There are many philosophical questions surrounding the notion of lying. Is it ever morally acceptable to lie? Can we acquire knowledge from people who might be lying to us? More fundamental, however, is the question of what, exactly, constitutes the concept of lying. According to one traditional definition, lying requires intending to deceive. More recently, Thomas Carson has suggested that lying requires warranting the truth of what you do not believe.

This paper examines these two prominent definitions and some cases that seem to pose problems for them. Importantly, theorists working on this topic fundamentally disagree about whether these problem cases are genuine instances of lying and, thus, serve as counterexamples to the definitions on offer. To settle these disputes, we elicited judgments about the proposed counterexamples from ordinary language users unfettered by theoretical bias. The data suggest that everyday speakers of English count bald-faced lies and proviso lies as lies. Thus, we claim that a new definition is needed to capture common usage.

{ Philosophical Psychology | via Improbable }

Playing Moderately Hard to Get

Undergraduate college student participants imagined a potential romantic partner who reciprocated a low (reciprocating attraction one day a week), moderate (reciprocating attraction three days a week), high (reciprocating attraction five days a week), or unspecified degree of attraction (no mention of reciprocation). Participants then rated their degree of attraction toward the potential partner. […] The results support the notion that playing moderately hard to get elicits more intense feelings of attraction from potential suitors than playing too easy or too hard to get.

{ Interpersona | Continue reading }

photo { Danilo Hess }

{ Wikipedia Vandalism }

Man tries to sell stolen brains on eBay

Increase in the number of books challenged or banned across the U.S. in 2013.

Thief ripped an ATM out of a Chinatown bank with his SUV - then tried to drag it over the Manhattan Bridge.

Wind chill in NYC was about 2 below today. At that temperature, exposed skin can start to freeze within 15 minutes.

Men are more likely to drop dead during sex if they’re cheating.

Participants had worse memory for objects when they took photos of them.

Biologists once thought humans had 2 million genes. Now it turns out we have 19,000, fewer than nematode worms.

Fate of bones and wood in the Antarctic sea

A mathematical pattern of movement called a Lévy walk describes the foraging behavior of animals from sharks to honey bees, and now for the first time has been shown to describe human hunter-gatherer movement as well.

This study investigated the relationship between foot size and human balance performance.

Walking through doorways causes forgetting.

When, and How, Should Cognitive Bias Matter to Law?

Research shows eye-reflections in photos could be used to identify criminals.

The most accurate psychopaths in cinema.

Are Germans dour, Brits reserved, and Americans brash? The Inaccuracy of National Character Stereotypes

The Paranoid and Obsessive Life of a Mid-Level Bookie

The community of people who consume their own urine every morning to boost their immunity.

When I stopped smoking weed, my appetite shrivelled and my head throbbed – but it was the dreams that really shook me.

Some users will administer it to their children—they’ll blow it into their mouths if they’re smoking it. I Embedded with a Community of Meth Users.

How to Decode What Your Dog Is Saying to You

Dogs Poop in Alignment with Earth’s Magnetic Field.

10 Animals That Went Extinct in 2013

Scientists create glow-in-the-dark pigs using jellyfish DNA.

This Self-Cleaning Plate May Mean You’ll Never Have To Do The Dishes

Coinye West isn’t an official production of Kanye West, and the developers are staying anonymous because they probably fear the inevitable copyright lawsuits.

Its 2014 trends report predicts that next year will be one to be “proudly imperfect”—including in the world of food.

Roman Emperors, Up To AD 476 And Not Including Usurpers, In Order Of How Hardcore Their Deaths Were

After the tomb was completed, the slaves who built it were massacred, and then the soldiers who killed them were also killed.

What is the best position to use a laptop?

One of the most popular puzzles ever created was the Get Off the Earth puzzle, invented by America’s premier puzzlist, Sam Loyd, in 1898.

Marijuana Overdoses Kill 37 in Colorado On First Day of Legalization

Rivalry

“News is what somebody does not want you to print. All the rest is advertising,” […]

In 2014, the fastest-growing form of online “content” is an epidemic of heartwarming videos (“One Mother Did Something Illegal To Help Her Kids, And This Cop Was Totally, Unexpectedly Cool”), funny lists (“33 Reasons Miley Cyrus Was Actually The Best Thing To Happen To 2013”) and click-bait headlines from sites such as BuzzFeed, Upworthy and ViralNova.

