Blazes Boylan walked here and there in new tan shoes about the fruitsmelling shop, lifting fruits, young juicy crinkled and plump red tomatoes, sniffing smells
You see a shopper trip over in a busy street. Someone else can help. That’s what you tell your conscience. This is the Bystander Effect in action - the dilution of our sense of responsibility in the presence of other people - and it’s been demonstrated in numerous studies over many years.
But life is complicated and psychologists have begun looking at the circumstances that can nullify or even reverse the effect.
photo { Lee Friedlander, New York City, 1963 }
Peep! Bopeep! (He wheels twins in a perambulator.)
The fork is a latecomer to the table. Knives are the descendants of sharpened hand axes—the oldest human tools. It is likely that the first spoons derived from whichever local objects were used to scoop up liquid. […] But the fork didn’t have a place at the Greek table, where people used spoons, knife points, and their hands.
‘Evil has its heroes as well as good.’ –La Rochefoucauld
After 50 years of the current enforcement-led international drug control system, the war on drugs is coming under unparalleled scrutiny. Its goal was to create a “drug-free world”. Instead, despite more than a trillion dollars spent fighting the war, according to the UNODC, illegal drugs are used by an estimated 270 million people and organised crime profits from a trade with an estimated turnover of over $330 billion a year – the world’s largest illegal commodity market.
And I will keep loving you, in spite of yourself. My heart beats faster when I think of you. Nothing else matters.
{ In a study of more than a thousand compliments, women accepted compliments from other women 22% of the time. When they came from men? 68%. | The Beheld | full story }
photo { Bill Sullivan }
Twining, receding, with interchanging hands, the night hours link, each with arching arms, in a mosaic of movements
James and Daniel are twins. What sets them apart is that one is white and one is black – and the differences don’t end there.
James is gay, gregarious, and academic. He’s taking three A-levels next summer, and wants to go to university. Daniel is straight, shy, and he didn’t enjoy school at all.
artwork { Bruce Nauman, Mean Clown Welcome, 1985 }
‘Even a paranoid can have enemies.’ –Henry Kissinger
What if we someday learn how to model small brain units, and so can “upload” ourselves into new computer brains? What if this happens before we learn how to make human-level artificial intelligences?
{ Robin Hanson/Extropy, 1994 | Continue reading }
via:
One of the few pieces of evidence I find compelling comes from Mihály Csíkszentmihályi research into the experience he calls “flow.” His work suggests that humans are most productive, and also most satisfied, when they are totally absorbed in a clear but challenging task which they are capable of completing.
photo { Thomas Prior }
Then spoke young Stephen orgulous of mother Church that would cast him out of her bosom, of law of canons, of Lilith, patron of abortions
People can be trained to forget specific details associated with bad memories, according to breakthrough findings that may usher the way for the development of new depression and post-traumatic stress disorder therapies. […]
Researchers found that individuals were still able to accurately recall the cause of the event even after they’ve been trained to forget the consequences and personal meaning associated with the memory.
The occasional acid flashback
Most people think perfection in bowling is a 300 game, but it isn’t. Any reasonably good recreational bowler can get lucky one night and roll 12 consecutive strikes. If you count all the bowling alleys all over America, somebody somewhere bowls a 300 every night. But only a human robot can roll three 300s in a row—36 straight strikes—for what’s called a “perfect series.” More than 95 million Americans go bowling, but, according to the United States Bowling Congress, there have been only 21 certified 900s since anyone started keeping track. […]
There’s almost never a time when every decision you make is correct and every step is in the right direction. Life, like bowling, is full of complicating factors, unpredictable variables, plenty of times when there is no right answer. But Bill Fong had some experience with near-perfection prior to the night.
The extinction of that beam of heaven
In 1991, former MIT dean Lester Thurow wrote: “If one looks at the last 20 years, Japan would have to be considered the betting favorite to win the economy honors of owning the 21st century.”
It hasn’t, and it likely won’t. But 20 years ago, the view was nearly universal. Japan’s economy was breathtaking — rapid growth, innovation, and efficiency like no one had seen. From 1960 to 1990, real per-capital GDP grew by nearly 6%, double the rate of America’s.
But then it all stopped. […]
There are two key numbers to watch when looking at demographics: the percentage of the population that’s of working age (15-64), and the percent likely to be in retirement (over 65).
