Bed Bath is always so crowded on Sundays. Megapuke.
The study found the simpler the design, the better. But why?
The study found the simpler the design, the better. But why?
Typically, the loser of a bar fight who later initiates a lawsuit has been beaten up pretty badly, or at least has the medical bills to suggest significant personal injuries. The loser sues the bar on one of several theories — the most common ones being inadequate security, not having banned a patron known to have a history of fighting, bar employees initiating the violence, or bar employees responding to a situation with unreasonable force. But that’s the boring legal stuff. […]
Roughly equal numbers of men and women filed these lawsuits. […] Everyone I can remember had tattoos. […]
You might think that a bar fight is most commonly started between two guys fighting over a woman. That’s not so, at least not in my experience. Ejection seems to be a more precipitating event. More than half the bar fights I had to sort out started when a too-drunk patron was asked to leave and refused to do so. […]
Women were faster to employ weapons, whether prepared (the knife) or improvised. Improvised weapons are almost always thrown, and have included highball glasses, pool balls, bar stools, knives, and in one notable case, the assailant’s own feces.
{ More art than literature, the new book “And Every Single One Was Someone” consists of the single word “Jew,” in tiny type, printed six million times to signify the number of Jews killed during the Holocaust. | NY Times | Continue reading | via gettingsome }
Craigslist sperm donor told to pay child support
Naked man walks into a bar with a bag of sex toys and asks, “What’s the problem?”
Gmail Glitch Is Causing Thousands Of Emails To Be Sent To One Man’s Hotmail Account
The Communicative Functions of Emoticons in Workplace E-Mails
What percent of your work day do you spend on email? 28%. Use email auto-analytics to tame your inbox.
How Silicon Valley’s most celebrated CEOs conspired to drive down 100,000 tech engineers’ wages
This paper will explore how the Nazis tried to quell the demand for jazz music by creating a new, ideologically acceptable music. [PDF]
“Mr. Faulkner, you were saying a while ago that you don’t like interviews.”
How the U.S. Maps the World’s Most Disputed Territories
When Mary Ellis died in 1828, her family buried her in a peaceful patch of woods near a bend in the Raritan River. She’s still there, but the trees are long gone—her body now rests in the middle of a movieplex parking lot.
Photos of every New York City subway stop
Since 1955, The Journal of Irreproducible Results has offered “spoofs, parodies, whimsies, burlesques, lampoons and satires” about life in the laboratory. Among its greatest hits: “Acoustic Oscillations in Jell-O, With and Without Fruit, Subjected to Varying Levels of Stress” and “Utilizing Infinite Loops to Compute an Approximate Value of Infinity.” The good-natured jibes are a backhanded celebration of science. What really goes on in the lab is, by implication, of a loftier, more serious nature.
It has been jarring to learn in recent years that a reproducible result may actually be the rarest of birds. Replication, the ability of another lab to reproduce a finding, is the gold standard of science, reassurance that you have discovered something true. But that is getting harder all the time. With the most accessible truths already discovered, what remains are often subtle effects, some so delicate that they can be conjured up only under ideal circumstances, using highly specialized techniques.
Fears that this is resulting in some questionable findings began to emerge in 2005, when Dr. John P. A. Ioannidis, a kind of meta-scientist who researches research, wrote a paper pointedly titled “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.”
[…]
The fear that much published research is tainted has led to proposals to make replication easier by providing more detailed documentation, including videos of difficult procedures. […] Scientists talk about “tacit knowledge,” the years of mastery it can take to perform a technique. The image they convey is of an experiment as unique as a Rembrandt.
Why does life exist?
Popular hypotheses credit a primordial soup, a bolt of lightning and a colossal stroke of luck. But if a provocative new theory is correct, luck may have little to do with it. Instead, according to the physicist proposing the idea, the origin and subsequent evolution of life follow from the fundamental laws of nature and “should be as unsurprising as rocks rolling downhill.”
From the standpoint of physics, there is one essential difference between living things and inanimate clumps of carbon atoms: The former tend to be much better at capturing energy from their environment and dissipating that energy as heat. Jeremy England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity. The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life.
Put it in the right place and sperm generally knows where to go. But researchers who use sperm in experiments have a harder time controlling where these swimmers end up. Put sperm onto a petri dish or glass slide, for example, and it’ll wander off in any direction it pleases.
Today, Alejandra Guidobaldi at CONICET in Argentina and a few pals say they’ve worked out a way to control the direction in which sperm swims to keep it on the straight and narrow. Their discovery could lead to new ways of generating a uniform stream of sperm and perhaps even a jet of the stuff.
Countries print 150 billion new notes each year, at a cost of about $10 billion. Cash attracts grime and dirt, gets stuffed into underwear drawers, is daubed with pens, and exposed to harsh UV light. In other words, money goes through a lot, with the result that 150,000 tons of it has to be destroyed annually.
As a new paper explains, one of the main problems with keeping money in good condition is sebum, the substance the body produces to protect the skin. Waxy and oily, sebum builds up on the surface of the paper and then reacts with the air, eventually turning bills a nasty shade of yellow.
