As the rain splashed the nickel
At Kean University, students are dying (as it were) to get into Norma Bowe’s class “Death in Perspective,” which has sometimes carried a three-year waiting list. On one one field trip to a local coroner’s office, Dr. Bowe’s students were shown three naked cadavers on metal tables. One person had died from a gunshot, the other from suicide and the third by drowning.
The last corpse appeared overweight but wasn’t; he had expanded like a water balloon. A suspect in a hit-and-run case, he had fled the scene, been chased by police, abandoned his car and jumped into the Passaic River. On the autopsy table, he looked surprised, his mouth splayed open, as if he realized he had made a mistake. As the class clustered around, a technician began to carve his torso open. Some students gagged or scurried out, unable to stand the sight or the smell.
This grim visit was just one of the excursions for Dr. Bowe’s class. Every semester, students also leave the campus in Union, New Jersey, to visit a cemetery, a maximum-security prison (to meet murderers), a hospice, a crematory and a funeral home, where they pick out caskets for themselves. The homework is also unusual: Students are required to write goodbye letters to dead loved ones and to compose their own eulogies and wills.
JFK ✈ YOUR BEDROOM
Both men and women erred in estimating what the opposite sex would find attractive. Men thought women would like a heavier stature than females reported they like, and women thought men would like women thinner than men reported they like.
Results suggest that, overall, men’s perceptions serve to keep them satisfied with their figures, whereas women’s perceptions place pressure on them to lose weight.
In this model of time, nothing returns
Our brains show more activity in their emotional regions when the music we are listening to is familiar, regardless of whether or not we actually like it.
related { Young Musicians Reap Long-Term Neuro Benefits }
and { By Licking These Electric Ice Cream Cones, You Can Make Music }
‘The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.’ –Nietzsche
fMRI studies show that the same areas of the brain become activated when we experience rejection as when we experience physical pain.
{ Psychology Today | Continue reading | Thanks Tim }
Every day, the same, again
‘Too drunk’ gambler sues Las Vegas casino over $500,000 debt
Fortune Teller Scams Young Woman Out Of $200K
Wealthier people are more musical, research
5% of people have “no real response to music,” study
Early treatment ‘cures’ second US HIV-positive baby
“exposure to an unstructured, uniform stimulation field, elicits in most observers pseudo-hallucinatory percepts” Hallucinating without drugs, the profundity of silence, and the thalamocortical circuit
The Reality Behind the Stock-Picking Prowess of S.E.C. Staff Members
The man who discovered the Stroop effect never realised the massive impact he had on psychology.
Scotland, one of the four countries that make up the United Kingdom (along with England, Northern Ireland, and Wales), will hold a referendum on independence this September. If it succeeds, Britain’s iconic flag may need a makeover.
Study: More Children Growing Up In Single-Parrot Households
During the chase, Nakamoto was seen throwing bitcoins out the window to deter his pursuers
Every day, the same, again
California court says drivers can read maps on their phones
Americans use twice as much water as they think they do, study says
1 in 10 Americans think HTML is an STD, study finds
First LSD tests in decades show terminal patients gained valuable and lasting insights
Want to remember something? Have some coffee.
5 percent of calories should be from sugar
Many psychotherapists dream about their clients
A study suggests that taking Truvada everyday reduces HIV transmission risk by 99 percent.
Study after study has shown that those who live with children are less satisfied with their lives than those who do not. Is there something wrong with these empirical analyses?
LCD Soundsystem James Murphy wants to to change the sound of the New York City subway turnstiles. He has worked out a unique set of notes for every station, one of which would sound each time a passenger swipes his or her MetroCard.
Finally, an app that lets you rent out your toilet
The person who takes a photo is legally the owner; the person who owns the camera or organized the shoot is not the owner. Who owns the rights to Ellen’s selfie?
Brooklyn Tattoo Artist Inks His Dog
Richard Prince kicked off Instagram Previously/related: Praise The Fucking Lord
These Are the “Most Hipster” Bands, According to Science
Origins of Joy Division’s “Unknown Pleasures” cover
‘I’m running the Shakespeare Monologue booth at this year’s Van’s Warped Tour. It’s $5 for tragedies.’ —Jeb Lund
It’s a concept that had become universally understood: humans experience six basic emotions—happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and surprise—and use the same set of facial movements to express them. What’s more, we can recognize emotions on another’s face, whether that person hails from Boston or Borneo.
