ChannelNate Blog and ReBlog

YouTube - Amazing Flying Helicopter - Defying The Laws Of Physics:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dyisg9-Mwjw

Cool video of framerate and blade sync

Annals of Anthropology: Vengeance Is Ours: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker:

No people has ever freely organized itself into a state in the absence of external pressure, and people have always been understandably reluctant to cede power over themselves to some other entity.

On the high horse: Why dominant individuals climb the proverbial ladder:

“Our results are among the first to establish the benefits of the metaphor representation perspective for understanding personality processes,” explained Moeller, “and they specifically suggest that thinking dominantly predisposes one to see vertically.”

:

Zink and colleagues saw increased activity in the brain’s reward center when people won money or saw their social standing rise.

“The processing of hierarchical information seems to be hard-wired … underscoring how important it is for us,” Zink said in a statement.

The Government Is Trying to Wrap Its Mind Around Yours - washingtonpost.com:

The government can’t read our minds — yet. So far, these tools simply measure changes in the brain; they don’t detect thoughts and intentions.

Scientists, though, are hard at work trying to decode how those signals relate to mental states such as perception and intention. Different EEG frequencies, for example, have been associated with fear, anger, joy and sorrow and different cognitive states such as a person’s level of alertness.

Music Has Its Own Geometry, Researchers Find:
Music Has Its Own Geometry, Researchers Find:
Now, three music professors — Clifton Callender at Florida State University, Ian Quinn at Yale University and Dmitri Tymoczko at Princeton University — have devised a new way of analyzing and categorizing music that takes advantage of the deep, complex mathematics they see enmeshed in its very fabric.

They take sequences of notes, like chords, rhythms and scales, and categorize them so they can be grouped into “families.” They have found a way to assign mathematical structure to these families, so they can then be represented by points in complex geometrical spaces, much the way “x” and “y” coordinates, in the simpler system of high school algebra, correspond to points on a two-dimensional plane.

Different types of categorization produce different geometrical spaces, and reflect the different ways in which musicians over the centuries have understood music. This achievement, they expect, will allow researchers to analyze and understand music in much deeper and more satisfying ways.

Predator kill-machine pilots suffering ‘chronic burnout’ | The Register    :
According to the report’s authors, a group of US officers, “crewmembers in a MQ-1 Predator unmanned aircraft system (UAS) squadron had significantly increased fatigue, emotional exhaustion, and burnout relative to traditional aircrew”. The study allowed for the present very high level of demand for Predator flights by comparing the drone operators against similarly hard-worked aircrews aboard AWACS airborne radar planes.

This was counterintuitive to me. Being in a loud, vibrating airplane where your physical safety is constantly threatened, because even regular airplanes aren’t 100% safe, sounds pretty stressful to me.

I wouldn’t be surprised if this was a cognitive load problem, in addition to the other issues of diminished self worth issues. Trying to get a sense of yourself in space and concentrate when all you have to look at are little, fuzzy screens with the resolution of current cameras would be difficult, and quite different than what these pilots are used to.

Google Image Result for http://www.diginfo.tv/archives/unicharm_mask.jpg:

Unicharm Revamps Its Non-woven Disposable Mask

Unicharm will begin marketing a revamped model of Chourittai Mask for Pollen Allergy, its proprietary non-woven disposable mask, on January 6. The new mask offers increased flexibility in the ear loops so it can fit the face properly. Three sizes are available: small, medium and large. A package of 15 masks for each size will sell for 520 yen ($4.50).

How to Write Strong Arguments at The CreateDebate Blog:

Created from an essay on how to disagree:

“Graham postulates that all arguments falling below Contradiction are unconvincing. You may come across popular arguments that are intellectually dishonest.”

Cognitive Dissonance in Monkeys - The Monty Hall Problem - New York Times:

Cognitive dissonance is an interesting issue for me, since I rationalize all sorts of beliefs that seem to contradict one another.

” Once we reject something, we tell ourselves we never liked it anyway (and thereby spare ourselves the painfully dissonant thought that we made the wrong choice).”

Is it painful to consider that we made a wrong choice?

I love that many psychological experiments could be wrong and the incorrect aspect is counter-intuitive. Cognitive neuropsychology holds the hope of ransomings us away from a millenia of intuitive, but incorrect, reasoning. Tee-hee.