Reddit user delverofsecrets posted photos of a cryptic note that he or she obtained from a “homeless looking man” on the 1 train in New York City. The user asked Reddit for help in identifying what the characters might mean, and the post quickly shot to the top of the front page as Redditors discussed and looked for clues.

[…]

There’s plenty more money to make.
Figure this out and prepare to meet July 19th, 56th & 6th.
There’s a hot dog stand outside Rue57 cafe. Ask for Mr. Input.

{ Mashable | Continue reading }

photo { Robert Frank, London, 1952 }

previously { NotSoSerious.com–the campaign in advance of the Dark Knight }

You’re imagining, in the course of a game of make-believe, that you’re a cat. You don’t believe that you’re a cat. You are moved to say “Meow.” This case illustrates something that a theory of imagination should explain: sometimes when you imagine something, you are moved to act.

Consider another case. You’re watching a movie. A monster is on the loose and you are imagining, along with the movie, that it is at- tacking people willy-nilly. You do not believe there is a monster on the loose or that you are in any danger, but still you feel afraid. This case illustrates something else that a theory of imagination should explain: sometimes we have emotional reactions to things that we do not believe but merely imagine.

[…]

To be clearer, the first phenomenon we think needs accounting for is that sometimes you are moved to act by something you imagine but do not believe. Children are a good source of examples of this phe- nomenon — they act on the basis of their imaginings a lot. […]

Other, related questions that we try to answer are: How do imaginings motivate behavior? To what extent, and in what respects, is the behavior-generating role of imagination like the behavior-generating role of belief? Beliefs don’t generate behavior all on their own; they do so in combination with desires. If imaginings play something like the role of beliefs in generating behavior, is there also some state that plays something like the role of desire? If so, what kind of state is it — a desire, or something else? And if it’s a desire, a desire about what?

{ Tyler Doggett & Andy Egan, The Case for an Imaginative Analogue of Desire, 2007 | PDF }

image { Jiří Kovanda }

In recent years, we’ve seen an explosion of scientific research revealing precisely how positive feelings like happiness are good for us. We know that they motivate us to pursue important goals and overcome obstacles, protect us from some effects of stress, connect us closely with other people, and even stave off physical and mental ailments. […]

But is happiness always good? Can feeling too good ever be bad? Researchers are just starting to seriously explore these questions. […]

Too much happiness can make you less creative—and less safe.

[…]

Happiness can hurt us in competition. Illuminating studies done by Maya Tamir found that people in a happy mood performed worse than people in an angry mood when playing a competitive computer game.

[…]

A more nuanced analysis of different types of happiness suggests that some forms may actually be a source of dysfunction.

[…]

Pursuing happiness may actually make you unhappy.

{ GreaterGood | Continue reading }

photo { Sebastian Reiser }

A man sits in front of a computer screen sifting through satellite images of a foreign desert. The images depict a vast, sandy emptiness, marked every so often by dunes and hills. He is searching for man-made structures: houses, compounds, airfields, any sign of civilization that might be visible from the sky. The images flash at a rate of 20 per second, so fast that before he can truly perceive the details of each landscape, it is gone. He pushes no buttons, takes no notes. His performance is near perfect.

Or rather, his brain’s performance is near perfect. The man has a machine strapped to his head, an array of electrodes called an electroencephalogram, or EEG, which is recording his brain activity as each image skips by. It then sends the brain-activity data wirelessly to a large computer. The computer has learned what the man’s brain activity looks like when he sees one of the visual targets, and, based on that information, it quickly reshuffles the images. When the man sorts back through the hundreds of images—most without structures, but some with—almost all the ones with buildings in them pop to the front of the pack. His brain and the computer have done good work.

{ The Chronicle of Higher Education | Continue reading }

photo { Michel Le Belhomme }

{ Hollie Stevens (January 4, 1982 – July 3, 2012), American pornographic actress, “Queen of Clown Porn,” has passed away. | SF Weekly | Wikipedia }

{ President Obama has dinner in Woodside, Calif., in February 2011 with tech leaders including John Chambers (Cisco), Larry Ellison (Oracle), Reed Hastings (Netflix), Carol Bartz (Yahoo), Steve Jobs (Apple), and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook). | One year ago tomorrow, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings took the first of a series of missteps that angered customers and nearly derailed his company. Current and former employees disclose what went wrong. }

Sometime within the next 5 years, the Voyager 1 space craft is expected to reach interstellar space. It will be the first man made object to cross the heliosphere, which is the final stop in our solar system.

