Thanks to the @FederalReserve arrival, the value of all tweets will collapse by 98% in a few years
The @FederalReserve is concerned about declining characters per tweet - to fix that it will give $1.6 trillion to insolvent US banks.
{ @ZeroHedge }
I know, I am a ray of sunshine
In one experiment, just telling a man he would be observed by a female was enough to hurt his psychological performance.
Every day, the same, again
Angelina Jolie to sack stylist over Oscar dress humiliation.
Chicago Billboard Provides Helpful Reminder That Hot Dogs Cause Butt Cancer. Related: Eating red meat — any amount and any type — appears to significantly increase the risk of premature death, according to a long-range study that examined the eating habits and health of more than 110,000 adults for more than 20 years.
Steve Jobs smelled so foul that none of his co-workers at Atari in the seventies would work with him. Entreating him to shower was usually futile; he’d inevitably claim that his strict vegan diet had rid him of body odor, thus absolving him of the need for standard hygiene habits.
Most unpaid internships are illegal.
Allen Stanford, the billionaire Texas banker who was once knighted by the government of Antigua, was convicted of stealing $7bn in customer money to fund a high end lifestyle that involved sponsorship of an international cricket tournament, yachts, and island properties.
For 150 years, the rest of the world has shown scant interest in the Canadian dollar. But now tiny Iceland…
Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs [NY Times].
Extreme Poverty In The U.S. Has Doubled In The Last 15 Years.
Extreme Poverty Down Despite Recession, World Bank Data Show. [NY Times]
Words spelled with more letters on the right of the keyboard are associated with more positive emotions than words spelled with more letters on the left, according to new research by cognitive scientists.
A new study shows that bringing somebody back to your freezing apartment may increase their loneliness and send them in search of the “social warmth” a companion can provide.
The Upside of Anger: 6 Psychological Benefits of Getting Mad.
When men get stressed, their bodies get more revved up than women’s. Now, two Australian researchers have a theory as to why — and it all boils down to a single gene.
How repeated stress impairs memory.
Old memories interfere with remembering new ones. Scans in healthy people reveal how the brain juggles outdated versus fresh information.
It turns out that sometimes sex can induce retrograde amnesia.
Ketamine - Magic Antidepressant, or Expensive Illusion?
Why a classic psychology experiment isn’t what it seemed. More: Unbeknownst to them, walking the hall was the real experiment.
There has been a lot of talk recently of the promise of personalised medicine, but some recent research led by Cancer Research UK may mean that this isn’t as simple as we thought – a genetic profile from one part of a tumour may not be the same as a sample from nearby in the same tumour. The genetics of cancer? Not as simple as we thought.
The Good News About the Virus in Your Genes.
Will we ever restore sight to the blind?
Can The Human Brain See Quantum Images?
Ancient impact may explain moon’s magnetic mystery. Anomalies near crater suggest scattering of iron-rich debris.
Uranium production in Africa, and what it means to be nuclear.
How Three Germans Are Cloning the Web.
Nigeria’s email scammers exposed.
Why Is iPad So Much More Dominant Than iPhone?
An Autoethnographic Account of a Tattooed Female and (Re)appropriation of the Tourist Gaze.
Confessions of a Genius Art Forger.
The Enduring Legacy of Basquiat’s Hair.
Listen to the music from Bret Easton Ellis’ entire oeuvre.
“The secret of success is… to be fully awake to everything about you.” 1928 Letter to 16-Year-Old Jackson Pollock from His Dad.
Dear Mr. Orwell, […] Yours sincerely, Aldous Huxley.
The novel has been described with the term “Mommy porn,” a distressing new addition to the lexicon.
Crossword: Computers vs. humans.
How Do You Cite a Tweet in an Academic Paper?
The Associated Press introduces new logo and look.
Five common Misconceptions About the Middle Ages.
What Do All The Controls In An Airplane Cockpit Do?
Transform Your iPhone Into a Microscope: Just Add Water.
What an excellent day for an exorcism
If you’re looking to enhance your experience of abstract art, you may want to consider spending some pre-gallery time watching a horror film. Kendall Eskine and his colleagues Natalie Kacinik and Jesse Prinz have investigated how different emotions, as well as physiological arousal, influence people’s sublime experiences whilst viewing abstract art. Their finding is that fear, but not happiness or general arousal, makes art seem more sublime.
600 boyfriends later
Why do birds sing in the morning?
