G as in Good H as in Happy

Bloggery/Technophilia

February 28, 2005

Powerline points to the conversation between Austin Bay and Mark Steyn. Steyn in his inimitable style publishes an essay in the Telegraph.  Bay disagrees on his blog. Now, this is the modern, post-modern, 21st century moment.  Steyn responds with a collegial, constructive reply in the comments that clarifies his position and extends the argument. The medium + the message: it makes a new place and time for a more developed, refined, complete, serviceable message, encompassing more of us in the conversation.

Once upon a time they would, maybe, have exchanged a letter.  And we couldn't have eavesdropped. We are in good company these days, if we want to be.

And go here to hear Mark Steyn on C-Span.  I'm eager to find out whether he is as finely-tuned and fearlessly articulate alive as he is in print. Turns out he never went to journalism school, even to college...

Furthermore, anyone can webcast a lecture or conversation anywhere. Jeff Jarvis tells how. "The possibilities are endless."

The Danger of What We Know

The mathematician Georg Cantor spoke of a Law of Conservation of Ignorance:

A false conclusion once arrived at is not easily dislodged. And the less it is understood, the more tenaciously it is held.

Cantor is known for demonstrating that some infinite sets of numbers are larger than other infinite sets of numbers.

From Mathematics for the Non-Mathematician, by Morris Kline.

Counterfeit Happiness and the Buyer's Brain

According to an LA Times article, brain imaging shows intricate meshing of marketing messages with brain areas for fear, anxiety, motor impulses, and sense of self.

Cool images: Images deemed "cool" activated a brain area known as Brodmann's area 10, associated with identity and social image. -- Cool fools: These participants could be impulsive shoppers. Thinking about an object in terms of social identity may produce a powerful reward signal.

Uncool images: Images judged "uncool" provoked activity nearer the center of the brain in an area involved in monitoring conflict.-- Uncool at any price: These participants may be experiencing distress as they envision themselves with the "uncool" object.

In the political realm, it appears that the image of the viewer's "own" candidate generated activity in the middle of the front brain, an area that responds to reward. There are signs of neutral bonding with the preferred candidate, and the opposing candidate provoked activity in the brain area associated with reasoning and emotional control -- negative emotions or a suppression of emotion.

Both major US political affiliations had these reactions in common.  The article further discusses differences between Republicans and Democrats, as to activation levels of the amygdala's anxiety level, and in responses to the image of a "strong leader."

These investigations are still incomplete and unrefined, and the interconnecting links have yet to be established.  Students of neurolinguistic programming, who have for twenty years accomplished something similar without machines, could predict that once the algorithm is fully sketched out, environmental elements like lighting, rhythm, speed, color, vocabulary, aroma, vectors for movement, volume, personnel selection, and more will come into play to "strum" brains to the desired arousal. These elements, known as submodalities, are already in play as many accomplished people traverse their own lives with the help of knowledgeable guides who apply this data. For instance, the difference between decision-making patterns based on "toward," or desire-based motivation, and ones based on "away-from" or anxious avoidance, is old news, and dictates strategies that need not wait for brain-scan machinery.

Marketing and political messages are iconic examples of persuasion that implies happiness and seldom delivers it in any robust way, especially if the communication exploits emotion to serve a covert agenda, in conspiracy with an agitated amygdala in the clue-impaired mark.

Genuine self-knowledge is the best defense in order to maintain intelligent independence of mind. Our illusions about ourselves, including the delusion that we easily see and shed our illusions, are the manipulators' best friend. Ignorant of our own driving reality, we flee fear or chase desire, and rationalize our decisions after the fact. Even one of the researchers had an epiphany when she saw her own brain activity.

At [one] extreme were people whose brains reacted only to the unstylish items, a pattern that fits well with people who tend to be anxious, apprehensive or neurotic, Quartz said.

The reaction in both sets of brains was intense. The brains reflexively sought to fulfill desires or avoid humiliation.

Asp, a Swedish researcher who once majored in industrial design, volunteered for the fMRI probe. The scanner revealed a personality quite at odds with her own sense of self.

She searched the scanner's images for the excited neurons in her prefrontal cortex that would reflect her enthusiasm for Prada and other high-fashion goods. Instead, the scanner detected the agitation in brain areas associated with anxiety and pain, suggesting she found it embarrassing to be seen in something insufficiently stylish.

It was fear, not admiration, that motivated her fashion sense.

"I thought I would be a cool fool," she said. "I was very uncool."

