A word about this site. ~Efficient Happiness is designed to be collection of excerpts from news reports, essays, speeches, articles, and blog posts that I find interesting. My primary goal is to edit together other people’s written and artistic work into cohesive reader-friendly posts. Disclaimer: Please assume that I am not the original author of any material on this site unless the material so indicates. All content and pictures are attributed to the sources where I found them. For more information, click What is ~Efficient Happiness.
". . . The theremin is one of the earliest fully electronic musical instruments. It was invented by Russian inventor Léon Theremin in 1919, and it is unique in that it was the first musical instrument designed to be played without being touched. It consists of two radio frequency oscillators and two metal antennae. The electric signals from the theremin are amplified and sent to a loudspeaker.
The theremin is unique among musical instruments in that it is performed without being physically manipulated by the operator. The musician stands in front of the instrument and moves his or her hands in the proximity of two metal antennae. The distance from one antenna determines frequency (pitch), and the distance from the other controls amplitude (volume). Typically the right hand controls the pitch and the left controls the volume, although some performers reverse this arrangement. Additionally, some newer theremin use a volume dial and have only one antenna. . . "
". . . What Do We Learn If We Digitize Everything? After a couple years in the flat part of exponential growth, the steep part is now arriving for the massive multi-player online world construction kit called "Second Life." With 1.7 million accounts, membership in "Second Life" is growing by 20,000 per day. The current doubling rate of "residents" is 7 months, still shortening, which means the growth is (for now) hyperexponential.
For this talk at the The Long Now Foundation the founder and CEO of "Second Life," Philip Rosedale, tried something new for him - a simultaneous demo and talk. His online avatar, "Philip Linden," was on the screen showing things while the in-theater Philip Rosedale was conjecturing about what it all means. "This is a game of 'Can I interest you more in what I'm saying than what's going on on the screen?'"
He showed how new arrivals go through the "gateway" experience of creating their own onscreen avatar, explaining that because intense creativity is so cheap, easy, and experimental, the online personas become strongly held. "You can have multiple avatars in 'Second Life,' but the overall average is 1.25 avatars per person." The median age of users is 31, and the oldest users spend the most time in the world (over 80 hours per week for 10 percent of the residents).
At about 19 mins in Philip talks about emergent behavior, and why the world of Second Life has to be connected, and why it must be a large scale “one world.” [PacificRim Exchange] suspects this concept will keep Linden Lab from breaking up the grid(s) until all other options have been exhausted to address the grid issues. . . ." --- ". . . FORA.tv delivers discourse, discussions and debates on the world's most interesting political, social and cultural issues, and enables viewers to join the conversation. It provides deep, unfiltered content, tools for self-expression and a place for the interactive community to gather online. . . ."
". . . This is a short narrative film created by Superfad for Vision Research/Phantom using their slow motion camera. The video is amazingly well put together. The narrative is just enough to keep you interested but doesn’t distract you from what is obviously the point of the video, to show off the amazingly cool Phantom cameras. Phantom, for those who are unfamiliar with them, have been producing cameras since the 1950’s and have produced some of the highest quality cameras in the business. Hopefully one day in the future I will be able to review one of them for you all. But until then we can look at this amazing video and drool. . . ." From Stunning slow motion HD video from Superfad using a PhantomHD.
". . . This is a high-speed video of a water balloon that doesn't pop. Visit http://www.lucidmovement.com for a complete blog post with more information and a higher resolution video. . . ."
". . . Disney lawyers' heads must be spinning over this one. A movie posted on StanfordUniversity's site called "A Fair(y) Use Tale" mashes up all your Disney favorites to humorously and effectively explain copyright law. Professor Eric Faden of BucknellUniversity provides this humorous, yet informative, review of copyright principles delivered through the words of the very folks we can thank for nearly endless copyright terms. The ten minute movie, directed by Prof. Faden, came out of StanfordUniversity's Fair Use Project Documentary Film Program.
The Stanford Fair Use Project--to which Stanford Law professor, Copyright guru, Creative Commons advocate and Wired writer Lawrence Lessig contributes--was founded last year to "support to a range of projects designed to clarify, and extend, the boundaries of fair use in order to enhance creative freedom." And, well, the movie is damn sure creative, and certainly seems to take the boundaries of fair use about as far as they can go.
The mashup cuts up and splices audio from more Disney movies than I could begin to list (or even identify) to explain the intricacies of copyright law and the fair use doctrine. It takes the works of "the very folks we can thank for nearly endless copyright terms" and flips them to argue against longer copyrights and attacks on fair use. It leads to some beautifully surreal moments, often highly recursive, with the characters of The Jungle Book and The Lion King asking questions such as "what is the public domain?" or proclaiming "fair Use is not a right; fair use is only a legally defensible position, and this is not fair...The point is if fair use actually works then movies like this one will have legal protection." . . ." From Hijacked Disney Characters Explain Copyright.
