Two illustrations of a test designed to show Anne's ability to recognize Sally's false belief. Anne perceives Sally will believe the ball is in the basket. An element of human consciousness and a key facet of our media.

Winogrand is one of the few masters of his genre, street photography. His method was relentless, at his death some 6000 rolls had yet to be developed and tens of thousands of negatives remained untouched. Like another master Lewis Hine, entire off-camera narratives can be derived from Winogrand's pictures, and they go hand in hand with the age of movies, exposing unseen sides of human desire. With so many negatives left unscanned, a veritable secret history of the 20th century awaits archivists in the Winogrand collection. The N.Y. Times chose his tour of the 1960 Democratic Convention to showcase.

Stare at it for a long, long time.

"The United States is the only developed nation without a visual literacy curriculum in its public education program."

paraphrased from Douglas Rushkoff's Coercion

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/03/hunger-games-and-trayvon-martin.html

The editors of the Wall Street Journal find an opportunistic Nero, William Happer, an atomic physicist from Princeton, who fiddles an op-ed questioning the logic of climate change by using the misnomer 'global warming.' Be wary of anyone using this phrase in the news, 'global warming' is a simpleton's view of anthropogenic (human made) CO2, the result of 1 billion cars and ample technological growth. The only proper name for the event is 'global climate change,' which has already altered seasons, farming dates, and contributes to ever stranger weather patterns.  He faults computer models predicting vast changes (like the 12,000 year old Larsen B shelf's melting in 2002, below) by aiming his sights only at one aspect of the data: the average temperature. It's a little like saying the body is healthy because the average of it's body parts' temperatures are stable. But if one leg is in increasingly colder areas and the head is in increasingly hotter areas, the body has a harder time regulating its temperature. The WSJ should be warned it risks future generations' livelihoods with such pointed, commercial defiance of climatological research. Tell them: wsj.ltrs@wsj.com

Lisa Miller uses Xanax and describes in New York Magazine a culture of fear endlessly popping chemical shields to a key mammalian growth mechanism: anxiety. A must-read for anthropologists, sociologists, and public health thinkers, a quote:

"Xanax and its siblings—Valium, Ativan, Klonopin, and other members of the family of drugs called benzodiazepines—suppress the output of neurotransmitters that interpret fear. They differ from one another in potency and duration; those that enter your brain most quickly (Valium and Xanax) can make you the most high. But all quell the racing heart, spinning thoughts, prickly scalp, and hyperventilation associated with fear’s neurotic cousin, anxiety, and all do it more or less instantly. Prescriptions for benzodiazepines have risen 17 percent since 2006 to nearly 94 million a year; generic Xanax, called alprazolam, has increased 23 percent over the same period, making it the most prescribed psycho-pharmaceutical drug and the eleventh- most prescribed overall, with 46 million prescriptions written in 2010. In their generic forms, Xanax is prescribed more than the sleeping pill Ambien, more than the antidepressant Zoloft. Only drugs for chronic conditions like high blood pressure and high cholesterol do better.

“Benzos,” says Stephen Stahl, chairman of the Neuroscience Education Institute in Carlsbad, California, and a psychiatrist who consults to drug companies, “are the greatest things since Post Toasties. They work well. They’re very cheap. Their effectiveness on anxiety is profound.”

Dean Falk, rebel paleontologist, discovered a discrete difference between extinct gracile and robust hominids that lived 2.5 million years ago. The robust lived in trees, with arms and legs of equal mass and ate mostly plant-life. The gracile lived on the savannah, where they faced dangerous predators, and adapted by running faster on powerful legs bi-pedally, and this allowed their arms to become the focus of their motor cortex. What she found may be the best evidence of where humans evolved from. Orchestrating hundreds of sources, Falk weaves the discoveries as a series of detective's eurekas. The shift from knuckle-walking to bipedalism involved transitions from forest to savanna, vegetarian diet to carnivorous, and a shift in how the body and brain cools itself (standing on two legs decreases exposure to the sun by a major percentage). Along the way, cranial blood-flow both shifts to certain key areas (speech) and adapts itself for a type of emergency cooling system that defaults when body heat reaches dangrous levels. The book is essentially a diagrammatic exploration of the chimp-hominid-human evolutionary "braindance", a pre-history for all neurologists, the book is a masterpiece of paleoneurology. Issues like balance and movement alert readers to the potentially limitless abilities of the bipedal mind. Her final chapters involve chimp and human agression (we get this from chimps who exhibit a gleeful rage fighting over food), calling us to become aware of the rationale for anger, murder and potetial for eventual self-destruction. Falk takes on the established, slumbering academics that ruled over the human missing link and the results involve amending their error-filled zoological family tree.

Hollywood, now in its 16th year of Romanesque decline, makes films it doesn't love and employs Harvey Weinstein as the defacto/unofficial vizier of its conscience. He finds the movies they love, the ones they cannot make, and he markets these films to them. From NYC, Weinstein discovers gems in plain sight at festivals, then overpowers the academy's psyche, playing his hand like an insurrection. Like an outsider OZ unmasking the Emerald City rather than hiding within it, Weinstein transforms the ceremony into his own without ever entering its management. The outcome was so obvious, the news is already at the bottom of the cycle by 10:30 am following day. The decline and fall of the sunset republic. Hollywood convulsively, obviously needs Harvey, he games them so well, it must be a new form of mogul desire...

Why I Quit Facebook NY Post Feb 13