…another clue regarding one of my favorite historical mysteries:

The book’s estimated 250,000 characters are totally alien. Arranged in groups like words and sentences, some resemble Latin letters and Roman numerals; others are unlike any known language.Moreover, the puzzling handwriting is surrounded by intricately drawn illustrations: plants that can’t be identified, astrological symbols, elaborate networks of pipework, and naked ladies dancing or bathing in a strange green liquid.

“Who knows what’s being written about in this manuscript. … Just look at those drawings: Are they botanical? Are they marine organisms? Are they astrological? Nobody knows,” said Greg Hodgins, an assistant research scientist and assistant professor in the University of Arizona’s department of physics with a joint appointment at Arizona’s School of Anthropology.

Working at the NSF-Arizona Accelerator Mass Spectrometry, Hodgins was able to solve one of the many mysteries about the book, nailing down the time when the manuscript’s pages were made.

via Mysterious Manuscript’s Age Determined : Discovery News.

Lot of excellent ideas in here for those engaged in placing information where you want people to find it, especially images and identities of entities:

…we started exchanging emails with a Wikipedia administrator, explaining the background; he pointed out that the easiest way for us to remove the offending images was to license higher-quality, more up-to-date pictures so Wikipedia could use them.

Those two conversations paid off at roughly the same time: we secured rights to some great new pictures, and the Wikipedia editor helped us to replace the offending images in the client’s article.

We also corrected a few factual errors in the article. Those mistakes had been copied on other sites, which could then be cited as evidence for their own veracity.

To mitigate this, we wrote an official biography on our client’s site. This biography carried more weight than the online citations used by other Wiki editors.

via Updating Google Image Results For Online Reputation Management.

a mea culpa trend in advertising; generate buzz through tasteless, shocking blunders, then seek forgiveness and visibility for your brand once you have everyones’ attention.

via Mea Culpa Marketing: Were Groupon’s Gaffes Intentional? | Fast Company.

This roadmap navigates through the centrifugal forces of Burkean theory by arranging concepts around the central principle of a complementary duality between formal structure and psycho-social dynamic that comes together at many different levels in Burke’s thought, but particularly in his coinage of certain key terms that for him express both formal and social aspects at once. These terms act as bipolar foci for the interplay between aesthetic form and social ethic that is the foundation of dramatism as I understand it. The principle itself is evident in Burke’s distinction between action and motion. While motion is the basis of “scientism,” and assumes that change is the result of purely physical, autonomous processes, action captures the idea of “motion with intent.” The bipolar term motive expresses the duality inherent in the motion-action distinction, since it takes the root common to “motion” but infuses it with intent. Further, “motive” has the double meaning of the purposes surrounding discourse as an ethical-aesthetic act, and also the motives or themes found within a discourse. For Burke there is a ligature between these two senses of motive so that the one invokes the other.

via Kenneth Burke Roadmap.

A Buddhist temple featuring Superman and a Marvel comic reproducing an actual UFO photo? A pulp fiction editor using his own precognitive dreams to write short stories and a sci-fi master getting zapped by an alien space machine? What is going on here? It would be easy to fall into an either-or mentality, as in “This happened, and that didn’t.” or “This is true, and that is false.” That, I want to suggest, is precisely what is wrong with much of our thinking about popular culture and the paranormal. Much better to pay attention to all the back-and-forth loops, that is, the incredibly messy, “loopy” ways in which popular culture informs paranormal events, which in turn informs popular culture, which in turn informs … well, you get my point. I mean, where exactly are we supposed to draw a line between the real and the unreal in, say, a graphic novel and an actual UFO sighting? It would be easy to suggest that the graphic novel is pure fiction and the UFO—whatever it was—non-fiction, except for the uncomfortable fact that the UFO encounters of the second half of the twentieth century often followed, down to precise details, the pulp fiction fantasies of the first half…

via Psi-Fi: The Feedback Loop Between Pop Culture and Paranormal Experience.

How long did it take you to translate a complex thinker like Derrida?

