Dentist who used copyright to silence her patients is on the run. He threatened patients who wrote bad Yelp reviews with lawsuits.

Man acquitted in romantic bear-spray squabble.

Women are more vulnerable to infections.

Health officials are watching in horror as bacteria become resistant to powerful carbapenem antibiotics — one of the last drugs on the shelf.

In 1971, he declared that vitamin C would cause a 10 percent decrease in deaths from cancer. Subsequent studies have consistently shown that vitamin C doesn’t treat cancer.

While in the U.S. and other wealthy countries viruses appear to be involved in about 5 percent of all cancers, in some countries the number can be as high as 20 percent. (The worldwide average is about 13 percent.)

Concepts from the branch of mathematics known as game theory have inspired new ideas in poker strategy and new advice for ordinary players.

The personality trait that distinguishes smokers from nonsmokers: poor self-control.

If you want to make a really good bipedal leg, you should make one a lot like an ostrich’s, and nothing like a human’s.

Another ahistorical analogy for thinking about technology is that the role of technology in learning is similar to the role of technology in sex. Technology may be enhancing, useful, amusing, diversifying, but at the end of the day, it will not replace the basic human transaction. So there is nothing to fear, only something to gain.

Same Programs + Different Computers = Different Weather Forecasts.

Chinese Cuisine Patterns Revealed By Food Network Analysis.

Chinese Food Density by Neighborhood in NYC.

Circular map of New York City subway.

Kubrick’s favorite films and viewing habits.

Will Sheep’s wool just keep growing and growing if humans don’t cut it off?

“These two ad behemoths will have the industry’s largest and most formidable talent pool of people called ‘creatives’ who have never created a single thing in their lives and whose only apparent ability is to trick other people.”

The pressures and expectations of the market weigh heavily on everyone. The erosion of long-term stability in employment means that people are expected to throw themselves into any job they find. Every minor task or training exercise must be met with absolute enthusiasm, as if motivation were something that could be turned on or off at will.

Such behaviour is impossible to sustain, and exacts its toll: depressive feelings, physical and emotional exhaustion at the expenditure of energy on projects we care little about.

Motivation loses its roots in our childhood interests and ideals, and becomes something external to us. Hence the oscillation between hyper-motivation and depletion characteristic of the contemporary worker.

{ The Guardian | Continue reading }

art { Kevin Barton }

A banana may be healthier than a burger, but how it’s brought to you is not all that different. Before the fast-food industry learned to process, pack, and ship inexpensive temperature-controlled meals, banana carriers had already perfected their own shipping process. […]

The result “is bananas that arrive at the market on their final green day, and which will last exactly seven days before turning brown.” 

By the time bananas land on the supermarket shelf, their ripening process has already been carefully engineered through the use of three gases: ethylene, carbon dioxide, and oxygen.

{ Nautilus | Continue reading }

polaroid { Andy Warhol }

On a street in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, an unremarkable gray box protrudes from a telephone pole. Inside the box lies a state-of-the-art airflow-sampling device, one part of an experiment to track how a gas disperses through the city’s streets and subway system. […]

The goal of the project is to develop a model for how a dangerous airborne contaminant, such as sarin gas or anthrax, would spread throughout the city in the event of a terrorist attack or accidental release.

The scientists released tiny amounts of a colorless, nontoxic gas at several locations around the city. The airflow samplers, located at various points throughout the city, measured the gas to determine how fast and how far it spread.

{ LiveScience | Continue reading }

unrelated { Eproctophilia is a paraphilia in which people are sexually aroused by flatulence. The following account presents a brief case study of an eproctophile. | Improbable }

62% of women check their phones during sex, new study finds.

Kickstarter Project Canceled After Dude Spends All the Money.

No Menstrual Hygiene For Indian Women Holds Economy Back.

Chuck Feeney is the James Bond of philanthropy. Over the last 30 years he’s crisscrossed the globe conducting a clandestine operation to give away a $7.5 billion fortune derived from hawking cognac, perfume and cigarettes in his empire of duty-free shops.

To Change Behavior, Focus on a Single Situation.

Coldhearted Psychopaths Feel Empathy Too.

There is another number in psychology that makes a lot less sense: the number 2.9013.

