Every day, the same, again
Woman arrested after restaurant guests covered in soy sauce.
Boulder resident beats raccoon to death as ‘revenge’ for cat’s death.
Former Disney exec’s reputation destroyed after porn-star scandal.
Kim Jong-un’s ex-girlfriend ‘executed by firing squad for appearing in porn films.’
Researchers Grow 3-D Human Brain Tissues.
Shaking hands with a cheat or thief, or merely sitting in a chair they used, is likely to make you experience feelings of guilt, according to a new study.
Learning a new language alters brain development.
How to read and understand a scientific paper: a guide for non-scientists.
5 reasons you should be reading the CIA’s online magazine.
The decline of serial killers and rise of the sharing economy.
Impostor uses Facebook and a co-opted photo to befriend California kids.
Skype confirms 3D video calls are under development.
What happened to India’s economic miracle?
Here’s what’s in store for India if the rupee continues to crumble.
In the U.S., Lemann is virtually unknown, even though he and his two longtime partners now control three icons of U.S. consumer culture: Heinz ketchup, Burger King, and Budweiser beer. The combined market value of the companies they run is $187 billion—larger than that of Citigroup.
Does Low-Fat Yogurt Make You Fat?
We discuss the idea of building a 2 km high mountain in the Netherlands.
Inside the hospital-themed restaurant where meals are eaten in a stylised operating theatre, on a dentist’s chair or in a gynaecologist’s exam room.
And can you, by no drift of circumstance, get from him why he puts on this confusion
In the two years since Atos Origin, the IT consultancy, declared its intention to become a “zero email” company, other companies introducing restrictions include Volkswagen, which has stopped its servers forwarding email to employees’ BlackBerrys outside working hours, and Ferrari, which clamped down on email, arguing that it is often inefficient.
It is not just email. Constant text messaging, Tweeting, checking of social networks can now be seen as a disorder. Last year, “internet addiction” was added to the DSM, the international psychiatric diagnostic manual. Concerned executives from Microsoft, Google, Xerox and Intel got together with academics and consultants some years ago to form the Information Overload Research Group to try to find solutions to the electronic deluge. Basex, the research group, estimated that information overload caused economic losses of $900bn in 2009 alone.
Every day, the same, again
New surgery trend creates perma-smiles for South Korean women
‘Ghostbuster’ Huang Jianjun Allegedly Tried To Perform Exorcism With His Penis.
Woman’s phone bill during trip to Thailand costs more than holiday itself.
It has been long known that some people have severe difficulties recognising faces – something called prosopagnosia and sometimes inaccurately labelled ‘face blindness’. But more recently, it was discovered that a tiny minority of people are ‘super recognisers.’
How Short-Term Stress Boosts Immune Systems.
In a technical tour de force, Japanese researchers created eggs and sperm in the laboratory. Now, scientists have to determine how to use those cells safely — and ethically.
Here’s Why Mosquitoes Can’t Transmit HIV.
10 psychological biases and errors we face when driving.
Some financial lending companies have found that social connections can be a good indicator of a person’s creditworthiness. One such company, Lenddo, determines if you’re friends on Facebook with someone who was late paying back a loan to Lenddo. If so, that’s bad news for you.
A scam ad is the industry term for an ad made simply for the purpose of entering it into advertising award shows. It’s made for a client without the client’s consent, and sometimes, the agency or creatives don’t even have that client on their roster.
Bloomberg surpasses Reuters in web traffic for July.
Haunted Play House At The Museum Of Contemporary Art In Tokyo.
If you can look into the seeds of time, and say which grain will grow, and which will not, speak
Singapore is inequality on steroids, as you might expect from a high human capital, high information tech, growing financial center.
Seventeen percent of the population are millionaires, and that is not counting real estate wealth, which is substantial.
The H&M in the shopping district is closing, because the rent was doubled and it is being replaced by luxury retailers.
photo { Thomas Prior }
More matter, with less art
It has been conjectured that individuals may be left-brain dominant or right-brain dominant based on personality and cognitive style, but neuroimaging data has not provided clear evidence whether such phenotypic differences in the strength of left-dominant or right-dominant networks exist.
images { Bernhard Handick | 2 }
Hiss: Sire! Sire! They may be bandits.
