I have written about haterz and internet trolls before (here and again here) but this video – which includes brief accounts from those who have been the target of spiteful comments, such as comedian and performer Richard Herring – captures perfectly the tone of the troll and how he or she might be dealt with in a humorous way (strong language: not suitable for work).
Some of the comments are funny and insightful – one invokes Godwin’s law, another suggests there should be debate in the video’s comments about creationism – and overall it’s a brilliant lampooning of the trolls and the haterz.
This is excellent. It’s a time-lapse map of European history, from 1000 AD to 2003. It’s really quite amazing to see countries or parts of them change so much. It’s rather saddening too – many, perhaps most, of the changes came as the result of war and the subsequent land-grab.
I’ve posted the longer by clearer version, which contains dates and further annotations. You can find the shorter versions here. Both are well worth viewing full screen for the full effect.
With the development of blogging, social networking, micro-blogging and all other forms of online self-publication, we’re all editors now. I’ve worked professionally as an editor (the copy editor and proofreader flavour of that nebulous word, ‘editor’) and have found The Economist’s style guide to be one of the most useful resources one can find on how to use language with precision. This comical and beautifully illustrated video gives a brief insight into the kinds of things we editors – professional or otherwise – are interested in.
I’ve probably broken several of the rules of this style guide in this very short post already. Nevermind. No doubt there will be some helpful soul out there willing and ready to take his or her (not ‘their’ – never ‘their’) metaphorical red pen to the post and put me right.
This superb interactive graphic will give you a chance to discover the size of things, from the smallest to the largest. It is simple but quite wonderful. The quickest way to explain what it does is ask you to try it.
Just use the scroll button on your mouse to move between levels of magnification. (It runs in Shockwave so it will not work with iPads, iPhones and so on.)
I highly recommend you open the full-screen version, which can be found here.
Later this year, Austrian Felix Baumgartner will go one further than his colleague Joseph Kittinger by performing the highest, fastest and longest freefall from the edge of space. Kittinger, who was captured and held prisoner for 11 months during the Vietnam conflict, is assisting in the project.
All of which gives me the opportunity to show The Board of Canada’s excellent video for their track Dayvan Cowboy, the first part of which shows Kittinger in freefall (Kittinger’s video can be found here).
Kittinger describes feeling as if he were stationary during the first part of his fall, as if he were floating in space, since there were few visual clues to remind him he was falling and his suit didn’t ripple with air resistance. In fact, he was falling at a rate approaching the speed of sound, a speed Baumgartner intends to break.
The excellent website Great Artist’ Mews has a collection of comical and well-executed artworks that combine the wonder of cats with the splendour of art. I couldn’t help but post this collection of master artworks ‘remade’ and improved by the insertion of cats. This is my favourite, based upon Salvador Dali’s ‘Dream’.
And the original Dali’s ‘Dream’ in case you’ve forgotten it.
In some ways, this is a bit of lighthearted frippery of the best kind. But it also captures a prominent flavour of the web at the moment. Cats are notoriously ubiquitous on site like YouTube (sometimes known mockingly as ‘CatTube’). Further, the ‘mashup’ of incongruous elements (here the inserting cats in artistic masterpieces) – along with its sometimes irreverent attitude to canonical artworks and their originality – is notable achievement of creatives all over the web.
That heavyweight heading shouldn’t put you off. All I’m saying really is nothing new. Since photography has been opened to the masses through the availability of cheaper, easier to use digital cameras and the ability to publish freely online, ‘professional’ (and the less well-paid ‘serious’) photographer has to cling on to power somehow. This short film brilliantly and hilariously shows how.
The opening line – ‘I only shoot film’ – pithily represents the elitism of pro/serious photography, and is funny too. When in doubt, deny the very basis of the revolution – in this case, suggest analogue is better than digital. But don’t feel isolated, pro snappers. You’re not the only ones. The assertion of power, conscious and deliberate or otherwise, happens everywhere in culture, everywhere in life. In fact, we’re probably doing it right now.