MIT scientists implant false memory into a mouse brain.

Dolphins using personal names, again.

Every wolf has its own distinct voice.

The perfect hexagonal array of bees’ honeycombs owes more to simple physical forces than to the skill of bees, according to a new study. Bees simply make cells that are circular in cross section and are packed together like a layer of bubbles. The wax, softened by the heat of the bees’ bodies, then gets pulled into hexagonal cells by surface tension at the junctions where three walls meet.

Fish are the last wild creatures that we eat. And as global demand for fish has doubled in the past 20 years, the prices have remain stagnant. How is that possible, you ask? We catch a buttload more of them now, that’s how.

Google Serves 25 Percent of North American Internet Traffic.

How do smartphones reveal shoppers’ movements?

Ms. Lee is among the roughly 1 in 5 students in South Korea who the government said is addicted to smartphone use. This addiction is defined as spending more than seven hours a day using the phone and experiencing symptoms such as anxiety, insomnia and depression when cut off from the device.

To avoid paying taxes, the rich are emptying their bank accounts in Switzerland and investing in art. This has spawned a new business of storing such works tax- and duty-free in warehouses across the world.

Imprison the Royal Family and Abolish the Monarchy.

In the same way that the detective movie is a fantasy about city life, the spy movie is a fantasy about tourism.

Lady Gaga’s early years in NYC.

Of Submarines and Sharks: Musical Settings of a Silent Menace.

How to escape a car underwater.

Lone Signal is a messaging platform that allows anyone with an Internet connection to send a message toward star systems selected for our METI (messaging to extraterrestrial intelligence) experiment. Through our website, users can send a 144-character text message for free, and they can send subsequent messages or photos for a fee.

Amazon, The Complete Hilarious Charts.

Cutting golf balls in half reveals delightfully bonbon-esque interiors.

Urbanism starts with the location of the parking lot. [via Matthew Poplawski]

Changing a tire on a car while driving on two wheels.

{ Robin Black }

First, about how glaciers turn into ocean water.

Consider this experiment. Take a large open-top drum of water and poke a hole near the bottom. Measure the rate at which water comes out of the hole. As the amount of water in the drum goes down, the rate of flow out of the hole will normally decrease because the amount of water pressure behind the hole decreases. Now, have a look at a traditional hourglass, where sand runs from an upper chamber which slowly empties into a lower chamber which slowly fills. If you measure the rate of sand flow through the connecting hole, does it decrease in flow rate because there is, over time, less sand in the upper chamber? I’ll save you the trouble of carrying out the experiment. No, it does not. This is because the movement of sand from the upper to lower parts of an hourglass is an entirely different kind of phenomenon than the flow of water out of the drum. The former is a matter of granular material dynamics, the latter of fluid dynamics.

Jeremy Bassis and Suzanne Jacobs have recently published a study that looks at glacial ice as a granular material, modeling the ice as clumped together ice boulders that interact with each other either by sticking together or, over time, coming apart at fracture lines. This is important because, according to Bassis, about half of the water that continental glaciers provide to the ocean comes in the form of ice melting (with the water running off) but the other half consists of large chunks (icebergs) that come off in a manner that has been very hard to model.

{ Greg Laden/ScienceBlogs | Continue reading }

What if talent and luck are increasingly hard to distinguish?

Alan Krueger, the departing chairman of Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, hit upon just that possibility in a speech in June, when he observed, “The lucky and the talented – and it is often hard to tell the difference – have been doing better and better, while the vast majority has struggled to keep up.” […]

Imperfect substitution means that you “would rather listen to one song by your favorite singer than a song and a half by someone else. Or, in another context, it means that if you need to have heart surgery, you would rather have the best surgeon in Cleveland perform it rather than the second and third best together.” In the corporate context, a board of directors would sooner pay $100 million for the best possible CEO than $10 million for the second best. […] But how does one get to be the best CEO, rather than second best? Here’s where luck comes in.

{ The Economist | Continue reading }

Summer movies are often described as formulaic. But what few people know is that there is actually a formula—one that lays out, on a page-by-page basis, exactly what should happen when in a screenplay. It’s as if a mad scientist has discovered a secret process for making a perfect, or at least perfectly conventional, summer blockbuster.