Rather than being found on news sites or through search engines, they flourish on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. While reporters pride themselves on digging out bad news and awkward facts, these stories often appeal to positive emotions – affection, admiration and awe. They are packaged to make people share content with friends, and to spread like a virus.

Some of this is advertising – BuzzFeed designs viral campaigns for companies that are difficult to tell apart from its other output. Much of it has an advertising-like aspect. […]

One study of 7,000 New York Times articles by two professors at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School found that sad stories were the least shared because sadness is a low-arousal, negative state.

{ FT | Continue reading }

What does the ‘B’ in Benoit B Mandelbrot stand for? Benoit B Mandelbrot.

Mathematician Mandelbrot coined the word fractal – a form of geometric repetition.


{ Guardian | Continue reading }

related { ‘Fractal Orgy’ Is the First Ever Raw Fractal To Be Banned }

Why do we have numbers like 12 and 60 in our system of time units?

What are the basics of the art of negotiation?

Why don’t Einstein’s descendants inherit Einstein’s IQ?

Why didn’t the creator of Hashtag patent the concept?

What is the greatest scientific discovery of 2013?

Ethics: If a serial killer hits her head and develops complete amnesia, is she still guilty?

What happens in the brain during and after orgasm?

What are the best ways to think of ideas for a startup?

{ Quora | More }

When writing essays on disgust, teenage girls in Lucknow, India, listed, among other things, feces, urine, toilets, sweat, menstrual blood, cut hair, impurities of childbirth, vomit, open wound, saliva, dirty feet, bad breath, nose picking, dirty nails, clothes that have been worn, flies, maggots, lice, mouse in a curry, rats, stray dog, meat, fish, pigs, garbage dump, sick person, beggars, touching someone of lower caste, crowded trains, kissing in public, betrayal.

Here are some of the things that Dutch women found revolting: feces, cats, aphids in lettuce, hairs, dogs, pollution, vermin, drug users, vomit, drunkenness, dust, rotten waste, fat people, sweat, badsmelling food, insulting, stickiness, politicians, offal, worms, dirty old men, fishmongers’ hands, flies.

Women in Burkina Faso mentioned feces, dirty latrine, dirty food, diarrhea, flies on food, sores, rubbish in the yard, worms, sexual relations before a child is weaned, smelly drains, dirty clothes, sick people, pigs, vomit.

A group of women in Cheshire, in the north of England, included feces, stained kitchen, flies, dog diarrhea, moldy food, drunken louts, vomit, rude people, wounds, foul language, maggots, eating with mouth open, man beating a woman, sweaty person, body parts in jars, cruelty to a horse, stained toilet, cleaning another’s false teeth. […]

Some of the most disgusting bodily products turned out to be the most deadly.

{ Natural History | Continue reading }

Time travel has captured the public imagination for much of the past century, but little has been done to actually search for time travelers. Here, three implementations of Internet searches for time travelers are described, all seeking a prescient mention of information not previously available. The first search covered prescient content placed on the Internet, highlighted by a comprehensive search for specific terms in tweets on Twitter. The second search examined prescient inquiries submitted to a search engine, highlighted by a comprehensive search for specific search terms submitted to a popular astronomy web site. The third search involved a request for a direct Internet communication, either by email or tweet, pre-dating to the time of the inquiry. Given practical verifiability concerns, only time travelers from the future were investigated. No time travelers were discovered. Although these negative results do not disprove time travel, given the great reach of the Internet, this search is perhaps the most comprehensive to date.

{ arXiv | Continue reading }

But it didn’t take physicists long to realise that while the Wheeler-DeWitt equation solved one significant problem, it introduced another. The new problem was that time played no role in this equation. In effect, it says that nothing ever happens in the universe, a prediction that is clearly at odds with the observational evidence.

