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In the Future, Dreams Will Be in High-Definition

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Ken Hunt
on October 21, 2008
in Culture and psychology
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Image by aye_shamus via Flickr: i sleep in black and white, but i dream in color

I’ve often wondered exactly how films and television affect the way we dream. Growing up, I remember hearing that most people dreamed in black and white. This was something that made no sense to me. My dreams were in colour. All of my friends dreams were in colour. It was only adults who claimed to have dreams in black and white, and there was something very sad about the idea that as we aged it was possible that the colour would be drained out of even our dreams.

As I got older, though, and continued to dream in colour, I suspected that people who dreamed in black and white did so because they were used to black and white television and films. Dreams, after all, are like movies in our heads. This has always been the case for me, at least. Dreams even tend to use devices like close-up, slow motion, and change of perspective that are common in film, but totally foreign to our everyday experience with vision. It seemed reasonable to me that the brain was borrowing from these media to make our dreams, so if someone thought of films as being in black and white, they would dream in black and white, but if they thought of films as being in colour, their dreams would be in colour as well.

A new study from Ewa Murzyn, a post-grad student at the University of Dundee seems to have verified exactly that. People who grew up with black and white television dream in black and white, those who didn’t mostly don’t. Now I want more in-depth studies about how the media primes our dreams. Do people who never watch scary movies have scary dreams? What about the correlation between pornography viewing and sex dreams? Do people who play a lot first-person shooters have murderous dreams? Is there any way we can find out what dreams were like in the golden age of radio?

One thing I’m fairly certain of is that my son will grow up having dreams in beautiful colour and high-definition. That’s a lovely thought.

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Unschooling, Poverty Tips, Obama’s Millions & Our Precious Economy

Published
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Ken Hunt
on October 20, 2008
in Links
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Lively Links for Monday, Oct. 20, 2008

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The Messy History of Voting in America

Published
by
Ken Hunt
on October 16, 2008
in Culture, Politics and Technology
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The New Yorker’s Politics Issue had some great reads in it, including the eloquent endorsement of Barack Obama, and the fascinating profile of Arianna Huffington, but my favourite piece was written by Jill Lepore and titled Rock, Paper, Scissors. It is an historical overview of the messiness and madness of the American electoral process. In particular, the piece focuses on the adoption of the secret ballot (also known as the “Australian Ballot“) in the United States.

One of the things that great writing about history always does is to remind us that there are some notions that we don’t even think about today, ideas we find so commonplace and sensible that it is hard to believe they haven’t always been the status quo, but were once considered radical or controversial. For instance, Lepore  tells us that 150 years ago, voting wasn’t a simple matter of showing up at the polling place and filling out your ballot. In fact, polling places didn’t even have ballots. Voters had to provide their own.

Nowhere in the United States in 1859 did election officials provide ballots. [...]  Voters got their ballots either from a partisan, at the polls, or at home, by cutting them out of the newspaper. Then they had to cross through the throngs to climb a platform placed against the wall of a building (voters weren’t allowed inside) and pass their ballots through a window and into the hands of an election judge.

Violence and intimidation at the polls was common in this era. That is true not only in the U.S., but here in Canada as well. (According to the Canadian Encyclopedia, British Columbia adopted the secret ballot in 1873, Ontario in 1874, and P.E.I. didn’t adopt it permanently until 1913.) The primary reason, it seems, that violence flourished at the polls at this time in history was that suffrage was expanding faster than the mechanisms needed to handle it.

In this fall’s Presidential election, every citizen who is eighteen or older—except, in some states, prisoners and felons—will be eligible to vote. Somewhat more than half of us will turn up. We won’t be clobbered, stabbed, or shot. We will not have to bring our own ballots. We will insist that how we vote be secret. The founders didn’t plan for this. No one planned for it. There is no plan. It’s patches all the way down.

[...]

With the exception of Benjamin Franklin, who anticipated Malthus, the nation’s founders could scarcely have imagined that the population of the United States, less than four million in 1790, would increase tenfold by 1870. Nor did they prophesy the party system. Above all, they could not have fathomed universal suffrage. In the first Presidential election, only six per cent of Americans were eligible to vote. And these men didn’t elect George Washington; they voted only for delegates to the Electoral College, an institution established to further restrain the popular will.

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Canadian Election Results: Everyone Lost

Published
by
Ken Hunt
on October 15, 2008
in Politics
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Stephen Harper

Only in Canada could we have an election that no one wanted, that nearly no one paid attention to, and yet wind up with a result that left everyone disappointed.

There was just no good news for anyone last night.

