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Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - that engenders the territory, and if one must return to the fable, today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours. The desert of the real itself.

✖ Via Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard, tr. Sheila Faria Glaser, University of Michigan Press, [1981]1995, p. 1 [full pdf]

Baudrillard is quoting a very (very) short story by Jorge Luis Borges “On Exactitude in Science” or “On Rigor in Science”. Learn more about it on Wikipedia and read one of its English translation.

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Film-makers have got better and better at constructing shots so that their lengths grab our attention,” says James Cutting, a psychologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. He analysed 150 Hollywood movies and found that the more recent they were, the more closely their shot lengths tended to follow a mathematical pattern that also describes human attention spans.

✖ Via New Scientist: “Solved: The mathematics of the Hollywood blockbuster” by Ewen Callaway, Feb. 18, 2010

Professional website of James Cutting, author of the study. Full PDF of the study (James E. Cutting, Jordan E. DeLong and Christine E. Nothelfer, “Attention and the Evolution of Hollywood Film” Psychological Science, XX(X) 1-8, published online on Feb 5, 2010).

Interesting study (it’s far from being the first scientific attempt at explaining box office success), VERY BAD TITLE from the New Scientist. Nothing was “solved”, for at least two reasons.

1) Some common aspects were observed in 150 movies, after the fact. Therefore, the study could have the value of a good but limited deduction. Its inductive and predictive potential still needs to be demonstrated.

2) More importantly, one won’t be able to find any satisfactory description of what a “blockbuster” is in this study. In fact, there isn’t any mention of the word “blockbuster” in it. Instead, one will notice a normative effort to classify a number a films according to a certain number of criteria :

“We chose 150 films, 10 released in each of 15 years, every 5 years from 1935 to 2005. The Supplemental Material available on-line provides the complete list. Assembled from information in several on-line databases, the films from 1980 onward were among the highest grossing of their year and the earlier films were among those with the largest number of viewer ratings on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb; http://us.imdb.com). The films were also chosen, as best we could, to represent five genres—action, adventure, animation, comedy, and drama— although their distribution could not be uniform because of vagaries in Hollywood production and changes in social milieu and viewers’ taste. Genres were defined by the first-designated category for each film on the IMDb.”

Same problem with the title Neatorama chose for the post they published about the story : “The Code for Making Hollywood Blockbusters”. But Neatorama is no weekley international science magazine…

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✖ Via PHD Comics: Science News Cycle (originally published on May 18, 2009)

About PHD Comics:

“”Piled Higher and Deeper” (PhD) is the comic strip about life (or the lack thereof) in academia. [The author] Jorge Cham got his PhD in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University, and was a full-time Instructor and researcher at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) from 2003-2005.” (more)

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✖ Via Tom Gauld: Reasoned Scientific Debate [click for hi-res]

Previously on Skandalon

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✖ Via Mondorama 2000: “Coment un disque peut-il chanter?”, Dis, pourquoi?, Encyclopédie de la Jeunesse (Éditions Hachette-1967), illustrateurs: Philippe Daure & Jacques Poirier

Mondorama 2000 is a blog featuring a “sélection d’illustrations épatantes et en couleur tirées d’encyclopédie pour la jeunesse des Trente Glorieuses (1945-1975)”

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Scientists at the University of Montreal launched a search for men who had never looked at pornography - but couldn’t find any.

✖ Via Telegraph.co.uk: “All men watch porn, scientists find - Telegraph” by Jonathan Liew, Dec. 2, 2009

What a great title for this article. Science at it’s best.

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The finding, published in the December issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, suggests that loneliness is not a character trait, as in “that person is such a loner,” but more of a state such as hunger, which evolved as a cue to motivate our ancestors to go find food. “We’re fundamentally a social species so we need others with whom we can cooperate and work,” Cacioppo said. As such, loneliness may have been a cue to look out for anyone who might ostracize you, he added.

✖ Via LiveScience: “Loneliness Spreads Like a Virus” By Jeanna Bryner, Senior Writer, Dec. 1st, 2009.

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✖ Via L’Histoire par l’image: “Pinel Liberating the Madwomen of the Salpêtrière” by Tony Robert-Fleury [Hi-Res]

“Charcot worked under the aegis of Fleury’s painting, which exhibits, in the foreground, the fetters and tools that tell the tale of the enchaining of the madwomen and their ‘liberation’ by Pinel; what is depicted is the turning point, or rather the decisive chiasmus, which Pinel is said to have effected in the mythology of madness. This chiasmus was, in the first place, the concept of madness that Hegel formulated, declaring himself wholly indebted to Pinel; madness was not supposed to be an abstract loss of reason, but a simple disorder, ‘a simple contradiction within reason’. This means that, in principle, a madwoman should be supposed, or presupposed, writes Hegel, to be quite simply a reasonable being.” (Invention of Hysteria. Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière by Georges Didi-Huberman, tr. by Alisa Hartz, The MIT Press, [1982]2003, p. 4)

Wikipedia entries for Tony Robert-Fleury and Philippe Pinel

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✖ Via Hammer Gallery: Snow Crystal by Wilson Bentley, photomicrograph, c. 1883-1931, 2 7/8 x 3 1/2 inches, H 07

“Wilson Alwyn “Snowflake” Bentley (February 9, 1865 – December 23, 1931), born in Jericho, Vermont, is the first known photographer of snowflakes. He perfected a process of catching flakes on black velvet in such a way that their images could be captured before they either melted or sublimated.” (Wikipedia)

“Though produced in considerably primitive conditions, the photographs are masterpieces of the intricate, infinite patterns in nature, never before imaginable. Wilson A. Bentley captured the astonishing beauty of what he called “gems, wrought by blizzards.” Today, the knowledge we have, in large part, about the complexity and the beauty of the snowflake is due to the scholarly efforts of this remarkable pioneer. Bentley’s prodigious body of work, SNOW CRYSTALS, was published in 1931 in New York, N.Y., by the McGraw-Hill book publishers. That same year, less than a month after the book’s release, Wilson A. Bentley walked home in a raging snow blizzard to make yet more photos of his beloved form of precipitation, and, contracting pneumonia from that walk, died two weeks later.” (Hammer Gallery)

“Every snowflake has an infinite beauty which is enhanced by knowledge that the investigator will, in all probability, never find another exactly like it. Consequently, photographing these transient forms of Nature gives to the worker something of the spirit of a discoverer. Besides combining her greatest skill and artistry in the production of snowflakes, Nature generously fashions the most beautiful specimens on a very thin plane so that they are specially adapted for photomicrographical study.” Read the full essay by Wilson Bentley at his official website.

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Without question, the most socially and economically significant technological event of the last quarter-century has been the invention of the surrogate. As this paper will show, never before in human history has the consumer been offered a product capable of delivering such a dramatic personal change. The ramifications of the surrogate’s rapid assimilation into everyday living can be witnessed in virtually every facet of culture, particularly in the United States where in the twenty years since their introduction the portion of the adult population that either owns or has operated a surrogate has risen to an astounding 92%. With surrogate technology in a constant state of refinement, there is no evidence to suggest this trend will be reversed. The improvements and transformations enjoyed by the operating public are here to stay, which leaves us with the question: What, if anything, remains to be overcome?

✖ Via aphelis : Paradise Found. Possibility and fullfilment in the age of the surrogate. Full paper in PDF.

” “Paradise found…” is a fictional paper appearing in the first volume of the comic book series The Surogates, created and written by Robert Venditti. The film was recently adapted into a film by Jonathan Mostow, starring Bruce Willis.”

Previously on SKandalon.

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