Here you are on January 7th finding out about the perfect calendar. It was put together by “The Fertile Earth Foundation” and it features months and months of beautiful women covered in shit.
Fertile Earth is a Miami-based hippie clusterfuck that encourages people to compost using their own organic waste. Grow a potato from your poop. That sort of thing.
The mystery of the art market is that some people would rather possess an object of marginal utility than the ultra-usable money they exchange for it. This is the mystery of all markets in which taste is transformed into appetite by a nonpecuniary cloud of discourse that surrounds the negotiation. There is always a tipping point at which one’s taste for Picasso or freedom or pinot noir becomes a necessity, or at least something one would rather not do without. The exact nature of this “something” is effervescent and indistinct.
photo { Shelby Lee Adams }
The Internet sells itself as an improved content-delivery service, giving you whatever you want, whenever you want—by no small coincidence is its premiere streaming-music site called Pandora—but there is an increasingly clear downside to opening the on-demand box. We no longer feel compelled to “own” music, because it has no scarcity value. Music has become ether, navigable by desire, or impulse, and so the need to patronize musicians, whom we were previously cowed into compensating by a protectorate of record labels, becomes not only optional, but indistinct.
We assume musicians are taken care of, because their music is getting to us, and in that way, they have succeeded—they have communicated, and they may even be famous as Joanna Newsom—but they will never profit, because neither they nor their ostensible parent labels control the medium by which we increasingly receive and interpret their work. To the extent their fame is driven and/or sustained online, artists are subservient to the Internet, and must engage with that audience on its terms, begging for donations—tithing—or prostituting themselves via cost-denominated signed copies, telephone calls, personal concerts and personalized songs.
art { Vincent van Gogh, Peasant Burning Weeds, 1883 }
{ 1. Kevin Systrom, co-founder and CEO of Instagram | 2 }
Unilateral skipping or bipedal galloping is one of the gait types humans are able to perform. In contrast to many animals, where gallop is the preferred gait at higher speeds, human bipedal gallop only occurs spontaneously in very specific conditions (e.g. fast down-hill locomotion). This study examines the lower limb mechanics and explores the possible reasons why humans do not spontaneously opt for gallop for steady state locomotion on level ground. […]
This makes gallop metabolically more expensive and involves high muscular stress at the hips which may be the reasons why humans do not use gallop for steady state locomotion.
photo { Lisette Model, Running Legs, 1940–41 }
Researchers from the University of North Carolina have shown that coupling and sexual behavior are related to our gendered behavior.
What they found is that couples who are showing highly gendered behavior (so highly masculine men and highly feminine women) more often select one another as sexual partners and have intercourse more quickly, compared to couples who show less distinct gendered behavior. The latter are the slowest to have sex and the quickest to break up. The authors argue that the distinct gender differences between highly masculine men and highly feminine women may be needed to incite, and maintain, (sexual) interest in a relationship.
So, your love life may just be the result of how much of a macho man or a girly girl you grew up to be.
In this article, we discuss […] the design of modular consumer products, whose parts and components could be re-used for the design of other products.
Initiatives like OpenStructures, Grid Beam, and Contraptor combine the modularity of systems like LEGO, Meccano and Erector with the collaborative power of digital success stories like Wikipedia, Linux or WordPress.
An economy based on the concept of re-use would not only bring important advantages in terms of sustainability, but would also save consumers money, speed up innovation, and take manufacturing out of the hands of multinationals.
1. YOU CAN ONLY WORK FOR PEOPLE THAT YOU LIKE.
[…]
2. IF YOU HAVE A CHOICE NEVER HAVE A JOB.
[…]
3. SOME PEOPLE ARE TOXIC AVOID THEM.
Woman auctioned off ex-boyfriend’s secret fishing spots for $3,000.
Florida pilot spots theft at his home from his plane.
Indonesia city to ban women ’straddling motorbikes.’
Disgusted people have enhanced ability to spot dirt.
Study looks into a stool sample, to see whether the whole is indicative of the parts.