The only problem with this concept, according to Northeastern University Distinguished Professor of Psychology Lisa Feldman Barrett, is that it isn’t true at all.
art { Richard Hamilton, Swingeing London 67 (f), 1968-9 | Acrylic paint, screenprint, paper, aluminium and metalised acetate on canvas }
Even if you knew the entire past history of the universe, this would not contain the information about what the particles will do in the experiment
Quantum physics is famously weird, counterintuitive and hard to understand; there’s just no getting around this. So it is very reassuring that many of the greatest physicists and mathematicians have also struggled with the subject. The legendary quantum physicist Richard Feynman famously said that if someone tells you that they understand quantum mechanics, then you can be sure that they are lying. And Conway too says that he didn’t understand the quantum physics lectures he took during his undergraduate degree at Cambridge.
The key to this confusion is that quantum physics is fundamentally different to any of the previous theories explaining how the physical world works. In the great rush of discoveries of new quantum theory in the 1920s, the most surprising was that quantum physics would never be able to exactly predict what was going to happen. In all previous physical theories, such as Newton’s classical mechanics or Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity, if you knew the current state of the physical system accurately enough, you could predict what would happen next. “Newtonian gravitation has this property,” says Conway. “If I take a ball and I throw it vertically upwards, and I know its mass and I know its velocity (suppose I’m a very good judge of speed!) then from Newton’s theories I know exactly how high it will go. And if it doesn’t do exactly as I expect then that’s because of some slight inaccuracy in my measurements.”
Instead quantum physics only offers probabilistic predictions: it can tell you that your quantum particle will behave in one way with a particular probability, but it could also behave in another way with another particular probability. “Suppose there’s this little particle and you’re going to put it in a magnetic field and it’s going to come out at A or come out at B,” says Conway, imagining an experiment, such as the Stern Gerlach experiment, where a magnetic field diverts an electron’s path. “Even if you knew exactly where the particles were and what the magnetic fields were and so on, you could only predict the probabilities. A particle could go along path A or path B, with perhaps 2/3 probability it will arrive at A and 1/3 at B. And if you don’t believe me then you could repeat the experiment 1000 times and you’ll find that 669 times, say, it will be at A and 331 times it will be at B.”
{ The Free Will Theorem, Part I | Continue reading | Part II | Part III }
‘In practical life we are compelled to follow what is most probable ; in speculative thought we are compelled to follow truth.’ —Spinoza
When a coin falls in water, its trajectory is one of four types determined by its dimensionless moment of inertia I∗ and Reynolds number Re: (A) steady; (B) fluttering; (C) chaotic; or (D) tumbling. The dynamics induced by the interaction of the water with the surface of the coin, however, makes the exact landing site difficult to predict a priori.
Here, we describe a carefully designed experiment in which a coin is dropped repeatedly in water to determine the probability density functions (pdf) associated with the landing positions for each of the four trajectory types, all of which are radially symmetric about the centre drop-line.
{ arXiv | PDF }
Hell is the impossibility of reason
Men want sex more than women do. (While I am sure that you can think of people who don’t fit this pattern, my colleagues and I have arrived at this conclusion after reviewing hundreds of findings. It is, on average, a very robust finding.) This difference is due in part to the fact that men, compared to women, focus on the rewards of sex. Women tend to focus on its costs because having sex presents them with bigger potential downsides, from physical (the toll of bearing a child) to social (stigma).
Accordingly, the average man’s sexual system gets activated fairly easily. When it does, it trips off a whole system in the brain focused on rewards. In fact, merely seeing a bra can propel men into reward mode, seeking immediate satisfaction in their decisions.
Most of the evidence suggests that women are different, that a sexy object would not cause them to shift into reward mode. This goes back to the notion that sex is rife with potential costs for women. Yet, at a basic biological level, the sexual system is directly tied to the reward system (through pleasure-giving dopaminergic reactions). This would seem to suggest a contrasting hypothesis that perhaps women will also shift into reward mode when their sexual system is activated. […] Women, more than men, connect sex to emotions. Festjens and colleagues therefore used a subtle, emotional cue to initiate sexual motivation – touch. Across three experiments, Festjens and colleagues found that women who touched sexy male clothing items, compared to nonsexual clothing items, showed evidence of being in reward mode.
{ Scientific American | Continue reading }
“If a stranger came up to a woman, grabbed her around the waist, and rubbed his groin against her in a university cafeteria or on a subway, she’d probably call the police. In the bar, the woman just tries to get away from him.”
[…]
“The current study was part of an evaluation of the Safer Bars program, a program we developed to reduce aggression in bars, primarily male-to-male aggression,” said Graham. “However, when we saw how much sexual aggression there was, we decided to conduct additional analyses. So these analyses of sexual aggression were in response to how much we observed – which was considerably more than we were expecting.”
photo { John Gutmann, Memory, 1939 }
Here we are now, entertain us
A 30,000-year-old giant virus has been revived from the frozen Siberian tundra, sparking concern that increased mining and oil drilling in rapidly warming northern latitudes could disturb dormant microbial life that could one day prove harmful to man.
