Your Brain on E
e-words by Angie Mah
e-image courtesy of Flickr member: brain_blogger
Well, E-Books.
It’s no longer contestable, computers and handheld reading devices like smart-phones are altering the way that we read by the millisecond.
Last Saturday at the Boston Book Festival, New York Times technology columnist David Pogue hosted a talk titled, “The Future of Reading: Books Without Pages?” Guest speakers from Google, Sony, Interread, and Pixel Qi joined an auditorium packed with curious audience members at the Boston Public Library Rabb Lecture Hall to discuss with the public strategies these companies are undertaking to digitize essentially all of the world’s readable resources into one enormous database. Their collective hope for the future of reading: to make materials readily accessible to a large number of people at the fastest rate possible—at once an appealing and all-over frightening notion. But for a moment forget about productivity and usefulness, and dwell on this article published by the New York Times in early October which delves into the question of whether or not humans even like e-reading and the ways that e-reading is rapidly affecting and shaping the way people are remembering, learning, and understanding written material and visual representations.
Try this memory exercise out for size.
The image above is from Charles Bell (1774-1842): The Anatomy of the Brain, Explained in a Series of Engravings. London: T.N. Longman and O. Rees (etc.), 1802.
Red on Yellow Kills a Fellow
Image by Flickr Member: Pierson Hill
“Red on yellow, kill a fellow; red on black, friend of Jack”
Be happy you learned this little ditty before a foray into the Southern woodland regions of North America. This saying originated in North America as a way to distinguish the venomous coral snake–recognizable by its red, yellow, and black banded skin–from nonvemonous look-a-likes. There are only two species of coral snake found in North America, the eastern coral snake, or harlequin snake (Micrurus Fulvius) and the Arizona coral snake (Micruroides euryxanthus). “Red on yellow” refers to the red and yellow striped bands that run down the the snake’s body. Variations of the phrase include, “Red on Yellow Kills a Fellow, Red on Black, Venom Lack,” and “Red on yellow kills a fellow; red on black, pat it on the back.” Unfortunately the saying’s usefulness ween outside of North America, where in regions like India, the coral snakes have different color and band patterns on their skin. The image above is of the charlatan coral snake, the scarlet king snake (Lampropeltis Triangulum Elapsoides).
Glimpse Journal Recommends: WAR TOYS/TOY WARS
Glimpse Journal contributor Mary Ting (China Vision 2.2) is pleased to present the work of James Wong and Robert Visani in her newly curated show War Toys/Toy Wars. The show will be up from Oct.9th – Nov. 6th, 2009 at Gallery 456, Chinese American Arts Council (CAAC), 456 Broadway, 3fl, New York, NY 10013. For more information please visit the CAAC website.
Step Outside
Orionid Meteor Shower Tonight
Step outside anytime between 1 – 6 a.m. EST to catch a glimpse of the Orionid Meteor Shower as Earth makes its annual rotation through a dense area of debris left by Halley’s Comet. Individuals on Earth, especially those in rural, less light-polluted areas, should expect a beautiful show.
The Poems of Arto Vaun
Congratulations to Glimpse Staff Poet and Contributing Editor, Arto Vaun, for his High Commendation by the 2009 Forward Prize! One of Vaun’s works has been selected for High Commendation by the Forward Prize (the Pulitzer equivalent of the UK) as one of the best poems published in the UK in 2009. Vaun states: “I’m honored to be alongside some stellar company like Anne Carson, Sharon Olds, CK Williams, Mary Oliver, Stanley Moss, and Andrew Motion.” His first book of poems, Capillarity, was published this year by Carcanet Press. The poem for nomination can be found in the Forward Book of Poetry which was released on Oct. 1st by Faber & Faber. Vaun joined the Glimpse team in August 2009, and his inaugural poem for Glimpse, featured below, will appear in our upcoming Color (vol 2.3) issue:
Singed Bedroom, Weekend Afternoon
I painted the walls plum and hung sheer
Curtains so when they caught fire from the atoms
Rushing from my body this afternoon
It was the loveliest thing I had seen
The rain came down like a song as I was
Disintegrating seamlessly all electric soft colors
I turned into something solar and crackling
Watching from my twin bed
How I wanted to reach out to my own going
As a spirit might want to examine itself in a photo
Barely present in a spot of faded yellow light
Looking hard squinting and asking Is that me
The Space Oasis
Ice on (or “in”, rather) the Moon
On Friday morning on Oct. 9, 2009, NASA’s Centaur rocket delivered a blow onto Cabeus, a two-mile-deep crater on the moon’s south pole. The mission was captured and documented with some shaky real-time footage by NASA’s Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) . The $79 million dollar mission was funded by NASA as a hopeful attempt to find ice below the moon’s surface, indicating the possibility of a future water resource. NASA says one hope behind the presence of water is to mitigate costs of space travel by eliminating the need to carry large quantities water from earth. In short, a space oasis. The video below shows the launch of the Atlas 5 Centaur rocket from its launch pad, its calculated route and target, and the locations and names of U.S. observation teams. The images above show Charles “Pete” Conrad and Alan L. Bean on their Nov. 14, 1969 Apollo 12 man mission on the moon.
For a few fun moments of procrastination-exploration of the moon, check out Google Moon, launched by Google on July 20, 2005.
Is the U.S. the only country in space? Check out NASA’s list of other countries’ explorations in space.
Upcoming Events: Yang Liu Poster Exhibit
Yang Liu, a Glimpse Journal contributor from China Vision 2.1, is a Guest of Honor at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair where she will provide audience members with a taste of her 2007 book East Meets West; Cultural Differences Between Germany and China. Her work will be on view from Tuesday, October 13, 2009 – Sunday, October 18, 2009. To see the specifics of the event visit the 2009 Frankfurt Book Fair site.
From Our Internal Organs to the Cosmos
Congratulations to this year’s Nobel prize in physics recipients!
On Tuesday Oct. 6, 2009 at 11:45 am, the recipients of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics were announced at The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. One half of the prize was awarded to Charles K. Kao for his research in glass fiber optics, and the other half of the prize was evenly divided between Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith for their invention of the charge-coupled device, or CCD.
In 1966 with his college George A. Hockham at Standard Telecommunication Laboratories, Kao proposed a solution for the then thought implausible transmission of long range information technology. They suggested that impure glass particles inhibited long range light transmissions in optical fibers. By chemically purifying the glass with fused quartz and fused silica, Kao purposed a method of extracting an ultra-thin fiber thread that would carry at least 1% of light over the distance of 1 kilometer. Today this glass fiber optics technology is fused with our everyday lives and employed in various forms (like the internet), allowing for instantaneous transnational and global cable communication.
In 1969, Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith of Bell Laboratories discovered the CCD while drafting the proposal for a technological information storage device. What they came up with instead was a light transmission technology, a digital image sensor, based on Albert Einstein’s theory of the photoelectric effect. When particles of light enter the light sensitive silicone plates, the CCD, electrons in the photocells emit at equal proportions as the incoming light, transferring the incoming optical image into a digital one in the form of pixels; opening the door for even more novel inventions like pixelated digicams, 96 megapixel images of outer planets on the Hubble telescope, and internet porn. The image above is of a star formation called the Orion Nebula. It was taken by the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) on NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope in 2006.
For more information about the 2009 Nobel laureates visit the Nobel prize website.
First Year Cantonese Reader
A lesson plan from an Early 20th century Cantonese Reader.
