Cuttings: May 2015

Strange continuity: why don't our brains explode at movie cuts? - article by Jeffrey M. Zacks in Aeon online magazine, referenced in MindHacks blog. "Movies are, for the most part, made up of short runs of continuous action, calledshots, spliced together with cuts. With a cut, a filmmaker can instantaneously replace most of what is available in your visual field with completely different stuff. This is something that never happened in the 3.5 billion years or so that it took our visual systems to develop. You might think, then, that cutting might cause something of a disturbance when it first appeared. And yet nothing in contemporary reports suggests that it did.... the first cinemagoers seem to have taken little note of cuts. Something that, on the face of it, ought to seem discontinuous with ordinary experience in the most literal sense possible slipped into the popular imagination quite seamlessly. How could that be?"

Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen by Mary Norris – review by Gilda Williams in The Guardian. "Her first book is both an English-usage manual and a memoir; but Norris’s unending patience is not required of her readers, who are repeatedly rewarded with gems of wit and wisdom. '"Whom" may indeed be on the way out', she writes, 'but so is Venice, and we still like to go there.' The title refers to her top-rated grammatical offence, 'between you and I' – ranked second in David Foster Wallace’s catalogue of blunders in his essay 'Authority and American Usage'. It rankles with her not because of offenders’ ignorance, but because they foolishly imagine that 'between you and I' sounds grand. Down-to-earth Norris dislikes pretentiousness even more than crummy grammar, but she is no stickler."

VE Day: what the end of the war was like for those who were there - compilation by Walter Kempowski in The Guardian, extracted from his book Swansong 1945: A Collective Diary from Hitler’s Last Birthday to VE Day. "Martin Hauser, sergeant in the British army, near Trieste. 'I hold a glass of beer in my hand, look into the transparent yellow liquid, and my thoughts wander. So this is the end. Is this what peace looks like? Is this what it feels like? Here we sit, a group of men who left their homes and families a long time ago, who freed themselves from the routine of daily life in the past to assure their lives in the future. Here we sit, happy to have got through these years full of danger and horror sound of limb and mind. But where is the joy, the enthusiasm that can be expected of us? Not a bit of it – a smile here, a chuckle there, a joke as we drink our beer. Time passes with an exchange of memories – memories of past times, serious struggles, friends who have fallen. The past weighs heavily on everyone.'"

Eve Online: how a virtual world went to the edge of apocalypse and back - article by Simon Parkin in The Guardian, related to his forthcoming (August 2015) book Death by Video Game: Tales of Obsession from the Virtual Frontline. "In 2011 CCP [the Icelandic company which runs Eve Online] introduced a new feature that had been 18 months in the making: a digital store where in-game items (clothing, accessories and so on) could be purchased for real money. It was a disaster that brought New Eden close to its second catastrophic event.... The leak of an internal memo from the company’s CEO, Hilmar Pétursson, that denounced the complaints as 'noise' further enraged the player base. Thousands gathered within the game and began to stage symbolic riots, firing their ships’ weapons on a giant monument stationed outside a major trading hub. The protest ... was effective. In an unprecedented move, Pétursson wrote an open letter to the game’s players admitting that he had made a mistake. 'We made a mess and someone had to own it,' he explained to me. 'It was mine to own.' After the letter of apology, CCP acknowledged the protest by switching the 3D model of the in-game monument to one that was broken and damaged, a lasting memorial to the time when the players made their collective voice heard and the game’s makers responded. Few video games accommodate their player base in this way.... Eve’s creators have learned that the future of their world depends not only on the happiness of the game’s players, but also their feeling that the players, ultimately, own the world which they inhabit."

Top of the list of student demands: not lower fees, but more counselling - article by Becky Gardiner in The Guardian. "Ruth Caleb, who runs the counselling service at Brunel University in west London, has been listening to students’ problems for 25 years. Since 2005, the number of students seeking her help has more than doubled. When she started, the most talked about subjects were 'homesickness, first boyfriends, learning to live with new people'. Now, the problems are: depression, eating disorders, self-harm. At the same time, many universities have cut back spending on counselling services for students with mental health problems."