Just lately, I seem to be writing about something I read or saw or listened to in the past and that I’ve returned to later. I blame the internet. I, like my contemporaries, have been able to revisit things we experienced in our past, our childhood, before the internet made information and resources easier to access. No I can learn more about those things that coloured our lives pre-internet but that won’t make it into encyclopaedias or even be the subject of talking-heads nostalgia shows.
There’s not a day goes past without some relic of the near-past being laughed about or the subject of gentle nostalgia. I imagine the impulse to understand our origins, our culture, our past is old: but the use of the internet to do so is new. In fact, much of what is happening, like so much in the revolution of the internet, is happening for the first time. Sometimes it is simply the recording of some document that we thought lost.
Take this, a scan of an Argos shopping catalogue from the 1976 (for those that do not recognise the name, Argos is one of the UK’s largest general-purpose stores). It’s seemingly innocuous but actually it’s highly charged with memories for many of us. We might find toys we played with or stuff that was in our homes as a kid. it reminds us of a different time, perhaps more innocent. (For me, there was a great deal of delight in finding ‘Super Flight Deck’ in the toys section. It never really worked at its one trick. But it could have been so great). The website in which it appears, Retronaut, is devoted to such nostalgia. Its banner reads: ‘The past is a foreign country. This is your passport.’
For most, the subject of such wistful reverie is the reappearance of toys or sweets or other childish pursuits. But people can return, too – namely, celebrities. Some are like a bad dinner; you get a chance to encounter them twice. If you thought that D-list celebrity you couldn’t abide was gone forever then there’s always reality tv to offer them a second bite of the cherry. Some are funny, like Ozzy Osbourne, who returned to our screens in one of the grandaddies of all reality tv, The Osbournes. Other are a little sadder, like Freddie Starr wheezing an exit on 2011’s I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here!
The internet also gives us a chance to return to perhaps more highly valued culture, something a little more substantial than the ephemera of our childhood. I’ve listened to and loved Primal Scream’s Screamadelica album and especially the song ‘Come Together’. At the beginning it has a sample of what sounds like a speech, in which the speaker exclaims: ‘This is a beautiful day… it is a new day… We are together… we are unified and all for the cause…’
That cause, unknown to me in its precise context for so long in, was black empowerment and the speech is taken from Jesse Jackson’s opening address from the Wattstax music festival, held in Watts, California in 1972. I’ve have often idly sung that phrase ‘It is a beautiful day… it is a new day’ first thing in the morning when I’m feeling especially bright: now I know where it came from:
This lead me finding out a bit more about Wattstax and that period American history. For me, the vibrant era of civil rights and social justice in the United States is especially interesting and in the case of the Watts festival, was captured wonderfully in a full length documentary.
Revisiting our past life in this way, through reviewing new information on ephemera or other culture that’s personal to us, becomes like a step into a future of new possibilities rather than a retreat to the cul de sac of inward-looking nostalgia. We are going back to the future, hoverboards or not.
Trying to live and think as a rational human being is my goal. But perhaps the project is doomed. I’ve been reading David McRaney’s book You Are Not So Smart, which playfully (but no less convincingly) undermines the cherished belief that we are rational human beings.
For example, he writes about priming – “When a stimulus in the past affects the way you behave and think or the way you perceive another stimulus later on” – which leads us to an idea about how our thoughts maintain mental equilibrium without necessarily being grounded in reason, called the adaptive unconscious; and eventually, with a little research from Wikipedia, we find ourselves at the introspective illusion:
The introspection illusion is a cognitive illusion in which people wrongly think they have direct insight into the origins of their mental states, while treating others’ introspections as unreliable. In certain situations, this illusion leads people to make confident but false explanations of their own behavior (called “Causal theories”) or inaccurate predictions of their future mental states.
In short, we cannot be sure of where some of our mental states – and the beliefs, ideas, thoughts and feelings that accompany them – originate. The following experiment illustrates the potential for people to lack insight into their preferences and the ability, in the absence of a rational explanation, to ‘confabulate’, or invent, the reasons for doing so:
Subjects saw two photographs of people and were asked which they found more attractive. They were given a closer look at their “chosen” photograph and asked to verbally explain their choice. However, using sleight of hand the experimenter had slipped them the other photograph rather than the one they had chosen. A majority of subjects failed to notice that the picture they were looking at did not match the one they had chosen just seconds before. Many subjects confabulated explanations of their preference. For example, a man might say “I preferred this one because I prefer blondes” when he had in fact pointed to the dark-haired woman, but had been handed a blonde. These must have been confabulated because they explain a choice that was never made.
