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Look down at her ring to find an excuse. Whispering gallery walls have ears.
A Michigan company announced that for the low, low price of $1.99, you could have a lifetime license to use something you might not have thought you needed - a new punctuation mark.
It’s called the SarcMark, and it looks like a reversed “at” sign.
It must be a movement then, an actuality of the possible as possible
Beyond the practical experiences and impressions being held for ages from ancient times, the scientific observations and surveys indicate that psychopathological symptoms, especially those belonging to the bipolar mood disorder (bipolar I and II), major depression and cyclothymia categories occur more frequently among writers, poets, visual artists and composers, compared to the rates in the general population. Self-reports of writers and artists describe symptoms in their intensively creative periods which are reminiscent and characteristic of hypomanic states. Further, cognitive styles of hypomania (e.g. overinclusive thinking, richness of associations) and originality-prone creativity share many common as indicated by several authors.
Among the eminent artists showing most probably manic-depressive or cyclothymic symptoms were: E. Dickinson, E. Hemingway, N. Gogol, A. Strindberg, V. Woolf, Lord Byron (G. Gordon), J. W. Goethe, V. van Gogh, F. Goya, G. Donizetti, G. F. Händel, O. Klemperer, G. Mahler, R. Schumann, and H. Wolf. Based on biographies and other studies, brief descriptions are given in the present article on the personality character of Gogol; Strindberg, Van Gogh, Händel, Klemperer, Mahler, and Schumann.
Further example is the enigmatic silence and withdrawal from opera composing of Gioacchino Rossini (1792-1868), which is still a matter of various theories and explanations. Until his life of 37 years he composed 39 operas and lived almost another 40 years without composing any new one. Biographies show that severe depressive sufferings played a role in that withdrawal and silence, while in his juvenile years most probably hypomanic personality traits contributed to the extreme achievements and very fast composing techniques. Analysing the available biographies of Rossini and the character of music he composed (e.g. opera buffa, Rossini crescendo) strongly suggests the medical diagnosis of a bipolar affective illness.
Comparing to the general population, bipolar mood disorder is highly overrepresented among writers and artists. The cognitive and other psychological features of artistic creativity resemble many aspects of the hypomanic symptomatology. It may be concluded that bipolar mood traits might contribute to highly creative achievements in the field of art. At the same time, considering the risks, the need of an increased medical care is required.
My childhood bends beside me. Too far for me to lay a hand there once or lightly.
{ Every adopted child wonders who his biological mother is. | AOL News | full story }
‘In the long run we are all dead.’ –John Maynard Keynes
From the perspective of an anthropologist, or a psychologist, or someone trying to understand humanness: What is that thing? What is that mental process where we invisibilize something that’s present all the time? (…)
Why have we developed, or, rather, why have we found ourselves implicated in a system that not only generates so much trash, but relies upon the accelerating production of waste for its own perpetuation? (…)
Every single thing you see is future trash. Everything. (…)
There’s a Buddhist saying about housework, that it’s invisible labor because you see it only when it’s not done.
{ Interview with NY sanitation depart’s resident anthropologist | The Believer | Continue reading }
Li Pingri remembers swimming with fish and shrimp as a boy in Guangdong’s Chigang waterway in China. Today, even after the city spent 48.6 billion yuan ($7.2 billion) on a cleanup, he can’t stand the canal’s smell.
“We are surrounded by black and smelly waterways, breathing the foul air every day and paying the price at the cost of our health,” said Li, 79, a former researcher at the Guangzhou Institute of Geography. “If we can’t breathe clean air or drink clean water, high economic growth is meaningless.”
China, the world’s worst polluter, needs to spend at least 2 percent of gross domestic product a year — 680 billion yuan at 2009 figures — to clean up 30 years of industrial waste, said He Ping, chairman of the Washington-based International Fund for China’s Environment. Mun Sing Ho, a senior economist at Dale W. Jorgenson Associates and a visiting scholar at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, put the range at 2 percent to 4 percent of GDP.
{ Bloomberg | Continue reading }
“There is really no debate about climate change in China,” said Peggy Liu, chairwoman of the Joint U.S.-China Collaboration on Clean Energy, a nonprofit group working to accelerate the greening of China. “China’s leaders are mostly engineers and scientists, so they don’t waste time questioning scientific data.” The push for green in China, she added, “is a practical discussion on health and wealth. There is no need to emphasize future consequences when people already see, eat and breathe pollution every day.”
