Facebook and more

Courtesy of The Atlantic and the NY Review of books comes this interesting analysis of the new Facebook movie and the Facebook phenomenon and a rebuttal of said article. Both posts are good reads, although I disagree with their fundamental conclusions. I don't think Zadie Smith really understands how Facebook is used, and like everyone else on the Facebook bandwagon really gives it way too much credit for shaping our beliefs and habits. Likewise, I think the Atlantic blogger is a bit off base in his analysis of Zadie's position as well. I don't think she's really worried about bad writing...

The ever reliable NY Times blogs gives us this article on brains and metaphors and how the brain uses the same structure to process philosophically similar yet fundamentally different things. In a similar vein, there's a post up on IO9 about the Bouba Kiki effect. Since "sharpness" is a frequency effect (take the Fourier transform of a sharp signal, visual or auditory, and there's a lot of high frequency components), it makes sense that the brain would use similar or the same bits to process high frequency objects versus low frequency ones.