I like this poem over at Linebreak.

EXCEPT.

I don’t think it should have the—what to call them?—dangling sentence-starters. “Outside” on the third line of the first stanza.

I don’t know the, like, poetry etiquette though; does calling the line breaks into question call into question the whole thing? I don’t think it should. I like the words a lot—the rhythm and the images!

James Fallows follows up on nine Chinas with a bunch of fun refractions of China’s mass based on perceptions from particular vantage points. You’ve seen maps like this before. Here’s China from the POV of Shanghai:

It’s just like that great old New Yorker cover with the view of America from 9th Avenue—

—which I love because the rendering does all the work; no labels required. The American interior as maize rectangle. Doh. Perfect.

These maps only work if they’re drawn from some specific perspective, with some particular allegiance made clear. This annotated map of San Francisco, for instance, is not funny—because it hates everything! (Except maybe the “Forests of Mystery”?) Now, a hipster’s map of San Francisco, or San Francisco through the eyes of a visiting Chicagoan—those could be good.

Likewise, Maira Kalman’s classic map of New Yorkistan doesn’t fit the genre; it, at least, manages to be super-funny, but it still doesn’t really let you know who is drawing the map. (Am I being too picky?)

Any more like this out there that you’ve seen?

A few years back, I Asked MetaFilter: “What do you think is the cheapest, healthiest, tastiest, easiest meal to prepare?”

I got several excellent answers. But having now made this lentil tomato stew numerous times, I realize I’ve found the answer. Every time I make it, I’m shocked at how easy it is, how delicious it is, and how cheap it is. And dagnabit, it’s also super-healthy. Thought I’d share. Back to playing Dragon Age: Origins.

I do not know that this is actually true:

Many types of classic jacket derive from a specific purpose. Trench coats have epaulettes so that dead or wounded soldiers can be dragged to safety.

However, I want it to be true, and will repeat it often, in an attempt to make it as-good-as-true.

In the fall of my freshman year of college, I read an essay by Stephen Jay Gould called “The Panda’s Thumb” (drawn, I think, from a book by the same name) for an Introduction to Philosophy class.* The premise was that evolution was best revealed not in examples of perfect adaptation of a species to its environment, but in biological accidents, cobbled-together solutions. The panda’s “thumb,” for example, isn’t a finely tailored opposable digit like the human’s, but a kind of randomly mutated bone spur at the end of the rest, held together by an overstretched tendon where a ligament should be. Evolution doesn’t produce perfect solutions – whenever possible, it uses what’s there, readapting existing features (or exaggerated versions of them) to fit new uses. To use the terminology of the late anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, evolution for the most part isn’t an engineer, creating the perfect tools to fit the job, but a bricoleur, a kind of everyday handyman, perfectly willing to use a butterknife in place of a screwdriver if the butterknife is what’s on hand.

The neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene, of the Collège de France, has been getting a lot of buzz for his new book Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention, which that reading and writing and evolved in much the same way, making use of existing parts of the visual cortex and rewiring them. What’s more, Dehaene claims that reading and writing’s dependence on a part of the brain that originally evolved to serve other purposes has actually helped determine how reading has emerged historically, and even the shapes of letters themselves. Writing, in other words, isn’t entirely arbitrary – it’s limited by how far our brains can bend.

The neuroscience of writing also suggests that it’s primarily a visual phenomenon, and only secondarily a linguistic one (in the sense of language = speech). But the part of the visual cortex that handles reading relays visual recognition of letters to the speech and motor and conceptual centers of the brain so quickly and efficiently that it almost doesn’t matter; reading becomes a total mental act, integrating nearly all of our mental capacities with split-second timing.

