rochelle.mazar.ca

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lXh2n0aPyw?rel=0&w=560&h=345]

Now this kind of advertising I can get behind.

I don’t love how the Google Docs embed looks, so: HTML5: An Introduction.

(GNN)– Rapid-fire news from conversation with friends or too many stories from newspapers could numb our sense of morality and make us indifferent to human suffering, scientists say.

Scientists say updates from friends and family, let alone media like printed text, are often too quick for the brain to fully digest.

New findings show that the streams of information provided by newspapers, street signs, and conversation with others are too fast for the brain’s “moral compass” to process and could harm young people’s emotional development.

Before the brain can fully digest the anguish and suffering of a story, it is being bombarded by the next bit of information or update from one’s mother, according to a University of Southern Suburbia study.

“If things are happening too fast, you may not ever fully experience emotions about other people’s psychological states and that would have implications for your morality,” said researcher Mary Helen Scaremonger-Yang.

The report, published next week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Online Early Edition, which tries to update itself as slowly as possible because of these findings, studied how volunteers responded to real-life stories chosen to stimulate admiration for virtue or skill, or compassion for physical or social pain. iReport.com: Growing pains for the conversational art?

Brain scans showed humans can process and respond very quickly to signs of physical pain in others, but took longer to show admiration of compassion.

“For some kinds of thought, especially moral decision-making about other people’s social and psychological situations, we need to allow for adequate time and refection,” said Scaremonger-Yang.

She said the study raises questions about the emotional cost, particularly for young people, of heavy reliance on a torrent of news snippets delivered via vocal conversation and text-based sources such as newspaper headlines and posters in shop windows.

She said: “We need to understand how social experience shapes interactions between the body and mind, to produce citizens with a strong moral compass.”

USS sociologist Beamish Boy said the study raised more concerns over fast-moving lives than the conversational-based environment.

“In a culture in which violence and suffering becomes an endless show, be it in a play, politics, or merely your means of employment, indifference to the vision of human suffering gradually sets in.”

Research leader Tony Dammitall, director of USS’s Brain and Creativity Institute, said the findings stressed the need for slower delivery of the news and conversation, and highlighted the importance of slow-burn emotions like admiration.

Dammitall cited the example of French Absolutist Louis XIV, who says he was inspired by his father, to show how admiration can be key to cultural success.

“We actually separate the good from the bad in great part thanks to the feeling of admiration. It’s a deep physiological reaction that’s very important to define our humanity.”

Conversation, which allows users to swap messages and use their hands to emphasize a point often in as little as a single word at a time, is largely seen as a solution to information overload, rather than a cause of it.

This function, it is said, “means you can step in and out of the flow of information as it suits you and it never queues up with increasing demand of your attention. You can just stop and ask someone if you want to know what’s going on. No pressure.”

(In response to this.) Ahem.

The rules:

1. Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
2. Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
3. Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.

I was tagged by Catspaw.

1. Everyone thinks my favourite colour is pink, because I have a pink camera, a pink phone, a pink ipod shuffle, and a violently pink raincoat. My favourite colour is actually yellow.

2. When I was small, I used to put bowls on my head. No one is sure why, but I used to want a bowl on my head while watching sesame street. Many of my childhood pictures feature these plastic bowls.

3. When I was in my first year undergrad, I used to mock a friend of mine who had a mac. I told her how much better my PC was. I am ashamed of myself.

4. I only made it to city track and field in high school once, but I won first place in my event. It was shot put.

5. My earliest memory is being suspended in the air in front of a large brick planter. The planter was so tall I could just barely see over it. But I could bounce, and while bouncing I could see a blurry greenness beyond the brick. This brought me great joy. That planter is in my parents’ backyard, and doesn’t even come up to my knee now. But they used to put the jolly jumper in front of it.

6. I’ve never consciously eaten cottage cheese. I have no idea what it tastes like.

7. I like the smell of concrete stairwells, that sort of rockish sort of smell. My cat’s unscented litter smells like that, so I really like pouring out new cat litter. Is that odd?

I tag Jeremy, Dorothea, Emma, Box_Nine, Erica G, Chrys, and Rob.

For the last few weeks I’ve been attempted to recover from treatment-related anemia. It’s not uncommon, and someone (including me) should probably have seen it coming, but I certainly didn’t. I haven’t been feeling well for some time, but I couldn’t accept being sick again. I just felt tired; everyone feels tired sometimes, right? So I worked through it until I started losing my balance and was so light-headed I had trouble concentrating. My doctor’s response, after seeing my blood test results, was: “Oh crap.”