Though all countries age, within four decades the U.S. will likely have one of the lowest percentages of elderly citizens, and one of the highest rates of working-age bodies among large economies. China, meanwhile, will see its working-age population plunge and its elderly ranks soar — an echo of its one-child policy. Europe falls deeper into age-based stagnation. Alas, Japan becomes the global equivalent of Boca Raton.
Every day, the same, again
Bear trapped in garage rescued by other bear.
Startup has technology to read fingerprints through the air from 6 meters away.
Adidas cancels release of sneaker designed by Jeremy Scott.
Sea-level rise accelerates faster on US east coast.
Alligator caught in Connecticut River.
Scientists Discover That Mars is Full of Water.
Excitement Builds Over Expected Higgs Boson Announcement.
Persistence is learned from fathers, study shows.
Female sex offenders receive lighter sentences for the same crimes than males.
We form impressions of strangers incredibly quickly: What your choice of shoe says about you.
New research suggests that overall happiness in life is more related to how much you are respected and admired by those around you, not to the status that comes from how much money you have stashed in your bank account.
Semen helps sperm stick to the bitch’s uterus.
Remember the Famous Invisible Gorilla Experiment? The Same Thing Can Happen With Sound.
The idea is to apply Darwinian-like selection to music.
Google tells operators of YouTube-MP3.org that by converting YouTube music videos into MP3 files, they violate the site’s terms of service and risk “legal consequences.” Also: Clip.dj. Clipped along with YouTube-MP3.
Google detects 9500 malicious sites per day.
Outside of Search, Google’s products— Android, Google Docs— are s**t.
Gigapixel camera could revolutionise photography.
The Truth About What Works in Digital Marketing.
Could Morality Have a Source? [PDF]
I guess I am old enough now for my music-writing “career” to have entered officially into the obituary rather than the discovery phase. Anyway, I wanted to write something about Fleetwood Mac guitarist Bob Welch after I heard about his death last week.
In a 2011 study, psychologists found that individuals who had seen a spoiler paragraph prior to reading a short story rated the story as more, not less, pleasurable. And that held true even of stories where the plot, the “trick” so to speak, was seemingly the center of the experience, such as one of Roald Dahl’s signature ironic twist tales or an Agatha Christie mystery. Why? When we know the plot, the twist, the surprise, we become more able to focus on everything else: language, character, the intricacies of rhythm and technique. We may even pay closer attention than we otherwise would, trying to wrestle with elements that we hadn’t even noticed the first time around. So, too, with magic.
The Long History of the Espresso Machine.
An air conditioner is a device that lowers temperatures to an artificially cold level, by contributing to global warming. It thereby perpetuates and increases the problem it is designed to solve. Great business model. Just like heroin.
Does the U.S. Really Have More Oil than Saudi Arabia?
And then I learned the first cardinal rule of VC - it’s all about the team.
Chessboxing Worldchampionship.
Another Thing Paris Hilton Sucks At: DJing
ergo illi intellegunt quid Epicurus dicat, ego non intellego?
Charles Darwin and Alan Turing, in their different ways, both homed in on the same idea:
the existence of competence without comprehension.
Coincidence. Just going to write. Lionel’s song. Lovely name you have.
Applied Cognitive Psychology recently published a study on […] walking while texting (WwT). […]
The researchers looked at how walking while texting alters an individual’s own walking behavior. The researchers found that, on average, people who engaged in WwT where much more cautious than walkers who weren’t texting. Despite this excess in caution, “texters” did not avoid obstacles with more ease than “non-texters.” The scientists concluded that being overly cautious while texting does not decrease the chances of being involved in an accident. […]
In 2010, The Pew Research Center reported that 17% of adult Americans admit to having bumped into objects while texting.
photo { Andy Reynolds }
‘*picture of cock* #HenryMillerTexts.’ –Malcolm Harris
Look at this fucking article:
Harry, 15, and his 18-year-old brother are the well-spoken product of cross-pollination of the Übermenschen.
I want to take this sentence, drag it out into the backyard, and beat it to death with a shovel. […]
“Everybody loves celebrity children,” said Stephanie Trong, the editorial director of The Cut.
No, they don’t. That’s wrong. Just last week, I prayed to Jesus that Jaden and Willow Smith would each get hit by a milk truck. No one loves celebrity children. Even Tom Hanks couldn’t be stopped from siring obnoxious offspring. What fucking galaxy did this lady emerge from? […]
Why would the New York Times […] tell us about these fuckfaces?
