Regruntled.com

The current discussion of a stimulus package to avert a possible recession tacitly assumes the logic of consumerism. The signs of a recession are:

• Slow holiday sales (not enough consumption)
• Rising unemployment (not enough people working)

The remedy is to put money in people’s hands via tax rebates. The debate is over how much money to hand out, and who to give it to. The problem is that the money goes to the wrong people, they might save it or use it to pay off their credit cards instead of spending it. I am not making this up.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke made this point in testimony before the House Budget Committee. “If you’re somebody who has lots of financial assets and you receive an extra dollar, you may not change your spending much because you can simply either put the dollar in your bank account or take out a dollar as you need it,” Bernanke said. “If you’re somebody who lives paycheck to paycheck, you’re more likely to spend that extra dollar.”

But let’s look at this from the point of view of the person receiving the check. If you’re living paycheck to paycheck and worried about losing your job, should you spend the money on a flat-panel TV before you lose your job, or on food and rent after you lose your job? Hmmm, tough choice.

In Sudokified images, I rearranged an image according to a sudoku pattern. The problem with that effect was that it was not isotropic. Pieces of the image were rearranged within 3-by-3 blocks. The effect is different depending on whether you are looking at the center of a 3-by-3 block or at the boundary between two 3-by-3 blocks.

I thought about this for a while and came up with a pattern that works on an infinite plane. Unfortunately, any pattern that is isotropic on an infinite plane is going to run into problems with the edges and corners when it is used in a finite rectangle. The sudoku pattern already had the edge and corner problems, so I just lined up the corners of the 3-by-3 sudoku blocks with with the corners of the image. The rectangle didn’t make things any worse.

So I had to modify the pattern for the corners and edges. This is not so bad, because people focus on the middle of the image. If you’re going to have irregularities in your pattern, the corners and edges are the best place for them.

The Economist has an article reporting an experiment using functional magnetic resonance imaging that shows that the price of wine really does affect the taste.

The scanner showed that the activity of the medial orbitofrontal cortices of the volunteers increased in line with the stated price of the wine. For example, when one of the wines was said to cost $10 a bottle it was rated less than half as good as when people were told it cost $90 a bottle, its true retail price. Moreover, when the team carried out a follow-up blind tasting without price information they got different results. The volunteers reported differences between the three “real” wines but not between the same wines when served twice.

Nor was the effect confined to everyday drinkers. When Dr Rangel repeated the experiment on members of the Stanford University wine club he got similar results.

First, I note that this effect has diminishing returns. The wine with the $90 price tag only tastes twice as good as the same wine at $10, not nine times as good.

The article suggests a couple of explanations. One is that there is a survival value to using price as a proxy for quality. In other words, “you get what you pay for” is generally a good rule. The other is that what is being measured is not the enjoyment of the wine itself, but the enjoyment of the status display, the conspicuous consumption of the wine.

I suggest a third explanation, that we have internalized the relentless bombardment of advertisements for consumer products; in other words, that television commercials have rewired our brains. I’d like to see the experiment repeated with subjects who have isolated themselves from consumerism, people who have instead internalized the values of simplicity and frugality, people who have been deliberately socialized against status display. The Amish, for example. (You’d have to run the experiment with grape juice or some other non-alcoholic beverage.)

This image has been rearranged according to a sudoku. The image was divided into 20-by-20 pixel cells, which were then shuffled within 3-by-3 groups of cells. For example, if the 20-by-20 cells were arranged like this in the original image:

they might be arranged like this in the final image:

I’m not sure whether this was such a good idea or not, but I had to try it. Here is the picture I started with:

I’m so glad the fashion industry tells us what to buy, because it never would have occurred to me to look like THAT.

A model displays a creation as part of Emporio Armani’s Fall/Winter 2008/09 men’s collections during Milan Fashion Week January 13, 2008.

Jeez, the gloves! It looks like he botched a body cavity search on a couple of Shar-pei puppies.

