Fox News host Bill Hemmer explains missing plane: ‘It took 2,000 years to find Noah’s Ark’

Woman charged $787.33 for two-mile cab ride

Two charged in an insider trading scheme that used notes scribbled on napkins — then eaten to maintain secrecy

Time Warner Cable chief will get a nearly $80 million golden parachute. He was CEO less than two months.

Most popular hedge fund stocks

Peoples’ jobs as adults in 2010 and their parents’ income when they were kids in 1979

Human nose can detect at least 1 trillion odors — far more than thought, says study. For comparison, our eyes can see a few million different colors, and we can hear about 340,000 tones.

How thinking in a foreign language makes you more rational in some ways but not others

Periods of sleeplessness may cause permanent brain damage regardless of makeup rest, study

At present, no more than about 200 young people start using crack-cocaine each day. Ten years ago, the corresponding estimated daily rate was 1000.

Pots of honey, thousands of years old, and yet still preserved.

Knowing whether food has spoiled without even opening the container

The waning popularity of the American microwave deserves a closer look.

Why did Anthony Gatto, the greatest juggler alive — and perhaps of all time — back away from his art to open a construction business?

In the summer of 1982 the city of Waco was confronted with the most vicious crime it had ever seen: three teenagers were savagely stabbed to death, for no apparent reason.

The story of a totally made-up place that suddenly became real — and then, strangely, undid itself and became a fantasy again.

Like other federal agencies, the NSA is compelled by law to try to commercialize its R&D.

Plausible Scenario of What Happened to Flight 370, part II: It increasingly appears to be a mystery that will never be solved with any certainty.

Museum of Endangered Sounds

Avoid exes, co-workers, that guy who likes to stop and chat [Thanks Tim]

How many times would you have to fold a page onto itself to reach the Moon? 42.

What Jupiter would look like if it were the same distance from us as the Moon

Self-propelled catwalk car in the Lincoln Tunnel, NY, 1960 and in the Holland Tunnel, 1954

Burden called a group of friends into a gallery to watch an assistant shoot him with a .22 rifle

Can you unsuck a penis? [via Max Read]

“Would you please take a selfie of my friend and I in front of this window?”

She was not aware that she had approached a linguist. […]

It would not be like him to snarl that of my friend and I should be of my friend and me (or perhaps better, of me and my friend). Nor did he remonstrate with the woman over her rather extraordinary misuse of the noun selfie.

{ Language Log | Continue reading }

unrelated { Photographer countersues Empire State Building for $5M over topless photos }

More than 400 years after Shakespeare wrote it, we can now say that “Romeo and Juliet” has the wrong name. Perhaps the play should be called “Juliet and Her Nurse,” which isn’t nearly as sexy, or “Romeo and Benvolio,” which has a whole different connotation.

I discovered this by writing a computer program to count how many lines each pair of characters in “Romeo and Juliet” spoke to each other, with the expectation that the lovers in the greatest love story of all time would speak more than any other pair.

{ FiveThirtyEight | Continue reading }

Australia has begun exporting camels to Saudi Arabia.

More than 100 animals are being shipped from the Australian port city of Darwin and are due to arrive in Saudi Arabia in early July [2002].

The vast majority are destined for restaurant tables in a major camel-consuming nation.

{ BBC | Continue reading }

photo { Janet Biggs, Point of No Return, 2013 }

A paper that correlates occupations with divorce and separation rates, to be published in the Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology, reveals that those employed in extrovert and stressful jobs are highly likely to divorce, as are those who work in the caring professions.

Dancers, choreographers and bartenders have around a 40% chance of experiencing a relationship breakdown. But also at high risk are nurses, psychiatrists and those who help the elderly and disabled. Conversely, agricultural engineers, optometrists, dentists, clergymen and podiatrists are all in occupations which carry a 2-7% chance of family breakdown.

{ The Guardian | Continue reading }

{ Robert Heinecken, Lessons in Posing Subjects/Matching Facial Expressions, 1981 }

{ Robert Heinecken, Kodak Safety Film/Figure Horizon, 1971 }

{ Robert Heinecken, Cybill Shepherd/Phone Sex, 1992 | Robert Heinecken retrospective at MoMA, through September 7, 2014 }

Missing Woman Found Alive in Trash Compactor

Commercial drones are now legal in U.S. skies, thanks to a court decision this month that slapped down the Federal Aviation Administration’s attempt to ground them.