So while America’s Republicans turned “climate change” into a four-letter word — J-O-K-E — China’s Communists also turned it into a four-letter word — J-O-B-S.
“China is changing from the factory of the world to the clean-tech laboratory of the world,” said Liu. “It has the unique ability to pit low-cost capital with large-scale experiments to find models that work.” China has designated and invested in pilot cities for electric vehicles, smart grids, LED lighting, rural biomass and low-carbon communities.
Chloroform. Overdose of laudanum.
Even demonstrably false or irrelevant information can influence judgments, which in turn influence decisions. (…)
Policy makers have long recognized the potential danger of false statements by advertisers. But in the belief that most adults are suitably skeptical about promotional puffery, Congress has tried to prohibit only the most blatantly false or explicitly misleading claims.
But what about merely irrelevant statements, or only implicitly misleading ones? Standard economic models say such claims are, well, irrelevant, so there should be no need to regulate them. But according to recent behavioral research, it’s a distinction without a difference.
Although cigarette advertisements, for example, typically portray smokers as young, healthy and attractive, smoking can make people look older and less healthy. Such ads make no explicitly false claims, but that doesn’t make them less misleading, even for informed consumers.
related { A girl playing noughts and crosses, a Playboy centrefold, Sky satellite dishes, the trill of a modem – all have hidden meanings | The secret messages written into the fabric of our world }
Also I think I
Reverse-engineering the human brain so we can simulate it using computers may be just two decades away, says Ray Kurzweil, artificial intelligence expert and author of the best-selling book The Singularity is Near.
It would be the first step toward creating machines that are more powerful than the human brain. These supercomputers could be networked into a cloud computing architecture to amplify their processing capabilities. Meanwhile, algorithms that power them could get more intelligent. Together these could create the ultimate machine that can help us handle the challenges of the future, says Kurzweil.
related { The Man Who Made a Copy of Himself. A Japanese roboticist is building androids to understand humans–starting with himself. | ieee Spectrum | full story }
‘It is obvious that we always succeed better through Reason and the love of truth than through remorse and sorrow.’ –Spinoza
David Larcker and Anastasia Zakolyukina of Stanford’s Graduate School of Business analysed the transcripts of nearly 30,000 conference calls by American chief executives and chief financial officers between 2003 and 2007. They noted each boss’s choice of words, and how he delivered them. They drew on psychological studies that show how people speak differently when they are fibbing, testing whether these “tells” were more common during calls to discuss profits that were later “materially restated”, as the euphemism goes. They published their findings in a paper called “Detecting Deceptive Discussions in Conference Calls”.
Deceptive bosses, it transpires, tend to make more references to general knowledge (“as you know…”), and refer less to shareholder value (perhaps to minimise the risk of a lawsuit, the authors hypothesise). They also use fewer “non-extreme positive emotion words”. That is, instead of describing something as “good”, they call it “fantastic”. The aim is to “sound more persuasive” while talking horsefeathers.
When they are lying, bosses avoid the word “I”, opting instead for the third person. They use fewer “hesitation words”, such as “um” and “er”, suggesting that they may have been coached in their deception.
installation { Sebastian Wickeroth, Strategie der Steine 3, Junger Westen, Kunsthalle Recklinghausen, 2007 }
‘Recognize meat for what it really is: the antibiotic and pesticide laden corpse of a tortured animal.’ –Ingrid Newkirk, PETA President
On May 15, 1985, trainers at Hawaii Sea Life Park were stunned when a 400- pound gray female bottlenose dolphin named Punahele gave birth to a dark-skinned calf that partly resembled the 2,000-pound male false killer whale with whom she shared a pool. The calf was a wholphin, a hybrid that was intermediate to its parents in some characteristics, like having 66 teeth compared with the bottlenose’s 88 and the 44 of the false killer whale, a much larger member of the dolphin family. (…)
While several examples of human-bred animal hybrids are well known and can thrive in captivity including zorses (zebra-horse), beefalo (bison-beef cattle) and, of course, mules (donkey-horse), naturally occurring animal hybrids have many factors working against their longer-term success.
Throw them the bone. I remember slightly. How long since your last mass?
