"What a deal of cold business…" [Snowy Valentine's Day Repost!]

"What a deal of cold business doth a man misspend the better part of life in! In scattering compliments, tendering visits, gathering and venting news, following feasts and plays, making a little winter-love in a dark corner."

-from Ben Jonson's Timber, 1640 (p. 5 of the 1892 edition, ed. Schelling).


[reposted from June, 2010]

Edward I. Koch, 1924-2013

In what sense is it true that, had the past been in some way different, an aspect of the present would be more substantial?

Counterfactual history is a literary genre, not a mode of scientific argument, so it was a (pleasant) surprise to come upon the following in a thoughtful and provocative article entitled "Default positions: how neuroscience's historical legacy has hampered investigation of the resting mind" by F. Callard, J. Smallwood, and D.S. Margulies, which appears in Frontiers in Psychology:

"... a compelling body of literature – largely unknown or disregarded ... – ... documents various methods to investigate the processes characterizing activities pursued during so-called “idle time” ... what we now refer to as self-generated mental activity including daydreaming, fantasy, mind-wandering, and dissociation. It is not difficult to see that if these research domains had flourished ... rather than been neglected, our vocabulary for describing self-generated thought would have been richer; our methods to investigate such thought more creative; and hence our capacities to interpret the psychological meaning of different forms of spontaneous neural activity in different systems, including the mental life and associated neural systems of the [Default Mode Network], more substantial."

Correction of the Week!

From today's New York Times:

Because of an editing error, a theater review on Wednesday about “Bad Kid” — David Crabb’s solo show about being a gay, goth youth in Texas — misidentified what the reviewer described as “the most famous ancestor of the goth movement.” It was Victor Frankenstein’s monster, not Frankenstein.

Zip Code 10048.

[Photo by Jon Thaler; Nikon 35mm f/2 on D700.]

Some things cannot be used twice.

When I heard this morning on the Writer's Almanac that today is the anniversary of the experimental detection of antimatter by Carl Anderson in 1932, I thought back to last month's MIT symposium in honor of the 80th birthday of Prof. William Bertozzi, where I heard a speaker lament: "Unfortunately one cannot use antiprotons twice."

From Sendai to K-Town.

As we photographed early blossoms of Spring yesterday, we paused, thinking of the people at the Nikon factory in Sendai who made the camera we held in our hands, and of their friends, family, & neighbors – surely some have been affected by the earthquake, tsunami, and on-going nuclear crisis. You can help.

"... I took black coffee ..."

"For fifteen days I struggled to prove that no functions analogous to those I have since called Fuchsian functions could exist; I was then very ignorant. Every day I sat down at my work table where I spent an hour or two; I tried a great number of combinations and arrived at no result. One evening, contrary to my custom, I took black coffee; I could not go to sleep; ideas swarmed up in clouds; I sensed them clashing until, to put it so, a pair would hook together to form a stable combination. By morning I had established the existence of a class of Fuchsian functions, those derived from the hypergeometric series. I had only to write up the results which took me a few hours."

- Jules Henri Poincaré (1854 – 1912), excerpted from "Science et Methode" (1908)

Also not a punk band.

Much like the coefficient of alienation, obliteration by incorporation is not a punk band.

Here's an excerpt from wikipedia:

"The obliteration phenomenon is a concept in library and information science, referring to the tendency for truly ground-breaking research papers to fail to be cited after the ideas they put forward are fully accepted into the orthodox world view. For example, Albert Einstein's paper on the theory of relativity is rarely cited in modern research papers on physical cosmology, despite its direct relevance."

12/25

We wish our NeuroCooking friends a Merry Christmas.

A metacognitive approach to problem-solving.

"You're a pretty smart fella."

"Not that smart."

"If you're not that smart, how'd you figure it out?"

"I tried to imagine a fellow smarter than myself. Then I tried to think, 'what would he do?' "

- from Heist (2001) by David Mamet

on intercourse & distinctions

"Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions."

-from Common Sense by Thomas Paine, 1776.

A speech of exemplary clarity, with lots of passion – and data.

