Just five companies, Apple, Microsoft, Cisco, Google, and Pfizer, now hold nearly one-quarter of all corporate cash, equal to more than a quarter-trillion dollars. (…)

Netflix is now responsible for about one-third of all Internet bandwidth. (…)

As the economy tanked in 2009, the top 25 hedge fund managers collectively earned $25.3 billion. On average, that works out to about $2,000 a minute for each manager. (…)

A 2008 Swedish study found that unemployed people gradually lose the ability to read. (…)

The combined assets of Wal-Mart’s Walton family is equal to that of the bottom 150 million Americans.

{ Motley Fool | Continue reading }

related { 42% of households worldwide will have Wi-Fi by 2016; 25% today }

Under the transgender umbrella, a distinct subset of “Bigender” individuals report blending or alternating gender states. It came to our attention that many (perhaps most) bigender individuals experience involuntary alternation between male and female states, or between male, female, and additional androgynous or othergendered identities (”Multigender”). (…)

A survey of the transgender community by the San Francisco Department of Public Health found that about 3% of genetic males and 8% of genetically female transgendered individuals identified as bigender. To our knowledge, however, no scientific literature has attempted to explain or even describe bigenderism.

{ Medical Hypotheses | via Neuroskeptic | Continue reading }

All natural hair colors are the result of two types of hair pigment. Both of these pigments are melanin types, produced inside the hair follicle and packed into granules found in the fibers.

Eumelanin is the dominant pigment in dark-blond, brown hair, and black hair, while pheomelanin is dominant in red hair.

Blond hair is the result of having little pigmentation in the hair strand.

Gray hair occurs when melanin production decreases or stops.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

photo { Matthew Spiegelman }

The New Aesthetic reeks of power relations. Drones, surveillance, media, networks, digital photography, algorithms. (…)

The ability to watch someone is a form of power. It controls the flow of information. “I know everything about you, but you know nothing about me.” Or, “I know everything about you, and all you can do is make art about the means by which I know things.” (…)

Someone is always watching. Someone has always been watching. If you’re a woman, you’ve probably known that your whole life.

{ Madeline Ashby | Continue reading | via Marginal Utility }

Homicidal sleepwalking, also known as homicidal somnambulism, is the act of killing someone during an episode of sleepwalking.

About 68 cases had been reported in the literature up to 2000.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

photo { Anja Niemi }

An Illinois congressman known for his rock-hard abs is rejecting a claim that he used his campaign account to pay for a P90X fitness DVD.

A 23-year-old financier who ran up a bar bill of more than $315,000 has been arrested.

Ice shelf in Antarctica has shrunk by 85% since 1995.

Chinese teenager sold a kidney so he could buy an iPhone and an iPad.

A Colorado man shot a woman in the head after mistaking her red Mohawk hairdo for a bird. [Thanks Seymour]

Wyoming town - population 1 - sells for $900,000 to Vietnamese buyer.

She arrived at the surgery center at 8 a.m., left at 12:30 p.m., and the bill came to $37,000, not counting doctor fees. The bizarre calculus of emergency room charges.

At what age are you happiest? According to a recent survey, the answer is 33.

Why women hate me for being beautiful.

NYC’s Most Insane Real Estate Deal: $55/Month Rent-Controlled Apt In SoHo.

A new study reveals that muscles in the upper face may divulge when people are not telling the truth. Researchers found four different facial muscles that a trained eye can use to separate genuine expressions of emotion from deceptive ones.

A growing body of evidence from both science and history suggests that the eight-hour sleep may be unnatural.

In their study, 22 volunteers were faced with the 9 dots problem, a notoriously difficult puzzle. [solution]

Extreme eaters show abnormal brain activity.

New research found a dramatic rise of skin cancer among people under 40, especially women. The researchers speculate that the use of indoor tanning beds is a key culprit.

62 percent of men and 37 percent of women over the age of 65 are sexually active. The main causes of sexual inactivity are physical illness and widowerhood.