{ Taxpayer money, building overpasses for bears? Is that really necessary? Would they even use the things? Researchers have been methodically studying the crossings since 1996 to answer this. And it turns out that, yes, animals deterred by fencing that now runs the full 70-kilometer length of the highway in the park actually cross the road an awful lot like a rational pedestrian would. It takes them a while, though, to adapt to the crossings after a new one is constructed: about four to five years for elk and deer, five to seven years for the large carnivores. | The Atlantic Cities | full story }
The Game Cock clipp’d and arm’d for fight does the Rising Sun affright
And so the housing “recovery” comes to a screeching halt, which is not surprising as there never was a recovery to begin with. Moments ago cheerleaders of the second housing bubble were shocked to learn that in July a tiny 35K new houses were sold (with just 3K sold in the Northeast, and just 19K in the otherwise strong South), of which 13K houses were not even started. This translated into a puny 394K seasonally adjusted annualized sales, missing expectations of 487K by nearly a massive 100K, and in addition the June print was revised much lower from 497K to 455K (which back in July beat expectations of 484K and was trumpeted as the highest print since 2008 - so much for that). Yet one thing that did not change is that the median home sale price decline continued, and in July dropped to $257.2K down from $258.5.
Every day, the same, again
The world’s first bullet-proof couch.
How North Korea got itself hooked on meth.
Florida Keys considering drones to fight mosquitoes.
Single men change bed sheets just four times a year.
Sex workers are operating on Linkedin.
Glasses That Solve Colorblindness, for a Big Price Tag.
The purpose of this study is to estimate whether sexual activity is associated with wages, and also to estimate potential interactions between individuals’ characteristics, wages and sexual activity. [PDF]
Does High Intelligence Mean Low Cognitive Bias?
Compulsive lying makes you smarter.
How does a brain generate consciousness?
Don’t panic but psychology isn’t always a science.
An Intriguing Correlation between the Distribution of Star Multiples and Human Adults in Household.
Scientists Investigate Whether the City Mouse Is Smarter Than The Country Mouse.
Everyone would save a sibling, grandparent or close friend rather than a strange dog. But when people considered their own dog versus people less connected with them—a distant cousin or a hometown stranger—votes in favor of saving the dog came rolling in. And an astonishing 40% of respondents, including 46% of women, voted to save their dog over a foreign tourist.
The Steve Jobs email exchange that perfectly captures Apple’s strategy.
Code By Voice Faster Than Keyboard.
They want to rebuild the internet — one block at a time.
Millions stolen from US banks after ‘wire payment switch’ targeted.
Rich-Get-Richer Effect Observed in BitCoin Digital Currency Network.
The mystery of China’s missing millionaires.
In a World Where Women Never Narrate Movie Previews.
Usually, the weather — often referred to as an “act of God” in a ticket contract — is a perfectly legitimate reason for a delay or a service interruption. How travelers can challenge the industry’s ‘act of God’ excuses.
Ever had the feeling that your job might be made up? That the world would keep on turning if you weren’t doing that thing you do 9-5? David Graeber explored the phenomenon of bullshit jobs.
Unscientific Science and the Insignificance of “Significance” [via Bookforum]
Le Corbusier painting in the nude. [more]
Follow the Frog. [Thanks Tim]
Ronen, I’m just going to jump in here, as someone who is not employed by PandoDaily, can’t speak for PandoDaily but who has been BCC’d on the conversation so far. Fuck you Ronen, you condescending sack of shit.
‘Having perfected our disguise, we spend our lives searching for someone we don’t fool.’ –Robert Brault
As it turns out, high-functioning sociopaths are full of handy lifestyle tips. […]
After being hired at an elite law firm, Ms Thomas exploited her company’s “non-existent” vacation policy by taking long weekends and lengthy vacations abroad. “People were implicitly expected not to take vacations, but I had my own lifelong policy of following only explicit rules, and then only because they’re easiest to prove against me,” she explains.
