Into the eternal darkness, into fire and into ice
Studies have shown that pleasant weather conditions (namely, sunshine) favor positive social relationships and improve moods. However, the effect of sunshine on one nonverbal expression that facilitates social relationships (namely, smiling) has never been studied. In a field experiment, men and women walking alone in the street were passed by a male or a female confederate who displayed a smile to the passersby. The contagion effect of smiling was measured. The study was carried out on days that were evaluated as being either sunny or cloudy, but precaution was taken to control the temperature and not to solicit participants when it rained. It was found that the display of a smile results in a smile more often on sunny days. The positive mood induced by the sun may explain such results.
{ Springer }
related { Sunscreen slows wrinkles: Will this evidence increase the use of sunscreen? }
‘Hell is more bearable than nothingness.’ –PJ Bailey
China, India and Pakistan have increased their nuclear weapons by about 10 warheads each in the past year, and other nuclear states appear set on maintaining their arsenals, a Swedish think tank said Monday. […]
“It is not so much about an increase in numbers, but an increase in quality,” said researcher Pillip Schell.
Every day, the same, again
Scientists Discover the Genetic Reason Why Birds Don’t Have Penises.
12 Clear Signals That The U.S. Economy Is About To Really Slow Down.
Why do identical twins end up having such different lives?
Professor Discovers Way to Alter Memory.
Researchers, Using Light to Activate Neurons, Make Mice Obsessive, or Not. Mind-control optogenetics experiments in mice give new clarity to the neural circuitry that underlines repetitive behaviors.
Parents with heavy TV viewing more likely to feed children junk food.
Procedures in human heart extraction and ritual meaning among the ancient Maya [PDF]
U.S. mining data from 9 leading Internet firms; companies deny knowledge. Top-secret program allows extraction of audio, video, photos, e-mails and documents, enabling analysts to track movements and contacts.
How likely is the NSA PRISM program to catch a terrorist?
It Won’t Be Easy, But Here’s How You Can Keep All Your Conversations Private
And say what thou seest yond
Adults make eye contact between 30% and 60% of the time in an average conversation, says the communications-analytics company Quantified Impressions. But the Austin, Texas, company says people should be making eye contact 60% to 70% of the time to create a sense of emotional connection, according to its analysis of 3,000 people speaking to individuals and groups.
One barrier to contact is the use of mobile devices for multitasking. Among twentysomethings, “it’s almost become culturally acceptable to answer that phone at dinner, or to glance down at the baseball scores.” […] Young adults who are dissatisfied with their lives or relationships feel compelled to check mobile gadgets repeatedly to see what social opportunities they are missing—even when they don’t enjoy it, the study says. […]
Eye contact can be a tool for influencing others. Looking at a colleague when speaking conveys confidence and respect. Prolonged eye contact during a debate or disagreement can signal you’re standing your ground. It also points to your place on the food chain: People who are high-status tend to look longer at people they’re talking to, compared with others, says a 2009 research review in Image and Vision Computing.
Three and eleven she paid for those stockings in Sparrow’s of George’s street on the Tuesday
A study by Swami and Furnham (2007) showed that tattooed women were rated as less physically attractive but more sexually promiscuous. Given that men interpret women’s sexual intent according to their physical appearance, we predicted that women with tattoos would be more favorably approached by men. A temporary tattoo was placed on confederates’ lower back, or not, and all confederates were instructed to read a book while lying flat on their stomach on a well-known beach. Two experiments were conducted. The first experiment showed that more men (N = 220) approached the tattooed confederates and that the mean latency of their approach was quicker. A second experiment showed that men (N = 440) estimated to have more chances to have a date and to have sex on the first date with tattooed confederates. However, the level of physical attractiveness attributed to the confederate was not influenced by the tattoo condition.
{ PubMed }
photo { Eric Marrian }
Every day, the same, again
Breast Milk Flavored Lollipops Make Debut.
Proposed Calif. law would make “revenge porn” a crime.
New research shows cheese may prevent cavities.
Pedestrians were observed at 20 high-risk intersections. Nearly one-third (29.8%) of all pedestrians performed a distracting activity while crossing. Distractions included listening to music (11.2%), text messaging (7.3%) and using a handheld phone (6.2%).
Facebook Removes Downloads of Your Posts.
The cities that are stealing finance jobs from Wall Street.
Nearly all the plastics sold today come from petroleum and aren’t biodegradable. Researchers are genetically engineering switchgrass to produce a biodegradable polymer that can be extracted directly from the plant.
Will Saudi Arabia Allow The U.S. Oil Boom?
Islands and the CounterIntuitive Effect They Have on Tsunamis.
What is life like serving Kim Jong-il and his heir? A strange and dangerous gig where the food and drink never stop, the girls are all virgins, and you’re never really safe.
Why This New York Design Agency Makes Its Employees Pose Naked For Official Staff Photos.
The first little pig built his house out of straw because it was the easiest thing to do
The airwaves are full of stories of economic recovery. One trumpeted recently has been the rapid recovery in housing, at least as measured in prices.