Auditioning successfully for the Good&Happy Well, Duh Files, Judy Illes, a senior research scholar at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics, says, "That might have some potentially scary possibilities for misuse."

Still incomplete in its applicability, this is equivalent to nano-biology in its potential impact on the very building blocks of our experience and values. The horse is out of the barn, and picking up speed. To the acknowledged complexities of evaluating public information, add commercial and political propaganda that acts as a tuning fork for the brain. It can't be stopped, so had better be understood.

Meanwhile, we here quietly out of the mainstream learn something every day. Didn't know Barbra Streisand, Justin Timberlake, and
Patrick Swayze were so uncool.

Makes sense to our brains.

Update: Behind the USNews archive wall, Marianne Szegedy-Maszak in Mysteries of the Mind explains that a huge proportion of our decision-making has roots outside our conscious thought.

In the personal coaching enterprise, it is often useful to ask about a past decision, "What were you thinking?!"  Often a deep breath and the question yield unconscious beliefs, unsuspected drivers.  Even before a decision is made, people benefit from a review of the relevant and roused belief-set. Nice to know who's driving, before setting off on a Tour of the Wild West!

Reference via David Wolfe.
 

The [approx.] Seven Month Itch, and the Forty Day[+] Cure

February 27, 2005

Tim Blair posts ironically: Blogs to Fade Away,

once readers realise they are rife with inaccuracies and mundane minutiae,

raising his eyebrows at the offhand AP prediction that exercised us here a few days ago.

It suggests our continued presence is based on reader approval, or at least on eyeballs. We here at Good&Happy, with readership racing weekly upward into the low double digits, don't audit our undertaking in those terms. Don't get us wrong, we cherish our readers, sources, commentors, and interlocutors. If we could, every day we would serve you fresh fragrant tea with a homemade muffin.  We would hang on your every word for up to 90 seconds at a time. We would name a new pastel-suede hug toy after your first love.

But we are in no way at the mercy of readers' taste, inclination, fashion, or action. We don't get paid. Our contract subsists in other parameters.

We write for ourselves and for our near-and-far-flung co-conspiring collaborators and beloveds; to keep a record; to find out what we think and are able to communicate; to practice satin-shod pirouettes of indirection; and to circulate invitations to the Cosmic Wedding Reception in one or another venue at sundry times and diverse occasions. It's a note in a bottle, and the reader must decide if it's a MacGuffin for further adventure. We're fully employed just locating corks and checking our spelling.

On the other hand, we're bored, subject to the law of diminishing returns, or at least retiring for a moment to reconsider.

What brought us as readers to the 'sphere was the limiting  superficiality and perhaps-unconscious bias of MSM / house organ coverage that oversimplified the challenge, complexity, and anxieties of 9.11 and events following; that ignored the American Episcopal Church's accelerating confusion in the wake of General Convention 2003; and that threw up impediments to understanding the course of the presidential campaign and election of 2004. Although those matters stimulated our desire to approach the fray, we did not expect to address them directly, or frequently.

In that context, propelled by then-raging crosscurrents of Rathergate, we therefore heaved one round pink foot at a time out of the scallop-shell onto the beach on September 12, 2004, muttering, on the twin subjects of wearing pajamas and having opinions, "I could do that."

Now, on the presenting issues, distributed information and the arrow of time have begun to make their point. 

--Mary Mapes has resigned, and Dan Rather seems increasingly ossified psychologically and molecularly. Even more of the story may surface through employment lawsuits. The old and new media are under scrutiny, and no journalism student can reasonably graduate thinking (s)he will be permitted to tell the rest of us what to think or to know (or not to know), without push-back for explanation.

As to Rather and CBS, we can see more clearly, it's simply the cut of their jib, and we release them all from our foolish expectation that people will do anything other than what they do and are. At the same time, we are deeply satisfied when the tack shifts, the shore comes into focus, and more of us are weathermen to figure out the wind direction.

--Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams and the international Anglican Primates are eyeball to eyeball with American/Canadian verbal and doctrinal slush machines.  Something has to give.

Without the internet, more of the vaguely uncomfortable but forcedly-genial pew potatoes would still be reading only the parish pundit on what's new at the bookstore and the building fund. Some of us have even  been galvanized to sneak a third or fourth look at the unpraiseworthy prose and indeterminate anthropology of the 1979 prayer book, and have morphed into outlines moving through the dead of night, packing our steamer trunks for early transport to the banks of the Tiber or Bosphorous.

