Absolutely lovely video exploring some 3D fractal spaces. Sweet music, too. You can see another one here.

[Maybe less than we assume. -e]

Judith Harris’s big idea–that peers matter much more than parents–runs counter to nearly everything that a century of psychology and psychotherapy has told us about human development. Freud put parents at the center of the child’s universe, and there they have remained ever since. “They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do,” the poet Philip Larkin memorably wrote, and that perspective is fundamental to the way we have been taught to understand ourselves. When we go to a therapist, we talk about our parents, in the hope that coming to grips with the events of childhood can help us decipher the mysteries of adulthood. When we say things like “That’s the way I was raised,” we mean that children instinctively and preferentially learn from their parents, that parents can be good or bad role models for children, that character and personality are passed down from one generation to the next. Child development has been, in many ways, concerned with understanding children through their parents.

In recent years, however, this idea has run into a problem. In a series of careful and comprehensive studies (among them the famous Minnesota studies of twins separated at birth) behavioral geneticists have concluded that about fifty per cent of the personality differences among people–traits such as friendliness, extroversion, nervousness, openness, and so on–are attributable to our genes, which means that the other half must be attributable to the environment. Yet when researchers have set out to look for this environmental influence they haven’t been able to find it. If the example of parents were important in a child’s development, you’d expect to see a consistent difference between the children of anxious and inexperienced parents and the children of authoritative and competent parents, even after taking into account the influence of heredity. Children who spend two hours a day with their parents should be different from children who spend eight hours a day with their parents. A home with lots of books should result in a different kind of child from a home with very few books. In other words, researchers should have been able to find some causal link between the specific social environment parents create for their children and the way those children turn out. They haven’t.

Malcolm Gladwell

Interesting roundtable with Nate Silver (of fivethirtyeight) about what paths there might be to a Sanders nomination.

[My current attempt to play in this playground hasn’t made me any less cynical about it. -egg]

Who knows what innovations will crawl from between the interlocked toes of the technology corporations, venture capitalists, physicists, chemists, engineers, and biologists now incubating in the nation’s creative class redoubts. Collaboration is the buzzword that sits tremulously like a fig leaf over the privatizing clusters in which America’s future is restarted.

A mix of big corporations and investor-backed startup enterprises gathers around the shared strategic value of innovation, operating in an environment rich with public resources. The triumphant arc is chronicled in the rapid development of some new product and said to be personified by a Zuckerberg or a Gates, a captain of coding brimming with cowboy grit, pressing onward into the computerized frontier and all. The hero is the one who creates something from nothing, thus resolving the eternal pundit riddles of American life like Can we keep our edge? and Are we still number one?

The Baffler

[Might be interesting… -egg]

Over time hippie-inspired Rainbow Gatherings in the forest have become magnets for a new counterculture: homeless teens and young adults. Alice Stein’s new film Dirty Kids explores the culture clash and commonality of the two free-spirited groups.

Many of these young people are running from bad home situations, warrants, or other parts of their lives they want to escape. Rainbow Gatherings appeal to both groups, because both young and old attendees reject consumerism, corporate capitalism and mainstream culture and values. Where they differ gets explored in depth in the film, largely from the younger point of view.

Video trailer and more info

The minimum wage machine allows anybody to work for minimum wage. Turning the crank will yield one penny every 4.5 seconds, for $8.00 an hour, or NY state minimum wage (2014). If the participant stops turning the crank, they stop receiving money. The machine’s mechanism and electronics are powered by the hand crank, and pennies are stored in a plexiglas box. The MWM can be reprogrammed as minimum wage changes, or for different wages in different locations.

Blake Fall-Conroy

Here’s a Stravinsky piece I had never heard until today, and I think it’s now my favorite of his, after a couple of listens. More info at The Guardian and Wikipedia.

“The setting of Psalm 150 in the finale is the most original movement in the symphony. It’s a contrast between two kinds of time, and two wildly differentiated sorts of music: the slow, circling sighs and breathtaking evocation of static, infinite timelessness that you hear at the start of the movement, and fast, violent shock of the music that comes next. There’s an animal ferocity in this faster music: Stravinsky’s vision of praising God takes in desperation and even savagery.”

YouTube video

http://wondermark.com/c1152/

This evening I’ve been trying to understand better the position & movement of things in the sky (which I find pretty much baffling and insanely complex), and ran across this really lovely time-lapse video of the night sky, shot from a pristine location in Chile: