Every day, the same, again
Woman arrested for trying to sell her kids on Facebook.
Last Two Speakers of Dying Language Refuse to Talk to Each Other.
2,000 to 4,000 businesses now producing marijuana for legal purposes. Total sales: $1.2 billion to $1.3 billion last year.
450,000 people had robot-assisted surgery last year, making Intuitive Surgical, the maker of the da Vinci machine, one of the hottest stocks around. Hospitals across the country embrace the cutting-edge surgical device but criticism is mounting. CNBC’s Herb Greenberg investigates allegations of problems in the operating room in his latest documentary, “The da Vinci Debate.”
This paper proposes that networks can act as covers which allow actors to participate in markets while maintaining a plausible excuse that they are not. [PDF]
Sites listing an individual’s real name have become common. This shift towards real names is not merely a technical convenience, but a specific political turn. As pseudonyms are often associated with Internet trolling and cyberbullying, it is useful to track the use of pseudonyms in history and to consider many of their positive functions.
This month marks 20 years since work started to wipe away one of the most striking features of the Hong Kong landscape for good. A 2.7-hectare enclave of opium parlours, whorehouses and gambling dens run by triads.
Why has China built a ghost town in Africa?
Does riding a motorcycle reduce your sperm count?
Why White People are Called Caucasian? [via Sunday Reading]
The Eat-This-Then-Your-Sweat-Will-Smell-Like-Rose-Water Experiment.
MoMA’s Jackson Pollock Conservation Project.
A Wet Towel In Space Is Not Like A Wet Towel On Earth. [Thanks Tim]
Traveller arrested smuggling live hummingbirds in his trousers.
‘Victory, Creon, is not always so glorious: Shame and remorse often follow.’ –Racine
{ Cocaine Caused Financial Crisis, Ex-UK Drug Czar Says | Thanks GG }
oil and varnish on birch-ply { James White }
That is typically Swedish. They’ll hold their breath until they turn blue. And yellow.
When we recognize someone, we integrate information from across their face into a perceptual whole, and do so using a specialized brain region. Recognizing other kinds of objects does not engage such specific brain areas, and is achieved in a much more parts-based way.
In a recent review of the literature [The evolution of holistic processing of faces], we investigated how this face-specific mode of perception may have evolved by examining the evidence for face-based holistic processing in other species. A surprisingly wide variety of other animals can recognize each other from their “face,” but for most of these there is either evidence that they don’t do this “holistically” (dogs are an example) or insufficient evidence to claim that they do (typically because the experiments are poorly designed).
There is good evidence that some species of monkey are as affected by turning the face upside down as humans are (which is one index of holistic processing), and one species of monkey (Rhesus macaques) also shows evidence of the “composite effect.” The composite effect refers to the fact that people find it difficult to recognize the top half of a face if it is shown lined up with the bottom half of a different face, because we can’t help integrating the two halves into a new whole. People have trouble recognizing other primate faces when they are upside down, but only show the composite effect for human faces.
Googley-goo where’s the gravy
One way to undermine social media monopolies is to refuse to contribute to the communicational economy they are based upon: don’t generate exploitable signals, stay quiet — and ask how this might be developed as a common response. Given the naturalized assumption that ‘more communication’ will automatically produce ‘more freedom’, suggestions, like this one, that are based on doing less of it might provoke hostility. However, in the case of the social media industries, communication is cultivated not in the interests of freedom, but in the interests of growth; social media wants to capture more of you through your transactions. Moreover, through this process communications are not made ‘more free’ but tend rather to become less open — certainly in the sense that they are commoditized.
photo { Hisaji Hara }
In ageless sleep, she finds repose. The years roll by.
In the early 1990s, psychiatrist Thomas Wehr conducted an experiment in which a group of people were plunged into darkness for 14 hours every day for a month.
It took some time for their sleep to regulate but by the fourth week the subjects had settled into a very distinct sleeping pattern. They slept first for four hours, then woke for one or two hours before falling into a second four-hour sleep. […]
In 2001, historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech published a seminal paper, drawn from 16 years of research, revealing a wealth of historical evidence that humans used to sleep in two distinct chunks. […]
Much like the experience of Wehr’s subjects, these references describe a first sleep which began about two hours after dusk, followed by waking period of one or two hours and then a second sleep. […] During this waking period people were quite active. They often got up, went to the toilet or smoked tobacco and some even visited neighbours. Most people stayed in bed, read, wrote and often prayed. Countless prayer manuals from the late 15th Century offered special prayers for the hours in between sleeps.
And these hours weren’t entirely solitary - people often chatted to bed-fellows or had sex.
A doctor’s manual from 16th Century France even advised couples that the best time to conceive was not at the end of a long day’s labour but “after the first sleep”, when “they have more enjoyment” and “do it better”.
Ekirch found that references to the first and second sleep started to disappear during the late 17th Century.
