Russian criminal tattoos have a complex system of symbols which can give quite detailed information about the wearer. Not only do the symbols carry meaning but the area of the body on which they are placed may be meaningful too. […]

Tattoos done in a Russian prison often have a distinct bluish color (due to being made with ink from a ballpoint pen) and usually appear somewhat blurred because of the lack of instruments to draw fine lines. The ink is often created from burning the heel of a shoe and mixing the soot with urine, and injected into the skin utilizing a sharpened guitar string attached to an electric shaver. […]

Barbed wire across the forehead signifies a sentence of life imprisonment without possibility of parole (tattoos on the face usually signifies an expectation that the bearer will never leave prison). […]

Celtic Cross: Part of the racist white power movement. It has also been used to represent crosshairs of a gun, meaning that wearer is a hit man and he too will meet a violent end one day. […]

Skull: Signifies murder, if the murder was significant enough to merit the tattoo.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

images { Between 1948 and 1986, during his career as a prison guard, Danzig Baldaev made over 3,000 drawings of tattoos | more }

With human decisions come human biases, even in situations that demand objectivity. For example, crimes involving more victims can sometimes receive lesser punishments, an outcome known as the “identifiable victim effect.”  With more victims, each one becomes less identifiable, and this elicits less sympathy for the victims and a corresponding punishment that’s less severe.

A new study by a group of Tilburg University psychologists lays out another bias that can creep into evaluations of wrongdoing. In a series of six experiments the researchers found evidence for the “insured victim effect” — the tendency for perpetrators to be judged differently if the losses they cause are covered by insurance.

{ peer-reviewed by my neurons | Continue reading }

art { Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled, 1980 }

{ The latest meme to overtake the internet in China? “Gou gou chuan siwa” (狗狗穿丝袜), or in English, “Dogs wearing pantyhose.” }

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is an organization that publicly claims to represent the best interest of animals.” Yet approximately 2,000 animals pass through PETA’s front door every year and very few make it out alive. The vast majority — 96 percent in 2011 — exit the facility out the back door after they have been killed. […]

In 2012, 733 dogs entered this building. They killed 602 of them. Only 12 were adopted. Also in 2012, they impounded 1,110 cats. 1,045 were put to death. Seven of them were adopted. They also took in 34 other companion animals, such as rabbits, of which 28 were put to death. Only four were adopted. […]

Despite $35,000,000 in annual revenues and millions of “animal-loving” members, PETA does not even try to find them homes. PETA has no adoption hours, does no adoption promotion, has no adoption floor, but is registered with the State of Virginia as a “humane society” or “animal shelter.”

{ Nathan J. Winograd/HuffPost | Continue reading }

I do not know where family doctors acquired illegibly perplexing handwriting; nevertheless, extraordinary pharmaceutical intellectuality, counterbalancing indecipherability, transcendentalizes intercommunications’ incomprehensibleness.

(Dmitri Borgmann, Language on Vacation: An Olio of Orthographical Oddities. Scribner, 1965)

This is a ‘rhopalic’ sentence: A sentence or a line of poetry in which each word contains one letter or one syllable more than the previous word.

{ Quora | Continue reading }

related { “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo” is a grammatically valid sentence in American English | Wikipedia }

photo { Paul McDonough }

{ A Collection of Human Brains from the Texas State Mental Hospital }

Last week I discussed a way of preserving bodies almost indefinitely in some cases: embalming. On the other side of this is decay, the process of bodily decline and biological breakdown of the flesh. If you’ve ever watched any of the forensics crime shows, you know that understanding decay and changes in the body can be a key factor in determining when the individual died and how the body was treated after death. But it’s also important for archaeologists dealing with remains that are ancient.

First, let’s look at the early stages of decay. […] The first stage consists of the ‘mortis‘ phases. The blood isn’t being pumped through the body so due to gravity it pools in certain areas, and this is known as livor mortis. Shortly after this, the muscular tissue becomes rigid and incapable of relaxing, a state called rigor mortis. Next the body loses heat and cools in a process called algor mortis. Second, the body goes through bloat, in which means that microbes are rapidly growing and forming gases within the body. […]

Bones are also subject to continued decay, the study of which is known as taphonomy and is extremely important for archaeologists.

{ Bones Don’t Lie | Continue reading }

photo { Bobby Doherty }

Cops are looking for a man who smashed a woman over the head with a ketchup bottle while shouting anti-gay slurs at a Greenwich Village diner, cops said.

The attack took place in the Waverly Restaurant on Sixth Avenue at about 4:40 a.m. Monday, sources said.

The victim suffered head lacerations.

