Psychedelic Takes on Traditional Folk (videos)

Did I mention that all these bands are from Germany in the early 70s?  Yes, this is another one of those posts I always do with a few youtube picks from ______ country of ______ genre during ______ era. 

Setting the paradigm at top left, Rufus Zuphall rips through Derroll Adams' Portland Town.  You'll find the band is often called Germany's Jethro Tull, but you'll also find more unpolished, rugged charm in the band's recordings.  I'm on the fence on whether the drummer's performance is over the top or not.  Top right is an early clip from Hölderlin, taking a very progressive approach to the folk tradition.  Like I said, I don't have much to say.  But it's good stuff, no?

Singer is public enemy #1 for many people with disabilities, but Johnson found herself oddly comfortable debating him, first in Charleston, South Carolina, where she lived, and then at Princeton, where he invited her to speak. Here she was, face to face with a man who believes her parents wouldn’t have been wrong to have her killed, yet she couldn’t help but like and respect him. A woman with a big heart and an open mind!

Can serious disabilities keep you from living a perfectly good life? Of course, says Singer, while Johnson says No. The problem with having a disability, she says, is entirely socially manufactured. Society does much too little to accommodate differences, and it’s this that makes the lives of the disabled difficult. What is the nature of this “good life” that’s equally attainable by anyone, no matter how severe their disability? Well, she doesn’t quite say, but I surmise it’s “different strokes for different folks.” What’s good for me is one thing, what’s good for a person with a severe disability is (often) another.

The idea that there is a single way for all humans to flourish gets you into some silly ideas about people with disabilities. In Martha Nussbaum’s book Frontiers of Justice, the general picture is this: justice should be defined by results. In a just society, every human fulfills a set of human capacities (and each kind of animal fulfills the capacities typical of the species— the book also has a chapter about animals). The goal must be for every human, regardless of disability, to have human dignity, not just their own form of dignity.

To see how peculiar this view is, you have to think about what it would mean in practice. One of the distinctively human capacities is the capacity to participate in political activity. If disabilities stand in the way for “Sesha”—a person Nussbaum uses as an example–some facsimile of political participation should be arranged anyway. But wait, what if Sesha has no grasp of politics? What if she couldn’t care less? It’s still important for her to flourish by our species standard.

On such a notion of what the good life amounts to, a disability is entirely something to be overcome. Each person must in one way or another, symbolic or real, attain the goods that are definitive of being human. I’m with Johnson here. She attained the goods that are definitive of being Harriet McBryde Johnson, and to hell (I can hear her say) with any peculiarly human goods that were beyond her.

But then, there’s also a problem with Johnson’s view. Some disabilities are so severe as to put all goods off limits, or even to make life a constant misery. Why is even a life like that worth preserving? I like the fact that Johnson does not resort to vapid phrases like “the sanctity of human life”—she was an atheist–but the fact is that she doesn’t have an answer.

Considered a pioneer of the talk-show format, Crane got his start on the radio in 1958 at KONO in San Antonio. After a stint at WPEN in in Philadelphia, he went on to KGO in San Francisco, where, according to his wikipedia profile, "he delighted and irritated callers and listeners with his forthright style and unwillingness to suffer fools quietly, often hanging up on callers in contravention of the polite ethos of the time."

In September 1963, he debuted on ABC-TV, where he hosted a couple of late night talk shows through the end of 1965. Crane, considered rather hip and edgy, was known as "the bad boy of late night television" according to the New York Times of his times. He conducted the first televised interview of the Rolling Stones in the United States in June 1964, and also hosted Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Bob Dylan, George Wallace, and Lee Harvey Oswald's mother, among others. He later worked as an actor on television shows such as "The Virginian" and "Love, American Style".

In 1971, Les Crane's reading of the poem "Desiderata" reached number 8 on the Billboard Charts, and earned him a Grammy for best spoken word recording. Its inspirational tone hit a chord in the popular sentiments of the times, but Crane disavowed the recording in 1987, saying "I can't listen to it without gagging", and even expressed his preference for the National Lampoon's parody version of the hit called "Deteriorata", released in 1972. (Station Manager Ken played both songs (the Crane version first) on his radio program back in on September 26, 2001 (streaming real audio))

Les Crane ended his working days as the chairman of a software company in northern California. He is survived by his daughter (whom he had with actress and ex-wife Tina Louise) and his wife of 20 years.

For 40 years, psychologists thought that humans and animals kept time with a biological version of a stopwatch. Somewhere in the brain, a regular series of pulses was being generated. When the brain needed to time some event, a gate opened and the pulses moved into some kind of counting device.

