TeledyN - the skin of culture - Comments

C'mon and get happy - yet

mrG — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 18:18:00 -0500

C'mon and get happy - yet another cognitive chicken and egg problem elegantly solved by a simple cultural ritual

Knowing someone who is happy makes you 15.3% more likely to be happy yourself, the study found. A happy friend of a friend increases your odds of happiness by 9.8%, and even your neighbor's sister's friend can give you a 5.6% boost.

"Your emotional state depends not just on actions and choices that you make, but also on actions and choices of other people, many of which you don't even know,"
[ Happiness is contagious ]

Thank goodness I found this

a stranger — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 05:33:11 -0500

Thank goodness I found this - you just saved my marble mouse from the bin!

3 minutes with a screwdriver and screenwipe and it's as good as new. Clicky-clicky.

A Practical Magick Primer,

mrG — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 13:34:00 -0500

A Practical Magick Primer, it occurs to me there's more to this oxytocin trust reflex than meets the eye; deep, deep repercussions appearing everywhere, and especially on that most sensitive of all human topics:

"That, Lord, is why you willed that the Son at your right hand, the man whom you made strong for yourself, should be called Jesus, that is to say, Saviour, for he will save his people from their sins, and there is no other in whom there is salvation. He taught us to love him by first loving us, even to death on the cross. By loving us and holding us so dear, he stirred us to love him who had first loved us to the end."
[ He Loved us First: Advent Reading by William of Saint-Thierry ]

This technique is a rampant motif, and herein the socio-evolutionary purpose and essential value. Psychiatry transference, Tony Robbins Power Within, fraternity oaths; religion solves a delicate Chicken and Egg problem in that a human community union is a mind/body reflex that needs an opening gambit before it begins. The catalyst promise, the vital ingredient for individual compliance and thereby societal cohesion, "Because He loved us first" just requires credible prerequisite proof, some token pre-assurance of His 'trust' -- perhaps even if only a sealed envelope stuffed with worthless magazine clippings.

"I have drugged my people"

Oh this is a choice piece of shamanic code, this one is. Its no wonder Richard Bandler and Aliester Crowley both went mad: the 'kill' was just too juicy to resist ....

Meanwhile, back at the Trust

mrG — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 23:52:38 -0500

Meanwhile, back at the Trust thread, yet another facet of the role of Oxytocin and the notion of Who's Yer Daddy to follow on, it seems it gets a little worse for that original feel-good post back on the KM site: inducing the neuro-sense of trust is as simple as the con feigning trust of their mark, reeling in the fish by way of a dear friend they cutely call THOMAS

The neurochemical system at play in the con is, as Zak explains, the The Human Oxytocin Mediated Attachment System (THOMAS). THOMAS is a powerful brain circuit that releases the neurochemical oxytocin when we are trusted and induces a desire to reciprocate the trust we have been shown -- even with strangers.

When THOMAS is engaged by someone who displays trust, we become more vulnerable to the devices of the unscrupulous. The prefrontal cortex, home of our deliberative, and hence more vigilant faculties, takes a back seat while THOMAS flirts with disaster. The flip side of this, of course, is that if THOMAS was never engaged, we'd never empathize with anyone or be able to build relationships. Zak's research suggests that about 2% of those we encounter in trust scenarios are, using the clinical term of art -- 'bastards'.

[ The Psychology of Grifting ]

So we're only to beware of trusting the genetic mutant sociopaths? Well, no, not quite. As those who've been on sales motivation courses might suspect and as the following video cleverly illustrates, there is an automatic brain-juice high awaiting the executor of the 'kill', and repeated doses of that built-in perk itself can be the step up into a life of predation for just about anybody willing to undergo the conditioning to get there ...

Keep in mind for a moment that nearly last image, the face on the pidgeon when, after the con is done and exposed, he's just been told he can keep the envelope. Man oh man, he is happy happy happy and still believing in things too good to be true, he's a pal of these guys, even after all that's just happened to him; he's got Treasure and he's just been told it is his to keep. w00t w00t!

Next time you see someone being sold on snake oil and you wonder how it's done, you'll know.

Gee, I'm only 4 years ahead

mrG — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 13:30:15 -0500

Gee, I'm only 4 years ahead of my time now:

IN THE beginning computers were human. Then they took the shape of metal boxes, filling entire rooms before becoming ever smaller and more widespread. Now they are evaporating altogether and becoming accessible from anywhere.

That is about as brief a history of computers as anyone can make it. The point is that they are much more than devices in a box or in a data centre. Computing has constantly changed shape and location -- mainly as a result of new technology, but often also because of shifts in demand.

