“I realized from quite early on in my childhood that I saw things differently than other people,” he wrote. “But more often than not, it’s helped me in my life. Psychopathy (if that’s what you want to call it) is like a medicine for modern times. If you take it in moderation, it can prove extremely beneficial. It can alleviate a lot of existential ailments that we would otherwise fall victim to because our fragile psychological immune systems just aren’t up to the job of protecting us. But if you take too much of it, if you overdose on it, then there can, as is the case with all medicines, be some rather unpleasant side effects.”

Might this eminent criminal defense lawyer have a point? Was psychopathy a “medicine for modern times”? The typical traits of a psychopath are ruthlessness, charm, focus, mental toughness, fearlessness, mindfulness and action. Who wouldn’t at certain points in their lives benefit from kicking one or two of these up a notch?

I decided to put the theory to the test. As well as meeting the doctors in Broadmoor, I would talk with some of the patients. I would present them with problems from normal, everyday life, the usual stuff we moan about at happy hour, and see what their take on it was. […]

Around 20 percent of the patients housed there at any one time are what you might call “pure” psychopaths. These are confined to the two Dangerous and Severe Personality Disorder (DSPD) wards. The rest present with so-called cluster disorders: clinically significant psychopathic traits, accompanied by traits typically associated with other personality disorders—borderline, paranoid and narcissistic, for example. Or they may have symptoms such as delusions and hallucinations indicative of psychosis. […]

“I think the problem is that people spend so much time worrying about what might happen, what might go wrong, that they completely lose sight of the present. They completely overlook the fact that, actually, right now, everything’s perfectly fine. So the trick, whenever possible, I propose, is to stop your brain from running on ahead of you.”

{ Kevin Dutton/Scientific American | Continue reading }

Based on prior research, it was hypothesized that heterosexual participants, especially women, who do not perceive themselves as having a strong, close, positive relationship with their opposite-sex parent would be more likely to engage in or attempt to engage in casual sexual behavior (hookups). Also, men were expected to be more satisfied with, and more in agreement with, hookup behavior than women. The results were partially consistent with the hypotheses. Men were more satisfied with and more in agreement with hookup behavior than women. But, opposite sex parent-child relationship quality only affected men’s agreement with the hookup behavior of their peers. Men with lower relationship quality with their mothers agreed more with the hookup behavior of their peers.

{ Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology | PDF }

Infiniti Poker, like several other new online gambling sites, plans to accept Bitcoin when it launches later this month. […]

Developed in 2009 by a mysterious programmer known as Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoins behave much like any currency. Their value—currently about $13 per Bitcoin—is determined by demand. Transactions are handled through a decentralized peer-to-peer network similar to BitTorrent, the protocol for sharing films and music over the Internet. An assortment of merchants around the globe accept Bitcoin; it’s also the currency used on online black markets such as Silk Road, which processes an estimated $1.2 million a month in sales of illegal drugs, according to Nicolas Christin, the associate director of Carnegie Mellon’s Information Networking Institute.

Individuals can buy and sell Bitcoins using global currencies through such online exchanges as Mt. Gox. There’s even a service facilitated by BitInstant, a payment-processing company, that allows you to purchase the virtual currency for cash at 700,000 U.S. locations, including participating Wal-Mart, Duane Reade, and 7-Eleven stores. Once users have Bitcoins, they store them on their computers or mobile devices in files known as Bitcoin wallets or in cloud-based “e-wallets.”

Hajduk says Infiniti Poker will accept credit cards, wire transfers, and other payment options, but players in the U.S. will be able to play only using Bitcoins. He originally included the currency not to get around U.S. law but to reduce the time it takes to cash players out. Bank transactions can take up to 12 weeks; players who use Bitcoin can get a payout in a matter of hours, he says.

{ Businessweek | Continue reading }

Take the biggest question of all, for example: what is the ultimate nature of reality? We used to think the answer was atoms. Then we learned about the electron and then about the atomic nucleus. Then it became clear that this nucleus was composed of protons and neutrons. Then these particles were discovered to be composed of quarks held together by gluons. And now we’re in trouble. We know these particles follow those strange quantum laws, and the consequences of this lead us towards an extraordinary answer to our very ordinary question.

At heart, quantum theory is about probabilities. No particle has a real existence that we can speak of; we can only express the probability of finding it somewhere. In fact, quantum theory is really about getting access to information.