Denial is an amazing thing; there may be no force more powerful.

But that said, in the last few weeks I’ve started to really come to terms with cancer. Easy to say: it appears to be well behind me now (just had my 6 month all-clear). I’ve gone through periods of cursing my body for doing this to me, for allowing this to happen, for creating cancer in me. But lately I’ve been turning around on that.

My body found that group of malignant cells before any doctor ever did. And when it found them it started coating the in stone to keep them away from me, to keep me safe. My bod deserves a pat on the back for that.

Things other than my tumour that are 1.5cm:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwM6f0liHpo&hl=en&fs=1]

This woman is a saint.

When I was at Divinity School in the late 90s, one of the things I was required to do was to take two classes in scriptural studies along with my very free-wheeling program of early modern European history. I didn’t object to this, as it was useful for my studies in Reformation history and religion, but it was extremely new for me. I was a bit intimidated by it. First I took a class on the New Testament, which didn’t make that much of an impression on me other than to boggle at the art of parsing small collections of words to determine who wrote them and what influenced them. After that I took a class on the Hebrew bible, which intimidated me far more. Raised an atheist by devoutly atheist parents, I had at least a cursory understanding of the New Testament, given that our culture is saturated with it; the Hebrew bible was more of a mystery. But in the end, this class was one of the ones that utterly changed my world view.

We started at the beginning, with Genesis, of course. The first big revelation is that we have particular expectations of stories, expectations that are culturally defined, not “natural”. When someone tells us a story, a “history”, we anticipate that we are getting a basic list of facts. This is not the way middle eastern stories were told. Instead, they expressed truths through metaphor; take a familiar narrative and twist it in a particular way. We still do this, of course. But for narratives like this to make sense, you need to be well-versed in the whole culture in order to understand the signifiers. This is the same revelation I had when I took a music history class that finally explained to me why it was impossible to understand hip hop as anything other than an extraordinarily high form of art; to use the culture as your instrument, and manipulate it to say something new, with each note, each tone, coming with its own particular cultural resonance. To tell a story that isn’t just the straight narrative, but is a story that constructs itself in your head based on all the internal meanings of the pieces. To be outside the culture that created these kinds of narratives means that you won’t ever entirely understand all of it, like reading novels based on biblical stories without knowing the bible; you can understand the straight narrative, but not it’s inherent meaning. I was inspired by this form of story telling. I appreciate the depth of it. So my subsequent reading of the Hebrew bible brought me insights I couldn’t have come to otherwise, though I know I’m missing so much else. If you think about it, one of the overriding stories of the Hebrew Bible is that anyone who thinks they understand the will of G-d, the mind of G-d, is bound for failure. G-d cannot be understood by the human mind. To me, this was an important spiritual realization. Men and women since the beginning have been trying to find a way to communicate, to understand.

What followed in that course was a description of the history of the tribes; the nomadic history, the tribes who claimed land, the one who was dispossessed and became the priestly class. The remaining nomadic tradition that brought the key religious objects, the tabernacle containing the holiest of objects, to all communities in turn. I loved this idea; a movable temple, so that no one area laid claim to these precious objects. And how precious those objects were! Imagine: you have found one way to communicate with your creator and benefactor; it’s an unusual way, granted. You carry a seat, and this seat is the liminal space where your G-d’s space and yours coincide. This is the one chink in the wall between you and G-d; being near these objects is being near your G-d, not because they are divine necessarily, but because these are the tools that restructure space and time so that the hear the strains of G-d’s voice. G-d might well be everywhere, but this space, this little string and cans, is the only way you can make direct contact. And then the temple settles and is built in Jerusalem; the centre of that temple contains this special spot, the telephone line between heaven and earth. The communication lines aren’t just initiated by objects anymore, but are linked to this particular place, this special rock, this quality of the planet at this particular location. A tiny footprint of the planet where everything is arranged just right, the riverbed that brings G-d’s words to earth. As time goes on, this place is more and more protected; only the priests can go inside to be near this wonderful and dangerous spot. The course ended with only a mention that the following event is the destruction of the temple in 586 BCE. Just a mention.

Photo by Christopher Chan

The following term I took a course in comparative iconography. And the very first day, the instructor (the wonderful Kimberley Patton) showed us a picture of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. She told us: “according to measurements based on the placement of the remains of the temple, the Dome of the Rock, the oldest existing Muslim structure, sits over the place where the Holiest of Holies would have been.”

