What the goth Goddess of Time has to do with elephant head transplants and Pixar’s pastimes.

What if you could cross The Night Life of Trees, the magical artwork based on Indian mythology, with The Ancient Book of Myth and War, that delightful side project by a team of Pixar animators? You’d get The Little Book of Hindu Deities: From the Goddess of Wealth to the Sacred Cow — an impossibly charming illustrated almanac of gods and goddesses by Pixar animator Sanjay Patel. These beautiful stories from Indian mythology span the entire spectrum of human experience — petty quarrels and epic battles, love and betrayal, happiness and loss — with equal parts humor and respect, pairing each full-color illustration with a lively profile of that deity.

In the book’s introduction, Patel notes his fascination with Japanese animation, which influenced his style in depicting the Hindu deities — a curious case of creative cross-pollination across cultures. For an added smile, Patel originally self-published the book before Plume picked it up.

A playful morphology of a mythological pantheon, The Little Book of Hindu Deities is as captivating and entertaining as it is informative without being encyclopedic — a light and joyful journey into Hinduism by way of the contemporary pop culture aesthetic.

Patel’s follow-up, The Big Poster Book of Hindu Deities, featuring 12 stunning removable prints, is also very much worth a look.

HT @ShamilaJiwa; images courtesy of Sanjay Patel

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Source: http://acravan.blogspot.com/2010/09/echo-chamber-echo-chamber-cocktail.html

We regularly fear living in an echo chamber (this is especially true for us because our blog serves as a feedback forum from regular participants, even if many of the inputs driving its content originate from industries unrelated to marketing). In fact, the foolish, mutual reassurance of ad folks is one of the most common criticisms of our industry. But recently a study came out that got me to reexamine the so-called echo chamber.

The report was authored by Sinan Aral (NYU, Stern School of Business) and Marshall Van Alstyne (Boston University, School of Management) and ran in the American Journal of Sociology. It can be downloaded here.

The historical thinking around how one gets new, diverse information via their networks has placed a tremendous amount of emphasis on “weak ties,” those people you don’t know very well and don’t speak to very often. The most often cited study in this work is by Mark Granovetter and was done in 1973, before the invention of the web and digital social networks. Letting an outdated study drive our thinking in this space is an issue, as it assumes technology is simply facilitating what was previously true about relationships, rather than evolving it.

What’s more modern and practical about Aral and Van Alstyne’s study is that it accounts for bandwidth. In a world of unprecedented connectivity and content generation, the format of information shared (say 140 characters of text) and the frequency with which it’s consumed have to be accounted for. It seems ridiculous this day and age to think the depth of my relationship with people is the determining factor of getting new information from them. Aral and Van Alstyne ask a more contemporary question than simply where new information comes from. They ask “where does one find the most novel information per unit time?” In other words, they’re accounting for bandwidth. You talk to closer ties more often and distant ties less often, a critical issue neglected in the previous thinking about the value of weak ties. Bandwidth is simply too important a factor to ignore in a world where contact across miles, economic classes, and belief systems is easier than ever—especially when said contact is frequently asynchronous.

Aral and Van Alstyne also discuss a point about strong ties I found interesting: those who know you well know what type of information is novel for you. That’s a filtering mechanism we know most readers of this blog employ regularly (just glance at how community members caveat and source what they share back to us as the managers of the blog).

This natural filtering is what’s really the heart of the matter because it addresses homophily (the idea that we surround ourselves with like-minded people, or more colloquially, “birds of a feather flock together”). People who think like us, seek out our blog. We do the same, following twitter accounts, listening to speakers, taking meetings with those we think are similar to us. Thus, the echo chamber, right? We all just tell each other what we want to hear, limiting our new thinking.

