Eve

Dreary out- supposed to get colder tonight. People massing in Times Square already. I love the human impulse to head to the place where there are the most people. It seems built-in, biological. Marketers on NY1 talking about the "Nivea Kissing Booth" and the "Milky Way Wishing Wall". City closing down all of Midtown.

Happy Birthday, 2009.

Sad Fact

I was reading a book on evolutionary psychology, and there was a little baby factoid right at the margin of a paragraph, barely remarked upon by the author: People who watch a lot of TV tend to rate their satisfaction levels with their friendships higher than people who don't watch TV. According to the authors, the human brain isn't all that great at distinguishing between an image of a person and an actual person, so while you're watching, say, Gossip Girl, your brain is saying, "These are my friends". And, the the more often you watch a show, the closer your brain thinks you're becoming with those people: Best friends!

I find this slightly disturbing from a philosophical standpoint. What do you mean we can't differentiate between people and images of people? Does this mean that in the future, we'll be able to sit in front of a screen and have a stomach tube and be contented without interacting with the world? (Is that an entirely bad thing, based on our record of interacting with the world?)