‘We forfeit three-quarters of ourselves in order to be like other people.’ –Schopenhauer
A few months ago I wrote a two-part post about how fMRI and PET scan technology were able to detect differences in the brains of psychopaths compared to non-psychopathic individuals. This area of research has identified that psychopathy has a genetic component, and has even been used in court cases to determine sentencing.
Recently, I came across a story on NPR about a neuroscientist who studies these scans, and decided to analyze his own brain scans and those of his family to determine if psychopathy was present. What he found was more than a little disturbing to him…
James Fallon reported that there was a documented history of criminal activity on his paternal side of the family, (including a relation to Lizzy Borden), that made him curious to view the brain scans of his family. They had all previously submitted brain scans and a blood sample in order to rule out a risk for Alzheimer’s, so he had the materials already. […] Fallon decided to go one step further and analyze the blood samples in search of genes that are associated with violence; namely the MAO-A gene (monoamine oxidase A), specifically MAOA-L (low activity variant). […] Much to his dismay, Fallon again found that everyone in his family has the low-aggression variant of the MAO-A gene, except for one person—himself.
Fallon isn’t, of course, a killer; however, genetically speaking he meets the criteria of psychopathy. […] And therein lays the process of how one person can become a psychopath, and another to go on with a fairly “normal” life.
photo { Leon Levinstein, Fifth Avenue, 1959 }
‘The press conference was briefly interrupted when bandito Paul Krugman stormed the stage.’ –ifyoucanreadthisyourelying.blogspot.com
It’s an exciting time to be in the energy industry in America. The impact of unconventional oil and gas development on the U.S. economy is considerable, with potentially hundreds of billions of dollars in investments, millions of new jobs, and a renaissance of American ingenuity and innovation.
In thinking about what is to come, looking back five years helps set the stage. January 2008: The energy sector was facing the great recession, high current and future expected natural gas prices, and job losses to China. There was a generally poor outlook for the energy industry and the economy.
Few could have predicted the changes that were to come. Unforeseen happenings include the North Dakota oil rush, liquefied natural gas facilities being used as export facilities (instead of as import facilities as originally planned), railroads hauling crude oil, and jobs coming back from China. And, this is just the beginning. The commencement of the crude oil and natural gas revolution can be boiled down to one simple equation:
Abundant resources + cost effective extraction = high production levels of unconventional oil and gas.
The net effect is a reshaping of the U.S. energy industry and our economy.
Every day, the same, again
‘Middle Finger’ Christmas Lights Are Legal, Judge Rules.
Military Must Prep Now for ‘Mutant’ Future, Researchers Warn.
Top 10 Legally Weird Stories of 2012.
33-tonne shark tank explodes in busy shopping centre in Shanghai, leaving 15 injured.
10 reasons why India has a sexual violence problem.
Facebook Paid 0.3% Taxes On $1.34 Billion Profits.
New species of the year. More creatures, less Latin used to describe them.
Mullen compares these mass killings to the Malaysian amok, a recognized “culture-bound syndrome” often defined as a “spree of killing and destruction (as in the expression “run amok”) followed by amnesia or fatigue.”
Amnesia and the Self That Remains When Memory Is Lost.
Which 3D printers should you buy?
Does a guy’s mood synchronize with his girlfriend’s menstrual cycle?
Could we speed up Earth’s rotation, so that we do not need Leap Seconds?
Tous les hommes se hâtent vers la décomposition
Jean–Jacques Rousseau… […] This is a man who sent all five of his children away to orphanages, and also wrote a book, Emilie: or, on Education, about the proper way to educate a child. This is a man who, when a friend he greatly respected purchased for him a ticket to an opera, snuck away during the commotion in the lobby of the amphitheater, ran back to the box office and refunded the ticket. He took the money and ran. Of the incident, he wrote, “There are moments when a man is seized by a sort of madness and should not be judged by his actions.” He loved providing these little justifications. […] He hid in dark alleyways and revealed his ass to women walking by. […] And then there was the time Rousseau abandoned a friend in the middle of the street after the friend had a seizure.
{ Full Stop | Continue reading | via The New Inquiry }
I’m sorry, I wasn’t listening
Slowly, but surely, robots (and virtual ’bots that exist only as software) are taking over our jobs; according to one back-of-the-envelope projection, in ninety years “70 percent of today’s occupations will likewise be replaced by automation.” […]
If history repeats itself, robots will replace our current jobs, but, says Kelly, we’ll have new jobs, that we can scarcely imagine:
In the coming years robot-driven cars and trucks will become ubiquitous; this automation will spawn the new human occupation of trip optimizer, a person who tweaks the traffic system for optimal energy and time usage. Routine robosurgery will necessitate the new skills of keeping machines sterile. When automatic self-tracking of all your activities becomes the normal thing to do, a new breed of professional analysts will arise to help you make sense of the data.
