All you really need to do to seem clairvoyant about [Russia] is to be an utter pessimist. […]

[B]y Stalin’s very conscious design and very deliberate border drawing and population movement, most former Soviet republics are ethnic hodgepodges. So Ukraine has a sizable Russian population. Ditto Estonia, ditto Georgia, ditto Kazakhstan. And, according to Putin’s unspoken doctrine, anywhere Russian citizens are determined to be at risk, Mother Moscow can intercede with force on their behalf.

{ Julia Ioffe | Continue reading }

This leader came to power in democratic elections, to be sure, but then altered the system from within. For example, the leader had been a common criminal: a rapist and a thief. He found a judge who was willing to misplace documents related to his case. That judge then became the chief justice of the Supreme Court. There were no constitutional objections, subsequently, when the leader asserted ever more power for his presidency.

In power, this leader, this president, remained a thief, but now on a grand, perhaps even unsurpassed, scale. Throughout his country millions of small businessmen and businesswomen found it impossible to keep their firms afloat, thanks to the arbitrary demands of tax authorities. Their profits were taken by the state, and the autonomy that those profits might have given them were denied. Workers in the factories and mines had no means whatsoever of expression their own distress, since any attempt at a strike or even at labor organization would simply have led to their dismissal.

The country, Ukraine, was in effect an oligarchy, where much of the wealth was in the hands of people who could fit in one elevator. But even this sort of pluralism, the presence of more than one very rich person, was too much for the leader, Viktor Yanukovych. He wanted to be not only the president but the oligarch-in-chief. His son, a dentist, was suddenly one of the wealthiest men in Europe. Tens of billions of dollars simply disappeared from the state budget. Yanukovych built for himself a series of extravagant homes, perhaps the ugliest in architectural history. […]

If a leader steals so much from the people that the state goes bankrupt, then his power is diminished. Yanukovych actually faced this problem last year. […] He needed someone to finance the immediate debts of the Ukrainian state so that his regime would not fall along with it. […] the Ukrainian leader had two options. The first was to begin trade cooperation with the European Union. No doubt an association agreement with the EU would have opened the way for loans. But it also would have meant the risk of the application of the rule of law within Ukraine. The other alternative was to take money from another authoritarian regime, the great neighbor to the east, the Russian Federation.

{ NY Review of Books | Continue reading }

California Barbie fan is undergoing hypnotherapy in hopes that it will lower her IQ

We are more likely to perform a task when we receive the request in our right ear rather than our left.

Sword swallowing and its side effects

The Society of Mutual Autopsy

Our Memory for Sounds is Worse Than Touch or Sight

Most important years of your life were probably from 17 to 24. Those character-building formative years tend to stand out most in our memory, even if they included difficult or tragic events, researchers found.

Every Minute Of Exercise Could Lengthen Your Life Seven Minutes

Economists finally test prisoner’s dilemma on prisoners

How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy Reputations

Boeing’s smartphone with a built-in self-destruct function.

If electric cars become popular quickly, the demand for charging them is likely to exceed supply

Why do Japanese people wear surgical masks? It’s not always for health reasons

Computer Recognition of Speakers Who Disguise Their Voice

Most recently, he tested how two different diets affected flatulence.

An Open-Source “Clothing Printer” That Lets You Make Your Own Garments [Thanks Tim]

Native American Tribe Launches Its Own Cryptocurrency

Keith Haring foundation sued by art collectors claiming loss of $40M after ‘counterfeit’ label [via gettingsome]

You want a physicist to speak at your funeral.

The Guy Who Wants to Sell Lab-Grown Salami Made of Kanye West Is “100% Serious” [Thanks Tim]

Sequentially Yours, Brazil, 1961

Today, credit cards are on supersale. Pageler says that means a big breach just happened.

Strangely, platinum credit cards on the site are selling for less money than gold cards. […]

The bots send out emails, and between 5 percent and 10 percent of recipients open the attachment, which lets the crooks in.