I was so struck by this image, by this reality. It’s as if the temple had just been destroyed for me, the implications hadn’t quite been revealed to me until that moment. There are no more prophets after the destruction of the temple, because there cannot be. G-d’s voice can no longer be heard. The means of communication are gone. These two spheres, the mortal and the immortal, still spin around each other, regarding each other, but no voice can be heard. No more fire in the bushes that does not burn its leaves, no more commandments, no more lost and confused youngest sons asked to bring an awkward, unwanted message to his people. No more surprise visits at the well. And here it is, that spot, the broken communication lines. The tools are long gone. The silence is deafening. I had to leave the room to catch my breath and consider it all, let it all sink in. The tragedy of it; a crucial, comforting connection, gone. To be cast adrift like that, never hearing the voice of a loved one ever again.

So in that moment I understood how contested that ground is, how high the stakes can be when history, religious and geography collide. So that’s my story for the 60th birthday of the modern state of Israel. G-d help us all.

Photo by Rent-a-Moose

My sister is an artist, and I remember her telling me the standard line they use in reaction to the ultimately least helpful criticism a piece of art can get: “Well, I could have done that!” Yeah, but you didn’t.

I remember the first time I heard her say it; I was 18, she had just finished her first year of her BFA program at Queen’s University in Kingston, and I was visiting her in her summer digs. (Incidentally, that was also the summer I read Maus. There’s really nothing quite like those hours you spend completely sucked into a great piece of literature, is there!) Yeah, but you didn’t. I got her point at the time, on some level, but I think now I get it quite a bit more.

Art isn’t about skill. And that’s what those people are expecting when they say that; art should be something that the average guy on the street can’t concieve of producing on his own. He want to look at a piece of art and be awed. The easiest way to be awed by something is to look behind the curtain and see who’s pulling the strings. If you can’t see the strings, and can’t even get a look behind the curtain, there’s a level of the magic that remains. You can be in awe of someone’s technical skill. That’s easy. And i guess it’s easy to stop there and let the definition of art rest.

But what my sister said is that it’s not about that. The skill isn’t the point. The ideas are the point. The creativity. Saying something, doing something, producing something so surprising and unique that it hasn’t been done before, ideas that haven’t been thought before. I don’t know my artists all that well, but that fellow who put a toilet in a room as an installation: he was the first one to think of doing that. He’s expressing that every day objects are art as well, he’s taking something ordinary and humble out of its context and forcing you to think about it in a new way. Those are the things that can only be art once; the first time someone thinks to do it. After that it’s just derivitive. “But I could have done that.” Yeah, but you didn’t. And you can stand there and be scornful, thinking, what skill was involved here that’s so special, what skill is being demonstrated that make this piece of art worth untold millions of dollars? But that would be missing the point. That’s the tyranny of skillfulness. The point is the newness, and once it’s done it can’t be new again.

And then I think of artists like Van Gogh, who created things that his peers had nothing by criticism for. Paradigm shifters. The rest of us stand on the shoulders of giants; as a culture, we need to move incrementally from one idea to the next. We don’t manage radical change of ideas well. We need to be introduced to things slowly. For the vast majority of us, truly unique, paradigm-shifting ideas cannot even be birthed in our brains; we are too stuck in the hegemony of the status quo, too utterly born into the water of this culture that we can’t even imagine what lies beyond it. We can’t even consider that there is a “beyond” in the first place. That’s survival, that’s living in the real world. Is it physiological? Can we only progress so far in a lifetime? It you picked up a medieval man and dropped him in Times Square, could he learn to make sense of it, or is he shackled to the Great Chain of Being so much that his brain can’t make the necessary leaps? It seems fairly clear that, in general, people don’t like change. When we first look at a thing, or think a brand new thought, it seems ugly. Once we feel around the edges of it and understand what it is, why it’s wonderful, what it brings us, then we can see the beauty of it.

Once in a while, when I’m looking around at the world, I think about the fact that the very concept of seeing is flawed. We like this idea that we see things as they are, that there is real truth in what we see. But we don’t “see” objects and things, do we? We only see how light reflects off them. We see the particular way that light moves, and we wring information from it. No different, really, from echo-location; just using different senses. In medieval medicine, it was believed that you could get sick if someone looked at you, because looking at a thing meant that invisible tenacles reached out from your eyes and touched the thing you had your eyes locked on. Looking at a person, in that context, is a profoundly intimate and possibly dangerous experience. And in many ways they were right; looking at a thing isn’t nearly as clear cut as it seems to be. It could have been our noses that came to dominate, and we would “see” the colours of things based on how they smell.