Information is not an abstract entity. It is always encoded in something physical: a computer’s hard disk, say, or molecules of ink on a page. So if quantum theory is leading us towards the idea that information lies at the heart of reality, this information must be stored somehow in the physical universe.

Faced with such a staggering notion, scientists began to seek out the supporting evidence. And, though it’s very early days, it seems there is some.

{ New Humanist | Continue reading }

photo { Danny Lyon }

A drug applied to the ears of mice deafened by noise can restore some hearing in the animals. By blocking a key protein, the drug allows sound-sensing cells that are damaged by noise to regrow. The treatment isn’t anywhere near ready for use in humans, but the advance at least raises the prospect of restoring hearing to some deafened people.

{ Science | Continue reading }

image { Yoshifumi Hayashi }

Guy Debord’s first book, Mémoires, was bound with a sandpaper cover so that it would destroy other books placed next to it.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

Mémoires was written, or rather assembled, by Guy Debord and Asger Jorn in 1957. Debord himself often referred to Mémoires as an anti-book. […] The text is entirely composed of fragments taken from other texts: photographs, advertisements, comic strips, poetry, novels, philosophy, pornography, architectural diagrams, newspapers, military histories, wood block engravings, travel books, etc. Each page presents a collage of such materials connected or effaced by Jorn’s structures portantes, lines or amorphous painted shapes that mediate the relationships between the fragments.

{ via David Banash | Continue reading }

{ This is what would happen if we breach the debt ceiling }

images { 1. Fakir Musafar | 2 }

We tested whether eye color influences perception of trustworthiness. Facial photographs of 40 female and 40 male students were rated for perceived trustworthiness. Eye color had a significant effect, the brown-eyed faces being perceived as more trustworthy than the blue-eyed ones.

{ PLOS | Continue reading }

As we age, it just may be the ability to filter and eliminate old information – rather than take in the new stuff - that makes it harder to learn, scientists report.

“When you are young, your brain is able to strengthen certain connections and weaken certain connections to make new memories,” said Dr. Joe Z. Tsien, neuroscientist. It’s that critical weakening that appears hampered in the older brain, according to a study in the journal Scientific Reports. […]

“We know we lose the ability to perfectly speak a foreign language if we learn than language after the onset of sexual maturity. I can learn English but my Chinese accent is very difficult to get rid of. The question is why,” Tsien said.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

photo { Achim Lippoth }

At this time last year, the price of a frozen, euthanized mouse was 45 cents. But now, that price has nearly doubled. […]

Mice and rats are in high demand as a main food source at a clinic that houses and rehabilitates 4,000 to 5,000 injured, orphaned and displaced wild animals every year.

{ LJ World | Continue reading }

photo { Nico Krijno }

There are notes and notes, of course: notes to oneself and notes to others; notes taken, made, jotted, and passed. Mash, doctor’s, suicide, and condolence notes. Field, class, and case notes; notes for general circulation; foot and head notes, notes of hand. But it’s the bookish notes that academics care most about, the ones that intervene between the things we read and the things we write. […]

In his 1689 De arte Excerpendi, the Hamburg rhetorician Vincent Placcius described a scrinium literatum, or literary cabinet, whose multiple doors held 3,000 hooks on which loose slips could be organized under various headings and transposed as necessary. Two of the cabinets were eventually built, one for Placcius’s own use and one acquired by Leibniz. It was an early manifestation of the principle that still governs our response to the knowledge explosion: The remedy for the problems created by information technology is more information technology. […]

There’s no evidence that Leibniz made any use of his literary cabinet. Despite his lifelong interest in organizational schemes—he designed one of the earliest book-indexing systems—Leibniz’s note-taking was as disorganized as it was obsessive.

{ Geoffrey Nunberg/The Chronicle of Higher Education | Continue reading }

Scientists think that they have the answer to why the skin on human fingers and toes shrivels up like an old prune when we soak in the bath. Laboratory tests confirmed a theory that wrinkly fingers improve our grip on wet or submerged objects, working to channel away the water like the rain treads in car tyres. […]

Wrinkled fingers could have helped our ancestors to gather food from wet vegetation or streams, Smulders adds. The analogous effect in the toes could help us to get a better footing in the rain.

