Far more insidious is the insistence by some feminists on mocking transsexual women and denying their existence.

The word that annoys these so-called feminists most is ‘cis’, or ‘cissexual’. This is a term coined in recent years to refer to people who are not transsexual. The response is instant and vicious: “we’re not cissexual, we’re normal - we don’t want to be associated with you freaks!” Funnily enough, that’s just the kind of pissing and whining that a lot of straight people came out with when the term ‘heterosexual’ first began to be used as an antonym of ‘homosexual.’  Don’t call us ‘heterosexuals’, they said - we’re normal, and you don’t belong.

{ Laurie Penny | Continue reading | via Nathan/Zungu Zungu }

art { Astrid Klein }

{ 5 hurt in accidental shootings at 3 U.S. gun shows }

George Church, 58, is a pioneer in synthetic biology, a field whose aim is to create synthetic DNA and organisms in the laboratory. During the 1980s, the Harvard University professor of genetics helped initiate the Human Genome Project that created a map of the human genome.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Church, you predict that it will soon be possible to clone Neanderthals. What do you mean by “soon”? Will you witness the birth of a Neanderthal baby in your lifetime?

Church: That depends on a hell of a lot of things, but I think so. The reason I would consider it a possibility is that a bunch of technologies are developing faster than ever before. In particular, reading and writing DNA is now about a million times faster than seven or eight years ago. Another technology that the de-extinction of a Neanderthal would require is human cloning. We can clone all kinds of mammals, so it’s very likely that we could clone a human. […]

SPIEGEL: So let’s talk about possible benefits of a Neanderthal in this world.

Church: Well, Neanderthals might think differently than we do. We know that they had a larger cranial size. They could even be more intelligent than us. When the time comes to deal with an epidemic or getting off the planet or whatever, it’s conceivable that their way of thinking could be beneficial.

SPIEGEL: How do we have to imagine this: You raise Neanderthals in a lab, ask them to solve problems and thereby study how they think?

Church: No, you would certainly have to create a cohort, so they would have some sense of identity. They could maybe even create a new neo-Neanderthal culture and become a political force.

{ Der Spiegel | Continue reading }

I once tried to talk somebody out of pursuing a mail-order bride, a young Filipino who for a relatively modest fee would agree to move to Spokane, Wash., and start a new life with a complete stranger. Among the many questions raised by this half-baked plan was: How could you marry someone you had never met?

The case of Manti Te’o, the Notre Dame linebacker and finalist for college football’s highest honor, and his fake dead girlfriend takes this question to a whole new level. How can someone claim to have fallen in love with a woman he never met?

The answer, in part, is what’s wrong with love and courtship for a generation that values digital encounters over the more complicated messiness of real human interaction. As my colleague Alex Williams reported in a widely discussed piece a few days ago, screen time may be more important than face time for many 20- and 30-somethings. “Dating culture has evolved to a cycle of text messages, each one requiring the code-breaking skills of a cold war spy to interpret,” said Shani Silver, 30, in the story.

Technology, with its promise of both faux-intimacy and a protective sense of removal, does not alone explain the bizarre and still unfolding story of Te’o, who claimed that the love of his life died of leukemia last September after also suffering from a serious car crash. […] Te’o never actually met his phantom lover. Never. No face time. The entire relationship was electronic. And yet she was likely to become his wife, according to Te’o’s father. […]

The woman either existed, and then died, or didn’t exist, and therefore couldn’t have died at such a young and tender age. […] The digital girlfriend, Te’o said in an interview last October, two months before he found out the fraud, “was the most beautiful girl I ever met. Not because of her physical beauty, but the beauty of her character and who she is.” […] There was a picture, from their online encounters, of a lovely woman, a Stanford student, supposedly. There was a voice, from telephone conversations, of someone as well. And that someone finally called him up in early December and said the whole thing was a hoax perpetuated by an acquaintance in California, according to Deadspin, which broke the story.

“The pain was real,” said Swarbrick. “The grief was real. The affection was real. That’s the nature of this sad, cruel game.” No, that’s the nature of people who develop relationships through a screen. […]

To fall in love requires a bit of unpredictable human interaction. You have to laugh with a person, test their limits, go back and forth, touch them, reveal something true about yourself. You have to show some vulnerability, some give and take. At the very least, you have to make eye contact. It’s easier to substitute texting, tweeting or Facebook posting for these basic rituals of love and friendship because the digital route offers protection. How can you get dumped when you were never really involved?

{ NY Times | Continue reading | Thanks Rob }

art { General Idea, Artist’s Conception: Miss General Idea 1971, 1971 }

From the 1940s through the 1980s, recovery was accompanied by significant job growth—on the order of between 10 and 20 percent after four years. In our last three recessions, by contrast, we actually continued to lose jobs through the first months of “recovery,” and then added jobs at a glacial pace.

In 2003-4 and again over the last three years, this combination is often passed off as a curiosity: a “jobless recovery” in which the economy gets better but the labor market doesn’t. But that’s not really what’s happening. Job growth is slow because the recovery is slow. From the 1940s through the 1980, recoveries were relatively short and robust—usually adding about 10 percent to GDP in the first two years after the trough of the business cycle. In the 1991-3 recovery, GDP grew only 6 percent. In 2001-3, GDP grew only 5.9 percent. In the first two years of our current recovery (through July 2011), GDP grew only 4.4 percent. That’s not a jobless recovery. It’s no recovery at all.

{ Dissent | Continue reading }

photo { Allen Frame }

Artists, creative writers, and musicians have long been interested in the complex motives that spark passionate love, sexual desire, and sexual behavior. Recently, scholars from a variety of disciplines have begun to investigate two questions: “Why do men and women choose to engage in sexual liaisons?” “Why do they avoid such encounters?” Theories abound. Many theorists have complained that there exists a paucity of scales designed to measure the plethora of motives that prompt people to seek out or to avoid sexual activities. In fact, this observation is incorrect. Many such scales of documented reliability and validity do exist. The reason that few scholars are familiar with these scales is that they were developed by psychometricians from a variety of disciplines and are scattered about in an assortment of journals, college libraries, and researchers’ desk drawers, thus making them difficult to identify and locate. This paper will attempt to provide a compendium of all known sexual motives scales, hoping that this will encourage scholars to take a multidisciplinary approach in developing typologies of sexual motives and/or in conducting their own research into the nature of sexual motives. […]

Until recently, American sexologists generally assumed that young people engage in sexual activities for one of three reasons (the Big Three): love, a desire for pleasure, and/or a desire to procreate. […] Take a foray into the worlds of culture, art, and literature, however, and suddenly one becomes aware of how narrow the perspective of the Western scientist has been. There are a multitude of reasons why men and women might wish to engage in sexual activities. As Levin (1994) observed: “Coitus is undertaken not only for pleasure and procreation but also to degrade, control and dominate, to punish and hurt, to overcome loneliness or boredom, to rebel against authority, to establish one’s sexuality, or one’s achieving sexual competence (adulthood), or to show that sexual access was possible (to “score”), for duty, for adventure, to obtain favours such as a better position or role in life, or even for livelihood.”

{ Interpersona | Continue reading }

photo { Man Ray, Prayer, 1930 }

Google agrees. “Along with many in the industry, we feel passwords and simple bearer tokens such as cookies are no longer sufficient to keep users safe,” Grosse and Upadhyay write in their paper.
Thus, they’re experimenting with new ways to replace the password, including a tiny Yubico cryptographic card that — when slid into a USB (Universal Serial Bus) reader — can automatically log a web surfer into Google. They’ve had to modify Google’s web browser to work with these cards, but there’s no software download and once the browser support is there, they’re easy to use. You log into the website, plug in the USB stick and then register it with a single mouse click.

They see a future where you authenticate one device — your smartphone or something like a Yubico key — and then use that almost like a car key, to fire up your web mail and online accounts.

In the future, they’d like things to get even easier, perhaps connecting to the computer via wireless technology.

{ Wired | Continue reading }

photo { Yasuhiro Ishimoto, Children at Halloween, Chicago, 1952 }

{ Brazilian site that builds fake girlfriend profiles on Facebook for 3, 7 or 30 days depending on your chosen plan }

The Phantom Time Hypothesis is a conspiracy theory developed by Heribert Illig in 1991.

