Given the liberal stigmas that adorn much of Pixar's work, who would have thought there is a socially conservative thread running through some of their most seminal work, most notably the films directed by Brad Bird?

There is something conservative about much of Pixar's output, but when I say conservative, I mean a small “c” conservative that sees the world along the same lines as Edmund Burke: “A disposition to preserve.” I'm going to call this “social conservatism,” by which I don't mean the religious or moral conservatism of modern political discourse, but a conservatism that is interested in preserving traditional social features - in particular, the idea of “family” - but which sees such preservation as ultimately futile. The family will dissolve, eventually, and so we must do what we can to keep it going as long as possible. It is a worldview based not on progression but on loss.

(Via kottke)

Absolutely fascinating:

Dinotopia artist James Gurney posted this video about a "change blindness" experiment. 75% of the participants didn't notice that the experimenter who bent under a counter was replaced by a different person. Says Gurney: "Here's proof that most of the time we look but don't see." I think Matisse said something to the effect that he didn't really see things unless he was painting them.

Mark Frauenfelder over at Boing Boing asks an interesting question:

Here’s a test: let’s say a meeting, originally scheduled for Wednesday, has been moved forward two days. What is the new day of the meeting?

To me, the answer is Monday (because moving something forward means it will happen sooner), but it turns out that how you answer the question says a lot about how you perceive time itself.

If you think it’s Friday, you imagine time as something you move through. If you think it’s Monday, you think of time as something that passes by you.

What does this have to do with anger?

Well, according to the British Psychological Society, “Friday” people have an angrier disposition, than “Monday” people.

Not sure how scientific this is (seems a little wobbly to me), but it sure makes for fun intra-office profiling.

(Via Tyler Cowen)

Men with wide faces are consistently more aggressive than those without, study finds.

“We were astounded to see that this relatively simple measurement in the face predicted how aggressive men were in a lab-based computer game, and then equally astounded to see that the same measure could predict aggressive behavior in a real-world setting, that of sports,” said researcher Cheryl McCormick, a behavioral neuroscientist at Brock University. These new findings suggest that faces may have been shaped by evolution to signal aggressiveness to others. “Competitors may have used this cue, likely on a subconscious level, to decide whether or not to take an opponent on,” McCormick told LiveScience. Perhaps linked with these results is the fact that making an angry face involves lowering the brow and raising the upper lip, which squashes the features of your face together, making it look wider, the scientists added.

(via Deron)

Here's a surprisingly powerful video of students made by students about their lives, the rules they have to play by, and the discord between who they really are and who they're asked to be. It's fine and well to talk about keeping up with technology and espousing the benefits as it relates to productivity and work, but what nobody talks about is how technology has transformed the culture to such a degree that anthropological mainstays such as schools and chalkboards have been rendered nearly powerless.  In a very literal sense, they're anachronisms. The video was shot by cultural anthropology students, class of Spring 2007, at Kansas State University. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o]

"The smartest and richest people people in the world have all turned off their TVs. [...] How difficult it is for someone to become curious: that for seven, 10, 15 years of school, you are required to not be curious. Over and over and over again the curious are punished. [...] It's more about a five or 10 or 15 year process that people start finding their voice and they start realizing that the safest thing they can do feels risky and the riskiest thing they can do is play it safe." Seth Godin: Curiosity (short film)

Right now, if the statistics are correct, about 15 percent of Americans are not happy. Soon, perhaps, with the help of psychopharmaceuticals, melancholics will become unknown. That would be an unparalleled tragedy, equivalent in scope to the annihilation of the sperm whale or the golden eagle. With no more melancholics, we would live in a world in which everyone simply accepted the status quo, in which everyone would simply be content with the given. This would constitute a nightmare worthy of Philip K. Dick, a police state of Pollyannas, a flatland that offers nothing new under the sun. Why are we pushing toward such a hellish condition? The answer is simple: fear. Most hide behind a smile because they are afraid of facing the world's complexity, its vagueness, its terrible beauties. If we stay safely ensconced behind our painted grins, then we won't have to encounter the insecurities attendant upon dwelling in possibility, those anxious moments when one doesn't know this from that, when one could suddenly become almost anything at all. Even though this anxiety, usually over death, is in the end exhilarating, a call to be creative, it is in the beginning rather horrifying, a feeling of hovering in an unpredictable abyss. Most of us habitually flee from that state of mind, try to lose ourselves in distraction and good cheer. We don inauthenticity as a mask, a disguise to protect us from the abyss.

You don't need to look very far or wide to see the endless American pursuit of happiness: look at Amazon's best sellers, check out an episode of Dr. Phil or Oprah, grab nearly any self-help book off the shelf at your local Borders. I've witnessed many people painting on happy faces that seem discordant with their circumstance and the larger worldstate, and the notion of inauthenticity quickly bubbles up into the conscious. That's not to say that happiness isn't good or desirable or even virtuous. What's missing from today's sweeping "positive psychology" trend is the value of sadness, its place in the human emotional continuum, its contribution towards wisdom and a life lived in full. We are increasingly treating melancholy and sadness as an affliction in need of eradication, and that's an unbalanced and unnatural objective. Do we really want a dystopian world full of Yin, completely devoid of the Yang? Do we really want a sterile, perma-smile society, accepting all that we have and never pushing to understand our world our ourselves through the natural mechanisms of self-actualization? I certainly don't. Link: In Praise of Melancholy