Every day, the same, again
Scientists confess to sneaking Bob Dylan lyrics into their work for the past 17 years
Morphed images of Hollywood celebrities reveal how neurons make up your mind
How to tell when a robot has written you a letter
Order doesn’t just happen, and it isn’t the product of individual freedom. It needs to be established, and it needs to be established first (sometimes by force), before individuals can be granted civic, economic, and social freedom. [via Rob Horning]
How Edward Hopper “Storyboarded” His Iconic Painting Nighthawks
Artists to Serve Radioactive Soup at Frieze London
New York artist creates ‘art’ that is invisible and collectors are paying millions. Previously: Andy Warhol: Invisible Sculpture [photo]
Every day, the same, again
Mother drives with 5-month-old in trunk to avoid being cited for not having car seat
Scientists may have accidentally misread space dust as evidence of the Big Bang
Researcher proves, mathematically, that black holes do not exist
Scientists have “hacked” photosynthesis, and it could help them speed up food production
Coffee Drinkers Have Trouble Talking About Emotions?
How to Instantly Tell If Someone is About to Make a Good Decision (Or Not)
The color green facilitates creative performance
The idea of an aesthetically pleasing gluteal region has been with us since early recorded history.
Are dolphins cleverer than dogs?
The Verbal Overshadowing Effect (describing the perpetrator will make it more difficult for you to identify him out of the lineup)
Lobbying money is flooding into Washington, DC, like never before
Every day, the same, again
Grandfather busted for prostituting himself… to young women
Venezuela’s shortage of breast implants
Domestic violence likely more frequent for same-sex couples
What body parts are seeing the most striking rise in venture-capital funding? Eyes and ears.
‘Memories’ can be passed down through genetic code from one generation to the next.
Schizophrenia not a single disease but multiple genetically distinct disorders
Sometimes Indirect Speech Is the Most Direct Course of Action Related: The evolutionary social psychology of off-record indirect speech acts [PDF]
How your brain actually makes decisions while you sleep
Emotion Is Not the Enemy of Reason
What links creativity, conspiracy theories, and delusions? A phenomenon called apophenia.
Study finds ‘magical contagion’ spreads creator’s essence to artworks, adding value
What Happens When We All Live to 100?
Quick-change materials break the silicon speed limit for computers
Alibaba isn’t just the “Amazon of China”—it’s also the Dropbox, PayPal, Uber, Hulu, and more.
Share selfies with your friends if they’re standing behind you. [Thanks Tim]
Her job was to taste Hitler’s food to make sure it wasn’t poisoned. [via Natalie Shutler]
Plane crash [Thanks Tim]
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
Findings from two experiments suggest that priming the passage of time through the sound of a ticking clock influenced various aspects of women’s (but not men’s) reproductive timing. Moreover, consistent with recent research from the domain of life history theory, those effects depended on women’s childhood socioeconomic status (SES). The subtle sound of a ticking clock led low (but not high) SES women to reduce the age at which they sought to get married and have their first child (Study 1), as well as the priority they placed on the social status and long-term earning potential of potential romantic partners (Study 2).
photo { Aaron McElroy }
Every day, the same, again
Chinese City Sets Up ‘No Cell Phone’ Pedestrian Lanes
Airlines are creating rush hours and crowds at airports - on purpose
People Are Attracted to the Body Odor of Others with Similar Political Beliefs
Gene-Silencing Drugs Finally Show Promise
Genes may help explain why some people are naturally more interested in music than others
Frst-person account of Cotard’s delusion – the belief that you’re dead
New Study Examines Impact of Violent Media on the Brain
Action films most likely to make you fat
How to increase children’s patience in 5 seconds
Scientists come closer to the industrial synthesis of a material harder than diamond
Why Apple Didn’t Name Its Smartwatch ‘iWatch’
How the FBI took down the online black market and drug bazaar known as the Silk Road
The various ways to duck paying the fare on the Paris Subway
You’re waiting for a train. A train that’ll take you far away. You know where you hope this train will take you. But you can’t know for sure. Yet it doesn’t matter. Now, tell me why?
A woman has reached the age of 24 without anyone realising she was missing a large part of her brain. […] The discovery was made when the woman was admitted to the Chinese PLA General Hospital of Jinan Military Area Command in Shandong Province complaining of dizziness and nausea. She told doctors she’d had problems walking steadily for most of her life, and her mother reported that she hadn’t walked until she was 7 and that her speech only became intelligible at the age of 6.
