Pater Familias

FIREFLIES AND ROMANCE.

Philip — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 14:26:49 +0000

FIREFLIES AND ROMANCE. Fireflies evoke romance and past summer evenings. The Kevin Kline “Midsummer Night’s Dream”, with Rupert Everett as Oberon and Michelle Pfeiffer as Titania, ended with images of the fairies as fireflies as the lovers go off together. This article tells how each flash of light by a firefly is part of a courtship ritual. The fireflies flashing in the air are all male. Female fireflies stay on the ground and respond to the flashes of one of the males at the precise time interval for that species. Each species has a different pattern of flashes. (There are six different species in the field in eastern Massachusetts where the article is set). A female may respond to as many as ten males in an evening, but at the end of the evening, she mates with only one.

MEMORIES AND MARSHMALLOWS.

Philip — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 20:40:58 +0000

MEMORIES AND MARSHMALLOWS. Thinking about choices between present and future is more complicated if pleasure in the present will give rise to happy memories in the future. Experiments with young children avoid these complications because we assume that when children make choices, they will not take into account future memories. Experiments with cookies and marshmallows also avoid these complications because cookies and marshmallows don’t give rise to many memories. On the other hand, Proust found happiness in the memories arising from the taste of a cookie.

STORING UP MEMORIES.

Philip — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 22:44:52 +0000

STORING UP MEMORIES. My brother and a friend were studying late for an exam in graduate school. They paused to discuss how many others in their age group were at that moment having a good time. They agreed that in the terms of Aesop’s fable, it was graduate students like themselves who were grasshoppers, spending their time in study and foregoing happy memories. The young people who were having a good time were the ants, storing up happy memories. The idea that you can invest in memories shows up all the time. Think of CASABLANCA: “We’ll always have Paris.”

“THERE IS NO GREATER PAIN….” (COMMENT).

Philip — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 22:39:02 +0000

“THERE IS NO GREATER PAIN….” (COMMENT). Mary Jane’s reaction to the Madoff post was that Dante had a different perspective on memories of happy times. She referred me to a line by Paola in Canto V in THE INFERNO. (Canto V tells of Paola and Francesca). The quote is: “Nessun maggior dolore che ricordarsi del tempo felice nella miseria.” In Sinclair’s prose translation: “There is no greater pain than to recall the happy time in misery.”

THE HAPPY MEMORIES OF CRIMINALS (COMMENT).

Philip — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 22:21:24 +0000

THE HAPPY MEMORIES OF CRIMINALS (COMMENT). Dick Weisfelder commented on yesterday’s post on Bernie Madoff that perhaps other criminals, including killers, have happy memories. I am in unhappy agreement. I hesitated on whether to make the Madoff post because I find it painful to think of criminals reminiscing happily. I think people like me tend to think of criminals who specialize in crimes involving money as being in it only for the money. Yet some criminologists believe that armed robbers are motivated by the joy of dominating people, of putting them in fear of their lives. Others enjoy the excitement of being outlaws, defiers of the legal order. All of which makes deterrence difficult.

BERNIE MADOFF’S MEMORIES.

Philip — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 23:01:40 +0000

BERNIE MADOFF’S MEMORIES. What must if be like to be Bernie Madoff? After a life of luxury, he is universally hated and reviled, rejected by his family, and today was sentenced to 150 years in jail. And yet, I wonder. He has his happy memories. Memories of the things that were important to him, memories of the days and years when he was always the most important person in the room, treated with deference wherever he went. Knowing that the respect was not deserved seems not to have mattered to him. I suspect that if Bernie Madoff had the opportunity to live his life over again, he would choose the same path.

THE BOSTON MOLASSES DISASTER.

Philip — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 14:26:51 +0000

THE BOSTON MOLASSES DISASTER. Sam Anderson gives an amusing list of all the things that distracted him in the course of writing his article. One of the items is the Boston Molasses Disaster. Anderson says: “If I were going to excuse you from reading this article for any single distraction, which I am not, it would be to read about the Boston Molasses Disaster.” Here is a link to the wikipedia article on the Boston Molasses Disaster. When I studied American history in high school, I never encountered the Boston Molasses Disaster, but apparently both Annalisa and Nick learned that in 1919, a huge molasses tank in Boston collapsed, killing 21 people. I suppose the significance of the Boston Molasses Disaster for the teaching of history is that students would learn that in 1919–instead of sugar–“molasses was the standard sweetener in the United States.” It’s also a good story.