". . . The Chicago school of economics is a school of thought favoring free-market economics practiced at and disseminated from the University of Chicago. The leaders were Nobel laureates George Stigler and Milton Friedman. It is associated with neoclassical price theory and free market libertarianism, refutation and rejection of Keynesianism in favor of monetarism (until the 1980s, when it turned to rational expectations), and rejection of regulation of business in favor of laissez-faire. In terms of methodology the stress is on "positive economics"--that is, empirically based studies using statistics, with less stress on theory and more on data. The school is noted for its very wide range of topics, from regulation to marriage, slavery and demography, that it studies. . . ."
Watch the complete program and "explore theories, facts, and trends that drive our understanding of economic forces and events" in PBS's Commanding Heights.
Lasse Gjertsen is a Norwegian animator, musician, and videographer known on YouTube as lassegg. He is best known for his short pieces "Hyperactive" and "Amateur," which string together short clips of video to create a unique form of video akin to stop-motion animation. His "Hyperactive" video has over 10 million views. During a 5 month break from new content, Lasse worked on a two part music video collaboration, named Sogno ad Occhi Aperti, with the Italian Cellist Giovanni Sollima.
Cognitive Load refers to the load on working memory during problem solving, thinking and reasoning (including perception, memory, language, etc.). Most would agree that people learn better when they can build on what they already understand. But the more things a person has to learn in a short amount of time, the more difficult it is to process information in working memory.
Consider the difference between having to study a subject in one's native language versus trying to study a subject in a foreign language. The cognitive load is much higher in the second instance because the brain must work to translate the language while simultaneously trying to understand the new information.
Inattentional blindness, closely related to the subject of change blindness, is an observed phenomenon of the inability to perceive features in a visual scene when the observer is not attending to them. That is to say that humans have a limited capacity for attention which thus limits the amount of information processed at any particular time. Any otherwise salient feature within the visual field will not be observed if not processed by attention.
" . . . Chris Anderson, the editor of WIRED, explores the four key stages of any viable technology: setting the right price, gaining market share, displacing an established technology and, finally, becoming ubiquitous. To demonstrate this trajectory, Anderson explores the evolution of the DVD player as it passes through each of these four tipping points, then offers specific examples of current trends in technology -- ranging from DNA sequencing to the hybrid -- to illustrate each stage of the game. . . ."
--- ". . . Wired Magazine debuted with a new logo that it “obeys the Law of Optical Volumes.” The Law of Optical Volumes states that the area between any two letters in a word must be of equal measure throughout the word, and remain consistent throughout the body of text, and is Wired creative director Scott Dadich’s term for a typography rule that governs the spacing of characters within a font.
The Law boils down to the science of kerning. In typography jargon, kerning is the act of adjusting the space between two letters to make words and sentences lay out more evenly. For example in the word “VAST,” there is usually reduced space between the V and A, and maybe extra space between the S and T. Otherwise the “VA” would seem too far apart and the “ST” would seem cramped.
The formal definition for a font includes not only the shape of each letter, but also a series of kerning pairs that specify a customized distance between certain pairs of letters, such as the “Yo” in “You.” Without the adjusted spacing, these pairs appear too far apart or too close together.
Typographers strive to balance letters so that the area of space between each pair of letters is identical. The premise is that human eyes unwittingly measure that area to decide how far apart each pair is. If Scott were more of a geometry wonk, he’d have dubbed it the Law of Optical Areas rather than volumes, but that doesn’t sound as imposing.
The same goes for Wired’s new logo. It alternates between letters without and with serifs, yet the area between each pair of letters is about the same, thanks to the serifs on the I and E and lack thereof on the W, R and D. This equivalence makes the logo easier to see and read across a crowded supermarket aisle. The alternating fonts also make the letters seem to blink on and off as you read them from left to right, in emulation of digital ones and zeroes. . . ." From Law of Optical Volumes: The Math Behind Wired's New Logo.
". . . In the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Jane Elliott developed a simple exercise that explored the nature of racism and prejudice.
Elliott's method for exploring racism in the context of an all-white classroom consisted of dividing her students into two groups on the basis of eye color, blue or brown (those with other eye colors were assigned to the group that most closely matched their own.) In 1970, a half-hour documentary film about the experience was produced by ABC News, entitled "The Eye of the Storm." PBS's Frontline also produced a one-hour documentary called "A Class Divided" that showed, in addition to the 3rd grade experiment, the method applied to correctional facility employees.
In this segment, Jane Elliott divides her 3rd graders into blue and brown-eyed groups. She tells the blue-eyes they are "the better people in this room," gives them privileges and comments on their superiority all day. The brown eyes must wear collars. . . ."