There are two parts to the question, of course: why do birds sing? And why do they sing in the morning more than at other times of day? The first I think we’ve had a pretty good idea about for a long time, and there are two main reasons: to attract mates, and to claim their territory. (…)
One of the oldest ideas is that they sing in the morning because it’s still too dark to be out and about finding food, so you might as well sing. That’s a pretty solid idea - but it doesn’t really explain why they sing more in the morning than in the evening, when the light also fades - or even in the middle of the night. Another theory is that the conditions early in the morning - often cool and with lower humidity than later in the day - might be particularly good for letting the sounds of the song carry further, though recent experiments suggest that actually the middle of the day might be the best time to sing if acoustic conditions are what’s important so I don’t think that’s a winning idea. The third and most interesting theory is that birds sing most in the morning because that’s when, most days, they’ve got spare energy to use up. (…)
Here in Africa there’s an additional complication we should consider: many female birds sing too.
You have to assume they’re watching you
In their 2006 research they compared 40 exotic dancers with a similar number of young adult females who didn’t strip for a living. Using validated surveys, and interviewing both groups, they made some significant findings:
• Strippers had remarkably less satisfaction from their personal relationships and were more likely to think their romantic partnerships would fail
• There was no difference in self-esteem between strippers and non-strippers
• Strippers prized their physical appearance over and above their other qualities and abilities.
• If a stripper felt their body was not beautiful enough, their self-esteem would be affected.
• Strippers seemed to be slightly less satisfied with their body and were more likely to scrutinise their physical appearance. More often they would “be ashamed if people knew what I really weigh”.
‘I already want to take a nap tomorrow.’ –Glenn Glasser
Getting older makes us happier, because we give up on our dreams
Although physical quality of life goes down after middle age, mental satisfaction increases.
The study of more than 10,000 people in Britain and the US adds support to a previous report that happiness levels form a U-curve, hitting their low point at around 45, then rising.
Nurse Ratched: The best thing we can do is go on with our daily routine.
Some activists and theorists in the field of gender and sexuality have partly or wholly abandoned the designation LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) and instead write and organise under the banner of “queer.” Queer theory and politics originated in the 1990s and continue to be influential today. Many books are written from this perspective, and they inform university courses—Leeds University, for example, offers an MA in Gender, Sexuality and Queer Theory. More importantly, many of the most radical LGBT people identify as queer and adopt this approach to political organising: the last year, for example, has seen the establishment in London of UK Uncut-style group Queer Resistance, and of the trade unionist group Queers Against the Cuts. This article traces the development of queer theory and politics, and assesses their claim to provide a radical alternative to what they see as the LGBT mainstream.
artwork { Richard Prince }
The Zombie’s Rage
Eating people is wrong. But why? People of different sorts, at different times, expressing their views in different idioms, have had different answers to that question. Right now, our culture isn’t obsessed with cannibalism, though we are still unwholesomely fascinated enough to buy books and go to movies about anthropophagy among the Uruguayan rugby team that ran out of food after their plane crashed in the Andes. (…)
Our modern idioms for disapproving of cannibalism are limited. There is a physical disgust at the very idea of eating human flesh, though it’s not clear that this is necessarily different from the revulsion felt by some people confronted with haggis, calf brains, monkfish liver, or sheep eyes, the rejection of which rarely requires, or receives, much of an explanation. It is widely thought that cannibalism is in itself a crime, but in most jurisdictions it isn’t. (It is criminal to abuse a corpse, so eating dead human flesh tends to be swept up under statutes mainly intended to prevent trading in human body parts or mutilating cadavers.)
artwork { Keith Haring }
I am so booking the Hilton for next year like, today
‘I don’t see Airbnb being a sustainable business in the long run.’ Pause ‘Want to go to their party later?’
related { SXSW 2012: Design from the Gut: Dangerous or Differentiator? }
Pro tip: Drug dealers don’t carry pens to check counterfeit bills.
Phenomenology is commonly understood in either of two ways: as a disciplinary field in philosophy, or as a movement in the history of philosophy.
The discipline of phenomenology may be defined initially as the study of structures of experience, or consciousness. Literally, phenomenology is the study of “phenomena”: appearances of things, or things as they appear in our experience, or the ways we experience things, thus the meanings things have in our experience. Phenomenology studies conscious experience as experienced from the subjective or first person point of view. This field of philosophy is then to be distinguished from, and related to, the other main fields of philosophy: ontology (the study of being or what is), epistemology (the study of knowledge), logic (the study of valid reasoning), ethics (the study of right and wrong action), etc.
