“There’s a blind spot in the center of your visual field,” Sarasti pointed out. “You can’t see it. You can’t see the saccades in your visual timestream. Just two of the tricks you know about. Many others. Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self-deception promotes fitness, the brain lies. Stops noticing— irrelevant things. Truth never matters. Only fitness. By now you don’t experience the world as it exists at all. You experience a simulation built from assumptions. Shortcuts. Lies. Whole species is agnosiac by default.”

From the excellent book I’m reading, Peter Watts’ Blindsight.

Headphone Commute did a set of year-end lists for 2014 with some great music on them, and organized into the best damn set of categories ever. -egg

Music For The Film Behind Closed Eyelids
Music For Bending Light And Stopping Time
Music For Awakened Spirits And Open Minds
Music For Crawling Through Abandoned Cities
Music For Withered Leaves And Lonely Fishtanks
Music For Long Car Rides With My Family & Friends
Music For Walking And Not Crying In The Autumn Rain
Music For The Frosty Night When I Miss Your Warm Light
Music For Watching The Snow Slowly Fall In The Moonlight
Music For Sonic Installations In The Cavern Of Your Skull
Music For Missed Friends, Barbecues And Turntables
Music For Vibrating Your Neighbors’ Dusty China
Music For Synergizing The Synapse Of Ideas
Music For Capricious Souls Adrift In Noir-fi

‘and the Spirit of Adonai shall rush mightily upon thee, and thou shalt prophesy with them, and shalt be turned into another man.’

Chrome used to save your browser history indefinitely, but now it only keeps the last 90 days, with no way to change that (boo!). The History Trends Unlimited browser extension fixes that by maintaining a local database that you can search, as well as showing you some interesting statistics:

Jack Tworkov (1900-1982):

Compression and Expansion of the Square (Q3-82 #2)

Note:

Jean-Étienne Liotard (1702-1789)

Liotard Laughing (self-portrait), circa 1770

La Chocolatiere, 1743-1745

Cyndy Salisbury (unknown-present):

Medusa in Chains:

This place is not a place of honor.

No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here.

Nothing valued is here.

This place is a message and part of a system of messages.

Pay attention to it!

Sending this message was important to us.

We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.

Excerpts from Expert Judgment on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, Sandia National Laboratories report SAND92-1382 / UC-721, p. F-49

[Via this very interesting essay (the first of three parts) riffing off a recent talk by Bruce Sterling on Alien Aesthetics. -egg]

Such questions may seem fanciful or mad, but why is it so strange to ponder the experience of objects, even while knowing objects don’t really have “experiences” as you or I do? Why is it so strange to be fascinated with all “things” – from apple pies to microprocessors, tree frogs to alternating current – and to embrace that fascination not just as engineers but also as philosophers? What if engaging in this way holds important clues about a future in which the boundaries between things are fast dissolving?

This kind of engagement will necessitate a new alliance between science and philosophy, one grounded in rational speculation. From a common Enlightenment origin, studies of human culture split. Science broke down the biological, physical and cosmological world into smaller and smaller bits in order to understand it. But philosophy concluded that reason could not explain the objects of experience but only describe experience itself. One extreme led to scientism, the belief that we can know the world completely by taking it apart; the other to relativism, the belief that we can never escape the mind, that the world conforms to thought, language and culture.

Ian Bogost

Why programmers HATE being interrupted, and what they can do to mitigate the effects

http://blog.ninlabs.com/2013/01/programmer-interrupted/

I, maybe more than most people, can completely understand why broke white folks get pissed when the word “privilege” is thrown around. As a child I was constantly discriminated against because of my poverty, and those wounds still run deep. But luckily my college education introduced me to a more nuanced concept of privilege: intersectionality.

Source: Explaining White Privilege to a Broke White Person | Gina Crosley-Corcoran

These are just incredible.

“Construction of stepwells involved not just the sinking of a typical deep cylinder from which water could be hauled, but the careful placement of an adjacent, stone-lined “trench” that, once a long staircase and side ledges were embedded, allowed access to the ever-fluctuating water level which flowed through an opening in the well cylinder. In dry seasons, every step—which could number over a hundred—had to be negotiated to reach the bottom story. But during rainy seasons, a parallel function kicked in and the trench transformed into a large cistern, filling to capacity and submerging the steps sometimes to the surface. This ingenious system for water preservation continued for a millennium.”