A passage:

The master sign or “five items of the lodge” consists in this: one joins his right leg to the other’s right leg, in such a way that the legs are parallel, although inverted, and come closely together, and the left cheeks are close together. The left hands are placed, still closed, on the back of the other, but the right hand is given in such a way that one closes with the thumb and the baby finger the index finger and the middle finger of the other’s hand. When performing this grasp, one whispers silently Macbenah or simply M in the ear of the other.

(from “Rite Hand In” – Hapers – January 2012)

Interview with Information Scientist Kevin Knight.

and more…

1. ‘White Christmas’ (Case 4). Sung by a choir
2. ‘Rolling Along Together’ Not identified by patient, but recognised by operating-room nurse when patient hummed it on stimulation
3. ‘Hush-a-Bye Baby’ (Case 6). Sung by mother, but also thought to be theme-tune for radio-programme
4. ‘A song he had heard before, a popular one on the radio’ (Case 10)
5. ‘Oh Marie, Oh Marie’ (Case 30).
6. The theme-song of a radio-programme   ‘The War March of the Priests’ (Case 31).
7. This was on the other side of the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ on a record belonging to the patient
8. ‘Mother and father singing Christmas carols’ (Case 32)
9. ‘Music from Guys and Dolls’ (Case 37)
10. ‘A song she had heard frequently on the radio’ (Case 45)
11. ‘I’ll Get By’ and ‘You’ll Never Know’ (Case 46).
12. Songs he had often heard on the radio In each case—as with Mrs O’M.—the music was fixed and stereotyped. The same tune (or tunes) were heard again and again, whether in the course of spontaneous seizures.

via Amazon Kindle: The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: and other Clinical Tales.

&
Penfield W. and Perot P. “The brain’s record of visualand auditory experience: a final summary and discussion.” Brain (1963)

Rotten boroughs were those where a member of Parliament could be elected by a small number of people, as at Bute in Scotland, where just one resident out of fourteen thousand had the right to vote and so obviously could elect himself. Pocket boroughs were constituencies that had no inhabitants at all but that retained a seat in Parliament, which could be sold or given away (to an unemployable son, say) by the person who controlled it. The most celebrated pocket borough was Dunwich, a coastal town in Suffolk that had once been a great port—the third biggest in England—but was washed into the sea during a storm in 1286. Despite its conspicuous nonexistence, it was represented in Parliament until 1832 by a succession of privileged nonentities

via Amazon Kindle: At Home: A Short History of Private Life.

from: At Home: A Short History of Private Life

Ukraine protesters make farce out of "drugged oranges and american valenki" photo from Flickr user blandm

As we wait to hear the breaking news in the Libya protests, this post finds comfort fixating on the inconsequential details. In a recent statement, Colonel Qadaffi blamed hallucinogenic drugs planted in coffee by Osama bin Laden are behind the uprising.

A few years ago when studying the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, I ran across a similar accusation was made by Yanukovych’s wife to explain the demonstrations. She described “pinned oranges” – oranges injected with hallucinogenic drugs by the Americans – as the reason for the protests.

Obviously, these are not the only instances of hallucinogenic drugs being blamed for anti-governement protests. But they are of particular interest since they try to pretend that the population was drugged against their will. As if once the population recovers from their “trip,” everything can go back to normal. Instead of blaming “hippies” they blame the drug dealer.

from James Bridle’s project at booktwo.org:

I talked about Wikipedia because for me, Wikipedia is a useful subset of the entire internet, and as such a subset of all human culture. It’s not only a resource for collating all human knowledge, but a framework for understanding how that knowledge came to be and to be understood; what was allowed to stand and what was not; what we agree on, and what we cannot.

…

This particular book—or rather, set of books—is every edit made to a single Wikipedia article, The Iraq War, during the five years between the article’s inception in December 2004 and November 2009, a total of 12,000 changes and almost 7,000 pages.

It amounts to twelve volumes: the size of a single old-style encyclopaedia. It contains arguments over numbers, differences of opinion on relevance and political standpoints, and frequent moments when someone erases the whole thing and just writes “Saddam Hussein was a dickhead”.

link to site

Visualisation of Activity in Afghanistan using the Wikileaks data from Mike Dewar on Vimeo.

The intensity of the heatmap represents the number of events logged. The color range is from 0 to 60+ events over a one-month window. We cap the color range at 60 events so that low intensity activity involving just a handful of events can be seen — in lots of cases there are many more than 60 events in one particular region. The heatmap is constructed for every day in the period from 2004-2009, and the movie runs at 10 days per second.

The orange lines represent the major roads in Afghanistan, and the black outlines are the individual administrative regions.

Work in progress for my upcoming group show at Maccarone Gallery.

From The New York Times:

The question of whether James Joyce’s “Ulysses” is obscene seemed to have been settled for more than 75 years. Until last week, that is, when the creators of a Web comic version of the classic novel, called “Ulysses Seen,” said that Applerequired them to remove any images containing nudity before the comic was approved as an application for the iPad.

Article:
Joyce Found Too Graphic, This Time by Apple, Julie Bisman, July 13, 2010
Previously:
Not only can Apple control what you say, but how you say it.