Arts Information From Government Sources

Here are some interesting articles on the Arts from government documents:

• Art-in-Architecture Program: National Artist Registry
• Arts in Education: Model Development and Dissemination Program
• Professional Development for Arts Educators Program
• Indian Arts and Crafts
• Creative Arts Exchanges
• Remarks on Presenting the 2000 Arts and Humanities Awards

Wracking my Brain

I was wracking my brain for a subject for this post, when I thought of the term ‘wracking my brains’ — I have heard that so often, I thought it was more common the singular form I used in the title. But really, on introspection, I’m fairly certain I have only one, so it should be singular.

Which is more common? Well, big brother Google will tell us, if we ask nicely. The phrase ‘wracking my brain’ returns 55,300 results, while the plural form ‘wracking my brains’ returns only 16,000 results. So of 71,300 writers, 77.5% agree that the singular form is correct. That still leaves 22.5% who think the plural form is better — I guess those are double-brained folks.

This trivial exercise has its lesson though — semantic analysis of Google results can tell us a lot about how people really use the language. Even with the ready availability of spell-checkers, lots of words get misspelled on web pages. Take the common word abilities, for example: it is often misspelled abilties. How often? Google says: abilities 56,600,000 abilties 84,700. Only about 0.15% of the time is this word misspelled. Much less than one percent. Guess that puts our 22% usage of brains into perspective, doesn’t it?

Interesting Psychological Quirk

A new study has come up with another quirky characteristic of human behavior, and you can expect marketers to be testing it out on you soon. It seems people are willing to pay more if just before the purchase process they were viewing relative prices from the perspective of more expensive items.

In the experiment, people were asked to rank hotel prices in three cities. I’m assuming they were given a list of prices for each city. One group was told to rank them in most-expensive to least-expensive order, while another group were told to put them in the opposite order. Then both groups were asked how much they would be willing to pay for a hotel room. The group ranking cities from most-expensive to least were willing to pay significantly more, on average, than those whose thought-patterns were primed in the opposite direction, looking for the least expensive first.

So the next time a marketer asks you to review comparison prices before making your buying decision, see if they are trying to manipulate your expectations and behavior by suggesting you look at the most expensive first.

This is another subtle trick that can be cloaked as being friendly and helpful (Would you like fries with that?) but is basically pure manipulation.

Food

I saw video tonight of a Japanese whaling ship slaughtering a whale, and think it is time for that kind of killing to stop. I’m not a big ‘animal rights’ sort, I had chicken for dinner and think that pea-brained critter was better off soaked in molé sauce, than ever it was in life. But I do hope it was dispatched without cruelty, for not even dumb animals deserve torture.

First, the whale was tortured — harpooning is not a swift or painless death. Second, whales, like a few other animals, are demonstrably intelligent, and should receive a higher level of respect. In the Americas we don’t eat horses, not because horse meat is bad, but because close association with these animals has convinced most of us that they are intelligent beings, who deserve respect. Somehow, we have come to the same conclusion about dogs, thought sometimes I wonder why, but again, I’m just as glad we don’t eat them. Dolphins, whales and chimpanzees should be in the same category.

Now parrots and crows are pretty smart birds, and I can hear people saying we shouldn’t eat birds either. Well, I don’t eat parrots or crows, but just like mammals, I like to draw the line at specific species, based on their demonstrated intelligence, or lack there-of. Cows, sheep and pigs are food, people, chimps and whales are not. That is just where I like to draw the line.

Yes, pigs can be relatively intelligent. Smarter than dogs, no doubt. I hope those that dispatch them take that into consideration and make it as swift and painless as possible. But still, they are raised as food, and would be nowhere so numerous as they are if they weren’t so good to eat.