Wait a minute. As someone who has a core job responsibility of innovation (i.e., “the introduction of something new”—in this case to BBH), I should fear an echo chamber more than anyone. Instead, I’ve found this supposed echo chamber is inhabited by people that are my most efficient means of learning something new. When I find time to be in the stream, I’m inundated with novel information. That’s partially because I’m forced to filter people based on how frequently I expect to be engaged (“I want to hear anything she says, but she says so much I have to tune her out”—efficiency decisions relating to bandwidth). Simultaneously, the very people I choose to listen to are filtering for people like them (or should I say “us”?), wanting to avoid saying something they can only assume I know—otherwise I may just have to filter them.

It may be an echo chamber. But at its core is a virtuous circle.

What 1920s rope-skipping has to do with the birth of paleontology, restaurant entrepreneurship, and Oprah.

One of history’s greatest downfalls is its asymmetry of acclaim, catapulting some figures into legend status while leaving others, even those of great cultural contribution, behind as mere footnotes. Today, we turn to five such unsung heroes whose work and legacy shaped fundamental aspects of modern life.

HENRIETTA LACKS
When Henrietta Lacks (1920-1951), an African-American mother of five who migrated from the tobacco farms of Virginia to poorest neighborhoods of Baltimore, died at the tragic age of 31 from cervical cancer, she didn’t realize she’d be the donor of cells that would create the HeLa immortal cell line — a line that didn’t die after a few cell divisions — making possible some of the most seminal discoveries in modern medicine. Though the tumor tissue was taken with neither her knowledge nor her consent, the HeLa cell was crucial in everything from the first polio vaccine to cancer and AIDS research. To date, scientists have grown more than 20 tons of HeLa cells.

Good science is all about following the data as it shows up and letting yourself be proven wrong, and letting everything change while you’re working on it — and I think writing is the same way.” ~ Rebecca Skloot

In The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the ever-brilliant Rebecca Skloot weaves a fascinating and tender detective story about HeLa’s legacy through the discovery of Henrietta’s youngest daughter, Deborah, who didn’t know her mother but who always knew she wanted to be a scientist. As Skloot and Deborah, infinitely different yet united by the shared quest for answers, unravel one of the most absorbing mysteries of modern science, we also get a rich and sensitive tale about family, community, and the dark side of society’s capacity for exploiting its poorest and most vulnerable members. The book, one of the decade’s most excellent and ambitious science-and-so-much-more reads, is currently being made into an HBO movie by Oprah Winfrey and Alan Ball.

Henrietta and David Lacks, circa 1945.

Deborah Lacks at about age four.

Margaret Gey and Minnie, a lab technician, in the Gey lab at Hopkins, circa 1951.

LINCOLN BEACHEY
“Master Birdman.” “The man who owned the sky.” “The world’s greatest aviator.” Lincoln Beachey (1887-1915) was known by many names and recognized by sight by hundreds of thousands around the world in his heyday — yet, despite having invented aerobatics, pioneered aviation stunts, and set a number of records, he remains practically unknown today. His story is one of optimism, bravery, entrepreneurship and, ultimately, deadly obsession.

Beachey was early to the mechanics game — he opened his own bicycle shop at the age of 13, graduated to repairing motorcycle by 15, and eventually made his way to the emerging and glamorous world of aviation as a dirigible pilot. When he was 17, he set out on a publicity stunt, building his own dirigible and flying it around the Washington Monument, eventually landing it on the White House. His remarkable flying stunts and clever personal branding soon catapulted both Beachey and aviation itself into mainstream, international fame — but his relentless ambition was also the demon of his demise. On March 14, 1915, Beachey set out to impress a crowd of nearly 250,000 at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition with a stunt he had never performed in public before — inverted flight. As he intently dove to make a loop and turn the plane onto its back, he failed to notice he was only 2,000 feet above San Francisco Bay. Startled, he pulled on the controls to flip the plane back, but strain ripped both wings off, causing the plane to plunge directly into the bay. By the time Navy officers recovered Beachy’s body 1 hour and 45 minutes later, Beachey was long dead — from drowning, not the crash, as an autopsy determined — but rescuers spent nearly 3 hours trying to revive the era’s beloved folk hero. He was 28.

