June, 2010 | The Januarist

Change Blindness, Saccadic Masking: Eye Hacks – Oh My!

30 June 2010March 27, 2013Dan ZamboniniPsychologyLeave a comment

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In the above video, 75% of the people tested failed to notice that the person they were talking to was swapped with a different person during their conversation. In a similar experiment conducted by Derren Brown, about 50% of people failed to notice that a person asking them for directions was

swapped-out during their interaction. This phenomenon is referred to as Change Blindess or Inattentional Blindness – our inability to detect large changes in a scene.

We also experience some form of ‘blindness’ on a very small scale. Our brain performs something called Saccadic Masking during certain types of fast eye movements (saccades), where our vision is massively impaired during the movement, but our brain uses before and after snapshots to hide the fact that we were unable to clearly see during the movement – in effect, it is hiding the useless blurred image of movement from us.

You can see this in action with a simple experiment. Grab a friend and a mirror. Look into the mirror, and stare at one eye, then switch to the other, then back again. You won’t be able to see your eye movement (your brain is masking it), but your friend will.

For more information, check out Hack #17, Glimpse the Gaps in Your Vision (pdf) from O’Reilly’s excellent Mind Hacks book.

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Numbers Stations – The Soundtrack to Your Nightmares

24 June 2010March 27, 2013Dan ZamboniniPsychologyLeave a comment

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Listen to a minute of this, from about 0:50 onwards: The Swedish Rhapsody (MP3).

This spooky sound is sampled from a Numbers Station. Hundreds of these shortwave radio stations exist around the world, transmitting numbers, letters, beeps and simple tunes. Their origin – and ongoing transmissions – still largely remain a mystery.

Are they secret codes and directives for spies in foreign countries? Are they sources of misinformation to distract the enemy? Perhaps messages between druglords? Hoaxes by amateur enthusiasts? The answer is probably: yes, all of these, and more besides.

The Conet Project sampled 150 transmissions from 20 years and released them on a 4CD set (“Not available in stores!“, I suspect). This is currently “out of stock”, but the recordings are also available on archive.org, should you wish to disturb yourself some

more.

You can read more about Numbers Stations on Damn Interesting, and Boing Boing’s coverage of the copyright fight between The Conet Project and Wilco, who used a sample of the recordings on their Yankee Hotel Foxtrot album. Wikipedia also has entries for some individual stations, including The Lincolnshire Poacher, Cherry Ripe, and UVB-76.

Lego spy photo under Creative Commons license from Flickr user Dunechaser.

Round-Up: Five Great Online Comic Strips

23 June 2010March 27, 2013Amy ThibodeauPresent3 Comments

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In no particular order:

Dakota McFadzean: Tries to create a new comic each day, usual

ly published on his site once a week. Funny, sad and a bit nostalgic, McFadzean’s best work is like Peanuts for a new generation. Notable strips: Post Apocalyptic Puppy and anything featuring Dakota himself.

A Softer World: Written and photographed by Emily Horne and Joey Comeau, it’s a unique take on the genre using photos instead of illustrations. Offering a social commentary on the most mundane of experiences, it is sad, weird and often laugh-out-loud funny.

XKCD: Simple drawings, complex ideas; “a web comic of romance, sarcasm, math and language.” The guy who writes and illustrates these self-describes as a graduate with a degree in physics whose previous experience includes working on robots at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia. This strip was nominated by Dan Zambonini.

Beatonna: Excellent collection of mainly historically-based comics with a particular interest in the crazy Victorians. Written by Kate Beaton (whose personal website seems to be down at the moment) and nominated by Dave Joyner.

Garfield Minus Garfield: Nothing else to say really.

Honourable mentions go to Concerned (nominated by Jim O’Donnell) and User Friendly (nominated by John Greenaway – sorry I just didn’t get it!).

Do you have favourite online

comics? Please share in the comments.

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Portrait of a Real Rock Rebel: Bill Drummond

20 June 2010March 28, 2013Dan ZamboniniPast1 Comment

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It’s frustrating how the media, hungry to fill their 24-hour schedule for thousands of television and online outlets, so easily present the hissy-fits and staged faux dissention of music celebrities as acts of rebellion.

I’d like to highlight some of the exploits of a real revolutionary: Bill Drummond. Sure, much – if not all – of what he did and does is for the same self-serving publicity purposes, but at least he does it with style and originality. And above all, he takes risks – the real mark of a rebel.

Sources for the following information include Wikipedia, The Independent, The Telegraph, KLF.de and Drummond’s Penkiln Burn website.

