norway invited everyone to read the same book at one time. After researching, I discovered this is a thing — One City One Book — and has been attempted all over, including New York.
Can the brain actually create anything? Are we capable of pure creativity? Or do we just rearrange what already exists?
Being touched actually helps - when you are touched, the receptors under your skin called Pacinan corpuscles receive pressure stimulation and send a signal to the vagus nerve in the brain, which slows the heart and decreases blood pressure.
Weber! In the ancient world, people knew all knowledge that they thought was possible to know. We know so little of all the knowledge there is possible to know (however we have the notion that we could know everything). Because we know so little, we cannot make value judgments and that may be detrimental to us as a society.
The Red Sea may have actually parted, per new research.
The biblical story Moses and the Israelites escape across the parted Red Sea may actually be true. Researchers at National Center for Atmospheric Research and the University of Colorado at Boulder show that if the winds get to be 63 mph in the Eastern Nile Delta, they could push back the waters, exposing a mud flat about 2.5 miles long and 3 miles wide for four hours. When the wind dies down, the waters would come rushing back in to drown anyone in the mud flat.
1978 vs today in Greenpoint. via Brooklyn Based
Peggy Liu, chairwoman of the Joint U.S.-China Collaboration on Clean Energy, a nonprofit group working to accelerate the greening of China.
From Thomas Friedman’s NYT op-ed about China’s recent developments in addressing climate change versus our lack thereof.
Using data from the 2000 Census, Eric Fischer mapped the racial segregation in the top 40 cities in the United States. This is New York. White is pink; black is blue; Hispanic is orange; Asian is green. View all 40 cities on his flickr. (via vneckandacardigan)
Baby carrots go junk. I’m pretty curious how this $25M marketing campaign is going to play out. Can Baby Carrot, a $1B industry, compete with the $18B salty snack food industry by repackaging carrots to look like junk food? Per USA Today, the campaign includes:
I quite like the campaign. It made me finally research what I’ve been curious about for a while - baby carrots. What are they really?
Well what we typically see are baby-cut carrots. Which are carrots. Fully grown, adult carrots, that are shaved down to cute, bite-size, baby form. This practice started when a farmer did not want to waste and discard his unsightly, rotting carrots. At the time, about 70% of his carrot crop was too bent, broken, or twisted to sell to consumers. He, instead, cut them down, shaving off the ugly parts, and started a baby carrot revolution! Carrots are now bred specifically to be baby carrots - with more sugar and a brighter and more even orange color. They also are often bathed in chlorine, an antimicrobial treatment to reduce contamination on the skinless product. Ironic that something created to prevent waste seems pretty wasteful itself.
the saddest thing happened last week. my childhood dog, buster, who was 17 years old and nearly blind and deaf, was killed by a coyote. apparently, attacks are becoming an issue in orange county. :<
“Things that are made from organic material age and decay, especially when they stop being alive. A piece of home-baked bread, say, left on your kitchen counter, will get moldy relatively fast. Lord knows what some ground beef would smell like after a week. But the artist Sally Davies has been photographing one McDonald’s hamburger and fries every day for 137 days. They look basically exactly the same.” via GOOD
