It seems that giving consideration to the other sides’ point of view hurts—literally. In another study Mr Frimer asked people who had voted in the 2012 presidential election whether they were interested in hearing why voters had backed the other side. Over a third of Obama voters and more than half of Romney voters compared the experience of listening to the other side’s voters to having a tooth pulled. (Mr Frimer did a related study in Canada before the 2015 election, with similar results, suggesting the findings are not unique to the United States.)

A study in 2016 by Jonas Kaplan of the University of Southern California suggested that such responses are hard-wired in the brain. Mr Kaplan asked 40 liberal voters to get into fMRI scanners while they read various statements, including those that supported liberal political orthodoxy (abortion should be legal) and those that challenged it (ten times more people are murdered with kitchen knives each year than are killed by guns). The opinions that challenged liberal positions prompted a greater flow of blood to a part of the brain which is associated with basic beliefs and a sense of personal identity. If this is true, it is not surprising that, when challenged, people are reluctant to admit the other side might have a point.

https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/12/08/what-psychology-experiments-tell-you-about-why-people-deny-facts

For kids…I guess. <3

“I don’t know what justice is,” she said.

“That’s because it isn’t the sort of thing you discover. It’s a thing you make.” She looked at him, and he shrugged. “There are things you find out in the world. Rocks and streams and trees. And there are things you make. Like a house, or a song. It’s not that houses and songs aren’t real, but you don’t just find them in a field someplace and haul them back home with you. They have to be worked at. Made.”

Daniel Abraham, The Spider’s War

AirSpace: ‘this strange geography created by technology’

Why is AirSpace happening? One answer is that the internet and its progeny — Foursquare, Facebook, Instagram, Airbnb — is to us today what television was in the last century, with “a certain ability to transmit and receive and then apply layers of affection and longing and doubt,” as George W.S. Trow wrote in his paranoiac masterpiece of media criticism, “Within the Context of No Context,” originally published in The New Yorker in 1980. But instead of Trow’s “grid of 200 million,” American television viewers, we now have a global grid of 1.6 billion: Facebook’s population of monthly active users, all acting and interacting more or less within the same space, learning to see and feel and want the same things.

The connective emotional grid of social media platforms is what drives the impression of AirSpace. If taste is globalized, then the logical endpoint is a world in which aesthetic diversity decreases. It resembles a kind of gentrification: one that happens concurrently across global urban centers. Just as a gentrifying neighborhood starts to look less diverse as buildings are renovated and storefronts replaced, so economically similar urban areas around the world might increasingly resemble each other and become interchangeable.

In their introduction to The Fabric of Cultures: Fashion, Identity, and Globalization, the fashion scholars Eugenia Paulicelli and Hazel Clark write that this “aesthetic gentrification… divides the new world map in the light of a softer post-Cold War prejudice: the fashionable and the unfashionable world.” In other words, we are experiencing an isolationism of style versus one of politics or physical geography, though it still falls along economic lines. You either belong to the AirSpace class or you don’t.

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/welcome-to-airspace

Cut and copy text from the world

Take photos in the dark! (Pixel phones only)

FINALLY

…that will change on Jan. 1, when “The Prophet” enters the public domain, along with works by thousands of other artists and writers, including Marcel Proust, Willa Cather, D. H. Lawrence, Agatha Christie, Joseph Conrad, Edith Wharton, P. G. Wodehouse, Rudyard Kipling, Katherine Mansfield, Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens.

This coming year marks the first time in two decades that a large body of copyrighted works will lose their protected status — a shift that will have profound consequences for publishers and literary estates, which stand to lose both money and creative control.

But it will also be a boon for readers, who will have more editions to choose from, and for writers and other artists who can create new works based on classic stories without getting hit with an intellectual property lawsuit.

…

The sudden deluge of available works traces back to legislation Congress passed in 1998, which extended copyright protections by 20 years. The law reset the copyright term for works published from 1923 to 1977 — lengthening it from 75 years to 95 years after publication — essentially freezing their protected status. (The law is often referred to by skeptics as the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act,” since it has kept “Steamboat Willie,” the first Disney film featuring Mickey, under copyright until 2024.)

Now that the term extension has run out, the spigot has been turned back on. Each January will bring a fresh crop of novels, plays, music and movies into the public domain. Over the next few years, the impact will be particularly dramatic, in part because the 1920s were such a fertile and experimental period for Western literature, with the rise of masters like F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woolf.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/29/books/copyright-extension-literature-public-domain.html

These are really remarkably soothing to watch. The narrative tone is somewhere between Bob Ross and Mr. Rogers. My only wish is that he would do ones that are more lightly edited, down to 40 minutes or so. Although then I wouldn’t have time to watch them ;P

Julian Baumgartner, of Baumgartner Fine Art Restoration in Chicago, condenses over 40 hours of delicate swiping, scraping, and paint retouching into a 11.5 minute narrated video of a recent conservation project. Baumgartner walks the audience through his restoration of The Assassination of Archimedes, which involved cleaning a darkened varnish from the surface of the piece, removing the work from its original wooden panel using both modern and traditional techniques, mounting the thin paper-based painting to acid-free board, and finally touching up small areas that had become worn over the years. You can watch the entire process in the video above, and learn about Baumgartner’s other conservation projects on Instagram and Youtube.

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2018/12/conservation-by-baumgartner/

Sans Forgetica is a free-to-download font that supposedly helps you “remember your study notes”, designed by typographer Stephen Banham and the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology’s Behavioural Business Lab. It’s a remakably hostile mindhack: the letterforms are designed to be difficult to read without losing their legibility, thereby “prompting your brain to engage in deeper processing” and “question the gestalt understanding of type”.

 

Millitext is a “font” whose glyphs are just one pixel wide. But it’s really a clever exploitation of how subpixels — the individual red, green and blue lights of an LCD display — are triggered by pixels of certain colors. For example, a magenta pixel triggers the red and blue subpixels, leaving the green one dark between them.

Both via Boing Boing:

Sans Forgetica, a font to make you remember

Millitext

Posting mostly for the tangential collection of links in this paragraph:

This is obviously not real human traffic. But what would real human traffic look like? The Inversion gives rise to some odd philosophical quandaries: If a Russian troll using a Brazilian man’s photograph to masquerade as an American Trump supporter watches a video on Facebook, is that view “real”? Not only do we have bots masquerading as humans and humans masquerading as other humans, but also sometimes humans masquerading as bots, pretending to be “artificial-intelligence personal assistants,” like Facebook’s “M,” in order to help tech companies appear to possess cutting-edge AI. We even have whatever CGI Instagram influencer Lil Miquela is: a fake human with a real body, a fake face, and real influence. Even humans who aren’t masquerading can contort themselves through layers of diminishing reality: The Atlantic reports that non-CGI human influencers are posting fake sponsored content — that is, content meant to look like content that is meant to look authentic, for free — to attract attention from brand reps, who, they hope, will pay them real money.

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/how-much-of-the-internet-is-fake.html