On Saturday evening I attended a brilliant (but under-reported in the media and local blogosphere) culmination of viral marketing: The international showing of the documentary Zeitgeist at the Labia Theatre, Cape Town. I have never seen so many people entrancing and exiting this art nouveau theatre. It seems that these underground left-wing movements are great […]

Ok the title is a bit misleading, but if someone could figure out how to sleep with your eyes open he or she would rake in billions.
The product or method would be sold to millions of office workers around the world, as well as students. Papers would say it would cause a loss of trillions […]

Whether something is art or can be defined as ‘art’ or has artistic value is questionable and supposedly relative. It seems to me that the question of ‘artistic value’ is an economic and historical one. We could call this the historoeconomic theory of art (or the capitalist’s valuation of art).
An artwork always has an economic […]

Using our eyes and brains and senses we see a skewed and highly individualized version of the world. As of this moment there are roughly 6.65 billion realities (based on the human population and not taking into account animals, our imagination, dreams and dissociative identities). 6.65 billion versions of today, of our time, of this […]

An interesting linguistic phenomenon has been occurring at schools in Baltimore: the development of a gender-neutral third-person pronoun. The neologism is the pronoun Yo. It can apparently be used to describe both a he and a she. For example I could use the sentence ‘Yo reads my blog‘ to mean, ‘She reads my blog’, but […]

The literature of stage directions is an interesting, and mostly disregarded, subject. Brecht, the German playwright, was perhaps the only person to make his actors say his stage directions out loud, in many ways to distance (or ‘alienate’) the performers from the play and setting. In all other circumstances, stage directions are a soft or […]

Blog frequency is a thought going through many heads consciously and unconsciously. How often should one blog, and how much should one blog. Intrinsically it seems that frequent blogging on a daily basis is good and blogging sporadically is bad.
Too much blogging is not good either. If I blogged every minute my life would suddenly […]

Google Psychic is the latest experimentation out of Google Labs. It is based on Jungian theory of the collective unconscious.  It allows us to find information by tapping into the collective knowledge of the human race. The basic premise is that the user think of a keyword or phrase in his or her head, wait […]

I have just come across some humourous (although very serious) sites on dining etiquette . One is a list of standards and conventions that allow one to make a ‘favorable impression’ when dining. The other is a list of table manners that vary slightly to significantly from country to country. For instance many customs […]

The Rodney of Kuhn pointed me to an interesting series of audio clips that demonstrate how the brain makes use of sense data to construct or reconstruct your reality (or sense of it). Go here and listen to the Virtual Haircut clip with stereo headphones with your eyes closed. I won’t spoil anything and altering […]