The large proportion of subjects who were taken in by the deception contrasts with the 84% who, in post-test interviews, said that hypothetically they would have detected a switch if it had been made in front of them. The researchers coined the term “choice blindness” for this failure to detect a mismatch.
In this case, any perceived (by the subject) rational explanation for making their choices was undermined by the sleight of hand. Despite this, most subjects didn’t notice; and of those, they offered what was to them a rational justification for their choice. One explanation for our difficulties with understanding our preferences, for example, is the sometimes unknown significance that objects possess for us. As McRaney suggests:
Just about every physical object you encounter triggers a blitz of associations throughout your mind. You aren’t a computer connected to two cameras. Reality isn’t a vacuum where you objectively survey your surroundings. You construct reality from minute to minute with memories and emotions orbiting your sensations and cognition; together they form a collage of consciousness that exists only in your skull. Some objects have personal meaning, like the blow-pop ring your best friend gave you in middle school or the handcrafted mittens your sister made you. Other items have cultural or universal meanings, like the moon or a knife or a handful of posies. They affect you whether or not you are aware of their power, sometimes so far in the depths of your brain you never notice.
When we interrogate the extent to which we are rational beings, the perceived dichotomy between religious belief and reason needs to be renegotiated. Julian Baggini, in his ‘Heathen’s Progress’ blog, argues that those who believe themselves to be rationalist need to recognise the ways in which their reason might be compromised:
Humanism [secular rationalism] is faced with the bind that its existence depends on maintaining a tension between finding what is good and worth celebrating in the human and having the intellectual integrity to see our species warts and all, which means being open to the possibility that we are not as great as we’d like to think we are.
‘Not as great as we like to think we are’ chimes with the notion of the illusion of introspection and our ability to make rational decisions, as we’ve seen in the ‘choice blindness’ example above. He goes on:
No self-respecting humanist can fail to have “doubt over humanity”, and although that need not occlude all the light, it is a dark cloud we have to live under.
Here’s where it gets interesting. The doubt over humanity that is an inevitable corollary of secular humanism cannot be neatly contained and eventually it spills over into doubt abut the capabilities of human reason. Indeed, the more you know about how the human mind works, the less reason we have to trust our rational capacities. For instance, Alvin Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism claims that secular reason leads to evolution, but evolution removes any reason we might have to trust secular reason. There is no reason to believe that a brain that evolved to help us survive in the pleistocene is a reliable tracker of truth. Darwin himself had this concern, writing that “the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy”.
Baggini summarises:
What all this suggests is that in practice there is no neat distinction between the logical and the psychological. Those who attempt to use pure reason cannot expect to succeed, while those who willingly allow psychological factors to affect their reasoning may be being more self-aware about their rational capacities than those who do not.
Despite this, we need not throw out the rational baby in the bath water of reason. Even if we are not completely rational beings and do not possess the kinds of intellects and cognitive apparatus to make us what we might sometimes aspire to be – rational human beings – we must continue using reason, whilst noting its limitations:
Kierkegaard saw the limits of reason as themselves a reason to make irrational leaps of faith. In a more modest form, his insight could help explain the rational non-rationality of much religious belief. […] We choose faith so as not to be lost, because the alternative, reason, cannot enable us to find ourselves.
As an atheist, I’m not convinced by this. People who have a point are often nonetheless wrong, and often it’s precisely because of that point that they go wrong. Reason has its limits but we need to go right up against them, and for my money faith sees these limits and gives up on reason too soon.
Nonetheless, the mere fact that a serious argument can be made against the coherence of relying on human reason alone not only gives us atheists a way of understanding religion more sympathetically, it also suggests that the limits and role of reason has been a relatively neglected area of debate between believers and non-believers.
