Recently in Amazing Stories Category

Thanks to my cousin Mike for pointing out this article/commencement speech by the late writer David Foster Wallace.  Wallace hits on a few themes in the article, but he's mostly focused on biological preservation via putting one self first, worship (not just the religious or spiritual kind), and awareness/consciousness.  In sum, though, I think Wallace is making a simple point: it's tough being human.  Here's an excerpt:

Because here's something else that's true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things -- if they are where you tap real meaning in life -- then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already -- it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power -- you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart -- you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

Coincidently, I must admit to owning Infinite Jest (bought it used about 5 years ago) but never got through the first couple of pages.  I did read through a collection of essays which I thought were quite good, but the aforementioned commencement speech/article in the Wall Street Journal was particularly well done.

Here's a nice interview with Wallace on Charlie Rose in 1997, I think:

Just how is time perceived and has the concept of time changed across human history?  Phillip Zimbardo aims to answer the above questions in his new book, The Time Paradox.

Zimbardo touches on a few "fun facts" surrounding human perception, attitudes, and facts towards time, for example:

• Individuals living near the equator tend to be less "future oriented" and more concerned about the "present". 
  
  
• The more education an individuals has received the more "future oriented" the person tends to be.
  
  
• In a well publicized study, young children who are offered one treat now or two treats later (thus delaying gratification and positioning themselves in the future) tend to score better on the SAT (and is a better predictor of success than IQ).

Listen to an Interview with Zimbardo on the Leonard Lopate show from WNYC.org

Business Week ran an article on Emotiv Systems' new Epoc headset which apparently can communicate wirelessly with a PC and allow a users to play a game or arrange photos on a screen without any other input device!

OK, so I just updated my Facebook status to read, "Vincent is feeling Old World" and I need to explain the thinking behind the status:

I just finished watching Emanuele's Crialese's The Golden Door and it was truly magnificent.  Crialese tells the story of a Sicilian's family voyage to the US in the early 20th century.  The film is simplistic in story, but very rich in language and meaning.  The language component is remarkable in that Crialese manages to accurately reproduce the Calabrian/Sicilian dialect.  The film has rich dream sequences and true to life depictions of the immigrant experience at Ellis Island (psychological tests and all - looks like the Soviets weren't the only ones trying to create a perfect society).

The film had tremendous meaning to me as I'm a first generation American - my parent's immigrated to the US in the early 1970's (from the same environment that Crialese depicts in his film).  However, you don't need to be an immigrant's son to appreciate the film, so go out and find the DVD or purchase it on Amazon.

Here's the trailer:

The writer Chrisopher Hitchins participated in a water boarding session to truly understand the techniques used by the American government at Guantánamo and elsewhere.  You can view the video here, courtesy of Vanity Fair magazine.

If you've spent any time in New York City then you're probably well aware of the NY / NJ Port Authority; they run the Hudson River crossings (and constantly increase tolls), World Trade Center re-building project, etc.  The NY Times recently ran a nice article profiling the Executive Director of the agency, Christopher O. Ward, who happens to have a degree from the Harvard Divinity School (should we be praying when we cross any of the bridges?).

The New York Times ran a front page article this morning with the title, "Monkeys Think, Move Artifical Arm as Own." and my first thought was how are we defining "think?"  For example, there are certain bees that engage in very organized flight patterns that convey, "danger", "food", etc. to other bees, but the academic community hasn't come out and declared that bees have language!  The same holds true for the monkeys in the experiment cited in the New York Times; that is, while the primate has willed the artificial arm to move, we can't logically conclude that the monkey can now ponder whether God exists or if chicken would make for a nice dinner.  "Think" is a very strong word and the New York Times should have thought longer about the usage in a headline on the front page.

There is a moving article in the New York Times this morning about a couple (Wang Zhijun and Li Wanzhi) that survived last Monday's earthquake in China. 

The article reminded me of the book, The Long Walk the story of a group of Siberian prisoners who escaped and trekked 4,000 miles to their freedom in India.