After being launched in 1977, Voyager 1 was the first probe to visit many of the outer planets. It has sent back countless original images from space, almost all of which have been released to the public. Although NASA does sell images, and many appear in copyrighted works (such as books); NASA is very good about releasing information into the public domain, almost all scientifically significant information from space is given to the public.

Voyager 1, famously contained a gold phonographic record. The record was filled with iconic sights, images, and sounds from earth, and the prevailing message, “we come in peace”. We think. Even though any alien that can figure out how to play a phonographic record, will have certainly already have received fox news, the contents of the actual gold record are not public domain.

The disc was comprised by a man named Carl Sagan, and it contained many pieces of art, songs, and images, that are all copyrighted. Sagan had to secure the rights to include these items separately, at great expense. The special alien license does not allow the right to free copy and distribution to educators. In fact, it is unclear if an original copy of the entire disc still exists on earth at all.

{ Active Politic | Continue reading }

Each Voyager space probe carries a gold-plated audio-visual disc in the event that either spacecraft is ever found by intelligent life-forms from other planetary systems. The discs carry photos of the Earth and its lifeforms, a range of scientific information, spoken greetings from the people (e.g. the Secretary-General of the United Nations and the President of the United States, and the children of the Planet Earth) and a medley, “Sounds of Earth,” that includes the sounds of whales, a baby crying, waves breaking on a shore, and a variety of music.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

photo { featured in the Voyager Golden Record: Demonstration of licking, eating and drinking }

One of the worst parts of being pregnant […] is what is commonly referred to as morning sickness.

This term for the nausea and vomiting accompanying pregnancy is something of a misnomer, actually, since such gastrointestinal issues certainly aren’t limited to the morning hours. Rather, for those women who do get green around the gills (and not all do; more on that later) sudden bouts of toilet-hugging can happen morning, noon and night. […]

Why, if it is indeed an evolutionary adaptation, does pregnancy sickness not occur in all (or at least, almost all) pregnant women? […]

So what does Gallup say is the real culprit behind nausea and vomiting in early pregnancy? Semen. More specifically, unfamiliar semen.

Gallup’s evolutionary reinterpretation of pregnancy sickness is quite new—so new, in fact, that it hasn’t been put to a test. But at the 2012 meeting of the Northeastern Evolutionary Psychology Society in Plymouth, N.H., he and graduate student Jeremy Atkinson laid out a set of explicit predictions that, if borne out by data, would support their model and may lead scholarship away from the traditional embryo-protection account.

First, the authors predict that the intensity of pregnancy sickness should be directly proportional to the frequency of insemination by the child’s father. “Risk factors for morning sickness,” they reason, “should include condom use, infrequent insemination, and not being in a committed relationship.” In fact, Gallup and Atkinson believe that lesbians with little (if any) previous exposure to semen who are impregnated by artificial insemination should have some of the worst cases of nausea and vomiting. Also, pregnancy sickness should wane in severity from one consecutive pregnancy to the next, but only assuming that the same man sires each successive offspring. By contrast, a change in paternity between offspring should reinstate pregnancy sickness.

{ Slate | Continue reading }

Nearly 500 species of animals (ranging from mammals through to insects) have been observed performing homosexual behaviour, according to Aldo Poiani, a biologist at the University of Melbourne.

In addition to penguins, he says, koalas, flamingos, giraffes, monkeys, killer whales and dolphins are on list. In some cases, the animals commit themselves to a same-sex partner for life (like penguins), although in other species it appears that they have no preference, but rather act ‘bisexually’. […]

“Homosexual behaviour occurs in over 130 species of birds, yet explaining its maintenance in evolutionary terms appears problematic at face value, as such sexual behaviours do not seem in immediate pursuit of reproductive goals,” McFarlane and colleagues wrote in the journal Animal Behaviour in late 2010. […]

Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection suggests that animals, including humans, exist in order to continue their species, or rather, reproduce. It is an evolutionary paradox, says McFarlane, that animals engage in homosexual behaviour when “the prevailing view (is) that sex is for reproduction only”, which makes it scientifically significant to explain. According to Darwin’s theory, it’s a scientific conundrum that evolution hasn’t eliminated individuals that are not going to actively reproduce.

According to RV Kirkpatrick, an anthropologist from the University of California, Davis, in the Darwinian view, individuals should seek to maximise reproductive success. “Homosexual behaviour is too widespread to be a fluke or an aberration, but evolutionists in particular should be puzzled by its ubiquity,” he wrote in the journal Current Anthropology in 2000. […]

One theory is that because the percentage of exclusive homosexuality in both the animal and human world is so small, it poses no threat to the continuation of a species.

{ Cosmos | Continue reading }

photo { Cécile Menendez }

{ Batman could glide from tall buildings using his cape but would probably die from the impact of landing, physics students have demonstrated. | BBC | Continue reading | Trajectory of a Falling Batman | PDF }

Traditional newspapers that move online are about to lose the war against pure players and aggregators. Armed with the conviction their intellectual superiority makes them immune to digital modernity, newspapers neglected today’s internet driving forces: relying on technology to build audiences and the ability to coalesce a community over any range of subjects — even the most mundane ones. […]

On one side, legacy medias: Great franchises who grew on strong values, such as “pristine” journalism, independence, storytelling, fact-checking, solid editing, respect for the copyright… Along the way, they made their share of mistakes, but, overall, the result is great. After all, at the height of the Fourth Estate’s power, the population was better informed than today’s Facebook cherry-pickers.  Now, this (aging) fraternity faces a new generation of media people who build their fiefdom on a completely different set of values. For instance, the notion of copyright has become exceedingly elastic. A few months ago, Flipboard began to aggregate contents from French news organizations, taking large excerpts — roughly capturing the essence of a story — along with a token link back to the original content. […]

On July 5th, The Wall Street Journal runs an editorial piece about Mitt Romney’s position on Obamacare. The rather dull and generic “Romney’s Tax Confusion” title for this 1000 words article attracted a remarkable 938 comments.

But look at what the Huffington Post did: a 500 words treatment including a 300 words article, plus a 200 words excerpt of the WSJ opinion and a link back (completely useless). But, unlike the Journal, the HuffPo ran a much sexier headline :

Wall Street Journal: Mitt Romney Is ‘Squandering’ Candidacy With Health Care Tax Snafu

A choice of words that takes in account all Search Engine Optimization (SEO) prerequisites, using high yield words such as “Squandering”, “Snafu”, in conjunction with much sought-after topics such as “Romney” and “Health Care”. Altogether, this guarantees a nice blip on Google’s radar — and a considerable audience : 7000+ comments (7x more than the original), 600 Facebook shares, etc.

HuffPo’s editors took no chance: the headline they picked is algorithm-designed to yield the best results in Google.

{ Monday Note | Continue reading }

image { Aleksandra Waliszewska }

An analysis of five large-scale studies following about 2 million people in several different countries found that the life expectancies of people who said they spent more than three hours a day sitting were two years less than people who spent less than three hours sitting daily.

{ US News | Continue reading }

photo { Bjarne Bare }

Stickers on produce contain 4-5 digit number, known as a Price Look-Up (PLU) code, for stores to identify produce and distinguish between conventionally-grown, GMO, and organic produce.

PLU codes have been used by supermarkets since 1990 to make check-out and inventory control easier, faster, and more accurate.

• A four-digit code beginning with a 3 or a 4 means the produce is conventionally grown.

• A five-digit number that starts with a 9 means the item is organic.

• A five-digit code that starts with an 8 means the item is genetically modified.

{ Consumer Reports | PLU codes }

photo { Hudson Hayden }

The fact that the concept Americans refer to as “karma” exists across so many different cultures seems both nonsensical and reasonable at the same time. On one hand, there is no evidence that karma actually exists. On the other hand, the belief that “what goes around comes around” is clearly one that leads to more cooperation, increased altruism, and a better chance a society will thrive. […]

The fact that karma is useful at the community level doesn’t fully explain why it was created and widely accepted. […] Is there something else about karma that makes it appealing to individuals in specific moments of their lives?

A new study suggests that there is.

{ peer-reviewed by my neurons | Continue reading }

photo { Andrea Jaeger, Wimbledon, 1983 }

I don’t diagnose people I haven’t met. More importantly, I don’t use the diagnosis of sex addiction. In thirty-one years as a sex therapist, marriage counselor, and psychotherapist, I’ve never seen sex addiction. I’ve heard about virtually every sexual variation, obsession, fantasy, trauma, and involvement with sex workers, but I’ve never seen sex addiction.

New patients tell me all the time how they can’t keep from doing self-destructive sexual things; still, I see no sex addiction. Instead, I see people regretting the sexual choices they make, often denying that these are decisions. I see people wanting to change, but not wanting to give up what makes them feel alive or young or loved or adequate; wanting the advantages of changing, but not wanting to give up what makes them feel they’re better or sexier or naughtier than other people. Most importantly, I see people wanting to stop doing what makes them feel powerful, attractive, or loved, but since they don’t want to stop feeling powerful, attractive or loved, they can’t seem to stop the repetitive sex clumsily designed to create those feelings.

{ The Humanist | Continue reading }

photo { David Armstrong }

In Namibia of southwestern Africa, the sparse grasslands that develop on deep sandy soils under rainfall between 50 and 100 mm per annum are punctuated by thousands of quasi-circular bare spots, usually surrounded by a ring of taller grass. The causes of these so-called “fairy circles” are unknown, although a number of hypotheses have been proposed. This paper provides a more complete description of the variation in size, density and attributes of fairy circles in a range of soil types and situations. Circles are not permanent; their vegetative and physical attributes allow them to be arranged into a life history sequence in which circles appear (birth), develop (mature) and become revegetated (die). Occasionally, they also enlarge. The appearance and disappearance of circles was confirmed from satellite images taken 4 years apart (2004, 2008).

{ PLoS One | Continue reading | More: Science }

photo { Nicolas Hosteing }

Destroying neurons is not difficult. Destroying specific neurons, but leaving others intact is another story.

Ablating specific neurons usually involves fancy genetic trickery, but it can also be accomplished with fancy mechanical lasers.

{ The Cellular Scale | Continue reading }

photo { Unknown Artist, Portrait of a Woman of the Hofer Family, c. 1470 }

…a bizarre affliction that has been widely reported in the media to affect around a dozen of the approximately one million Japanese tourists who visit Paris each year. Paris Syndrome is said to occur when a combination of factors leave tourists with a particularly severe case of culture shock.

Symptoms are purported to include:

acute delusional states, hallucinations, feelings of persecution (perceptions of being a victim of prejudice, aggression, or hostility from others), derealization, depersonalization, anxiety, and also psychosomatic manifestations such as dizziness, tachycardia (and) sweating

{ Neurobonkers | Continue reading }

photo { Iiu Susiraja }

{ FEI announces that cloned horses can compete in international competitions }

images { 1. Roe Ethridge | 2 }

When a romantic relationship isn’t going well it seems like it influences everything in life. This brings up a slew of interesting questions. What is the exact nature of a relationship’s influence on unrelated decisions? How might different kinds of relationship troubles influence people in different ways? For example, in what ways do you behave differently when you’re considering breaking up your significant other as opposed to when you feel like they’re considering breaking up with you? […]

The researchers found that feeling as though your partner was the reason for incompatibility led people to become “promotion focused” – a psychological orientation where the tendency is to be motivated by gains, growth, and not missing out on positive outcomes. On other hand, when people felt that they were the reason for the incompatibility, it led to a “prevention focus” — an orientation where the tendency to is to be motivated by the need to maintain responsibilities and avoid negative outcomes.

{ peer-reviewed by my neurons | Continue reading }

photo { Isabel Martinez }