Characters For an Epic Tale

Artist: Tom Gauld & his 

flickr photostream

Binder Clips Make Simple Cable Solution

Pretty much everyone can benefit from seeing this picture, I think (which is what I think every time I post pictures). It's a true measure of creativity, to come up with alternative uses for common objects like that. I'm definitely buying more tomorrow [Source].

3 Photos of Russian Soldiers

These pics from English Russia, an eclectic Russian photo blog, show how, oddly enough, musical interest is a hallmark of their army.

In Grozny Central Park. February 1995. [source]

Needs No Caption. Timeless. [Source]

And, while not strictly a musical instrument, I'm certain this made an awesome sound 

[same source as above].

Evolution of the Roman Alphabet

Hard to say who made this and why (tell me if you know), but this really simple animated .gif I just dug up does a great job of demonstrating the development of the latin alphabet. Thanks to whomever cobbled it together back in 2007- the .gif, that is, not the writing system.

It's one alphabet that is very close to my heart, so I hope you take time to appreciate it. 

Bonus word: 

Syllabary - n. a set of written symbols that represent (or approximate) syllables

Letter of Note: Aldrich Ames on Polygraph Testing

After stumbling upon the following letter from Aldrich Ames, the USSR's and later Russia's top man in the CIA from the 1980s to the early 90s and the highest paid spy in American history, I decided to pay homage to the endlessly readable Letters of Note, and post one such letter here. 
[Update 5.19.2010: Many thanks to Letters of Note for linking back here in this morning's post] 

In the letter, which is addressed to Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, Ames comments on the impracticality of polygraph testing as a method of screening for potential government employees and interrogating suspects. He speaks with some weight on the matter as he beat the so-called lie-detector twice, evading exposure by CIA agents in 1986 and again in 1991. 

Rightly mocking the polygraph, which is now widely regarded as pseudoscience because of its high rate of false positives, Ames brands it "junk science"; the US's reliance on the polygraph to root out misrepresentations and falsehoods is a product of a bureaucratic misunderstanding of both the technology and human physiology. He makes a just comparison between the CIA's misplaced faith in the lie-detector and people who are swayed by graphology, astrology, homeopathy, and cold reading - each a bullshit theory or an outright con. And - after all he is in federal prison for all eternity - he allows himself a moment or two of vitriolic humor, making reference to the CIA's PR mishaps after the then-recently bungled Iran-Contra affair and the careers of the agents who failed to detect him. Transcript follows the letter below. 

Dear Mr. Aftergood,

Having had considerable experience with the polygraph (well beyond that which you referred to), I read your very sensible essay in Science with great interest. I offer you a few comments on the topic for whatever interest or use they may have.

Like most junk science that just won't die (graphology, astrology and homeopathy come to mind), because of the usefulness or profit their practitioners enjoy, the polygraph stays with us.

Its most obvious use is as a coercive aid to interrogators, lying somewhere on the scale between the rubber truncheon and the diploma on the wall behind the interrogator's desk. It depends upon the overall coerciveness of the setting -- you'll be fired, you won't get the job, you'll be prosecuted, you'll go to prison -- and the credulous fear the device inspires. This is why the Redmond report ventures into the simultaneously ludicrous and sinister reality that citizens' belief in what is untrue must be fostered and strengthened. Rarely admitted, this proposition is of general application for our national security apparatus.

You didn't mention one of the intriguing elements of the interrogations of Dr. Lee which is in fact quite common -- the false representation to the subject of the polygraph results. Because interrogations are intended to coerce confessions of one sort or another, interrogators feel themselves entirely justified in using their coercive means as flexibly as possible to extract them. Consistency regarding the particular technique is not important; inducing anxiety and fear is the point.

Polygraphers are fond of the technique used by psychics called cold reading, as a slightly less dramatic practice than actually lying to the subject about the results. In this sort of cold reading, the interrogator will suggest to the subject that there may be a potential problem, an ambiguous result, to one of the questions and inquire whether the subject knows of anything that might help clear it up, etc, etc.

Your account of the Redmond report -- I haven't seen it -- shows how another hoary slider is thrown past the public. The polygraph is asserted to have been a useful tool in counterintelligence investigations. This is a nice example of retreating into secret knowledge: we know it works, but it's too secret to explain. To my own knowledge and experience over a thirty year career this statement is a false one. The use of the polygraph (which is inevitably to say, its misuse) has done little more than create confusion, ambiguity and mistakes. I'd love to lay out this case for you, but unfortunately I cannot -- it's a secret too.