YOU CAN’T REALLY MULTITASK.

Philip — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 01:23:42 +0000

YOU CAN’T REALLY MULTITASK. Sam Anderson says that despite all the talk about multitasking, with minor exceptions, people can really pay attention to only one thing at a time. The best we can do is to switch rapidly from one thing to another. The phrase for this is apparently: “continuous partial attention.”

ALLOCATING ATTENTION.

Philip — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 01:17:24 +0000

ALLOCATING ATTENTION. Economists think in terms of allocating a limited amount of a resource. Traditionally, they deal with the problem of efficiently allocating a limited income. I posted here about how economists are now thinking about allocating time and that some psychologists are thinking in terms of allocating a willpower budget. Sam Anderson quotes the great economist Herbert Simon as pointing out in 1971 that: “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”

AGREEING TO MY EXPERIENCE.

Philip — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 01:28:23 +0000

AGREEING TO MY EXPERIENCE. I posted here on Jonah Lehrer’s insights into Virginia Woolf. Lehrer concluded that: “Woolf realized that the self emerges via the act of attention.” Sam Anderson tells how Winifred Gallagher, the author of RAPT, a book about the control of attention, is able to ignore the sound of jackhammers outside her apartment window. “Gallagher stresses that because attention is a limited resource….our moment-by-moment choice of attentional targets determines, in a very real sense, the shape of our lives.” The epigraph to Gallagher’s book is from William James: “My experience is what I agree to attend to.” I think this is an empowering idea.

WHY FOCUS ON A DOT?

Philip — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 23:13:46 +0000

WHY FOCUS ON A DOT? Alan Jacobs in The New Atlantis takes issue here with Sam Anderson’s article and with William James as well: “This is wrong-headed in a number of ways, but chief among them is this: there’s no good reason for focusing on a dot.”

PAYING ATTENTION TO A DOT.

Philip — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 23:12:59 +0000

PAYING ATTENTION TO A DOT. I posted here about the difficulty four year olds have in not paying attention to a marshmallow. In this article Sam Anderson points out that William James argued that it was difficult for a person to focus attention. James set the challenge of focusing the attention on a dot. James contended that a human can’t focus on a dot for more than a few seconds. Our minds crave variety. Anderson took on the challenge. He tried to focus for thirty minutes and concluded that he had not been able to focus on the dot. He says: “The dot… becomes only the hub of your total dot-related distraction.”

BAD LINE CALLS.

Philip — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 01:19:35 +0000

BAD LINE CALLS. I have previously posted (for example, here) on error rates for sports officials. The Wall Street Journal recently alerted me to a study of tennis line calls by researchers at the University of California at Davis (see here and here). They reviewed some 4400 points chosen at random from the 2007 Wimbledon championship and found 83 bad line calls. The articles about the study seem to be most interested in the finding that a disproportionate number of incorrect “out” calls were made–70 as opposed to only 13 incorrect “in” calls. I am more interested that about two per cent of points are affected by errors. This is a higher error rate than I would have expected.

CUTE CATS AND REVOLUTIONARY ACTIVITIES.

Philip — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 19:41:34 +0000

CUTE CATS AND REVOLUTIONARY ACTIVITIES. Annalisa and Lee Bryant claim to be followers of web sites that show cute cats. I posted here about Lolcat, which is a web site devoted to cute cats and novel grammar. This article explains the “Cute Cat Theory of Internet Censorship, as propounded by Ethan Zuckerman, a senior researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.” The theory is that “most people use the Internet to enjoy their lives, and among the ways people spread joy is to share pictures of cute cats.” It is hard for the Iranian government (or other governments) to shut down blogs to censor political messages when the blogs have become part of daily life. Zuckerman gives Kenya as another example. Kenya has the second largest number of bloggers in Africa, many of whom blog about rugby. Think of how much anger there would be in this country if an attempt were made to cut down on blogs devoted to cute cats and sports.

BIRDS AND JOURNALISTS AND TELEPHONE WIRES.

Philip — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 22:21:12 +0000

BIRDS AND JOURNALISTS AND TELEPHONE WIRES. Senator Eugene McCarthy said that nobody can explain why journalists focus on one news story for a while and suddenly shift to another story. He compared the journalists to a flock of birds that will suddenly move from one telephone wire to another without explanation.