Here’s a summary offered by Susan Okie in her review of the book in the Washington Post:

“Only a stroke of good fortune allowed us to read,” Dehaene writes near the end of his tour of the reading brain. It was Homo sapiens’s luck that in our primate ancestors, a region of the brain’s paired temporal lobes evolved over a period of 10 million years to specialize in the visual identification of objects. Experiments in monkeys show that, within this area, individual nerve cells are dedicated to respond to a specific visual stimulus: a face, a chair, a vertical line. Research suggests that, in humans, a corresponding area evolved to become what Dehaene calls the “letterbox,” responsible for processing incoming written words. Located in the brain’s left hemisphere near the junction of the temporal and occipital lobes, the letterbox performs identical tasks in readers of all languages and scripts. Like a switchboard, it transmits signals to multiple regions concerned with words’ sound and meaning — for example, to areas that respond to noun categories (people, animals, vegetables), to parts of the motor cortex that respond to action verbs (“kiss,” “kick”), even to cells in the brain’s associative cortex that home in on very specific stimuli. (In one epileptic patient, for example, a nerve cell was found that fired only in response to images or the written name of actress Jennifer Aniston!)

This result astonishes me, since I was pretty sure that the one cell = one concept model of the brain — what Douglas Hofstadter calls “the grandmother neuron” theory — had been completely debunked. Apparently, though, there’s a Jennifer Aniston cell? At least for some of us? It might not be the ONLY cell that lights up – but it doesn’t light up for anything else (and appears, at least in this case, to function at either the image OR the written name, suggesting a degree of cognitive interchangability between the two).

These reading cells work differently for words we immediately recognize – like the name of Jennifer Aniston – and those that we don’t (again suggesting that the brain works by macros and shortcuts whenever it can). Jonah Lehrer explains:

One of the most intriguing findings of this new science of reading is that the literate brain actually has two distinct pathways for reading. One pathway is direct and efficient, and accounts for the vast majority of reading comprehension — we see a group of letters, convert those letters into a word, and then directly grasp the word’s meaning. However, there’s also a second pathway, which we use whenever we encounter a rare and obscure word that isn’t in our mental dictionary. As a result, we’re forced to decipher the sound of the word before we can make a guess about its definition, which requires a second or two of conscious effort.

Lehrer also keys in Dehaene’s conclusions about the evolution of writing systems:

The second major mystery explored by Dehaene is how reading came to exist. It’s a mystery that’s only deepened by the recency of literacy: the first alphabets were invented less than 4,000 years ago, appearing near the Sinai Peninsula. (Egyptian hieroglyphic characters were used to represent a Semitic language.) This means that our brain wasn’t “designed” for reading; we haven’t had time to evolve a purpose-built set of circuits for letters and words. As Deheane eloquently notes, “Our cortex did not specifically evolve for writing. Rather, writing evolved to fit the cortex.”

Deheane goes on to provide a wealth of evidence showing this cultural evolution in action, as written language tweaked itself until it became ubiquitous. In fact, even the shape of letters — their odd graphic design — has been molded by the habits and constraints of our perceptual system. For instance, the neuroscientists Marc Changizi and Shinsuke Shimojo have demonstrated that the vast majority of characters in 115 different writing systems are composed of three distinct strokes, which likely reflect the sensory limitations of cells in the retina. (As Dehaene observes, “The world over, characters appear to have evolved an almost optimal combination that can easily be grasped by a single neuron.”) The moral is that our cultural forms reflect the biological form of the brain; the details of language are largely a biological accident.

“Writing evolved to fit the cortex.” On the one hand, it makes perfect sense that a human invention would be limited by human biology – that the visual forms of writing would be limited by our abilities to recognize patterns in the same way that the sounds of letters are limited by the shape and structure of the human mouth.

On the other, it so often seems that writing is BIGGER than we are, or at least independent – that it stands apart and outside of us, like it really was a gift from an Egyptian god – or that it’s so abstract, so removed in modern script from any kind of mimetic resemblance to the world, that it’s a purely arbitrary system, dictated by the requirements of the hand rather than the eye.

The other cool thing about Dehaene’s research? All that brain imaging and reading research and mapping of connections between different parts of the brain has helped him to figure out a neuroscientific way to begin to 1) define consciousness and 2) explain why consciousness is evolutionarily desirable. (Really.)