The paper, published in an American Chemical Society journal, discusses a new process that might keep more notes circulating longer, and therefore cut the cost of printing and distributing new bills. It involves subjecting notes to supercritical CO2.
image { Intricate mechanical and chemical separation is needed to extract and recover pigment from US currency. The ink is then re-stabilized, divided into individual doses and packaged into medical vials. | Diddo, The Cure for Greed }
“I want you to know…” or “I’m just saying…” or “I hate to be the one to tell you this…” Often, these phrases imply the opposite of what the words mean, as with the phrase, “I’m not saying…” as in “I’m not saying we have to stop seeing each other, but…” […]
Language experts have textbook names for these phrases—”performatives,” or “qualifiers.” Essentially, taken alone, they express a simple thought, such as “I am writing to say…” At first, they seem harmless, formal, maybe even polite. But coming before another statement, they often signal that bad news, or even some dishonesty on the part of the speaker, will follow. […]
Their use may be increasing as a result of social media, where people use phrases such as “I am thinking that…” or “As far as I know…” both to avoid committing to a definitive position and to manage the impression they make in print.
photo { Marek Chorzepa }
Opera Singer Says Operation Ruined Her Career With Flatulence
Only 15% of Davos attendees are women, even fewer than last year.
An agunah is a woman whose husband refuses to give her a divorce – in Hebrew it means “chained wife.” Mark Oppenheimer reports on agunah in the Orthodox Jewish community.
Women go on twice as many diets as they have lovers.
It is now possible to 3-D print your unborn fetus.
Swiss company Algordanza takes cremated human remains and compresses them into diamonds.
{ When a shopper enters Reebok’s flagship store in New York City, a face-detection system analyzes 10 to 20 frames per second to build a profile of the potential customer. The algorithms can determine a shopper’s gender and age range as well as behavioral and emotional cues, such as interest in a given display (it tracks glances and the amount of time spent standing in one place). Reebok installed the system, called Cara, in May 2013; other companies are following suit. Tesco recently unveiled a technology in the U.K. that triggers digital ads at gas stations tailored to the viewer’s age and gender. | Popular Science | full story }
The news around shopping during the holiday season was dominated by two separate stories. One talked about how traffic to brick-and-mortar stores was well below expectations, and that these retailers were forced to discount tremendously to drive sales. The other talked about how an enormous late surge in packages coming from e-commerce companies overwhelmed the capacity of UPS and, to a lesser extent, FedEx, and caused many of these packages to arrive after Christmas.
But, to me, these two stories are not at all separate, they simply reflect different sides of the same narrative: We’re in the midst of a profound structural shift from physical to digital retail.
Psychoactive Plants in the Bible
[…]
The holy anointing oil is essentially an anxiolytic-hallucinogen. The transdermal application of it led to its absorption and psychoactive effects, even in extremely low doses. […]
Myrrh is a resin that is used widely in the bible. Myrrh contains the terpenes furanoeudesma-1,3-diene and curzarene which are Mu-opioid agonists. This opioid receptor is the same one that morphine activates. This means that inhaling or absorbing myrrh incense can cause a drug reaction.
art { Francis Bacon, Portrait of George Dyer Talking, 1966 }
You prefer apples to oranges, but cherries to apples. Yet if I offer you just cherries and oranges, you take the oranges. […] New research shows that sometimes a decision like this, which sounds irrational, can actually be the best one.
photo { James Tolich }
In the late 1960s and ‘70s, working with the New York City Planning Commission, the sociologist William H. Whyte conducted groundbreaking granular studies of the city’s public spaces, spending hours filming and photographing and taking notes about how people behave in public. Where do they like to sit? Where do they like to stand? When they bump into people they know, how long do their conversations last? […]
Whyte and his acolytes formulated conclusions that were, for their time, counterintuitive. For example, he discovered that city people don’t actually like wide-open, uncluttered spaces. Despite the Modernist assumption that what harried urban people need are oases of nature in the city, if you bother to watch people, you see that they tend to prefer narrow streets, hustle and bustle, crowdedness. Build a high-rise with an acre of empty plaza around it, and the plaza may seem desolate, even dangerous. People will avoid it. If you want people to linger, he wrote, give them seating — but not just benches, which make it impossible for people to face one another. Movable chairs can be better. Also: Never cordon off a fountain.
[…]
For his dissertation at the University of Toronto, Hampton studied an extraordinary early experiment in wired living. In the mid-1990s, a consortium that included IBM and Apple helped raise more than $100 million to turn a new suburban development in Newmarket, Ontario, a Toronto suburb, into the neighborhood of the future. As houses went up, more than half of them got high-speed Internet (this in the age of dial-up), advanced browser software for their computers, a tool for videoconferencing between houses and a Napster-like tool for music sharing. He treated the other homes as a control group. From October 1997 through August 1999, Hampton lived in a basement apartment in the new development, observing and interviewing his neighbors.
Hampton found that, rather than isolating people, technology made them more connected. […] [T]hey were much more successful at addressing local problems, like speeding cars and a small spate of burglaries. They also used their Listserv to coordinate offline events, even sign-ups for a bowling league. Hampton was one of the first scholars to marshal evidence that the web might make people less atomized rather than more.