--Our primary interest in the election, along with its outcome, was the philosophies, ethics, and rhetoric driving it and on display. We have no ambition here to be on anyone's Front Page as Hildy Johnson (editor, that's another matter) covering the political or any beat.  Others do that so much better, partly because of their inexplicable ability to sustain their interest for more than 15 minutes before skittering after another bright shiny idea.

Almost everyone who is rhetorically anyone is on the job, climbing the ladder of insight up from the bottom Lakoff rung -- Framing Issues, Joining Argument, Comparing  Value-systems, Shaping Vocabulary.  We here still have ideas, and are hatching many more. But for the moment we are able to add only fine points or echoes.

Furthermore, Lent according to the Orthodox calendar approaches on March 9, culminating this year in Pascha/Easter on May 1. Not least, the difference in calendars should be appreciated in the restaurant trade for spreading the Festive Easter Brunch traffic. As the Eastern Orthodox are developed in fasting, so in feasting.

A recent New Yorker aside says that our life is bedeviled by Envy and Addiction. Lent provides an opportunity to dissolve the Crazy Glue(tm) attachments to some of the instruments of both. Like last year, lenten 2005 will see little or no weekday 'sphere-wide surfing by us. The computer at Chez Dilys is licensed to hum away for e-mail, business, and graphics. But the motley gang of 'sphere-titillated Lusts of the Eyes for amusement and up-to-date-ness will for a time be buttoned into their spring linen pjs and packed off to the metaphorical spa for a rest cure, clearing the guest room for their more decorous print-seeking cousins, some of whom may very likely peep around the curtain here as semi-regular postings.

Inasmuch as Good&Happy has a portfolio, its purpose is to raise the Happiness Index here and now, for you and me and all Dilys' Crewe and everyone affected even indirectly. We seek deeper definitions and truer measures of the term, and the rehabilitation of some of its exiled components. Our passion for happiness is unlikely to disappear. We shall see what shape it takes for the next few weeks as the weather changes, inside and out.

It could look somewhat different by May, especially here in the warmer latitudes as patios are be-flowered, windows washed, beach parties firmly pencilled-in on breeze-ruffled calendar squares.

 

Archangel Michael

February 26, 2005

Lacking an authorized exorcist, all baptised persons are entitled to pray when confronting what they believe to be evil:

Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle. Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil; may God rebuke him, we humbly pray. O Prince of the heavenly host, by the power of God, thrust into hell Satan and all the evil spirits who wander through the world for ruin of souls. Amen.

Why this, here, today?  Who knows? Maybe because Scott Peck of the long-term best seller The Road Less Traveled has published a new book, Glimpses of the Devil: A True Story of Evil, Possession, Exorcism and Redemption, inspired by his experiences as a young psychiatrist. Now ill, he does not expect to write another book.

Via Dappled Things. The modern icon of St. Michael was written by Shirley Kontos.

Update: for an even more frequently useful prayer, see Darwin Kirby's Jottings:

Sometimes at night, when I am saying my prayers, I end by saying -- God bless all the people that I don't like and all the people who don't like me. And that covers a mighty multitude.

Via Orthodixie, which also proposes others.

Friendly Observation

February 25, 2005

If you believe an insouciant allusive  hip-and-elaborate cellphone ring tone impresses the rest of us...

Reconsider.

An observing European, perhaps before he has enjoyed his morning Starbuck's, writes:

[There] seems an inverse relationship between the length and complexity of the ringing set for the cell phone and the importance of the conversation - i.e. if the ring is a setting of Eine Kleine Nacht Musik, the full opening exposition repeated three times before the person picks up, set at maximum volume, the conversation will be about a sale of eye liner at the Wal Mart, or if the lodge is having that fish fry this week-end or next week-end. People look at me like the crabby Scandanavian when I opine that only people who trade currencies for high flying mutual funds or work in inner city trauma centers need their cell phones constantly on [in libraries] for a ring....what is it with the need for noise 24/7? It is it to fill an empty brain?

How about birdsong? We awake to dulcet whistles and chirps (the rooster emerging from the henhouse only when our sloth is obdurate).  What about a cardinal, or a mockingbird call, for the phone? Better yet, what about a program that translates overheard banal conversations into ocean waves, or cricket-signal?

We regret to learn that illegal cellphone jammers are selling briskly in New York.  We regret understanding their appeal.

Via The Corner.

"like Tammy Faye with a law degree"

February 25, 2005

...well, that's got to sting. Or at least it's supposed to.

