News

Your brain's letterbox

“Evidence suggests that reading – which depends on an alphabet, writing materials, papyrus and such – is only about 5,000 years old,” New Scientist reports. “The brain in its modern form is about 200,000 years old, yet brain imaging shows reading taking place in the same way and in the same place in all brains. To within a few millimetres, human brains share a reading hot spot – what Stanislas Dehaene [a leading European cognitive neuroscientist] calls the ‘letterbox' – on the bottom of the left hemisphere.”

Our inappropriate age

“No words are more typical of our moral culture than ‘inappropriate' and ‘unacceptable,'” Edward Skidelsky writes for Prospect magazine. “They seem bland, gentle even, yet they carry the full force of official power. When you hear them, you feel that you are being tied up with little pieces of soft string. Inappropriate and unacceptable began their modern careers in the 1980s as part of the jargon of political correctness. They have more or less replaced a number of older, more exact terms: coarse, tactless, vulgar, lewd. They encompass most of what would formerly have been called ‘improper' or ‘indecent.' An affair between a teacher and a pupil that was once improper is now inappropriate; a once indecent joke is now unacceptable. This linguistic shift is revealing. Improper and indecent express moral judgments, whereas inappropriate and unacceptable suggest breaches of some purely social or professional convention. … Calling your action indecent appeals to you as a human being; calling it inappropriate asserts official power.”

Surviving stampedes

In exactly one month, Christmas will be at our throats. Tardy shoppers will likely get caught in crowds that could be dangerous. “We asked Lou Marciani, director of the University of Southern Mississippi's spectator sports security program, for tips on how not to get tenderized,” Rachel Dovey writes in Wired magazine. Some of what she learned:

Watch the crowd. The mood of the mob will let you know if that superstore isn't going to open fast enough to prevent a riot. Plan your evacuation route in advance.

Stay upright. Falling in the middle of the crowd is very bad. Lower your centre of gravity: Duck your head and shoulders, tighten your stomach muscles and wrap your arms around your waist, like you're hugging yourself.

Go sideways. Moving with the mob or against it is a bad idea. Try to head sideways to the edge of the crowd. If you do fall, assume the fetal position with your hands clasped behind your neck.

Click, click, click

“One hundred [British] women were asked to carry a clicker in an experiment to measure how many times they felt anxiety about their bodies aging,” Harriet Alexander writes in The Daily Telegraph. “Over a seven-day period, the women aged 35 to 69 had to use the clicker every time they worried about their face, body or appearance in general. On average, the women surveyed had negative thoughts 36 times a day.” The study, which was filmed for television, was devised by fitness instructor Irene Estry and psychologist Emma Kenny to see if a looks-obsessed society creates ageism and pressure to stay youthful.

Meformer? Informer?

“It seems like we have a hard time forgetting about the ‘I' in Twitter,” Niala Boodhoo writes for The Miami Herald. “That was the conclusion by two Rutgers professors who studied the content of 3,000 tweets sent by 350 Twitter users. The communication and information professors, Mor Naaman and Jeffrey Boase, found that there tend to be two types of Twitter folks. The majority, or 80 per cent, were what they called ‘meformers' –Twitter users who sent out messages that revolved around themselves, updating others about their activities or sharing thoughts and feelings. The other 20 per cent are ‘informers' – people who were actually sharing information. Not surprisingly, the informers tended to have larger social networks and be more interactive.”

Friends with sponsors

“[Last] Tuesday was another typical day for John Chow, blogger and Internet entrepreneur in Vancouver,” Brad Stone reports in The New York Times. “Mr. Chow treated his 50,000 Twitter followers to a photograph of his lunch (barbecued chicken and French fries), discussed the weather in Vancouver and linked to a new post on his Internet business blog. Then he earned $200 by telling his fans where they could buy M&Ms with customized faces, messages and colours. Mr. Chow is among a growing group of celebrities, bloggers and regular Internet users who are allowing advertisers to send commercial messages to their personal contacts on social networks.”

Thought du jour

“I step over to his table and give him a medium hello, and he looks up and gives me a medium hello right back, for, to tell the truth, Maury and I are never bosom friends.”

– Damon Runyon