How to apply to your own life: Ignore “suggested donation” pleas at museums, always help yourself to more food and drinks at dinner parties and recline your seat all the way back when flying. […]
Ms Thomas’s opportunism applies to the social as much as the professional realm. “I have learned that it is important always to have a catalogue of at least five personal stories of varying length in order to avoid the impulse to shoehorn unrelated titbits into existing conversations,” she writes. “Social-event management feels very much like classroom or jury management to me; it’s all about allowing me to present myself to my own best advantage.” […]
One of Ms Thomas’s favourite activities is attending academic conferences. Since she doesn’t teach at a top-tier school, she captures her colleagues’ attention by other means: “Everything about the way I present myself is extremely calculated,” she writes. “I am careful to wear something that will draw attention, like jeans and cowboy boots while everyone else is wearing business attire.” The goal, Ms Thomas says, is “to indicate that I’m not interested in being judged by the usual standards.”
Take but degree away, untune that string, and hark
High frequency trading. I won’t go into the details, but basically it has become an arms race of being a millionth of a second faster than the other guy. The exchanges (Nasdaq and NYSE) started offering co-location within their facilities and traders started fighting for the best physical real estate within the co-location center (ie. literally trying to be a few feet closer to the exchanges’ computers). Some of the high frequency traders complained about how ‘unfair’ it was to be a few feet farther away. The exchanges conceded and added ‘latency’, basically a few feet of cable, so everyone within the co-location center is equidistant. It baffles me financial progress is moving in this direction.
Prediction by ‘experts’/pundits. Why do people still believe in pundits and ‘experts’ on TV? If ‘experts’ could predict the future with any accuracy, they would be doing something else. They are not always wrong, they are simply not right consistently enough to provide meaningful value. I’m always surprised how confident and certain people sound on CNBC (I rarely feel sure of anything). Keynes got it right when he said, “If you must forecast, forecast often.”
And make them know, what it is to let a queen kneel in the streets and beg for grace in vain
“What makes somebody who they are?” In other words, what makes it right to say of somebody who occupied my body and went by my name last month that they are the same person as I am now? Anyway, don’t we also want to say that I am not morally responsible for the actions that “I” performed as, say, a 4 year old? […]
Some of the main (wrong) answers are: Physical Continuity (disproof: I do not have any of the same cells or matter that I did one year ago), Memory (disproof: I can remember being 10 but not 5, yet when I was 10 I could remember being 5), and Psychological Continuity (disproof: I am not the same person that went by my name as a child; I am not guilt-worthy and praise-worthy for his crimes and achievements, yet there is psychological continuity between us).
photo { Bruce Nauman, Failing to Levitate in My Studio, 1966 }
Modest doubt is call’d the beacon of the wise, the tent that searches to the bottom of the worst
The economics of “happiness” shares a feature with behavioral economics that raises questions about its usefulness in public policy analysis. What happiness economists call “habituation” refers to the fact that people’s reported well-being reverts to a base level, even after major life events such as a disabling injury or winning the lottery. What behavioral economists call “projection bias” refers to the fact that people systematically mistake current circumstances for permanence, buying too much food if shopping while hungry for example. Habituation means happiness does not react to long-term changes, and projection bias means happiness over-reacts to temporary changes. I demonstrate this outcome by combining responses to happiness questions with information about air quality and weather on the day and in the place where those questions were asked. The current day’s air quality affects happiness while the local annual average does not. Interpreted literally, either the value of air quality is not measurable using the happiness approach or air quality has no value. Interpreted more generously, projection bias saves happiness economics from habituation, enabling its use in public policy.
Is it getting solipsistic in here, or is it just me?
Every word in this sentence is a gross misspelling of the word “tomato.” –Doug Hofstadter
[…]
There is a well-known joke about Talmudic interpretation. A Jew is talking to his Rabbi.
Rabbi,” the man said, “Explain the Talmud to me.”
“Very well,” he said. “First, I will ask you a question. If two men climb up a chimney and one comes out dirty, and one comes out clean, which one washes himself?”
“The dirty one,” answers the man.
“No. They look at each other and the dirty man thinks he is clean and the clean man thinks he is dirty, therefore, the clean man washes himself.”
“Now, another question: If two men climb up a chimney and one comes out dirty, and one comes out clean, which one washes himself?”
The man smiles and says, “You just told me, Rabbi. The man who is clean washes himself because he thinks he is dirty.”
