Brideshead Revisited

Watched a couple episodes of Brideshead Revisited again (love it!)--inspired by friends Ian and Denise who watched and loved Best of Youth on our recommendation and wanted other suggestions. BR was near the top of my list. It's darker, but covers a long sweep of years as well and is so much about character and a portrayal of particular times and places in Ryder's life. And of course I chortled like mad over John Gielgud's scenes. Those were hilarious.

Books:

Humanity: A History

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto (just looked this one over quickly at the library). It's not about the signified (i.e. humanity), but rather a history of the word "humanity" and how we have defined it in different times. He talks about our connection to different animals via legend, anthropomorphization and shamanic beliefs. Also, about how Lucy and that other chimpanzee learned sign language (though I believe that has, in some way been debunked--I remember looking into it when I was reading Dragons of Eden because Sagan also mentions those two examples) and so on. Because I recalled that it had been debunked, that did undermine his credibility about such things.

One of the notions that I did find interesting was that he pointed out that our inclusive and egalitarian view of humanity is a relatively recent conceit. Prior to that, there were hierarchies within the classification, drawn along racial (or, to be even more precise, racist) lines. As Djikstra also mentioned in Evil Sisters, in the early days, Darwinism was used to reinforce these prejudices and notions of racial superiority.

At any rate, it was more an extended contemplation of this idea than anything deeply informative, IMO (as Fernandez-Armesto calls it, an extended essay). I didn't love it.

Reading:

Blink

About "thin slicing", the idea that we make a lot of valid snap judgements that serve us well in everyday life but which we cannot explain or verbalize. I.e. the power of the "gut feeling," based on the internalization of numerous, often small but cumulative experiences. He also talks about those biases which lead us astray without our realizing it and that we should be trying to resist. The other big concept introduced is priming--namely, we can unknowingly be primed towards thinking a certain way by seeing a profusion of words or images (e.g. if we are asked to make grammatical sentences from a number of assembled words, we might not notice, scattered within them, words about, say, politeness, because we see them used in a different context. But, the unconscious, "thin slicing" part of our brain does associate them and our behaviour changes accordingly, in subtle ways). It's actually quite a lot about things that Ian covered in his "Faith and Politics" class at UU--really neat stuff.

This book, The Tipping Point and Freakonomics were three books discussed together at Denise's baby shower (which Denise wasn't able to attend because she was in labour!!)--most of the people there had Psych backgrounds and so they were talking about how TTP and Blink were both about fairly basic concepts within Psych circles, but which might have been new to laypersons (true)--and how according to someone's Economist friend, Freakonomics was similar in the latter area--trendily repackaged for popular consumption, but generally fairly basic ideas.

Funny thing (also pointed out by one of the women there): TTP and Freakonomics both talk about the same phenomenon of dropping crime rates in NYC, but cite completely different root causes.

The Tipping Point

Just a few pages in, but the Tipping Point seems to be a trendy, catchy repackaging of the notion of memes--ideas as forms of virus or bacteria that can spread. More viable ones propagate and grow and reach a point of widespread saturation after a while.