One reason this clock model was so compelling: Psychologists could use it to explain how our perception of time changes. Think about how your feeling of time slows down as you see a car crash on the road ahead, how it speeds up when you’re wheeling around a dance floor in love. Psychologists argued that these experiences tweaked the pulse generator, speeding up the flow of pulses or slowing it down.

Staring at an angry face for five seconds feels longer than staring at a neutral one.

But the fact is that the biology of the brain just doesn’t work like the clocks we’re familiar with. Neurons can do a good job of producing a steady series of pulses. They don’t have what it takes to count pulses accurately for seconds or minutes or more. The mistakes we make in telling time also raise doubts about the clock models. If our brains really did work that way, we ought to do a better job of estimating long periods of time than short ones. Any individual pulse from the hypothetical clock would be a little bit slow or fast. Over a short time, the brain would accumulate just a few pulses, and so the error could be significant. The many pulses that pile up over long stretches of time should cancel their errors out. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. As we estimate longer stretches of time, the range of errors gets bigger as well.

CLICK CLOCK
These days, new kinds of experiments using everything from computer simulations to brain scans to genetically engineered mice are helping unlock the nature of mental time. And their results show that the brain does not use a single stopwatch. Instead, it has several ways to tell time, and none of them seems to work like a conventional clock.

Dean Buonomano, a neuroscientist at UCLA, argues that in order to perceive time in fractions of a second, our brains tell time as if they were observing ripples on a pond. Let’s say you are listening to a chirping bird. Two of its chirps are separated by a tenth of a second. The first chirp triggers a spike of voltage in some auditory neurons, which in turn causes some other neurons to fire as well. The signals reverberate among the neurons for about half a second, just as it takes time for the ripples from a rock thrown into a pond to disappear. When the second chirp comes, the neurons have not yet settled down. As a result, the second chirp creates a different pattern of signals. Buonomano argues that our brains can compare the second pattern to the first to tell how much time has passed. The brain needs no clock because time is encoded in the way neurons behave.

Potter Rarities

The standard answer, one that’s been in the literature for years, is “two weeks,” with the caveat that full effects may take weeks longer.

But clinicians have always suspected that some changes come about earlier. A (reasonably unreliable) rule of thumb is that a good, even if transient, initial response predicts a solid outcome later. And there have always been studies showing some improvement within days, so that patients are “better but not well.”

Now out of England comes research that should enter Guinness World Records.

Or perhaps the headline of this post should read, "American media: you suck at fact-checking."

Iran's state-run media agency has been accused before of having digitally manipulated images released to foreign media. This week, as word spread of purported missile tests in Iran, the validity of an image of four missiles shooting into the sky turned out to be photoshopped -- but not before a bunch of big news organizations printed it as legit.

From the NYT blog The Lede:

Unfortunately, it appeared to contain one too many missiles, a point that had not emerged before the photo appeared on the front pages of The Los Angeles Times, The Financial Times, The Chicago Tribune and several other newspapers as well as on BBC News, MSNBC, Yahoo! News, NYTimes.com and many other major news Web sites.

Agence France-Presse said that it obtained the image from the Web site of Sepah News, the media arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, on Wednesday. But there was no sign of it there later in the day. Today, The Associated Press distributed what appeared to be a nearly identical photo from the same source, but without the fourth missile.

This morning, Agence France-Presse retracted the image as “apparently digitally altered.”

Here's the caption on the NYT illustration above:

In the four-missile version of the image released Wednesday by Sepah News, the media arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, two major sections (encircled in red) appear to closely replicate other sections (encircled in orange).

Boing Boing readers are invited to further manipulate the image, whip up nuclear cat macros, or create topically specific fan-remixed versions of YOU SUCK AT PHOTOSHOP.

Post links in the comments, and our digital manipulation ambassadors will evaluate as hastily as a nuclear missile seeks the heavens.

UPDATE: And the winner is... BB commenter CORPSE1, who says, "Here's my rendition. I fixed up a number of inaccuracies for them."

UPDATE 2: And the hits keep rolling in. More photoshoppery from BB readers after the jump; I'll update this post as more hijinks ensue.

Below, from BB commenter JIMH.

Below, from BB commenter THEBLUEONE.

Below, from BB commenter BIGROBINAUSTIN.

Below, from BB commenter SQUIRRELMONKEY.

Below, from BB commenter SIMONFT.

