Archive for November 2014
“Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind”*…
Bookworm: Movies
Search for trends in the dialogue of thousands of movie and TV shows, based on subtitles from Open Subtitles
Bookworm is like a lot of other word frequency sites. But unlike most, it directly incorporates links to every text searched, so you can actually see what drives changes; and it lets you customize the corpus so you can exclude texts that aren’t interesting to you. This particular instance looks at movies and TV shows. Genre, location and language information from the Internet Movie Database textfiles. Click to see the movies/TV shows where the matches are found. For some caveats, explanations, and examples, see the accompanying blog post.
Hours of illuminating fun at Ben Schmidt‘s “Bookworm: Movies.”
* Rudyard Kipling
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As we marvel at multiplying memes and dynamic dialogue, we might recall that it was on this date in 1981 that Warner Bros. released The Looney Looney Looney Bugs Bunny Movie, a feature-length Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies compilation of classic Warner cartoon shorts and animated bridging sequences produced by Friz Freleng, hosted by Bugs Bunny. The new footage was one of the final productions of DePatie-Freleng Enterprises.
“Life is about using the whole box of crayons”*…
* RuPaul
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As we muse on Mango Tango, we might recall that it was on this date in 1895 that Frederick E. Blaisdell of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was granted U.S. patent No. 549,952 for a paper pencil, (self-sharpening pencils, on which the tip could be renewed by peeling away some of the paper barrel– the type better known as “china markers” today), as well as patent number 550,212 for a machine for manufacturing pencils.
“Mistakes are, after all, the foundations of truth, and if a man does not know what a thing is, it is at least an increase in knowledge if he knows what it is not”*…
Controversy is essential to scientific progress. As Richard Feynman said, “science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” Nothing is taken on faith, all assumptions are open to further scrutiny. It’s a healthy sign therefore that psychology studies continue to generate great controversy. Often the heat is created by arguments about the logic or ethics of the methods, other times it’s because of disagreements about the implications of the findings to our understanding of human nature. Here we digest ten of the most controversial studies in psychology’s history…
From “the Stanford Prison Experiment” and “the Milgram ‘Shock Experiments'” to “Voodoo correlations in social neuroscience” and “Libet’s Challenge to Free Will”– The British Psychological Society‘s “The 10 most controversial psychology studies ever published.”
(Lest one wonder whether all of this has any purchase in the real world, this review of Hooked…)
* Carl Jung
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As we brace ourselves on our lab benches, we might spare a thought for Gustav Theodor Fechner; he died on this date in 1887. A philosopher and physicist with a keen interest in human behavior, Fechner is recognized (with Wilhelm Wundt and Hermann von Helmholtz) as the founder of experimental psychology. He formulated the rule known as Fechner’s law–that, within limits, the intensity of a sensation increases as the logarithm of the stimulus– a result indicative of his approach to studying the relationships between physical stimuli and the sensations and perceptions they cause. His approach, which came to be known as Psychophysics, has been influential ever since.
“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted”*…
People sometimes say “If I had all the money in the world …” in order to discuss what they would do if they had no financial constraints. I’m curious, though, what would happen if one person had all of the world’s money?
– Daniel Pino
So you’ve somehow found a way to gather all the world’s money. We won’t worry about how you did it—let’s just assume you invented some kind of money-summoning magic spell.
Physical currency—coins and bills—represents just a small percentage of the world’s wealth. In theory, you could edit all the property records on Earth to say that you own all the land and edit all the banking records to say you own all the money. But everyone else would disagree with those records, and they would edit them back or ignore them. Money is an idea, and you can’t make the entire world respect your idea.
Getting all the world’s cash, on the other hand, is much more straightforward. There’s a certain amount of cash in the world—it’s about $4 trillion—and you want it all…
Find out what you’d have to do with all that scratch on Randall Monroe’s What If? at “All the Money.”
* Sociologist William Bruce Cameron (though often attributed to Albert Einstein)
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As we go all Scrooge McDuck, we might send imperial birthday greetings to Titus Flavius Caesar Vespasianus Augustus (better known as Vespasian); he was born on this date in 9 CE. Vespasian was crowned Emperor of Rome in 69 after a year of civil strife following the death of Nero; he served for six years and founded the Flavian Dynasty that ruled the Empire for another 20 years. Vespasian was judged (by Suetonius and others) to have been a witty and effective ruler, even as he had to govern through severe financial turmoil. Indeed, to this day urinals are known in Italian as vespasiano, a vestige of Vespasian’s tax on urine (which was valuable in his day for its ammoniac content).
Roman aureus depicting Vespasian as Emperor; the reverse shows the goddess Fortuna.
“Our greatest stupidities may be very wise”*…
THE CANON OF PHILOSOPHY STUDENT KARAOKE SONGS
By Jarry Lee
“Total Eclipse of Descartes”
“Don’t You (Foucault About Me)”
“U Kant Touch This”
“Hit Me Baby Wittgenstein”
“Camus Feel the Love Tonight?”
“Get the Party Sartred”
“Forever Jung”
“I Kissed Hegel (And I Liked It)”
“Ain’t No Montaigne High Enough”
“Pop, Locke & Drop It”
“Bataille Will Always Love You”
“My Milkshake Brings All the Baudrillard”
“Rousseau Vain (You Probably Think This Song is About You)”
“Love Voltaire Us Apart”
“Psycho Schiller”
* Ludwig “Baby” Wittgenstein
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As we clear our throats, we might might send psychedelic birthday greetings to Terence Kemp McKenna; he was born on this date in 1948. Often called called the “Timothy Leary of the 90s,” McKenna was a philosopher, psychonaut, ethnobotanist, lecturer, and author. His writings on the consciousness-expanding capacity of hallucinogenic drugs earned him some enemies. In 1993 Judy Corman, vice president of Phoenix House of New York, a drug treatment center, said in a letter to The New York Times: “Surely the fact that Terence McKenna says that the psilocybin mushroom ‘is the megaphone used by an alien, intergalactic Other to communicate with mankind’ is enough for us to wonder if taking LSD has done something to his mental faculties.” But that same year, biologist Richard Evans Schultes, of Harvard University, wrote in American Scientist in a review of McKenna’s book Food of the Gods, that it was; “a masterpiece of research and writing” and that it “should be read by every specialist working in the multifarious fields involved with the use of psychoactive drugs.” Concluding that “it is, without question, destined to play a major role in our future considerations of the role of the ancient use of psychoactive drugs, the historical shaping of our modern concerns about drugs and perhaps about man’s desire for escape from reality with drugs.”
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