We are in the business of making mistakes. The only difference between the winners and the losers is that the winners make small mistakes.
The kings of the Spanish Habsburg dynasty (1516–1700) frequently married close relatives in such a way that uncle-niece, first cousins and other consanguineous unions were prevalent in that dynasty. In the historical literature, it has been suggested that inbreeding was a major cause responsible for the extinction of the dynasty when the king Charles II, physically and mentally disabled, died in 1700 and no children were born from his two marriages, but this hypothesis has not been examined from a genetic perspective. In this article, this hypothesis is checked by computing the inbreeding coefficient (F) of the Spanish Habsburg kings from an extended pedigree up to 16 generations in depth and involving more than 3,000 individuals. […]
It is speculated that the simultaneous occurrence in Charles II of two different genetic disorders […] could explain most of the complex clinical profile of this king, including his impotence/infertility which in last instance led to the extinction of the dynasty.
{ PLoS | Continue reading | Read more: Nature }
photo { Erich Heckel, Fränzi Reclining, 1910 }
Torrent tracked by BayTSP. DCMA’d. Avoid.
Did you know Disney created its own confetti called ‘Flutterfetti,’ which was actually engineered to ‘flutter’ in the air better? Or that the parks will pump out a vanilla scent on Main Street because the smell triggers fond memories?
From Gucci to Stussy to fliggedy-flam a groupie
{ via Brad Feuerhelm }
‘No scanners here, just ears, and they’re being shattered by the sirens.’ –M. Monalisa Gharavi
In psychology literature, “ask for the moon, settle for less” is known as the “door in the face” (DITF) technique. Unlike the “foot in the door” technique, in which the fulfillment of a small request makes people more likely to fulfill a large request, DITF uses an unreasonable request as a way of making somebody more likely to subsequently fulfill a more moderate request. The technique was first demonstrated by Robert Cialdini’s famous 1975 experiment in which students became more likely to volunteer for a single afternoon after first being asked to volunteer for an afternoon every week for two years.
So, can research on DITF shed some light on why pursuing an assault weapons ban didn’t pan out?
Every day, the same, again
Bears In Russia Are Addicted To Jet Fuel, Sniff It To Get High And Pass Out. [Thanks Erwin]
What does the United States export?
People who worry habitually about separation and abandonment - the “anxiously attached” - tend to be highly skilled at lie detection, an attribute that means they excel at poker.
How Can I Avoid Procrastination?
There are anecdotal reports that men who wear (Scottish) kilts have better sperm quality and better fertility. But how much is true?
How does the public engage with the new knowledge that advances in neuroscience produces?
The revival of an extinct species is no longer a fantasy. But is it a good idea?
Struggling, trapped bed bugs are impaled by trichomes on several legs and are unable to free themselves. Scientists document how beans create a natural bedbug trap and, potentially, how it could be used to improve bedbug purging efforts.
Do Dogs Try to Hide Theft of Food?
During an interview what’s an appropriate answer when asked “where do you see yourself in 5 years?”
The 12 Best Very Small Agencies to Work For in Government.
It’s time for the flying public to cut the airlines some slack and show a little appreciation. Stop Whining About Air Travel.
Why did kamikaze pilots wear helmets?
1913: When Hitler, Trotsky, Tito, Freud and Stalin all lived in Vienna.
The Ford “Quonset-Hut Mansion” House, 1948.
List of patents for machines that do not and, by their nature, cannot work as described.
I’ve gotten texts about people actually cheering for the opposing team
Newsflash you stupid cocks: FRATS DON’T LIKE BORING SORORITIES. Oh wait, DOUBLE FUCKING NEWSFLASH: SIGMA NU IS NOT GOING TO WANT TO HANG OUT WITH US IF WE FUCKING SUCK.
{ via Gawker | Continue reading }
Radio, suckers never play me
Mirrors are defeating because they don’t tell you what you look like to someone else.
{ Lynne Tillman | Continue reading | via Rob Horning }
But I can fe-fi-fo-fum, diddly-bum, here I come
Let’s say you ran one of the Fortune 10 companies. And for some reason, you wanted to ensure that this business would be hated by its customers, forever. What would you do? […] for long term contempt, you need stuff that nobody notices. […]
What I’d do is create a policy that makes it really hard for my company’s employees to ask questions of my company’s customers. I’d make it a struggle to collect feedback. In order to collect any form of feedback, I’d make it so that you had to first ask for permission from an underfunded and understaffed component of the central office of my corporation.