A new study shows that women bosses take better care of their employees than men do.

A new study indicates that daydreamers are better at remembering information in the face of distraction.

Herpes linked to coral decline.

Changes in the Earth’s axis of rotation and its orbit around the Sun may have triggered a series of sudden, extreme global warming events 55 million years ago.

A study confirms that long commercials evoke stronger emotions.

It’s hard to believe but nobody has properly calculated how much a social gaming company should be worth. Until now.

New index identifies periods when global stock markets might decline.

Why Groupon Is Poised For Collapse.

No self-respecting New Yorker would ever request turn-by-turn directions from 23rd and Park to The Strand. Google Glasses. What could go wrong?

Texas researcher adds ‘Enemy’ feature to Facebook.

The Most Expensive Real-Estate in the World.

Life expectancy in China is increasing but the number of young adults is plummeting due to strict birth control policies. China faces ‘timebomb’ of ageing population.

Does the U.S. Really Have More Oil than Saudi Arabia?

So why did Planned Parenthood turn down nearly a half a million dollars they could put to good use?

Why Las Vegas is moving to Macau.

Welcome to the national headquarters of The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. [more]

He was about to do what no human had ever done before - free-fall to earth at the speed of sound.

The rise of 3D technology is just getting started.

The Pirate Bay launches crazy Physibles category for printing 3D objects. [previously]

Wiiliam Eggleston reprints sell out. The sale was controversial because it included new, larger-format editions of the famous dye-transfer images that the artist first produced in the 1970s and early 1980s.

Hannibal Lecter’s Guide To The ‘Goldberg Variations’.

The Last Handwritten Newspaper In The World.

“The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.” “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” There’s just one problem with both these quotations: No one can point to a primary source proving that Keynes ever uttered them.

Newsweek’s “Mad Men” issue. Stories are set in Newsweek’s 1960s fonts. And many of the advertisements are designed to look vintage-1965.

The Crack-Up, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, published in Esquire, February 1936.

Claire Thompson, David Foster Wallace’s girlfriend of two years, stopped reading his 67-page breakup letter at page 20, she admitted Monday.

Unsimulated sex refers to the presentation in a film of sex scenes where the actors engage in an actual sex act, and not merely simulated sex.

Here are a few signs that an individual may have moved out of the normal social drinking part of the spectrum and into the almost alcoholic zone:

Can a hard-hit baseball crush your skull?

A Better Strategy for Hangman.

How to make your Hanko Stamp.

Visual representation of the history of life on Earth as a spiral.

World Population clock.

Kind of weird how something designed to keep you from being a target for gunmen in the woods has the opposite effect in the city.

Zombie Ass. [Thanks G]

We all know the story: Every few years, millions of lemmings, driven by a deep-seated urge, run and leap off a cliff only to be dashed on the rocks below and eventually drowned in the raging sea. Stupid lemmings. It’s a story with staying power: short, not-so-sweet, and to the rocky point.

But it is a lie.

{ The Scorpion and the frog | Continue reading }

I have heard that higher IQ people tend to have less children in modern times than lower IQ people. And if larger family size makes the offspring less capable, than we are pioneering interesting times.

{ comment on marginalrevolution.com }

photo { Augustin Rebetez }

{ Glithero, still from Burn Burn Burn Glithero, 2007. Video featuring wood and flammable paint. | Dust, Ashes, and Dirt in Contemporary Art and Design, at Museum of Arts and Design, NYC, through Aug. 12 }

For decades in art circles it was either a rumor or a joke, but now it is confirmed as a fact. The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art - including the works of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko - as a weapon in the Cold War. In the manner of a Renaissance prince - except that it acted secretly - the CIA fostered and promoted American Abstract Expressionist painting around the world for more than 20 years. (…)

Why did the CIA support them? Because in the propaganda war with the Soviet Union, this new artistic movement could be held up as proof of the creativity, the intellectual freedom, and the cultural power of the US. Russian art, strapped into the communist ideological straitjacket, could not compete.