What I propose is that “consciousness is global information in the brain” — information which is shared across different brain areas. I am putting it very strongly, as “consciousness is”, because I literally think that’s all there is. What we mean by being conscious of a certain piece of information is that it has reached a level of processing in the brain where it can be shared… The criterion of information sharing relates to the feeling that we have that, whenever a piece of information is conscious, we can do a very broad array of things with it. It is available…

In several experiments, we have contrasted directly what you can do subliminally and what you can only do consciously. Our results suggest that one very important difference is the time duration over which you can hold on to information. If information is subliminal, it enters the system, creates a temporary activation, but quickly dies out. It does so in the space of about one second, a little bit more perhaps depending on the experiments, but it dies out very fast anyway. This finding also provides an answer for people who think that subliminal images can be used in advertising, which is of course a gigantic myth. It’s not that subliminal images don’t have any impact, but their effect, in the very vast majority of experiments, is very short-lived. When you are conscious of information, however, you can hold on to it essentially for as long as you wish,. It is now in your working memory, and is now meta-stable. The claim is that conscious information is reverberating in your brain, and this reverberating state includes a self-stabilizing loop that keeps the information stable over a long duration. Think of repeating a telephone number. If you stop attending to it, you lose it. But as long as you attend to it, you can keep it in mind.

Our model proposes that this is really one of the main functions of consciousness: to provide an internal space where you can perform thought experiments, as it were, in an isolated way, detached from the external world. You can select a stimulus that comes from the outside world, and then lock it into this internal global workspace. You may stop other inputs from getting in, and play with this mental representation in your mind for as long as you wish…

In the course of evolution, sharing information across the brain was probably a major problem, because each area had a specialized goal. I think that a device such as this global workspace was needed in order to circulate information in this flexible manner. It is extremely characteristic of the human mind that whatever result we come up with, in whatever domain, we can use it in other domains. It has a lot to do, of course, with the symbolic ability of the human mind. We can apply our symbols to virtually any domain.

Consciousness, in other words, is like writing for the brain – it fixes information that would otherwise be ephemeral, and allows you to perform more complicated operations with it. (Kind of like how we need a pencil and paper to do complicated arithmetic.)

Play with those analogies for a while. I’m going to start reading Dehaene’s book.

*Digression: This class was taught by a prof my friends and I nicknamed “Skeletor,” an ancient woman who couldn’t project her voice beyond the first few rows of the long rows of 50+ desks that passed for a seminar at Michigan State. On some days, she would wear a wrap-around microphone that inevitably dropped down her neck, becoming completely useless. She was always totally oblivious of this. We used to joke that she should wear a live snake wrapped around her neck instead – it would amplify her speech just as well, but everyone would pay rapt attention. I skipped about half of the classes to this class, netting one of my four 3.5s as an undergrad, all of them in my freshman year. If I hadn’t taken Ethics with the great Herbert Garelick the next semester, I’d probably be a math teacher today.

P.S.: I forgot to link to this great Scientific American interview with Dehaene. Here’s a snip:

COOK: In the book, you describe a part of the brain as the “letterbox.” Can you please explain what you mean by that?

DEHAENE: This is the name I have given to a brain region that systematically responds whenever we read words. It is in the left hemisphere, on the inferior face, and belongs to the visual region that helps us recognize our environment. This particular region specializes in written characters and words. What is fascinating is that it is at the same location in all of us – whether we read Chinese, Hebrew or English, whether we’ve learned with whole-language or phonics methods, a single brain region seems to take on the function of recognizing the visual word.

COOK: But reading is a relatively recent invention, so what was the “letterbox” doing before we had written language?

DEHAENE: An excellent question – we don’t really know. The whole region in which this area is inserted is involved in invariant visual recognition – it helps us recognize objects, faces and scenes, regardless of the particular viewpoint, lighting, and other superficial variations.