It proposes that periods of history, specifically that of Europe during the Early Middle Ages (AD 614–911), did not exist, and that there has been a systematic effort to cover up that fact. Illig believed that this was achieved through the alteration, misrepresentation and forgery of documentary and physical evidence.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading | via Nick Moran }

The question is, what happens to your ideas about computational architecture when you think of individual neurons not as dutiful slaves or as simple machines but as agents that have to be kept in line and that have to be properly rewarded and that can form coalitions and cabals and organizations and alliances?  This vision of the brain as a sort of social arena of politically warring forces seems like sort of an amusing fantasy at first, but is now becoming something that I take more and more seriously, and it’s fed by a lot of different currents.
 
Evolutionary biologist David Haig has some lovely papers on intrapersonal conflicts where he’s talking about how even at the level of the genetics, even at the level of the conflict between the genes you get from your mother and the genes you get from your father, the so-called madumnal and padumnal genes, those are in opponent relations and if they get out of whack, serious imbalances can happen that show up as particular psychological anomalies.

We’re beginning to come to grips with the idea that your brain is not this well-organized hierarchical control system where everything is in order, a very dramatic vision of bureaucracy. In fact, it’s much more like anarchy with some elements of democracy. Sometimes you can achieve stability and mutual aid and a sort of calm united front, and then everything is hunky-dory, but then it’s always possible for things to get out of whack and for one alliance or another to gain control, and then you get obsessions and delusions and so forth.

You begin to think about the normal well-tempered mind, in effect, the well-organized mind, as an achievement, not as the base state, something that is only achieved when all is going well, but still, in the general realm of humanity, most of us are pretty well put together most of the time. This gives a very different vision of what the architecture is like, and I’m just trying to get my head around how to think about that.

{ Daniel C. Dennett/Edge | Continue reading }

photo { Robert Heinecken }

String theory is an attempt to describe all particles and all forces in nature in one unified theoretical framework. It encompasses quantum mechanics and gravity, and it is based on the idea that the fundamental building blocks of matter are not particles, but strings: objects which have some length, and which can vibrate in different ways.

{ Steven Gubser on String Theory | Continue reading }

images { 1 | 2 }

The Robot Restaurant opened in China in June. Robot Restaurant staffs a total of 20 robots as waiters, cooks and busboys.

Cross-Dressing Priest Busted for Selling Meth and Laundering Money Through His Sex Shop.

Most people who buy life insurance never actually get paid when they die.

A lucky two percent of people have a gene for stink-free armpits. But a new study finds most of them still use deodorant.

Extraversion does not just explain differences between how people act at social events. How extraverted you are may influence how the brain makes choices — specifically whether you choose an immediate or delayed reward, according to a new study.

Studies have shown that women are less likely to take the most direct approach to ensure that they receive fair pay compared to their male counterparts – simply asking.

Over one hundred million women in the world are estimated to be “missing” from the world’s population due to some form of gendercide. Gendercide exists on almost every continent and affects every class of people. Gendercide has traditionally taken the form of sex-selective abortion, infanticide, or death caused by neglect.

People with low risk for cocaine dependence have differently shaped brain to those with addiction.

Did you know fecal transplants are a thing? They are. And not only that, they’re an effective cure for a potentially fatal intestinal infection resistant to antibiotics.

Urinary incontinence: Could two cups of coffee a day cause urinary incontinence in men?

Why do we remember more from young adulthood than from any other time of our lives?

After a string of digital dating disasters, Amy Webb dug into the data…and found her husband. {Thanks Tim]

How personal-health journalism ignores the fundamental pitfalls baked into all scientific research and serves up a daily diet of unreliable information.

All Scrabble players know that Q and Z are the highest scoring tiles. You can get 10 points for each, in the English language version of the game. But according to one American researcher, Z really only deserves six points.

A nine-year-old Pennsylvania girl wearing a black and white Halloween costume was shot in the shoulder by a shotgun-wielding relative who mistook her for a skunk. Is a bullet wound in the shoulder as harmless as the movies make it seem?

“SUBWAY FOOTLONG” is a registered trademark as a descriptive name for the sub sold in Subway® Restaurants and not intended to be a measurement of length.”

