Ed Dowding

Latest estimates suggest that 200,000 people died in the Haiti earthquake, 7 days ago. The world population increases by 200,000 people in just 1 day.

So on the plus side, we’re still up 1,200,000 people in the past week. On the downside, of those newcomers

• 200,000 will be malnourished
• 400,000 won’t have access to a safe water supply
• 600,000 will be born into poverty

100,000 people die each day from the effects of malnutrion and they’re not getting air-dropped ready meals, or £multi-million Tweetathons.

Haiti is not an extraordinary tragedy. It’s just a fraction of daily tragedy all bunched up in one place.

My point is NOT that Haiti is no big deal, I just wanted an attention grabbing headline. My concern is that the staccato fits of empathy and cash are mainly spent curing the symptom and not the problem, but at least it makes us feel better until the cameras are pointed somewhere else and we can go back ignoring the fact that the world is so colossally fucked up.

Yeah like we didn’t know that already! Any man in the world will confirm that. But it’s even more quantifiable than you might think. We’re talking about actual distances to objects here. Sexy girls may be further away than they appear.

The participants who had been given pretzels to eat during the experiment reported feeling thirstier than those who drank the water, as would be expected. They also rated the bottle of water as being more desirable, and estimated the distance between themselves and the bottle to be smaller than did the quenched participants. Their state of thirst had influenced their perception of distance, such that the water bottle was perceived to be closer than it actually was.

That the thirsty participants found the bottle of water to be more desirable is not at all surprising – water will quench their thirst, and therefore has immediate physiological benefits. But how about objects that are desirable because of their social value? To investigate this, Balcetis and Dunning asked another set of students to estimate their distance from a $100 bill. One group was told that they could win the money in a simple card game; the other was told that the bill belonged to the experimenter. In this case, the first group find the money more desirable than the first. Again, both groups were asked to estimate their distance from the object in question and again, those who had been told they could win the $100 bill reported it as being closer than those who were told it belonged to the experimenter.

The researchers then asked a third set of participants to complete a survey, and told that it had been designed to assess their sense of humour. Each then watched as their response was graded; half of them were told that their sense of humour was “above average”, and the other half were told that theirs was “below average”. The surveys were then clipped to a stand, and each participant was asked to estimate how far away it was. Those given positive feedback estimated the stand to be closer than those negative feedback.

A perceptual test which did not require a numerical response was then performed. Participants were asked to throw a small rubber bean bag towards a gift voucher placed on the floor in front of them, and told that the person whose toss landed closest to the voucher would win it. One group was told that the voucher had a value of $25, thus making it desirable to them, while the other was led to believe that it was worthless. This experiment confirmed the earlier ones – those participants who believed the voucher was worth something perceived it to be nearer, and consequently underthrew the bean bag so that it fell short of the target.

Source: NeuroPhilosophy

This must have really annoyed hungry hunters.

Just in case you’re subscribed to my RSS feed for this site, it’s about to change to http://feeds.feedburner.com/EdDowding — please update your doohickeys accordingly.

I’m reminded by a conversation that I’ve just had that the Hierarchy of Needs is about as succint and powerful and true and psychological models get.

It’s probably time for an update on the details. So often the day to day things change and we forget to mention them. Or for various reasons we don’t mention them until they’ve become an ingrained part of our lives, so we forget to relay them as news, and civility / humility / fear of boring others prevents us from enthusing about them to anyone who’ll listen.

But not me. So brace yourself for a Christmas-round-robin level of sweetly enthusiastic updates and summaries.

Firstly I’m very much in love with a wonderful girl named Ali. We met in Verbier last winter, and she’s quite brilliant, wears big glasses,  has big knobbly brown bird legs, and finds glee in despatching miscreant dogs with her knitting needles, which she carries everywhere.

It’s quite wonderful to meet someone, and to be ready to meet someone, who is quite so ideal. Knowing that everything I want is right there, neatly packaged in a foxy little body, and that we’re a team working together for the same goals, and taking joy in the journey in similar ways. I could go on, but I shall save my whisperings of sweet nothings for her ears. Ah, love!

She also has a dog, Lola, who is increasingly ideal. A beautifully gentle weimaranananana. At times she can be mischievious (in this photo she is replete with stolen pizza), and can be seized by her inner wolf when she smells quarry… but she is getting better and better every day as she settles in to her new life.

The new life is in France. We’re renting this house for the year (at least). It’s in the Pyrenees, not far from Spain (map). If you walk south, it’s just forest all the way.

The plan is to use this as a base whilst we find a place to buy and do up (possibly with you?), probably in much the same way as the owners of the house we’re renting have done. We then aim to be reasonably self-sufficient within about 3 years. So in addition to house hunting and making money (sigh), we’re learning lots about permaculture, seeds, and preserving. Hopefully I can follow in the footsteps of my namesake, Charles Dowding, and become a (Monty) don of greenery.

Work is coming in steadily via Igloo59 (tell your friends!) and I have a few other nice big projects on the go which I hope to be able to tell you more about soon.

I think that’s probably enough for now. We do hope you’ll come visit?

(It’s £120 return on the train , which can be an overnight sleeper from St.Pancras if you do it right, and living here is cheap. There is a £50 kitty tax for flyers.)

Imagine how different the world would be if we didn’t have geographic allegiance, and just social / ideological allegiance instead. Oh.. wait.. that’s right – that’s how it is. Well.. imagine how different it would be if the geographic borders aligned with the ideological ones. I’ll bet we could have some really really HUGE wars then.

http://www.good.is/post/transparency-good-s-most-popular-infographics-of-2009/

Does what it says on the can: http://freedocumentaries.org/