In rational discourse, it is not enough to simply immerse yourself in the ideas and arguments of others, but to understand – where possible – the extent to which your ideas are influenced by unconscious processes. You must know thyself as well as know thy enemy.
I won’t do anymore throat-clearing before starting the list other than to say that this list might equally (and more accurately) be called ‘stuff which I listened to / read / watched, etc but that didn’t come out in 2011’. Although many of them did appear for the first time in 2011, many didn’t – this list just means I encountered them in 2011. Since I have an almost preternatural way of seeking out and sharing what you’ve already seen / done /read, this comes as hardly a surprise.
So, that said, here they are, in no particular order…
Favourite song – ‘Video Games’ by Lana Del Rey
I read on Twitter from Caitlin Moran that she had more or less repeatedly listening to Lana Del Rey’s song, ‘Video Games’, all summer long. Clicking the link, I could hear why. It’s amazing. Best seen as well as heard – the video and song work seamlessly together – it has topped the polls for many others, so I’m hardly being original – a theme that perhaps is true of all my list. This piece nicely sums up why we like it. I like it because it will forever remind me of my little bike tour, where I sang it, if not word perfect then with gusto (and aloud), for most of the way.
Favourite album – The Courage of Others by Midlake
I started listening to The Courage of Others in 2010 and I haven’t stopped playing this regularly since. It was the same with Vanoccupanther in 2009. The Courage of Others might 2012’s favourite album, too – I wouldn’t bet against it. I know it will always remind of being here in France and the mountains in particular. It’s so tied up with memories it’s hard to think of anything else which has touched me like it.
Favourite book(s), article
Remainder by Tom McCarthy
Netherland by Joseph O’Neill
‘Two Paths for the Novel’ by Zadie Smith
I’m opening up the idea of a ‘favourite’ book by including two books, both published outside of 2011 and one of which I read in 2009; and by including an article. It’s a bit sneaky, I know. Bear with me and I’ll explain.
Remainder is one of those books that helps you rethink the boundaries of fiction and offer a glimpse of where it might be heading. There are problems with it: the forensics of assembling some of the scenes can drag and some of the red herrings seems a little contrived, by even both of those approaches illustrate how this book is different. That said, it is brilliantly conceived and is packed full of ideas – what time means; how we construct reality; the difficult of being authentic; public and private lives. There’s so much there to think about. Its style is deceptively light: it’s a complicated book with an unforgettable ending that seems to capture what it means to be living now.
I wouldn’t say that either book is ‘about’ cricket but both contain an element of the fine game, so that’s my ill-conceived ‘hook’ to bring them together. Netherland is a novel about being lost in a new country; about expatriation and changing identities; about new worlds and the old. As such, it spoke to me a little following my move to Switzerland, then France. The character of Ramkissoon is brilliantly drawn, the narrator convincing. Alas, it dies a little by the end; but what comes before is enough.
As good as these books are, I would suggest they are best read in conjunction with Zadie Smith’s perceptive work of comparative analysis which considers both books and their contribution to the identity of the contemporary novel. I think Smith (who also wrote a brilliant analysis of the effect that computers have on us, ostensibly as a discussion of Jaron Lanier’s book You are not a Gadget and David Fincher’s film, Social Network) offers two paths that fiction might take, illustrated by these two novels. Remainder and Netherland diverge in many ways, not least in realism and technique – one more conventional, the other ‘experimental’ (that dread word). It’s ok, though – we can read both.
Favourite internet meme – Ultimate dog tease (hungry dog)
In our house, something that is especially good is now referred to as ‘the maple kind’. If a video is good enough to get you starting you own, minor meme then it has my vote. Honourable mention goes to Fenton. Unusually, it’s dogs, not cats, that rule the roost.
Favourite restaurant – Bistrot des Halles de Rives
This unprepossessing place appears to offer very little if judging by appearances. Sandwiched between the stalls in the indoor (admittedly, gourmet) food market in Geneva, there really is (for me) only one dish – the steak frites equivalent, served with buerre Parisien and garnish (a rather lonely half tomato). It is uniformly superb. I have to keep returning to make sure they retain their standards.