--- ". . . [The work of the Expert Performance Movement], compiled in the "Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance," makes a rather startling assertion: the trait we commonly call talent is highly overrated. Or, put another way, expert performers — whether in memory or surgery, ballet or computer programming — are nearly always made, not born. And yes, practice does make perfect. These may be the sort of clichés that parents are fond of whispering to their children. But these particular clichés just happen to be true.
"I think the most general claim here," Anders Ericsson says of his work, "is that a lot of people believe there are some inherent limits they were born with. But there is surprisingly little hard evidence that anyone could attain any kind of exceptional performance without spending a lot of time perfecting it." This is not to say that all people have equal potential. Michael Jordan, even if he hadn't spent countless hours in the gym, would still have been a better basketball player than most of us. But without those hours in the gym, he would never have become the player he was.
Ericsson's conclusions, if accurate, would seem to have broad applications. Students should be taught to follow their interests earlier in their schooling, the better to build up their skills and acquire meaningful feedback. Senior citizens should be encouraged to acquire new skills, especially those thought to require "talents" they previously believed they didn't possess. . . ." From A Star Is Made: Where Does Talent Really Come From.
" . . . It was 7:51 a.m. on Friday, January 12, the middle of the morning rush hour. In the next 43 minutes, as the violinist performed six classical pieces, 1,097 people passed by—almost all of them were on the way to work. On that Friday in January, those private questions would be answered in an unusually public way. No one knew it, but the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of the escalators was one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made. His performance was arranged by The Washington Post as an experiment in context, perception and priorities -- as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?
The musician did not play popular tunes whose familiarity alone might have drawn interest. That was not the test. These were masterpieces that have endured for centuries on their brilliance alone, soaring music befitting the grandeur of cathedrals and concert halls. Three days before he appeared at the Metro station, Bell had filled the house at Boston's stately Symphony Hall, where merely pretty good seats went for $100. So, what do you think happened? Watch here, then read on:
In the three-quarters of an hour that Joshua Bell played, seven people stopped what they were doing to hang around and take in the performance, at least for a minute. Twenty-seven gave money, most of them on the run -- for a total of $32 and change. That leaves the 1,070 people who hurried by, oblivious, many only three feet away, few even turning to look. . . ." From Pearls Before Breakfast.
·Computer software that automatically adds one click buttons after three clicks to get to a function – self customizing software
·Interactive visual/personality startup programs that customize software to people
·To what extent could there be the Platonic form of an intuitive efficient operating system (so to speak)? That is, to what extent could one design a computer operating system that most efficiently conforms to/interacts with the human brain?
oCould there be a small handful of forms for different types of people?
oCould you write a program that would customize software to people that would then monitor and further customize with usage?
oIf so, is there a set or a handful of sets of characteristics that are common to different clusters of people?
The TED website has been completely redesigned to focus on our award-winning TEDTalks, video and audio recordings of great presentations from TED Conferences by speakers including Malcolm Gladwell, Jane Goodall, Julia Sweeney, Richard Dawkins, Dan Dennett Bono, Bill Clinton, Jeff Bezos, Stefan Sagmeister, Eve Ensler, Nicholas Negroponte, Peter Gabriel, Al Gore, Tony Robbins, Anna Deavere-Smith, Hans Rosling, Jeff Han and 90+ others, including 30 talks never available to the public.
TED is an invitation-only event where the world’s leading thinkers and doers gather for inspiration and insight. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design—three broad subject areas that are, collectively, shaping our future. Each year, TED features 50 of the world’s most fascinating people. TED presenters run the world’s most admired companies and design its best-loved products; they invent world-changing devices and write best-selling books. They are trusted voices and convention-breaking mavericks, icons and geniuses.
Danish economist Bjorn Lomborg heads the Copenhagen Consensus, which has prioritized the world's greatest problems -- global warming, world poverty, disease -- based on how effective our solutions might be. It's a thought-provoking, even provocative list.
KT Tunstall performs Black Horse And The Cherry Tree. The song is usually performed solo by Tunstall, with the layered guitar and vocals constructed piece-by-piece by sampling the parts live, and using a digital delay unit to create the backing track.
Alex DePue's lightning fast fiddle is a hit at Open Mic Night at Lestats in San Diego: Yes's Owner of a Broken Heart by Yes & Michael Jackson's Smooth Criminal.
". . . Kelly Cobb decided to make a man's suit only from materials produced within 100 miles of her home. But Cobb's locally made suit turned into a exhausting task. The suit took a team of 20 artisans several months to produce -- 500 man-hours of work in total. "Every piece of the suit took three to five pairs of hands to make," Cobb added. "Every garment you wear took three to five pairs of hands to make too, but you don't know whose hands or where." "It definitely makes you think for a minute before you buy that $10 skirt . . . it didn't just grow on the rack at Forever 21. It's too easy to forget that people made it.". . ." From 100-Mile Suit Wears Its Origins on Its Sleeve.