{ NPR | Continue reading }

Bitcoin itself may not flourish as a currency, but the underlying technology is beginning to suggest valuable new applications. […]

For example, Namecoin is a system used to create and exchange domain names: the coins contain information about the domain names themselves. Recall that the domain name market has about $3 billion in revenue per year: it’s a good example of a weird, scarce digital resource. And Bitmessage is a Bitcoin-inspired messaging platform that allows for anonymous (or at least pseudonymous) communication. What Namecoin and Bitmessage share is that they allow data to be added to the transaction, making the exchange one not just of perceived value but also of information.

Or take digital art. Larry Smith, a partner at the business architecture consultancy The matix and an analyst with long experience in digital advertising and digital finance, asks us to “imagine digital items that can’t be reproduced.” If we attached a coin identifier to a digital image, Smith says, “we could now call that a unique, one-of-a-kind digital entity.” Media on the Internet—where unlimited copying and sharing has become a scourge to rights holders—would suddenly be provably unique, permanently identified, and attached to an unambiguous monetary value.

{ Technology Review | Continue reading }

Author profiling is a problem of growing importance in applications in forensics, security, and marketing. E.g., from a forensic linguistics perspective one would like being able to know the linguistic profile of the author of a harassing text message (language used by a certain type of people) and identify certain characteristics. Similarly, from a marketing viewpoint, companies may be interested in knowing, on the basis of the analysis of blogs and online product reviews, the demographics of people that like or dislike their products. The focus is on author profiling in social media since we are mainly interested in everyday language and how it reflects basic social and personality processes.

{ PAN | Continue reading }

photos { Neal Barr, Texas Track Club, 1964 }

Cleaning woman mistakenly throws away contemporary artworks

A 10-year-old Norwegian boy who took his parents’ car for a joyride last week, claiming he was a dwarf who forgot his driver’s license, New research shows the way a room is lit can affect the way you make decisions

Scientists turn off pain using nothing but light

By mapping the links between themes that appear in dreams, network scientists reveal the connections between dreams in different cultures for the first time

Does snow make a city cleaner?

New breakthrough over the Voynich Manuscript: Professor says he has deciphered 10 words, which could lead to more discoveries.

Conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation [PDF]

Skadden is the second largest law firm in the world in revenue. Forbes magazine called it “Wall Street’s most powerful law firm,” and it has been named as America’s best Corporate Law firm every year since 2001.

Edgar Allan Poe, Interior Design Critic

Designer creates type family from his beard, bold and medium variations are determined by beard growth

Analyzing selfies worldwide (gender proportions, average head tilt angles…)

4 Russian Travel Tips for Visiting America

What ended in 1896?

To answer the seemingly simple question “Have I been here before?” we must use our memories of previous experiences to determine if our current location is familiar or novel. In a new study published in the Journal of Neuroscience researchers have identified a region of the hippocampus, called CA2, which is sensitive to even small changes in a familiar context. The results provide the first clue to the contributions of CA2 to memory and may help shed light on why this area is often found to be abnormal in the schizophrenic brain.

{ Function Space | Continue reading }

Crocodiles can climb trees: researchers

Snake-Handling Pastor Dies From Snake Bite

British internet users share more than 3.8 million cat photos and videos every day, compared to 1.4 million selfies.

China accounts for 27% of global cancer deaths

Fake Pub Studies Drinking Habits

Homophobia Takes Years Off of Your Life, Study

People who appear popular may actually be withdrawn and sad, new study claims.

Home made cigarettes are more addictive than the factory-rolled ones, study.

“Penis captivus” or can couples really get stuck together during sex?

“At a distance of 20 feet, they were clearly seeing what someone with normal vision could see at no farther than 7.5 feet away.” App Trains You to See Farther

German Hackers Are Building a DIY Space Program to Put Their Own Uncensored Internet into Space

Proust’s and Deleuze’s takes on enigmatic messages.

Instances of fuck before the fifteenth century are rare. On the origin of Fuck

The quality of work has plummeted to such a low point in the digital advertising and marketing industry that I feel like a fucking Creative God, when in reality I am just an above-average copywriter.

