Tomorrow kicks off the Chinese year of the dog, which may explain why Google’s tail is wagging.
Blogging will be light today. I’ve realized that I’m way behind in planning for this event. Anyone know a good source for novelty cocktail stirrers? Something with a Corgi theme would be perfect!
This website, Lulu Titlescorer, lets you analyze a book title and tell you how likely it is to be a best seller. My novel’s title came in at 69 percent. Too bad the manuscript has fallen down some agent’s rabbit hole, and to get it back, apparently I have to play a game of croquet with a flamingo for a mallet. Wish me luck, I’m going in. As soon as I finish this cup of coffee with the “drink me” printed on the side.
I guess this would work! It’s in the January 2006 issue of the Western and Central New York Outdoors newsletter.
I’m having visions of myself surrounded by crumbling snow blocks. But if you give it a try, do stop back and let me know how it goes!
(There’s also an article on trails in Penfield.)
[tags] how to build an igloo [/tags]
No: it’s a Freymoir!
Even better: we’re now using cathartic television to help us recover from the trauma caused by . . . cathartic television. Oprah feels “duped.” Frey ‘splains it all was a “coping mechanism.”
Meanwhile, back in the real world, A Million Little Pieces languishes at #4 on Amazon.
No word on whether Amazon plans to re-tag the book as Literature and Fiction instead of Biographies and Memoirs. Or get rid of the now-embarrassingly-dated editorial reviews.
(Gawker live-blogged the show, if you’re interested in a minute-by-minute.)
Update: Also meanwhile, my dog training book is enjoying an Amazon ranking dip so deep it’s scraping barnacles off its belly. Maybe I should post about how naughty my dog is???? Secret’s out! I caught her gnawing a wooden block today! That is NOT a chew toy!
“This is a room cleano. A room cleano cleans up rooms. It has a mouth so it can tell you when it’s done cleaning the room. It will clean any room you tell it to if it has seen it clean.”
Unfortunately, I’d be in big trouble on account of that last bit. Maybe I’ll hold out for version 2.0.
Prospect magazine has a piece online by Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad exploring the “divide” between western and eastern philosophy.
A little over half-way in, Ram-Prasad touches on the political implications of western vs. eastern conceptions of the self:
The east/west divide on the self extends to political individualism. In different ways, both the major eastern traditions conceive of the individual in very particular terms. The responsibilities, entitlements and authority of individuals depend on their specific natures: people are not interchangeable in their rights and duties. If asked whether an individual either can or should do something, the classical Chinese or Indian would answer that it depended on that particular person’s nature. X might be heard in the royal court on account of his birth, personality and status, while Y, in the same official position, would not be accorded the same power.
This contrasts with the western idea of the self, which Ram-Prasad characterizes as “generic” individualism:
Under this notion, individuals are interchangeable; it does not matter who one is in biographical and psychologically specific terms. It is the general idea of the individual that is important, not the particularities of specific people. The rule of law, the formality of political institutions and the claim to universal rights have flown from this paradoxical idea of generic individualism, in which each person is equally like every other.
(Well, not “equally like,” perhaps, but accorded a uniform measure of minimum political power.)
In both classical Chinese and Indian thought, there is a contrasting “microindividualism”: each individual in a sociopolitical collective has specific burdens and freedoms. In China, this led to an organic communitarianism in which each individual, by doing exactly what was specific to themselves, contributed in his or her own special way to a larger entity — the Middle Kingdom. The particularity of each individual was significant to the extent they contributed to the polity as a whole, and therefore each individual was insignificant apart from that whole. In different ways, Confucian and Daoist thinkers subscribed to this idea, and it may help to explain why economic success has not prompted major demands for democracy in modern China. In India, this microindividualism, based on dharma — the nature and duty of each persona — was supposed to lead to a social order in which there was clear differentiation of labour and functional expertise. The actual result was an explosion of multiple values evident in Indian democracy today. The implication in Indian and Chinese thought is of an infinite diversity of individualisms, a situation which generates many problems of equality and universality, but also suggests possibilities for political theories on how to live with fundamental difference.
Ram-Prasad doesn’t elaborate on those “possibilities for political theories.” I wish he had. As we plunge toward our common global destiny, Westerners need to have realistic expections for how our political values will be integrated — or not — into non-Western political systems. Otherwise, all we have is cliche. And misunderstanding, which is even worse.