Immediately, because I had no idea who he was. I was an Assistant Professor at Iowa…you know, I was very young: I was about 24/25 by then. I thought: here I am… a 1st class 1st from the University of Calcutta, Ph.D. from Cornell, here I am at Iowa – stupid really – I must keep up my intellectual life. I would order books from catalogues and, you know, it was by chance that I ordered Grammatologie. If I hadn’t ordered the book … I didn’t know Derrida’s name at all. I was far, far away. There was no email, no fax, no nothing. How would I know? If I hadn’t ordered that book my life would have been so totally different. Just the thought of that accident fills me with a certain kind of terror…and also with so little French  it is a very complicated book  at the age of 25. I think that’s the one intelligent thing I have done in my entire life. I read the book and I knew that this was a good book…I thought to myself: I am a young Assistant Professor and this is a young unknown author. I want to write something on this book but there was no way that this was going to fly…I heard at a cocktail party someone mention that the University of Massachusetts press was doing translations. I really felt at that point that I could do anything. So that gave me the idea. So I wrote this absurd query letter to the University of Massachusetts press: I am a wonderful translator – I had never translated anything before! It took me a week to translate that one page. I was a wonderful translator, it’s a wonderful book but I wouldn’t translate if they didn’t let me write a monograph-size introduction, and sent it off. This query letter was so innocent, with no one’s recommendation or anything… these days you know when I recommend my students’ manuscripts for publication, I think to myself that there was no one recommending this thing. I just sent a query letter. You know, I always fall on my feet  like borrowing that money. And so they felt that they should give me a chance and they gave me a chance. And I surfaced, and so that’s how it was. I didn’t even think twice about it. Of course my Chairman said I was stupid because I was going into this unknown thing. He didn’t know either. Why was I going away from British literature and doing this thing? But, of course, it really kind of made me into a kind of middle line star, didn’t it? And I took a whole year off because I had never had a course in philosophy  undergraduate, graduate, anything. Of course when I was de Man’s student he had met Derrida, but this I didn’t know. So I took a year off and I got a sabbatical from Iowa ..they were very kind and I put myself to school and I read all by myself this philosophical text and I wrote my introduction. It’s really like…when I think back upon it I think, ‘My God, how did I mange all that?’

via The Hindu : Arts / Books : In Conversation: Speaking to Spivak.

Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs” seeks to explain human motivation, and proposes a layered series of motivators ranging from survival to self-actualization. Applying this framework to risk management reveals why individuals and organizations think first about threats, and why they see opportunities as optional extras to be addressed later if at all.

Memetics suggests that ideas (or “memes”) can be seen as packets of information which self-replicate like genes. According to this theory, the “risk is bad” meme appears to be better adapted to the current environment than the “risk includes both threat and opportunity” meme.

The paper describes how to motivate project teams and organisations to address opportunity based on Maslow’s theory, and how to enhance the competitiveness of the threat-plus-opportunity meme through memetic engineering. Applying these solutions will strengthen the ability to address opportunities through the risk process, bringing practice into line with theory.”

via Risk management, Maslow and Memetics.

Neuroscientists have yet to find anything in the brain they are happy calling consciousness, and philosophers are far from agreement over a way of talking about what happens after we wake up.

Undaunted by history, one psychologist believes he has the answer. The problem, says Nicholas Humphrey, Emeritus Professor at the London School of Economics, is that people have been looking in the wrong place.

Consciousness, he argues in his book Soul Dust, is not so much about thinking, but rather the way our brain generates for itself powerful feelings, colours, sounds and smells with you at the centre.

“Consciousness is a kind of theatre, it’s an entertainment which we put on for ourselves inside our own heads,” he says.”We generate this magical mystery show in order to enchant the world and to give ourselves a sense of our own importance and place in it.”

via BBC News – Today – Experience the magic.

Here’s the first three:

1. Filtering: You take the negative details and magnify them, while filtering out all positive aspects of a situation. A single detail may be picked out, and the whole event becomes colored by this detail. When you pull negative things out of context, isolated from all the good experiences around you, you make them larger and more awful than they really are.

2. Polarized Thinking: The hallmark of this distortion is an insistence on dichotomous choices. Things are black or white, good or bad. You tend to perceive everything at the extremes, with very little room for a middle ground. The greatest danger in polarized thinking is its impact on how you judge yourself. For example-You have to be perfect or you’re a failure.

3. Overgeneralization: You come to a general conclusion based on a single incident or piece of evidence. If something bad happens once, you expect it to happen over and over again. ‘Always’ and ‘never’ are cues that this style of thinking is being utilized. This distortion can lead to a restricted life, as you avoid future failures based on the single incident or event.

via EWU | 15 Styles of Distorted Thinking.

Douglas Hofstadter examines the role and contributions of analogy in cognition, using a variety of analogies to illustrate his points.

via YouTube – Analogy as the Core of Cognition.