[ IT's global 'cloud' | Let it rise | The Economist ]

Ok, maybe five years. That makes me feel a little better.

no dazzling job offers yet

mrG — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 09:53:17 -0400

no dazzling job offers yet from this one; I was sure this essay would hit a spark with sr. exec scouting HR for some whole-systems thinking enterprise somewhere, but in the four years and a bit since, best I had was one nomination for Best Essay of the Year (no prize) and the closest real industrial push to networked componentization is the way Ubuntu extended the old Gentoo package-install model of bootstrapping the unraveling sweater from a single CD install (a notion I had proposed to pre-Mandriva multi-CD Mandrake, and was laughed from the cooker room), and one tech VC who says un-interoperable systems are un-interesting (he also wants to see real opensource, and not the once-popular rack of patents).

Oh, and Google, who I had thought would find this networked-computing notion a true no brainer dead-obvious strategy, well, at least they did grasp some of the engineering business benefits of a Small-Tools approach, which is at least some progress from the Explorilla software kaiju we'd been using.

But hey, it's only 4 years later. My own best-estimate for innovations-lag in this industry is 3-5 years so maybe this industry innovation is just one on the tardier side.

Yes, somebody is wrong. that

mrG — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 12:02:05 -0400

Yes, somebody is wrong. that much seems certain. Wrong, or bending results to support their own agendas. There is also the annoying point of view (which I tend to side with) which says the planet is indeed warming but it is supposed to be warming -- ie it has nothing whatsoever to do with the considerable ego (and funding lobbies) of tiny humans. For example, why else would Mars also show identical warming?

What I caution, as one trained in the rhetoric of Science, is to run far far away as soon as you hear the word 'simulation'; all simulations, on both side of the fence, amount to prognostication, ie sorcery and are only really useful as tools of the imagination. Simulations only describe the 'reality' inside the pre-frontal cortex of the programmer of the simulation. In short, the data is 100% worthless. Ok, maybe 99.9% worthless.

If simulations actually worked, Las Vegas would be out of business and the US economy would be healthy. QED.

As to the actual measurable empirical facts, they are few and far between in this debate, and that's kinda odd, don't you think? For example, "carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was the highest for at least 600,000 years" is a pretty incredible claim to give without any reference, yet the links above will lead you to the Greenland Core Samples that show our Earth to have been considerably warmer than now ... up until roughly 1500AD when it starts to cool for the mini Ice Age that gave Shakespearean England and Shogun Japan their weird style of dress, then it warms again only to drop off, oddly, with the rise of the use of coal!!. But lo, it warms once more, in the first half of the 20th century. And then, as we develop jet travel, ocean liners and NASA shuttles, it cools off!? ... until very recently, and then it warms again, and then, the last few years, we cool.

I don't know about you, and I admittedly do not have much hard empirical data, but what I do have all mirrors the graph on this page and I struggle to find a correlation between these empirical warm/cool cycles and the activities of Man.

Especially on Mars.

That's odd. I thought the

a stranger — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 14:30:40 -0400

That's odd. I thought the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was the highest for at least 600,000 years. I also thought that carbon dioxide was a greenhouse gas. And I thought the latest on the arctic was that there would be no summer ice by 2013.

Somebody's wrong, thats for sure.

You made that up!

a stranger — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 14:24:21 -0400

You made that up!

CNN on Psylocybin and what,

mrG — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 17:50:00 -0400

CNN on Psylocybin and what, only two years since seeing the same story here? I must be getting old. I am losing my edge ....

Disclosure - this is

mrG — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 11:32:00 -0400

Disclosure - this is hilarious

5.. DISCLOSURE - you may of course disclose your paid participation in this program. You may also state that Canada Blog Friends has paid you to help promote awareness for harness racing, but please do not discuss me personally, or Canada Blog Friends at length in the post. Remember the CBF is a very private affair - only good bloggers are invited to join. The members list is Top Secret and never published and there are no tracking codes whatsoever.

OMG darn it all now I done gone and ruined it! Another Secret Order exposed. I figure, though, he should have done what Crowley did, leak it freely, but cover it all with demonic symbols to scare the sheep away.

But now the cat's out of the bag, that's just the way it goes sometimes. I'll take some sliver of the blame I suppose, but really, Robert Campbell (ol' roberrific) really should have known better than to put me on his rube mailing list. I mean, he said he'd read my blog, that we're an exclusive hand-picked elite, so really he should know better, right? Can't be that much surprise to him. OMG, did I just violate another clause of the Disclosure? Dang. I'm just having a clumsy day; the moon must be in Clutz.

Btw, if you notice any sudden blog-share attention extolling Ontario Harness Horse Association (OHHA) racing on www.getsulky.com or their new shill-spotlights on Flickr and Squidoo, it isn't because the dreary anachronism has suddenly become très chiq. Not at all, no, it's solely because those 'bloggers' are being paid $7.50 times their Google Rank to pretend to you that it's the Greatest Thing They Ever Did^tm.

addendum: Rob responds:

I heed your words; you have affected me.
Obviously I need to rethink the cbf disclosure policy and all moral implications of paid posts, and in general evolve a more organic method of helping my clients.