Actually, Beachey is hardly unsung in the literal sense — his final flight became the subject of a popular rope-skipping rhyme from the 1920s, uncovered by the fine folks at Radiolab in their fantastic recent episode on loops. (The same episode that inspired last week’s beautiful and poetic animated short film about the afterlife of a whale and that, in fact, in part inspired this very article on unsung heroes.)

POGGIO BRACCIOLINI
Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459) is the most important man you’ve never heard of.

One cold winter night in 1417, the clean-shaven, slender young man pulled a manuscript off a dusty library shelf and could barely believe his eyes. In his hands was a thousand-year-old text that changed the course of human thought — the last surviving manuscript of On the Nature of Things, a seminal poem by Roman philosopher Lucretius, full of radical ideas about a universe operating without gods and that matter made up of minuscule particles in perpetual motion, colliding and swerving in ever-changing directions. With Bracciolini’s discovery began the copying and translation of this powerful ancient text, which in turn fueled the Renaissance and inspired minds as diverse as Shakespeare, Galileo, Thomas Jefferson, Einstein and Freud.

In The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, acclaimed Renaissance scholar Stephen Greenblatt tells the story of Bracciolini’s landmark discovery and its impact on centuries of human intellectual life, laying the foundations for nearly everything we take as a cultural given today.

This is a story [of] how the world swerved in a new direction. The agent of change was not a revolution, an implacable army at the gates, or landfall of an unknown continent. […] The epochal change with which this book is concerned — though it has affected all our lives — is not so easily associated with a dramatic image.”

FRED HARVEY
Without Fred Harvey (1835-1901), modern life would be devoid of such staples as Starbucks, Yelp, Top Chef, and even dating — for Harvey pioneered the restaurant chain in North America and thus elevated the restaurant itself from a small-town business to a formidable industry. From his first eating houses along the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad to his eventual Harvey House empire of restaurants, lunch rooms, dining cars, hotels, and souvenir shops, the cunning entrepreneur and marketer inspired the iconic Judy Garland musical The Harvey Girls (which might, in fact, disqualify him from the “unsung” game) and embodied the spirit that makes America America.

I spent the better portion of my college years sifting through countless rolls of 19th-century newspaper microfilm, calling small public libraries across the American Southwest, and scouring eBay for Harvey ephemera as I helped author Stephen Fried with his research for Appetite for America: Fred Harvey and the Business of Civilizing the Wild West, One Meal at a Time — a fascinating and lively more-than-biography of Harvey that traces his incredible journey of entrepreneurship, the little-known family drama that surrounded his quest, and his lasting legacy.

MARY ANNING
British fossil collector and paleontologist Mary Anning (1799-1847) was only twelve years old and the child of a poor family when she made her first seminal discovery. While fossil-hunting on the cliffs of Lyme Regis, England, she found the first dinosaur skeleton, that of an ichthyosaur. Until her landmark discovery, animal extinction was believed to be impossible. Though her gender and social class made it difficult for her to fully participate in the scientific community of 19th-century Britain, she read as much scientific literature as she could get her hands on and went on to become a renowned fossil-hunter and dealer, often risking her life in the face of landslides and daunting cliffs. The great Stephen Jay Gould, arguably the most beloved popular science writer of all time, famously called Anning “probably the most important unsung (or inadequately sung) collecting force in the history of paleontology” — indeed, her work ignited a fundamental shift in scientific thinking about prehistoric life in the early 19th century.

The Fossil Hunter: Dinosaurs, Evolution, and the Woman Whose Discoveries Changed the World tells Anning’s extraordinary story of curiosity, rigor, self-education, and passionate perseverance in the face of stifling social norms and circumstances. Anning is also the protagonist of a delightful children’s book, Stone Girl Bone Girl: The Story of Mary Anning.

