Every day, the same, again
Dead toddler reanimates at own wake to ask for some water, then re-dies.
Norwegian prison may hire friends for mass killer.
Magician Arrested in Series of Brooklyn Bank Robberies. The police say that a self-described escapist who once set a speed record for eating a household light bulb was charged with robbing six banks. [NY Times]
Flame authors order infected computers to remove all traces of the malware. Self-desctruct module overwrites file data to prevent forensic analysis.
“Doug said he hated sleeping with John because his body was very hairy, and he didn’t like the way John smelled,” Britz said. Travolta had 6-year fling with pilot, ex-secretary claims.
Nearly 15 percent of work email is gossip.
Sexual orientation fluctuation correlated to alcohol misuse.
You can’t resist the pull of another person’s gaze. More surprising, perhaps, is their finding that the directing effect of arrows is also impossible to resist.
The benefits of breast milk are well known, but why breastfeeding protects against various forms of cancer remains a mystery. The cancer fighting properties of breast milk.
Kane propped himself up with pillows in order to get a good view of his abdomen. He injected cocaine and adrenalin into his abdominal wall, and then he swiftly cut through the superficial tissue, found the swollen appendix, and excised it. The Top Ten Strangest Self-Experiments Ever.
Researchers in Hong Kong have analyzed the incidence of maritime piracy during the last decade and have developed a way to predict whether or not a particular vessel, with a specific cargo, shipping in a given patch of water is likely to be a target for piracy and what degree of violence might be involved.
Why on Earth would a working-class person ever vote for a conservative candidate?
Thirteen Ways Government Tracks Us.
During the Cold War, prankster physicist Feynman kept the FBI working — and wondering.
How many seconds would it take to break your password?
The life of a ‘booth babe’: $100 to $170 per day and mixed feelings about their work.
First photos ever of jaguars in Colombian oil palm plantation taken with camera traps.
A Look Inside the World of Beep Baseball, Blind America’s Pastime. [thanks GG]
Damien Hirst Brands a London Restaurant. [thanks Tim]
Mirror, plexiglass, 150 lights and water.
Life expectancy of people in the five boroughs of NYC compared to the rest of the country.
Trying. So. Hard.
Do rebelliousness, emotional control, toughness and thrill-seeking still make up the essence of coolness? […] Research has found the characteristics associated with coolness today are markedly different than those that generated the concept of cool. […]
The research is described as the first systematic, quantitative examination of what characteristics recur in popular understandings of the cool personality. […]
Participants in the study still appreciated the traditional elements of cool, such as rebelliousness and detachment, but not as strongly as friendliness and warmth.
‘A woman is like your shadow: run after her, she runs away from you; run away from her, she runs after you.’ –Alfred de Musset
Is there a point at which your efforts become counter-productive? According to a new study, the answer is yes.
In general, humans don’t like to have their behavior controlled by others, and the result is that we have an aversion to being persuaded. This is one reason why advice about persuasion often involves the idea of leading somebody to a conclusion, but making them think they got there on their own. Feiler and his colleagues wanted to know if providing additional reasons to do something could increase awareness that a persuasion attempt was occurring, and thus make somebody less likely to do it.
image { Winnie Truong }
There was a sort of scholars along either side the board, that is to wit, Dixon yclept junior of saint Mary Merciable
How might one prove the existence of other universes given that we can experience only this one? […]
What is the world made of? One might answer in terms of the electrons, protons, and neutrons that make up atoms. But what are electrons, protons and neutrons? Quantum physics shows how they are observed to behave like waves as they move about. But on reaching their destination and giving up their energy and momentum they behave like tiny particles. But how can something be both a spread out wave with humps and troughs, and at the same time be a tiny localized particle? This is the famous wave/particle paradox. It afflicts everything, including light.
painting { Peter Halley, Delayed Reaction, 1989 }
Life as the product of life
Scientists have now accurately predicted almost the whole genome of an unborn child by sequencing DNA from the mother’s blood and DNA from the father’s saliva.
artwork { Ellsworth Kelly, Red White, 1961 }
Every time someone checks in on Foursquare, I just assume it’s a requirement of their parole officer
Free services in exchange for personal information. That’s the “privacy bargain” we all strike on the Web. It could be the worst deal ever. […]
Why do we seem to value privacy so little? In part, it’s because we are told to. Facebook has more than once overridden its users’ privacy preferences, replacing them with new default settings. […]
Even if you read the fine print, human beings are awful at pricing out the net present value of a decision whose consequences are far in the future. […] The risks increase as we disclose more, something that the design of our social media conditions us to do. […]
Imagine if your browser loaded only cookies that it thought were useful to you, rather than dozens from ad networks you never intended to interact with. […] There’s a business opportunity for a company that wants to supply arms to the rebels instead of the empire.
photo { Leonard Freed }
Just kiss’d the lake, just stirr’d the trees
I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to get my hands on some fucking gourds and arrange them in a horn-shaped basket on my dining room table.