{ NY Post }

Take a container of mixed nuts, shake it and examine the contents. The chances are that the largest nuts, Brazil nuts for example, have risen to the top.

This phenomenon is called the Brazil nut effect and is known to depend on a number of factors, such as the container size and shape as well as the frequency and amplitude of the shaking. However, the general idea is that the shaking process creates voids that smaller, but not larger, particles can drop in to. […]

Carsten Guttler [et al.] have performed standard Brazil nut effect experiments […] on an A300 Airbus flying parabolic arcs to simulate gravitational forces on the Moon and on Mars.

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }

As I reported a couple of weeks ago, a recent Senate bill came with a nice bonus for the genetically modified seed industry: a rider, wholly unrelated to the underlying bill, that compels the USDA to ignore federal court decisions that block the agency’s approvals of new GM crops. I explained in this post why such a provision, which the industry has been pushing for over a year, is so important to Monsanto and its few peers in the GMO seed industry. […]

Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) has revealed to Politico’s ace reporter David Rogers that he’s the responsible party. Blunt even told Rogers that he “worked with” GMO seed giant Monsanto to craft the rider.

{ Mother Jones | Continue reading }

art { Cady Noland, Mutated Pipe, 1989 }

Facebook released a mobile thing today. It’s not a Facebook phone. But it’s more than an app. It’s like a digital skin that you slide your phone into so that it’s covered in sticky Facebook goodness. […]

If users actually take to Home, Facebook has come up with an excellent way to get people to have Facebook running on their phones all the time. That means Facebook will be able to constantly collect location information from them, making Facebook even more attractive to advertisers looking to deliver ads based on who you are, where you are and what you’re doing.

{ Forbes | Continue reading }

Gerald Crabtree, a neurobiologist at Stanford University, states that intelligent human behavior requires between 2,000 and 5,000 genes to work together. A mutation or other fault in any of these genes, and some kind of intellectual deficiency results. Before the creation of complex societies, humans suffering from these mutations would have died. But modern societies may have allowed the more intelligent to care for the less intelligent. While anyone who had participated in a group project understands this phenomena, it doesn’t explain why IQ and other tests have consistently risen, and why people with high scores on those tests still do stupid things.

{ United Academics | Continue reading }

photo { via Bill Sullivan }

A transgender man who made worldwide headlines after he married and gave birth to three children will appeal an Arizona judge’s ruling denying him a divorce from his wife of 10 years.

Cougar Cruises Bring Younger Men To Older Women.

Cross dressing Catholic priest to plead guilty to meth dealing ring. He had also purchased a bookstore - one that sold primarily pornography and sex toys - which he used as a front to launder money.

Chinese fishing vessels are taking a huge unreported global catch, fisheries researchers have found. Instead of an average 368,000 tonnes a year that China reported to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, its fleets hauled in as much as 4.6 million tonnes, the scientists estimate.

Ireland’s Homeowners: Global Champions in not Repaying Mortgages. [Chart]

Dream contents deciphered by computer. (60 percent accuracy)

Films for oral application offer an interesting new approach for drug administration.

Does Greek coffee hold the key to a longer life?

Men deliver ripe coffee berries to El Molino mill for processing in El Salvador, November 1944.

A growing body of research suggests that tea helps prevent cardiovascular disease, burn calories and ward off some types of cancer.

What we exhale is unique to us – our ‘breathprint.’

New research from an international team of scientists suggests evolution, or basic survival techniques adapted by early humans, influences the decisions gamblers make when placing bets.

One study famously found that people who had big wins on the lottery ended up no happier than those who had bought tickets but didn’t win. It seems that as long as you can afford to avoid the basic miseries of life, having loads of spare cash doesn’t make you very much happier than having very little.

The men and women who helped hide Ratko Mladic through his many years as a fugitive saw him as a Serb hero. But just in case their loyalty should waver, they were presented with a gift: photographs of their children. The implication was clear: if we can shoot them with a camera, we can shoot them by other means as well.

Russian Cyber Criminal Unmasked as Creator of ‘Most Successful’ Apple Malware Ever. Researchers estimated that the malware was earning its operator up to £6,600 [$9,900] per day.

The Digital Public Library of America, to be launched on April 18, is a project to make the holdings of America’s research libraries, archives, and museums available to all Americans—and eventually to everyone in the world—online and free of charge.

The warships of the future will be floating factories that create everything from food to robots and spare parts — all thanks to 3-D printers. One far-out idea from the U.S. Naval Institute: printable ships.

“When is the difference between 99% accuracy and 99.9% accuracy very important?” When it can stop a Zombie Apocalypse.

“Such adaptations [i.e., retention of the hymen] are explicable only if the male of the species finds it to his advantage to seek a virgin.”

