Sherlock will return to BBC1 on New Year’s Day when the mystery will finally be resolved how the sleuth survived that plunge to his apparent certain death.
why was the bra cut off the body? Were Knox and Sollecito on hard drugs? What were the couple up to at six in the morning the day after the murder? What was the mop for? (Sollecito mentioned the spill in a phone call to his dad at 8.40 on the night of the murder – it must have dried out by the morning.) What kind of man covers the body of the woman he’s just murdered with a sheet, then goes and takes a shit and forgets to use the flush?
Nothing fits is a long and thorough piece by Nick Richardson for the London Review of Books about the murder of Meredith Kercher by, supposedly, Amanda Knox and her Italian boyfriend. Read it, and you’ll know everything about this story.
This story is quite literally amazing—because of the youth of the people involved in it and the mysteries that still linger on—and is surprisingly more complex than fiction thrillers. Where are you Sherlock?
Mindfulness, or why you can't multitask
Again, this is taken from a post about Maria Konnikova’s book: Mastermind, How To Think Like Sherlock Holmes:
Holmes practices mindfulness, which sounds new-agey, but is actually quite practical. Mindfulness means focusing on only one problem or activity at a time. But mindfulness isn’t the opposite of multi-tasking, because there’s actually no such thing. “Our brain cannot do two things at once,” says Konnikova. “What we believe is multi-tasking is really the brain switching quickly from one task to the next.” And when our brains move so quickly between pursuits, it’s impossible to be truly focused on any single one. “Your attention is a finite resource,” says Konnikova. “Even when we’re walking down the street–not on the phone, not listening to music but simply thinking about what we’re having for dinner–we’re not really noticing the world around us.”
She points to a study from the National Academy of Sciences, which showed that people who described themselves as heavy media multi-taskers had much more trouble tuning out distractions than light media multi-taskers. They were also worse at switching between tasks. “So even though they were multi-tasking all the time, they were less efficient,” says Konnikova. She explains that our minds are programmed to wander, which multi-tasking exacerbates. But concentration is self-reinforcing. The more you do it, the better you get. “The more you learn to filter out irrelevant distractions, the better your brain can monitor [your] environment–both externally and internally.” This means that focusing on one activity or thought at a time will help you notice or remember details in your work, the things your read, and the people you talk to. This kind of focus will also make you better attuned to how you’re feeling, physically and emotionally.
To both see and observe: Therein lies the secret. When I first heard the words as a child, I sat up with recognition. Like Watson, I didn’t have a clue. Some 20 years later, I read the passage a second time in an attempt to decipher the psychology behind its impact. I realized I was no better at observing than I had been at the tender age of 7. Worse, even. With my constant companion Sir Smartphone and my newfound love of Lady Twitter, my devotion to Count Facebook, and that itch my fingers got whenever I hadn’t checked my email for, what, 10 minutes already? OK, five—but it seemed a lifetime. Those Baker Street steps would always be a mystery.