Update Whoops, looks like we lost a paragraph in the original edit.

The good people at TED, who run conferences for very clever people about even more clever people who can do presentations without Powerpoint, are promoting a great project called Pangea Day that is all about citizen film-making, or ordinary people making films. The objective is world peace through video. Easy.

Anyway, Pangea Day wants to bring together a whole bunch of video-makers in a big celebration next May aimed at reducing cultural disconnects by empowering real people to tell real stories through film. This is a global do-good thing, not a comedy gangsta rap thing (see below). The celebration looks like being a Live Aid/YouTube mashup.

So the people at TED have asked that we help this video go viral. Go here to view, comment and recommend Pangea Day on YouTube. For more information on how to participate and the full presentation from the project’s founder — documentary-maker and TED prize-winner Jehane Noujaim — visit the Pangea Day website.

And if that’s too serious for a Friday, here is that gangsta rap video on the subject of fresh fruits.This video is slightly rude, so if you are more arch than the Knackered Hack, don’t go there. To protect your limbic from the offensive material — which has generated a rather dubious lawsuit against the two brothers who made the video — here is the refrain:-

It’s all about the produce produce, we don’t like to kid
It’s the lower middle portion of the food pyramid.”

And here’s one for the evolutionary fitness crowd .

They call me razor blade because I cut veggies with precision and skill.
I cut the roots off arugula, Italian parsley, and sometimes dill”

Blogging orthodoxy seems to dictate that short posts of regular frequency represent the best strategy for maintaining a loyal readership. But here at the Knackered Hack we just keep “doing the opposite,” to quote Scott Page and Seinfeld’s George Costanza. It has indeed been a long time since the last (very short) post about memory. Sorry about that. It was not that I forgot — I’m not that dogmatic.

In a nutshell, I’ve been away. And a little busy. And also thinking hard. Now I’m back, both literally and metaphysically. So, “normal” service can now resume. But please be prepared for wide variations in post length, frequency and variety, and possibly more inclusions of pictures and other things to delight your limbic, as I get more of a handle on this Web 2.0 malarkey. Rather than a woeful lack of structure and organisation, I would frame this as a necessary preservation of playfulness and spontaneity in what might otherwise become a predictable yet likely unreadable blog.

Even less frequent a blogger is Nassim Taleb, the Knackered Hack’s favourite interviewee. He does not really have a blog in the terms understood above, but you can go here to see what he had to say about the current credit crunch. He is more regular with his home page notes, where he has an interesting item about fruits and their sweetness. (Hat tip to Paul Wilmott, whose company hosts the Taleb “blog”, while it is Art de Vany who highlights the discussion on the history of sweetness in fruits.)

In a future post I’m going to write about figs, which is connected with what Taleb is talking about. Here is a picture that includes figs, just to be going along with. Underneath all the basil is some parma ham – a delightful partner to fig.

Meanwhile, de Vany says this in response to Taleb:-

The process for producing sweetness and tenderness is selective breeding, as you [Taleb] note, and selection for neotony, the retention of juvenile traits in the adult. Ah, it seems that is true of people these days as well. Many fail to achieve adulthood. On the other hand, humans evolved a form of neotony and retain their juvenile traits of playfulness and pleasure longer than chimps and other animals. It was an advantage for our large-brained, highly social species to retain aspects of youthfulness.”

Prior to this comment, de Vany’s emphasis on play has been having a quite profound effect on Knackered Hack thinking, and much of the Knackered Family’s time away from blogging has been spent head-scratching on that particular issue. Lots more on that in future posts. And, of course, de Vany is echoed in a slightly different context by today’s news, reported in a letter to the Daily Telegraph by a group of scientists, educationists, authors, and other advocates about toxic childhood and the declining quality of children’s play in the UK.

Compelling examples [of research supporting this view] have included Unicef’s alarming finding that Britain’s children are amongst the unhappiest in the developed world, and the children’s charity NCH’s report of an explosion in children’s clinically diagnosable mental health problems.

We believe that a key factor in this disturbing trend is the marked decline over the last 15 years in children’s play. Play – particularly outdoor, unstructured, loosely supervised play – appears to be vital to children’s all-round health and well-being.”

If you live in a competitive family and are a middle child, the news that first-born children are the cleverest is not good. A study conducted at the University of Oslo, and reported in the New Scientist, states that first-borns have an average 2.3 point IQ advantage over their dopey siblings.

I’ve never fancied IQ as a real measure of intelligence. And 2.3 points difference I could probably make up with better nutrition and all this flaxseed oil I’m consuming.

But then that is sort of the point that the Norwegian research is making. That some of the difference in intelligence within families is social, not genetic. It probably results from the fact that parents have more time for the first-born. The older children have been progressively more exposed to the sophisticated vocabulary of the parents. It suggests more powerfully that we should not overstate — as too many people prefer to these days — nature over the complex circumstances of individual nurture, which can produce heavily path-dependent outcomes.

The Knackered parenting experience would bear that out. Continue reading ‘curse of the second-born’

I have recently been over-eating and putting on weight, despite a lot of exercise and the flaxseed oil (which in the past seemed to have helped contain appetite). The following video explains a large part of the problem. But I don’t suffer from the savoury-sweet dilemma that stymies Shuttleworth.

You can buy the record here.

However, today I instigated a strict left-over avoidance protocol, and the pounds have literally been not yet falling off.