We are starting to do brain-imaging experiments in illiterates, and we find that this region, before it responds to words, has a preference for pictures of objects and faces. We are also finding that this region is especially attuned to small features present in the contours of natural shapes, such as the “Y” shape in the branches of trees. My hypothesis is our letters emerged from a recycling of those shapes at the cultural level. The brain didn’t have enough time to evolve “for” reading – so writing systems evolved “for” the brain!

You say “artificial ecologies,” and it sounds like you’re talking about zoos or aquariums or biodomes or terraforming or something. But actually, every legal border on a map creates an artificial ecology. Nicola at Edible Geography (following a post from FP Passport) explains:

For example, the antlion surplus in Israel can be traced back to the fact that the Dorcas gazelle is a protected species there, while across the border in Jordan, it can legally be hunted. Jordanian antlions are thus disadvantaged, with fewer gazelles available to serve “as ‘environmental engineers’ of a sort” and to “break the earth’s dry surface,” enabling antlions to dig their funnels.

Meanwhile, the more industrial form of agriculture practised on the Israeli side has encouraged the growth of a red fox population, which makes local gerbils nervous; across the border, Jordan’s nomadic shepherding and traditional farming techniques mean that the red fox is far less common, “so that Jordanian gerbils can allow themselves to be more carefree.”

I’m fascinated by the fact that differing land-use practices, environmental legislation, and agricultural technology on either side of the political border have shaped two distinct and separate ecosystems of out what would otherwise be a shared desert environment.

(Note: sorry for the lack of posts this week. I’m still in hospital – with hopes of a Monday release! – and among its many other sins, the internet here blocks Google. Can’t even tell you the ridiculous workarounds I’ve had to do just to get the links for this post together. Suffice it to say, Yahoo sucks. As does having nearly all of your internet life hosted by a single company whose pages can get firewalled for no good reason.)

The origin of modern individual consciousness: not perhaps Shakespeare (sorry Harold Bloom) but rather the humble space:

In the course of researching modern camel case, I stumbled across the medieval phenomenon of run-together text, formally known as scriptura continua, and could not resist chasing it down the rabbit hole. The pioneer and dean of this paleographic subfield is Paul Saenger. As I explain in my article, Saenger believes that the introduction of space between words in the seventh and eighth centuries laid the psychic groundwork for modern individual consciousness—that most of the intellectual breakthroughs that Marshall McLuhan credited to Gutenberg are more properly to be attributed to monks in Ireland and England […]

!!!

That’s from Caleb Crain’s blog post addendum to his NYT Mag post about camel case. (Ha! I just called it an “NYT Mag post,” totally on instinct. I shall let it stand.)

I like this twist. There’s a whole huge section on Irish monks in Alex Wright’s book Glut, and of course you know The Irish Saved Civilization. (Note the one-star comments.) What I like about this new angle is that we’re not relying on the Irish monks to save civilization—just transform it.

It’s not just spaces between words, either; it’s also silent reading. More to say about this at some point.

I just finished Margaret Atwood’s bio-dystopian “The Year of the Flood”—the first of her novels I’ve read—and wow, I can’t believe this is real and not something from the book. Rex says:

The Black Friday sale that I recommend: 23andMe. Complete ancestry and health analysis for $300 if you order three or more. I’m getting it!

I think we’re gonna need a special day for bio-deals in the 21st century. Get all your electronics on Friday; get your DNA upgrades on, what? Blue Monday?

So I went to this terrific conference last week called the Forum d’Avignon. Highlights included seeing comic-book auteur Marjane Satrapi, hanging out with the AFP’s Eric Scherer, talking Dude Theory with Umair Haque (previous love here, here), and seeing Larry Lessig give one of his amazing, media-saturated presentations in this room…

…which is inside this building…

…which is, you know, where the pope once reigned.

Pretty nice spot for a conference.

Now, let me pause there and start another thread. They’re going to come back together in a moment.

Tim has recommended Jacques Derrida’s book Paper Machine many times before (here and here, for starters)—and he even hooked me up with a copy a few months ago. Since then, I’ve tried, several times, to dig into it—always without any luck.

