Giant Steppes

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Sat, 18 May 2013 18:00:38 -0600

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"Never cut a tree down in the wintertime. Never make a negative decision in the low time. Never make..."

Thu, 16 May 2013 18:00:47 -0600

“Never cut a tree down in the wintertime. Never make a negative decision in the low time. Never make your most important decisions when you are in your worst moods. Wait. Be patient. The storm will pass. The spring will come.”

- Robert H. Schuller (via larmoyante)

necspenecmetu: Francesco Furini, Adam and Eve, 17th century

Thu, 16 May 2013 12:00:24 -0600

necspenecmetu:

Francesco Furini, Adam and Eve, 17th century

inebriatedpony: Yelling myths at the internet. The best way to...

Wed, 15 May 2013 18:00:48 -0600

inebriatedpony:

Yelling myths at the internet.

The best way to learn about mythology is by going to college or watching movies like Thor and Troy, right? Wrong. For the past few years, Myths RETOLD has been sharing the world’s oldest stories using a kind of caps-locked slam poetry. Or as the site’s author Cory O’Brien puts it, “Yelling myths at the internet.”

With titles like “Charlemagne is Heteroflexible” and “Daedalus is a Way Bigger Asshole Than You Suspected,” Myths RETOLD takes on everything from Aesop’s Fables to the Zoroastrians. The thing about most ancient myths is that they lend themselves really well to this kind of crude and funny, rap/poetry style. They have timeless themes: murder, incest, dick jokes, and bearded men dressing in drag to marry an ice giant and steal back their magical hammer. (Spoiler alert: That one didn’t make it into the Thor movie.)

For O’Brien, this passion for mythology recently resulted in a book deal. Zeus Grants Stupid Wishes: A No-Bullshit Guide to World Mythology came out earlier this year, featuring an intriguing selection of (awesomely genuine) myths that you’ve probably only heard in their cleaned-up, child-friendly versions. The book’s blurb is in iteself an eye-opener:

Zeus once stuffed an unborn fetus inside his thigh to save its life after he exploded its mother by being too good in bed.

The Hindu universe is run by a married couple who only stop murdering in order to throw sweet dance parties…on the corpses of their enemies.

The Norse goddess Freyja once consented to a four-dwarf gangbang in exchange for one shiny necklace.

Curious about this one-man crusade to educate the world on classic mythology, we contacted Cory O’Brien for a chat… [READ MORE]

This guy’s technique is more or less how I explained myths to friends in school. the teachers sure loved that…

neuromorphogenesis: Grammar errors? The brain detects them even...

Wed, 15 May 2013 12:00:36 -0600

neuromorphogenesis:

Grammar errors? The brain detects them even when you are unaware

Your brain often works on autopilot when it comes to grammar. That theory has been around for years, but University of Oregon neuroscientists have captured elusive hard evidence that people indeed detect and process grammatical errors with no awareness of doing so.

Participants in the study — native-English speaking people, ages 18-30 –- had their brain activity recorded using electroencephalography, from which researchers focused on a signal known as the Event-Related Potential (ERP). This non-invasive technique allows for the capture of changes in brain electrical activity during an event. In this case, events were short sentences presented visually one word at a time.

Subjects were given 280 experimental sentences, including some that were syntactically (grammatically) correct and others containing grammatical errors, such as “We drank Lisa’s brandy by the fire in the lobby,” or “We drank Lisa’s by brandy the fire in the lobby.” A 50 millisecond audio tone was also played at some point in each sentence. A tone appeared before or after a grammatical faux pas was presented. The auditory distraction also appeared in grammatically correct sentences.

This approach, said lead author Laura Batterink, a postdoctoral researcher, provided a signature of whether awareness was at work during processing of the errors. “Participants had to respond to the tone as quickly as they could, indicating if its pitch was low, medium or high,” she said. “The grammatical violations were fully visible to participants, but because they had to complete this extra task, they were often not consciously aware of the violations. They would read the sentence and have to indicate if it was correct or incorrect. If the tone was played immediately before the grammatical violation, they were more likely to say the sentence was correct even it wasn’t.”

When tones appeared after grammatical errors, subjects detected 89 percent of the errors. In cases where subjects correctly declared errors in sentences, the researchers found a P600 effect, an ERP response in which the error is recognized and corrected on the fly to make sense of the sentence.

When the tones appear before the grammatical errors, subjects detected only 51 percent of them. The tone before the event, said co-author Helen J. Neville, who holds the UO’s Robert and Beverly Lewis Endowed Chair in psychology, created a blink in their attention. The key to conscious awareness, she said, is based on whether or not a person can declare an error, and the tones disrupted participants’ ability to declare the errors. But, even when the participants did not notice these errors, their brains responded to them, generating an early negative ERP response. These undetected errors also delayed participants’ reaction times to the tones.

“Even when you don’t pick up on a syntactic error your brain is still picking up on it,” Batterink said. “There is a brain mechanism recognizing it and reacting to it, processing it unconsciously so you understand it properly.”

The study was published in the May 8 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.

The brain processes syntactic information implicitly, in the absence of awareness, the authors concluded. “While other aspects of language, such as semantics and phonology, can also be processed implicitly, the present data represent the first direct evidence that implicit mechanisms also play a role in the processing of syntax, the core computational component of language.”

It may be time to reconsider some teaching strategies, especially how adults are taught a second language, said Neville, a member of the UO’s Institute of Neuroscience and director of the UO’s Brain Development Lab.

Children, she noted, often pick up grammar rules implicitly through routine daily interactions with parents or peers, simply hearing and processing new words and their usage before any formal instruction. She likened such learning to “Jabberwocky,” the nonsense poem introduced by writer Lewis Carroll in 1871 in “Through the Looking Glass,” where Alice discovers a book in an unrecognizable language that turns out to be written inversely and readable in a mirror.