The formula didn’t come from a mad scientist. Instead it came from a screenplay guidebook, Save the Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need. In the book, author Blake Snyder, a successful spec screenwriter who became an influential screenplay guru, preaches a variant on the basic three-act structure that has dominated blockbuster filmmaking since the late 1970s. […]

Instead of a broad overview of how a screen story fits together, his book broke down the three-act structure into a detailed “beat sheet”: 15 key story “beats”—pivotal events that have to happen—and then gave each of those beats a name and a screenplay page number. Given that each page of a screenplay is expected to equal a minute of film, this makes Snyder’s guide essentially a minute-to-minute movie formula.

{ Slate | Continue reading }

photo { Ralph Crane }

{ Nicolas Menu }

If we — art dealers, collectors, writers and experts — all agree a particular work has value, it surely does, irrespective of its cost of production, utility and purpose.

In that sense a lot of the art market fuses the core characteristics of both Bitcoin and the gold market.

Though, of course, art, unlike Bitcoin and gold, is not scarce. Certain works of established artists, especially those who are no longer living, are scarce. Only forgeries can threaten supply in that case. But overall there are no barriers of entry. New assets can always be produced.

Consequently, regulating supply is down to the tight and clubby world of the art dealer and auctioneer network.

{ FT | Continue reading }

Art, then, is very similar to venture capital, insofar as who you know matters — and also insofar as both markets go to great lengths to hide natural valuation fluctuations. “Down rounds” are if anything even more harmful to an artist than they are to a startup: galleries will, as a rule, drop an artist before selling her art for less than she was charging at her previous show. The reason is entirely to protect the gallery’s own credibility: the gallery wants collectors to see it as a place where they can buy art which is going to rise in value, and as a result it will do everything in its power to make it look as though the work of all of its artists is only ever going up in price rather than down.

{ Salmon/Reuters | Continue reading }

Scientists claim to power phone with urine.

Texas Contractor Razes House, but the Wrong One.

A Chinese museum has been forced to close after claims that its 40,000-strong collection of supposedly ancient relics was almost entirely composed of fakes.

Dutch art heist paintings may have been burned by suspect’s mother.

The researchers have shown that people with a preference for the evening and night-time tend to score highly on the “Dark Triad” of personality traits - Machiavellianism, psychopathy and narcissism.

This study extends previous research by showing that expressive writing can improve wound healing in older adults and women.

Shyness is a part of being human. The world would be a more insipid, less creative place without it.

Could open-source GMOs bring down Monsanto at last?

If the planet warms by 4 °C, which is within the IPCC range of estimates, they will eventually rise by 9 meters, on average, and up to 12 meters in some parts of the world. The point, aside from the fact that 12 meters is a lot of water, is that generations of humans will have to deal with sea levels that keep going up.

Bush, Global Warming, Circumcision… The 10 Most Controversial Topics on Wikipedia.

How big is your chance of dying in an ordinary day?

How Forensic Linguistics Outed J.K. Rowling.

Outsmarting bugs with a fan may be a poorly known strategy. But the method, it turns out, is endorsed by the American Mosquito Control Association. [NY Times]

10 rules of Internet.

The temperatures at the platforms on the L train line.

First 3D printed dress.

There is a rainbow.

Apparatus for facilitating the birth of a child by centrifugal forces, 1965.— the woman is strapped onto a circular table, and the table is then rotated at high speed.

For a couple years now I’ve been fascinated by some recent ideas about how complexity evolves. Darwin’s great insight was recognizing how natural selection could create complex traits. All that was needed was a series of intermediates that raised the reproductive success of organisms. But recently some researchers have developed ideas in which natural selection doesn’t play such a central role.

One idea, laid out in the book Biology’s First Law, holds that life has a built-in propensity to get more complex–even in the absence of natural selection. According to another idea, called constructive neutral evolution, mutations can change simple structures into more complex ones even if those mutations don’t provide an advantage. The scientists who are championing these ideas don’t see them as refuting natural selection, but, rather, complementing it, and enriching our understanding of how evolution works.