“No,” says the Rabbi. “If they each look at themselves, the clean man knows he doesn’t have to wash himself, so the dirty man washes himself. Now, one more question. If two men climb up a chimney and one comes out dirty, and one comes out clean, which one washes himself?”
”I don’t know, Rabbi. Depending on your point of view, it could be either one.”
Again the Rabbi says, “No. If two men climb up a chimney, how could one man remain clean? They both are dirty, and they both wash themselves.”
The confused man said, “Rabbi, you asked me the same question three times and you gave me three different answers. Is this some kind of a joke?”
”This is not a joke, my son. This is Talmud.”
art { Tim Hawkinson, Emoter, 2002 }
‘It is a matter of perfect indifference where a thing originated; the only question is: Is it true in and for itself?’ –Hegel
Researchers at the University of Kentucky were interested in the link between low glucose levels and aggressive behavior… […]
When you go several hours without eating, your blood sugar drops. Once it falls below a certain point, glucose-sensing neurons in your ventromedial hypothalamus, a brain region involved in feeding, are notified and activated resulting in level fluctuations of several different hormones. Ghrelin, a hormone that increases expression when blood sugar gets low and stimulates appetite through actions of the hypothalamus, has been shown to block the release of the neurotransmitter serotonin. The serotonin system is incredibly complex and contributes to a number of different central nervous system functions. One of the many hats this neurotransmitter wears is modulation of emotional state, including aggression. […]
If you have a predisposition to aggression, low serotonin levels circulating in your brain may lead to altered communications between brain regions that wrangle aggressive behavior.
‘I suppose my formula might be: dream, diversify and never miss an angle.’ –Walt Disney
The evidence for a flat earth is derived from many different facets of science and philosophy. The simplest is by relying on ones own senses to discern the true nature of the world around us. The world looks flat, the bottoms of clouds are flat, the movement of the sun; these are all examples of your senses telling you that we do not live on a spherical heliocentric world.
[…]
People have been into space. How have they not discovered that the earth is flat?
The most commonly accepted explanation of this is that the space agencies of the world are involved in a conspiracy faking space travel and exploration.
{ Flat Earth Society | Continue reading | More: The Flat Earth Society now has a podcast! }
And while human life goes on this way in very diverse expectancy, expecting very different things according to different times and occasions and in different frames of mind, all life is again one nightwatch of expectancy
The biggest problem in the business world is not too little but too much—too many distractions and interruptions, too many things done for the sake of form, and altogether too much busy-ness. The Dutch seem to believe that an excess of meetings is the biggest devourer of time: they talk of vergaderziekte, “meeting sickness”. However, a study last year by the McKinsey Global Institute suggests that it is e-mails: it found that highly skilled office workers spend more than a quarter of each working day writing and responding to them. […]
Creative people’s most important resource is their time—particularly big chunks of uninterrupted time—and their biggest enemies are those who try to nibble away at it with e-mails or meetings. Indeed, creative people may be at their most productive when, to the manager’s untutored eye, they appear to be doing nothing.
‘No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.’ –Antonin Artaud
Many scholars have argued that Nietzsche’s dementia was caused by syphilis. A careful review of the evidence suggests that this consensus is probably incorrect. The syphilis hypothesis is not compatible with most of the evidence available. Other hypotheses – such as slowly growing right-sided retro-orbital meningioma – provide a more plausible fit to the evidence.
{ Journal of Medical Biography | PDF }
From his late 20s onward, Nietzsche experienced severe, generally right- sided headaches. He concurrently suffered a progressive loss of vision in his right eye and developed cranial nerve findings that were documented on neurological examinations in addition to a disconjugate gaze evident in photographs. His neurological findings are consistent with a right-sided frontotemporal mass. In 1889, Nietzsche also developed a new-onset mania which was followed by a dense abulia, also consistent with a large frontal tumor. […] An intracranial mass may have been the etiology of his headaches and neurological findings and the cause of his ultimate mental collapse in 1889.
Vow, alack! for youth unmeet: Youth, so apt to pluck a sweet.
The more you multitask, the worse you get at it.
{ Priceonomics | Continue reading | More: Media multitaskers performed worse on a test of task-switching ability | PDF }