--- I, Pencil is written in the first person from the point of view of an Eberhard Faber pencil. The pencil details the complexity of its own creation, listing its components (cedar, lacquer, graphite, ferrule, factice, pumice, wax, glue) and the numerous people involved, down to the sweeper in the factory and the lighthouse keeper guiding the shipment into port. Here is an except:
There is a fact still more astounding: the absence of a master mind, of anyone dictating or forcibly directing these countless actions which bring me into being. No trace of such a person can be found. Instead, we find the Invisible Hand at work. Man can no more direct these millions of know-hows to bring me into being than he can put molecules together to create a tree. The lesson I have to teach is this: Leave all creative energies uninhibited. Merely organize society to act in harmony with this lesson. Let society's legal apparatus remove all obstacles the best it can. Permit these creative know-hows freely to flow. Have faith that free men and women will respond to the Invisible Hand. This faith will be confirmed.
". . . The Stanford prison experiment was a psychological study of the human response to captivity, in particular to the real world circumstances of prison life and the effects of imposed social roles on behaviour. After a relatively uneventful first day, a riot broke out on day two. Guards volunteered extra hours and worked together to break up the revolt, attacking the prisoners with fire extinguishers without supervision from the research staff. After this point, the guards tried to divide the prisoners and pit them against each other by setting up a "good" cell block and a "bad" cell block. This was supposed to make the prisoners think that there were "informers" amidst their ranks. The efforts were largely effective, and there were no further large-scale rebellions. . . " --- ". . . The prisoner's dilemma is a type of non-zero-sum game in which two players can "cooperate" with or "defect" (i.e. betray) the other player. No matter what the other player does, one player will always gain a greater payoff by playing defect. Since in any situation playing defect is more beneficial than cooperating, all rational players will play defect. . . ." --- ". . . The term "geospatial technology" refers generally to global satellite surveillance systems or similar technology. The term "land remote sensing" generally means the collection of data which can be processed into surface feature imagery of the Earth. An easily recognizable example of this is the set of images posted on Mahmood's Den showing palaces and islands owned by the Monarchy. These images came from a popular application of this technology, Google Earth, which is a browser for geospatial data. . . ." --- "He put the ring to the test to see if it indeed had such power, and he came to this conclusion that, by turning the collet inwards, he became invisible, outwards, visible. Having perceived this, he at once managed for himself to become one of the envoys to the king ; upon arrival, having seduced his wife, with her help, he laid a hand on the king, murdered him and took hold of the leadership." (From Plato, Republic, II, 359b-360b).
Liberalism emphasizes individual rights. It seeks a society characterized by freedom of thought for individuals, limitations on power (especially of government and religion), the rule of law, the free exchange of ideas, a market economy that supports free private enterprise, and a transparent system of government in which the rights of all citizens are protected.
Conservatism is a relativistic term used to describe political philosophies that favor traditional values, where "tradition" refers to religious, cultural, or nationally defined beliefs and customs.
In Canada, advocating genocide or inciting hatred against any 'identifiable group' is an indictable offense under the Canadian Criminal Code with maximum terms of two to fourteen years. An 'identifiable group' is defined as 'any section of the public distinguished by color, race, religion, ethnic origin or sexual orientation.' It makes exceptions for cases of statements of truth, and subjects of public debate and religious doctrine.
Click here for more information about the editor of this site. For comments or requests for changes to the content herein write efficient.happiness@gmail.com.
In this segment (see rest here), Jane Elliott divides her 3rd graders into blue and brown-eyed groups. She tells the blue-eyes they are "the better people in this room," gives them privileges and comments on their superiority all day. The brown eyes must wear collars.
Featured Thought Merchant
Hernando de Soto is a Peruvian economist known for his work on the informal economy, or economic activity that is neither taxed nor monitored by a government. De Soto argues that an important characteristic of capitalism is the functioning state protection of property rights in a formal property system where ownership and transactions are clearly recorded.
“. . . Capitalism is essentially the economic system of poor people. That's what allowed the people that came from humble origins of the world to have economic rights the way only nobility and the high bourgeoisie had it before. So capitalism is essentially a tool for poor people to prosper. . . The constituency of capitalism has always been poor people that are outside the system. That's the way it worked in the United States. That was the basis of the libertarian or liberal democratic revolution that occurred in Western Europe. I don't know why it is that everybody expects that when you go and you talk to rich people throughout Latin America or Asia or the Middle East you are in touch with people who have the same libertarian principles that you do. You don't. The real constituency is below, and until the people who consider themselves real capitalists realize that they're not real capitalists, they're talking about the systems of privilege that existed way before popular capitalism was in place. . . .”