1977: Recording debut as guitar player with Big in Japan, alongside members Holly Johnson (Frankie Goes to Hollywood) and Ian Broudie (The Lightning Seeds). Later sets up Zoo Records, before becoming an A&R executive for Warners.
Late 1970s: As manager for Echo & The Bunnymen (EATB), Drummond books tour venues based on the shape they make, “If you look at a map of the world,
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the whole tour’s in the shape of a rabbit’s ears.”
1980s: Ian Curtis, of Joy Division, commits suicide, sending their sales rocketing. Noticing this, Drummond tries to convince the EATB singer to kill himself (Note: another source relays this same story with Julian Cope, rather than EATB, possibly via Drummond’s solo song “Julian Cope is Dead”).
1980s: Drummond believes there’s a line of cosmic energy that bounced off Iceland, was channelled down a manhole in Merseyside (England), and exited the other side in Papua New Guinea. He tests this theory by getting EATB to play in Reykjavik while he stands on the manhole cover.
1986: Resigns from Warners via a press release, which states that he is nearly 33⅓ years old (33⅓ RPM being the speed at which vinyl albums revolve).
1987: Forms the group The Justified Ancients of Mu-Mu with Jimmy Cauty (later, of The Orb), whose first single All You Need Is Love is recorded in a week. The song, and later album (1987), makes blatant use of copyrighted samples, taking “plagiarism to its absurd conclusion”.
1987: After a legal conflict with ABBA regarding samples, the 1987 album is forcibly withdrawn from sale. Drummond and Cauty travel to Sweden hoping to talk to ABBA. Unable to get in contact with ABBA, they present the gold disc of the album to a prostitute, who they pretend is Agnetha “fallen on hard times”.
1987: Re-releases the 1987 album as “1987: The JAMs 45 Edits”, with all unauthorised samples removed, leaving long periods of protracted silence, and less than 25 minutes of music.
1988: Achieves a number one novelty hit, “Doctorin’ the Tardis” under the name The Timelords (with Cauty). It sells over a million copies.
1988: Co-writes the book, “The Manual (How to Have a Number One The Easy Way)” with Cauty, detailing instructions on how to create a novelty number one record. This later gets translated into a German stage musical.
1988: Drummond and Cauty form The KLF, who go on to pioneer ambient and trance electronic music.
1991: The KLF become the biggest-selling singles act of the year.
1992: Having received the Best British Group award, KLF perform at the Brit Awards with hardcore metal band Extreme Noise Terror, fire machine gun blanks into the industry-executive-filled audience, and dump a dead sheep at the aftershow party.
1992: At their peak, The KLF announce their retirement from the music industry and proceed to delete their entire back catalogue, ensuring no future revenue could be earned from it.
1993: Establishes the art foundation, “The K Foundation”, which awards a “worst artist of the year” award to Rachel Whiteread, the same winner of that year’s Turner Prize. Whiteread refuses to collect the £40,000 award – double that of the Turner Prize – until Drummond threatens to set fire to it outside the Tate.
1994: The K Foundation withdraws £1 million in cash, the remaining earnings from KLF. After failing to sell it (nailed to a board) to the Tate Gallery for £750,000, they burn it. Drummond later comments, “Our accountant couldn’t write it off as an artistic statement. We had to pay £330,000 extra. Which was unexpected”.
1995: Drummond buys A Smell of Sulphur in the Wind by his favourite artist, Richard Long, for $20,000. Six years later, he cuts it into 20,000 pieces (4mm x 11mm each) and sells each for $1.
1995: Drives around London on Christmas Eve, distributing over 6,000 cans of lager to the homeless and street-drinkers.
1999: Plans to destroy Stonehenge (but doesn’t).
2002: Puts up 100 posters in Liverpool, offering to have sex with anyone for £10,000, with a signed testimonial.
2003: Launches mydeath.net – a website where you can make preparations for your own death – with the tagline, “Prepare To Die”.
2003: Launches youwhores.com, a site for you to “advertise what you are willing to do and the price you are willing to do it for”.
2004: Devises an imaginary line from Belfast to Nottingham called “The Soup Line”. If anyone who lives in a town on the line asks him, he will visit and make a hearty vegetable broth.

For more information about Bill Drummond’s latest activities (including The17 Choir), see the Penkiln Burn website.

Photograph of Bill Drummond’s Twinned With Your Darkest Thought sign by Flickr User Squirmelia, under a Creative Commons license.

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The Poetry Brothel

18 June 2010March 29, 2013Amy ThibodeauPastLeave a comment

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Poetry has always been passionate and even a wee bit sexy. From Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Kissing Helena, “Kissing Helena, together/With my kiss, my soul beside it/Came to my lips, and there I kept it …” to Dylan Thomas’s In My Craft or Sudden Art, “When only the moon rages/And the lovers lie abed/With all their griefs in their arms …” sex and love have been a natural theme throughout the ages.

In an excellent acknowledgment of this fact, a group called the Poetry Brothel are looking to throw off the shackles of black, itchy woolen turtlenecks and berets, and reclaim the fun, quirky spirit of poetry:

The Poetry Brothel is foremost interested in showcasing a diverse roster of emerging and established poets. However, our events are also interactive performance art pieces based on the concept of the prewar brothels in the United States and Europe. Each night The Madame presents a rotating cast of both male and female poets engaged in a night of literary debauchery and private poetry readings. The poets act as “whores,” making audience members “johns,” but instead of physical intimacy, the poets offer the intimacy of their poetry in private, one-on-one readings. For a small fee, all of the resident “whores” are available for these sequestered readings at any time during the event. Of course, any good brothel need a furtive “front” or cover; ours is

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part saloon and part salon, offering a full bar with absinthe, live music, live painting, fortune-tellers, gypsies, and gamblers with newly integrated performances and installations from our poets and other artists at each event. (source)

Where can I sign up?

Image: The Poetry Brothel xxx by mirosim