{ Nature | Continue reading }

Age-otori (Japanese): To look worse after a haircut

Tingo (Pascuense language of Easter Island): To borrow objects one by one from a neighbor’s house until there is nothing left

Backpfeifengesicht (German): A face badly in need of a fist

{ via The Atlantic | Continue reading }

photo { Mary Ellen Mark }

Guns should know where they are and if another gun is nearby. Global positioning systems can meet most of the need, refining a gun’s location to the building level, even within buildings. Control of the gun would remain in the hand of the person carrying it, but the ability to fire multiple shots in crowded areas or when no other guns are present would be limited by software that understands where the gun is being used.

Guns should also be designed to sense where they are being aimed. Artificial vision and optical sensing technology can be adapted from military and medical communities. Sensory data can be used by built-in software to disable firing if the gun is pointed at a child or someone holding a child.

Building software into guns need not affect gun owners’ desire to protect their homes. Trigger control software could be relaxed when the gun is at home or in a car, while other safety features stay on to prevent accidental discharges. Guns used by the police would be exempt from such controls.

{ Jeremy Shane/CNN | Continue reading }

For decades, consensus among psychologists has held that a group of five personality traits –– or slight variations of these five –– are a universal feature of human psychology. However, a study by anthropologists at UC Santa Barbara raises doubt about the veracity of that five-factor model (FFM) of personality structure as it relates to indigenous populations. […] Studying the Tsimane, an isolated indigenous group in central Bolivia, Michael Gurven, a professor of anthropology at UCSB and lead author of the paper, found they did not necessarily exhibit the five broad dimensions of personality –– openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. While previous research has found strong support for what experts refer to as the “Big Five” in more developed countries and across some cultures, Gurven and his team discovered more evidence of a Tsimane “Big Two” –– prosociality and industriousness.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

photo { Nadav Kander, Chongqing IV, Sunday Picnic, 2006 }

A sense of humor is widely viewed as beneficial for physical health. However, some limited research suggests that humor may actually be related to increased smoking and alcohol consumption because humorous individuals may take a less serious attitude toward substance use. The purpose of the present study was to explore this hypothesis in greater detail in a sample of 215 undergraduate students. […] Overall, these results support the view that a sense of humor may be related to less healthy habits, at least in the domain of substance use.

{ Europe’s Journal of Psychology | Continue reading }

Cameroon acquits two men sentenced for “looking gay.”

Apple products were the only items taken when thieves targeted Microsoft’s research and development centre in California.

Your iPhone will soon detect bad breath… and other smells.

There seem to be a lot of Barnes & Noble superstores closing lately.

The Barnes & Noble store at Sixth Avenue and Eighth Street in NYC closed.

New York City street cleaning policy increases car usage for those without off-street parking.

The Curious Mathematics of Domino Chain Reactions.

Do 98% of women hover over public toilet seats?

A Map Of Every Person In The U.S. And Canada.

Guide to Spanish.

Unruly passenger taped to seat on Icelandair flight.

When a law bans exchanges wanted by everyone directly involved a number of things happen:

1) The exchanges continue;

2) Prices of the banned items rise and wars to control turf begin;

3) New criminals are created, including many people who are ordinary good people (like colored margarine seekers);

4) New enforcement agencies and staff are created;

5) New jails are built and new jailers are trained;

6) Laws, lawyers and lawsuits proliferate;

7) A new branch of law and its practitioners prosper and support further extension and complexification of regulations;

8) A portion of the entire apparatus of enforcement and punishment is progressively corrupted;

9) New agencies and staff are created to discover, eliminate or suppress the corruption;

[…]

It is not enough to simply ban exchanges that have consequences we don’t like. The costs of doing it should be compared with the costs of not doing it.

{ Chicago Boyz | Continue reading }

related { Have We Lost the War on Drugs? | Tide detergent: Works on tough stains. Can now also be traded for crack. }

The more alcoholic drinks people consume, the more attractive they perceive themselves to be. […]

First, women with high levels of estrogen feel prettier, and second, smoking causes a lowered presence of estrogen in your body. So if you’re a female smoker and want to feel more attractive, boost your estrogen levels and stop smoking. Additionally this hormone helps maintain your female features and is vital to your body’s fertility.

{ United Academics | Continue reading }

photo { Bill Brandt }