There are lots of products out there that might accomplish some silly task like “stress relief” but whose real and primary purpose is humor. The Tiddy Bear more than applies here, it’s actually best in show. But I don’t want to ruin the joke for you, so watch the video and then I’ll say my piece.
I think, by now, anyone who’s digerati has seen Wordle. Wired made a big thing of it a few days ago, visualizing several word clouds revolving around the new iphone. I also just saw a great cloud over at The Big Picture constructed from Ben Bernanke’s presentation to Congress—a great use of Wordle. So I’m just throwing my two cents in, too.
Here’s a cloud constructed from all the tags used here at Banapana:
Here’s just a cloud of the front page of Banapana:
At least with the tag cloud, I’m glad to see that media is the largest word, since that’s what this blog purports to be about!
This is the latest in psychometric computational assistance! Just answer a few simple questions and the Jobbotron will email you your ideal career! Need proof that it works? It’s run on a Cray 15 and brought to you by the folks at You Look Nice Today—how could you go wrong?
A.J. Marr has written an excellent essay on the notion of the meme and why he believes it to be essentially a poor metaphor for the complexities of human behavior. It is well-researched and thoughtful, but in the end, relegates the concept of the meme to the land of mixed metaphors and gives it too much credit of control over human behavior. Read more…
The New Scientist reports that one anthropologist, Maurice Bloch, is making the argument that religion is a natural development that has come about due to the evolution of imagination in our species. I’d likely agree with this since I also agree with Jeff Hawkin’s ideas about intelligence being largely made up of the ability to predict. And prediction can require imagination. Such a development though would inevitably lead to predictions that were, sadly, incorrect but unverifiable, like heaven or prayer. Our species’ early attempts to predict things often amounted to speculations about unseen powers controlling the seen elements of nature, and given the evidence our ancestors had at the time, unseen powers was a logical, if anthropomorphic, conclusion.