How to Light a Bar on Fire.

The “Russian Banksy” is dead at 28.

Bull riding, 1916.

Portable Masturbatorium.

Around 1 in 7,500 otherwise healthy people are born with no sense of smell, a condition known as isolated congenital anosmia (ICA). So dominant are sight and hearing to our lives, you might think this lack of smell would be fairly inconsequential. In fact, a study of individuals with ICA published last year showed just how important smell is to humans. Compared with controls, the people with ICA were more insecure in their relationships, more prone to depression and to household accidents.

{ BPS | Continue reading }

photo { Francesca Woodman, Self-portrait talking to Vince, Providence, RI (RISD), 1975-78 }

{ The eternal affirmation of the spirit of man, is not just a facet of the Archipelago tables, but a defining principle of Mr Rocks design philosophy. | Eagle Wolf Orca }

The fastest growing industry in the US right now, even during this time of slow economic growth, is probably the patent troll protection racket industry. Lawsuits surrounding software patents have more than tripled since 1999.

It’s a great business model.

Step one: buy a software patent. There are millions of them, and they’re all quite vague and impossible to understand.

Step two: FedEx a carefully crafted letter to a few thousand small software companies, iPhone app developers, and Internet startups. This is where it gets a tiny bit tricky, because the recipients of the letter need to think that it’s a threat to sue if they don’t pay up, but in court, the letter has to look like an invitation to license some exciting new technology. In other words it has to be just on this side of extortion.

Step three: wait patiently while a few thousand small software companies call their lawyers, and learn that it’s probably better just to pay off the troll, because even beginning to fight the thing using the legal system is going to cost a million dollars.

{ Joel Spolsky | Continue reading }

A new form of corpse treatment has also been developed: freeze-drying or lyophilization. In freeze-drying the body of the deceased is cooled to -18° C. The frozen body is then immersed in a bath of liquid nitrogen. The frozen body then becomes very fragile. By then subjecting it to vibrations, the body falls apart into a kind of powder from which the moisture is then extracted by means of vacuum. A dry, odourless powder with a weight in the order of 25 to 30 kg eventually remains.

{ U.S. Patent Application/Improbable | Continue reading }

art { Cady Noland , Oozewald, 1989 }

Feb. 19
First male patient, 87, became ill with H7N9

Feb. 27
Second male patient, 27, became ill with H7N9

March 4
First male patient dies

March 9
First female patient, 35, from Anhui province became ill with H7N9

March 10
Second male patient dies
Initial report of over 900 dead pigs in Shanghai’s Huangpu River (as of Saturday, March 9)

March 11
Count of dead pigs in rivers near Shanghai reaches nearly 3,000

March 13
Officials say the number of pig carcasses in Huangpu River has risen to 6,000

March 14
Workers continued to haul dead hogs from a river in the Shanghai suburbs Thursday, where the pig body count now exceeds 6,600, according to the municipal government
Farm in Zhejiang province confesses to dumping pig carcasses into river

March 20
The number of dead pigs discovered in Chinese rivers around Shanghai has risen to almost 14,000

March 22
50 pigs wash up onshore in Changsha, Hunan province; ~1,000 dead ducks are also discovered
Number of dead pigs found in Shanghai river rises to 16,000

March 25
China pulls 1,000 dead ducks from Sichuan river
Government officials say that 1,000+ rotten duck carcasses pose no threat to human and livestock along river banks
Illegal Zhejiang pork found in food chain

March 26
Dumping of thousands of dead pigs linked with Chinese crackdown on pork black market

April 1
Dr. Michael O’Leary, World Health Organization, says that there is no evidence to show that a type of bird flu which has killed two Chinese men can be transmitted between people

April 2
Shanghai Animal Disease Prevention and Control Center tested 34 samples of pig carcasses pulled from Huangpu River and found no flu viruses

{ Foreign Policy | Continue reading }

Imagine you have a choice to make.
 
In one scenario, you’d get $8 and somebody else — a stranger – would get $8 too. In the other, you’d get $10; the stranger would get $12.
 
Economists typically assume you’d go for the $10/$12 option because of the belief that people try to maximize their own gains. Choosing the other scenario would just be irrational.
 
But new research conducted in collaboration with a professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management shows that if a person is feeling threatened, or concerned with their status, they are more likely to choose the option that gives them less. And although this choice might seem irrational from an economic perspective, this choice satisfies an important psychological need.
 
People who do this, “have a reason for their behaviour, and that reason is to protect themselves from low status,” described as a low position or rank in relation to others, says Prof. Geoffrey Leonardelli.

{ University of Toronto | Continue reading }

image { Tony Oursler }