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.

Past the intro: a spirited mash-up of Lensman and Star Wars. Some great physics.

"We've never seen anything like it," added archaeologist David Stuart of the University of Texas at Austin, who is deciphering the hieroglyphs. Stuart acknowledged that "we don't know exactly what this is noting," but the Maya were looking at "patterns in the sky and intermeshing them mathematically."  Tulane University’s Marc Zender, another Mayan expert not involved in the work, said that “it’s about as exciting as discovering lost manuscripts of a famous mathematician like Archimedes. It’s an amazing privileged glimpse over their shoulders.”

From Frank Zappa's 1977 concert film

Cognitive neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran's Tell-Tale Brain is an exceptional walk through the modular elements of brain structures that appear to regulate or promote syntax, metaphor, grammar, parts of what we label as language. By deciphering anomalistic behaviors in distinct properties of language correlated to minute parts of the brain, he comes close to proving what linguists have theorized about for decades: The human brain comes wired with language's capabilities. This neuroscientist adds forensic linguist to his titles; he combines both Pinker's and Chomsky's separate, complimentary theories as well a few others into a larger holistic one built on the available structural data. That's merely the first part of the book. What Ramachandran does once he has these pieces is to launch a two pronged adventure. Magellan cubed. First he searches for the missing link in early consciousness: when did the brain 'switch' on this language ability? Secondly he extends these brain structures into visuals. Humans are visual thinkers that enabled verbal language to communicate with. Ramachandran explores how this language 'ability' with its origins in separate parts of the brain, first operated using images the eye sees and the brain memorizes. His eureka is that humans assemble visual information, like spoken language, with properties of syntax, semantic, grammar and metaphor. His careful observations add to the book's self-awareness (he notices in the east an integration between image and context and a disintegration in the west).  He closes his book with a treatise on how visual art operates, and as a lure I've included a taste below, his 9 laws of aesthetics.. A groundbreaking highly readable book.

 Ramachandran's 9 Laws of Aesthetics (from The Tell Tale Brain)

1. Grouping

2. Peak Shift

3. Contrast

4. Isolation

5. Peekaboo, or perceptual problem solving

6. Abhorrence of coincidences

7. Orderliness

8. Symmetry

9. Metaphor

Below, Ramachandran's mirror-box. A device to help amputees alleviate 'phantom' pain in phantom limbs.

Birch, which may have supplied the first portable written surface for Indo-European languages, has also been sometimes identified as the Rg Veda's 'tree of life.' Indo-European's first recorded myth, the Rg Veda, is a rich source mined for valuable references to the origins of written language. Both Russian and Hindi histories used birch until relatively recently (14th century).

"The public doesn't demand anything...it is only after a thing is created that the public demands it."

Sid Grauman, Hollywood's first exhibitor impresario, operator of Grauman's Chinese & Egyptian Theaters

www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/may/10/crisis-big-science/

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.