Centripetal Notion: category

Click through for larger images and a lot of variations. Drawings were collected from 250 participants in a research project who were asked to draw what various emotions felt like, what direction that emotions travels, etc. The result is revealing.
LINK/IMAGES Emotionally}Vague website, via infosthetics

“I for one am afraid that American culture’s overemphasis on happiness at the expense of sadness might be dangerous, a wanton forgetting of an essential part of a full life. I further am concerned that to desire only happiness in a world undoubtedly tragic is to become inauthentic, to settle for unrealistic abstractions that ignore concrete situations.”

Microphones record an ongoing conversation, graphing the audio in concentric rings, differentiating voices by color. The further inward the rings, the further back in the conversation. Patterns reveal themselves such as individual people not speaking, interrupting, dominating, etc. Arguments and group silences become immediately tangible. (…)

Give enough of a tug and you can stretch outside your body, at least enough to induce a nonlocal perspective. Think solar flares, jet lightning, Wooly Willy …

“The Pirahã, Everett wrote, have no numbers, no fixed color terms, no perfect tense, no deep memory, no tradition of art or drawing, and no words for “all,” “each,” “every,” “most,” or “few”—terms of quantification believed by some linguists to be among the common building blocks of human cognition.”

A National Geographic study reveals the distribution of single men and women around the country. Blue and red represent an excess of single men and women respectively. It’s middle school all over again — the boys grouping up on one side of the continent and the girls on the other.

“We travel through life as in a ‘time ship,’ which ‘has a prow and stern and room inside for us to move around.’ The problem is that the notion of the ‘extended present’ is fundamentally incoherent to the commonsense mind.”

Some thoughts from Danah Boyd on the implications persistent digital memory (IM/email archives, blogs, images, video) has on culture, relationships, etc.

“That means that the more reasonably you try to act, the more unpredictable you are, at least to yourself (…)”

“Back in 1974, an unusual report from Jane Goodall at the Gombe Stream Wildlife Research Centre in Tanzania caught the public eye. Chimpanzees had committed infanticide and were engaging in war. Not only were they acting in unanticipated ways, chimpanzees were acting like humans. Goodall’s discovery bridged the divide between Homo sapiens and other species. (…)”