{ Regular exercise reduces patient anxiety by 20 percent, study finds }

photo { Asger Carlsen | S magazine 6 }

loop

In real life, nothing happens like switching on a light bulb. Those are sort of poetic notions. In the real business world and the real world, it’s a learning curve. You learn a little bit and you learn some more, learn some more, and you’ve got to keep in the race.

{ Gene Simmons | Continue reading }

Be true to your own act and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant to break the monotony of a decorous age.

{ R. W. Emerson | more quotes }

headline { Magnolia, 1999 }

photo { Estelle Hanania }

{ Nietzsche and philosophy by Gilles Deleuze | Continue reading }

In movies when they show a person walking down a crowded New York sidewalk the people are always mysteriously headed in the same direction. Navigation is actually a little more complicated than that.

{ S Shirazi | Continue reading | Courtesy of Daniel S. L., who wrote: “ Interesting dissection/take down of Starbucks at 39 . The clean bathrooms shouldn’t be undersold, however. In NYC Starbucks basically serve as the city’s only reliable facilities.” }

photo { Gosia Wieruszewska }

Solitude and Leadership

If you want others to follow, learn to be alone with your thoughts

My title must seem like a contradiction. What can solitude have to do with leadership? Solitude means being alone, and leadership necessitates the presence of others—the people you’re leading. (…)

Leadership is what you are here to learn—the qualities of character and mind that will make you fit to command a platoon, and beyond that, perhaps, a company, a battalion, or, if you leave the military, a corporation, a foundation, a department of government. Solitude is what you have the least of here, especially as plebes. You don’t even have privacy, the opportunity simply to be physically alone, never mind solitude, the ability to be alone with your thoughts. And yet I submit to you that solitude is one of the most important necessities of true leadership.

{ William Deresiewicz | The American Scholar | Continue reading }

A physical object like Mont Blanc or a species of plant or animal can be the subject of aesthetic analysis and evaluation, but such analysis is not part of natural science. Similarly, any human artistic activity has a psychological and eventually a neuro-physiological or biochemical basis, but this does not make a study of the brain activity of Michelangelo while he was painting part of “the humanities” (as we would call them). Neither is it the case that there is some specific method or set of characteristic methods used by the natural as opposed to the cultural sciences (or vice versa). Precise observation is equally important everywhere, and the basic forms of logical inference and evidentiary argumentation are similar in all scientific disciplines. Nevertheless, Windelband argued, there is an important distinction between the two basic kinds of “science”; it is merely that the distinction is not in terms of methods or subject matter but in terms of goals or aims.

{ Raymond Geuss, Goals, Origins, Disciplines | Continue reading | PDF }

What distinguishes women with unusually high numbers of sex partners?

We recruited two groups of women who differed in their number of lifetime sex partners in order to investigate several hypotheses related to female sociosexuality. Specifically, we explored whether women who engage in casual sex have low mate value, are especially likely to have come from stressful family environments, or are masculine in other respects besides their interest in casual sex.

Women with many partners were not lower than other women on direct or indirect indicators of mate value. Nor were they more likely to recall adverse family environments during childhood.

On several measures related to masculinity, women with many sex partners were elevated compared with other women.

{ Evolution and Human Behavior }

illustration { Stuart Patterson }

{ YBU, Soul Magic | Download | via Skegness Chilled }

The drum beat goes like this:

During his swindling career, Mr. Quinn helped run a giant boiler-room operation out of a villa overlooking the French Riviera, had a champion racehorse and was alleged to have helped former financier Martin Frankel pull off one of history’s largest insurance frauds. U.S. authorities say he stole an estimated $500 million total.

His record, which includes three SEC injunctions and two federal criminal convictions, stretches back to 1966 when regulators barred the 28-year-old Mr. Quinn from the brokerage business for peddling shares of a bogus Florida land company. In 1992, a federal judge called Mr. Quinn an “incorrigible” recidivist whose business activities “appear to be devoted exclusively to securities fraud.” Yet he has served a total of only about six years in prison—with most that in France.

All of that could change now. Last November, at the age of 72, he was arrested by federal agents as he stepped off a plane from Ireland at John F. Kennedy Airport and charged with helping orchestrate a $50 million telecommunications fraud.

{ Wall Street Journal | Continue reading }

bonus:

As long as we’re on the topic of impulsivity, a brief remark about the word ‘manipulative,’ which I’ve found to be a remarkably overused, overrated explanation for the behavior of inflexible-explosive children. To me, the act of manipulation requires a fair amount of forethought, planning, affective modulation, and calculation — qualities that are in short supply in the vast majority of the inflexible-explosive children I know. Given that few of us enjoy being manipulated, believing that a child is being manipulative often causes adults to behave in counterproductive ways and hinders their consideration of more accurate explanations.

{ Ross Greene, The Explosive Child, 1998 | Thanks Blue M.! }

Climate scientists have long warned that global warming could unlock vast stores of the greenhouse gas methane that are frozen into the Arctic permafrost, setting off potentially significant increases in global warming.

Now researchers at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and elsewhere say this change is under way in a little-studied area under the sea, the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, west of the Bering Strait.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }