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During a two-day visit to Silicon Valley last week, I barely used the Air at all. It was iPad-all-the-time: airport, plane, hotel, and on the road locally. Though certainly not the equivalent of the Air in productivity, it always trumps the Air in one crucial area: grab-and-go. In short, the iPad is a sticky commodity. It's always there, always accessible when you need it: instant on, instant access to the Internet, thanks to 3G. And this pushes me to do more productivity--i.e., writing--on the iPad, despite the relative inefficiency vis-a-vis the Air. It may sound illogical, nevertheless that's the way it has evolved for me.
November 2010 Archives
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He became a consultant at the Maudsley and, in 1992, went to the USA to work on brain imaging at Johns Hopkins University. There, he noticed another disturbing phenomenon: literalism. “It struck me that there was no room for the implicit in America. Everything that should have been implicit was made explicit. If it wasn’t explicit, it was either completely ignored or misunderstood.
“They even put out little manuals for undergraduates on how they could or couldn’t date each other. I thought, ‘God, if we’ve got to that point, it’s all up.’” Dating involves unspoken social signals; if we have to write them down, it’s as if we are suffering a kind of mental illness not unlike schizophrenia.
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Every Marine sees himself or herself as on the front lines, if not at the moment, then ready to deploy at any time. The Marine Corps is a smaller service than the other branches, with a greater singularity of purpose. That attitude is part of Marine Corps exceptionalism broadly, as well as when it comes to the repeal of "don't ask, don't tell." Anything that could dilute the warrior ethos will face a challenge.
I am an openly gay woman, equally comfortable at Quantico and in Dupont Circle. Each of these worlds holds negative stereotypes about the other, and like all stereotypes, they tend to break down on an individual level. Yet for some in both cultures, the notion of a gay Marine seems almost impossible, as though this most masculine and punishing service simply isn't for gay people.
That the two hemispheres interpret and create the world differently, with different modes of attention, different priorities and different values, emerged from Bogen and Sperry’s work in the 1960s and ’70s... But we were looking for different ‘functions’ for the two halves of the brain to do, as if it were a machine with a lot of little specialised modules...Over time, we discovered that each so-called ‘function’ was carried out in both hemispheres, not one, and people gave up looking for a real difference... What I began to see was that the difference lay not in what they do, but how they do it. In particular, the right hemisphere was capable of appreciating ambiguity, the implicit and the metaphorical, where the left hemisphere tended to require certainty, the explicit and the literal... This illuminated problems in the nature of human thought and experience that I had struggled with all my life, and which had been brought into focus by my study of literature.
Acclaimed psychiatrist and writer Iain McGilchrist draws on a vast body of recent experimental brain research to reveal that the differences between the brain’s two hemispheres are profound. The left hemisphere is detail-oriented, prefers mechanisms to living things, and is inclined to self-interest. It misunderstands whatever is not explicit, lacks empathy and is unreasonably certain of itself, whereas the right hemisphere has greater breadth, flexibility and generosity, but lacks certainty.It is vital that the two hemispheres work together, but McGilchrist will argues that the left hemisphere is increasingly taking precedence in the modern world, resulting in a society where a rigid and bureaucratic obsession with structure and self-interest hold sway - with potentially disastrous consequences.
Nearly an hour, but well worth the watch (via CJR):
Jay Rosen's interesting commentary on it:
We're all on the field!
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Would things have been different if we still had Leah Ward Sears? "The record in this case establishes that the prosecutor, in the final moments of her concluding argument on behalf of the State, “clicked” her fingers at which signal one of the deputies in the courtroom turned out the lights and an associate prosecutor “popped out a cake out of a grocery bag” complete with eight candles, which were then lit with a lighter brought into the courtroom; the prosecutor and her associate then proceeded to sing to “dear Josef,” i.e., the deceased victim, the celebratory words to “Happy Birthday.”" The Georgia Supreme Court upheld the conviction despite the despicable shenanigans.