Like Beachey, Anning too inspired a popular piece of folk poetry, the tongue-twister “She Sells Sea Shells by the Seashore.”

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From Ancient Greece to quantum mechanics, or what a Chinese room and a cat have to do with infinity.

From the fine folks at the Open University comes 60-Second Adventures in Thought, a fascinating and delightfully animated series exploring six famous thought experiments.

The Paradox of the Tortoise and Achilles comes from Ancient Greece and explores motion as an illusion:

The Grandfather Paradox grapples with time travel:

Chinese Room comes from the work of John Searle, originally published in 1980, and deals with artificial intelligence:

Hilbert’s paradox of the Grand Hotel, proposed by German mathematician David Hilbert, tackles the gargantuan issue of infinity:

The Twin Paradox, first explained by Paul Langevin in 1911, examines special relativity:

Schrödinger’s Cat, devised by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935, is a quantum mechanics mind-bender:

For more such fascination and cognitive calisthenics, you won’t go wrong with Peg Tittle’s What If….Collected Thought Experiments in Philosophy .

via Open Culture

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How do you define "aerosol", or "manipulation"? What about "organic", "mutant" and "confidence"?

The truth is that scientists often say words that do not mean what the general public thinks they mean. And that's a problem. If you're not speaking the same language, miscommunication is inevitable. There's a new paper up in Physics Today, which argues that it's the responsibility of all scientists to think about the colloquial meanings of words and talk in a way the public can understand.

But here's the first step: Making it clear to scientists which words cause communication problems. You can see the list from the Physics Today paper above. Meanwhile, the Southern Fried Science blog has added to the collection, and Southern Fried Science blogger Andrew Thaler is looking for more suggestions. You can add words that you think scientists and public use differently to Thaler's Google Docs spreadsheet. If you've got a good alternative for a confusing word, add that, too.

Via Mountain Beltway

From Morocco to Mongolia, or what we can learn about climate change from Inuit whale hunters.

What is it about Dutch photographers that makes them so visually eloquent at capturing the human condition? From Jeroen Toirkens comes Nomad — a fascinating and strikingly beautiful visual anthropology of the Northern Hemisphere’s last living nomadic peoples, from Greenland to Turkey. A decade in the making, this multi-continent journey unfolds in 150 black-and-white and full-color photos that reveal what feels like an alternate reality of a life often harsh, sometimes poetic, devoid of many of our modern luxuries and basic givens, from shiny digital gadgets to a permanent roof over one’s head.

Since the beginning of time, nomadic people have roamed the earth. Looking for food, feeding their cattle. Looking for an existence, freedom. Living in the wild, mountains, deserts, on tundra and ice. With only a thin layer of tent between them and nature. Earth in the 21st century is a crowded place, roads and cities are everywhere. Yet somehow, these people hold on to traditions that go back to the very beginning of human civilization.” ~ Jelle Brandt Corstius

Zuun Taiga, Mongolia, 2007

Tiniteqilaaq, Greenland, 2009

Altai Mountains, Russia, 2006

Tiniteqilaaq, Greenland, 2009

Nuuk, Greenland, 2009

Zuun Taiga, Mongolia, 2007

Zuun Taiga, Mongolia, 2007

Arghangai Aimag, Mongolia, 2007

Gobi Desert, Mongolia, 2007

Gobi Desert, Mongolia, 2007

Gobi Desert, Mongolia, 2007

Kola Sami, Russia, 2006

Nenets, Russia, 2005

Baruun Taiga, Mongolia, 2004

Kazakh, Altai Mountains, Russia, 2004

Berbers, High Atlas Mountains, Morocco, 2002

Kirgiz, Kyrgystan, 2000

Yörük, Bolkar Mountains, Turkey, 1999

Sami, Karesuvanto, Finland, 2001

Kola Sami, Russia, 2006

This video of what the “Eskimo” life really means, made in the settlement Tiniteqilaaq hunters, will give you a taste for the project’s breathtaking mesmerism:

Because of climate change, we can see and feel winter days get colder and the sea, it’s warmer. And, because of that, it’s more difficult to hunt in the winters.”

