Beyond Rivalry

Otto the octopus wreaks havoc:

"A octopus has caused havoc in his aquarium by performing juggling tricks using his fellow occupants, smashing rocks against the glass and turning off the power by shortcircuiting a lamp....

"'We knew that he was bored as the aquarium is closed for winter, and at two feet, seven inches Otto had discovered he was big enough to swing onto the edge of his tank and shoot out a the 2000 Watt spot light above him with a carefully directed jet of water.' ...

"'Once we saw him juggling the hermit crabs in his tank, another time he threw stones against the glass damaging it. And from time to time he completely re-arranges his tank to make it suit his own taste better - much to the distress of his fellow tank inhabitants.'"

Carve a pumpkin online -- fun!

Also:

Scary Stock Ticker Jack O'Lantern (not for the faint of heart, or for those who can't "program and test [a] microcontroller")

Extreme Pumpkins (scroll down for many photos)

Pumpkincarving tag on Flickr

Pumpkin Carving the Martha Stewart Way (yes, having a cordless drill helps) and photos

(Photo by mysticmaggatha on Flickr)

Admit it. Certain things make you desperately unhappy, and you don't know why -- the Sbarro at the mall, the taste of Jolly Ranchers in winter, the woman in the Buick station wagon you saw at the KwikTrip, the Food Network after ten p.m.

In 100 words or less, please answer the question, "What makes you so unhappy?" in the comments field [at his site]. Selected answers will appear in Dean Bakopoulos's new novel, My American Unhappiness, forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in late 2009 or early 2010.

I'm not the first to say it, but, hey, way to outsource the novel!

This is the sort of little news story that is most poignant for me, most "pricking" or "stinging," that makes me gasp, tear up, simultaneously hate this cruel, careless world and send my heart out to those involved, animal and human alike:

WOODFIN, North Carolina (AP) -- Police in North Carolina had to halt traffic on a highway to help a mother bear get to her cub after it was struck and killed by a vehicle.

Police said the cub was struck Tuesday afternoon and the driver didn't stop.

Officers in the western North Carolina town of Woodfin halted cars for about 20 minutes after the mother bear had failed twice at trying to get her 80-pound cub off the busy highway.

Sgt. Dawn Roberts says officers stood with rifles while others pulled the cub to the side of the road near the mother. She says the mother bear grabbed the cub by the scruff of the neck and ran off into the woods to tend to it.

Why are these accounts always so interesting, funny? (And timeless: originally published May 2003)

"I am nervous. Spending half a week passing harsh judgment on your fellow Manhattanites just seems so… well, when put like that, it sounds just like every other day."

"The judge is Irish, fast-talking, and hilarious. 'Is there anyone among you who likes crime?' he asks. I consider the question. I do like some crimes: I love jaywalking; I love watching people turnstile-jump; I enjoy committing pre-crime. I say nothing. Neither does anyone else. Thus begins my suspicion of lies beneath the black and white world of the law."

"Potential juror#1: Then when I was 10, my parents moved to a suburb of Philadelphia.
"Judge: Did they take you with them?"

"I am in the jury box. I make snap judgments. I have no opinion about the defendant, but I'm ready to send the Zionist down the row from me to the electric chair; she's wasting our precious time blathering about her good deeds for Israel while we could be happily smoking."

"I want that jury power so bad I can taste it. If I don't get picked today, I may have to re-enter therapy. I feel I must get into the box today, but even as my conviction grows, I am torn. Sending someone to prison is like, really bad."

"I immediately become gal pals with the funny gay fellow behind me. I don’t ask his name or anything else -- I'll learn it all in voir dire, the speed-dating of jury duty!"

My irregular annotated link dump:

>> Never Say Die: Why We Can't Imagine Death by Jesse Bering in the 22 Oct. 2008 SciAm:

The crux: "So why is it so hard to conceptualize inexistence anyway? Part of my own account, which I call the 'simulation constraint hypothesis,' is that in attempting to imagine what it's like to be dead we appeal to our own background of conscious experiences -- because that's how we approach most thought experiments. Death isn't 'like' anything we've ever experienced, however. Because we have never consciously been without consciousness, even our best simulations of true nothingness just aren't good enough."

Fun for the Whole Family: "In a 2004 study reported in Developmental Psychology, Florida Atlantic University psychologist David F. Bjorklund and I presented 200 three- to 12-year-olds with a puppet show. Every child saw the story of Baby Mouse, who was out strolling innocently in the woods. 'Just then,' we told them, 'he notices something very strange. The bushes are moving! An alligator jumps out of the bushes and gobbles him all up. Baby Mouse is not alive anymore.'"

What We Can't UnLearn: "Back when you were still in diapers, you learned that people didn't cease to exist simply because you couldn't see them. Developmental psychologists even have a fancy term for this basic concept: 'person permanence.' Such an off-line social awareness leads us to tacitly assume that the people we know are somewhere doing something. ... We can't simply switch off our person-permanence thinking just because someone has died. This inability is especially the case, of course, for those whom we were closest to and whom we frequently imagined to be actively engaging in various activities when out of sight."