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Would things have been different if we still had Leah Ward Sears? "The record in this case establishes that the prosecutor, in the final moments of her concluding argument on behalf of the State, “clicked” her fingers at which signal one of the deputies in the courtroom turned out the lights and an associate prosecutor “popped out a cake out of a grocery bag” complete with eight candles, which were then lit with a lighter brought into the courtroom; the prosecutor and her associate then proceeded to sing to “dear Josef,” i.e., the deceased victim, the celebratory words to “Happy Birthday.”" The Georgia Supreme Court upheld the conviction despite the despicable shenanigans.
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Tim Wu appears hell-bent of redefining the English language. After reading his new book, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires and his new editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal, “In the Grip of the New Monopolists,” it’s clear to me that he has made it his mission in life to redefine some rather basic, widely-accepted economic terms to suit his own political purposes. Among them: “market power,” “monopoly,” and “laissez-faire.” ... In today’s Journal editorial, it’s “monopoly” that Wu seeks to redefine.
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The Internet has long been held up as a model for what the free market is supposed to look like—competition in its purest form. So why does it look increasingly like a Monopoly board? Most of the major sectors today are controlled by one dominant company or an oligopoly. Google "owns" search; Facebook, social networking; eBay rules auctions; Apple dominates online content delivery; Amazon, retail; and so on...
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In early July, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation placed its two London-based “quality” dailies, the Times and Sunday Times, behind a paywall, charging £1 for 24 hours access, or £2 for 2 weeks (after an introductory £1 for the first month.*) At the same time, News Corp also forbad the UK’s Audit Bureau of Circulations from reporting site traffic*, so that no meaningful measure of the paywall’s effect was available.
That situation has now been partially reversed, with News reporting some of its own numbers: they claim 105,000 total transactions for digital content between July and October ... News Corp notes that about half of those transactions were one-offs, meaning only about 50,000 transactions were by people with any commitment to the site longer than a single day.
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Efforts to teach acceptance of homosexuality, which have gained urgency after several well-publicized suicides by gay teenagers, are provoking new culture wars in some communities.
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A federal appeals court, seeking to solve a legal puzzle over where a murder case appeal can now go, ruled on Friday that lawyers for Georgia death row inmate Troy Anthony Davis have only one option: a new appeal to the Supreme Court. In a six-page order, a three-judge panel of the Eleventh Circuit Court refused to allow an appeal to that court from a federal judge’s ruling rejecting Davis’s claim that he did not commit a murder 21 years ago.
Mad Men Don Draper What? meme. Flight attendant turned gay meme master Samwell's "What What (In the Butt)." Wikipedia entry.
Via.
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This astounding conjunction of art, technology, and justice--known as Asset (Advanced Safety and Driver Support for Essential Road Transport)--is so packed with gizmos that it can discover you are breaking a multitude of laws all at the same time. Yes, Asset can check whether you're insured, whether you're wearing your seat belt, whether you're too close to the car in front... It takes a multitude of pictures and wafts them back by satellite to a large central database. Think of it as a real-time Google search of your car.
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Obama doesn't trust the press any more than he should, any more than Bush did. But that doesn't mean giving up on communication. The sitting President can't run campaign ads as an aspiring President does. But he has the ability to communicate more effectively than anyone else on the planet, if that power is developed. If you send people away to places that involve them.
The White House blog should be a daily link list of ideas and perspectives on what's happening in the world.
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America’s all-volunteer military has left many in the country at a remove from the debasements of the wars; the WikiLeaks archives offer an authentic transcript of them. All wars are terrible, but some must be fought. A democracy is strengthened when its citizens are confronted with the raw truths that follow from the choices of their elected leaders. Whether WikiLeaks will prove over time to be a credible publisher of such truths is another question.
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Google Inc. has shifted its Google TV initiative to its YouTube division, The Chronicle has learned.
Some industry observers speculated that the move was a response to recent negative reaction to the new Internet television service among major media companies, but it appears the change happened several weeks earlier.
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