by this passage in Numbers are associated with different types of spatial information depending on the task van Dijck, Gevers and Fiasa
"When patients neglecting the left side of perceptual space bisect physical lines, they typically shift the subjective midpoint towards the right. Similarly, when indicating the midpoint of a numerical interval (e.g. what is in the middle between 1 and 9?) they overestimate the midpoint (e.g. 7)."
I finally finished my SoFoBoMo book. I decided to take the text of Cory Doctorow's essay Snitchtown, which, as with all of his work, is released under a creative commons license.
The SoFoBoMo website limits me to a 15MB upload, and the compression algorithm in Preview squashes the file rather brutally from 44MB to <1MB, so I'm also sharing the larger version here.
All the photos are available under an attribution, non-commercial, sharealike licence here.
For my next trick, I plan a new embroidery project. Keep in mind the fact that the last embroidery I did was my counted cross-stitch "buggy BASIC" sampler for the UCL CS panto. This time I plan to stretch myself a little.
For a long time I have been in awe of the drawings of neurons Santiago Ramón y Cajal, painter, gymnast, blower-up of shit and neuroscientist. See, for example, this observation of a Purkinje cell from a cat:
"Kitteh can has new-ron..."
The thought of trying to do this as counted cross stitch makes my toes curl, so I spent a coupla hours yesterday making myself a transfer with a hot-iron transfer pen.
I ended up with one good transfer on canvas. I also have one ok-ish spare that I'll happily give to anyone else at the intersection of the sets "textile nerds" and "neuroscience nerds"[1]. See here for details.
[1] This makes the rather bold assumption that this set is not a singleton...
I am going to learn how to do needlework/quilting/appliqué so I can make myself a wall hanging of the stunning "Structure of the Mammalian Retina" by Santiago Ramon y Cajal (multifarious name, multi-talented guy):
Beautiful, isn't it?
I've been investigating some techniques and I think some stitches from this excellent dictionary of stitches will be in order. I plan to use 28 count linen, couching for the axons and dendrites, satin stitch for the braces and maybe the bases of the rods, and appliqué for the various nuclei.
I know I have some extremely craft-talented readers and I'm hoping I'll get some very useful advice. Know any better techniques? Have some thread/fabric I can have? Already turned this beautiful diagram into your own work of art? Let me know, please!
At the GECCO debate (audio and video available here, Steve Jones described a little game he plays with his undergrads, in which they have to come up with an evolutionary hypothesis for a facet of human behaviour or biology beginning with every letter of the alphabet. His "hypothesis" for blushing is cleverly designed to make women blush, and his description of the evolutionary benefits of zoophilia would get me thrown out of Aberystwyth University (formerly the University of Wales, Aberystwyth). The point he was making was that these evolutionary fables are diverting and very plausible-sounding, but are ultimately untestable.
It seems that, whilst I was away, the bad science of evo-psy reared its head again, this time on the evolutionary basis of the "preference" for pink vs blue for girls vs boys. Let us turn once again to the acerbic Ben Goldacre who critiques the study. Read the article, and consider the sartorial choices of Alice, Cinders and Bo-Peep.
The Truth is worth more than an iPod.