I have to admit, I have tasted whale and walrus meat and blubber, when I lived in Alaska, and I make no apologies (unless I could apologize to the specific animals involved) — curiosity overcame my qualms in the matter, and nothing I might do would bring back those already deceased animals. Still, I wish they had not been available to me, and I would not eat such food today (and not just because the blubber was so unpalatable) — because my curiosity is satisfied. They are no better than cow, and I’m firmly convinced that is a dumb animal.

Life is a long series of decisions, and many of those decisions require us to draw fine distinctions. We each have to make the decisions that we can live with — I wish the Japanese would decide to stop killing whales, but I respect the fact that it need be their decision, not one forced on them from any outside agency.

Reality vs Feeling

OK, so science is fallible, which should come as no great surprise since scientists are people. Bust still, it is a better way of understanding reality than the alternative, which is religion, isn’t it?

Religion is also espoused by people, so it is equally fallible. But it makes us feel better. Isn’t it nice to think we are better than 98% of the rest of the world, because we are True Believers? And isn’t it nice to think we will never really die — our bodies yes, but soul lives on forever.  Isn’t it nice to think that justice will prevail, if not now (as we can plainly see) then at least in the afterlife?

Anyone who looks at it rationally can see religion only exists to make us feel better. But is that bad? Certainly, 95% of people will never contribute anything worthwhile to human existence, shouldn’t they at least feel good about their worthless lives? Faith-based belief is delusional, but perhaps it is better than the hopelessness the unimaginative feel on the loss of faith.

I think perhaps it is time we merged science with the ‘feel good’ principals, and enlighten those who realize religion is bogus. Science is not so hopeless or unimaginative as they think. Take time, for example.

Science tells us time is just another dimension, like up and down, left and right, forward and backward. We even use those last two to describe time, though in a somewhat different sense than when referring to spatial dimensions. And now, new theories suggest there may even be more than one dimension to time, a hard concept to grasp.

So, for those religious doubters who still want to feel good, consider this: we are eternal. Time is just another dimension, so we exist forever, though perhaps only within a small time frame. Considering the size of the universe, we exist in a very small spatial frame as well, so this should not be disconcerting. We will always exist — at those time and spatial parameters that encompass us.

Maybe another time I’ll go in to morality, which is another bogus argument for the superiority of  religious belief over science. Meanwhile, watch the news, and see who is committing the atrocities — religious believers, or atheists?

Most Studies Are Just Plain Wrong

After years of watching reports of studies flip-flop from one view to the complete opposite, it comes as no great surprise to learn that there is a bias for wrong results to prevail. Just like bad news dominates news reporting, because it gets attention, so too, bad science prevails, for various reasons.

A 2005 report by  John P A Ioannidis called Why Most Published Research Findings are False explains — with lots of math — why this is so, so I will not repeat it here. I just suggest you read that if you are interested. Of course, that study is a Published Research Finding — so maybe it is false? At least I wish it were false.

Dinosaurs Bugged to Death

A new theory suggests that it wasn’t the meteor or asteroid hitting the Yucatan that wiped out the dinosaurs, though that may well have played a role. Paleontologists keep finding evidence for dinosaur fossils thousands of years after that event, so at least some must have survived.

To what, then, do we owe the ultimate extinction of all dinosaurs? The new theory says it was bugs, er, I mean insects. Both insects and flowering plants flourished after the climate-changing asteroid hit, probably filling in the environmental niches left under-utilized by plants and animals that were wiped out. Insects acted as pollinators for the flowering plants, which then had an evolutionary advantage because they could adapt more rapidly than plants that didn’t reproduce sexually. So the growth in insect and flowering plant diversity and ubiquity went hand in hand.

That was bad for dinosaurs. They had evolved to eat the earlier types of plants, or other dinosaurs who relied on eating those types of plants. Those darn flowers probably didn’t taste good to a dinosaur palate. Their favorite foods were more widely dispersed, making it harder for the dinosaurs to thrive.

Also, the evolutionary paths of insects included many that were blood-suckers, like ticks and fleas and mosquitoes. These insects served as ideal vectors for the spread of diseases, exposing dinosaurs to another stressing, and often fatal, environmental pressure.