And am I not learning, studying the shape of her lovely breasts?
We know that love lives in the brain, not in the heart. But where in the brain is it – and is it in the same place as sexual desire? A recent international study is the first to draw an exact map of these intimately linked feelings.
“No one has ever put these two together to see the patterns of activation,” says Jim Pfaus, professor of psychology at Concordia University. “We didn’t know what to expect – the two could have ended up being completely separate. It turns out that love and desire activate specific but related areas in the brain.”
painting { François Boucher, Venus Consoling Love, 1751 }
Not being known doesn’t stop the truth from being true
Recent world tragedies have led to an increased emphasis on the importance of deception training - especially at security checkpoints in airports, bus terminals, and train stations – that is designed to avert potential terrorist attacks. Past research on deception has identified the physiological and behavioral cues that can expose the individual liar, but most major terrorist acts involve two or more coconspirators. […]
“Deception has been studied as an almost exclusively individual-level phenomenon,” said Tripp Driskell. “You have a hard-nosed detective on one side of a desk and a suspect on the other. But there are many situations today, especially in security settings, in which the opportunity exists to question two or more suspects. The bottom line is that there are many occasions in which people conspire to lie or to deceive. In fact, many terrorist acts are carried out jointly by multiple participants or conspirators, and initial encounters with these suspects are likely to be in a group setting.” “We believe that the key to distinguishing truthful dyads from deceptive dyads is the concept of transactive memory,” he continued. “Two people describe an event differently if they had actually performed that event together versus if they did not but are fabricating a story about an event that did not take place. When we are questioned about the event, we recall it also in a joint manner - you recall some information and I recall some information. This is not as evident when two people recall a story that is fabricated or that did not take place.”
Fellow sharpening knife and fork, to eat all before him
Yesterday we found out that Jonah Lehrer, the Gladwellesque whiz kid who’s The New Yorker’s newest staff writer, reused his own old writings for every goddamn blog post he’s written for The New Yorker so far. […] What’s the latest? […]
Repackaging the work of others without disclosure is arguably a much more serious offense than reusing your own work without disclosure. […]
This is also why you should never pay someone in their 20s to give a speech and expect to learn something new.
{ Hamilton Nohan | Continue reading }
Wired editor Chris Anderson cemented his speaker-circuit bona fides with a 2006 book, The Long Tail, that was hailed as cogent and disruptive. His last effort, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, met with considerably worse reviews, and its premise was derided on many blogs. Worse, chunks of it turned out to have been copied and pasted without attribution from Wikipedia. None of that matters on the speaking circuit, where Mr. Anderson’s agency says he is in more demand than almost any other client worldwide.
And when you’re running from yourself there’s just no place to hide
Could mirror universes or parallel worlds account for dark matter — the ‘missing’ matter in the Universe? In what seems to be mixing of science and science fiction, a new paper by a team of theoretical physicists hypothesizes the existence of mirror particles as a possible candidate for dark matter. An anomaly observed in the behavior of ordinary particles that appear to oscillate in and out of existence could be from a “hypothetical parallel world consisting of mirror particles,” says a press release from Springer. “Each neutron would have the ability to transition into its invisible mirror twin, and back, oscillating from one world to the other.”
photo { Aaron Fowler }
‘When a true genius appears you will know him by this sign; that all the dunces are in confederacy against him.’ –Jonathan Swift
Editors’ Note: Portions of this post appeared in similar form in an April, 2011, post by Jonah Lehrer for Wired.com. We regret the duplication of material.
[…]
Editors’ Note: The introductory paragraphs of this post appeared in similar form in an October, 2011, column by Jonah Lehrer for the Wall Street Journal. We regret the duplication of material.
[…]
Editors’ Note: Portions of this post appeared in similar form in a December, 2009, piece by Jonah Lehrer for Wired magazine. We regret the duplication of material.
[…]
Editors’ Note: Portions of this post appeared in similar form in an April, 2010, column by Jonah Lehrer for the Wall Street Journal and in a July, 2009, article for the Guardian, which was an excerpt of Lehrer’s book “How We Decide.” We regret the duplication of material.
[…]
Editors’ Note: Portions of this post appeared in similar form in an October, 2011, post by Jonah Lehrer for Wired.com and in an August, 2008, column by Lehrer for the Boston Globe. We regret the duplication of material.
{ The New Yorker | Jonah Lehrer just landed a job at the New Yorker and plagiarized the shit out of himself }