The professor who thinks video games will be the downfall of men - article by Pete Etchells in The Guardian. "Central to their ideas, Zimbardo and Coulombe are worried that these are issues solely for men. But again, the data don’t seem to reinforce this idea. For example, they suggest that 'for the ordinary gamer a sixteen-hour stretch would be just another typical weekend, and few parents would even bat an eyelid.' Given that they provide no definition of the "ordinary gamer", all we can do is to look to data that tell us something useful about age and sex. 'We do have some pretty good research that suggest that ordinary gamers are middle aged women who play social games on facebook, and that the median age of gamers is probably in the mid-30s and less than a quarter are under 18, and of them, roughly half are female' says [Andrew] Przybylski [of the Oxford Internet Institute].... In the UK,... 52 percent of all people who played some form of video game in the first half of 2014 were women. For most ‘average’ gamers then, these data just don’t seem to play into the idea that anyone would simply have time to spend 16 hours playing games on an average weekend. That Zimbardo and Coulombe suggest that parents wouldn’t care about the amount of time spent perhaps belies the perception of the typical gamer that they hold – lone boys, below the age of 18."

Tomorrowland: how Walt Disney’s strange utopia shaped the world of tomorrow - article by Steve Rose in The Guardian. "Welcome to the future. Or is it the past? In Tomorrowland, Disney’s new adventure movie, George Clooney and friends risk life and limb to reach the utopian realm of the title, and it looks pretty much like we expected the future to look, at least back in the 1960s: a pristine, shopping-mall sort of place with soaring glass spires and flying trains and happy people of all nations wearing coloured boiler suits. But here in the real world (a relative term, admittedly) you can visit Tomorrowland today. As many millions of visitors know, it is already an area of Disney’s theme parks, devoted to the same type of optimistic techno-futurism Tomorrowland the movie espouses.... For better or worse, Epcot [the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow] never came to pass. Disney’s utopianism died with its master in 1966, and no one else had the stomach to build his dream city. Rather than the city of the future, Epcot became another theme park, more like a corporate-sponsored World’s Fair.... In the theme parks, too, Tomorrowland ceased to anticipate the real future and instead focused on futuristic attractions... Tomorrowland the movie is a sincere attempt to address this lack of belief in the future, without which humanity could be doomed, it suggests."

When raising awareness backfires - article by Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian. "The Petrified Forest National Park, in the desert wilderness of Arizona, is famous for its fossilised wood, the remains of trees millions of years old. It’s also famous for people carting off chunks of that wood as souvenirs... So when a team of psychologists were exploring ways to halt the plundering, they put up signs telling people not to steal, along with a note: 'Many past visitors have removed the petrified wood from the park, changing the state of the Petrified Forest.' But that sentence led to three times as much theft as no sign at all. The intended message was drowned out by the implicit one: everyone’s doing it, so what difference could one more chunk make? I was reminded of the Petrified Forest ... by a new study on the power of stereotypes... Since everyone’s a little bit racist and sexist, it’s become a popular tactic in fighting prejudice not to shame people for it – that makes them defensive – but instead to remind them that everyone’s susceptible to thinking in stereotyped ways. Yet this 'everyone stereotypes' message, the study found, worked just like the signs in the Petrified Forest: it made people more relaxed about engaging in stereotyping themselves."

My hopes for the Occupy St Paul's drama that puts me on the stage - article by Giles Fraser in The Guardian. "On the afternoon of 26 October 2011, the cathedral chapter of St Paul’s came together for a hastily convened meeting. Some were absent, but there were enough of us to make a decision. And there was only one item on the agenda: the eviction of Occupy. Everyone was tired. Everyone was emotional. The previous weeks had taken their toll. And we all dealt with it differently. During the meeting, I felt almost unable to speak, perhaps overwhelmed by the gravity of the moment. The dean reached across the baize table to hold my hand and break my silence. It was a simple act of kindness in an impossible situation. He, too, was tired and angry. I don’t remember what I said, but it wasn’t enough. The vote was close but it didn’t go my way. A few hours later, I rang the dean’s doorbell and handed him the letter. I couldn’t just pop it through his letterbox. He knew what it was....
Though I find it uncomfortable – painful even – to have these events revisited, there is an issue here that extends far beyond the personalities involved. Perhaps that’s why it makes a good subject for a play. The St Paul’s/Occupy thing was not just a little bit of local difficulty. What was at stake, for all involved, was a theological question that takes us back to the very foundations of the Christian faith...."