But from our vantage, what's so dismissable? Improvisational hair, plentiful cosmetic assistance, independent opinions, provincial accent, theological bricoleur, toughing it out through disgrace and near-extinction, a bit boundary-impaired...Sounds pretty human to us, and no more ridiculous with additional education than a number of folks who, in different circumstances, might be a bit less glib'n'glossy, a little more grating.

Years ago, a columnist wrote in a national newspaper that contempt toward women per se would not have been demolished until a plump woman in ruffles named Arabella could plausibly rise to the executive ranks in a major corporation.

Then, Tammy Faye wisecracks might be funnier, without the sting.

Though Noonan's body language analysis is interesting, given the panache and attention to style that prevails these days.

Via Betsy Newmark.

Sanhedrin 2005 CE

February 24, 2005

In compliance with the exacting description by 12th-century Torah scholar Maimonides in the Mishna Torah, steps have been taken in Israel to convene a historic legal body, dormant for 1,600 years.

The rabbis were asked to prepare topics they thought the Sanhedrin should deal with:

* uniform kashrut [dietary kosher] certification;
* the precise length of the biblical cubit (with ramifications on many issues, including [the size of Noah's Ark and] the location of the altar on the Temple Mount);
* unemployment;
* assisting Anousim from Spain and Portugal and others whose ancestors were forced to convert;
* lost Jewish tribes from other parts of the world
* unifying Sephardic and Ashkenazi practices on issues such as prayer liturgy, kitniyot (legumes) on Passover, and glass utensils;
* the Sanhedrin's decision-making procedures;
* foreign workers;
* unifying the religious parties;
* restoring the Davidic monarchy;
* an ethical code for Israel's army (as opposed to the present one, which is based largely on secular sources);
* the establishment of regional "small Sanhedrins;"
* the long-missing "t'chelet" blue color;
* sending delegations around the country to hear people's concerns,
and much more.

A Talmudic tradition* states that Elijah the Prophet will present himself before a duly-ordained Sanhedrin when he announces the coming of the Messiah.

*Eruvin 43b; Maharatz Chajas ad loc; Rashash to Sanhedrin 13b.

Boruch Nachson is a Chassidic artist living in Chevron, Israel. Detail, Jerusalem in its Glory, Acrylic on canvas.

City of New Orleans

Plans and constraints imposed on the social level are like tired fingers in a porous dike. Whether smuggling candy bars to school or taking one step after another to geographical and political freedom, human beings will find a way. The Christian Science Monitor traces the train route of The City of New Orleans, then and now.

And, people are always people.  We liked this:

Then it's over Lake Pontchartrain by bridge and along its shores.

A passenger unconcerned with decorum is on his cellphone: You be in those stiletto pumps, he commands.

["Play song clip."]

  

 

 

Mistakes Will Be Made. And Appreciated.

Authentic Promotion's Molly Gordon believes

mistakes are the currency with which we purchase tickets in the amusement park of life,

sometimes required for surrender only when the ride has ended and we're a little unsteady on our feet. Having examined ourselves, apologized if necessary, and corrected what we can, what then is it possible to do with guilt, disappointment, or embarrassment because our arrow-shot-into-the-air fell to earth at some very inconvenient, and sometimes painful, latitude.  What is there to do?

Our version of some of her suggestions:

• Give up guilt as a strategy for revising or paying ransom to the past.
• Notice what happens when you agree to things in order to impress or please other people.
• Promptly revise commitments that you are not going to keep. Brief embarrassment is kinder to everyone than postponed dishonesty.
• Learn the difference between being wrong about something, and having something wrong with you.
• Let go of managing other people's reactions and feelings. That's their job. They're often very good at it.
• Entertain your motives, all of them. The more clearly you see what you want and why, the easier it will be to notice if you really want to follow those inclinations in a particular situation.
• Pay attention to the people you resent. Do they have something you want? How do they get away with feeling just fine about themselves when they do things you wouldn't allow yourself to do? You might notice something useful.
• Be aware of the feelings of guilt, shame, and repression in your body: the way the jaw muscles tighten and the shoulders creep upward, that sinking feeling in the midsection, the clipped, insistent tone of justification in your inner dialogue. Imagine honoring your principles about people and commitments without making your body a battleground.
• Write a new script. Try on different ways of telling the story of your mistakes so that they are steppingstones to insight and building blocks in relationships. Tell the story of what the hero learned, and how (s)he quite accidentally brought treasure to the people by what happened.

There are easy and useful ways to start doing this. Consult your local experienced lifecoach for more ideas. (S)he just might offer a substantial introductory session for nothing more than the fun of it.

Or not.