A sure-fire way to destroy your relationship is to diagnose your partner with a personality disorder or other character disease. Unfortunately, a cottage industry of self-help books exists to encourage you to do just that. Some are written by advocates or "survivors," who describe how you should react to your partner, using incendiary and contemptuous adjectives, such as "congenitally manipulative, opportunistic, cunning, exploitive, wolf in sheep's clothing, etc." Others are written by therapists who psychoanalyze your partner with various interpretations of why he/she makes you feel bad. Both types describe the insidious behavior of the PD, not so much to inform and enlighten as to appeal to the reader's victim-identity and self-righteousness. They typically supplement their superficial descriptions with general symptom checklists, without emphasizing that a preponderance of those - not just a few -- are necessary for a valid diagnosis and that a valid diagnosis must come after careful, objective examination.

These days a book has a good chance of making the best-seller list if it comes up with a new way for the reader to feel like a victim and justify the sense of entitlement that goes with victimhood. Such books allow readers to substitute easy pity for genuine compassion, only to be caught in an inevitable pity-contempt-guilt-pity pendulum of pain.

Unfortunately, it's not just self-help books that contribute to emotional pollution. The desire to hook clients into psychotherapy sometimes overrides the ethics of therapists who diagnose their clients' partners, based entirely on third-party descriptions. I have had more than two dozen couples referred to me in the past year alone who were each diagnosed by their partner's individual therapist with a personality disorder. The most common combination, of course, is a narcissistic man married to a borderline woman, though variations have come from more creative therapists with the temerity to diagnose without examination. In no case were these third-party diagnoses valid or helpful.

Complementary diagnoses have become common because the motivation to diagnose loved ones is neither to understand nor sympathize, but to blame from a position of moral superiority -- a powerful driving force in the age of entitlement.

While self-help authors who encourage readers to diagnose their partners are out to sell books, I suspect that many therapists who diagnose without examination are trying to counter the propensity of some clients to blame themselves for the poor behavior of their partners -- "It's not your fault!" is the mantra of the poorly trained. But there's little doubt that the utter powerlessness engendered by blaming will keep their hapless clients in treatment for quite some time, to the financial benefit of the therapist.

Personality disorders are extremely complex diagnoses that only a professional should make after thorough examination and testing of the subject, supplemented by interviews with the partner. The diagnosis cannot be made by a self-help book or advocate or by a therapist going exclusively on the highly-subjective descriptions of a hurt, distressed, or resentful client.

If you have an urge to diagnose your partner, you cannot at the same time have genuine self-compassion, which would give you insight into your pain, along with motivation to heal and improve; blame neither heals nor improves. Neither can you experience the genuine compassion for your partner that would give you insight into his/her deeper experience, which is necessary to evaluate the possibility that he/she can heal and improve. The urge to diagnose makes you see yourself and other people too superficially to do anything but harm to your relationship.

If you truly believe you are married to a personality disorder, you should leave the relationship before your pity-contempt-guilt-pity pendulum swings make him/her angrier and still harder to live with. However, you would be better served to burn any self-help book and fire any therapist or advocate who diagnoses your partner unseen.

Instead of diagnosing, try to understand your partner's experience of you and of the world. The only way to judge the emotional reality of your relationship is to hold his/her perspective alongside your own. One perspective of your relationship, even when it is right, is incomplete. Relationships must have binocular vision to flourish.

You do not need a diagnosis to evaluate your relationship. All you need to determine whether it is viable and repairable is to feel as much compassion from your partner as you give and to know, through your binocular vision, that your partner sees your perspectives as equal to his/her own.

Hit pause for a moment and consider how greatly we – people in the digital age – are indebted to typographers. Almost all of our visual communication is delivered using the products of their craft: newspapers, SMSes, instant messages, emails, web pages, signs, posters, billboards; the list of purposes is endless.

In these days where looping strokes have been replaced by keyboard clickety-clack, typographers define the style and tone of our missives. Would you like to be elegant, modern, childish or ... disturbed? Then you can choose between Garamond, Montag, Comic Sans, Zebraflesh, and a thousand more.

There's great power in a typeface, but what's always interested me more than the typeface is the designer behind it – why did they create the typeface? Where did their inspiration come from? How did they start?

Lately, I've been asking just one question, though. Something which has always intrigued me: these people that help us communicate ... how do they themselves communicate? If we strip away the monitors, and the printing presses, and the typefaces ... how would William Caslon have written on a post-it note?

The handwriting of typographers intrigues me because it raises so many questions, big and small: Do typographers exert some extraordinary control of the pen that laypersons don't? Does a typographer's handwriting influence the typefaces they produce? Has the rise of digital communications made handwriting redundant? Do modern typographers, born of digital tools, lack the finesse of their more wizened counterparts? If so, does that change the way their type is designed?

And then, there's just something strangely ... meta ... about looking at the handwriting of people who work with type.

So, to satisfy my own curiosity I asked a number of prominent typographers to send me a scan of their handwriting. This is the result.