{ Colin Nissan | Continue reading | Thanks Rachel }
And I’m gonna shine homie until my heart stops
Using scientific theories, toy ecosystem modeling and paleontological evidence as a crystal ball, 18 scientists, including one from Simon Fraser University, predict we’re on a much worse collision course with Mother Nature than currently thought. […]
Earth’s accelerating loss of biodiversity, its climates’ increasingly extreme fluctuations, its ecosystems’ growing connectedness and its radically changing total energy budget are precursors to reaching a planetary state threshold or tipping point.
Once that happens, which the authors predict could be reached this century, the planet’s ecosystems, as we know them, could irreversibly collapse in the proverbial blink of an eye.
You need my love, you want my love
One of the most mysterious problems in neuroscience is the link between brain chemistry and consciousness. How do changes in our neurochemistry influence our perception of the real world? […]
Neuroscientists point out that in contrast to the small amount of formal scientific literature in this area, there are large volumes of narrative descriptions of the effects of drugs posted on the web. Their idea is to mine these descriptions using machine learning techniques to identify common features which would allow a quantitative comparison of their effects. […]
The obvious place to start such an endeavour is a website called erowid.org, which is a well known and popular source of user generated information about the effects of all kinds of psychoactive substances. […]
Coyle and co confine their investigations to ten drugs ranging from 3,4‐methylenedioxymethamphetamine, better known as ecstacy, and lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, to less well known drugs such as N,N‐dipropyltryptamine, sometimes called The Light, and 2,5‐dimethoxy‐4‐ethylphenethylamine which has the street name Europa. […]
The Light and Europa were associated with words such as “stomach,” “nausea,” “vomit,” “headache.”
photo { Eylül Aslan }
related { How plants make cocaine }
related { Bath Salts: Your Guide to Dangerous Designer Drugs }
The general character of the world, on the other hand, is to all eternity chaos
What’s, in a way, missing in today’s world is more biology of the Internet. More people like Nils Barricelli to go out and look at what’s going on, not from a business or what’s legal point of view, but just to observe what’s going on.
Many of these things we read about in the front page of the newspaper every day, about what’s proper or improper, or ethical or unethical, really concern this issue of autonomous self-replicating codes. What happens if you subscribe to a service and then as part of that service, unbeknownst to you, a piece of self-replicating code inhabits your machine, and it goes out and does something else? Who is responsible for that? And we’re in an increasingly gray zone as to where that’s going.
The most virulent codes, of course, are parasitic, just as viruses are. They’re codes that go out and do things, particularly codes that go out and gather money. Which is essentially what these things like cookies do. They are small strings of code that go out and gather valuable bits of information, and they come back and sell it to somebody. It’s a very interesting situation. You would have thought this was inconceivable 20 or 30 years ago. Yet, you probably wouldn’t have to go … well, we’re in New York, not San Francisco, but in San Francisco, you wouldn’t have to go five blocks to find five or 10 companies whose income is based on exactly that premise. And doing very well at it. […]
In 1945 we actually did create a new universe. This is a universe of numbers with a life of their own, that we only see in terms of what those numbers can do for us. Can they record this interview? Can they play our music? Can they order our books on Amazon? If you cross the mirror in the other direction, there really is a universe of self-reproducing digital code. When I last checked, it was growing by five trillion bits per second. And that’s not just a metaphor for something else. It actually is. It’s a physical reality. […]
The best example of this is what we call the flash crash of May 6th, two years ago, when suddenly, the whole system started behaving unpredictably. Large amounts of money were lost in milliseconds, and then the money came back, and we quietly (although the SEC held an investigation) swept it under the rug and just said, “well, it recovered. Things are okay.” But nobody knows what happened, or most of us don’t know. […]
What’s the driver today? You want one word? It’s advertising. And, you may think advertising is very trivial, and of no real importance, but I think it’s the driver. If you look at what most of these codes are doing, they’re trying to get the audience, trying to deliver the audience. The money is flowing as advertising.