For a second language, she said, “Teach grammatical rules implicitly, without any semantics at all, like with jabberwocky. Get them to listen to jabberwocky, like a child does.”

ancient-serpent: Eve (detail), Albrecht Dürer

Tue, 14 May 2013 18:00:30 -0600

ancient-serpent:

Eve (detail), Albrecht Dürer

thelandofmaps: Major Mythological Traditions of the World...

Tue, 14 May 2013 12:00:20 -0600

thelandofmaps:

Major Mythological Traditions of the World [658x467]
CLICK HERE FOR MORE MAPS!
thelandofmaps.tumblr.com

medieval: Hortus Deliciarum Leviathan German Romanesque ca....

Thu, 09 May 2013 12:00:42 -0600

medieval:

Hortus Deliciarum Leviathan

German Romanesque ca. 1170

hallucigenesis: “The Creation of Eve” Luchino Vellum Belbello...

Mon, 06 May 2013 12:00:39 -0600

hallucigenesis:

“The Creation of Eve” Luchino Vellum Belbello da Pavia (After 1430) Biblioteca Nazionale, Florence

inacom:

“The Creation of Eve” Vellum BELBELLO da Pavia, Luchino (After 1430) Biblioteca Nazionale, Florence

Probably my favorite representation of this biblical scene

The New Inquiry: Hard Blows

Sun, 05 May 2013 18:00:38 -0600

Time has indeed healed the psychic wounds of most past relationships—even the ones that involved a shared lease—but in the case of the man in New York, time only mystified what had happened between us. In truth, part of what enabled my histrionic behavior was the sense of ethereality I experienced while dialing. It was somehow momentarily affirming to let my pride dissolve, to give in to something grander. I knew that, for a time, when with the man in New York—we’ll call him M.—I was at my happiest. After our relationship I had done the work to make myself whole, and now, as a total person, I still wanted him. It was not out of some co-dependent need, I believed. When I thought about our time together, I did not crave our complementary weaknesses, I clung to the complementary differences I had taken for granted. There was, of course, something terrifying in my attempt to engage a personality that I had blown up to mythic proportions, but it was also invigorating, even sublime, like staring into the expanse of the ocean or being up so high you see the curvature of the earth.

- Natasha Vargas-Cooper

Memory Myths

Sat, 04 May 2013 12:00:41 -0600

Memory Myths:

As a lifelong user of human memory, you probably feel you’ve got a good idea of how it works, right? To test your understanding of memory, we compare several commonplace conceptions with insights from psychology.

Photo

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 12:00:36 -0600

tastefullyoffensive: [via]

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 18:00:53 -0600

tastefullyoffensive:

[via]

HOW TO WRITE CLEARLY This booklet is intended for all writers...

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 12:00:28 -0600

HOW TO WRITE CLEARLY

This booklet is intended for all writers of English at the European
Commission. Whether your job is drafting or translating, here are
some hints – not rules – that will help you to write clearly and
make sure your message ends up in your readers’ brains, not in
their bins.

<…>

Important:
All the examples of FOG in this guide are fictional. Any resemblance to any
past, present or future EU document is coincidental.

Its theologians have known that our soul suffers from what ancient Greek philosophers termed...

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 18:00:47 -0600

Its theologians have known that our soul suffers from what ancient Greek philosophers termed akrasia, a perplexing tendency to know what we should do combined with a persistent reluctance to actually do it, whether through weakness of will or absent-mindedness. We all possess wisdom that we lack the strength properly to enact in our lives. Christianity pictures the mind as a sluggish and fickle organ, easy enough to impress but forever inclined to change its focus and cast its commitments aside. Consequently, the religion proposes that the central issue for education is not so much how to counteract ignorance - as secular educators imply - as how we can combat our reluctance to act upon ideas which we have already fully understood at a theoretical level. It follows the Greek sophists in insisting that all lessons should appeal to both reason (logos) and emotion (pathos), as well as endorsing Cicero’s advice that public speakers should have a threefold ability to prove (probare), delight (delectare) and persuade (flectere). There is no justification for delivering world-shaking ideas in a mumble.

However, defenders of secular university education have seldom worried about akrasia. They implicitly maintain that people will be properly affected by concepts even when they hear about them only once or twice, at the age of twenty, before a fifty-year career in finance or market research, via a lecturer standing in a bare room speaking in a monotone.

- Alain de Botton: Religion for Atheists

abbiegoth: heatherm00ch: jordanorsomething: punkrawkanarkay: ...

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 12:00:25 -0600

abbiegoth:

heatherm00ch:

jordanorsomething:

punkrawkanarkay:

Foxes are weird. They’re like dogcats.

dogcats

STOP

I have a policy to reblog this every time it appears on my dash thank you

"Jim Jarmusch once told me Fast, Cheap, and Good… pick two. If it’s fast and cheap it won’t be good...."

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 18:00:30 -0600

“Jim Jarmusch once told me Fast, Cheap, and Good… pick two. If it’s fast and cheap it won’t be good. If it’s cheap and good, it won’t be fast. If it’s fast and good, it won’t be cheap. Fast, cheap and good … pick two words to live by.”

- Tom Waits (via ancient-serpent)

Video

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 12:00:37 -0600

"Maybe coming clean is the ultimate selfish act. A way to absolve yourself by hurting someone who..."

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 18:00:32 -0600

“Maybe coming clean is the ultimate selfish act. A way to absolve yourself by hurting someone who doesn’t deserve to be hurt.”

- Cindy Chupack (via creatingaquietmind)

Photo

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 18:00:37 -0600