In Japan, helicopter drones have been spraying crops for 20 years. The drone industry and some members of Congress are worried the United States will be one of the last countries, rather than one of the first, to gain the economic benefits of the technology.

A plausible scenario of what happened to Flight 370

Organized criminals who have long trafficked drugs are diversifying into humdrum areas of commerce—particularly food, booze and cheap consumer goods.

How much meat is too much?

Even if your body makes it to 1,000 years, the thinking goes, that body is actually inhabited by a succession of persons over time rather than a single continuous person. And so, if you put someone in prison for a crime they committed at 40, they might, strictly speaking, be an entirely different person at 940.

Does the Human Body Really Replace Itself Every 7 Years?

Let’s say you transfer your mind into a computer—not all at once but gradually

The Phenomenology of Spirit: how to appreciate Hegel

Translating Lorem Ipsum [via Sunday reading]

Medieval multiverse heralded modern cosmic conundrums

Georges Lemaître, a Belgian Roman Catholic priest, astronomer and professor of physics, first proposed what became the Big Bang theory

Scientists say they have extraordinary new evidence to support a Big Bang Theory for the origin of the Universe.

How an Army e-mail phishing experiment went awry

OKCoin Raises $10 Million to Become China’s ‘Largest Exchange’

If Newsweek did proper due diligence, all of this information should have been available to them prior to their publication of the article.

The whole event was supposed to be a fundraiser for charity, but ended up costing the city millions in lawsuits [read more]

By taking about 100 pictures of McDuffie using a pillow to pose as he did in the picture taken Aug. 14, 1945, by photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt, Gibson said she was able to match the muscles, ears and other features of the then-80-year-old McDuffie to the young sailor in the original image.

Prada Marfa vandalized

Damien Hirst exhibition in Doha, Qatar

Types of Weirdos

Lego robot crushes Rubik’s Cube world record with superhuman speed

Women hold about 60 per cent of the total jobs in the thirty occupations projectedby the US Bureau of Labor Statistics to have the most net job growth in the decade through 2022. […]

The projections obviously should be interpreted more as a guide to current trends than as a reliable forecast. But combined with the number from the NWLC, they suggest that if those trends don’t change, then the recent struggles of men — and especially young men — finding work in a labour market that continues to shift towards traditionally female-dominated occupations will only worsen. […]

The jobs of the new labour market are lower-paying, and therefore difficult to accept for men who were accustomed to making more, even if the old jobs aren’t coming back. Many of these jobs are in traditionally female-dominated occupations, which require training that men are less likely to have. And they pay higher wages to college grads, the vast majority of which are now women. […]

The composition of future jobs is unlikely to get “manlier”.

{ FT | Continue reading }

Your voice betrays your personality in a split second

[…]

They extracted the word “hello” and asked 320 people to rate the voices on a scale of 1 to 9 for one of 10 perceived personality traits – including trustworthiness, dominance and attractiveness. […] “We were surprised by just how similar people’s ratings were.” […] most people agreed very closely to what extent each voice represented each trait.

{ NewScientist | Continue reading }

related { How sound affects the taste of our food }

In the last years news are over and over again about record breaking prices reached for an artwork at a public auction. Such high pricing strucks not only the old masters but also works for still living artists. As you might know the prices for young artist’s paintings are often assessed by canvas size. So the question for my use-case arises: Is there also a correlation between size and hammer price of famous artworks at auctions?

{ Ruth Reiche | Continue reading }

Man pronounced dead last month and put in a body bag only to come alive just before embalming, has now died

Lady Gaga’s Charity Donated Just $5,000 of Its $2.1 Million

Road closed as police hunt severed penis

The economics of prostitution in eight U.S. cities

Gonorrhea is about to become impossible to treat. Antibiotic resistance means the STD might soon spread more aggressively than ever.

Most of the caffeine used in soft drinks is actually synthetically produced in Chinese pharmaceutical plants.

Elephants Know How Dangerous We Are From How We Speak

A new study shows that the use of cocaine dropped by half across the United States from 2006 to 2010, while use of marijuana jumped by more than 30 percent during the period.

If you want to kill someone, do it with a car. As long as you’re sober, chances are you’ll never be charged with any crime, much less manslaughter.

The very unscientific tale of how Amazon first set the price of Prime

This startup claims it can read your fingerprint from nine feet away

Sigma X is one of the largest dark pools in the U.S., accounting for 1 percent of total daily trading in January

TOR Network Increasingly Being Abused by Cybercriminals.