What I Saw When I Crashed a Wall Street Secret Society And: The full Kappa Beta Phi member list

Challenging the conventional wisdom, the most expensive fares typically appear when purchased far in advance of a flight.

Toyota to debut wireless charging for 2016 model

A New Tool That Seals Bullet Wounds in Seconds With High-Tech Sponges

Rat-infested NYC restaurants [map]

Map of dirty NYC supermarkets

Part Of Sixth Avenue Shut Down Due To Electrified Doorknobs & Grates

200-year-old douche discovered under NYC city hall

Two works created by Banksy in New York City last fall fail to net minimum bid at auction [via gettingsome]

Underwater Acrobatics Using a Self-Propelled Wheelchair

{ Lee Price }

Almost half of all disturbing dreams contain primary emotions other than fear, study finds […]

The research also found that men and women tend to have different dreams. Men were “significantly” more likely to report themes involving disaster or calamity as well as insects while women’s dreams were more likely to feature interpersonal conflicts.

{ Telegraph | Continue reading }

related { Use what hotels know about sleeping to build your own dreamland }

The husband and wife team behind the handmade cosmetics company Lush – which this week won a high court battle against Amazon over its use of the word “lush” to sell rival cosmetics – has trademarked the name “Christopher North” as a brand name for a new range of toiletries, which could eventually extend to deodorants and hair removing cream. North is the managing director of Amazon.co.uk.

{ Guardian | Continue reading }

“At Starbucks I order under the name Godot. Then leave.”

{ New Yorker | Continue reading }

Scholars and therapists agree on the existence of a sort of second law of thermodynamics for sentimental relationships. Effort is required to sustain them. Love is not enough. […]

It is not understood at this juncture why so many couples end in divorce while some others do not. That understanding is of paramount importance since the social change induced by marital disruption deeply affects the social structure of contemporary western societies as well as the well being of their members.

The fact that, for most couples, both partners plan enduring relationships and commit to work for them, poses a contradiction with the reportedly high divorce rates. This contradiction is referred to in this article as the failure paradox. According to Gottman et al, the field of marriage research is in desperate need of (a mathematical) theory. This paper aims to alleviate the need. In particular, it offers a consistent explanation for the failure paradox. […]

In view of the ubiquity of the phenomenon of couple break-up, it seems sensible to look beyond specific flaws in relationships and search instead for an underlying basic deterministic mechanism accounting for break-ups. Building on sociological data, we propose a mathematical model based on optimal control theory accounting for the rational planning by a homogamous couple of a long term relationship. […]

The mathematical theory introduced in this paper unveils an underlying mechanism that may explain the deterioration and disruption occurring massively in sentimental relationships that were initially planned to last forever. Two forces work together to ease the appearance of the deterioration process. First, it happens that since an extra effort must always be put in to sustain a relationship on the successful path, partners may relax and lower the effort level if the gap is uncomfortable. Then instability enters the scene, driving the feeling-effort state out of the lasting successful dynamics. […] Lasting relationships are possible only if the effort gap is tolerable and the optimal effort making is continuously watched over to stay on the target dynamics.

{ PLoS | Continue reading }

[a]mong the married couples, a higher discrepancy between men’s and women’s number of previous intercourse partners was related to lower levels of love, satisfaction, and commitment in the relationship.

{ The Journal of Sex Research | Continue reading }

In this study, we tested the hypothesis that a nonhuman sexual stimulus would elicit a genital response in women but not in men. Eighteen heterosexual women and 18 heterosexual men viewed seven sexual film stimuli, six human films and one nonhuman primate film, while measurements of genital and subjective sexual arousal were recorded. Women showed small increases in genital arousal to the nonhuman stimulus and large increases in genital arousal to both human male and female stimuli. Men did not show any genital arousal to the nonhuman stimulus and demonstrated a category-specific pattern of arousal to the human stimuli that corresponded to their stated sexual orientation.