{ arXiv | Continue reading }

Small Alabama town accidentally hires black drag queens to dance in Christmas parade

Scientists Successfully Forecast the Size and Location of an Earthquake

Evidence that the Lunar Cycle Influences Human Sleep

“Grasping the testicle with forceps proved laborious” in most of the animals, the authors write. They also mention using a “two-handed technique” and ”moderate traction.” Why It’s Nearly Impossible to Castrate a Hippo

People who tell themselves to get excited rather than trying to relax can improve their performance during anxiety-inducing activities such as public speaking and math tests, study finds.

The current study examined whether men’s ratings of women’s desirability as a long-term pairbond, based on static photographs, were related to the women’s second-to-fourth digit (2D:4D) ratio and their sexual attitudes and behavior.

Human development of the ability to learn from bad news [PDF]

What Are Neuromarketers Really Selling? The poor data and shoddy logic behind a hyped business boom.

Researchers identify gene that influences the ability to remember faces.

Imagining the Post-Antibiotics Future

How radioactive poison became the assassin’s weapon of choice: The mysterious life and brutal death of a Russian dissident.

How the Science of Swarms Can Help Us Fight Cancer and Predict the Future

What Happened On Easter Island — A New (Even Scarier) Scenario

The only thing set to be less watchable than Girls in 2014 was E!’s upcoming reality show, Rich Kids of Instagram, based on the worst Tumblr in existence with the same name.

Personal Possessions found in the Pacific. Related: Tiny museum in New York showcases the ordinary

{ The World’s Best Ever }

Humans show a natural tendency to discount bad news while incorporating good news into beliefs (the “good news–bad news effect”), an effect that may help explain seemingly irrational risk taking. Understanding how this bias develops with age is important because adolescents are prone to engage in risky behavior; thus, educating them about danger is crucial.

We reveal a striking valence-dependent asymmetry in how belief updating develops with age. In the ages tested (9–26 y), younger age was associated with inaccurate updating of beliefs in response to undesirable in- formation regarding vulnerability. In contrast, the ability to update beliefs accurately in response to desirable information remained relatively stable with age. This asymmetry was mediated by adequate computational use of positive but not negative estimation errors to alter beliefs.

The results are important for understanding how belief formation develops and might help explain why adolescents do not respond adequately to warnings.

{ PNAS | PDF }

Over half a century ago, the global economy largely depended on just ten or so different materials. Most important products were made out of wood, brick, iron, copper, gold, silver or a few plastics — and that was about it.

Things are wildly different today. A huge chunk of modern-day technology, from hybrid cars to iPhones to flat-screen TVs to radiation screens, use dozens of different metals and alloys. A computer chip typically involves more than 60 different elements that are specifically selected to optimize performance, like europium or dysprosium.

And that’s long raised a concern: What would happen if we run short of any of these valuable metals? Say there’s a war. Or unrest in a crucial mining region. Or China decides to lock up its strontium deposits. Could we easily come up with substitutes? Or is modern society vulnerable to a materials shortage?
Here’s the case for vulnerability: A fascinating recent paper in The Proceedings of the National Academies of Science looks at 62 different metals that are widely used in modern-day industry. For a dozen metals, potential substitutes are either inadequate or flat-out unavailable. And there are no “excellent” substitutes for any of the 62 metals.

{ Washington Post | Continue reading }

art { Robert Indiana, The X-5, 1963 }

A high-ranking FBI agent filed a sensitive internal manual detailing the bureau’s secret interrogation procedures with the Library of Congress, where anyone with a library card can read it. […]

“A document that has not been released does not even need a copyright,” says Steven Aftergood, a government secrecy expert at the Federation of American Scientists. “Who is going to plagiarize from it? Even if you wanted to, you couldn’t violate the copyright because you don’t have the document. It isn’t available.”

{ Mother Jones | Continue reading }

French officials have fined a pub €9,000 for “undeclared labour” after a customer returned some empty glasses to the bar.

11 percent of people shop online naked, survey says.

‘Whatever’ rated most annoying word.

After exclusion of days when Bond was unable to drink, his weekly alcohol consumption was 92 units a week, over four times the recommended amount. Were James Bond’s drinks shaken because of alcohol induced tremor?

Distinct Personality Traits Associated with Intake of Coffee, Tea, and Cola Drinks and Smoking

When Waking Up Becomes the Nightmare: Hypnopompic Hallucinatory Pain

Some might consider drilling a hole in someone’s head a form of torture, but in the province of Ahdahuaylas in Peru, ca. AD 100-1250, it was state-of-the-art medical care.