Most people in the intelligence and CI business are well aware of the theoretical and practical failings of the polygraph, but are equally alert to its value in institutional, bureaucratic terms and treasure its use accordingly. This same logic applies to its use in screening potential and current employees, whether of the CIA, NSA, DOE or even of private organizations.

Deciding whether to trust or credit a person is always an uncertain task, and in a variety of situations a bad, lazy or just unlucky decision about a person can result not only in serious problems for the organization and its purposes, but in career-damaging blame for the unfortunate decision-maker. Here, the polygraph is a scientific godsend: the bureaucrat accounting for a bad decision, or sometimes for a missed opportunity (the latter is much less often questioned in a bureaucracy) can point to what is considered an unassailably objective, though occasionally and unavoidably fallible, polygraph judgment. All that was at fault was some practical application of a "scientific" technique, like those frozen O-rings, or the sandstorms between the Gulf and Desert One in 1980.

I've seen these bureaucratically-driven flights from accountability operating for years, much to the cost of our intelligence and counterintelligence effectiveness. The US is, so far as I know, the only nation which places such extensive reliance on the polygraph. (The FBI, to its credit in a self-serving sort of way, also rejects the routine use of the polygraph on its own people.) It has gotten us into a lot of trouble.

On the other hand, there have been episodes in which high-level pressures to use or acquire certain persons entirely override pious belief in the polygraph. One instance which made the press is that of the Iranian connection in the Iran-Contra affair.

I wish you well in this particularly important theater of the struggle against pseudoscience: the national security state has many unfair and cruel weapons in its arsenal, but that of junk science is one which can be fought and perhaps defeated by honest and forthright efforts like yours. 

Sincerely,

Aldrich H. Ames 

40087-083 

P.O. Box 3000 

White Deer, PA 17887

P.S. I should say that all my outgoing mail goes through the CIA -- unlawfully -- for review, censorship and whatever use it chooses to make of it.

Related:

Transcript source @ FAS

6 Bullshit Facts About Psychology that Everyone Believes which brought Ames to my attention

Words I Learned Today from the Phrontistery

Artist: Joseph Kosuth. Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.

I am free now to be academically indulgent and just because I found a whole bunch of words today related to colo(u)r. The Phrontistery [n. a thinking place; Gr phrontisterion from phrontistes a thinker, from phroneein to think] is a veritable shrine to lexical intrepidity, claiming the International House of Logorrhea, a dictionary of obscure words, the Compendium of Lost Words, and "many other glossaries, word lists, essays". In short, loads of etymological related goodness. 

One treat is a list of 168 of the most antiquated, recherché, and useful terms describing color that stretches way beyond that of your more common, pedestrian rainbows. Selected favs:

Amaranthine : a dark reddish purple color; eternal, infinite; of or related to the amaranth plant; of an imaginary flower that never fades

Eau-de-nil : a pale yellowish green color (like the Nile, presumably)

Ferruginous : rust colored; containing iron; brown approaching yellow

Gamboge : a strong yellow color; partially transparent dark mustard yellow pigment

Greige : hilariously, it's a color "between gray and beige, closely akin to the [even more blandly, accurately named] taupe"

Lurid : doesn't just mean "unnaturally or unpleasantly vivid in color" but especially when applied to red-yellow and yellow-brown mixtures (which is why an alternate meaning of lurid is "shining with an unnatural red glow as of fire seen through smoke; 'a lurid sunset'; "lurid flames'")

Umber : brownish red; obtained from natural clays variously colored by the oxides of iron and manganese

Rhodopsin : "visual purple" further defined as "a red photopigment in the retinal rods of vertebrates"

Vermeil : bright scarlet red or vermillion color; gilded silver

Viridian : chrome green; a bluish green pigment made from a foam of chromic oxide

I'm sure there will be a mindmap accompanying this post someday, since vocabulary building is one of my favorite applications of mindmaps. Watch for it maybehaps. [P.S. -a bonus, very thorough etymology dictionary. Enjoy seeing how mindblowingly embedded language is in itself. ]

Colorful World of Drugs [Infographic]

Another baller bit of knowledge paraphernalia from Information is Beautiful. 

Funny how marijuana is presented as the "middle way" drug.

