9/11 - A Time to Share Jokes

[Super Nova]

[Super Nova]

Islam should lighten up with more jokes.

[Neferti]

YANKS .......... arrogant lot they are, in the main.

[AiA in Atlanta]

actual ad, no joke intended

[boxy]

Not many Hiroshima and Nagasaki jokes about, still.

Too soon.

No fun trying to offend someone who can't understand English.

Or no fun taking the piss out of a country that got it's arse kicked, and accepted it?

[IQS.RLOW]

Not many Hiroshima and Nagasaki jokes about, still.

Too soon.

No fun trying to offend someone who can't understand English.

Or no fun taking the piss out of a country that got it's arse kicked, and accepted it?

Nah...the Japs have no understanding of English and no understanding of western humour either. Have you seen Japanese TV?

[Neferti]

Or no fun taking the piss out of a country that got it's arse kicked, and accepted it?

The Japs got on with Life, the Yanks have Memorial Days to remember every time they bombed a country out of existence.

Kevin Rudd is a Kokoda kid who survived. What a man!

[Super Nova]

On a more serious note.... Are your 9/11 memories really your own?

What were you doing this day?

Were you really?

My memory of where I was and what I did on 9/11/01 is an example of a flashbulb memory, which folk theory has raised onto a pedestal as the best, most vivid, and most accurate type of memory one can possibly hold. Where were you when you found out that JFK had been assassinated? Where were you when you found out that Princess Diana had died? Where were you on 9/11? Many people can tell you exact details of that day in 1963, 1997, or 2001 — down to the outfits they were wearing and the breakfasts that they ate.

Yet, interestingly enough, although most people believe that they remember these moments perfectly, people actually show frequent errors in their recall. In a landmark study on flashbulb memories from 1992, Neisser and Harsch asked students to write down the details about what they were doing when they found out that the Challenger had exploded within 24 hours of the “flashbulb” event in 1986. After two and a half years, the researchers asked the same people to recall these memories in as much detail as possible. Although all of the participants were equally confident in their memories and provided equally vivid memories after 24 hours and 2.5 years, the disparities were somewhat shocking. Only 7% of the students showed near-perfect recall of the day’s events (though even these reports had some minor inaccuracies), whereas 68% of the students reported memories that had a mix of accurate and inaccurate details. And then there was the most shocking finding of all — 25% of the students recalled memories that in no way matched the actual events that they had reported the day after the Challenger explosion. One student, 24 hours after the explosion, wrote a moving story in which she learned about the explosion in her religion class and felt sad for the school teacher (Christa McAuliffe) whose students had all been watching the event on television. Touching, right? The sort of story that you don’t easily forget. Except that the same student, 2.5 years later, reported learning about the explosion in her freshman dorm room with her roommate and then calling her parents.

Why would this happen? Of all of the memories that we can have, why would the ones that we most expect to be memorable be the ones that are prone to distortion?

It has to do with the nature of memory. Memory is not like a hard drive where we file away memories and then retrieve them with a simple double-click of the brain-mouse. Memory is an active, reconstructive process. Our memories are based around the “gist” of information — we often drop details without realizing it, and then end up inferring them (a.k.a. making them up) when we reconstruct the memory later on. In other words, we use our pre-existing knowledge to help us encode and store new knowledge; when we recall that knowledge later on, we used that same pre-existing knowledge to fill in the gaps that our memories left behind. The more you recall a memory, the more opportunities you have to fill in the gaps. And — not surprisingly — the more important a memory is, the more often you will find yourself recalling it.

For another example, take our founding fathers. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both reported vivid memories at the ends of their lives where they recalled in graphic detail how wonderful it felt to sign the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, the most momentous day of their lives. Except for one minor problem: July 4th was the day that the wording was approved by Congress. No one actually signed anything until August 2nd.

Why would Adams and Jefferson recall signing the Declaration of Independence on July 4th instead of August 2nd? Simple — by the time their lives were over, people had been talking about the “fourth of July” for years, and probably asking the two men to recall how it felt to sign the document itself. When their memories went to fill in the gaps each time, the “July 4th, 1776″ date was always right there. It was probably so easy for their memories to plug that omnipresent date into the story, it eventually became effortless.

In retrospect, the same thing likely happened to my memory of 9/11. I’m from New York; do you know how many times I’ve been asked what I was doing on 9/11 when I found out about the attacks? Do you know how many times I’ve heard people talking about the rancid smell of burning, or how they felt when they saw the smoke rising on the horizon? I remember it so clearly now, but I know that I’ve smelled burning before. I’ve seen smoke before. If my memory wanted to “fill in” the gaps in a fairly boring story about not having done my Math homework on the night of September 10th by taking other people’s much-more-exciting memories filled with vivid odors and graphic images, my brain certainly has the capacity to form the image of what a wisp of smoke would look like rising up in the distance and slide that image into the depths of my memory. It feels so vivid to me, now…but what if I just took everyone else’s countless retellings and I filled in the gaps?

Do you really know what you remember from that day?

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/psy ... -memories/

[Super Nova]

I was in a global sales meeting in a hotel when someone came in and announced what had happened. We all went into the hotel bar and watched in real time the CNN news coverage and watched the second plane hit in real-time. we cancelled the meeting and all sat around the TV to watch it. Everyone was shocked. Some people knew people who worked in the building. Calls were made. I rang a Muslim friend in Dubai who laugh and said it was Bin Laden... they all knew who it was. I was stunned that he thought it was funny. It was just after lunch in the UK if I recall properly.

[AiA in Atlanta]

Was in Japan and it was, of course, night time and I had already gone to bed ... early as I recall. My wife came in and said I had better see *this* and I knew that she wouldn't wake me up unless it was important. Today I am not sure what I was viewing on TV was live or recorded ... I rang an American friend in Japan and when I asked him had he seen what was on TV he seemed irritated with me "like why the fuck are you bothering me about what is on TV?" I didn't elaborate and just hung up. He called me back later stunned. I think I stayed up most of the night watching the Japanese coverage. The next day I bumped into an anti-American Canadian I knew casually who was over the moon at the good news of the attack. Bastard