All indulgences in life are bad for us—or at least it often seems that way. We regularly desire things that provide short-term satisfaction, yet may harbor long-term negative consequences. In order to enjoy these ‘‘guilty pleasures’’ however, we often find ways to justify their consumption. Challenging or adverse experiences serve this purpose well, providing a convenient rationale for self indulgence and making us feel more entitled to a little pleasure.

This paper considers two studies that support the link between adversity and self-reward. Study 1 demonstrates that pain leads to self-reward but only in contexts that frame the experience of pain as “unjust.” Study 2 shows that after pain people are more likely to self-reward with guilty pleasures (chocolate) in preference to other kinds of rewards (a pen).

The studies provide evidence that simply experiencing physical pain facilitates indulgence in guilty pleasures.

{ SAGE | PDF }

Did you know that around 85% of humans only breathe out of one nostril at a time? This fact may surprise you, but even more remarkable is the following: our body follows a pattern and switches from breathing out of one nostril to the other in a cyclical way. Typically, every four hours it switches from left to right, or right to left.

{ United Academics | Continue reading }

images { John Stezaker, The Voyeur, 1979 | 2 }

{ Taryn Simon, Black Square IV. The Blaster, Invented by Charl Fourie as an Anti-Hijacking system, installed on a Toyota Corolla, one of the most frequently carjacked vehicles in South Africa }

I HAVE WRITTEN A LOT ABOUT ART. I NO LONGER DO BECAUSE THE ART WORLD IS TOO STUPID. I DON’T KNOW ANY WORDS THAT ARE SHORT ENOUGH OR LONG ENOUGH. IT’S A DEAD PRACTICE BUT FUN WHILE IT LASTED. WITH AFFECTION, Dave Hickey

{ The Brooklyn Rail | Thanks Rob }

“They’re in the hedge fund business, so they drop their windfall profits into art. It’s just not serious,” he told the Observer. […] “I hope this is the start of something that breaks the system. At the moment it feels like the Paris salon of the 19th century, where bureaucrats and conservatives combined to stifle the field of work. It was the Impressionists who forced a new system, led by the artists themselves. It created modern art and a whole new way of looking at things.”

{ Guardian | Continue Reading }

In 1999, he bought Munch’s Madonna for $11 million. In 2004, he bought Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living for $8 million. In 2006, he bought a Pollock for $52 million. In 2006, he bought de Kooning’s Woman III for $137 million. In 2007, he bought Warhol’s Turquoise Marilyn for $80 million. In 2010, he bought a Johns Flag for $110 million. There have been works by Bacon and Richter and Picasso and Koons. Probably only he knows how much he has spent. Someone on the internet estimates it at $700 million. […] Steven Cohen is in the news a lot lately. Prosecutors have accused seven former employees of his firm, SAC Capital, of insider trading. Three have pled guilty. Six others have been accused of insider trading while at other firms.

{ n+1 | Continue reading }

{ Walter Bond, NIO’s “Director of Militant Direct Action,” is serving a federal sentence for torching a restaurant that served foie gras. He’s written that the world would be better off if “non-Vegans were disposed of.” | Gawker | full story }

New York police will begin asking city pharmacies to stock decoy bottles fitted with GPS devices among powerful painkillers like Oxycontin and oxycodone in the latest bid to combat gunpoint robberies of drug stores.

U.S. study warns of extreme heat, more severe storms. While U.S. agriculture will likely remain resilient in the next 25 years, yields of major crops could start declining by mid-century and warming oceans could threaten fish, the study said.

Scared Of Genetically Modified Food? It Might Be The Only Way To Feed The World.

Research suggests we may actually face a declining world population in the coming years.

Technology used to make us better at our jobs. Now it’s making many of us obsolete, as the share of income going to workers is crashing, all over the world. How to Protect Workers From the Rise of Robots.

The Algorithms That Automatically Date Medieval Manuscripts.

Cybersleuths uncover 5-Year spy operation targeting diplomats, governments and research institutions.

Here we show that curved motion, as employed by the magician in a classic sleight of hand trick, generates stronger misdirection than rectilinear motion.

How to disassemble a skyscraper.

Why trees can’t grow taller than 100 metres.

How to tell if you’re anal retentive.

Why everyone films at the same New York Chinese restaurant?