>> For a Fee, a Thai Temple Offers a Head Start on Rebirth by Seth Mydans in the NYT, 26 Sept. 2008. (Reminds me of a vividly described scene in the movie My Dinner with Andre.)  What interests me about the Thai story is the explicit connection between anxiety due to the state of the economy (i.e., decline in prosperity) and the need for this kind of burial and resurrection ritual:

"Nine big pink coffins dominate the grand hall of the temple, and every day hundreds of people take their turns climbing in for a [minute and a half] as monks chant a dirge. Then, at a command, the visitors clamber out again cleansed -- they believe -- of the past. ... A cardboard sign warns visitors not to stand behind the coffins, where bad karma sucked from the 'dying' devotees may still be hovering ...

"It is a renewal for our times, as recent economic hardship brings uncertainty and people try seeking a bailout on life. In growing numbers, they come here from around Thailand to join what has become an assembly line of resurrection.

"'When the economy is down, we latch our hopes onto some supernatural power,' said Ekachai Uekrongtham, the writer-director whose movie The Coffin is in Thai cinemas now with a plot revolving around such funerals for the living."

>> Psychology Voting: 'My Candidate, Myself,' by Robert Burton in Salon, 22 Sept. 2008 (I previously cited Burton's work on certainty when it appeared in a 9 Oct. SciAm piece): The lead-off quote is this: "Let's make sure that there is certainty during uncertain times" -- George W. Bush, 2008.

Burton laments humans' inability to change our minds, to view our own opinions with skepticism, to refuse to be swayed by logical appeal.

He cites a 1999 paper reporting on a study of Cornell undergraduates, which found that the most incompetent people overestimate their abilities to the greatest degree. In other words, "People who lack the knowledge or wisdom to perform well are often unaware of this fact. That is, the same incompetence that leads them to make wrong choices also deprives them of the savvy necessary to recognize competence, be it their own or anyone else's." And, conversely, "smart people tend to believe that everyone else 'gets it.'" They overestimate other people's abilities.

Further: "Closely allied with this unshakable self-confidence in one's decisions is a second separate aspect of meta-cognition, the feeling of being right. ... [F]eelings of conviction, certainty and other similar states of 'knowing what we know' may feel like logical conclusions, but are in fact involuntary mental sensations that function independently of reason. ...  The evidence is substantial that these feelings do not correlate with the accuracy or quality of the thought." And, "Like other powerful mental states such as love, anger and fear, they are extraordinarily difficult to dislodge through rational arguments."

He cites another study in which "staunch party members from both sides" are asked to "evaluate negative (defamatory) information about their 2004 presidential choice:

"Areas of the brain (prefrontal cortex) normally engaged during reasoning failed to show increased activation. Instead, the limbic system -- the center for emotional processing -- lit up dramatically. ...'[B]oth Republicans and Democrats 'reached totally biased conclusions by ignoring information that could not rationally be discounted.'"

Burton suggests that we would know more about our political candidates if we could give them thought experiments that would demonstrate how they think. He'd also like to focus on "each candidate's intellectual grasp of scientific method, from choosing and evaluating evidence to seeing how they would respond to a well-constructed contrary line of reasoning." And what do they do when they are presented with evidence that their answers are wrong? Can the candidates recognise their intellectual limitations? And can we?

Creative Design, Beautiful People. Too funny.

"As a beautiful person, I pretty much live a consequence-free life. I believe that's why I'm such a fearless designer. I can create disturbing, controversial imagery, and in the end people just say, Wow, she's hot."

What inspires me? "Death. Sunflowers." "A really nice handgun."

I'm re-reading James Alison's Raising Abel: The Recovery of the Eschatalogical Imagination. Alison speaks of the importance of the Resurrection as a subversion of our human story (which is framed by death) -- and not as the abolition of the human story -- and as "including that which is capable of being rescued and transformed: the human story of violence and victimization," and he calls to mind the English mystic Julian of Norwich in this context:

"Julian of Norwich ... affirms that in heaven our sins will be not shame, but glory to us. This seems to me to be the authentically Catholic intuition. I try to make sense of it in terms of the transvestite prostitutes whom I knew in Brazil when they were in the final phrase of their struggle with AIDS. I hope to know them again in heaven, not so transmogrified that their personal life story has been, in each case, abolished, but rather so utterly alive that their fake beauty, arduously cultivated, their sad personal stories of envy, violence, frustration in love, and their illness have become trophies which are not sources of shame, but which add to their beauty and joy."

And oh, that we would live more often in heaven now.

THIS IS WHAT I WANT. OMG. Imagine.

"Even as she was dying, she would take walks in Central Park in the daytime, and in the evening sit in a back booth in Bemelmans Bar, looking at the whimsical illustrations of New York City on the wall by the artist Ludwig Bemelmans, best known for the Madeline children's books, and listening to Mr. Harris play. She loved Cole Porter, and she would pass requests to the waiter."

U.S. Economic Timeline: All on one sheet, which Good magazine is distributing through Starbucks stores. Brief review of GDP, the national debt and the national deficit, business cycles (booms and busts), recession - stagflation - inflation, etc.