Doctors did a CAT scan and immediately identified the source of the problem – her entire cerebellum was missing. The space where it should be was empty of tissue. Instead it was filled with cerebrospinal fluid, which cushions the brain and provides defence against disease.
The cerebellum – sometimes known as the “little brain” – is located underneath the two hemispheres. It looks different from the rest of the brain because it consists of much smaller and more compact folds of tissue. It represents about 10 per cent of the brain’s total volume but contains 50 per cent of its neurons. […]
The cerebellum’s main job is to control voluntary movements and balance, and it is also thought to be involved in our ability to learn specific motor actions and speak.
It rubs the lotion on its skin. It does this whenever it is told.
When individual performance was publicly posted in the workplace, employees working in a group performed better than when working alone; however, when individual performance was not posted, employees working in a group performed worse than when working alone.
photo { Lionat Natalia Petri }
‘I stick my finger in existence — it smells of nothing.’ –Kierkegaard
We Westerners have a boring pointing repertoire. Most of the time, we just jut out our arm and index finger. If our hands are occupied — carrying a heavy load, say — then we might resort to a jerk of the head or elbow. But if the pointer finger’s free, we’ll point it.
Not so for the Yupno. Within a few days of their arrival in the valley, Núñez and Cooperrider noticed that the Yupno often point with a sharp, coordinated gesture of the nose and head that precedes them looking toward the point of interest. […]
Pointing, he answered, seems to be a fundamental building block of human communication. Great apes are never seen pointing in the wild. And in human babies, pointing develops even before the first word […]
The Yupno aren’t the only ones who point with their face. Lip pointing — in which protruding lips precede an eye gaze toward the area of interest — has been observed in people from Panama, Laos, and other groups in Australia, Africa, and South America. Head pointing, according to one study, happens frequently among people speaking Arabic, Bulgarian, Korean, and African-American Vernacular English.
‘Science does not think.’ —Heidegger
The main objective of this study was to describe male and female lumbar spine and hip motion and muscle activation patterns during coitus and compare these motions and muscle activity across five common coital positions. […]
A secondary objective was to determine if simulated coitus could be used in place of real coitus for future coitus biomechanics research.
{ via University of Waterloo | PDF }
Every day, the same, again
When you set sad lyrics against happy music, the music wins
Bra Wearing Not Associated with Breast Cancer Risk
Is spooning really the best position for men with back pain? More: Bad back? These are the best sex positions to ease the pain.
Cutting Back On Carbs, Not Fat, May Lead To More Weight Loss
A simple rule for making every restaurant meal better: Eat at 5 p.m. or 5:30.
Imagine that someone else was controlling your actions. You would still look like you, and sound like you, but you wouldn’t be the one deciding what you did and what you said. Would anyone notice the difference?
How Movies Trick Your Brain Into Empathizing With Characters
Serialized Killers: Prebooting Horror in Bates Motel and Hannibal
Only 1.5 percent of looted work is ever recovered. Why don’t museums put GPS trackers on everything?
Burger King goes “Goth” in Japan
The lessons around commitment and intimacy get deeper as Saturn continues his two-and-a-half-year sojourn through your partnership house, Taurus.
‘Nothing will come of nothing.’ —Shakespeare
The next time I had to negotiate a contract, it began in typical fashion with a prospective employer sending me a lopsided agreement and asking me to counter-propose. I said I was incompetent to do that and suggested they write a new contract as if they were me, putting in everything that would be in my best interests, and then taking out everything they would never agree to. Since that would be the best I could get, I would accept it subject to agreement on compensation.
We started with base pay. I wrote down the least I would work for and asked them to write down the most they would offer a perfect person, irrespective of whether I was that person or not. If when we exchanged papers, their number wasn’t higher than mine then we could stop there and save time. Their number was twice the best base pay I had ever received in past jobs, and my request was for $0. I explained that my goal is to live a debt-free life, and therefore I wanted to give value before receiving compensation.
‘If you’re critical, you’re already out of the game.’ —Jeff Koons
This paper considers when a firm’s freely chosen name can signal meaningful information about its quality, and examines a setting in which it does.
Plumbing firms with names beginning with an “A” or a number receive five times more service complaints, on average. In addition, firms use names beginning with an “A” or a number more often in larger markets, and those that do have higher prices.
These results reflect consumers’ search decisions and extend to online position auctions: plumbing firms that advertise on Google receive more complaints, which contradicts prior theoretical predictions but fits the setting considered here.