The latest find, described online Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, appears to belong to a new family of mega-viruses that infect only amoeba. But its revival in a laboratory stands as “a proof of principle that we could eventually resurrect active infectious viruses from different periods,” said the study’s lead author, microbiologist Jean-Michel Claverie of Aix-Marseille University in France.
photo { John Gutmann, I am the Magic Hand, 1937 }
Every day, the same, again
Inventor Has Waited 43-Years For Patent Approval
Man Wakes up in Body Bag at Funeral Home
CEO Ticketed For Running In Central Park Too Early
Teen’s Facebook brag costs dad $80,000 lawsuit settlement
Case against man who texted photo of his tattooed genitals dismissed
Fear suppressing neurons found
Science can predict if a seemingly healthy person will die on the short term, based on 4 biomarkers
Strangers with easier-to-pronounce monikers are deemed more trustworthy
Blind people have more nightmares than those who can see.
Doctors’ Stethoscopes Can Transmit Bacteria As Easily As Unwashed Hands
…bottles of ChlorOxygen chlorophyll concentrate, which “builds better blood.” Whole Foods: America’s Temple of Pseudoscience
How the global banana industry is killing the world’s favorite fruit
3 Minutes of Tetris Reduces Cravings for Drink, Cigarettes and Food
NY Will Use Birth Control To Wipe Out Mute Swans Instead Of Executing Them
How many healthy animals do zoos put down?
Macroscopic inspection of feces has been used to investigate primate diet.
“during the Greco-Roman period, a sponge fixed to a stick (tersorium) was used to clean the buttocks after defecation; the sponge was then replaced in a bucket filled with salt water or vinegar water.”
How a Hacker Intercepted FBI and Secret Service Calls With Google Maps
A map of how much the time zones of the world vary from solar time (China is about as big across as the continental United States and has only one huge time zone) [more]
How a 40% decrease in X can be a 6% increase in non-X
A “web-enabled” toothbrush collects dental data while it cleans your teeth
The 14 synthesizers that shaped modern music
Satanists unveil design for OK statehouse statue [Thanks Tim]
Toy Story: The True Identity of Andy’s Mom
Google Image Search Result for “Exhausted” Printed onto Blanket, 2009, mixed media
‘We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.’ –Schopenhauer
The simplest type of human communication is non verbal signals: things like posture, facial expression, gestures, tone of voice. They are in effect contagious: if you are sad, I will feel a little sad, if I then cheer up, you may too. The signals are indications of emotional states and we tend to react to another’s emotional state by a sort of mimicry that puts us in sync with them. We can carry on a type of emotional conversation in this way. Music appears to use this emotional communication – it causes emotions in us without any accompanying semantic messages. It appears to cause that contagion with three aspects: the rhythmic rate, the sound envelope and the timbre of the sound. For example a happy musical message has a fairly fast rhythm, flat loudness envelop with sharp ends, lots of pitch variation and a simple timbre with few harmonics. Language seems to use the same system for emotion, or at least some emotion. The same rhythm, sound envelope and timbre is used in the delivery of oral language and it carries the same emotional signals. Whether it is music or language, this sound specification cuts right past the semantic and cognitive processes and goes straight to the emotional ones. Language seems to share these emotional signals with music but not the semantic meaning that language contains.
‘6am breakfast assault delivery truck driving through neighborhood at 80mph firing grilled cheese inside of an omelette into peoples homes’ —@BAKKOOONN
Chefs have been using the sensation of chillies and other peppers to spice up their culinary experiments for centuries. But it is only in the last decade or so that scientists have begun to understand how we taste piquant foods. Now they have found the mechanism that not only explains the heat of chillies and wasabi, but also the soothing cooling of flavours like menthol.
The implications of this discovery extend far beyond cuisine. The same mechanisms build the body’s internal thermometer, and some animals even use them to see in the dark. Understand these pathways, and the humble chilli may open new avenues of research for conditions as diverse as chronic pain, obesity and cancer.
‘All writing is pigshit. People who leave the obscure and try to define whatever it is that goes on in their heads, are pigs.’ —Antonin Artaud
Ultracrepidarian (n):”Somebody who gives opinions on subjects they know nothing about.”
Groke (v): “To gaze at somebody while they’re eating in the hope that they’ll give you some of their food.” My dog constantly grokes at me longingly while I eat dinner.
