Interesting Observations About Disgust

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I thought David Pizarro’s TED talk on disgust was quite interesting. I thought it was interesting to explore the function of disgust, as well as the implications of disgust. Seeing disgust tied into both politics, social stigma, and simple perception to be incredibly interesting as well.

[Disgust] works through association. … This makes it very useful as a strategy if you want to convince somebody that an object or an individual or an entire social group is disgusting.

–David Pizarro

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Hey Jud–Actually, No…

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From the Thought Catalog article “15 Bad Things Even The Nicest People Do”…

Act like they don’t see someone that they definitely recognize and know, but would rather not engage in a brief, awkward what-have-you-been-doing-with-your-life conversation.

I do this sometimes, often without even thinking about it. I wonder if I don’t think about it simply because it has become routine. I’m going to work at stopping this bad habit of mine.

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Perception and Science

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Now, if perception is grounded in our history, it means that we’re only ever responding according to what we’ve done before. But that creates a tremendous problem because how can we ever see differently?

–Beau Lotto

I thought this was a super interesting talk on science and the nature of perception. If you recall that bee study published a while ago where most of the authors were children, two of the authors are giving this talk.

From #NaNoWriMo to #AcWriMo

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After reading a recent post by Catherine, I became aware of an event called AcWriMo–Academic Writing Month. Inspired by NaNoWriMo, AcWriMo is an event for academics to set writing goals for the month of November to really push themselves to get some serious writing done. I had originally started with NaNoWriMo, but after some consideration (I don’t feel a particular passion for my story at the moment, so I don’t see much purpose in writing it; for academic writing, on the other hand, I think there are some challenging goals I could set that would be much more purposeful), I’ve decided to switch over to AcWriMo. This way, I will still be writing, but I will be writing something that I hope to be more meaningful than a story that I am simply forcing.

My goals for AcWriMo:

  1. Finish my fosmid project report
  2. Finish my aerosol project report
  3. Finish book review for Start With Why
  4. Finish book review for So Good They Can’t Ignore You
  5. Finish book review for Drive
  6. Write an opinion-piece that is critically and thoroughly researched

TEDxTerry talks 2012

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Today, I attended TEDxTerry talks 2012 with Kelvin, Chloe, Khanh, Abby, Pritisha, Jason, Rikita, Urooba, et al. Overall, I was quite pleased with this year’s event. I thought most of the talks were of impressive quality :)

This year’s line-up included:

  1. Ryan Vandecasteyen: “Social Capital and the No Tankers Movement”
  2. Alisha Hackinen: “Soil, It’s Not a Dirty Word!”
  3. Nick Thornton: “Your Boyfriend Wants to be Pretty”
  4. Stefana Fratila: “WEIRD ERA: Being sincere in an era of digital creation”
  5. Alexander Wuolle: “Unmanned Aerial Vehicles”
  6. Joseph Glaser: “The Canadian Identity Crisis”
  7. Rebekah Parker: “Lessons from a 6.3 Earthquake: on Community Engagement and Resiliency”
  8. Erik Brown: “The ‘Trickle-Down’ Effect: How a Toilet Can Save Your Life”
  9. Sam Eifling: “Dying for Land in Brazil”
  10. Eunice Hi: “Don’t Just Follow Your Passion–The Missing Link, A Talk for Generation Y”

I’ll post the talks as soon as I find out they’re online. Expect the sound to be online within the next week or so, and the videos to be online in the next several months.

For me, it’s hard to pick a single talk that truly stands out, but there were several that I think I’ll be walking away with quite a bit from. I hope to highlight them as the videos come out.

They also watched the following three TED talks (all of which I think I’ve posted previously on my blog):

Anyhow, it was a great event this year! Looking forward to next year!