tonight

"A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed." - Cioran

"You don’t understand the basic assumptions of your own culture if your own culture is the only culture you know." - Alan Watts

After prayer, we ate dinner. The food was catered from one of my favorite greasy restaurants, Kennedy Fried Chicken. It’s a huge halal food chain here in New York. It’s halal and open late, can’t go wrong with it. Tonight I had a philly cheesesteak, cheesy tater tots and an orange (to give my meal an ounce of healthiness). Epic yum.

30 Mosques, 30 Days

Dubai tends toward gluttony every month of the year, but during Ramadan, things are even more over the top, with nearly every eating establishment offering an Iftar fast-breaking gut-buster at sundown. It's Dubai doing what it does best: using its limited resources for its own commercial advantage. Even American fast-food outlets in Dubai offer Ramadan Value Meals, usually adding a dessert to the already calorie-packed meal deal. At the Dubai Mall, McDonald's was the only major international food chain that didn't have a special offer, just a banner that read: "Ramadan Kareem"--"Happy Ramadan."

Slate | My Ramadan World Tour

shu ba du ba loo ba

Me - Bicyclist, heading to jury duty on 10th Street, Friday at 8:50am.
You - Prius driver, crossing over two lanes, hitting me with your car and speeding away.

I was hoping we could catch up for a cup of coffee, so I could get your views on the environment, and strangle you.

Craigslist.org | Best of

those experiences and joys which are only lovable because they are changing

Scientists have begun to examine how the city affects the brain, and the results are chastening. Just being in an urban environment, they have found, impairs our basic mental processes. After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory, and suffers from reduced self-control. While it's long been recognized that city life is exhausting -- that's why Picasso left Paris -- this new research suggests that cities actually dull our thinking, sometimes dramatically so.

"The mind is a limited machine,"says Marc Berman, a psychologist at the University of Michigan and lead author of a new study that measured the cognitive deficits caused by a short urban walk. "And we're beginning to understand the different ways that a city can exceed those limitations."

One of the main forces at work is a stark lack of nature, which is surprisingly beneficial for the brain. Studies have demonstrated, for instance, that hospital patients recover more quickly when they can see trees from their windows, and that women living in public housing are better able to focus when their apartment overlooks a grassy courtyard. Even these fleeting glimpses of nature improve brain performance, it seems, because they provide a mental break from the urban roil.

Boston.com | How the City Hurts Your Brain (And What You Can Do About It)

Taking a break--I'll be back Wednesday.

when i'm walking through the city, i only think of myself

is it much to admit i need a solid soul and the blood i bleed

Why don't things make us happy? The answer, I think, has to do with a fundamental feature of neurons: habituation. When sensory cells are exposed to the same stimulus over and over again, they quickly get bored and stop firing. (That, for instance, is why you don't feel your underwear.) This makes sense: the brain is an efficient organ, most interested in the novel and new. If we paid attention to everything, we'd quickly be overwhelmed by the intensity of reality. Unfortunately, the same logic applies to material objects. When you buy a shiny new Rolex watch, that watch might make you happy for a few days, or maybe even a week. Before long, however, that expensive piece of jewelery becomes just another shiny metal object - your pleasure neurons have habituated to the luxury good. (Of course, your Rolex can become a problem for everybody else, since it raises the material expectations of all those poor souls wearing less expensive watches. These people now feel inferior, since their Timex has been devalued by the costlier item. [Such luxury items are known as "positional goods," since part of their appeal is that they signal your social position.] Multiply this same psychological phenomenon across a full range of consumer products - from clothes to cars, stereos to shoes - and you can begin to see the "hedonic treadmill" that afflicts people in developed countries. Not only do their brain cells automatically adapt to their state of wealth, but those same neurons are constantly being bombarded with a new set of expensive expectations. Of course, not everybody can afford a Rolex or a Lexus, which means that we are constantly being disappointed.)