And the answer is...?

At the recent excellent resting-state conference in Milwaukee, a question arose over dinner: Is the brain a machine for turning the past into the future, or a machine for turning the future into the past?

"What a deal of cold business..."

"What a deal of cold business doth a man misspend the better part of life in! In scattering compliments, tendering visits, gathering and venting news, following feasts and plays, making a little winter-love in a dark corner."

-from Ben Jonson's Timber, 1640 (p. 5 of the 1892 edition, ed. Schelling).

The power of "today".

One afternoon maybe sixteen years ago I was buying espresso coffee & olive oil at the family-run Italian deli long since displaced by a well-known national chain café as part of the process that was then called the "improvement" of downtown Rockville, Maryland. I put down my coffee & oil on the counter in front of a clerk, and looked at the display of loaves of fresh bread heaped on the counter behind him. Following my gaze, he asked:

"How many you want today?"

The local Audubon Naturalist Society has cardboard-on-wood signs staked beside their driveway, facing passing drivers, about half the year 'round, that say:

"Bird Food Sale Today".

Today I was sitting working at the dining room table and happened to look up to see, passing by, a piano truck. It was a white panel truck, with the business name painted on the side, and, really big across the back, the words:

"Piano Sale".

They forget the "Today".

In which your correspondent learns a valuable lesson.

When I took MIT's Physics Junior Lab, we did about seven or eight experiments each semester. However, we were required to submit, each semester, only one written report. For each of the the remainder of the experiments, we underwent an oral examination. (We had to bring our lab notebooks to the oral exam, and sometimes they would be examined, but we did not have to write a report.)

My lab partner and I were at the oral examination for the experiment on plasma physics. Our professor asked me to define the Langmuir length (also called the Langmuir distance). I started in on what was, I'm afraid, a lengthy explanation, which I suppose I thought would show off my knowledge of the subject.

Our (famous and distinguished) professor interrupted me.

"No, not like that," he said. "That's not the kind of answer I want. Here's the kind of answer I want. Imagine you've had dinner with your girlfriend. You've had a little wine. Now you're in bed. She asks you, 'say, what's the Langmuir length?' What you want to do is give her the briefest possible answer, and then fuck. That's the kind of answer I want. Now, try again. What's the Langmuir length?"

I provided a one-sentence answer; he approved; we went on.

Remembering through Story

I recently participated in a storytelling workshop presented by Narativ, and gained insight into how story can actually be an embodiment of a person, in the sense that it can presence them in a community.

Participants were directed to tell a 3-minute story as if we were one of our grandparents. All 13 participants shared a pivotal moment, told in the voice of one of their grandparents, as well as a brief biography of that relative's life. At the end of the storytelling, it felt as if 13 additional chairs had been added to our circle, as if each of the grandparents who had "spoken" were now sitting amongst us.

Murray Nossel, the Director of Narativ, introduced the anthropological concept of "re-membering" (also used in narrative therapy) and offered this summary: "When people die, they are no longer members of our community, and we must re-member them by telling their stories."

This exercise got me thinking about why it is so critical that organizations share the stories of their founders.

I have the tremendous pleasure of working with Enterprise Community Partners, for whom Jim Rouse, their extraordinary founder, is very much a felt presence. I get the feeling that most decisions at Enterprise are made with Jim at the table, so to speak; he is often quoted, and many staff and board members continue to share personal and professional stories about him.

And I was reminded of a story David Beckwith, of The Needmor Fund, shared with me about their founder, Virginia Secor Stranahan. Very much focused on the family legacy of community stewardship, their board now contains family members who once played under the very table at which they currently meet. The Needmor Fund not only shares stories about the organization's history at every meeting, they even have an effigy of Virginia Secor Stranahan seated at the table!

Start now, when your founders are alive, so that their values and motivations live on to forever spark understanding and innovation within your organization. A great example of a young organization sharing the story of their founding can be found here, from Mercy Corps.

And certainly remember friends, family, mentors, and other people who have touched your life. Re-member their way back around your proverbial campfire.