COFFEE
+ ARISE
———-
FROZEN
It is one of the great everyday ironies of American history that many of the universities held in highest esteem by the people who don’t have to attend them are above the Mason-Dixon line.
Research in the January American Psychologist recreates the 1974 Milgram experiment in which volunteers obediently administered what they thought were increasingly painful electric shocks to protesting subjects. The original study was criticized as unethical, heralding the advent of stricter controls over institutional research on human subjects. So we waited a whole 32 years to do it all over again.
Santa Clara University Professor and Milgram experiment recreator Jerry Burger tried to correct for the ethical flaws in Milgram’s research design by weeding out volunteers deemed likely to be upset, decreasing the voltages supposedly involved in the fake shocks, and telling volunteers three times that they could stop participating at any time. Participants were also reassured that by clicking their heels together and saying “There’s no place like home,” they could leave the premises without penalty and visit Auntie Em.
All of which begs several questions: How do you decide who will be upset by what in the future? If you weed out the subjects who are likely to be upset according to your Magic 8-ball, won’t you get a higher proportion of people with lower empathy? Do you really buy that your subjects trust the guy in charge of electric shocks won’t hurt them if they stop doing what he says? Was there really any question after the Holocaust, the Nakba, 9/11, and Abu Ghraib that sometimes people just follow orders?
To better address these remaining questions, competing California University researcher Mary Whopper will be taking the modified Milgram experiment to Bulgaria, aboriginal Australia, and the remote part of Alaska from which Russia is visible on clear mornings. She hopes to find volunteers unexposed to mainstream obedience conditioning – “Whopper Virgins,” if you will – to determine once and for all whether blind obedience to authority is human nature or a variable result of social conditioning. She will also find out whether low empathy correlates with a preference for regular or curly fries.
Hannah Arendt concludes in Eichmann in Jerusalem: “Morally speaking, it is hardly less wrong to feel guilty without having done something specific than it is to feel free of all guilt if one is actually guilty of something.” Modern science has now confirmed and reconfirmed Arendt’s trenchant insight into the human condition, settling matters of personal responsibility, existential isolation, and man’s search for meaning once and for all. Don’t feel so bad that you’re an arschloch.
Icy rain shading into snow lit the sky early in Virginia this morning, but classes will still meet because I have all my homework done.
In the event of emergency cancellations, please enjoy a new recording of a wintry poem on my Music page: “Aren’t All Snow Angels Fallen?”
Witness the updated assortment of my oil paintings on display at Millmont Grille behind the Barracks shopping center. I priced them to move (especially “Departing Elephant” at $43), and will update the lot again soon.
There’s also glassware here.
My work remains on display around town at Enoteca (through January), At Last… A Hair Color Studio, Barnes & Noble (Barracks), Bigg Dawg Tattoo (Preston Avenue), the Geographical Information Systems Lab and Weather Room in the Climatology Office at the University of Virginia, and the Ivy Store (art cards only).
Astute observers will note my sweet new link on the right-hand sidebar. I know, I know. I’m supposed to be updating the art pages on my website, since that stuff is sold/gifted and my blog archives are gone with the wind - so there’s nearly all-new art that needs to go there and that’s no longer on the web anywhere. But this was SO much easier.
This fellah named Borowitz created a program named Isabel. Isabel is a very brainy gal. She’s like Google, but with hierarchies: instead of coming up with the disease process(es) that are most outrageous — lights! camera! exotic gore! — she automatically ranks a broad differential diagnosis from “horses” (your tremor is nothing) to “zebras” (hellooo, ALS). You input symptoms, she outputs differential. You input symptoms IN PATIENT TERMS, she recognizes clinical mumbo-jumbo synonyms and spits out matching lists along with the differential. This way, you don’t have to have already done all the research to know how to do the research on a differential. Oh, Isabel. Come away with me.
HORSE
+ HORSE
+ HORSE
+ HORSE
+ HORSE
———-
ZEBRA
Bonus alphametic for Isabel. (Anything for Isabel.)
HORSE
+ HORSE
+ HORSE
+ HORSE
+ ZEBRA
———–
BEAST
In marginally related news, read it and freak: older women don’t get on kidney transplant lists at comparable rates to older men, even though they have comparable or slightly higher post-op survival rates. Somebody should tell these guys how much older women are worth in unpaid labor…
Black Cat Sk8 on the Corner by U.Va. continues its second annual Broken Deck Art Show through the end of January. This happening starts in December, and I was too swamped with finals and small forest fires to blog in advance of the opening. If you want to participate next year, Andy has an email list and generously provides broken decks. Prr.
My personal favorite is still the above “Jesus vs. Unicorn,” from last year’s show. I would pay good money to see the post-match deck art.
Mine is entitled “WHAP!” It’s the one that resembles the splash of colors you see behind your eyelids between hitting the pavement and realizing you’ve hit the pavement.
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