The Frontal Cortex | Money and Happiness

"Since people are going to be living longer and getting older, they'll just have to learn how to be babies longer." - Andy Warhol

A problem with interventions that use role-playing to beat prejudice is that bigots usually aren't motivated to take the perspective of the groups that they discriminate against. In a new study, Gordon Hodson and colleagues have tested the effectiveness of an unusual alien-themed intervention for reducing homophobia that involves participants taking the perspective of a homosexual person, without really realising that that is what they're doing.

Hodson's team tested the homophobic tendencies of 101 heterosexual students and then had 79 of them complete the so-called "Alien-Nation" simulation, whilst the remainder acted as controls and attended a lecture on homophobia. For the Alien-Nation task, the students formed groups of four to five members and imagined landing on an alien planet that's populated by aliens who look exactly like humans, but who don't allow any public displays of affection, and live in same-sex housing and reproduce by artificial insemination.

The participants answered questions about how they would cope with life on the planet and maintain their lifestyles. They also shared plans for how to behave romantically in secret and how to identify other humans. Research assistants then asked the participants whether the situation applied to any real-life groups. The participants failed to recognise the parallel with homosexuality, but the research assistants pointed out the comparison and drew attention to ways that people who are homosexual deal with the constraints of an intolerant society.

BPS Research Digest Blog | Intervention Helps Reduce Homophobia

"When we ignore the body, we are more easily victimized by it." - Milan Kundera

A fascinating study has shown that we're unable to read insights into ourselves from watching a video of our own body language. It's as if we have an egocentric blind spot. Outside observers, by contrast, can watch the same video and make revealing insights into our personality. [...]

What was going on? Why can't we use a video of ourselves to improve the accuracy of our self-perception? One answer could lie in cognitive dissonance - the need for us to hold consistent beliefs about ourselves. People may well be extremely reluctant to revise their self-perceptions, even in the face of powerful objective evidence. A detail in the final experiment supports this idea. Participants seemed able to use the videos to inform their ratings of their "state" anxiety (their anxiety "in the moment") even while leaving their scores for their "trait" anxiety unchanged.

The British Psychological Society Research Digest Blog | We're unable to read our own body language

As long as you can laugh at yourself you will never cease to be amused.

So why don’t I have any tattoos?

It’s not that I don’t like them. Nope, I love ‘em. I’ve always loved ‘em. I think they’re romantic, unreasonable, thoughtless and eternal all at the same time. Therefore, I love them.

It’s just that with tattoos, I treat them like pricey jewelry. If I ever get a desire to get one, I say to myself okay, take a year to think about it and if you still want it next year, go ahead and get it. One year, that’s short for something that will last a lifetime.

Garance Dore | Sang Bleu (Blue Blood)

cross-legged on the floor surrounded by an enormous collection of Lego pieces

Sometime in the early 1980s, when I lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I received a postcard with a name and return address I didn’t recognize, bearing a cryptic image on the back. Every few weeks after that I received another card. There was one with holes punched in it, one with a symbol that resembled crosshairs, one with a picture of a man in sunglasses and a hooded sweatshirt, and one with a string of binary digits. The return addresses and postmarks kept changing. Assuming a friend from college was trying to get me to play some sort of puzzle game—a recreation for which I have no patience—I threw them in a drawer, a little guilty that he was going to all this trouble.

Then I received an article reciting details of the unsolved “Zodiac murders” that had unfolded in Northern California more than a decade earlier. In an episode that has since been recounted by countless journalists and Hollywood filmmakers, the killer had ambushed and slain five people. (The murderer has never been identified for certain, although numerous people have claimed to pinpoint the culprit—including a San Francisco woman who held a press conference in April declaring her father was the Zodiac killer.) He then sent letters to Bay Area newspapers threatening to kill many more unless they published a series of cryptic symbols, an act that created widespread panic. Included in the article I received were descriptions of the symbols, which sounded just like the ones on the postcards in my drawer. “Holy cow!” I said. “I’m getting mail from a mass murderer!” I called the local FBI branch, and a nice young woman with an FBI badge came to my office, picked up the collection of mail, said thank you, and left.