Well, maybe. Or maybe the professional analysts will be robots (or least computer programs), and ditto for the trip optimizers and sterilizers.
Boomed crashing chords. When love absorbs.
The US surveillance regime has more data on the average American than the Stasi ever did on East Germans.
The American government is collecting and storing virtually every phone call, purchases, email, text message, internet searches, social media communications, health information, employment history, travel and student records, and virtually all other information of every American.
Some also claim that the government is also using facial recognition software and surveillance cameras to track where everyone is going. Moreover, cell towers track where your phone is at any moment, and the major cell carriers, including Verizon and AT&T, responded to at least 1.3 million law enforcement requests for cell phone locations and other data in 2011. And – given that your smartphone routinely sends your location information back to Apple or Google – it would be child’s play for the government to track your location that way.
As the top spy chief at the U.S. National Security Agency explained this week, the American government is collecting some 100 billion 1,000-character emails per day, and 20 trillion communications of all types per year.
Enter into the golden city, which is to be the new in the Nova of the future
As the percentage of wives outearning their husbands grows, the traditional social norm of the male breadwinner is challenged. The upward income comparison of the husband may cause psychological distress that affects both partners’ mental and physical health in ways that impact decisions on marriage, divorce, and careers. This paper studies this impact through sexual and mental health problems. Using wage and prescription medication data from Denmark, we implement a regression discontinuity design to show that men outearned by their wives are more likely to use erectile dysfunction (ED) medication than their male breadwinner counterparts, even when this inequality is small. Breadwinner wives suffer increased insomnia/anxiety medication usage, with similar effects for men. We find no effects for unmarried couples or for men who earned less than their fiancée prior to marriage. Our results suggest that social norms play important roles in dictating how individuals respond to upward social comparisons.
{ Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin/SSRN | Continue reading }
Learn the smooth mincing walk on four inch Louis XV heels, the Grecian bend with provoking croup, the thighs fluescent, knees modestly kissing. Bring all your power of fascination to bear on them.
Perhaps no other human trait is as variable as human height. […] The source of that variation is something that anthropologists have been trying to root out for decades. Diet, climate and environment are frequently linked to height differences across human populations.
More recently, researchers have implicated another factor: mortality rate. In a new study in the journal Current Anthropology, Andrea Bamberg Migliano and Myrtille Guillon, both of the University College London, make the case that people living in populations with low life expectancies don’t grow as tall as people living in groups with longer life spans.
Every day, the same, again
Researcher says the Hawaiian Islands are dissolving.
Helicopter Parents from Hell Ordered by Court to Quit Stalking Their Daughter.
Neuroticism may have a healthy upside.
A Spider Builds Fake Spiders To Psych Out Predators. [thanks Sam]
Eat All you Want; Just Not Late at Night.
What are some things that neuroscientists know but most people don’t? 4. Our behavior is mostly automatic
Why Do We Blink So Frequently?
How does a traffic cop ticket a driverless car?
Debris from North Korea’s Launcher: What It Shows.
Instagram furor triggers first class action lawsuit.
Black Bookstores in the United States.
What should everyone know about cats?
Many parts of the space shuttles were built and crafted by the hands of skilled workers.
What’s the difference between Holland and the Netherlands?
Guidelines against body fluid transmission via CPR manikins.
Every day, the same, again
Owl survives head-on collision with pickup truck.
Is being not-greedy more important than being generous?
Facebook Test Will Let You Message Strangers for $1.
What’s it like to be face-blind?
When you want what you don’t like.
You’re most creative when you’re at your groggiest.
Marijuana Isn’t a Pain Killer—It’s a Pain Distracter.
We recycle less than we think .
What is it like to surf the Internet in the most secretive country on Earth?
Instagram Retreats Back to Old Policies. But are those older policies really better for users?
Google’s lobbying hard for its self-driving technology, but some features may never be legal.
Texas still welcomes human burials alongside animals in pet cemeteries.
The de Sitter Effect showed us how stars would look if light didn’t have a speed limit.
One of the more poignant moments in Nietzsche’s long and tormented career was when the catalogue of his many ailments, both mental and physical, started to include encroaching blindness. To remedy that he turned to experimentation with the (very primitive) typewriters of the time – a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball.
What are the main differences between a Masters and a PhD in computer science?
Enter a ghost and hobgoblins
Albert Alexander, a 43-year-old policeman in Oxford, England, was pruning his roses one fall day when a thorn scratched him at the corner of his mouth. The slight crevice it opened allowed harmless skin bacteria to slip into his body. At first, the scratch grew pink and tender. Over the course of several weeks, it slowly swelled. The bacteria turned from harmless to vicious, proliferating through his flesh. Alexander eventually had to be admitted to Radcliffe Hospital, the bacteria spreading across his face and into his lungs.
Alexander’s doctors tried treating him with sulfa drugs, the only treatment available at the time. The medicine failed, and as the infection worsened, they had to cut out one of his eyes. The bacteria started to infiltrate his bones. Death seemed inevitable.