{ Carl Zimmer | Continue reading | More: Scientists are exploring how organisms can evolve elaborate structures without Darwinian selection }

{ Men who score high on psychopathy are better at lie detection; opposite pattern for women. | via BPS }

art { James Turrell }

Darius McCollum has been arrested 29 times over the past 30 years for a series of transit-related crimes ranging from impersonating subway workers to stealing buses. […]

He first drew notice in 1981, when as a 15-year-old he operated an E train six stops from 34th Street to the World Trade Center without the conductor or passengers reporting anything amiss.

{ WSJ | Continue reading }

photo { Thomas Hoepker, Lover’s Lane, New Jersey, 1983 }

American man wakes up with amnesia, speaking Swedish.

The best estimates suggest that the authorities in Baghdad bought more than 6,000 useless bomb detectors, at a cost of at least $38 million.


Why are some people mosquito magnets?

US honey bee colony numbers are stable, and they have been since before CCD (colony collapse disorder) hit the scene in 2006. In fact, colony numbers were higher in 2010 than any year since 1999.

Why you think your phone is vibrating when it is not.

Here’s all the evidence that Apple is making an actual TV—and the remote will likely be your hand.

A new piece of malware is targeting OS X to extort money from victims by accusing them of illegally accessing pornography.

International journals, they’re giving them to everybody these days. The International Journal of…Zizek Studies! Baudrillard Studies! And now, Badiou Studies! Unfortunately, there is currently no International Journal of Deleuze or Ranciere Studies, because there is no justice in this world. Also: Schizorevolutions vs. Microfascisms: A Deleuzo-Nietzschean Perspective on State, Security, and Active/Reactive Networks. [both via Bookforum]

More Proof The Big Six Of Publishing Are Run By Morons.

Can you patent a magic trick?

Why are testicles kept in a vulnerable dangling sac? It’s not why you think.

Every action and drama seems to violate Alfred Hitchcock’s rule of matching the length of a film to the endurance of the human bladder. Why Are Hollywood Movies So Long?

Because.

The sense of smell is one of our most powerful connections to the physical world. Our noses contain hundreds of different scent receptors that allow us to distinguish between odours. When you smell a rose or a pot of beef stew, the brain is responding to scent molecules that have wafted into your nose and locked on to these receptors. Only certain molecules fit specific receptors, and when they slot together, like a key in a lock, this triggers changes in cells. In the case of scent receptors, specialised neurons send messages to the brain so we know what we have sniffed. […]

In the last ten years, however, reports have trickled in from bemused biologists that these receptors, as well as similar ones usually found on taste buds, crop up all over our bodies.

{ BBC | Continue reading }

In Japan, where palm reading remains one of the most popular means of fortune-telling, some people have figured out a way to change their fate. It’s a simple idea: change your palm, change the reading, and change your future. All you need is a competent plastic surgeon with an electric scalpel who has a basic knowledge of palmistry. […]

From January 2011 to May 2013, 37 palm plastic surgeries have been performed at the Shonan Beauty Clinic alone. Several other clinics in Japan offer the surgery, but almost none of them advertise it.

{ The Daily Beast | Continue reading }

photo { Brendan Baker }

If you’re a corporate executive, this may be one of the last sentences you want to hear: “Erich Spangenberg is on the line.” Invariably, Mr. Spangenberg, the 53-year-old owner of IPNav, is calling to discuss a patent held by one of his clients, which he says your company is infringing — and what are you going to do about it?

Mr. Spangenberg is likely to open the conversation on a diplomatic note, but if you put up enough resistance, or try to shrug him off, he can also, as he put it, “go thug.”

[…]

“Once you go thug, though, you can’t unthug,” he explained, returning to his warm and normal tone. “Actually, you can unthug, but if you do that, you can’t rethug. Then you just seem crazy.”

Mr. Spangenberg’s company, based in Dallas, helps “turn idle patents into cash cows,” as it says on its Web site.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

Sound waves with frequencies just above human hearing can levitate tiny particles and liquid droplets and even move them around, a team of engineers has demonstrated. […]

In the new research, the team […] uses the setup to lift and spin a toothpick. Previously, no one had been able to control objects larger than a few millimeters in diameter.

{ Science | Continue reading }