A stunning exercise in perspective-shifting, Nomad invites you to see the world — our world, and yet a world that feels eerily other — with new eyes, embracing it with equal parts fascination and profound human empathy.

Images courtesy of Jeroen Toirkens

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What Leo Tolstoy can teach us about curation.

Understanding creative influence is essential to understanding remix culture and a centerpiece of combinatorial creativity. I recently collaborated with illustrator extraordinaire Wendy MacNaughton and Michelle Legro of Lapham’s Quarterly of a subjective visualization of creative influence in literature and other arts, but this ecosystem of cross-pollination is far more layered and complex than a playful graphic could possibly convey. The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life is Harold Bloom’s ambitious effort to peel away at these many layers. Bloom, who for the past half-century has been exploring that ecosystem as a Yale literature professor and contemporary culture’s most significant literary critic, offers insight on 30 of the world’s most iconic writers, from Shakespeare to Joyce to Emerson, and examines issues ranging from the role of “creative misreading” in the joy of literature to the supreme fiction of the romantic self to the influence of a mind on itself.

Literature for me is not merely the best part of life; it is itself the form of life, which has no other form.” ~ Harold Bloom

The book is a follow-up to Bloom’s 1973 classic, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, and was inspired by Robert Burton’s 1621 masterpiece, The Anatomy of Melancholy. Of that influence, Bloom writes:

Traces of Burton’s marvelous madness abound in this book, and yet it may be that all I share with Burton is an obsessiveness somewhat parallel to his own. Burton’s melancholy emanated from his fantastic learning: he wrote to cure his learnedness. My book isolates literary influence as the agon of influence, and perhaps I write to cure my own sense of having been overinfluenced since childhood by the great Western authors.”

But the part that captivated me the most was this quote from a Leo Tolstoy letter in the book’s epigraph, which articulates the essence of my own curatorial sense of purpose better than I ever could:

For art criticism we need people who would show the senselessness of looking for ideas in a work of art, and who instead would continually guide readers in that endless labyrinth of linkages that makes up the stuff of art, and bring them to the laws that serve as the foundation for those linkages.”

A true treat for literati and remixologists alike, The Anatomy of Influence is an exquisite paean to the love of literature, one that pulls you into its enthusiasm with equal parts mesmerism and cunning precision.

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For most of the last decade, Israeli soldiers have been making the transition back to civilian life after their compulsory military service  by going on a drug-dazed recovery trip to India, where an invisible stream of modern global culture runs from the beaches of Goa to the mountains of Himachal Pradesh in the north.  While most of the Israelis eventually return home after a year or so, many have stayed as permanent expat stewards of the stream. The Israeli military stream is changing course these days, and starting to flow through Thailand, where the same pattern of drug-use and conflict with the locals is being repeated.

This pattern of movement among young Israelis is an example of what I’ve started calling a stream. A stream is not a migration pattern, travel in the usual sense, or a consequence of specific kinds of work that require travel (such as seafaring or diplomacy). It is a sort of slow, life-long communal nomadism, enabled by globalization and a sense of shared transnational social identity within a small population.

I’ve been getting increasingly curious about such streams. I have come to believe that though small in terms of absolute numbers (my estimate is between 20-25 million worldwide), the stream citizenry of the world shapes the course of globalization. In fact, it would not be unreasonable to say that streams provide the indirect staffing for the processes of modern technology-driven globalization. They are therefore a distinctly modern phenomenon, not to be confused with earlier mobile populations they may partly resemble.

Stream Citizenship

Stream citizens are not global citizens (a vacuous high-modernist concept that is as culturally anemic as the UN). Their social identities are far narrower and richer. They are (undeclared) stream citizens, whose identities derive from their slow journey across the world.

