Ciarán Ryan notebook

Both from Channel 4:

http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/arts_entertainment/
art/what+now+for+the+national+trust/2314772

A report by Nicholas Glass - informal but smooth - it rolls along (it felt self-shot to me… but it’s not). Web page just seems to repeat the film script though - a pity.

And the programme after:

19:50	The Truth About Street Weapons
	The Code of Silence This film explores the culture of silence that grips on the Mancunian community in which 15-year-old Jesse James was murdered two years ago.

Good access - the community spoke.
Also no cutaways over the interview edits - jarring and effective with such a powerful subject… can’t seem to watch again on the website… who is the film maker?

Today’s Sunday Times magazine was very strong - May 11 2008.

Follow up on disfigured soldier / photos from crushed Prague uprising - Josef Koudelka, photographer / and a piece about the subject of a forthcoming BBC documentary ‘Hold Me Tight, Let Me Go’ - on BBC4 on Thursday, May 22, at 9pm

http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/families/article3886308.ece

“The Mulberry Bush school in Oxfordshire – the subject of a film by Kim Longinotto to be shown later this month on BBC4 – looks after children who have been multiply excluded from mainstream primary schools. These are not yet the hooded teenagers of Camila Batmanghelidjh’s Kids Company: the youngest is just 6, the oldest 12. All of them are thought to have suffered significant neglect in the first two years of life, which has a ruinous effect on brain development. Fundamentally they are still babies. The building blocks of their personalities are not joined. They are chaotic, unpredictable and unable to function in a group without disrupting. That’s the theory. “

** Is there proof that neglect effects brain development? It sounds convincing - and it seems to be becoming a popular view.

Also: “Children with attachment disorders don’t just rage and spit and climb up on roofs: they connect inappropriately to total strangers, looking for warmth.”

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Also in the newspaper: Spaced learning

Monkseaton, which is a comprehensive in a deprived area, consistently wins high grades and has sent pupils to top British universities and Ivy League colleges in America.

Kelley’s technique, known as “spaced learning”, is based on the research of Douglas Fields, a neuroscientist at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in Baltimore. He has found that connections between developing brain cells form most effectively when they are allowed breaks from stimulation.

How to make your computer boot up faster:

In Windows, go to:

Start,
Run

Type in:

Msconfig.exe

Select ’start-up’ and see a list of the software that loads on start-up. Un-tick to disable items without removing them completely.

A miniature microphone was also be on board to record sounds on Mars. Attached to the lander spacecraft were a pair of small probes, the Deep Space 2 Mars Microprobes, which were to be deployed to fall and penetrate beneath the martian surface when the spacecraft reached Mars.

http://www.etsimo.uniovi.es/solar/eng/msur98.htm

Mars Polar Lander

Ken Richardson gave a talk at a symposium on the mind held at the Royal institution, London. 1999 (?)

“My argument is that the IQ test is not an objective, scientific instrument at all.

“… we end up with an external score without knowing what the internal quantity it’s supposed to represent really is.

“… it simply measures individuals’ proximity to a specific culture - that of the test designers, and of school learning.”

IQ scores have gone up - which corresponds with the growth of the middle class - would not be expected from an innate fixed power.

“The whole model is psychologically  vacuous and biologically highly naive.”

Sun blacked out in late 530s by a massive volcano? Caused famine etc

Faster: The Acceleration of Just about Everything (Paperback)
by James Gleick (Author)

Type A personalities - press the button in the lift to close the door - placebo?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_A_personality

Charles Dudley Warner, 1884, “The chopping up of time into rigid periods is an invasion of freedom”

Plautus: “The gods confound the man who first found out how to distinguish hours!”

Technology was to provide the fabled leisure society* - but we’ve just had to keep up with the machines. We deal with one item of work faster - but then another arrives faster.

Technology = not more lesiure or productivity - but more hours spent looking busy?

Ankore tribe (Uganda?) - doing nothing is not “wasting time”, but “creating time”. By being alive.

*A kind of leisure society for some? In UK - state benefits? etc?

====

See also: The end of time - Julian Barbour

Time does not exist. Everything happens all at once. Parallel worlds etc.

We perceive an overlapping set of instants wrote John Gribbon of Barbour’s theory, which gives us an illusion of time moving.

The film strip! Feck.

How do we enter the next frame? Probability? Genes? Who’s lining up the frames?

David Unwin (1999?) found a huge pterosaur - the largest creature ever to have flown. Size of a small executive jet - wingspan exceeds 40ft.

Fossils found near Valencia, Spain. 66 - 144 million years old.

Even larger than the Quetzalcoatlus.

Relationship between puns and clinical mania?

Turing said machines can be considered intelligent if they can hold a conversation and we can’t tell if they are machines.

John Searle disagrees - machines can post back symbols without understanding them.

Martin Cohen (1999?) Independent.

WTO Protest: TV networks turn a blinkered camera to the violence of Seattle
Independent, The (London), Dec 2, 1999

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_19991202/ai_n14271332

Protests - Seattle - end of 1999

Professor Kevin Browne

The “volatile combination” - children from violent families will be influenced by violent movies.

But maybe more important is the way violent films desensitive people to violence - they become passive to violence?

According to Wikipedia:

On June 15, 1970, Manson, Atkins, Krenwinkel, and Van Houten were sent to trial while Watson remained in Texas fighting attempts to extradite him. The details of the trial were reported throughout the world. Kasabian proved to be a reliable and consistent witness. She told of a hippie group and its leader Charles Manson, a thwarted musician who believed a race war was imminent. He believed the music of The Beatles warned of the coming holocaust, which he referred to as Helter Skelter, after the Beatles song, and also believed that only the “chosen”, his “family”, would survive. Briefly associated with Terry Melcher, Manson had believed Melcher would foster his musical aspirations; when this did not occur, Manson felt infuriated and betrayed. Manson believed that he would bring about the race war by having his followers slaughter wealthy people in their homes and cast suspicion on black militant groups such as the Black Panthers. In his carefully thought out scenario, Manson saw the blacks winning the war, but being too inept to run the nation. They would then turn to Manson for help, he reasoned, and make him ruler. He had been to the Cielo Drive address, and although he knew Melcher had moved, the house represented his rejection by the show business establishment. He instructed Watson, Atkins, Krenwinkel, and Kasabian to go to the house “and kill everyone there”, while he remained in their camp at “Spahn’s Movie Ranch”.[13]

Independent newspaper 30 July 1999,  Helter Skelter - Thirty years of the Manson Family - by Andrew Gumbel mentions:

“the weirdness of the murders”

Tex Watson announced: “I’m the devil. I’m here to do the devil’s business”

Hollywood sobered up.

http://listserv.uh.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9906&L=dsch-l&T=0&I=-3&P=17166

His tattoo work seems well know - but why aren’t Baldayev’s drawings of Gulag life on the web? Still no interest?

The web has maded information more accessible - but is it getting to the point that it doesn’t exist if not on the web? Cos the kids don’t read books? I dunno. Just a thought.

Hound dog - elvis - guitar break?