The historical movement of phenomenology is the philosophical tradition launched in the first half of the 20th century by Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, et al. In that movement, the discipline of phenomenology was prized as the proper foundation of all philosophy — as opposed, say, to ethics or metaphysics or epistemology. The methods and characterization of the discipline were widely debated by Husserl and his successors, and these debates continue to the present day. (The definition of phenomenology offered above will thus be debatable, for example, by Heideggerians, but it remains the starting point in characterizing the discipline.)
art { Andy Goldsworthy, Spire, 2008 }
‘Come on girl. Everyone’s doing it!’ –Peer pressure
Chances are pretty good you’ve recently seen the “Banksy on Advertising” quote that begins, “People are taking the piss out of you everyday.” The passage is from Banksy’s 2004 book Cut It Out, and it presents the idea that if advertisers are going to fill your world with ads, you have every right to “take, re-arrange and re-use” those images without permission. The quote has been posted widely on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter, which is where I found it.
Here’s the interesting part:
Most of it is swiped directly from an essay I wrote in 1999.
A playwright is a person who writes plays. The term is not a variant spelling of ‘playwrite,’ but something quite distinct: the word wright is an archaic English term for a craftsman or builder.
I wanted to slit my fucking wrists. Look at this world, it’s all so shallow. You want me to pay eighty bucks to listen to you bitch about your mother for two hours? I don’t think so.
{ J.T. Rogers, on the state of contemporary American theater | via Boston to Brooklyn }
photo { Tommy Malekoff }
Crystal Gayle: I love you more than all these words can ever say
In his groundbreaking 1995 book Descartes’ Error, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio describes Elliott, a patient who had no problem understanding information, but who nonetheless could not live a normal life. Elliott passed every standard intelligence test with flying colors. But he was dysfunctional because he was missing one thing: his cognitive brain couldn’t converse with his emotional brain. An operation to control violent seizures had severed the connection between Elliott’s prefrontal cortex, the area behind the forehead that plays a key role in making decisions, and the limbic area down near the brain stem, which is involved with emotions.
As a result, Elliott had the facts, but he couldn’t use them to make decisions. Without feelings to give the facts valence they were useless. Indeed, Elliott teaches us that in the most precise sense of the word, facts are meaningless…just disconnected ones and zeroes in the computer until we run them through the software of how those facts feel. Of all the building evidence about human cognition that suggests we ought to be a little more humble about our ability to reason, no other finding has more significance, because Elliott teaches us that no matter how smart we like to think we are, our perceptions are inescapably a blend of reason and gut reaction, intellect and instinct, facts and feelings.
artwork { Keith Haring }
Although he enrolled in a cancer vaccine study in an attempt to ward off the disease, John Wayne died of stomach cancer on June 11, 1979
Cancer is a puzzle of staggering complexity. Every move towards a solution seems to reveal yet another layer of mystery.
For a start, cancer isn’t a single disease, so we can dispense with the idea of a single “cure”. There are over 200 different types, each with their own individual quirks. Even for a single type – say, breast cancer – there can be many different sub-types that demand different treatments. Even within a single subtype, one patient’s tumour can be very different from another’s. They could both have very different sets of mutated genes, which can affect their prognosis and which drugs they should take.
How sexy am I now flirty boy?
Spontaneous Human Combustion occurs when a human body bursts into flame and is reduced to ashes without any apparent external source of ignition. Moreover, while the body is almost completely incinerated, which requires temperatures of about 3,000 degrees, the rest of the room, the furniture remain almost undamaged by the fire. SHC takes place in Charles Dickens’ novels but also in contemporary police investigations. A few months ago, the badly burned body of a pensioner was found in his living room in Galway, Ireland. Apart from his body, investigators could only find minor damage on the ceiling above him and the floor beneath him. “This fire was thoroughly investigated and I’m left with the conclusion that this fits into the category of spontaneous human combustion, for which there is no adequate explanation,” said the coroner.
{ We Make Money Not Art | Continue reading | Thanks Rob }
photo { Mark Thiessen }
‘Imagination as urgent tactical concern.’ –Malcolm Harris
One thing I’ve learned in the five years I’ve spent studying viruses is that these little things are genetic brewing machines. They can carry genetic material from different organisms, they can integrate in the host’s genome, they can transport genetic material from one organism to another. The viral genome of a flu virus in particular is split in different portions called segments. Now suppose an avian flu virus and a swine flu virus infect the same hosts, and two viral particles coinfect the same cell inside the host. Yes, you’ve guessed it: the genetic segments from the two distinct viruses can indeed “reshuffle” and create a completely new virus. In the case of H1N1, this pattern of coinfection and “reshuffling” (called segment reassortment) happened more than once and across three different hosts: birds, pigs, and humans.
The artist formerly known as Prince’s wife
How did the gender symbols originate in biology? What do ♀ and ♂ actually stand for?
The answer starts in antiquity, when planets and gods were almost synonymous.