Every day, the same, again
Man Stabs Roommate For Being Too Loud While Having Threesome
People’s belief in free will is lower when they need to urinate or desire sex
It is possible to predict the future – and a new breed of ‘superforecasters’ knows how to do it
Why Amazon Has No Profits (And Why It Works)
“At some factories, robots are even building other robots, producing about 50 robots per 24-hour shift and operating unsupervised for as long as 30 days at a time.” [via gettingsome]
Everything That’s Wrong With Banking Summed Up In One Bonehead Advertisement
We’ve reached a point in our civilization where counterculture has mutated into a self-obsessed aesthetic vacuum. So while hipsterdom is the end product of all prior countercultures, it’s been stripped of its subversion and originality. More: DATAcide: The Total Annihilation of Life as We Know It
New Toyota minivan equips parents with mic to make it easier to yell at unruly kids in the back
Richard Feynman’s Lectures on Physics
Yves Klein: The man who invented a colour
Porn for the Blind [thanks GG]
Hear the loud alarum bells
To examine the effects of grunting on velocity and force production during dynamic and static tennis strokes in collegiate tennis players. […]
The velocity, force, and peak muscle activity during tennis serves and forehand strokes are significantly enhanced when athletes are allowed to grunt.
{ Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research | Continue reading | more }
image { Imp Kerr, Pantherhouse, 2000 }
‘The fundament upon which all our knowledge and learning rests is the inexplicable.’ —Schopenhauer
One: Sit with your eyes closed and your back straight.
Two: Notice what it feels like when your breath comes in and when your breath goes out, try to bring your full attention to the feeling of your breath coming in and going out.
Third step is the biggie. Every time you try to do this, your mind is going to go crazy. You are going to start thinking about all sorts of stupid things like if you need a haircut, why you said that dumb thing to your boss, what’s for lunch, etc. Every time you notice that your mind is wandering, bring your attention back to your breath and begin again. This is going to happen over and over and over again and that is meditation.
It’s not easy. You will “fail” a million times but the “failing” and starting over is succeeding. So this isn’t like most things in your life where, like if you can’t get up on water skis, you can’t do it. Here the trying and starting again, trying and starting again, that’s the whole game.
Every day, the same, again
Robert Rauschenberg Painting Helps Solve 1950s Murder
Town in Brazil made up entirely of women has made an appeal for bachelors
Self-Deceived Individuals Are Better at Deceiving Others
The evidence that abstinence from alcohol is a cause of heart disease and early death is irrefutable
Double mastectomy for breast cancer ‘does not boost survival chances’
Both men and women find humility attractive
An office enriched with plants makes staff happier and boosts productivity by 15 per cent
This study examines whether tattoo visibility affects recidivism length of ex-offenders [PDF]
What People Cured of Blindness See
Time Travel Simulation Resolves “Grandfather Paradox”
Scientists use E.coli bacteria to create fuel
Hackers Are Homing in on Hospitals
The Goldman Sachs Aluminum Conspiracy Lawsuit Is Over
Indian start-up launches shoes that show you the way
‘It belongs to the imperfection of everything human that man can only attain his desire by passing through its opposite.’ –Kierkegaard
Take the Danes, for instance. True, they claim to be the happiest people in the world, but why no mention of the fact they are second only to Iceland when it comes to consuming anti- depressants? […] The Danes also have the highest level of private debt in the world (four times as much as the Italians, to put it into context; enough to warrant a warning from the IMF), while more than half of them admit to using the black market to obtain goods and services.
Perhaps the Danes’ dirtiest secret is that, according to a 2012 report from the Worldwide Fund for Nature, they have the fourth largest per capita ecological footprint in the world. Even ahead of the US. […] According to the World Cancer Research Fund, the Danes have the highest cancer rates on the planet. “But at least the trains run on time!” I hear you say. No, that was Italy under Mussolini. The Danish national rail company has skirted bankruptcy in recent years, and the trains most assuredly do not run on time. […]
I am very fond of the Finns, a most pragmatic, redoubtable people with a Sahara-dry sense of humour. But would I want to live in Finland? In summer, you’ll be plagued by mosquitos, in winter, you’ll freeze – that’s assuming no one shoots you, or you don’t shoot yourself. Finland ranks third in global gun ownership behind only America and Yemen; has the highest murder rate in western Europe, double that of the UK; and by far the highest suicide rate in the Nordic countries.
The Finns are epic Friday-night bingers and alcohol is now the leading cause of death for Finnish men.
{ Guardian | Continue reading | More: Nordic nations respond to the original article }
