The dark side of Dubai

Yes it's full of the kind of stuff you'd expect (or at least, that I'd expect anyway), but it was good to know us westerners can treat people just as bad with very little encouragement;

As she says this, I remember a stray sentence I heard back at Double Decker. I asked a British woman called Hermione Frayling what the best thing about Dubai was. "Oh, the servant class!" she trilled. "You do nothing. They'll do anything!"

Fucking Bitch!
And

My patience frayed by all this excess, I find myself snapping: doesn't the omnipresent slave class bother you? I hope they misunderstood me, because the woman replied: "That's what we come for! It's great, you can't do anything for yourself!" Her husband chimes in: "When you go to the toilet, they open the door, they turn on the tap – the only thing they don't do is take it out for you when you have a piss!" And they both fall about laughing.

let's hope this couple end up cleaning Emirate toilets with their tongues.

Obviously the whole Dubai dream is built on tears, read about it here

Practical Wisdom

Another interesting Ted Talk (is there any other kind?)



basically, toning down societies obsession with rules and allowing people to act morally.

The fear of strangers

We have it ass-backwards apparently..

What do Bruce Pardo and Atif Irfan have in common?

In case you’re not familiar with their names, let me rephrase:

What do the white guy who dressed up as Santa and killed his ex-wife and her family (and then committed suicide) and the Muslim guy who got thrown off a recent AirTran flight on suspicion of terrorism have in common?

so

As we wrote in Freakonomics, most people are pretty terrible at risk assessment. They tend to overstate the risk of dramatic and unlikely events at the expense of more common and boring (if equally devastating) events. A given person might fear a terrorist attack and mad cow disease more than anything in the world, whereas in fact she’d be better off fearing a heart attack (and therefore taking care of herself) or salmonella (and therefore washing her cutting board thoroughly).

something something Blindsight something

I felt a little like a blind man touching an elephant reading this but I think I understood just enough to post it;

A patient with bilateral damage to primary visual (striated) cortex has provided the opportunity to assess just what visual capacities are possible in the absence of geniculo-striate pathways. Patient TN suffered two strokes in succession, lesioning each visual cortex in turn and causing clinical blindness over his whole visual field. Functional and anatomical brain imaging assessments showed that TN completely lacks any functional visual cortex. We report here that, among other retained abilities, he can successfully navigate down the extent of a long corridor in which various barriers were placed. A video recording shows him skillfully avoiding and turning around the blockages. This demonstrates that extra-striate pathways in humans can sustain sophisticated visuo-spatial skills in the absence of perceptual awareness, akin to what has been previously reported in monkeys. It remains to be determined which of the several extra-striate pathways account for TN's intact navigation skills.

the link is from Peter Watts so I feel confident enough to nod dumbly in the corner;

Happily, the New York Times prints an English translation

Man made 'out of body experience'

fascinating stuff this;

Brain scientists have succeeded in fooling people into thinking they are inside the body of another person or a plastic dummy.

The out-of-body experience - which is surprisingly easy to induce - will help researchers to understand how the human brain constructs a sense of physical self.

link

Closed thinking

There's an interesting article here about cognitive dissonance, in particular trivialising or ignoring information which does not conform to your world view. In a break with scheduled programming it does not involve religion or the religious, instead it's about those (usually) devout atheist's, the Marxist's;

But my Marxist dinner companions really stunned me when they claimed
that Stalin “wasn’t all that bad,” and that “Mao was even better.”

WOW! the conclusion?

The problem, in other words, is the uniquely human
penchant for adopting an ideological position and then sticking to it,
reality be damned.