  • The Tories increase their seats in a minority government, but so what? This was probably their best opportunity to win. It was an election that opposition parties lost because they couldn’t make the public believe in an issue and the Tories failed to capitalize, falling apart in the last two weeks thanks to a poor campaign and bone-headed policy decisions. They didn’t break through in Quebec and without a majority, they still can’t implement the agenda they really want. Harper gets to hang on for another year, maybe two, depending on what happens to the economy.
  • The Liberals fall to historic lows, unable to defend Ontario, unable to get people on board with a Green Shift Plan that should have been easy to sell. They are now a party in disarray, doomed to at least a year of in-fighting. Dion is a decent guy, his heart is definitely in the right place, but Canada’s Natural Ruling Party can’t abide loses.
  • The NDP gambles big, spending more than they’ve ever spent before, in an effort to perhaps become Canada’s option to Stephen Harper. Despite the gains the party made, they failed to really break through anywhere. A good campaign, but a moral victory is not enough.
  • The Greens get walloped. Despite their leader being in the debates and higher profile coverage of their party than ever, they fail to win a single seat and their vote fails to materialize on election day.
  • The Bloc wins, sort of, by not losing. At the beginning of the election they looked doomed, but they managed to hold onto Quebec yet again. That’s a victory of sorts, but they too are facing leadership issues and could easily descend further into irrelevance.

Ho-hum. Everyone back to first positions. Let’s do this thing again. How’s eight months sound?

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Lively Links for Mon., Oct. 13 - Canadian Thanksgiving

Published
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Ken Hunt
on October 13, 2008
in Links
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A final reminder: Tomorrow is election day in Canada. If you are not signed up at PairVote, at least take the time to figure out how best to use your vote for the environment:

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How to Vote Strategically in the Canadian Election

Published
by
Ken Hunt
on October 11, 2008
in Politics
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Canadians will go to the polls on Tuesday to elect a new federal government. It is a cliche to suggest that whatever election happens to be going at the moment is “the most important election of our lifetimes,” but this is an important election. For the first time in our history we have major parties that have recognized the environment and climate change as central campaign issues and who will make reducing carbon emissions a fundamental part of their governing strategy.

The problem, however, is that even if you are concerned about the environment there are a number of parties you could legitimately choose to vote for and in Canada’s first past the post system, voting for your first choice of party can easily help hand the election to exactly the people you don’t want to win. Deciding how best to use your vote can be complicated. Luckily a couple of websites have popped up to help make your decision easier.

  • Vote for Environment - When you enter your postal code on this website, you’ll get a break down of how best to use your vote for the environment in your riding
  • Pair Vote - Every vote a party gets matters, even if they don’t win the riding, their future funding is directly related to their total vote tally. With Pair Vote, you can vote strategically and still help make sure your preferred party gets all the votes and funding it deserves by swapping votes with someone in another riding.

Use them. And use your vote wisely.

[UPDATE] Unfortunately, it is now too late to sign up for Pair Vote. You’ll have to find a way to vote strategically on your own.

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Save Us Warren Buffett, You’re Our Only Hope

Published
by
Ken Hunt
on October 9, 2008
in Economics
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Warren Buffett speaking to a group of students...

Warren Buffett is everywhere these days. In fact, he’s behind you right now. Boo!

First there was The Snowball a 1,000-page authorized biography that was just released. (Portfolio is reviewing it section-by-section for those of us who can’t dedicate that sort of time to the project. They’re mostly unimpressed, so far. With the writing, of course, not with Buffett.)

Then Buffett, stepped in to help shore up Goldman Sachs and General Electric to the tune of $8 billon. Next, there was John McCain, bringing up Buffett’s name on Tuesday night as a possible choice for Treasury Secretary, and going out of his way to remind everyone that Buffett is an Obama supporter. Now, articles like this piece in Slate by Daniel Gross comparing Buffett’s actions today with J.P. Morgan’s actions in 1907 and this piece by Steve Lohr in the New York Times which makes the same point, have started to pop up.

It would be nice to think that one man really could do something about the current crisis, but that’s just not the case this time around. The problems today are a lot bigger than the situation in 1907, and Buffett doesn’t have nearly the comparitive wealth or sway that Morgan had at the time. As a voice of reason in frightening times, however, he does serve us well.

Buffett’s conversation with Charlie Rose, as mentioned in the Times piece, is worth watching in its entirety. Buffett compares the current crisis with Pearl Harbor and suggests that government action on the same scale is needed to respond. He loves Paulson, loves the Bailout, and sees opportunity where everyone else sees disaster. He thinks that, long-term, buying up distressed assets will be a money-maker. In fact, he’d like a piece of the action, and if there’s anyone who knows something about making money over the long term, it’s Buffett. As always, his credo is: “Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.” The best thing we can do right now is keep that in mind.

