Is this thing on?

This Is Your Brain on Kafka

Absurdist literature, it appears, stimulates our brains.

That's the conclusion of a study recently published in the journal Psychological Science. Psychologists Travis Proulx of the University of California, Santa Barbara and Steven Heine of the University of British Columbia report our ability to find patterns is stimulated when we are faced with the task of making sense of an absurd tale. What's more, this heightened capability carries over to unrelated tasks.

In the first of two experiments, 40 participants (all Canadian college undergraduates) read one of two versions of a Franz Kafka story, The Country Doctor. In the first version, which was only slightly modified from the original, "the narrative gradually breaks down and ends abruptly after a series of non sequiturs," the researchers write. "We also included a series of bizarre illustrations that were unrelated to the story."

The second version contained extensive revisions to the original. The non sequiturs were removed, and a "conventional narrative" was added, along with relevant illustrations.

In other news, Reader's Digest files for bankrupcy. Hope for the human mind?

Some nights ago, at a pub in Žižkov that used to be called U smrku (The Pine), I was chatting with a friend while not listening seriously to the songs being played. I asked her what would be the ten most decadent songs in history, without really coming up with suggestions of my own.

I tentatively put up "Crazy frog" (Axel F) in position #8, but I am really not good with lists, particularly not with music lists. Maybe you can come up with some suggestions?

Early in December a Yahoo story spread quickly across the web, MAN DATES GAL ON INTERNET FOR SIX MONTHS -- AND IT TURNS OUT SHE'S HIS MOTHER!. Yesterday, almost three weeks later, the story was published unchecked by Dagbladet, Norway's third largest newspaper where it became the most widely spread and read story that day. The only problem was that this story wasn't true and it wasn't intended to be true either.

Writing infective stories is largely to follow a formula. One such story with a seemingly reliable source is all that is needed for it to pass. The source of the Yahoo page was Weekly World News, but the apparent origin was Yahoo! Entertainment. Until the WWN Yahoo stories are better marked it will lower the trust in Yahoo News! (or for that matter Dagbladet) as a reliable newssource.

A few days later a blog came up with the story that Google could buy Opera. That story was just about believable as a rumour. The blogger had connections, and while you could wonder why the anonymous source would spill the beans, but a titillating rumour all the same. The story made the rounds and within a couple days had mutated into that Google actually had bought Opera (but to my great disappointment nobody told us what our price was). That the original was in French added mystique and frisson to the story.

It was hard to believe that people would actually fall for the next story, that Microsoft had bought Opera (in past tense). This story was made by some obscure web site with no connection postulating a business plan that would make absolutely no sense for either Microsoft or Opera, no collaborating evidence, and with story holes that would require massive suspension of disbelief. But it was written according to the formula, the timing was good, and the story involved everyone: Opera users seeing Opera Software being sold out to its worst enemy, Firefox users in fear of a pincer maneuver, IE users for the hint of Microsoft dropping IE as their browser, web users in general as another corner of the web taken over by the Microsoft machine, and mobile web users in particular for Microsoft getting another foothold on their beaches.

Rumours are part of the territory for public companies. The share price generally increase for the company rumoured to be taken over (since purchasing a company comes at a premium) and usually decrease for the company doing the buy-out (since they have to pay a premium, and for all the synergy claims most merged companies do worse than they would have on their own). John Dowdell (Adobe Systems) observed that the recurrent "microsoft to buy macromedia" dream always happened in December. It is yet to be seen what delusions will come next December. Technorati perhaps? [Disclosure: John Dowdell is the recent owner of Opera Software ASA]

But for cui bono there are more motives for creating rumours than stock price manipulation. Making rumours may have its own financial incentives. Stock manipulation is usually intangible and anonymous (it is illegal so you don't want it tracked back to you), but media has always known that juicy rumours increase circulation and ad income balanced by loss of trustworthiness and lawsuits if the rumours are wrong. On the web a rumour would increase not just the number of hits to the publication, but also the page rank as so many high-rated pages will now link to it.

It could be possible to abuse the system to create newsspam. Reputable news sites can't create fictitious news without loss of credibility, but no-brand sites can. The referral pattern would be similar to cross-referral search engine scams, but would allow incoming links from external sources which is getting harder when counter-measures like rel=nofollow is getting common. Creating a successful rumour isn't that easy, most will be duds, but with the critical faculty spam filter missing in the blogosphere this strategy might do well on average.

It is odd to name a continent after a rape victim, even when you consider all the brutality four millennia of European history can muster. More prosaic sources might separate the name's real root from the myth of Zeus and Europa, but the Phoenician origin of Europa reflects the impact that seafaring culture has had on the continent. Different tellings disagree on whether the girl was bullied or eloping, but what matters for posterity is that she left behind the two dominant continents at that time, Africa and Asia, to mother the Minoan dynasty at her new home in Crete.

Heimskringla, the 13th century sagas of the Norwegian kings, states that "the western [part of the world] is called by some Europa, by some Enea.", but Virgil's Roman re-creation myth evidently lost out for the Middle-Eastern princess. You will not find many self-styled Aeneans around anymore.

Neither will you find any New Europeans. I wouldn't blame Donald Rumsfeld for coining the phrase, it served his purpose, but I was surprised to see it take up a life of its own for a while, even in ostensibly European countries like Britain. I take it as evidence that there are journalists that might live in Europe, but who have never been there.

In another sense Europeans are the result of successive waves of immigration and invasion, which ended with the spectacular European radiation when Europeans colonized every other continent in the course of a few centuries. The Eurasian conveyor belt has now reversed back to Asia as the source of migration, conflict, change, and power, giving present Europe a respite from that role, and once again the New Europeans are African and Asian.