Hi, I'm david (b) hayes.

The Real Indiana Jones

Speaking of Hitler… The Telegraph tells the rather interesting story of the German archeologist who inspired Harrison Ford’s character:

Like Jones, Rahn was an archaeologist, like him he fell foul of the Nazis and like him he was obsessed with finding the Holy Grail - the cup reputedly used to catch Christ’s blood when he was crucified. But whereas Jones rode the Grail-train to box-office glory, Rahn’s obsession ended up costing him his life.

(via kottke.org)

Hitler Defaced

Metafilter user Artw explains it better than I can:

Jake and Dinos Chapman have bought a stack of Adolf Hitlers paintings for £115,000 and defaced them with rainbows and butterflies for their new show, “If Hitler Had Been a Hippy, How Happy Would We Be”. The show also recreates “Fucking Hell”, a huge swastika shaped diorama of tiny plastic nazis torturing and killing each other, which had been destroyed in a fire.

An example of their modifications to the painting. I’m honestly unsure if this is an act of historic vandalism or legitmate art.

Crichton Was Right About Media Extinction

Jack Shafer says that Michael Chrichton’s rather infamous prediction about the demise of mass media wasn’t wrong, just early.

As we pass his prediction’s 15-year anniversary, I’ve got to declare advantage Crichton. Rot afflicts the newspaper industry, which is shedding staff, circulation, and revenues. It’s gotten so bad in newspaperville that some people want Google to buy the Times and run it as a charity! Evening news viewership continues to evaporate, and while the mass media aren’t going extinct tomorrow, Crichton’s original observations about the media future now ring more true than false. Ask any journalist.

He also talks at length with the author about the topic and more.

Art and Synesthesia

I’ve probably noted my fascination with synesthesia — associating numbers with colors, smells with shapes, etc — before, but this stuff is interesting:

Where does synesthesia come from? Maybe synesthetes are just lying. Perhaps they’re under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs — many research subjects are college kids, after all — or happened as children to play with colored alphabet blocks. Or maybe they’re simply good with metaphors.

To Ramachandran, the latter answer gets at the truth — but he stressed that what appears as metaphor is a literal sensory experience for synesthetes. That may explain, he said, why synesthesia is eight times more common among poets, artists and novelists than the general population.

The essence of art is, arguably, metaphor, and its practitioners are especially prolific — and metaphor is just a convenient shorthand for the connection of unlinked cognitive phenomena. That’s exactly what appears to happen in the minds of synesthetes. Far-flung parts of their brain have unusually high levels of cross-wiring.

It’s worth reading the rest of the post, if only for the heartening “we’re all synesthetes” argument at the end.

The Perks of $8 Gasoline

In case you’re not sold on the idea that there are upsides to high gasoline prices, I recommend this article.

(via GOOD)

Eating Bugs

It’s the way of the future according to David George Gordon. I find myself surprisingly interested in it. The crucial component is this:

Insect lovers like Gordon argue that entomophagy — the scientific term for consuming insects — could also be a far greener way to get protein than eating chicken, cows or pigs. With the global livestock sector responsible for 18% of the world’s greenhouse-gas emissions and grain prices reaching record highs, cheap, environmentally low-impact insects could be the food of the future — provided we can stomach them.

(via Slate)

I noticed two interesting things on Google today, so I thought I’d share.

• Google has a new favicon. They’ve switched from the big G to the little one. I like it. (via DF)
• Maps on searches for country names and cities. Now when I want to know where Zambia is, I no longer have click through to Wikipedia to know.

Recently I’ve been giving some serious thought to my aversion to cable news, local news programs, and the vast quantities of stories that circulate on the internet. I came to this rough conclusion:

There are essentially two kinds of news: events and trends that change the lives of millions of people, and one-off stories about violence, theft, or kidnappings.

Basically, the vast majority of what I don’t like — stories about celebrities, crime, “human interest pieces,” — are stories that are interesting primarily because of their randomness. They have little to no meaningful and lasting effect on the lives of most people.

Coming to this conclusion, I did pause to think of the callousness — perhaps necessary — of this. Someone getting shot is a tragedy. And it’s an important event that could change their life forever or even end it outright. But I don’t have the time nor energy to hear all of those stories one-by-one. I don’t think anyone — even if they spent their whole day listening to such stories — could know, understand, and empathize with all of them.

But a single one-off story can easily fill a whole hour of time. Shows like NBC’s Dateline, ABC’s Primetime, and CBS’s 48 Hours are essentially dedicated to doing that. Their go-to format is to take one sordid incident — a murder, a kidnapping, a robbery — and tell you all the details they can about it. This can be compelling as a storytelling device, but it generally fails as a way to show what’s really happening in the world.

These shows — and cables news networks which spend much of their airtime telling similar stories — are ostensibly engaged in the act of conveying news. But they often fail to document the broad brushes that truly matter historically and personally. Unless you’re involved in these one-off events it’s unlikely to affect your life. But everyone everywhere is affected by record prices for oil and food.

Having said all that, there’s a difficult-to-define line separating one-off news from the events and trends stories in which I am legitimately interested. One murder in Denver over the previous weekend seems to me a one-off story. But five murders are certainly something I’d want to know about. That quite nearly constitutes a trend and could be a valuable fact to know. Between one and five is a difficult line of delineation that I can’t begin to tackle.

Natural disasters are also one-off stories. Definitionally, they happen only once and are unlikely to have an impact on me unless they were nearby. But when the volume of tragedy and destruction reaches above some arbitrary benchmark — which, again, I don’t really know exactly — I care about them.

Now one could even say that many of the things that I do consider news — the war in the Congo, or the mess in Zimbabwe, the conflict in Darfur — are one-off trivia as well. After all, as an average American the state of democracy in Zimbabwe is unlikely to ever directly impact my life. But it does, I would defend myself, matter in the lives of millions of Zimbabweans and millions more in surrounding countries.

It’s very easy to break the world into categories, but much harder to accurately define the countours of those categories. I have no doubt that almost all news involving movies stars will always be lowly one-off news to me, but that doesn’t provide clean delination for the rest or what crosses a journalist’s desk in a day. I don’t consider this the final answer to the question of “What news is worth knowing?”, but I’m rather certain it’s a step in the right direction.

Little Change after Prostition Legalized

This may surprise people:

The number of sex workers in New Zealand does not appear to have increased since legislation decriminalising prostitution became law, according to a new report.

(via Passport)

The Drawback of Gay Marriage

Even for homosexuals eager for the right to get married, there could be one drawback to California’s making it legal: doting parents and the persistant question of “When are you gonna get married?”