But the individualist, existential notion of nomadism that I wrote about in On Being an Illegible Person does not apply. In particular, stream citizens are not necessarily nomadic in literal ways (such as living out of cars, boats or mobile homes). They may buy or rent property, accumulate material possessions, and so forth.

Streams are highly sociable collectives, not individuals. The stream itself may be illegible on a map of nation-states, but individuals within it are fairly legible at least to fellow citizens within the same stream. In this sense, streams are like David Hackett Fischer’s folkways. Unlike folkways, streams use geographic movement to structure themselves internally. You could also apply the John Hagel model in The Power of Pull and think of traditional folkways as “stock” folkways and streams as “flow” folkways. The running example in the book (global surfer culture) is not quite a stream, however.

The argument for a distinct new construct, the stream, is not based on a single clear criterion that separates it from other kinds of population movements. Instead, we have a distinctive pattern of deviations from other kinds of population movements.

I have a few examples in mind (such as the Israeli one), but to avoid the dangers of over-fitting, I’ll characterize the idea of the stream via a dozen abstract features, and follow it up with a very primitive and sketchy “world stream map,” without trying to describe specific streams in these abstract terms.

Distinct social identity: Streams possess a unique and distinct social identity, unlike more inchoate movements that may share some of the features of streams.  Unlike rite-of-passage travel patterns though (such as “karma-trekkers”), they tend not to have named, brand-like identities. Instead, they have unmistakeable, but implicit identities.
Partial subsumption: Streams subsume the lives of their citizens more strongly than more diffuse population movements, but less strongly than focused intentional communities like the global surfing community. There is a great deal more variety and individual variation. In particular, there is no solidarity around grand ideologies in the sense of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities.  In this, streams differ from nation-states, even though they provide something of an alternative organizational scheme. Not only is the subsumption at about a middling level at any given point in time, it varies in intensity throughout life, being particularly weak early and late in life.
Voluntary slowness: a stream is a pattern of movement where individual movements take place over years or decades, spanning entire development life stages. Unlike a decade-long limbo state imposed by (say) waiting for an American green card, which has individuals impatient to get the process over with and “settle down” in either a new home, or return to an old one, stream citizens don’t experience their state as a limbo state. They are always “home.” Being a relatively new phenomenon, there are no streams that are life-encompassing as yet. But I believe those will emerge — distinctive cradle-t0-grave geographic journeys.
Exclusionary communality: streams provide a great deal of social support to those who are eligible to join and choose to do so, but are highly exclusionary with respect to very traditional variables like race, ethnicity and gender. The exclusionary nature of streams is not self-adopted, but a consequence of the fact that streams pass through multiple host cultures.  A shared social identity in one host culture may splinter in another, while distinct ones may be conflated in unwanted ways.  So only relatively tightly-circumscribed social identities can survive these forces intact. I am really tempted to illustrate this particular point with examples, but I’ll leave it as an abstraction.
Distinct economic identity: unlike commercial travel that is part of broader economic activity (such as sea-faring), or non-commercial travel (such as tourism), streams tend to be at least partially self-sustaining within every host culture that they pass through. This partial self-sustainability often involves patterns of global commercial activity that lends money a different meaning within the stream. So even though streams don’t issue currencies, and merely borrow the economic apparatus of their host cultures, the money behaves in very different ways while it is circulating within the stream.
Non-tribal: Streams are not completely self-sufficient though, in the sense of segmentary tribes.  This is a crucial distinction from nomads or barbarians in the classical sense. They do not seek to form bonds of mechanical solidarity with other streams. Instead they seek to form fairly strong bonds of organic solidarity (mutual interdependence) with host cultures.
Vorticity: Streams contain higher-tempo patterns of travel among the waypoints, especially to old “home” bases, due to obligations and attachments inherited from pre-stream home cultures.
Partial self-absorption: stream citizens are not very interested in the host cultures they pass through except to the extent of maintaining economic and practical relationships. There is no sense of being on the periphery, looking on with longing at the action at the center. There is no oppressive sense of being trapped in a diaspora-ghetto.
Relative poverty: unlike the global jet-setting (think Davos) elite, streams are generally impoverished. In fact a great deal of the motivation for living in a stream is to leverage limited means. But this does not mean we are only talking about lifestyle-designing Internet marketers in Bali. We are also talking about migrant labor from Asia to the Middle East that starts with a “let me save money working in construction in Dubai for a few years” motivation, but ends up extending to a whole lifetime.
High adaptability: Unlike nomads who carry their lives around with them, creating tiny shells of reassuring familiarity around themselves, stream citizens behave more like hermit crabs. They cobble together the necessities of life — shelter, income, patterns of diet and exercise — from whatever is around them. Stream citizens eat Chinese food in China and Thai food in Thailand, not because they are particularly curious about local cuisines, but because the sustainability of the stream lifestyle is based in part on such adaptation. Nostalgia is weak for stream citizens, as is the faraway-home/near-exotic sense of alienation from surrounding. Stream citizens are both home and abroad at the same time.
Direct connection to globalization: In a sense, the notion of “stream” I am trying to construct is a generalization of the Internet-enabled lifestyle designer, which I think is much too narrow. But streams are definitely a modern phenomenon, and owe their capacity for stable existence to some connection with the infrastructure of globalization. The Internet is the major one for the creative class, but anything from container shipping to the Chimerica manufacturing trade to the globalized high-rise construciton industry qualifies.