The program started as a method of marketing Canadian movies in Canada. Now I'm not sure it has much reach beyond that.

RobC

Dear Teledyn, The climate

a stranger — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 10:42:00 -0400

Dear Teledyn,

The climate change declaration below was issued in a news conference in Orlando, Florida on July 1, 2008.

The associated press release is available for download at the web site : www.spaceandscience.net.

Best Regards,

John L. Casey
Director
Space and Science Research Center
4700 Millenia Blvd. Ste.175
Orlando, FL 32839
Tel: 407-835-3635
Fax: 407-210-3901

--------------------------------------------------------

Summary Declaration of the Start of the Next Global Climate Change

After an exhaustive review of a substantial body of climate research, and in conjunction with the obvious and compelling new evidence that exists, it is time that the world community acknowledges that the Earth has begun its next climate change. In an opinion echoed by many
scientists around the world, the Space and Science Research Center (SSRC), today declares that the world’s climate warming of past decades has now come to an end. A new climate era has already started that is bringing predominantly colder global temperatures for many
years into the future. In some years this new climate will create dangerously cold weather with significant ill-effects world wide. Global warming is over – a new cold climate has begun.

Space and Science Research Center
Orlando, Florida, USA
July 1, 2008

The Minister of Industry

mrG — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 15:32:00 -0400

The Minister of Industry responds (personally):

The Government of Canada has introduced Bill C-61 (An Act to Amend the Copyright Act). The proposed legislation is a made-in-Canada approach that balances the needs of Canadian consumers and copyright owners, promoting culture, innovation and competition in the digital age.
What does Bill C-61 mean to Canadians? Specifically, it includes measures that would: * expressly allow you to record TV shows for later viewing; copy legally purchased music onto other devices, such as MP3 players or cell phones; make back-up copies of legally purchased books, newspapers, videocassettes and photographs onto devices you own; and limit the "statutory damages" a court could award for all private use copyright infringements; * implement new rights and protections for copyright holders, tailored to the Internet, to encourage participation in the online economy, as well as stronger legal remedies to address Internet piracy * clarify the roles and responsibilities of Internet Service Providers related to the copyright content flowing over their network facilities * provide photographers with the same rights as other creators What Bill C-61 does not do: * it would not empower border agents to seize your iPod or laptop at border crossings, contrary to recent public speculation What this Bill is not: * it is not a mirror image of U.S. copyright laws. Our Bill is made-in-Canada with different exceptions for educators, consumers and others and brings us into line with more than 60 countries including Japan, France, Germany and Australia Bill C-61 was introduced in the Commons on June 12, 2008 by Industry Minister Jim Prentice and Heritage Minister Josée Verner. For more information, please visit the Copyright Reform Process website at www.ic.gc.ca/epic/site/crp-prda.nsf/en/home Thank you for sharing your views on this important matter. The Honourable Josée Verner Minister of Canadian Heritage, Status of Women and Official Languages and Minister for La Francophonie
The Honourable Jim Prentice Minister of Industry

another shill ploy, this one

mrG — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 00:02:47 -0400

another shill ploy, this one with the offer of a free hip MP3 player (also featured out at the Walmart)

Matchstick, Canada’s Word of Mouth marketing company, is looking to hook up a limited number of qualified individuals with the latest portable entertainment device from our client. We are specifically looking for bloggers or individuals with a social networking page who are highly sociable and connected and currently own and frequently use an MP3 player.

Yes, of course I signed up. You crazy? That's a free MP3 player and exactly the model my 8 year old wants to own, so I owe it to him to at least put my name in. I won't get it, of course, because I'm not in their mindlessly impressionable youth category of 16-24 (ie, all those now going "what on earth does he mean, 'shill'?" and, well, to qualify I had to give them this URL where the very first thing they are going to see is, well, this story. Rats, eh? Bad planning what? Yeah, I know. My bad.

But there's still hope for you and now you know about their age rule you can click in and answer accordingly.

Some recent science on this

mrG — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 11:59:20 -0400

Some recent science on this neuro-cognitive 'trust' premise ...

"(...) subjects in the oxytocin group show no change in their trusting behavior after they learned that their trust had been breached several times while subjects receiving placebo decrease their trust."

That is extremely interesting. This suggests that oxytocin, a mammalian hormone neurotransmitter that is known to be related to maternal behaviour and bonding, also is modulating social trust.
[ Oxytocin: the direct route to altruism? ]

In other words, your 'acceptance' of the 'face-value' and observed reputation of this salesperson could be seriously tainted by something as simple as some judicious applied aromatherapy, and that pretty much changes the facetime trust game completely.

Then again, on a positive note, if the live in-person experience could be manipulated so easily through an incense, then conversely the online experience would be completely immune to such tinkering! ... unless, of course, oxytocin could be triggered by sound, or images, or both ... which it probably can ...