In the darkness spirit hands were felt to flutter and when prayer by tantras had been directed to the proper quarter a faint but increasing luminosity of ruby light became gradually visible
Suppose in a large city somewhere in the western world, a man discovers on awaking from a two-hour nap that several hundred car accidents had occurred in the city while he slept. He wonders why. […] Something must be wrong with the traffic lights. He concludes that the lights are not working, leaving the drivers to figure out how to negotiate the intersections on their own. […] His wife […] suggests: “If you came to a traffic light and saw it was not working at all, wouldn’t you slow down and proceed cautiously? In fact, after Hurricane Katrina didn’t people in New Orleans just treat broken traffic lights like four-way stops, without explicit direction to do so?” […] It’s not that the traffic lights were not functioning at all, but rather they were all green. […] Not only do green lights mean go, they also mean that the cross-traffic has stopped. […]
Not only was it not a dream, it was the reality of the post-2001 boom that generated the financial crisis and Great Recession. The Austrian economist Israel Kirzner has long used traffic lights as an analogy for prices. In the case of the boom and bust, the key price was the interest rate. […] When the central bank intervenes, however, it turns all the lights green.
photo { Lee Friedlander }
Somebody once wrote: Hell is the impossibility of reason.
SPIEGEL: Professor Kahneman, you’ve spent your entire professional life studying the snares in which human thought can become entrapped. For example, in your book, you describe how easy it is to increase a person’s willingness to contribute money to the coffee fund.
Kahneman: You just have to make sure that the right picture is hanging above the cash box. If a pair of eyes is looking back at them from the wall, people will contribute twice as much as they do when the picture shows flowers. People who feel observed behave more morally.
SPIEGEL: And this also works if we don’t even pay attention to the photo on the wall?
Kahneman: All the more if you don’t notice it. The phenomenon is called “priming”: We aren’t aware that we have perceived a certain stimulus, but it can be proved that we still respond to it.
SPIEGEL: People in advertising will like that.
Kahneman: Of course, that’s where priming is in widespread use. An attractive woman in an ad automatically directs your attention to the name of the product. When you encounter it in the shop later on, it will already seem familiar to you. […] When it looks familiar, it looks good. There is a very good evolutionary explanation for that: If I encounter something many times, and it hasn’t eaten me yet, then I’m safe. Familiarity is a safety signal. That’s why we like what we know.
[…]
Psychologists distinguish between a “System 1″ and a “System 2,” which control our actions. System 1 represents what we may call intuition. It tirelessly provides us with quick impressions, intentions and feelings. System 2, on the other hand, represents reason, self-control and intelligence.
SPIEGEL: In other words, our conscious self?
Kahneman: Yes. System 2 is the one who believes that it’s making the decisions. But in reality, most of the time, System 1 is acting on its own, without your being aware of it. It’s System 1 that decides whether you like a person, which thoughts or associations come to mind, and what you feel about something. All of this happens automatically. You can’t help it, and yet you often base your decisions on it.
SPIEGEL: And this System 1 never sleeps?
Kahneman: That’s right. System 1 can never be switched off. You can’t stop it from doing its thing. System 2, on the other hand, is lazy and only becomes active when necessary. Slow, deliberate thinking is hard work. It consumes chemical resources in the brain, and people usually don’t like that. It’s accompanied by physical arousal, increasing heart rate and blood pressure, activated sweat glands and dilated pupils …
SPIEGEL: … which you discovered as a useful tool for your research.
Kahneman: Yes. The pupil normally fluctuates in size, mostly depending on incoming light. But, when you give someone a mental task, it widens and remains surprisingly stable — a strange circumstance that proved to be very useful to us. In fact, the pupils reflect the extent of mental effort in an incredibly precise way. I have never done any work in which the measurement is so precise.
photo { Richard Avedon }
‘My role is the joint of being the secretary and, quite ironically, the dialectically reduplicated author of the author or the authors.’ –Kierkegaard
Moebius syndrome is a rare condition that affects the 6th and 7th cranial nerves, resulting in paralysis of the muscles that control face and eye movements. This means that those affected by Moebius syndrome are unable to move their face and eyes, and thus to form any facial expressions.