{ Biological Psychology }

A set of mathematical laws that I call the Improbability Principle tells us that we should not be surprised by coincidences. In fact, we should expect coincidences to happen.

One of the key strands of the principle is the law of truly large numbers. This law says that given enough opportunities, we should expect a specified event to happen, no matter how unlikely it may be at each opportunity. Sometimes, though, when there are really many opportunities, it can look as if there are only relatively few. This misperception leads us to grossly underestimate the probability of an event: we think something is incredibly unlikely, when it’s actually very likely, perhaps almost certain.

{ Scientific American | Continue reading }

{ 29-year-old Akari Aoki slowly creeps down the streets of Tokyo in her zombie persona | slideshow }

Romantic love is also associated, particularly in early stages, with specific physiological, psychological, and behavioral indices that have been described and quantified by psychologists and others. These include emotional responses such as euphoria, intense focused attention on a preferred individual, obsessive thinking about him or her, emotional dependency on and craving for emotional union with this beloved, and increased energy. Tennov (1979) coined the term “limerance” for this special state, and Hatfield and Sprecher (1986) developed a questionnaire scale to measure it. The universality, euphoria, and focused attention of romantic love suggest that reward and motivation systems in the human brain could be involved.

In addition, cross-cultural descriptions of romantic love regularly include reward-related images and suggest strong motivation to win a specific mating partner. For example, the oldest love poem from Summeria, “Inanna and Dumuzi,” dating ∼4,000 yr ago and found on cuneiform tablets in the Uruk language is translated, “My beloved, the delight of my eyes…” (Wolkstein and Kramer 1983). From the Song of Songs, the Hebrew 10th century poem comes, “…your love is more wonderful than wine …the sound of your name is perfume … . I sought the one my soul loves…” (Wolkstein and Kramer 1983). Furthermore, among the ethnographies canvassed in the review of Jankowiak and Fischer (1992) is one by Harris (1995) who cited evidence of the yearning for love and the motivation to win the beloved among the peoples of Mangaia, Cook Islands, Polynesia. These people have a word for “dying for love.” […]

Several results support our two predictions that 1) early stage, intense romantic love is associated with subcortical reward regions that are also dopamine-rich (e.g., Fisher 1998) and 2) romantic love engages a motivation system involving neural systems associated with motivation to acquire a reward rather than romantic love being a particular emotion in its own right (Aron and Aron 1991). […]

One of the most interesting findings of this study is regional effects related to the number of months in love. Notably, several limbic cortical regions showed a correlation with the length of the relationship: anterior and posterior cingulate, mid-insula, and retrosplenial cortex; but also, parietal, inferior frontal, and middle temporal cortex. […] these results highlight the importance of these cortical regions for processing stimulus/internal state change, and the importance of taking time factors into account in future studies of human relationships. At the same time, these results must be interpreted cautiously because they are cross-sectional, so that, for example, it is possible they represent differences in the kinds of people that remain intensely in love over a longer period rather than changes over time.

{ Journal of Neurophysiology | Continue reading }

In two studies, we examine the effect of manipulating the position of different foods on a restaurant menu. Items placed at the beginning or the end of the list of their category options were up to twice as popular as when they were placed in the center of the list. Given this effect, placing healthier menu items at the top or bottom of item lists and less healthy ones in their center (e.g., sugared drinks vs. calorie-free drinks) should result in some increase in favor of healthier food choices.

{ Judgment and Decision Making | Continue reading }

This work explored the potential negative consequences of unexpected help. A behavioral observation and a survey study found that men are unlikely to have the door held open for them in a chivalrous manner, whereby they walk through the door before the person helping them does. In an experimental field study, passersby were randomly assigned to experience this type of door-holding help or not. Males who had the door held for them in this manner by a male confederate reported lower self-esteem and self-efficacy than males who did not have the door held for them. Females were unaffected by door-holding condition. These results demonstrate negative consequences of seemingly innocuous but unexpected helping behavior that violates gender norms.

{ Social Influence | via Improbable }