“Click Fraud Detection with Practical Memetics” is an evolution of my previous Defcon presentations. The original Meme Miner program and Meme Theory were enhanced for better predictive ability which led to an accidental detection of “Pay-Per-Click” advertising fraud. This presentation includes expanded overview of Meme Theory, real-life example of Botnet click fraud, strategies to detect memetic inconsistencies in network propagation, strategies to deceive existing detection schemes and future “Pay-Per-Click” fraud issues. See http://www.realmeme.com for more.

via YouTube – DEFCON 15: Click Fraud Detection with Practical Memetics.

When factions within a memeplex begin organizing, pay attention – it could end up spilling out into public witch hunts..

“We’re no more engaged in a witch hunt than a doctor excising a cancer is engaged in a witch hunt,” said Michael Voris of RealCatholicTV.com and St. Michael’s Media. “We’re just shining a spotlight on people who are Catholics who do not live the faith.”

John Allen, Vatican analyst for the National Catholic Reporter, has dubbed this trend “Taliban Catholicism.” But he says it’s not a strictly conservative phenomenon , liberals can fit the mindset, too, Allen says. Some left-leaning Catholics are outraged by any exercise of church authority.Yet on the Internet and in the church, conservatives are having the bigger impact. Among Voris’ many media ventures is the CIA , the Catholic Investigative Agency , a program from RealCatholicTV to “bring to light the dark deeds of evil Catholics-in-name-only, who are hijacking the Church for their own ends, not the ends of Christ.”

via Catholic bloggers aim to purge dissenters | Philly | 10/24/2010.

The easy answers are ready to hand. We might postulate a strand of political culture and thought in American society that reproduces hate and racism in some of the young people who are exposed to it. (Hate on the Internet falls in this category.) Or we might postulate a recessive “racist personality” type that is a portion of the human psyche (along the lines of the theory of the authoritarian personality). Or we might postulate that lack of opportunity and an enduring situation of defeated expectations pushes some young people into hate (skinheads in Britain or Germany).

But I don’t find any of the theories very convincing by itself. So we seem to have an important theoretical issue here that is unresolved: where does “hate” come from?

via Economist’s View: Where Does Hate Come From?.

Is there really such thing as “freedom of thought”? Or is some force bigger than myself manipulating my thinking, my consciousness? Is there such thing as “original thinking”? And if so, where do such thoughts come from anyway? Are we really that creative in our thinking, or are we picking up “mind viruses” unconsciously?

Consciousness, awareness, self-actualization are all topics that have fascinated me for most of my life. What is it that makes me truly aware? What does awareness even mean? Well, I think I am about to crack this nut for myself, and I have found it in this book!! I feel like I have just started a fascinating journey into the science of my mind and ultimately my self.

via Crisis of the Mind! (Reflections on Intro)THE Virtual Book Circle: Featuring Richard Brodie’s “Virus of the Mind” | THE Virtual Book Circle: Featuring Richard Brodie’s “Virus of the Mind”.

Before proceeding one should assess the nature of the environment. A bookstore or library is a fine place for this. The presence of books by Philip K. Dick indicates a fictional universe.

via Infictive Research – Uncle freddie’s guide for the ground level operative.

The difference between [opinion/thought/desire] and [belief/meme] is illustrated by these three points:

* 1 – People’s opinions, thoughts, and desires are often molded by the questions they are asked.

* 2 – People’s thoughts, opinions, and desires are often created in the moment and have little or no relationship with what they will actually do or what they will believe later

* 3 – Many people have beliefs about things that are not real, based upon questions they were asked and not knowledge they’ve accumulated.

(catechism is a brainwashing tool)

People don’t tell you what they think, they select options from those you give them. Once they’ve written down their decisions and handed them in, those decisions have become part of their nervous system’s experience. This has a direct relation to the magickal work of creating “Intentioning Iconography” (or sigilization) and burning it or somehow destroying it to release the energy into the universe. The idea being that by giving it to the universe, the biggest ‘believed’ authority, you are actually imprinting your subconscious.

via raw research notes « neopsychedelic.

This is only one entrance of many into the Infictive WIki:

Officer Roy Duncan is waving a minivan through the intersection. You turn off the radio and roll up the windows. You are so wasted and the tiredness is closing in hard. You suddenly feel very sick. You open the door and vomit into the grass bordering the park. You are disturbed to see that there’s blood in the vomit, lots of it.

via ..and the coffee will flow like blood!.