Lack of an arrival dynamic: this is perhaps the most important feature. There is no sense of anticipation of an “arrival” event  such as getting an American green card, after which “real” life can begin. There is a wherever you go, there you are indifference to rootedness. This psychological shift is the central individual act. By abandoning arrival-based frames, stream citizens free themselves from yearning for geographically rooted forms of social identity.

The Scale and Impact of Streams

In terms of sheer numbers, global migration does not seem to be a very powerful force. In World 3.0, Pankaj Ghemawat notes that only about 3% of the world’s population comprises first-generation immigrants. Over 90% of the world’s population will never leave their home country.

As a small subset of global migration and travel, the total population of stream citizenry is unlikely to exceed about 0.3% of the world population by my estimate[…]

Thank you for your excellent guide to independent bookshops included with this Saturday's Guardian. We were pleased to see that it included our own small shop along with so many others in all parts of the country, all much loved by their customers and hopefully most of them flourishing.
In the same paper (1 October) you report that Jamie Oliver is set to top the Christmas bestseller charts yet again – odds-on favourite according to William Hill. Readers may be delighted to learn that Amazon is offering this £30 book for a mere £10, a bargain indeed and a huge slap in the face to small bookshops like most of those in your guide, who will buy it from their wholesalers or direct from the publisher at considerably more. In our case we will pay £18 a copy (unless, of course, we order from Amazon) and feel impelled to discount to compete with the likes of WH Smith and the online giant.
Where is the sense in this, and how can small booksellers survive? The stark answer is that, like the Harbour Bookshop in Dartmouth, which closed a few days ago, most will not. Most of us have loyal customers who will buy from us whatever the price, but with the economic squeeze this state of affairs can hardly continue. Perhaps a new project for the Guardian might be to talk to publishers and attempt to find out why they feel impelled to give suicidally large discounts on the very books that people most want to buy. I believe most European countries have some form of net book agreement that protects small shops like ours. I wonder how many of the bookshops in your guide will still be trading a year from now.Patricia AbrehartKingsbridge, Devon
BooksellersPublishingAmazon.comJamie Oliverguardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Boycott, Maverick, Guillotine, Shrapnel, Cardigan, Sandwich, Silhouette, Zeppelin, Leotard, Lamborghini.