And I guess we should feel awe about that too.

I can’t stop coughing, and this is what I came up with to occupy my head.

“I am a fox,” said the fox.

“Come and play with me,” proposed the little prince.

“I am so unhappy.” “I cannot play with you,” the fox said. “I am not tamed.”

“Ah! Please excuse me,” said the little prince. But, after some thought, he added: “What does that mean, ‘tame’?”

“You do not live here,” said the fox. “What is it that you are looking for?”

“I am looking for men,” said the little prince. “What does that mean, ‘tame’?”

“Men,” said the fox. “They have guns, and they hunt. It is very disturbing. They also raise chickens. These are their only interests. Are you looking for chickens?”

“No,” said the little prince. “I am looking for friends. What does that mean, ‘tame’?”

“It is an act too often neglected,” said the fox. It means to establish ties.”

“‘To establish ties’?”

“Just that,” said the fox. “To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you, I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world…”

My attempt to build my own B612. (Click the image to see it bigger.)

My sister (Melissa) was due with her second child last Friday. Last Friday was also the fifth birthday of her first child (Max). Now, Max himself was a week overdue when he made his entrance into the world, so no one was entirely expecting the sequel to arrive when expected. And so he didn’t! Last night when I spoke to my brother-in-law (Peter), he said they weren’t planning to induce Melissa today, but maybe next Monday or Tuesday.

This morning at 6:30am my phone rang, and I was so dead asleep at the time I didn’t quite register what it was until it had stopped. Got up, checked the messages…it was my dad, sounding very pleased. My new nephew was born at 1:50pm this morning. Yay!

So now I’m trying desperately to get back to Guelph to hang out with the family, but I gotta tell you: for a city that is a lean hour drive from my condo in Clarkson, getting to Guelph is hard. There is no transit link between Mississauga and Guelph at all, so the only way to manage it is to get into Toronto (due east) in order to turn around and go to Guelph (due west). And then, of course, the arrival/departure times don’t match up at all; I took a commuter train into Toronto, and then walked twenty minutes up to the greyhound station, and now I’m parked there waiting for the next bus (2pm). For a 6:30am wake up, you’d think I’d be able to do this a little faster, but there you have it.

Apparently Max has already been in to meet his brother, held him, and sang to him. I’m sure this is the beginning of a beautiful relationship. My mother, minus a great deal of sleep because of the 1am phone call, is currently out sleeping on her patio in the sunshine. My sister, apparently, went into labour so fast there wasn’t time for painkillers. I can’t wait to see her, but word on the street is that she’s doing really well.

I haven’t been officially told the new one’s name yet, but last I heard the frontrunner was Leo. My mom says he’s a very beautiful baby, and that he already looks just like his brother. My mom said, over and over on the phone, “he’s so sweet, so sweet,” which I’m sure makes him a very unique and special less-than-a-day old! He’s nursing already and everything.

On the travel upside: I got on the Toronto wireless network. If only Guelph had one. Hopefully I’ll have some pictures to post, once I get an internet connection again after the big auntie-nephew introductions.

If one becomes a librarian the day one starts one’s first professional library job (debatable: possibly one becomes a librarian the moment one completes a library school degree, or the day one graduates from library school, or some other key date I’m not considering), then today is my two year anniversary of being a librarian.

It doesn’t feel like it’s been two years. It’s really zipped by.

I feel like the luckest person in the world.

Attended a vigil for the slain of Virginia Tech last night, in Second life. More to be said about this as I have time to process, but at the moment, really, there just are no words I can string together on the subject. More images, taken by Jason, here.

Me and Jason hanging out in Jeremy‘s Dancing Tree. I’m particularly fond of that rainbow, personally.

Jason looking particularly devious. Great suit, eh?

Walking in the woods on Info Island.

The person who built this is my kind of relaxer; a hedonist’s patio! You can’t see this from the snapshot, but I love how the translucent curtains around it billow in the wind. Really beautiful. You can see Jeremy hunched over idle in the background, poor thing.

My avatar dances better than I do, I can tell you that. Ta da!

Wheeeeeee! The waterslides are fun!