The problem is, a good portion of the rebound in house prices in many markets has less to do with renewed optimism, new jobs, and rising wages, and more to do with big money investors fueled by the ultra-cheap money policies of the Fed.
On my recent trip to Salt Lake City, Utah, after presenting to a bi-partisan audience in the Capitol building, a gentleman came up to me and introduced himself as a real estate agent. He explained that he’d been seeing something very strange over the past six months, where very well capitalized, out-of-state private equity funds had been buying up huge swaths of residential real estate with cash.
The effect, not surprisingly, is that regular home buyers are being outbid and eventually priced out of the market. Over time, these full cash offers at the ask get noticed and home sellers begin to raise their asking prices.
{ Chris Martenson/Zero Hedge | Continue reading }
[W]e were surprised to see an article in the very much mainstream, and pro-administration policies NYT, exposing just this facet of the new housing bubble. […]
Blackstone, which helped define a period of Wall Street hyperwealth, has bought some 26,000 homes in nine states. Colony Capital, a Los Angeles-based investment firm, is spending $250 million each month and already owns 10,000 properties. With little fanfare, these and other financial companies have become significant landlords on Main Street. Most of the firms are renting out the homes, with the possibility of unloading them at a profit when prices rise far enough.
Like a pebble in my shoe as I walk these streets
New research from McMaster University suggests women can remember faces better than men, in part because they spend more time studying features without even knowing it, and a technique researchers say can help improve anyone’s memories.
The findings help to answer long-standing questions about why some people can remember faces easily while others quickly forget someone they’ve just met.
photo { Guy Bourdin }
‘The knowledge of good and evil is nothing else but the emotions of pleasure or pain, in so far as we are conscious thereof.’ –Spinoza
7. The Law of Hedonic Asymmetry
There are certain awful circumstances to which we can never become accustomed. If things are bad enough, it is impossible to escape negative feelings like fear or anxiety. On the other hand positive emotions always fade over time. No matter how much we are in love, how big the lottery win, or how copious the quantities of drugs consumed, positive emotions like pleasure always slip away.8. The Law of Conservation of Emotional Momentum
Time doesn’t heal all wounds - or if it does, it only does so indirectly. Events can retain their emotional power over the years unless we re-experience and re-evaluate them. It’s this re-experiencing and consequent re-definition that reduces the emotional charge of an event. This is why events that haven’t been re-evaluated - say, failing an exam or being rejected by a potential lover - retain their emotional power across the decades.
and be careful to not get feelings of excitement and obsession confused with love
Have you ever wondered why one person can speak in public without apparent nerves while another crumples under pressure? Or why one elite athlete can shake off their nerves to win Olympic gold while another chokes?
Even with ample experience some people never seem to learn to cope with their emotions. A key insight comes from a controversial psychology study carried out on a rickety bridge by Dutton and Aron (1973).
Men crossing the bridge were approached by an attractive woman who asked them to fill out a survey. The men were chosen because they were known to be nervous and this was exaggerated by the fact the bridge was swaying, its handrails were very low and there was a 230-foot drop to the river below. After the men filled out the survey the woman gave them her number and said they could call her if they wanted the study explained in more detail.
A little further up men crossing another bridge were also being approached by a female researcher half-way across. The difference was that this bridge was sturdy, did not sway and was only a few feet above a small stream.
One of the key tests was: how many people would call up the attractive woman?
On the stable, safe bridge only 2 out of the 16 participants called. But, on the rickety bridge, 9 out of 18 called. So something about the rickety bridge made people more likely to call.
Dutton and Aron’s explanation was that it’s how we label the feelings we have that’s important, not just the feelings themselves. In this experiment men on the rickety bridge were more stressed and jittery than those on the stable bridge. And the argument is that they interpreted these bodily feelings as attraction, leading them to be more likely to make the call.
So: fear had been transformed into attraction.
This explanation is now controversial because subsequent studies have found that it’s rare to be able to reinterpret a negative emotion like fear into a positive one like attraction. Indeed some studies have specifically shown it can’t be done (Zanna et al., 1976).
However, we can reinterpret one positive emotion into a different positive emotion, and the same for negative emotions.
Why do people believe in conspiracy theories?
{ Miroslav Tichý, The City of Women Series | Tichý had been taking pictures of women furtively in his Czech hometown of Kyjov since the 1960s, with cameras he built himself | Wikipedia }
Flash, a-ah, savior of the Universe
{ A new invention aims to foil paparazzi who try to photograph people who do not wish to be photographed. Celebs are equipped with a flashgun that fires automatically the instant another flashgun fires nearby. | Improbable | full story }
Persistent vegetative state
These new robot-painting machines can wash, apply solvent to remove dirt, rinse and then spray two different paint types. […]
Manually, it takes a team of painters 4.5 hours to do the first coat. The robots do it in 24 minutes with perfect quality. Boeing began using the machine in February. By midsummer, all 777 wings will be painted this way. […]
Half the 777 wing-painting team has been redeployed to other roles, such as programming the machines, painting the airline liveries on the fuselage or working on the sophisticated paint job needed for the 787-9 tails, which have a special smooth aerodynamic finish, Clark said.
