If I could give one piece of advice as a relationships researcher, it would be this: Relationships take work. […] People who held high destiny beliefs were more likely to disengage from their relationships when they experienced relationship stressors and problems, perhaps because they take these as a sign that the relationship is not meant to be.
“I don’t have a cellphone or a Facebook account. I’ve never sent a text message. I don’t use Twitter,” he said. “I’m not a journalist. I’m not an academic. I’m not a professional writer. I’m not a professional editor. What I am is otherwise unemployed. Superfluous. That’s what I am.”
It’s a résumé that would disqualify Summers from working at most magazines. But most magazines aren’t The Baffler, which could be described as the country’s foremost journal of superfluous opinion. […]
…and The Atlantic, which writer Maureen Tkacik described as “a turgid mouthpiece for the plutocracy, a repository of shallow, lazy spin, and regular host of discussion forums during which nothing is discussed. It is, in every formal trait, a CIA front.”
Remains of New York woman missing for 28 years found in wall.
Human breast milk has become a new luxury for China’s rich, with some firms offering wet-nurse services. “Adult [clients] can drink it directly through breastfeeding, or they can always drink it from a breast pump if they feel embarrassed.”
State Department spent $630,000 to boost Facebook ‘likes.’
A Japanese economist has studied the mathematics used by air companies to set the prices of flights. According to his research, eight weeks before departure is the ideal timing to buy a travel ticket.
Where The Mask Seen In Global Protests Is Made.
There’s a new date for the end of the world: 2000002013.
When exposed to humor, women’s brains exhibit more activity than men’s in reward-related regions.
Exercise reorganizes the brain to be more resilient to stress.
Frontal Cortex Deficit Identified in Morning Insomnia.
A Battery and a “Bionic” Ear: a Hint of 3-D Printing’s Promise.
Failure is inevitable. Disks fail. Software bugs lie dormant waiting for just the right conditions to bite. People make mistakes. Data centers are built on farms of unreliable commodity hardware. If you’re running in a cloud environment, then many of these factors are outside of your control. To compound the problem, failure is not predictable and doesn’t occur with uniform probability and frequency. The lack of a uniform frequency increases uncertainty and risk in the system. In the face of such inevitable and unpredictable failure, how can you build a reliable service that provides the high level of availability your users can depend on?
Apple Hires Yves St Laurent CEO for Special Projects.
A Chinese Company Says Apple Stole Its Technology For Siri.
Players Rewrite Story Lines to Highlight Heroines; Princess Peach Saves Mario. Even Ms. Pac-Man began as a hack.
“You know in a mental institution they sometimes give a person some clay or some basket weaving?” he said. “It’s the therapy of moviemaking that has been good in my life. If you don’t work, it’s unhealthy—for me, particularly unhealthy. I could sit here suffering from morbid introspection, ruing my mortality, being anxious. But it’s very therapeutic to get up and think, Can I get this actor; does my third act work? All these solvable problems that are delightful puzzles, as opposed to the great puzzles of life that are unsolvable, or that have very bad solutions. So I get pleasure from doing this. It’s my version of basket weaving.”
photo { Lonneke van der Palen }
Exploding Fridge Leads to Pot Find in San Diego.
The boy who learned to speak again after losing his left brain hemisphere.
Last week Boston Magazine published an article claiming a “new theory” of emotion [previously]. Here is why I hated this article.
How Older Couples Handle Conflict: Just Avoid It.
Companies look at wrong things when using facebook to screen job applicants.
Glaciers for Sale: A global warming get-rich-quick scheme.
“It’s the illusion of danger,” said Rob Decker, who has collaborated on more than 30 roller coasters. Here’s a look at the forces at work and why they make us scream.
Vegan extremists launch Web site to name and shame ex-vegans.
In San Diego: 13 Years In Jail For Writing On A Sidewalk With Chalk?
MIT researchers can see through walls using ‘Wi-Vi.’
Qatar National Bank to issue diamond-embedded credit card.
For half a century, one theory about the way we experience and express emotion has helped shape how we practice psychology, do police work, and even fight terrorism. But what if that theory is wrong?
Late bedtimes and less sleep may lead to weight gain in healthy adults.
When a Small Thing Means so Much: Nonverbal Cues as Turning Points in Relationships.
The Physics Behind Traffic Jams.
Apple Seeks to Trademark ‘IWatch’ in Japan for Devices.
Apple is still one of Samsung’s biggest customers for processors and memory chips.
Firm that did background check on Snowden is under investigation.
How The NSA Collects Your Internet Data In Four Charts.
4 Changes to English So Subtle We Hardly Notice They’re Happening.
10 Creative Block Breakers That Actually Work.
Why we fall victims to scams and bad sales tricks.
Why Americans Are Eating Fewer Hot Dogs.
Scientists Find Link Between How Pathetic You Are, How Fast You Respond To Emails.