Keeping the other pets in line!
I hit a major milestone in the household dog training today: my Corgi discovered alien-cat up on the kitchen counter and barked madly until I came to see what was going on, and then, when alien-cat jumped down, the dog didn’t give chase! I called her, and she came to me!
Good dog! Very very very good dog!
Chick lit novelist Mary Castillo is blogging about games would-be writers play. Example:
The more we talk about how we want to write a book, or how we just can’t seem to get into the characters, or whatever, the more reasons why one shouldn’t call oneself a writer. A three- to four-inch thick pile of paper that constitutes your manuscript is the real deal, baby.
Can’t argue with that ;-)
A few days ago, I read about some research that suggests that men’s behavior can be affected by hormonal changes in a woman’s body.
So, okay. Appropriating another person’s bio-active chemicals has an effect on one’s own biochemistry.
But get a load of this: apparently, you don’t even need to get close up and personal to fall under someone’s spell.
In a contribution to a round-up of “dangerous ideas” at The Edge, Marco Iacoboni, a neuroscientist and director of the Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Lab at UCLA, describes a phenomenon called “mirror neurons.”
Mirror neurons are cells located in the premotor cortex, the part of the brain relevant to the planning, selection and execution of actions . . . [They] fire when we observe somebody else performing the same action. The behavior of these cells seems to suggest that the observer is looking at her/his own actions reflected by a mirror, while watching somebody else’s actions. My group has also shown in several studies that human mirror neuron areas are critical to imitation. There is also evidence that the activation of this neural system is fairly automatic, thus suggesting that it may by-pass conscious mediation.
I interpret this as follows. You see someone do something, like throw a frisbee. Within your own brain, a bunch of neurons fire — no surprise there. The surprise is that the “read out” of those neurons is not “other guy throwing frisbee” — it’s I am throwing a frisbee.
Iacoboni believes this phenomenon has unhappy implications for people who imbibe violence through the media.
I’ll leave that last bit to him. What I’m wondering is what role mirror neurons play in bonding. I’m thinking, for instance, of the ritual dances of bonded pairs of birds, and human dancing, and military exercises based on people synchronizing their actions.
And to step off even further into the wild blue yonder: does this suggest that multiple brains can link up and synchronize into what is, for all intents and purposes, a larger “brain” — like parallel processing CPUs?
Have you ever seen a flock of hundreds of blackbirds pivot simultaneously mid-flight? They look like they are a single organism, like they are operating under the control of a single brain.
Maybe they are.
And (wilder! bluer!) is it also possible Iacobani has discovered the biological basis for the “one mind” long postulated by mystics?
(More on Iacobani’s work and its implications for empathy here and here.)
Dog and Kennel Magazine has published a special report on nutrigenomics — foods designed to influence the way genetic tendencies express in dogs’ bodies.
The report says that the most successful application of this idea, so far, is in treating arthritis (partly because researchers have made solid progress in understanding the genetics of arthritis in dogs). By tweaking the levels of certain proteins and fats in their products, dog food manufacturers believe they can influence biochemical activity at the cellular level, cutting short the progression of the disease.
A twist on the story is that although these foods contain only natural ingredients — no drugs, nothing from a test tube — they are only available, right now, through veterinarians, as explained here by Dan Carey, DVM, “a trained veterinarian who now works as a scientist at Iams,” and Dr. Dru Forrester, scientific spokesperson for Hills Pet Nutrition:
“We want veterinarians to confirm that your dog has the body type and size so he’ll benefit from this diet.” Even more, Carey says, “We want to encourage people to work with veterinarians so they continue to get good general advice about their dog’s health.” Forrester also wants people to go through a veterinarian to prevent the rise of inferior imitations. “Everything in these foods is the result of detailed work. We don’s want to see nutrigenomic foods being copied and sold in grocery stores, where there are fewer controls on the contents.”
Translation: we plan to charge an arm and a leg for this stuff, and we don’t want people to get the idea that they can mix it up more cheaply in their own kitchens.
The article also asks why we can’t do something similar for people.
The answer is that we can exert more control over our dogs’ diets — and dogs are more willing to eat uniform (i.e. boring) food: “For nutrigenomics to work, you must eat the specific foods that have been developed for you, and do it faithfully.”
Faithfully as a dog, must be :-)
That said, the piece predicts this work will influence trends in human nutritional science, which is a good thing.