But that’s a virtue of physical books, isn’t it? They’re persistent. They hang around. They don’t disappear forever when you close the tab. So as I was packing for the Forum d’Avignon, I saw Paper Machine sitting there on my white table, and thought to myself, well, this seems appropriate.

Maybe sleep deprivation is the secret. Maybe high altitude helps abstract thinking. Maybe Air France puts philosophy in their coffee. Whatever it was, my experience with Paper Machine was completely transformed: I devoured it. Couldn’t get enough. My Carmody-provided copy is now mangled and molested—page-corners turned back, sections starred and underlined.

(And no surprise, Tim’s right: you ought to read this book.)

Here’s where it comes back together. In that grand conclave room of the Palais des Papes in Avignon, I moderated a panel of my own…

… a panel that featured, among others, the director of an innovative school in Denmark; the director of the second-largest publisher in France; and the chairman of Vivendi. And midway through this panel, to make a point, I used… yes… Paper Machine:

I just want to reinforce that there were some serious dudes in the audience here—the chairman of Vivendi on my left, and various ministers and CEOs arrayed before us. And that’s cool! The stuff we talk about here reaches out into the real world. Sometimes we get to be emissaries for this long-running conversation, and bring it before the bishops and cardinals of the media magisterium.

So that’s my Paper Machine story.

With one addendum: back during the flight, I was flipping through the book, looking for a note I’d made. I simply could not find it. I finally found the spot in the text that I’d been thinking of—but no note. The page was pristine. I was sure I’d made a big squiggly mark there; I remembered doing it, with a flourish; we were 30,000 feet above the Atlantic and I thought I was going insane.

But in fact, my copy of Paper Machine is defective. The first 32 pages repeat—so at page 33, I have another title page, and then the whole thing just loops, all the way until page 64, at which point it continues as if nothing happened. So aha: I had marked one copy of that spot, but was now looking at another.

Two things. First: isn’t that just totally, absolutely perfect? I cannot tell you how delighted I am that my copy of Jacques Derrida’s Paper Machine is messed up in a way that only a physical book could be messed up. And second: I still have 32 pages to read, somehow.

I bought my brother a copy of ESPN sportswriter Bill Simmons’s The Book of Basketball for his birthday, and he talked it up so much that I wound up buying a copy of it for myself. I’ve been reading it over the past week, and it is a delight. If you like basketball, and/or the history of basketball, or smart, snarky sportswriting, any of them, the least little bit, then you’ve got to nab a copy. In thr introduction, Malcolm Gladwell compares the book to the basketball equivalent of the original Bill James Baseball Abstract, and he’s right — it’s that nerdy (nerdier), that funny (funnier), and that good.

One of Simmons’s charms is that he will do things like define criteria for the NBA’s MVP award, justify those criteria, and then go through every year in NBA history to figure out if the right guy won. Here’s an excerpt from that chapter that gives you some of the flavor of the book:

Question no. 2 [for determing the MVP]: In a giant pickup game with every NBA player available and two knowledgable fans forced to pick five-man teams, with their lives depending on the game’s outcome, who would be the first player picked based on how everyone played that season? Translation: who’s the alpha dog that season? The Finals answer this question many times… but not every time. We thought Kobe was the alpha dog in 2008, but after watching him wilt against Boston in the finals — compared to the way LeBron carried a crappy Cavs team to seven games against Boston and nearly stole Game 7 — it’s unclear. This question reduces everything to the simplest of terms: we’re playing to 11, I need to win, I can’t screw around with this choice, and if I don’t pick this guy, he’s gonna get pissed and kick our asses as the second pick. I mean, imagine the look on ’97 MJ’s face if someone picked ’97 Karl Malone before him in a pickup game. It would have been like Michael Corleone in Godfather Part II when Kay informed him about her abortion.

That’s the other Simmons signature — LOTS of pop culture references. The only thing this guy seems to do besides watch basketball is watch movies, over and over again, which endears him to me in ways I can’t quite express.