This one-in-a-million neurological disorder is present from birth, but its rarity often leads to late diagnosis. Besides a “mask-like” lack of expression, the Moebius syndrome is characterized by the inability to suck, problems with swallowing, and hearing and speech impairment.
collage { John Stezaker }
Every day, the same, again
Homeowner sick of cold calls changes name to Tim P-P-P-P-P-P-P-P-P-Price.
Man Divorces Wife After She Refuses To Get Rid of Her 550 Cats.
Saudi ghost-hunters raid “haunted” hospital.
Good News: People Eat Other People on a Pretty Regular Basis. Here is a rundown of what we’ve found from just the past six months.
‘Tarantulas’ invade Indian village, ‘kill’ two.
That Unused Hour on Your Parking Receipt? You Might Think About Selling It. [ NY Times]
More tampons, less tips. Why Ovulating Lap Dancer Get Tipped More.
Human Monogamy Started with Weak Males and Faithful Females, According to Research.
Genius and insanity may actually go together, according to scientists.
Analytical thinking erodes belief in God.
The man who can remember every day of his life in detail.
How close are we to a forgetting pill.
Hiding true self at work can result in less job satisfaction, greater turnover.
How the immune system recognizes danger from non-danger.
Regular Exercise May Be Bad for Some People.
Plant geneticists who sequenced the tomato’s genome in hope of breeding better specimens found that it has 31,760 genes — about 7,000 more than a person. [NY Times]
Men’s Porn Use Linked to Unhappy Relationships.
Should amputation be offered as a treatment to people suffering from Body Integrity Identity Disorder? The science and ethics of voluntary amputation.
Compared to a spindly mosquito, the mass of a raindrop is like a bus bearing down on a human. Yet the delicate insects thrive in wet, rainy climates. To find out how mosquitos live through rain showers, researchers pelted them with water drops while filming them at high speed.
2 New Elements on Periodic Table Get Names: flerovium (Fl) and livermorium (Lv).
Astronomers have completed the first search for extraterrestrial intelligence on nearby exoplanets using very long baseline interferometry. No signs of E.T.
Spike in carbon-14 levels indicates a massive cosmic event between ad 774 and ad 775.
Female Suicide Bombers: Clues from Journalists.
An Hypothesis about Suicide Notes.
Irish Mathematicians Solve The Guinness Sinking Bubble Problem.
How the Surging Popularity of ‘Himalayan Viagra’ Is Causing Murder and Violence in Nepal.
How about those who do not travel? Segmenting the USA non-travel market.
Nintendo’s new Wii U console will embrace social networking. The machine will promote the Miiverse in which users can see what others are playing, share self-created game content and swap gaming tips.
Interview with Apple’s design guru Jonathan Ive.
Google Embraces “Paid Inclusion.” What Is Paid Inclusion?
Google Glasses patent hints at speech-to-text display for deaf users.
Hundreds of words to avoid using online if you don’t want the government spying on you.
Michael Geismar’s blackjack run ended just after six o’clock on Friday morning with $410,000 in manila envelopes in cash sitting on a table at Café Bellagio in the namesake Las Vegas luxury hotel, right next to the plates of steak and eggs and glasses of ice water. The co-founder and president of $4.6 billion managed futures firm Quantitative Investment Management couldn’t put the bundled $100 bills in his room upstairs because the safe was already full with about $300,000 in winnings from two nights before.
When Lichtenstein took up the brushstroke motif in 1965.
How to Make Your Vagina Taste Awesome.
The celebrated Terrier dog “Major” killing 100 rats in 8 minutes, 58 seconds.
‘Even the most courageous among us only rarely has the courage to face what he already knows.’ –Nietzsche
Mr D. was working on a reality television show when he was hospitalised after causing a public disturbance. While working on the production of the show, he came to believe that he was the one who was actually being broadcast: ‘‘I thought I was a secret contestant on a reality show. I thought I was being filmed. I was convinced I was a contestant and later the TV show would reveal me.’’
photo { Julius Shulman }
‘Although rivaled closely by SATAN PUT THE DINO BONES THERE, QUENTIN.’ –Malcolm Harris
Worst Companies At Protecting User Privacy: Skype, Verizon, Yahoo!, At&T, Apple, Microsoft.
photos { Marlo Pascual | Sean and Seng }