When she became pregnant, Ms. Martin called her local hospital inquiring about the price of maternity care; the finance office at first said it did not know, and then gave her a range of $4,000 to $45,000. […]
Like Ms. Martin, plenty of other pregnant women are getting sticker shock in the United States, where charges for delivery have about tripled since 1996, according to an analysis done for The New York Times by Truven Health Analytics. Childbirth in the United States is uniquely expensive, and maternity and newborn care constitute the single biggest category of hospital payouts for most commercial insurers and state Medicaid programs. […]
The average total price charged for pregnancy and newborn care was about $30,000 for a vaginal delivery and $50,000 for a C-section, with commercial insurers paying out an average of $18,329 and $27,866, the report found. […]
Two decades ago, women typically paid nothing other than a small fee if they opted for a private hospital room or television.
In August 2009, scientists in Israel raised serious doubts concerning the use of DNA by law enforcement as the ultimate method of identification. In a paper published in the journal Forensic Science International: Genetics, the Israeli researchers demonstrated that it is possible to manufacture DNA in a laboratory, thus falsifying DNA evidence. The scientists fabricated saliva and blood samples, which originally contained DNA from a person other than the supposed donor of the blood and saliva.
The researchers also showed that, using a DNA database, it is possible to take information from a profile and manufacture DNA to match it, and that this can be done without access to any actual DNA from the person whose DNA they are duplicating. The synthetic DNA oligos required for the procedure are common in molecular laboratories.
The New York Times quoted the lead author on the paper, Dr. Daniel Frumkin, saying, “You can just engineer a crime scene… any biology undergraduate could perform this.”
Dr. Frumkin perfected a test that can differentiate real DNA samples from fake ones. His test detects epigenetic modifications, in particular, DNA methylation. Seventy percent of the DNA in any human genome is methylated, meaning it contains methyl group modifications within a CpG dinucleotide context. Methylation at the promoter region is associated with gene silencing. The synthetic DNA lacks this epigenetic modification, which allows the test to distinguish manufactured DNA from original, genuine, DNA.
It is unknown how many police departments, if any, currently use the test. No police lab has publicly announced that it is using the new test to verify DNA results.
Just seeing a list of negative words for a few seconds will make a highly anxious or depressed person feel worse, and the more you ruminate on them, the more you can actually damage key structures that regulate your memory, feelings, and emotions. You’ll disrupt your sleep, your appetite, and your ability to experience long-term happiness and satisfaction.
If you vocalize your negativity, or even slightly frown when you say “no,” more stress chemicals will be released, not only in your brain, but in the listener’s brain as well. The listener will experience increased anxiety and irritability, thus undermining cooperation and trust. In fact, just hanging around negative people will make you more prejudiced toward others. […]
Negative thinking is also self perpetuating, and the more you engage in negative dialogue—at home or at work—the more difficult it becomes to stop.
quote { Dostoyevsky, The Idiot, 1868-1869 }
Recently more human beings have been dying by suicide annually than by murder and warfare combined. Despite the progress made by science, medicine and mental-health care in the 20th century — the sequencing of our genome, the advent of antidepressants, the reconsidering of asylums and lobotomies — nothing has been able to drive down the suicide rate in the general population. […] Worldwide, roughly one million people kill themselves every year. Last year, more active-duty U.S. soldiers killed themselves than died in combat; their suicide rate has been rising since 2004. […] At first, the stress of combat seemed to be the obvious reason for the jump in military suicides — until researchers realized that the rate has also risen among soldiers who were never deployed. […]
Our understanding of how suicidal thinking progresses, or how to spot and halt it, is little better now than it was two and a half centuries ago, when we first began to consider suicide a medical rather than philosophical problem. […]
Trying to study what people are thinking before they try to kill themselves […] Researchers can’t ethically induce suicidal thinking in the lab and watch it develop. Uniquely human, it can’t be observed in other species. And it is impossible to interview anyone who has died by suicide. To understand it, psychologists have most often employed two frustratingly imprecise methods: they have investigated the lives of people who have killed themselves, and any notes that may have been left behind, looking for clues to what their thinking might have been, or they have asked people who have attempted suicide to describe their thought processes — though their mental states may differ from those of people whose attempts were lethal and their recollections may be incomplete or inaccurate. Such investigative methods can generate useful statistics and hypotheses about how a suicidal impulse might start and how it travels from thought to action, but that’s not the same as objective evidence about how it unfolds in real time.
Another power law […] is Benford’s Law, which states that the distribution of digits in a lot of data are not even, but power law distributed. For example, in base 10, the number one should, all things being equal, appear 10% of the time. But in many data sources one appears around 30% of the time. This fact is actually used to help detect fraud in, for example, tax returns.