{ Independent | Continue reading }

photo { Jackson Pollock, Clement Greenberg, Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner and an unidentified child at the beach, 1952 }

We show that the number of gods in a universe must equal the Euler characteristics of its underlying manifold. By incorporating the classical cosmological argument for creation, this result builds a bridge between theology and physics and makes theism a testable hypothesis. Theological implications are profound since the theorem gives us new insights in the topological structure of heavens and hells. Recent astronomical observations can not reject theism, but data are slightly in favor of atheism.

{ Daniel Schoch, Gods as Topological Invariants | arXiv | Continue reading }

photo { Adam Bartos }

{ Dirk Braeckman | interview }

This experiment is designed to test the efficiency of the intuition, that is, the capacity to acquire information that does not require conscious control and intentional mental activity of the person. In this experiment your implicit intuition will be observed by measuring your pupil dilation. (…)

This study investigates the prediction accuracy of anticipatory pupil dilation responses in humans prior to the random presentation of alerting or neutral sounds. The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis that the autonomous nervous system may react prior to the presentation of random stimuli. A total of 80 participants, who were matched according to gender to take into account individual differences, were asked to listen to a random sequence of 10 neutral and 10 alerting sounds. Their pupil dilation was continuously recorded and the diameter of their pupils was used to predict the category of sound, alerting, or neutral. The pupil dilation of both males and females predicted alerting sounds approximately 10% more accurately than would be expected by chance, whereas neutral sounds were predicted at the chance level.

{ SSRN | Continue reading }

photo { Delaney Allen }

In one high profile case, TerrorZone gang members used ticket machines at train stations to launder dye-stained banknotes obtained through cash-in-transit robberies. They purchased cheap fares, paid with high denomination stolen cash, and pocketed the “clean change.”

In another example, gang members bought their own music on iTunes and Amazon websites using stolen credit cards in order to profit from the royalties.

{ Crime and Delinquency | PDF | via MindHacks }

artwork { Jean-Micel Basquiat, Not Detected, 1982 }

{ Jay-Z, Ed Ruscha and Marilyn Minter to Design Water Tanks in New York }

previously in let’s deface new york { Jeff Koons is in talks with Friends of the High Line }

There is no shortage of advice on how to recover from a bad break-up: keep busy, don’t contact your ex, go out with friends. (…) But according to a new study, something important is missing from this list. (…)

“It is just something that happens these days.” (…) This statement expresses a sense of common humanity, or recognition that suffering is part of the human experience, which is considered a fundamental part of self-compassion. (…)

“It was all my fault. (…) I know I did it all wrong.” In contrast to the first statement, this one includes a high degree of self-judgment, with no evidence of self-kindness. (…)

Results indicated that participants who were judged to be higher in self-compassion showed less distress at the beginning of the study and at the nine-month mark, while those low in self-compassion showed a greater increase in distress between six and nine months.

{ Psych Your Mind | Continue reading }

photo { Sam Haskins }

This one particular boy’s goal was to be able to press his lips to every square inch of his own body.

{ David Foster Wallace | Continue reading }

photo { Asger Carlsen }

You never forget your first taste of sperm. In Japanese, the word is shirako, which translates as “white children” or “albino.” You might also hear it described as, a bit more appetizingly, white pillows or fluffy clouds. To be honest, if it weren’t for the steady stream of sake and peer pressure from people we understand to be our friends, we probably would not have ordered the cod sperm sacs (tara shirako ponzu) from the specials menu at Hanako on a recent night.

{ BK | Continue reading | Thanks Tim }

Multiple viral diseases are spread through vectors, like ticks and mosquitoes, that result in massive health care issues and epidemics worldwide – my question has always been, if the vectors are infected with the virus, are they getting a disease? And, what is in it for the organism? Or, what is driving the vector to spread the viral infection?

George Dimopoulous’ group at Johns Hopkins University shed light on these questions in their latest publication on Dengue virus and the effect on its main vector, mosquito species Aedes aegypti.

{ Smaller Questions | Continue reading }