Of course I’d also make it take at least six months to get this approval. That way, most of the people who wanted to ask my customers a question were immediately discouraged from doing so. […] I’d staff this office with economists and lawyers. […]
Then, just to be especially perverse, what I’d do is encourage my company to use social media. I’d create policies around it, pushing my company to go online on Facebook and Twitter and stuff, and to have “authentic conversations” with our customers. I’d tell them that it was totally cool to use social media to informally do whatever they wanted, except to use that information to inform product or service decisions. This way, my employees will be completely cut off from their customers needs. And the only employees that actually make it to the customers are the people who know how to talk to the economists. That’ll make it so whatever inputs and outputs of my business are so incomprehensible that they’ll just create more frustration rather than solve problems. [And customers will] think they’re giving input to the company without that input actually making it anywhere useful.
It’s a machievellian scenario that, sadly, I didn’t make up. This “corporate policy” is actually a law that makes your government act like this, and it’s nefariously named the “Paperwork Reduction Act.” It was the last bill signed into law by Jimmy Carter in 1980.
Step aside for the flex Terminator X
From assembly line robots to ATMs and self-checkout terminals, each year intelligent machines take over more jobs formerly held by humans; and experts predict this trend will not stop anytime soon. […]
“By 2015, robots should be able to assist teachers in the classroom. By 2018, they should be able to teach on their own, and this will cause many teachers to lose their jobs.” […]
The ultimate tool to replace doctors could be the nanorobot, a tiny microscopic-size machine that can whiz through veins replacing aging and damaged cells with new youthful ones. This nanowonder with expected development time of mid-to-late 2030s could eliminate nearly all need for human doctors. […]
Experts estimate by 2035, 50 million jobs will be lost to machines […] and by the end of the century, or possibly much sooner, all jobs will disappear. Some believe the final solution will take the form of a Basic Income Guarantee, made available as a fundamental right for everyone. […] America should create a $25,000 annual stipend for every U.S. adult, Brain says, which would be phased in over two-to-three decades. The payments could be paid for by ending welfare programs, taxing automated systems, adding a consumption tax, allowing ads on currency, and other creative ideas.
I’ve just picked up a fault in the AE35 unit. It’s going to go 100% failure in 72 hours.
Modern humans are estimated to be about 200,000 years old, but 99% of progress has occurred in the last 10,000 years. What were we doing before that?
[…]
Low Population: Until about 10000 BCE, world population never exceeded 15 million and mostly was around 1 million. Urban World History The present population of the world is 7 billion and 1 million is comparable to the population of a medium size city. When you have just a couple of million people spread in this big wide world, there is little that humanity could collectively build. Even if we assume that early human being could be as productive as us, their civilization could produce less than 1/1000 of what our society could do.
Life Expectancy: From that point until 20th century, we had a very low life expectancy (about 30 years). Imagine if we all died by the time we reached 30, how much could we learn from our parents and how much can we teach our kids. Given the low life expectancy of early humans, there was not much time to learn and teach. We just started randomly doing whatever we could to survive.
installation { Jannis Kounellis, Untitled, 2005 }
Every day, the same, again
Maine ‘hermit’ gets marriage proposal, bail offer. [previously]
Mexico City tries to get salt shakers off tables.
Men can’t read women’s emotions, study confirms.
Data from a new study of British adults suggest that following a “Western-style” diet (fried and sweet food, processed and red meat, refined grains, and high-fat dairy products) reduces a person’s likelihood of achieving older ages in good health and with higher functionality.
Nobody really understands why listening to music — which, unlike sex or food, has no intrinsic value — can trigger such profoundly rewarding experiences. Salimpoor and other neuroscientists are trying to figure it out with the help of brain scanners.
Using brainwaves for authentication, instead of passwords.
Frequent texters tend to be shallow, research suggests. [Thanks Erwin]
Facebook Charging $1 Million For New, Intrusive Video Ads That Will Run In Users News Feeds. TV-Like ads can be bought for four broad demographic swaths.
Trader pleads guilty to making unauthorized purchase of nearly $1 billion in Apple shares.
Virtual Bitcoin Mining Is a Real-World Environmental Disaster.
In other words, it doesn’t matter how much experience you have. It doesn’t matter why you lost your previous job — it could have been bad luck. If you’ve been out of work for more than six months, you’re essentially unemployable.
5 Ways You’re Wrong About Surviving Disasters.
James Joyce’s grandson describes image on official commemorative coin as an ‘insult,’ says coin fiasco is typical of Ireland’s treatment of his family.
In 1983 psychiatrist Giles Brindley demonstrated the first drug treatment for erectile dysfunction in a rather unique way. He took the drug and demonstrated his stiff wicket to the audience mid-way through his talk.
Has anyone ever been killed by a falling piano?
A Complete History of Breakout. [Thanks Tim]
Fuck your frame cluster and bench tableau with a cactus on top.
Crucifixion ain’t no fiction
{ Hedge-fund manager John Paulson’s wager on gold wiped out almost $1 billion of his personal wealth in the past two trading days as the precious metal plummeted 13 percent. Paulson started the year with about $9.5 billion invested across his hedge funds, of which 85 percent was in gold share classes. | Businessweek | full story }
