Link Salad, the Know and Be Known Edition
-- This Is Your Brain On God - Jack Hitt, Wired, Nov. 1, 1999
"After restoring everything to its proper working position, the techies exit, and I'm left sitting inside the utterly silent, utterly black vault. A few commands are typed into a computer outside the chamber, and selected electromagnetic fields begin gently thrumming my brain's temporal lobes. The fields are no more intense than what you'd get as by-product from an ordinary blow-dryer, but what's coming is anything but ordinary. My lobes are about to be bathed with precise wavelength patterns that are supposed to affect my mind in a stunning way, artificially inducing the sensation that I am seeing God."
-- The Inheritance of Crime - Douglas Starr, Aeon, Jul 7, 2016
"In 1871, while performing an autopsy on a notorious bank robber, the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso saw something unusual. It was a small hollow at the base of the skull, under which lay an enlarged section of the spinal cord. The feature was rare in Europeans, but he had seen it in lower apes and certain ‘inferior races’ of South America. Eureka. ‘At the sight of that skull,’ he later wrote, he understood the biological nature of the criminal - ‘an atavistic being who reproduces in his person the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity’."
-- Night Moves - Amanda Petrusich, Virginia Quarterly Review, Jul. 5, 2016
"Still, a kind of basic, axiomatic discomfort with darkness persists. Anyone who has stayed up until dawn fretting about the future, suffering through the gloaming, hungrily watching the sunrise, cherishing the relief it entails (“People are buying newspapers!”), understands the weirdness of night in her bones. Awake in the dark, we are scared, vulnerable, and existentially afloat. Reconfiguring deeply engrained cultural ideas about darkness is a complicated task. It’s not just darkness we fear, it’s the vastness and loneliness of the universe, spreading out from here to God-knows-where. The relative size and emptiness of the universe is a lot to hold in mind: “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me,” Pascal admits in his Pensées."
"After restoring everything to its proper working position, the techies exit, and I'm left sitting inside the utterly silent, utterly black vault. A few commands are typed into a computer outside the chamber, and selected electromagnetic fields begin gently thrumming my brain's temporal lobes. The fields are no more intense than what you'd get as by-product from an ordinary blow-dryer, but what's coming is anything but ordinary. My lobes are about to be bathed with precise wavelength patterns that are supposed to affect my mind in a stunning way, artificially inducing the sensation that I am seeing God."
-- The Inheritance of Crime - Douglas Starr, Aeon, Jul 7, 2016
"In 1871, while performing an autopsy on a notorious bank robber, the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso saw something unusual. It was a small hollow at the base of the skull, under which lay an enlarged section of the spinal cord. The feature was rare in Europeans, but he had seen it in lower apes and certain ‘inferior races’ of South America. Eureka. ‘At the sight of that skull,’ he later wrote, he understood the biological nature of the criminal - ‘an atavistic being who reproduces in his person the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity’."
-- Night Moves - Amanda Petrusich, Virginia Quarterly Review, Jul. 5, 2016
"Still, a kind of basic, axiomatic discomfort with darkness persists. Anyone who has stayed up until dawn fretting about the future, suffering through the gloaming, hungrily watching the sunrise, cherishing the relief it entails (“People are buying newspapers!”), understands the weirdness of night in her bones. Awake in the dark, we are scared, vulnerable, and existentially afloat. Reconfiguring deeply engrained cultural ideas about darkness is a complicated task. It’s not just darkness we fear, it’s the vastness and loneliness of the universe, spreading out from here to God-knows-where. The relative size and emptiness of the universe is a lot to hold in mind: “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me,” Pascal admits in his Pensées."