And It's Been A Long Time Comin'

[Via The Big Caption and BoingBoing.
Thanks to Dennis over at Ride Like You Mean It for calling this to my attention.]

Rainbow Eucalyptus Tree

From the wiki: "Eucalyptus deglupta is a tall tree, commonly known as the Rainbow Eucalyptus, the Mindanao Gum, or the Rainbow Gum. It is the only Eucalyptus species found naturally in the Northern Hemisphere. Its natural distribution spans New Britain, New Guinea, Ceram, Sulawesi and Mindanao. Now, this tree is cultivated widely around the world, mainly for pulpwood used in making paper. It is the dominant species used for pulpwood plantations in the Philippines."

"This tree is also grown for ornamental purposes, due to the showy multi-coloured streaks that cover the trunk. Patches of outer bark are shed annually at different times, showing the bright-green inner bark. This then darkens and matures to give blue, purple, orange and then maroon tones"

Photos Source

Detailed (dense) info from the World Agroforestry Centre's database on Eucalyptus deglupta 

and

less detailed info from learned enthusiasts

Glitchscape

Make your own kind of glitch music, sing that one special glitch song [Actually, there's no singing, those are just The Mamas & The Papas lyrics which will get stuck in your head].


Another fun flash AV toy. Maybe you'll sound like B. Fleischmann or Aphex Twin something [haha, nope].


Related Posts:
Collaborative Sound Art In B♭
Tonematrix is for Humans

So, How Many People Are in Space Right Now?

This site is on top of it, whenever you might wonder.

Photographer Amy Stein

Over my two month sabbatical from posting, I managed to get across the river for an evening at the Harvard Museum of Natural History with some friends. The initial lure was a rumored Lucky Dragons show to take place there that (for the second time!) turned out to be a lie. That is, that whole artsy IDM crowd was indeed present, but just let people screw around with their equipment instead of playing themselves. I guess worse things have happened; the people seemed to get into it (despite lacking direction or leadership) and I got to explore the famous Ware Collection of over 3000 true to life glass flowers from around the world.

Which by itself would have sated my desire for novel nature oddities for the evening. But fortunately, around the corner was photographer Amy Stein's Domesticated, a commentary on human-animal relations. Stein uses stuffed models to recreate true to life stories - highlighting the imbalance between society and the wild - and calls into question the meaning of domestication. Several of my favorites here:

Howl

Window

Threat

New Homes

Struggle

Nursery

Grasp

Disturbance

Backyard 

What a sad joke hunting has become.

Trasheaters

Watering Hole

More on the theme of domestication at the artist's blog

Tulip Fields in Holland

Via Swissmiss

Via Flavorwire

Ditto

Hyacinths too! Via About.com

Via Tom McMahon

Via Pixdaus (favorite!)

Ditto

Ditto extreme! Go Pixdaus, one well organized nature photo site!

Via CoolHQPix [Despite the name seeming a little on the nose for a photo site]

Via Claude Monet, Tulip Fields in Holland [1886]

Apollo 11 @ 500 FPS

The initial 30 seconds of the Apollo 11 launch in such high definition it takes 8 minutes and 43 seconds to show. Produced by Spacecraft Films, a company specializing in HD production of exactly what it sounds like. Good to enjoy with sound (to learn about the chemical reactions and physical forces at work) or muted (overlayed perhaps with Milieu's Colortone or Boards of Canada why not).

Via Petapixel, a phantastic digital photo blog (with a ton of HD vids).
And they got it from BoingBoing, the mother of us all.

Portugal Leadin' the Way!

An interesting, if imperfect, example of how drug policy could look around here, considering that the U.S. is home to 5% of the world and 25% of its prisoners. 

Infographic via the honorable and ever-vigilant Narco Polo.

Comes complete with the research [Greenwald (2009)]

An article in Time, good for facts like "Proportionally, more Americans have used cocaine than Portuguese have used Marijuana."

Portugal's success story in Scientific American, good for all pop sci reporting.

an Official report from the Beckley Foundation (the most carefully weighed argument I've read so far)

 a RAND Europe paper written in 2002 discussing the transition to decriminalization.

And of course, the Wiki

Heike Weber Installations

Dizzying room-wide applications of permanent marker.

Via bumbumbum and TRIANGULATION

Utopia [2009]

Utopia [2009]

Room 104 [2000]

Utopia [2007]

 Bodenlos [2006]

Drop [1998]

Stage for the Opera [1998]

Artist homepage