Magic on the brain and Churchill on the sea
First, lolcats of the Middle Ages, courtesy of the British Library.
Stephen L. Macknik & Susana Martinez-Conde, Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals About Our Everyday Deceptions: Work on attention and distraction (gorillas in our midst, if you’ve read about that experiment) as translated through what working magicians already know about how to distract people or create visual illusions through appropriately sequenced movement. My favorite result in this book: it turns out that people susceptible to hypnosis can be hypnotized so that, when they hear a triggering sound, they see words as mere gibberish. This allows them to perform really well on the Stroop test because they see only colors, not conflicting color words; people who aren’t susceptible to hypnosis are unimproved. We still don’t know exactly what’s going on with hypnosis, but there’s something; if it’s an illusion, it’s a real one.
Christopher Bell, Churchill and Seapower: Free LibraryThing early reviewer book. Okay, I like Churchill, but this turns out to have been a little too much detail for me; you really have to enjoy intimate descriptions of force levels, movements, and expenditures to get the most out of this book. Bell argues that Churchill, while interventionist and too quick to second-guess commanders in the field, wasn’t actually as bad for the Navy as reevaluating historians have argued-he learned from early mistakes and, when he was depriving the Navy of resources like air cover for convoys, was doing so out of overall calculations about where best to deploy scarce resources. When he kept insufficient ships in the Far East, he did so not because he thought they could fight off a Japanese attack, but because he was attempting to signal (successfully, as it turned out) that the US and the UK were as one in the region-to attack one would be to attack the other. While the deterrence bit failed and the ships were lost, his decisions were part of what convinced the Japanese that they had to attack the US too, bringing it into the war as he so devoutly wished. Bell sugests that “[h]is only real mistake was thinking that Japanese leaders would give in to American pressure rather than begin a war they could not hope to win.” He believed too much in “strategic” bombing, but so did a lot of people. Bell is sympathetic to Churchill as leader, valuing his imagination and unquenchable resolve over his wild ideas and noting that anyone who worked with Churchill quickly understood that he routinely needed to be reined in-and often allowed himself to be. Finally, have some classic Churchill, from 1914: “We have got all we want in territory, but our claim to be left in undisputed enjoyment of vast and splended possessions, largely acquired by war and largely maintained by fource, is one which often seems less reasonable to others than to us.”
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
Stephen L. Macknik & Susana Martinez-Conde, Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals About Our Everyday Deceptions: Work on attention and distraction (gorillas in our midst, if you’ve read about that experiment) as translated through what working magicians already know about how to distract people or create visual illusions through appropriately sequenced movement. My favorite result in this book: it turns out that people susceptible to hypnosis can be hypnotized so that, when they hear a triggering sound, they see words as mere gibberish. This allows them to perform really well on the Stroop test because they see only colors, not conflicting color words; people who aren’t susceptible to hypnosis are unimproved. We still don’t know exactly what’s going on with hypnosis, but there’s something; if it’s an illusion, it’s a real one.
Christopher Bell, Churchill and Seapower: Free LibraryThing early reviewer book. Okay, I like Churchill, but this turns out to have been a little too much detail for me; you really have to enjoy intimate descriptions of force levels, movements, and expenditures to get the most out of this book. Bell argues that Churchill, while interventionist and too quick to second-guess commanders in the field, wasn’t actually as bad for the Navy as reevaluating historians have argued-he learned from early mistakes and, when he was depriving the Navy of resources like air cover for convoys, was doing so out of overall calculations about where best to deploy scarce resources. When he kept insufficient ships in the Far East, he did so not because he thought they could fight off a Japanese attack, but because he was attempting to signal (successfully, as it turned out) that the US and the UK were as one in the region-to attack one would be to attack the other. While the deterrence bit failed and the ships were lost, his decisions were part of what convinced the Japanese that they had to attack the US too, bringing it into the war as he so devoutly wished. Bell sugests that “[h]is only real mistake was thinking that Japanese leaders would give in to American pressure rather than begin a war they could not hope to win.” He believed too much in “strategic” bombing, but so did a lot of people. Bell is sympathetic to Churchill as leader, valuing his imagination and unquenchable resolve over his wild ideas and noting that anyone who worked with Churchill quickly understood that he routinely needed to be reined in-and often allowed himself to be. Finally, have some classic Churchill, from 1914: “We have got all we want in territory, but our claim to be left in undisputed enjoyment of vast and splended possessions, largely acquired by war and largely maintained by fource, is one which often seems less reasonable to others than to us.”
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.