We’ve all been there. You start nibbling on some chips — just a snack, you say to yourself — and before you know it, you’ve reached the bottom of the bag. How does that happen? More importantly: how do we stop?
This is neat. Visual cues to let us know when we’ve had a serving of junk food.
But you know what else helps us avoid overeating?
Reading the nutrition facts, counting out 12 crisps or weighing out a 20g serving.
Colour-coded Pringles will become the snack food for people who are too lazy to read.
Today, Google announced that their translation engine, which is premised on simple machine learning techniques multiplied by vast volumes of data, now receives 200 million users per day. The scale of the service spins out some crazy stats about Google’s role in language today. Here’s Franz Och, a research scientist at the company:
In a given day we translate roughly as much text as you’d find in 1 million books. To put it another way: what all the professional human translators in the world produce in a year, our system translates in roughly a single day. By this estimate, most of the translation on the planet is now done by Google Translate.
Well this is both impressive and discouraging.
Think of how rich and deeply personal your online persona has become. Now think of what will happen to it when you die.
This is relevant.
Ubiquitous technologies never seem miraculous. Who could possible be impressed with a car or a light bulb? Yet we know that people once were. A book we talk about a lot around here, David Nye’s American Technological Sublime details the way that light blew people’s minds when it began to arrive on the scene in the late 19th century.
“Dramatic demonstrations of arc lights began in the late 1870s and seemed to offer visible proof of coming changes. The Brooklyn Bridge or a skyscraper, when studded with electric lights, took on an entirely new appearance,” Nye wrote. “As these changes filled the urban night, a shimmering new world came into being. The electrified urban landscape emerged as another avatar of the sublime.”
A technology that, for Americans, allowed a particular kind of mediated sublimity takes on a different cast in this photograph, which I plucked from Alan Taylor’s spectacular collection of images from the World Press Photo Contest. It shows an area of Pyongyang without a single electric light except that used to illuminate a portrait of Kim Jong Il.
We’re so immersed in electric light at all times; this photograph may be the closest that I can get to thinking about what early Americans might have thought of lighting demonstrations at government and corporate buildings. The technology, in its specific association with power, seems to infuse it with a kind of other-worldliness. Such a demonstration has been impossible in the United States for decades and decades, but its effect is still visible in this photograph. Light and power go perfectly together when everything else is dark.
Conflict is inevitable in any relationship. So what distinguishes healthy conflict from the kind that is more destructive?
Good conversation.
A study of conflict in young couples has found that those who were able to easily engage in rewarding conversations with their partners were less likely to hold onto anger and stress and more likely to besatisfied with their relationship.
A team of researchers from Kansas State University worked with more than 50 couples ages 18 to 20 who had been dating for a least six months but were not engaged, married, or living together. These early dating relationships are so new that according to researcher Brenda McDaniel, it can even be difficult to get the couples to engage in conflict. It’s there, “but, because the relationship is so new to them, they don’t want to cause a break-up.”
The researchers looked at stress hormone levels after participants spent 20 minutes talking about a topic that typically caused relationship tension. Often, conflict occurred when one partner treated the other differently in front of family, did not introduce the other to parents and friends, or was flirting with someone else.
I am a Muslim, yet I sometimes visit Shabbat services in London and New York. Why? Because there is something deeply instructive about being among descendants of Abraham while they worship and recall lives of their ancestors, the ancient prophets of the Old Testament. Muslims also venerate Abraham, Isaac, Joseph, Solomon, Moses, Aaron, and others. Yet the abiding Arab-Israeli conflict continues to consume the children of Abraham: Jews, Christians, and Muslims.
Many Muslims in the Middle East would balk at the idea of sharing mosque space with Jews. I suspect most Jews in Israel or elsewhere would react with similar discomfort.
A recent development in the Bronx not only challenges extremist, separatist tendencies among many Muslims and Jews, but it also falsifies commonly held beliefs about Jews among Muslims. Rarely do I visit a Muslim-majority country and discuss Jewish communities without somebody commenting that Jews are universally wealthy and have an inherent hatred of Muslims. Needless to say, both assertions are flawed, racist, and historically inaccurate. Likewise, many Jews and others wrongly believe that Muslims intrinsically hate Jews. Demonstrating that such ideas are flawed is essential to promoting interfaith understanding and undermining extremist tendencies.
In this story, an Orthodox Jewish community lacking funds to pay the rent for their synagogue prays at a local Muslim center of worship. This religious unity among Abrahamic cousins in New York is an example for people in the Middle East of how Muslims and Jews can harbor less animosity toward each other.
Another example of this religious cooperation, a prelude to greater trust and potential political alliances, is the annual twinning of mosques and synagogues by the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), and the World Jewish Society, among other organizations in the United States, Latin America, and Asia.