Finding your name in the dictionary as a noun is a sure-fire litmus test for having made a impact on culture and history. Just look at OED-approved fine folks like Charles Boycott, Samuel Maverick, Joseph-Ignace Guillotine, Henry Shrapnel, and Lord Cardigan. But there are unsuspected downsides to being reduced to a noun — just ask suffragette and women’s rights pioneer Amelia Bloomer, now equated with a baggy pair of women’s underpants.

Now, thanks to NPR‘s Robert Krulwich and Adam Cole, there’s a delightful music video about them.

Semi-relatedly, this reminded me of a lovely illustrated children’s book called If You Were a Noun.

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Could an "obsessive" interest in violent computer games have been the decisive factor in submariner Ryan Donovan's murderous attack on his colleagues, as was suggested last week? Rather than being mentally unstable, drunk and placed in charge of a machine gun while living in a submarine? Does playing Grand Theft Auto make you want to kill, and kill, and kill again?
If you read a certain section of the press, the answers would be "Yes", "Yes" and "Whee, doggie! Hand me down my bazooka!" To certain papers, it was manna to learn that academics have published a study describing what its authors call Games Transfer Phenomena. The study, by academics at Nottingham Trent and Stockholm universities, has found anecdotal evidence that games linger in the mind.
It's pretty preliminary – 42 gamers between the ages of 15 and 21 were interviewed – but they did say some funny stuff. "After completing Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, when I accidentally dropped a sandwich with the butter side down, I instinctively reached for the R2 button," reported one subject. Another said he'd found himself wishing he had a gravity gun, so he could get a drink from the fridge without leaving his chair. One – bless him – said he liked to bake cakes mentioned in World of Warcraft.
Many of us will recognise this. After spending hours playing Tetris, you wander blinking outside and speculate that one of those L-shaped blocks would fit nicely into the downtown skyline. Or, after too long playing The Sims, you find yourself wondering whether replacing the bathroom door with a wall while your little brother's in there would be a laugh.
Of course experiences in video games transfer into real life. Other cultural forms do, too. You leave King Lear and feel sad and exhilarated. A Bridget Riley show makes your eyes go funny. You read Karl Marx and start plotting the overthrow of capitalism. You read the tabloids and feel angry and afraid.
Duly, then, out of these sandwich-droppers and Warcraft nerds, reporters have created a group of dangerously unhinged submariners-in-the-making. The Daily Mail reported: "How video games blur real-life boundaries and prompt thoughts of violent solutions to players' problems." A hat-tip to the gaming website Spong, then, for contacting the study's co-author, Professor Mark Griffiths of Nottingham Trent, who disavowed the claim that it shows gamers have trouble distinguishing fantasy from reality. "For one thing, we never said that in our paper," he said, "and for a second thing, the findings don't even hint at that." He added that one reporter who contacted him had interrupted his explanation with: "I don't want to know about that, I want to know the negative stuff."
How many times do we have to circle this mulberry bush? Grand Theft Auto IV alone has sold around 22m copies: for a whole generation, it is part of cultural life. It says absolutely nothing that when Donovan talked about his violent fantasies he referred to a GTA-style "kill frenzy". When members of this generation reach for a violent metaphor, they will reach for one from a video game – just as older people might reach for one from a film.
Look at the study yourself. Read the quotes. Do the interviewees sound as if they can't "tell the real world from a fantasy"? These gamers are laughing at themselves. They find it funny that it crossed their mind to use a gravity gun to fetch a Coke. They find it funny that they push an imaginary button when they drop a sandwich.
The problem with Donovan is not that he confused fantasy with reality: he was interested in real-life violence. I'd say a pretty good working definition of "not being able to tell the real world from fantasy" might be: seeking to blame a real murder on a video game, mistaking a 42-person anecdotal survey for a conclusion on human psychology, and reporting what you want to hear rather than what you're being told.
GamesPsychologySam Leithguardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

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