Favourite computer game – Dead Space 2 (Playstation 3)
I played Dead Space 2 before the first version and nearly didn’t play either. I played the first Dead Space in demo and thought to difficult and unexciting. I was wrong – the difficulty is just right in both games and it could hardly be said to be boring. Rather, the often samey scenes – both games are set onboard spaceships – are deliberately crafted to appear claustrophobic; their uniform design appears authentic and contrasts well with the horrors you find within. A superb game, superior in all departments to any other I’ve played this year.
Favourite Tweet / Status Update
This tweet made me laugh when I first read it – always a good sign:
tashapotamus
#midnight #snack
It introduced a whole new way of thinking about Twitter for me – no content, only metadata. Wow. Perhaps this is how we will communicate in the future – perhaps the modern aside (or soliloquy) will make the hashtag its vehicle? Who knows. This just made me laugh.
Favourite gadget – Apple iPad
I’ve used this more than any other single gadget, mostly for ebook reading, but also for travel – it’s 3G is useful for maps and for learning more about the place your in. I can’t imagine life without it now – and the new iBooks night reader has made it even more useful.
Favourite blog – ‘Heathen’s Progress’, Julian Baggini, The Guardian (Comment is Free)
The latter half of the year saw the start of philosopher Julian Baggini’s excellent blog on philosophy and belief, Heathen’s Progress. This series has sought to further understand the nature of belief as it is experienced. It suggests that rather than a single set fixed dogma, believers often have individual ideas about how to characterise their faith. It has sought to understand, if not to reconcile, without fundamental compromise. The comments are also unexpectedly good; like so many blogs, the author’s by line should be supplemented with a thanks to those who comment.
Favourite photo that I took – Tate Modern (version 5)
Tate modern (Version 5)
I had some trouble with this photo. I asked my Twitter contacts if they could help and they made some good suggestions. But still I couldn’t get the crop right. Even now, when I look carefully, it doesn’t fully work. Still, it’s an interesting image and one that I like because it happened completely spontaneously. They are sitting where I had just sat, to have a beer and a sandwich and watch people flow over the bridge across the Thames.
Favourite photo that someone else took – Black Macaque Self Portrait (David Slater)
You may have heard the story of a photographer – David Slater – who had his camera stolen by a black macaque, who then went on to take photographs of itself, like the one below. A great story – and some accomplished photos. Honourable mention to all those excellent photos I’ve seen on Flickr, too
Copyright David J Slater / Caters
Favourite television programme – The Hour
I think Mad Men was excellent again, now at Season 4. But the show that sticks in my mind was The Hour. It approached Mad Men’s mix of private and public politics – the grand and the great, the intimate and the secret – and I loved (again, like Mad Men) the period feel, only this time it British. Well worth seeing, I hope they make another series.
Favourite film – Rabbit Hole
I was completely surprised by Rabbit Hole (2010). I think Nicole Kidman plays some interesting parts and acts well but I was suspicious it might have suffered from the Hollywood gloss. It hasn’t. It’s very moving, horribly so around half way in – but it captures the horror that few of us will hopefully never know so beautiful and with such dignity. It was also superb at the dynamics of relationships and the sudden escalation of marital arguments.
Favourite artwork – Isenheim altarpiece
I saw the Isenheim altarpiece for the first time this year. I’ve written about it elsewhere (with photos) so I won’t repeat that, suffice to say it was incredible to see in the flesh.
Favourite memory – pitching a tent by the lakeside on my bike tour
Camping by the lake, Provence
Aside from all those wonderful times I have shared with Jennie (and which remain private), my bike tour provided me with the most pungent memories. But which one? Starting off, thinking I had forgotten to pack something – then relaxing and starting to enjoy it the ride? Arriving on a sweltering hot day in The Camargue, the journey over, and sitting in a bar to order a beer – when the waiter took my dry bidons and filled them with ice and water? All of these – but this one, moreso – making camp on the banks of a lake in Provence; cooking dinner on my portable stove; and looking over the lake, listening to the cricket on BBC TestMatch Special. Oh happy day.
what we've got 