Babies only hours old are able to differentiate between sounds from their native language and a foreign language, scientists have discovered. The study indicates that babies begin absorbing language while still in the womb, earlier than previously thought.
Do pets get mental health disorders?
Can a computer program reproduce everything that happens inside a living cell?
Today scientists predict an ice-free Arctic in years, not decades. How the IPCC Underestimated Climate Change.
Some four years after the 2008 financial crisis, public trust in banks is as low as ever. Sophisticated investors describe big banks as “black boxes” that may still be concealing enormous risks—the sort that could again take down the economy. What’s Inside America’s Banks?
Polaroid to open stores [Fotobars] to print Facebook, phone photos.
The Use and Abuse of Taxicab Cameras in San Francisco.
Are there any technologies to prevent yourself from being captured on camera or video?
The term dap may have originated as an acronym for dignity and pride. It appears to have been introduced to Western culture through film. For example, the 1936 movie Tarzan Escapes depicts the gesture.
Scientists are once again reporting alarmingly high methane emissions from an oil and gas field, underscoring questions about the environmental benefits of the boom in natural-gas production that is transforming the US energy system.
previously { It’s an exciting time to be in the energy industry in America }
Since its introduction in 1846, anesthesia has allowed for medical miracles. Limbs can be removed, tumors examined, organs replaced—and a patient will feel and remember nothing. Or so we choose to believe. In reality, tens of thousands of patients each year in the United States alone wake up at some point during surgery. Since their eyes are taped shut and their bodies are usually paralyzed, they cannot alert anyone to their condition. In efforts to eradicate this phenomenon, medicine has been forced to confront how little we really know about anesthesia’s effects on the brain. The doctor who may be closest to a solution may also answer a question that has confounded centuries’ worth of scientists and philosophers: What does it mean to be conscious?
Need to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere? They can engineer the insides of a bacterium to do just that. Want clean, biologically based fuels to replace petroleum taken from the ground? Company scientists will design a microbe to poop those out.
Ginkgo is, in essence, a 21st century factory of life. The researchers working there specialize in synthetic biology, a field that seeks to build living things from the ground up. After envisioning what they want new organisms to do, Ginkgo biologists actually grow vials full of redesigned cells. […]
Synthetic biology was born a little more than a decade ago, an offshoot of traditional genetic engineering but distinct in its ambitions, precision and mind-set. Instead of randomly tweaking the genetic blueprints of living organisms and then working backward to identify a cell with a desirable trait, the new field offered the power of designing and building cells with novel functions. Its pioneers dreamed of making armies of organisms that could produce alternative fuels, churn out drugs to battle disease or fill every stomach on the planet by squeezing more food out of each crop acre.
Now, synthetic biologists have laid the groundwork for that radical new future, by building biology’s version of Silicon Valley. One research team has created a new and more complex set of biological building blocks that snap together like Legos, bringing large-scale production of engineered organisms closer to reality. Other scientists have hooked those parts up in a complex living analog of an electrical circuit and programmed it, much like programming a computer. Researchers are now writing code to make cells do things never before thought possible, like hunt down and kill cancer cells.
A thousand years ago, the Doge Pietro Orseolo II took his triumphant naval fleet to the sea entrance at the Lido and ceremoniously threw a diamond ring into the water, thus marrying his city to the Adriatic and securing Venice’s dominion over its waters and trade routes. […]
When Goethe visited Venice for just over two weeks in 1786, he climbed the campanile twice, at high tide and then at low tide. It was from this tower that, at the age of 37 and already famous, he saw the sea for the first time in his life. […]
Now we know for sure that the ocean is rising faster than Venice will subside.
photo { Roman Noven and Tania Shcheglova }
Estimates of the relative mortality risks associated with normal weight, overweight, and obesity. […]
97 studies were retained for analysis, providing a combined sample size of more than 2.88 million individuals and more than 270 000 deaths. […]
Grade 1 obesity overall was not associated with higher mortality, and overweight was associated with significantly lower all-cause mortality.
{ 1 | 2. Richard Avedon }
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 }
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.