Jamie wasn’t latching on properly, and my nipple got sorer and sorer
{ Graham Reznick, I can See You, 2008 | Asger Carlsen, 2011 }
{ I can See You, 2008, poster }
{ Left: Chris Cunningham, Rubber Johnny, 2005 | Right: Asger Carlsen: “I have a lot of respect for Cunningham’s work and I like rubber Johnny. But I also had a big fascination for Francis Bacon while I was doing the first Hester image.” }
Every day, the same, again
Calif. Man Suspected of Painting Crosswalk.
Ex-Microsoft manager plans to create first U.S. marijuana brand.
Wealthy countries are creating more jobs by creating worse jobs.
What If Monetary Policy Doesn’t Work?
Soda and illegal drugs cause similar damage to teeth.
Ketamine Cousin Rapidly Lifts Depression Without Side Effects.
Australian researchers have isolated an immune system cell in salamanders which helps it regenerate missing limbs and damaged organs — and they suspect the same thing could work in humans, too.
The Latest Artificial Heart: Part Cow, Part Machine.
Why do we have greater insight into others than ourselves?
New research shows that asking for a precise number during negotiations can give you the upper hand.
Anatomy of a hack: How crackers ransack passwords like “qeadzcwrsfxv1331.”
Bell Labs Invents Lensless Camera.
16 Powerful Functions That Show Why Wall Streeters Can’t Live Without Their Bloomberg Terminals.
Hilton ends room service in favor of grab-and-go grub. New York City’s biggest hotel plans to discontinue the amenity and lay off 55; others may soon follow suit.
For Sale in NYC: Morgue cooler.
Female Israeli soldiers post ‘unbecoming’ half-naked photos on Facebook.
This is the true story of turn-of-the-century lesbian romance, erotic Deco illustrations rife with harlequins and crinolines, the world’s first male-to-female sex reassignment surgery, and the 1950s pulp novel that brought it all to light.
Brain surgery patient plays guitar during procedure.
Endre Tot, Outdoor Tests and To Where.
Le temps est-il essentiellement destructeur ?
Imagine we rewound the tape of your life. Your diplomas are pulled off of walls, unframed, and returned. Your children grow smaller, and then vanish. Soon, you too become smaller. Your adult teeth retract, your baby teeth return, and your traits and foibles start to slip away. Once language goes, you are not so much you as potential you. We keep rewinding still, until we’re halving and halving a colony of cells, finally arriving at that amazing singularity: the cell that will become you. The question, of course, is what happens when we press “play” again. Are your talents, traits, and insecurities so deeply embedded in your genes that they’re basically inevitable?
The Garden of Earthly Delights
Processed-food companies increasingly turn to their legions of scientists to produce foods that we can’t resist. These food geeks tweak their products by varying the levels of the three so-called pillar ingredients—salt, sugar, and fat. […]
[The] optimum amount of salt, sugar, or fat is called the bliss point. Scientists also adjust these ingredients as well as factors such as crunchiness to produce a mouthfeel—that is, the way the food feels inside a person’s mouth—that causes consumers to crave more. Technologists can also induce a flavor burst by altering the size and shape of the salt crystals themselves so that they basically assault the taste buds into submission.
The holy grail of junk-food science is vanishing caloric density, where the food melts in your mouth so quickly that the brain is fooled into thinking it’s hardly consuming any calories at all, so it just keeps snacking.
art { Peter Palombi }
Auri sacra fames
American households have rebuilt less than half of the wealth lost during the recession, according to a new analysis from the Federal Reserve, hampering the country’s economic recovery.
The research from the St. Louis Fed shows that households had accumulated net worth totaling $66 trillion at the end of last year. After adjusting for inflation and population growth, the bank found that meant families on average have only made up 45 percent of the decline in their net worth since the peak of the boom in 2007.
In addition, most of the improvement was due to gains in the stock market, according to the report, primarily benefiting wealthy families. That means the recovery for most households was even weaker. […]
The Fed is spending $85 billion a month to lower long-term interest rates and stimulate the economy. It has also kept short-term interest rates to near zero. That has helped push stock markets to record highs, while home prices have jumped by the most in seven years. Consumer confidence is at its highest point since February 2008. Officials hope those factors will eventually result in more consumer spending power.
{ Washington Post | Continue reading }
Uncertainty exists about how markets will reestablish normal valuations when the Fed withdraws from the market. It will likely be difficult to unwind policy accommodation, and the end of monetary easing may be painful for consumers and businesses. Given the Fed’s balance sheet increase of approximately $2.5 trillion since 2008, the Fed may now be perceived as integral to the housing finance system.
{ Federal Advisory Council via Zero Hedge | Continue reading }