The new theory doesn’t mention it, but I think you can add in one of the dominant contenders for dino-extinction from the pre-asteroid theories (remember, way back in the 1960s and 1970s, when nobody had heard of the asteroid theory?)  Mammals also flourished in the changed environment, mostly as little rat-like creatures. Today’s little rat-like (and big human-like) mammals love eggs, and there is no reason to think those sharing the world with the last dinosaurs were any different. Their egg-eating habit was probably another nail in the dinosaur coffin.

Less food, more disease, and fewer offspring — sheesh, it’s no wonder they went extinct.

Favorite Quotes #1

I’ve just read my new favorite phrase, which I will quote here:

They fail out of fear of failing.

That is from Andrew J Morris’ blog Web Empire, in a post on The Root Cause [of failure]. He maintains that fear of failure is the main cause of failing to make money online. More usefully, he also offers solutions to that problem.

Morris suggests that by having lots of websites, and a basic criteria to distinguish between success and failure, you are ensured of ultimate success. With multiple projects, if one fails you simply drop it. That leaves you with only successes, and the learning experience of failed efforts. Makes sense to me. Think I’ll add that site to the blogroll here.

Thriving Artist Review

My wife is an artist, she produces wonderful oil paintings, mostly based on scenes in antique photographs. Everyone who sees her work agrees it is beautiful, but she doesn’t sell much. So to help out, I bought her Steve Popkin’s “How to Sell Your Art Without Selling Out” course on how to become a thriving artist, instead of a starving artist. Not that my wife is starving — but she would be if we had to rely on her art earnings for a living.

She and I have both been really impressed with this course. It is plain English, easy to follow and understand, but conveys a wealth of tips and suggestions. It goes beyond mere money-making, and looks at the how and why of art, with suggestions on how to be more creative. The information on how to price your works is alone worth the entire cost of the course.

I think much of this information might just as well be applied to crafts, as well as art, and indeed to any sales medium where you have unique products, such as antiques, writing, or even art you collect, rather than produce yourself. Some of it is just common sense, but much more is clearly the voice of experience, telling us things we would never have suspected.

Selling art is itself an art, and one that most artists understand very little about. Approaching the sale of your art as a business, while keeping the creative end free from commercial consideration, is the path to self-fulfillment with profit, a wonderful combination.

We highly recommend this course for all creative persons who want to earn a living from that creativity. Just Click Here to learn more. I expect my wife’s earnings to skyrocket this year, using the information we learned through this course.

Time Enough

Ever wonder about time? Why is it that the clock ticks steadily on, but our perception of time ebbs and flows, even seeming to stop at times? And there are two times, now and past, that are perceived differently, even when they refer to the same moment.

Take new experiences for example. Go on vacation to someplace you have never been, and while you are there time seems to creep slowly, you experience so much that is new and stimulating. But when you get home, and remember that trip, it seems like it was just a fleeting moment.

There is also a different perception of time’s flow as we grow older, but I’ve got that one figured out. The older we get, the faster time seems to pass. Remember when you were seven, how long it was between birthdays? Or that huge time span between Thanksgiving and Christmas? With each passing year, those time spans seem to get shorter and shorter, compressed into blurring motion.

That is because they are all the past, and all past time has only one perceived length. When we are seven, one year is one-seventh of the past. The year gone by encompasses 14% of all our experiences, and much more than that of remembered experiences. By age 25 that percentage has dropped all the way to 4% — so the past year seems to have gone faster, because it includes less of our total experience of the past.

And the future? Well the future never comes, we have only now and back then. We can try to imagine the future, but we never really get it exactly right, as the past writings of any futurist will show. I’m still waiting for the flying-car I knew would be the normal mode of transportation when I imagined the year 2000 when I was a child.

Of course some future predictions come true, but the details are never correct. Jules Verne may have imagined flying to the moon, but he forgot his space-suit.