Mozart’s opera, whose proper Italian title is Il dissoluto punito ossia il Don Giovanni (The Punishment of the Libertine or Don Giovanni), has been admired by many enthusiastic opera-goers ever since its first performance in Prague on October 29, 1787. […]
Kierkegaard offers a deep meditation on the meaning of Mozart’s Don Giovanni in a splendid treatise entitled “The Immediate Erotic Stages or the Musical Erotic” found in his book Either/Or. […]
George Price offers this fine description of the “aesthetic” stage of life as he thinks Kierkegaard sought to depict it:
By its very nature it is the most fragile and least stable of all forms of existence. […] [The aesthetic man] is merged into the crowd, and does what they do; he reflects their tastes, their ideas, prejudices, clothing and manner of speech. The entire liturgy of his life is dictated by them. His only special quality is greater or less discrimination of what he himself shall ‘enjoy’, for his outlook is an uncomplicated, unsophisticated Hedonism: he does what pleases him, he avoids what does not. His life’s theme is a simple one, ‘one must enjoy life’. […] He is also, characteristically, a man with a minimum of reflection. […]
Kierkegaard also uses Faust as Goethe interpreted him, and Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, as exemplars and variations of the aesthetic stage of existence. “First, Don Juan, the simple, exuberant, uncomplicated, unreflective man; then Faust, the bored, puzzled, mixed-up, wistful man; and the third, the inevitable climax, the man in despair—Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew.” Kierkegaard’s discussion of this aesthetic aspect of life “is mainly a sustained exposition of a universal level of human experience, and as such it is a story as old as man. Here is life at it simplest, most general level […] the life of easy sanctions and unimaginative indulgences. It is also a totally uncommitted and ‘choiceless’ life [Don Juan]. But, for reasons inexplicable to itself, it cannot remain there. The inner need for integration brings its contentment to an end. Boredom intervenes; and boredom followed by an abortive attempt to overcome it by more discrimination about pleasures and diversions, about friends, habits and surroundings [Faust]. But the dialectical structure of the self gives rise to a profounder disturbance than boredom; and finally the man is aware of a frustration which nothing can annul [Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew]. Were he constituted differently, says Kierkegaard, he would not suffer in this fashion. But being what he is, suffer he must— in diminishing hope and in growing staleness of existence.
{ Søren Kierkegaard’s Interpretation of Mozart’s Opera Don Giovanni | PDF }
Liar-for-hire Tim Green will tell anyone anything — for a fee. As the founder of Paladin Deception Services, he will say what clients want him to say to anyone calling on his dedicated phone lines. He provides cover for cheating husbands, fake references for job-seekers and even “doctors” to confirm that someone needs a sick day.
Italian press finds gay hookup site for priests – in Rome.
Self-Disciplined People Are Happier (and Not as Deprived as You Think).
Do People Get Better Looking When the Bar is About to Close?
The female libido and ‘the two-year itch.’
Is the Internet killing the porn industry?
6 Reasons Why the MIT Blackjack Team Became Entrepreneurs.
More Small Businesses Embrace Bitcoin.
Is Patent reveals fingerprint scanner in next iPhone?
The nation has done a good job preparing for natural disasters like hurricanes and tornadoes. The difference between a disaster and a mega-disaster is scope.
Economists Have A One-Page Solution To Climate Change.
In this paper I distinguish principles from rules and standards and ask if there are norms that fit this description. I conclude that these may be moral principles but that there are no legal principles.
Here, you see participant six looking at a cook preparing dinner – in this case cockroaches.
The Church does not oppose tattoos.
The string of typographical symbols comic strips use to indicate profanity (”$%@!”) is called a grawlix.
Money shot [NSFW]
There’s such a blizzard of sensory information out there, the brain would be overwhelmed if it weren’t for a spotlight process of selective attention that allows us to focus. This means that once we’re tuned into certain aspects of the environment, we’re left blind to events outside of our selective attention - a phenomenon called “inattentional blindness.”
Central to this line of reasoning is the idea of attention as a finite resource. It’s because our processing powers are depleted by the focus of our attention that we’re left blind to that which we ignore. However, a new study challenges the finite resource element of this story. Baruch Eitam and his colleagues say that irrelevance is enough to render information invisible even if we have plenty of resources available for processing that information. It brings a new spin to our understanding of inattentional blindness that’s not just about attentional load but also about salience and motivation.
art { Cy Twombly, Untitled, 1968 }
Four years ago, Ed Snowden thought leakers should be ‘shot.’
Billionaire sends a porn video he filmed to his powerful New York contacts.
For the guys playing this game, the point isn’t to worry about when QE is going to end. The point is to get out before the other guy realizes the game is going to end.
Researchers say ability to throw played a key role in human evolution. That ability – to throw an object with great speed and accuracy – is a uniquely human adaptation.
What can we learn about emotion by studying psychopathy?
What is the Best Predictor of Unhappiness?
What kind of music do dogs prefer?
How Wikimedia Commons became a massive amateur porn hub.
A Mathematical Guide to the World’s Most Livable Cities.
The Polaroids of Andrei Tarkovsky.
Fur coat made entirely of male chest hair used to promotes chocolate milk drink for Men.
