To no one's surprise...

This week I am boycotting The New Yorker AND The Economist because they have been getting on my nerves. The New Yorker's penchant for the pretentious seems to have become more pronounced of late, manifest by the one and only thing I read in it during the week: the first 3/4 of the first page of this short story by Sam Shepard that is completely tired and boring. It doesn't seem to be going anywhere; it's not even luridly poetic (ie, art for art's sake); and its focus on Xanax obviously makes it Hip and Cool. Perhaps the only redeeming value is that it is perfectly illustrative of the fact that waiting in an endless line REALLY IS THAT DULL.

The Economist, meanwhile, has incurred my wrath by arriving on Thursday, five days late, every week of the past three. It's not news at this point, it's editorial retrospective. For that reason, I am going to type up three of the news blurbs of world events you may have missed hearing about for the week of October 17-23.

"In Russia, to no one's surprise, the ruling United Russia party won nationwide votes to local and municipal councils by a landslide. More surprisingly, opposition politicians walked out of parliament, complaining of vote rigging, and threatened to demonstrate in protest."

"Cuba's government denied Yoani Sanchez, a blogger, an exit visa for her to travel to New York to receive a prize from Columbia University's graduate school of journalism."

"Romania's government collapsed after a vote of no confidence in parliament. The vote was connected to political infighting before presidential elections due next month and may jeopardise the cash-strapped country's relations with the IMF."

The most stimulating thing I read all week (aside from finishing Imperial Life in the Emerald City) was "Timewarp: how your brain creates the fourth dimension". The way we perceive time as it's happening and the way remember it after the fact may or may not process separately in the brain. Ergo, experimenters decided to drop people from an eight-storey harness into a safety net and have them look at a special device that rapidly flashed a light - so quickly that, under normal conditions, the human eye would simply perceive it as a solid light. Researchers theorize that frame rate governs our perception of time, and that during certain traumatic moments, the phenomenon of "time slowing down" is actually due to an increase in the number of "frames" your mind takes in. Later on, your brain remembers all those frames but conceives of them with the normal frame rate, which makes them take up more space time. This also means that we may be on the verge of a cure for schizophrenia, if we can figure out why schizophrenic's brains don't have the same frame rate processor as the rest of us, and how to fix it - if that is in fact the reason for their delusions. The article does a much better job of explaining how this all is connected, so just go read it.

Apparently, if we can somehow figure out a way to make free-floating sea ice go where we want it, "We still have a chance to save the polar bears." All it depends on is international cooperation and a commitment from every country in the northern hemisphere not to promote economic development in the Arctic.

Poor polar bears don't stand a chance.

And finally, according to "Multiply universes: How many is the multiverse?" there may actually be a Discworld out there somewhere. Now, I'm not going to lie, I've read this three times and I still don't quite understand how this is science and not philosophy, but they assure me that it is, so we'll go with it. What it comes down to is perspective and observability and obviously we need to find the subtle knife to cut into one of these other universes and see what it's like. Duh.