Entries Tagged 'Culture' ↓

There is a very interesting and well-written post over at dive into mark about what is going to happen when Microsoft stops supporting the MSN Music DRM.

I’ll let Mark Pilgrim do the talking:

So what happens on August 31, 2008? On that day, Microsoft will turn off the servers that they maintain for the sole purpose of validating that the songs that people have already “purchased” through MSN Music are still theirs to play. Those people (hereafter “the victims”) will not notice the change right away. The victims will only notice it when they purchase a new computer, or when they upgrade the operating system on their current computer, or when the hard drive in their computer dies and needs to be rebuilt/reinstalled. At that point — transferring the music files they have “purchased” to another drive or a new computer — the Microsoft music player running on the victim’s PC (like iTunes, but all Microsoft-y instead of Apple-y) will make a call to Microsoft’s validation servers to verify that the music files were legitimately purchased. This call will fail, since the servers are not responding, since Microsoft has intentionally turned them off. The Microsoft music player will then conclude, incorrectly but steadfastly, that the music files were downloaded illegally and that the victim is a filthy pirate, and it will refuse to play them. In this case, the left hand knows exactly what the right hand is doing: they’re both giving you the finger.

An article at the New York Times by Benedict Carey talks about how we’ve become acclimated to ignoring the psychological shortcomings of individuals in our social groups to make our social interactions easier.

From the article:

In the modern vernacular, to say someone is “in denial” is to deliver a savage combination punch: one shot to the belly for the cheating or drinking or bad behavior, and another slap to the head for the cowardly self-deception of pretending it’s not a problem.

Yet recent studies from fields as diverse as psychology and anthropology suggest that the ability to look the other way, while potentially destructive, is also critically important to forming and nourishing close relationships. The psychological tricks that people use to ignore a festering problem in their own households are the same ones that they need to live with everyday human dishonesty and betrayal, their own and others’. And it is these highly evolved abilities, research suggests, that provide the foundation for that most disarming of all human invitations, forgiveness.

In this emerging view, social scientists see denial on a broader spectrum — from benign inattention to passive acknowledgment to full-blown, willful blindness — on the part of couples, social groups and organizations, as well as individuals. Seeing denial in this way, some scientists argue, helps clarify when it is wise to manage a difficult person or personal situation, and when it threatens to become a kind of infectious silent trance that can make hypocrites of otherwise forthright people.

This opens up all sorts of questions regarding our own self-perceptions of honest, forthright behavior. While I’m not sure how effectively social scientists and psychologists are truly able to quantify the number of allowances of dishonest behavior, it is an interesting study nonetheless.

Here is a short documentary about the composer and experimental musician, Steve Reich. I love the man’s work and think he paved the way for a lot of modern experimental musicians. He’s been covered and sampled by a lot of modern artists and there are still people performing some of his most famous pieces.

Check it out:

Here we find another set of super-realist sculptures, this time by Marc Sijan, a Wisconsin native who began using plaster, polyester resin, varnish, and oil paints to craft extremely like-like figures in graduate school in the early 1970’s. Ruth Sternberg (formerly of the Canton Institute of Art) once said of Mr. Sijan’s work, “Sijan’s figures are incredibly lifelike, sensuous and graceful. In fact, they are so lifelike, they seem always on the verge of movement, a mere instant away from action. The pores in the skin, the tiny hairs, and veins; even the bald spots, the blemishes, the individual shapes of the faces that make human beings so similar, yet so unique: These are the essence of what makes Marc Sijan’s work so arresting.” While his work has often been compared to the work of our previous subject, Duane Hanson, it has a very different quality to it. He seems to focus less on making social commentary and far more on capturing the posed moments of people’s lives in all of their three-dimensional glory.

Note: Much to the chagrin of many of the commenters on my previous super-realist post, I’ve included pictures of some of his works of obese people. Also, as so many of you said you’d have used your talent for, a marginally “hot chick.”

Here are six pictures of his pieces:

Deep in Thought


Mamma Mia


Depressed Mode


Help Me Snorkle


Mr. Policeman


Tourist Trap

The 34th edition of Encephalon, a quick guide to the previous two weeks worth of neuroscience news, has been posted at Distributed Neuron.

From Encephalon 34:

To start, Jake Young gives us a great analysis of a study of human and macaque visual cortices. Researchers dissected and analyzed the brains of people who had lost vision in one eye, comparing the results to a controlled study of macaques who had been partially blinded. It’s a fascinating analysis that also demonstrates the limits of fMRI.