Hampton crudely summarized his former M.I.T. colleague Sherry Turkle’s book “Alone Together.” “She said: ‘You know, today, people standing at a train station, they’re all talking on their cellphones. Public spaces aren’t communal anymore. No one interacts in public spaces.’ I’m like: ‘How do you know that? We don’t know that. Compared to what? Like, three years ago?’ ”
Turkle said that her decades of observation are pretty conclusive: “When you watch a mother texting as she pushes a stroller — and I follow that mother for blocks, I walk alongside — you know it. You know that the streetscape used to include mothers who spoke to their children.”
[…]
According to Hampton, our tendency to interact with others in public has, if anything, improved since the ‘70s. The P.P.S. films showed that in 1979 about 32 percent of those visited the steps of the Met were alone; in 2010, only 24 percent were alone in the same spot. When I mentioned these results to Sherry Turkle, she said that Hampton could be right about these specific public spaces, but that technology may still have corrosive effects in the home: what it does to families at the dinner table, or in the den. Rich Ling, a mobile-phone researcher in Denmark, also noted the limitations of Hampton’s sample. “He was capturing the middle of the business day,” said Ling, who generally admires Hampton’s work. For businesspeople, “there might be a quick check, do I have an email or a text message, then get on with life.” Fourteen-year-olds might be an entirely different story.
{ NY Times | Continue reading | Thanks Jane JL! }
A life without feelings — unimaginable. Although emotions are so important, philosophers are still discussing what they actually are. Prof. Dr. Albert Newen and Dr. Luca Barlassina of the Institute of Philosophy II at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum have drawn up a new theory. According to this, emotions are not just special cases of perception or thought but a separate kind of mental state which arises through the integration of feelings of bodily processes and cognitive contents.
related { Where in the body do our emotions lie? }
Lawsuit Accuses Hit Show New Girl of “Blatant Plagiarism”
[…]
In documents obtained by The Hollywood Reporter, it’s clear Counts and Gold aren’t fucking around.
images { 1 | Jayne Mansfield, 1964 }
jennyapples
Looks like they did a pretty simple edit job. I’ve done more retouching on basic portrait work.ToHelenBackAgain
Then you’re a crap photographer.jennyapples
lololol colour balance, brightness, levels, these are all totally normal things to alter.ToHelenBackAgain
You can’t get a good shot in the first place, you’re the problem. Photographers did not always have retouching to fall back on, and they got some pretty damned good shots without it. You are advertising that you are unable to do that.jennyapples
After spending 15 years as a photographer and countless hours in the darkroom, I am authorized to say you don’t have a fucking clue what you’re talking about. Dodge and burn, fool. Dodge and burn.ToHelenBackAgain
Argument from authority, which tends to be problematic in the first place (look it up, fool), and also pre-invalidated by the very subject.
Dude, this is Annie Freakin’ Leibovitz. You’re not a better authority than she is, and she screwed up massively here.jennyapples
Have I personally offended you? I’ve seen you on here before and know you’re not a troll. Are you just a massive fucking asshole, or what is your deal? My point was that these aren’t particularly edited shots and that they were fairly true to the original photos, so the bounty on the pictures did not serve any purpose because there was almost nothing to reveal. And when I said I’ve done more editing on basic portrait work, I clearly, to anyone who isn’t you, was saying that these were edited with such a light touch that even regular old portrait work requires more editing (i.e. not much).ToHelenBackAgain
You’re just wrong, that’s all.
Woman finds wrong body in mother’s casket at funeral home.
Penis pumps draining Medicare of millions
Crime study ended after data stolen by thief
Cyber security firm says it uncovered at least six ongoing attacks at merchants across the US and identified the Target malware author.
A new mathematical model helps hackers to pick the optimal moment to launch a cyber attack against a victim and inflict the most damage. [more]
Systematic evidence of fake crying by a baby
In competitions, men make opponents mad in order to win, study shows.
Compared with a brain at rest, a brain listening to music and watching a video is heavier.
How Argentine Farmers Overpowered Monsanto
“anticipatory shipping:” Amazon would consider things like previous orders and searches, wish lists, and the time your cursor spends hovering over a listing to determine what to pre-ship where.
BlackBerry makes an announcement that it just sold 1,000 phones
Successful comedians display symptoms of psychosis, study says
Is it possible that adolescence is most difficult—and sometimes a crisis—not for teenagers as much as for the adults who raise them? That adolescence has a bigger impact on adults than it does on kids?
Queens McDonald’s Terrorized by Pack of Senior Citizens
How Rich Was Hitler and is someone getting rich off his royalties today?
Will Commercial Airplanes Have Parachutes Someday?
Why do some birds fly in a V-formation?
How to open a bottle of wine – without a corkscrew
Here Are the Unretouched Images From Lena Dunham’s Vogue Shoot
American Apparel Mannequins Now Sporting Full Bush [and American Apparel Tells Us Why They’re Using Mannequins with Pubic Hair]