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Lively Links for Wed., Oct. 8

Published
by
Ken Hunt
on October 8, 2008
in Links
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  • Iceland: The Party at the End of the World - Tracy McVeigh of The Guardian reports that one of the world’s best places to live is a country on the verge of collapse, thanks to inflation, a crumbing currency and the meltdown of financial markets. (via BuzzFeed)
  • Sarah Palin’s Doodles - Noam Scheiber of The New Republic makes an absolutely amazing find on his reporting mission to Alaska. (via BuzzFeed)
  • Obama’s Good Deed - A wonderful story of how a young Barack Obama came to the rescue of a young Norwegian bride 20 years ago. (via reddit)
  • Don’t Blame the Poor - Daniel Koffler of Culture 11 tells us not to believe the pundits who want to blame the financial crisis on irresponsible poor people. (via Economist’s View)

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No doubt space travel will suck someday too

Published
by
Ken Hunt
on October 8, 2008
in Business and Technology
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Virgin Galactic

If you have enough extra money lying around it’s quite possible that you’ve already booked one of the seats on Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo, set to launch sometime in 2010. There are plenty of good reasons to get on board: the spirit of adventure, being among the first humans to slip the surly bonds of earth, and so on…

But perhaps the best reason to get a seat at the dawn of commercial space travel is so that you can experience it before it begins its long slide into becoming the same kind of life-sucking bureaucratic nightmare that air travel is today.

One of the saddest stories of the 20th century is the fate of air travel. In 1900 it was a dream, feverishly speculated upon, subject to all manner of Jules Verne imaginings; by 1999 it was a chore, a tedious, uncomfortable ritual undertaken in order to get from A to B.

That’s how Owen Hatherley starts a wonderful essay on the state of air travel over at the New Statesman. Much of the blame, in his view, belongs to the institution of the airport, which he describes as a “warren-like combination of the shopping mall and the high-security prison.” Fans of Douglas Adams, of course, cannot read any description of the airport and not immediately recall the famous opening lines of The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul.

It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the phrase, “as pretty as an airport.”

Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness arises because airports are full of people who are tired, cross and have just discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk (Murmansk Airport is the only known exception to this otherwise infallible rule), and architects have on the whole tried to reflect this in their designs.

They have sought to highlight the tiredness and crossness motif with brutal shapes and nerve-jangling colors, to make effortless the business of separating the traveler forever from his or her luggage or loved ones, to confuse the traveler with arrows that appear to point at the windows, distant tie racks, or the current position of Ursa Minor in the night sky, and wherever possible to expose the plumbing on the grounds that it is functional, and conceal the location of the departure gates, presumably on the grounds that they are not.

Adams is describing Heathrow circa 1988, but it seems that not a lot has changed since then. Twenty years after the publication of Tea Time, here’s how Hatherley describes the opening of Heathrow’s Terminal Five.

Terminal Five is majestic: a thrillingly Constructivist space, with huge spans of glass and steel, open to the expanse of the surrounding airfield. Yet within weeks of opening, 28,000 bags were lost, and 500 flights cancelled. And to ensure that people milling around in limbo keep themselves busy spending money, the terminal only has 700 public seats. Today, amid the airline bankruptcies, an advert declares “Terminal Five is working”, as if we should be impressed.

Hatherley’s essay reviews two new books, Naked Airport, a cultural history of “the world’s most revolutionary structure” by Alastair Gordon and Politics at the Airport, a collection of academic essays edited by Mark B. Salter of the University of Ottawa. Both sound like they are worth a read.

The title of Gordon’s book comes from a quote by Le Corbusier who apparently said “the airport should be naked”, and suggested placing them in the middle of cities, like railway stations, without any thought given to the logistics of actually landing planes or allowing them to take off.

When it comes to air travel, it seems, cold hard realities have always gotten in the way of big dreams. Today it is the economic realities of air travel that are truly destroying the fantasy of flying around the globe. Rising oil prices, deregulation and the emergence of discount carriers have thoroughly democratized the experience. Leaving aside the ecological problems of air travel, it is a wonderful thing that anyone can afford to do it, it’s just a shame that it is no more exciting than riding the bus and, because of security worries, a whole lot more hassle.

If commercial space travel ever becomes a useful way to get around, rather than just a novelty for the wealthy, it is inevitable that the same thing will happen to it. So, if you have the means, gather ye space miles, while ye may.

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Lively Links for Tues., Oct. 7

Published
by
Ken Hunt
on October 7, 2008
in Links
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