Extra extra read all about it 200816

• Here's an interesting long-form from the New Yorker with embedded cartoons about face-recognition among London policemen. Seems, as with so much human ability, it's on a spectrum from those with prosopagnosia who can't recognise their own face or anyone else's to these super-recognising cops who remember every perp they've ever nicked. Ethical, psychological and evidential issues abound. Not least in the fact that there is one CCTV camera in London for every 8 inhabitants!
• The benefits of reading to/with your kids. Better that parking them in front of the telly or even putting them in a corner swiping at a device "And when you cannot tap the picture of the horse and watch it gallop across the page, you learn that your brain can make the horse move as fast as you want it to" Similar arguments are made for radio /wireless being better for the imagination than visual forms of entertainment.
• Running on from the above:
  Two monks were arguing about a flag. One said: "The flag is moving."
  The other said: "The wind is moving."
  The sixth patriarch happened to be passing by. He told them: "Not the wind, not the flag; mind is moving."
  Ah so. Mumon comments: basically saying that none of them know what they are talking about because they are talking rather than being in the moment. Ah ah ah so.
• Further to The Blob on Dengue. Here's an interesting link about predicting a dengue outbreak by checking for blips in dengue symptoms on a medical telephone hotline. Computer geeks meet medicos and deliver.
• Today is the 30th anniversary of the Lake Nyos limnic carbon dioxide eruption that killed 1700 Cameroonians in 1986.