A week later, another agent came by with everything in a plastic envelope, gave it to me, and said, “Don’t worry, he’s harmless.”

“He’s what? What do you mean, harmless?”

“Don’t you know about this guy?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Do you mean the murderer?”

The agent then explained that the mail was from an amateur sleuth in California named Gareth Penn, who had been trying for some time to interest the police in the idea that I was the Zodiac killer.

Washington Monthly | Confessions of a Non-Serial Killer

frens

In A.D. 64 the Stoic philosopher Seneca pondered friendship. The Stoics’ intellectual adversaries, the Epicureans, had claimed that a man sought friends for purely instrumental reasons, “for the purpose of having someone to come and sit beside his bed when he is ill or come to his rescue when he is hard up or thrown into chains.” But Seneca knew better. A wise man wanted friends “so that he may have someone by whose sickbed he himself may sit, or whom he may himself release when that person is held prisoner by hostile hands.” Kindness was man’s duty but also his joy: “No one can live a happy life if he turns everything to his own purposes. Live for others if you want to live for yourself.”

The Believer | The Problem of Other People

i have everything i need

Last fall, I spent about a month in the file room of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, hoping to learn the secrets of the good life. The project is one of the longest-running—and probably the most exhaustive—longitudinal studies of mental and physical well-being in history. Begun in 1937 as a study of healthy, well-adjusted Harvard sophomores (all male), it has followed its subjects for more than 70 years.[...]

Arlie Bock conceived the project with his patron, the department-store magnate W. T. Grant. Writing in September 1938, Bock declared that medical research paid too much attention to sick people; that dividing the body up into symptoms and diseases—and viewing it through the lenses of a hundred micro-specialties—could never shed light on the urgent question of how, on the whole, to live well.

Exhaustive medical exams noted everything from major organ function, to the measure of lactic acid after five minutes on a treadmill, to the size of the “lip seam” and the hanging length of the scrotum. Using a new test called the electroencephalograph, the study measured the electrical activity in the brain, and sought to deduce character from the squiggles. During a home visit, a social worker took not only a boy’s history—when he stopped wetting his bed, how he learned about sex—but also extensive medical and social histories on his parents and extended family. The boys interpreted Rorschach inkblots, submitted handwriting samples for analysis, and talked extensively with psychiatrists. They stripped naked so that every dimension of their bodies could be measured for “anthropometric” analysis, a kind of whole-body phrenology based on the premise that stock character types could be seen from body proportions. [...]

Four members of the sample ran for the U.S. Senate. One served in a presidential Cabinet, and one was president. There was a best-selling novelist (not, Vaillant has revealed, Norman Mailer, Harvard class of ’43). But hidden amid the shimmering successes were darker hues. As early as 1948, 20 members of the group displayed severe psychiatric difficulties. [...]

The Grant Study men remain anonymous. (Even the numbers on the case studies have been changed.) A handful have publicly identified themselves—including Ben Bradlee, the longtime editor of The Washington Post, who opened his memoir, A Good Life, with his first trip to the study office. John F. Kennedy was a Grant Study man, too, though his files were long ago withdrawn from the study office and sealed until 2040.

The Atlantic | What Makes Us Happy?

i tend to open my lips very wide around tightly clenched teeth and my eyes become large, with an intensity that some have described as "maniacal"

Open-mindedness
by totocacapouet

and the universe is shown

"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."
–Albert Einstein

"I have never imputed to Nature a purpose or a goal, or anything that could be understood as anthropomorphic. What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism."
–Albert Einstein

"How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, 'This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant'? Instead they say, 'No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.' A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths."
–Carl Sagan

New York Times, The God Delusion | Wikipedia, Pantheism
Image: Jacob Magraw-Mickelson

"It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious." - Alfred North Whitehead

Anger makes you smaller, while forgiveness forces you to grow beyond what you were. - German Proverb

People Who Sit in the DIsability Seats While I'm Standing on My Crutches

"Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art." - Susan Sontag

Tumblr | David Horvitz

the point is to relate and have it relatable

brendan fowler (katietee on flickr)