Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

I'm into the amusement, and adaptability

The Galaxy's centre tastes of raspberries and smells of rum, say astronomersThe hunt for chemicals in deep space that could seed life on other planets has yielded a large, fruity molecule
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/ ... trobiology

Charles Prince, Citigroup's former chairman and chief executive officer abased himself before the federal panel investigating the causes of the crisis ...NYTIMES.Com

For Marx, one of the key critics of reification, religions are prime examples of the typical dynamics involved in reification. In Marx's view, gods are obviously human creations, projections of our imagination (see: projection theory; Feuerbach; atheism) that nevertheless come to rule over human beings, as if they were more real and powerful than their creators. His humanist critique of religion intends to revert this process of reification and to reinstate us as the true authors of our social world:
http://faculty.washington.edu/cbehler/g ... mples.html

1. Michael A. Fuoco, “Arrest in Bank Robbery, Suspect’s Picture Spurs Tips,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, April 21, 1995.

2. Michael A. Fuoco, “Trial and Error: They had Larceny in their Hearts, but little in their Heads,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, March 21, 1996. The article also includes several other impossibly stupid crimes, e.g., the criminal-to-be who filled out an employment application at a fast-food restaurant providing his correct name, address and social security number. A couple of minutes later he decided to rob the place.

3. Justin Kruger and David Dunning, “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties of Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-assessments,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1999, vol. 77, no. 6, pp. 1121-1134.

4. David Dunning may be channeling Socrates. “The only true wisdom is to know that you know nothing.” That’s too bad; Socrates gives me a headache.

5. NATO HQ, Brussels, Press Conference by U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, June 6, 2002. The exact quote: “There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. These are the things we do not know we don’t know.”

6. O.K. I looked it up on Wikipedia. The melting point of beryllium, the fourth element, is 1278 °C.

7. “Ctenoid” comes from one of my favorite books, “Jarrold’s Dictionary of Difficult Words.” I challenged a member of the Mega Society [a society whose members have ultra-high I.Q.s], who claimed he could spell anything, to spell “ctenoid.” He failed. It’s that silent “c” that gets them every time. “Ctenoid” means “having an edge with projections like the teeth of a comb.” It could refer to rooster combs or the scales of certain fish.

8. For the inner logoleptic in all of us, allow me to recommend the Web site:

http://www.kokogiak.com/logolepsy/

One of the site’s recommended words is “epicaricacy.” I read somewhere that the German word “schadenfreude” has no equivalent in English. I am now greatly relieved.

9. Errol Morris, “First Person: I Dismember Mama.”

10. Dunning, David, “Self-Insight: Roadblocks and Detours on the Path to Knowing Thyself (Essays in Social Psychology),” Psychology Press: 2005, p. 14-15.

11. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anosognosia.

12. A purist would no doubt complain that anosognosia has been taken out of context, that it has been removed from the world of neurology and placed in an inappropriate and anachronistic social science setting. But something does remain in translation, the idea of an invisible deficit, the infirmity that cannot be known nor perceived. I can even imagine a cognitive and psychological version of anosodiaphoria. The idea of an infirmity that people neglect, that they do not pay any attention to.