Monthly Archives: November 2008

Blog

This post on irony is really wonderful

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Christopher Moore said somewhere that irony isn’t just a literary device, but a basic property of the universe. [citation needed] If so, that might explain why some psychologists think human beings are hardwired with a sense of irony. Psychologist Penny M. Pexman of the University of Calgary in Alberta…

…trained kids to associate niceness with a smiling yellow duck and meanness with a snarling gray shark. Then they watched puppet shows, in which the puppets made both sarcastic and literal remarks. Rather than asking the kids to interpret the remarks, she tracked their eye gaze, to see whether they shifted their attention ever so slightly toward the shark or the duck after a particular remark….

If kids were indeed processing every sentence as literally true to begin with, then their eyes would reveal that. That is, they would look automatically at the duck on hearing “Well, that’s just great.” But they did not. When that sentence was used ironically, their eyes went immediately to the mean shark. The irony required no laborious cognitive crunching. They processed the insincerity as rapidly as they processed the basic meaning of the words.

[Image: carbonNYC]

Blog

‘Flux transfer events’ connect Earth and Sun

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News to me:

Like giant, cosmic chutes between the Earth and sun, magnetic portals open up every eight minutes or so to connect our planet with its host star.

Once the portals open, loads of high-energy particles can travel the 93 million miles (150 million km) through the conduit during its brief opening, space scientists say.

Called a flux transfer event, or FTE, such cosmic connections not only exist but are possibly twice as common as anyone ever imagined, according to space scientists who attended the 2008 Plasma Workshop in Huntsville, Ala., last week.

“Ten years ago I was pretty sure they didn’t exist, but now the evidence is incontrovertible,” said David Sibeck, an astrophysicist at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

There must be a use for these things, in fiction or real life…

[Image: NASA]

Fiction

NEW FICTION: RESURFACING BILLY by Douglas Lain

This month’s Futurismic story is a sober yet striking piece of work; Douglas Lain has constructed a moody and multilayered metaphor that compares our approach to waste management with our approach to our own minds… and the minds of our children.

Charged with subtle emotion, “Resurfacing Billy” will provide you with plenty of food for thought, and greatly rewards a close re-reading. Enjoy!

Resurfacing Billy

by Douglas Lain

About half way through my thirty-fifth year, some problems came up. My young son was unbalanced and maladjusted to school, my wife’s bohemian tendencies made her myopic and unable to respond to the situation, and the garbage buried under the wicker weave surface of our neighborhood leaked through. Toxic sludge oozed up in the parking lot of our local Food Co-Op, on the bike trail, and in our own backyard.

I didn’t know what to do about my wife and son, but my solution for the leakages in the Hawthorne neighborhood was the gumball. The design was colorful, nostalgic, and tactile. I felt confident that resurfacing the district with red, green, and yellow globes designed both to stick into a coherent and easily traversable surface and to separate into individual objects that pedestrians could manipulate, would work. I would win another ASLA prize. Organic and absorbent, they were designed to neutralize and sanitize leakages that occurred where the tarp lost integrity; the gumballs would change colors when exposed to toxins, serve as a warning system as well as a surface. Continue reading NEW FICTION: RESURFACING BILLY by Douglas Lain →

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The human billboard – people as advertorials

visual haiku - graffiti faceHere’s a neat bit of alarmingly plausible speculative thinking for you – what if the next frontier for contextual advertising is us?

The gent sitting next to me is an advert for high risk heart disease – the last passenger to rush aboard the plane, snarling at fellow passengers as he marches the isle trying to find space for his luggage, squeezing his plump frame into seat 8E before proceeding to wolf down 2 buttery croissants. It’s a compelling enough everyday drama for the stewardess to raise her seen-it-all-honey eyebrows, and its compelling enough for us to want to know more. If you’re in the business of pushing ads this is obviously an opportunity to push your product.

Sound ridiculous? Well, not really – how many small-time bloggers already rake back a few cents from ads on their sites? And it’s not like we’re averse to the idea of promoting products on our person: think about designer sportswear, or music and film merchandise. [image by Mikey G Ottowa]

By the way, the linked site is the blog of Jan Chipchase, who’s a kind of futurist thinker employed by Nokia to travel the world and think up stuff like this. And if you’re even vaguely interested in futurism (which, if you read Futurismic, I guess you must be), you should really be subscribed to it. He’s a very smart cookie indeed.