If you're surrounded by smiling faces, you're more likely to feel happy than if everyone around you is looking glum. But we know relatively little about how emotions spread from one person to another.

The Chameleon Project, a collaboration between artist Tina Gonsalves - currently in residence at the MIT Media Lab - and neuroscientists could help. The installation involves using face recognition software that analyses a person's expression as they walk into a room and shows them a video portrait of another person displaying a related emotion.

The project employs an algorithm developed by neuroscientist Chris Frith from University College London that tries to read and respond to the emotions of a person in the same way another person would.

April 12, 2009

Seduction 101 for Logicians and Economists

John Allen Paulos over at abcnews.com:

Suppose a man flirts with a woman and then asks her, "Will you solemnly promise to give me right now your telephone number if I make a true statement and, conversely, not give me your number if I make a false statement?"

Maybe he can soften the statement a bit, but let's assume that this is its gist.

Feeling that this is a flattering and benign request, the woman promises to give him her number if and only if he makes a true statement.

The man then makes his statement: "You will neither give me your telephone number now nor will you sleep with me tonight."

What's the trick? Note that she can't give him her number since, if she were to do so, his statement would be made false, and so she would have broken her promise to give him her number only if he made a true statement. (This is the crux of it.) Therefore, she must not give him her number under any circumstances.

But if she also refuses to sleep with him, his statement becomes true, and this would require her to give him her number.

The only way she can keep her promise is to sleep with him so that his statement becomes false. The woman's seemingly innocuous promise ensnares her.

Fortunately or unfortunately, I suspect that the class of people for whom this seduction technique would prove effective is probably rather small. Nevertheless, it might make an interesting premise for a Star Trek episode or perhaps form part of a logicians' dating manual.

Consider now a slight variant of the above story. Suppose an investment con man is talking to a prospective client.

Posted by Robin Varghese at 01:48 PM | Permalink

Damn. No wonder Logicians always get the hottest chicks. Oh why oh why did I insist on fronting a hair metal band ?!...

Seems rational and rigorous to me.

/ sigh

 French : point d’ironie | aka : a snark or zing

This mark --  -- was proposed by the French poet Alcanter de Brahm (alias Marcel Bernhardt) at the end of the 19th century. It was in turn taken by Hervé Bazin in his book Plumons l’Oiseau (1966), in which the author proposes several other innovative punctuation marks, such as the:

• - doubt point - 
• - certitude point - 
• - acclamation point -  
• - authority point -  
• - indignation point -
• - love point -   {aw}

  It was also featured in the art periodical Point d’Ironie by Agnes {b. in 1997}.

  Its form is essentially the same as the late medieval , a percontation point (punctus percontativus), which was used to mark rhetorical questions.

‘o, wikipedia

---
 I say we stage a coup against these ancient WASP Luddites, standing in the way of our freedom to think ironically.  Not unlike Thought Police, those Fascist grammarian.  NAZIs.  It's so Orwellian, brah 

Michael Nagle for The New York Times

Doga combines massage and meditation with gentle stretching for dogs and their owners

Rokay, but does stretching species distinctions really count as 'exercise'?