More pictures at Reuters.

Here are a bunch of images generated from completed sudokus.  I personally find the random-but-not-too-random pattern rather appealing… however, my esthetic sense may have been warped from doing too many sudokus!  My question for the non-sudokuholics out there:  what do YOU think about the images?

Hektor is a portable Spray-Paint Output Device for laptop computers.

Hektor’s light and fragile installation consists only of two motors, toothed belts and a can holder that handles regular spray cans. The can is moved along drawing paths just as the human hand or old plotters would. During operation, the mechanism sometimes trembles and wobbles, and the paint often drips. The contrasts between these low-tech aspects and the high-tech touch of the construction hold ambiguous and poetic qualities and make Hektor enjoyable to watch in action.

I don’t know about this. Hektor is very slow. I don’t see someone setting up Hektor on the side of a building and waiting around for the image. Bringing graffiti indoors takes away the outlaw aspect. Real graffiti looks more like this:

The BBC has a 4-part documentary that explores the relationships between psychoanalysis, consumerism and politics. Links to the individual episodes are at Daily Kos. A couple of tidbits:

•   Edward Bernays, who practically invented the profession of public relations after WWI, was Freud’s nephew.

• Focus groups in marketing use techniques from psychoanalysis to get at subconscious motivations.

The documentary shows how the changes in psychoanalytic fashion eventually led to changes in our conception of the self, and to changes in marketing. For example, Freud thought that subconscious drives were dangerous and had to be repressed, while Wilhelm Reich, the anti-Freud, thought that repression was a bigger problem than the subconscious. The Freudian view led to the conformity of the Fifties, while the Reichian view led to the rebellion of the Sixties and the self-expression of the Seventies. Throughout, the message of business has been that the way to conform or rebel is to purchase consumer products.

The documentary explains how modern political campaigns work. The candidates use polls and focus groups to determine the conscious and subconscious motivations of the swing voters, and then tailor the messages accordingly. Campaigning equals marketing and voting equals consumption of symbolic messages..

I ran across this gem on the web:

Ask a physicist ‘what creates the universe’ and they say energy. Ask them to describe energy and they tell you,

‘It can never be created or destroyed; it always is, always has been and always will be; it is always flowing into form, through form and out of form.’

Now, ask a theologian ‘what creates the universe’ and they say God. Ask them to describe God and they might also tell you,

‘It can never be created or destroyed; it always is, always has been and always will be; it is always flowing into form, through form and out of form.’

The point presumably being that science and religion are really two different ways of saying the same thing. My first reaction was that this was a really stupid analogy. Energy is also limited by the laws of physics, it has no personality, no volition, no purpose, and it is utterly indifferent to human needs. Does the writer really want to go there?

Then I realized that this was not an analogy, not a logical argument at all. It was not aimed at readers who think logically. The words “God” and “energy” are simply decorations, and it is enough to put them near each other on the same page. The sentences don’t have to make sense, they just have to look like sentences.

I think of Rudy Giuliani, who decorates every other sentence with a reference to 9/11. Or most of the candidates, for that matter, decorating their speeches with the word “change”. Decorative discourse may explain a lot of things..

Pantone has named Blue Iris as the color of the year for 2008.

Blue Iris brings together the dependable aspects of blue, underscored by a strong, soul-searching purple cast. Emotionally, it is anchoring and meditative with a touch of magic.

The color of the year for 2006 was Sand Dollar, “a neutral color that expresses concern about the economy”. Did they maybe get these backwards?

Whatever. In honor of Pantone and the new year, I’ve generated another of my non-periodic plaids. The background is Blue Iris, with the soul-searching and the magic. The lines are Sand Dollar, to express my concern about the economy. The non-periodic spacing symbolizes the existential chaos of modern capitalism, where the very colors of the rainbow are appropriated, branded and enlisted in the relentless marketing of consumer products.