Most vitamins such as antioxidants don’t help to prevent cancer, heart disease and dementia, and some supplements could be harmful, say doctors who advise people to stop wasting their money on the pills.

Tracking the secret lives of great white sharks. “There’s no frickin’ pattern at all.”

What color is the sun?

James Joyce: caught up in a scandal?

The recording industry’s nightmare: A government-backed torrent site

The US now watches the majority of its online porn on mobile phones.

One day in 1856, hundreds of people gathered to gawk at an escaped pet squirrel up a tree near New York’s City Hall.

The one airport hack that will get you home faster

While there until 5 a.m., they caroused with two women who called themselves travel executives from Great Britain.

Republique is set in a dystopic police state where everything is under surveillance. More: “There were lots of publishers who said you’re not making a mobile game here, you’re making a console game that nobody would want to play on mobile.”

The object of the game is to cut down the hydra to its root. Play: Try to defeat the hydra!

Shed your weight problem here

{ Behind the Scenes Look at the Horror Classic “The Shining” }

Scientists sent a text message using evaporated vodka.

Man fined 1.3 million yen for urinating in elevator every day for 6 months.

Warren Buffett made $37M a day this year.

The goal is to identify how much time can pass before a food no longer tastes good, which in turn dictates the sell-by date. Generally, foods are still safe to eat after that point, but they won’t taste as they were intended. Taste-testers are an elite bunch. In its last recruitment period three years ago, 150 people applied. The NFL accepted 15.

Uncontrollable rage could be cured by aspirin.

When You Criticize Someone, You Make It Harder for that Person to Change

Why does time fly as we get older?

Meteorologists solve the last major mystery of rain.

The average computer user makes more than 1000 mouse clicks per day. Scientists would love to know if that practice affects other aspects of your brain’s control of your body. The problem is finding people with no computer experience.

Valuable scientific data disappearing at alarming rate, 80% lost in two decades into old email addresses and obsolete storage devices.

Who Owns the World’s Biggest Bitcoin Wallet? The FBI

Bitcoin Alternative Dogecoin Soars 900% As Other Crypto-Currencies Suffer. Almost all of the 53 crypto-currencies tracked by CoinMarketCap are seeing growth.

While some analysts initially suggested that Google’s goal was to more thoroughly automate factories, it’s now clear that the company’s team of engineers and scientists has a vision of truly dexterous, autonomous robots that can walk on sidewalks, carry packages, and push strollers.

U.S. Copyright Office recommends that artists be paid a royalty when their work is resold at a profit.[NY Times]

Many people think that tweens and teens make up much of the music buying population. But older people actually buy the most music. So, why do record labels market most music to the demographic that buys the least music?

You have never actually used a Styrofoam cup, plate or takeout box.

The next big thing in surfing is artificial waves you can ride anywhere, any time.

Before we move on to other topics, I think it’s interesting how much the built landscape of New York has changed since you wrote The Warriors.

The Billion-Dollar Megaprojects That Will Transform NYC By 2030

New York City galleries have noticed an uptick in newcomers who share photos of themselves on social media.

Man Says ‘Fuck It,’ Eats Lunch At 10:58 A.M.

Chug-a-lug, Donna.

US scientists have performed a dramatic reversal of the ageing process in animal studies. They used a chemical to rejuvenate muscle in mice and said it was the equivalent of transforming a 60-year-old’s muscle to that of a 20-year-old - but muscle strength did not improve.

{ BBC | Continue reading }

Researchers have discovered a cause of aging in mammals that may be reversible.

The essence of this finding is a series of molecular events that enable communication inside cells between the nucleus and mitochondria. As communication breaks down, aging accelerates. By administering a molecule naturally produced by the human body, scientists restored the communication network in older mice. […]

“The aging process we discovered is like a married couple—when they are young, they communicate well, but over time, living in close quarters for many years, communication breaks down,” said Harvard Medical School Professor of Genetics David Sinclair, senior author on the study. “And just like with a couple, restoring communication solved the problem.”

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading | more }