Any WordPress site with Pingback enabled (which is on by default) can be used in DDOS attacks against other sites

The Story Behind The THX Deep Note

This past summer was a disaster for the major studios - but it was also a highly predictable one. The Future of Film I, II, and III

Study finds that social ties influence who wins certain Hollywood movie awards

Heidegger’s Hitler Problem Is Worse Than We Thought

A study finds more than half the books lining shelves in British homes have never been read.

The man who has painted more than 1,000 watercolors with his tongue.

Robert Mapplethorpe Children’s Museum Celebrates Grand Opening

3D Printed Phil Robertson Duck Dynasty Butt Plug

In his story Sarrasine, Balzac, describing a castrato disguised as a woman, writes the following sentence: “This was woman herself, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive worries, her impetuous boldness, her fussings, and her delicious sensibility.” Who is speaking thus? Is it the hero of the story bent on remaining ignorant of the castrato hidden beneath the woman? Is it Balzac the individual, furnished by his personal experience with a philosophy of Woman? Is it Balzac the author professing ‘literary’ ideas on femininity? Is it universal wisdom? Romantic psychology? We shall never know, for the good reason that writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing.

{ Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author, 1967 | Continue reading }

{ The Statue of Liberty under construction in Paris | more photos | Wikipedia }

These fictional examples suggest that creativity and dishonesty often go hand-in-hand. Is there an actual link? Is there something about the creative process that triggers unethical behavior? Or does behaving in dishonest ways spur creative thinking? My research suggests that they both exist: Encouraging people to think outside the box can result in greater cheating, and crossing ethical boundaries can make people more creative in subsequent tasks. 

{ Scientific American | Continue reading }

{ Effect of a clown’s presence at botulinum toxin injections in children }

Woman, 63, ‘becomes PREGNANT in the mouth’ with baby squid after eating calamari

Woman taking part in major mountain search operation for a lost tourist was the missing person everyone was looking for

Park Avenue surgeon implants woman with heart-shaped eye jewelry

To get one of those apartments, on average, you need to plunk down the equivalent of almost $300,000. Household rental system in South Korea

Most hotels actually lose money on room service.

Does Daylight Saving Time Affect Voter Turnout?

Hormones and Women Voters: A Very Modern Scientific Controversy

Some new evidence about just how quickly our unconscious minds can process incoming information

How to learn like a memory champion

Does clown therapy really help anxious kids?

An estimated 1 in 25 persons in the United States are silent sociopaths living anonymously and for some, successfully, amongst the rest of the country.

What the mind of a psychopath looks like

The surprising similarities between pole dancers and financial dealers [PDF]

Predators are supposed to exert strong control over ecosystems, but nature doesn’t always play by the rules.

Electric animals that aren’t eels

New spectroscopy technique makes it faster & easier to find out how much horse is in your burger

The last place on Earth… without life

Nearly Every Star Hosts at Least One Alien Planet

Why we find some languages more beautiful than others

The internationalized art world relies on a unique language.

Despite claims made and repeated for decades, Pollock did not paint “Mural” in one great, glorious burst of nonstop creative fervor.

What it Was Like to Travel to Iran With Andy Warhol in 1976

In 2005, the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance attempted to impose sales tax on a nightclub’s offering of exotic dancing to its customers.

Once derided as being like a plastic bag with the erotic appeal of a jellyfish, the female condom is being reinvented as the next big thing in safe sex.

‘Lick This’ App Teaches Oral Sex Via Phone-Licking

Butt Shaped Lamp Can Be Pinched On, Slapped Off [Thanks Tim]

In 2005, levamisole was found in almost 2 percent of the cocaine seized by the DEA. In 2007, the frequency went up to 15 percent, and by 2011 a staggering 73 percent of all cocaine seized by the DEA had been cut with levamisole.

The orb consists of a black latex balloon filled with helium, a battery-powered Arduino board, a speaker, and an Adafruit Wave Shield that’s been modified to record and play back ambient sounds on the fly.

How to curate your own group exhibition

Shooting Into the Corner, 2008-2009

Foot job

In memory of Roger Bucklesby

Richard Prince is selling inkjet prints of Twitter screenshots (another one)

The arguments for ditching notes and coins are numerous, and quite convincing. In the US, a study by Tufts University concluded that the cost of using cash amounts to around $200 billion per year – about $637 per person. This is primarily the costs associated with collecting, sorting and transporting all that money, but also includes trivial expenses like ATM fees. Incidentally, the study also found that the average American wastes five and a half hours per year withdrawing cash from ATMs; just one of the many inconvenient aspects of hard currency.