Kent Kiehl has studied hundreds of psychopaths. Kiehl is one of the world’s leading investigators of psychopathy and a professor at the University of New Mexico. He says he can often see it in their eyes: There’s an intensity in their stare, as if they’re trying to pick up signals on how to respond. But the eyes are not an element of psychopathy, just a clue.
Officially, Kiehl scores their pathology on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist, which measures traits such as the inability to feel empathy or remorse, pathological lying, or impulsivity.
“The scores range from zero to 40,” Kiehl explains in his sunny office overlooking a golf course. “The average person in the community, a male, will score about 4 or 5. Your average inmate will score about 22. An individual with psychopathy is typically described as 30 or above. Brian scored 38.5 basically. He was in the 99th percentile.”
“Brian” is Brian Dugan, a man who is serving two life sentences for rape and murder in Chicago. (…)
Dugan is smart — his IQ is over 140 — but he admits he has always had shallow emotions. He tells Kiehl that in his quarter century in prison, he believes he’s developed a sense of remorse.
“And I have empathy, too — but it’s like it just stops,” he says. “I mean, I start to feel, but something just blocks it. I don’t know what it is.”
Kiehl says he’s heard all this before: All psychopaths claim they feel terrible about their crimes for the benefit of the parole board.
“But then you ask them, ‘What do you mean, you feel really bad?’ And Brian will look at you and go, ‘What do you mean, what does it mean?’ They look at you like, ‘Can you give me some help? A hint? Can I call a friend?’ They have no way of really getting at that at all,” Kiehl says.
Kiehl says the reason people like Dugan cannot access their emotions is that their physical brains are different. And he believes he has the brain scans to prove it.
image { Richard Boulet }
I love Eastern philosophy. It’s… it’s metaphysical, and redundant. Abortively pedantic.
{ Over the weekend, 9/11 memorials were held across the nation. In New York, one such memorial was held at City Hall Park. Organized by inventors Steven Brandstetter and James Devlin of J&S Gaming, the event featured the pair’s Lottery Ball Characters which were turned into life sized costumes to represent the likeness of a police officer and a fireman. | adrants via copyranter }
‘I think that commentary and dissent have merged into dysentery by now.’ –Woody Allen
{ America and Europe face the worst jobs crisis since the 1930s and risk “an explosion of social unrest” unless they tread carefully, the International Monetary Fund has warned. | Telegraph | full story }
We fell in love. I fell in love, she just stood there.
{ Woody Allen interview from 1971 after the release of Bananas | more }
‘Superman can fly high way up in the sky cause we believe he can.’ –Luther Vandross
{ But who exactly bought what? Even Mr Hirst admits, “I’m still finding out.” Dealers acquired some works, but 81% of the buyers were private collectors purchasing directly. | How Damien Hirst grew rich at the expense of his investors | The Economist | full story }
{ The Art Damien Hirst Stole | more | Thanks Tim }
Then with my double barrel shotgun and a whole box of shells
Four dozen Prince George’s County police cadets had searched a wooded area in Glenn Dale for the BlackBerry of a woman who had been killed in her Upper Marlboro home. They found nothing.
Five days later, a county homicide detective, Benjamin Brown, the lead investigator into the strangulation of Antoinette Renee Chase, started a weekend night shift by driving back to the area. Brown suspected Chase’s husband but needed evidence before he could put him in handcuffs.
Brown, a Boy Scout leader who attained the rank of Eagle Scout, knows maps and Global Positioning System devices. The day of the slaying, the victim’s BlackBerry had made or received a phone call that placed the device within 200 meters of a particular location in Glenn Dale. Brown plugged longitude and latitude coordinates into his GPS device and identified an area about 300 meters from where the cadets had searched.
Behind a strip shopping mall, the detective inspected another wooded area. Nothing. He retreated to the shopping mall’s asphalt and, using a screwdriver, pried open a heavy metal storm drain cover. Then a second. Then a third. Jackpot.
On a ledge, Brown saw a plastic bag. Inside the bag, he found a purse that belonged to Antoinette Chase. At the bottom of the storm drain, Brown spotted another plastic bag, which had water shoes and work gloves. The shoes were the same size as those worn by Antoinette’s husband, Spencer Ellsworth Chase, according to court testimony. The work gloves contained the DNA of both Chases, according to testimony.
photo { Horst P. Horst, Costume for Salvador Dalí’s Dream of Venus, 1939 | The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today | MoMA, NYC, August 1–November 1, 2010}