The tablet explodes: over-50s and three-year-olds join the charge towards tech - article by Mark Sweney in The Guardian. "In the space of just five years, tablets have become a must-have device, with more than half of UK households and one in 10 three to four-year-olds owning one.... An interesting trend has been the rise of tablets among those aged over 55, a generation not traditionally considered to be particularly keen on new technology, from 1% ownership in 2011 to 37% in 2015....Tablets remain popular for that lean-back experience at home, where 37% of people use them to go online, and almost 60% of those doing so watching video clips. More than a third use tablets to catch up with their favourite TV shows and films on services such as the BBC’s iPlayer and the ITV player. Outside the home the mobile phone remains the most popular device for browsing the internet. More than half of adults regularly use one to do so."

What was the first pre-existing popular song to be used in a film? - Notes and Queries, in The Guardian. Q: " What was the first pre-existing popular song to be used on the soundtrack of a motion picture? I’m referring to original versions only, not songs composed or re-recorded especially for a film." A: "Quite obviously .... it was 'Sumer Is Icumen In' (also called the Summer Canon and the Cuckoo Song), a medieval English rota of the mid-13th century.... In the 1938 film The Adventures of Robin Hood, Little John (Alan Hale, Sr.) whistles the melody just before he meets Robin Hood. Quite a popular tune in its time so I hear."

How the compact disc lost its shine - article by Dorian Lynskey in The Guardian. "Thirty years ago this month, Dire Straits released their fifth album, Brothers in Arms. En route to becoming one of the best-selling albums of all time, it revolutionised the music industry. For the first time, an album sold more on compact disc than on vinyl and passed the 1m mark. Three years after the first silver discs had appeared in record shops, Brothers in Arms was the symbolic milestone that marked the true beginning of the CD era.... 'Brothers in Arms was an iconic release,' says Gennaro Castaldo [of the BPI]. 'The CD came to symbolise the so-called yuppie generation, representing new material success and aspiration. If you owned a CD player it showed you were upwardly mobile. Its significance seemed to go beyond music to a lifestyle statement.' ... It was the 2001 launch of the iPod, an aspirational premium product which made MP3s portable, that turned the tide. 'Before that the MP3 was an inferior good,' Witt says [Stephen Witt, author of How Music Got Free about the industry's relationship with the MP3]. 'Once you had the iPod, the CD was an inferior good. It could get cracked or lost, whereas MP3 files lasted.' Not pure, not perfect, but sound for ever."

When society isn’t judging, women’s sex drive rivals men’s - article by Tom Stafford in MindHacks blog,  also in The Conversation. "In 1978 two psychologists, Russell Clark and Elaine Hatfield,... had students at Florida State University approach people on campus and deliver a pick-up line ... according to one of three randomly chosen options. Either 'would you go out tonight?', or 'will you come over to my apartment?', or 'would you go to bed with me?'... None of the women approached took up the offer of sex with a complete stranger. Three-quarters of the men did... [In research published this month,] two German researchers, Andreas Baranowski and Heiko Hecht, replicated the original Clark and Hatfield study, but with some vital changes.... The pair reasoned that one factor in how women respond to invitations to sex may be fear – fear of reputational damage in a culture which judges women’s sexual activity differently from men’s, and fear of physical harm from an encounter with a male stranger.... They designed an elaborate cover scenario designed to make the participants believe they could accept offers of sex without fear of anyone finding out, or of physical danger. ... The results were dramatic. ... The women who thought they had the chance to meet up with men for sex, chose an average of slightly less than three men who they would like to have an encounter with. The men chose an average of slightly more than three women who they would like to have an encounter with."

Derek Walker obituary in The Guardian. "Taking the master plan for the new town [of Milton Keynes] conceived by the architect Richard Llewelyn-Davies, Derek and his team introduced a well-defined city centre and a tightened grid that the city centre team leader, Stuart Mosscrop, noticed was almost aligned with the rising sun on the summer solstice. Nudged into precise alignment, the modern town centre connected back to the ancient British landscapes that so fascinated the team.... To test their work, the team sat on the muddy field of the yet to be built town with the central street pegged, to watch the solstice sunrise. Stories about the sewage works being placed on a ley line might be mythical embellishments, but the names of Midsummer Boulevard and Avebury Boulevard still recall ancient links."