But then, on February 12, 1941, Alexander was injected with an experimental drug: a molecule produced by mold.
The molecule was, of course, penicillin. It had been discovered thirteen years earlier but soon abandoned because there didn’t seem to be any way to turn it into an effective drug. In the late 1930s, Howard Florey and his colleagues at the University of Oxford revived the drug and began testing it on mice. They found the penicillin could cure them of infections by killing their bacteria. Florey then gave a dose of penicillin to a woman dying of cancer and found that it wasn’t toxic to her.
Now Florey and his colleagues wanted to see if it could stop an infection in a human being. Alexander, with nothing left between him and death, was their first subject.
“Striking improvement” was how Florey described what happened next. Within a day, Alexander’s infections were subsiding. After a few more days, his fever broke and much of his face cleared up.
Florey could have saved Alexander’s life, if he hadn’t run out of penicillin after a few days. Nobody but Florey knew how to make the stuff, and his recipe only yielded a tiny amount at a time. To stretch out their supply of penicillin, a member of Florey’s lab would visit the hospital each morning to collect Alexander’s urine. He would carry it back by bicycle to the lab, where the scientists extracted the penicillin that Alexander’s body hadn’t absorbed. Alexander’s doctors then injected the recycled antibotic into Alexander’s arm. […]
Now that they can fish out the DNA of the microbiome, scientists are beginning to get a sense of the staggering diversity of microbes we harbor. Each of us is home to several thousand species. (I’m only talking about bacteria, by the way–viruses, fungi, and protozoans stack an even higher level of diversity on top of the bacterial biodiversity.) My own belly button, I’ve been reliably informed, contains at least 53 species. Many of the species I harbor are different than the ones you harbor. But if you look at the kinds of genes carried by those species, our microbiomes look very similar. […] The microbiome keeps us healthy. It breaks down some of our food into digestible molecules, it detoxifies poisons, it serves as a shield on our skin and internal linings to keep out pathogens, and it nurtures our immune systems, instructing them in the proper balance between vigilance and tolerance. It’s a dependence we’ve been evolving for 700 million years, ever since our early animal ancestors evolved bodies that bacteria could colonize.
photo { Jason Florio }
‘War doesn’t determine who’s right, just who’s left.’ –Steven Wright
MATHEMATICS PRIZE: Dorothy Martin of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1954), Pat Robertson of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1982), Elizabeth Clare Prophet of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1990), Lee Jang Rim of KOREA (who predicted the world would end in 1992), Credonia Mwerinde of UGANDA (who predicted the world would end in 1999), and Harold Camping of the USA (who predicted the world would end on September 6, 1994 and later predicted that the world will end on October 21, 2011), for teaching the world to be careful when making mathematical assumptions and calculations.
quote { thanks Tim }
video still { Adam Magyar }
C’est Toto qui va acheter des croissants
Making small easy changes to our eating habits on a consistent basis - 25 days or more per month - can lead to sustainable weight loss, according to research. The challenge is to figure out which changes work for specific individuals and how to stick with changes long enough to make them second nature.
image { Jeroom via Copyranter }
Camel Toe Central
Closed systems, or three-party systems, such as Discover and American Express typically issue cards to consumers and acquire merchants to accept the card. They set fees to both sides, which largely consist of an annual fee, an interest rate (for credit cards) and a rewards program for consumers, and a fee for merchants (termed the merchant discount in the industry). A closed card platform can choose any structure of prices that it so desires between cardholders and merchants. In particular, if low cardholder fees and high merchant fees are what generate the most card transactions or profit, then the closed card system is free to set this structure of prices.
In contrast, many of the largest systems separate the clearing-house services from the task of obtaining consumers and merchants. This is true for Visa and MasterCard, as well as for debit networks such as NYCE and Pulse. Thus, the direct customers of these systems are banks. The systems are open in the sense that any bank or equivalent financial institution can join. In these systems, banks join and then seek to issue cards to consumers and acquire merchants to accept cards. When a consumer makes a purchase from a merchant, the payment is authorized and routed from the issuing bank through the payment system (i.e., Visa or NYCE) to the merchant’s account with the acquiring bank; subject to liability rules governing fraud, payments are generally guaranteed to the merchant, and the issuer is responsible for collecting funds from the consumer. Since many banks are typically associated with each system, there can be substantial competition among banks to offer access to the system. The competition takes place over the terms mentioned above, fees and rewards, and other features such as consumer protection and customer service. Open systems are often referred to as four-party systems, referring to the merchant, the consumer and the two banks, although the network owner is really a fifth party.
Typically, the owner of the open system collects a fee, often called the switch fee for the service. These are fairly small and, to date, have been largely uncontroversial. In addition to the switch fee, open systems set an interchange fee. The interchange fee is an amount that the merchant’s bank pays to the consumer’s bank as part of a typical purchase transaction.