While coins last decades, or even centuries, paper currency is much less durable. A dollar bill has an average lifespan of six years, and the US Federal Reserve shreds somewhere in the region of 7,000 tons of defunct banknotes each year.

Physical currency is grossly unhealthy too. Researchers in Ohio spot-checked cash used in a supermarket and found 87% contained harmful bacteria. Only 6% of the bills were deemed “relatively clean.” […]

Stockholm’s homeless population recently began accepting card payments. […]

Cash transactions worldwide rose just 1.75% between 2008 and 2012, to $11.6 trillion. Meanwhile, non traditional payment methods rose almost 14% to total $6.4 trillion.

{ TransferWise | Continue reading }

The anal stage is the second stage in Sigmund Freud’s theory of psychosexual development, lasting from age 18 months to three years. According to Freud, the anus is the primary erogenous zone and pleasure is derived from controlling bladder and bowel movement. […]

The negative reactions from their parents, such as early or harsh toilet training, can lead the child to become an anal-retentive personality. If the parents tried forcing the child to learn to control their bowel movements, the child may react by deliberately holding back in rebellion. They will form into an adult who hates mess, is obsessively tidy, punctual, and respectful to authority. These adults can sometimes be stubborn and be very careful over their money.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

related { Hackers Hit Mt. Gox Exchange’s CEO, Claim To Publish Evidence Of Fraud | Where are the 750k Bitcoins lost by Mt. Gox? }

Two fields stand out as different within cognitive psychology. These are the study of reasoning, especially deductive reasoning and statistical inference, and the more broadly defined field of decision making. For simplicity I label these topics as the study of reasoning and decision making (RDM). What make RDM different from all other fields of cognitive psychology is that psychologists constantly argued with each other and with philosophers about whether the behavior of their participants is rational. The question I address here is why? What is so different about RDM that it attracts the interests of philosophers and compulsively engages experimental psychologists in judgments of how good or bad is the RDM they observe.

Let us first consider the nature of cognitive psychology in general. It is branch of cognitive science, concerned with the empirical and theoretical study of cognitive processes in humans. It covers a wide collection of processes connected with perception, attention, memory, language, and thinking. However, only in the RDM subset of the psychology of thinking is rationality an issue. For sure, accuracy measures are used throughout cognitive psychology. We can measure whether participants detect faint signals, make accurate judgments of distances, recall words read to them correctly and so on. The study of non-veridical functions is also a part of wider cognitive psychology, for example the study of visual illusions, memory lapses, and cognitive failures in normal people as well as various pathological conditions linked to brain damage, such as aphasia. But in none of these cases are inaccurate responses regarded as irrational. Visual illusions are attributed to normally adaptive cognitive mechanisms that can be tricked under special circumstances; memory errors reflect limited capacity systems and pathological cognition to brain damage or clinical disorders. In no case is the person held responsible and denounced as irrational.

{ Frontiers | Continue reading }

photo { Slim Aarons }

“Saying there are differences in male and female brains is just not true. There is pretty compelling evidence that any differences are tiny and are the result of environment not biology,” said Prof Rippon.

“You can’t pick up a brain and say ‘that’s a girls brain, or that’s a boys brain’ in the same way you can with the skeleton. They look the same.” […]

A women’s brain may therefore become ‘wired’ for multi-tasking simply because society expects that of her and so she uses that part of her brain more often. The brain adapts in the same way as a muscle gets larger with extra use.

{ Telegraph | Continue reading }

photo { John Gutmann, Freaky Faces Graffiti (Masks Graffiti), San Francisco, 1939 }

Le pop art dépersonnalise, mais il ne rend pas anonyme : rien de plus identifiable que Marilyn, la chaise électrique, un pneu ou une robe, vus par le pop art ; ils ne sont même que cela : immédiatement et exhaustivement identifiables, nous enseignant par là que l’identité n’est pas la personne : le monde futur risque d’être un monde d’identités, mais non de personnes.

We must realize that if Pop Art depersonalized, it does not make anonymous: nothing is more identifiable than Marilyn, the electric chair, a tire, or a dress, as seen by Pop Art; they are in fact nothing but that: immediately and exhaustively identifiable, thereby teaching us that identify is not the person: the future world risks being a world of identities, but not of persons.

{ Roland Barthes, Cette vieille chose, l’art, 1980 }

art { Andy Warhol, Foot and Tire, 1963–-64 }

related { David Cronenberg on Foot and Tire }