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.
While you guys were perfecting your deepthroating techniques and experimenting with scissoring and anal play, we were learning Calculus
Sperm Can Do ‘Calculus’ to Calculate Calcium Dynamics and React Accordingly
Sperm have only one aim: to find the egg. The egg supports the sperm in their quest by emitting attractants. Calcium ions determine the beating pattern of the sperm tail which enables the sperm to move. Scientists have discovered that sperm react to changes in calcium concentration, but not to the calcium concentration itself. Probably sperm make this calculation so that they remain capable of maneuvering even in the presence of high calcium concentrations.
quote { Barnard, Columbia at War Over Obama, Feminazis, and Cum Dumpsters | via Joe! }
The cosmos, then, became like a spherical form in this way
As for the love of the Other, or, worse, the “recognition of the Other,” these are nothing but Christian confections. There is never “the Other” as such. There are projects of thought, or of actions, on the basis of which we distinguish between those who are friends, those who are enemies, and those who can be considered neutral. The question of knowing how to treat enemies or neutrals depends entirely on the project concerned, the thought that constitutes it, and the concrete circumstances (is the project in an escalating phase? is it very dangerous? etc.).
Flou inn, flow ann
Amazon isn’t just a distributor, it’s a hoping to be the major publisher of e-books. When Amazon buys ebooks for $13 wholesale and sells them for $10 retail, and its gargantuan size means it can keep up the practice indefinitely, the strategy isn’t just jarring publishers into adopting lower price points. Because Amazon offers writers a better royalty for publishing directly, its pricing strategy is aimed at squeezing publishers out of the equation entirely.
You all been around here on a lot of bullshits
In one experiment, the psychologists asked a group of Christian students to give their impressions of the personalities of two people. In all relevant respects, these two people were very similar – except one was a fellow Christian and the other Jewish. Under normal circumstances, participants showed no inclination to treat the two people differently. But if the students were first reminded of their mortality (e.g., by being asked to fill in a personality test that included questions about their attitude to their own death) then they were much more positive about their fellow Christian and more negative about the Jew.
The researchers behind this work – Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski – were testing the hypothesis that most of what we do we do in order to protect us from the terror of death; what they call “Terror Management Theory.” Our sophisticated worldviews, they believe, exist primarily to convince us that we can defeat the Reaper. Therefore when he looms, scythe in hand, we cling all the more firmly to the shield of our beliefs.
This research, now spanning over 400 studies, shows what poets and philosophers have long known: that it is our struggle to defy death that gives shape to our civilization. (…)
The psychologists, psychiatrists and anthropologists who developed Terror Management Theory have shown that almost all ideologies, from patriotism to communism to celebrity culture, function similarly in shielding us from death’s approach. (…)
In one now classic secular example, the researchers recruited court judges from Tucson in the USA. Half of these judges were reminded of their mortality (again with the otherwise innocuous personality test) and half were not. They were then all asked to rule on a hypothetical case of prostitution similar to those they ruled on every day. The judges who had first been reminded of their mortality set a bond (the equivalent of bail) nine times higher than those who hadn’t (averaging $455 compared to $50).
So just like the Christians, they reacted to the thought of death by clinging more fiercely to their worldview.
artwork { Lui Liu }
Try to hold a light to me, I’m a lady
While women are no longer characterized as pathological by virtue of being women alone, and while scientific inquiry has expanded to explore issues affecting women and their health, much remains to be done about educating the general population about issues relating to women’s health. For all the information brought to our fingertips by the advances in technology made in our time, despite the increased rates of literacy we enjoy compared to past eras, we continue to disregard the female body. (…)
If Rush Limbaugh and those who agree with him knew anything about women’s bodies and female health, they would know that the oral contraceptive pill is not only used to prevent pregnancy. (….)
Polycystic ovary syndrome, also known as PCOS, is a hormone-related disorder in women which affects one in five women of reproductive age and is one of the biggest causes of substantially decreased fertility. It is characterized by an overabundance of male hormones (androgens); lack of ovulation; and excessive menstrual periods, very few menstrual periods or no periods at all, which can lead to abnormalities in the womb and even cancer. PCOS has also been linked to obesity and insulin resistance — in fact, women with PCOS are at risk for type II diabetes, high blood pressure, lipid disorders, cardiovascular disease, liver disease, and autoimmune thyroiditis. The contraceptive pill is used to regulate the hormone imbalances associated with PCOS.
Dysmenorrhea is a condition that results in extreme pain during menstruation, which is debilitating and different from menstrual cramps. Dysmenorrhea also causes nausea, dizziness, disorientation, diarrhea, constipation, and fatigue. It affects 25 percent of the female population, and 90 percent of sexually mature teen girls. Pain can begin shortly after ovulation and continue until the end of a woman’s cycle. Because the pain is produced by the changes in hormonal levels in the body, the birth control pill is used to treat the condition.
photo { Marilyn Monroe by Bert Stern }
To the hip hip hop, you don’t stop
One of the interesting things about success is that we think we know what it means. A lot of the time our ideas about what it would mean to live successfully are not our own. They’re sucked in from other people. And we also suck in messages from everything from the television to advertising to marketing, et cetera. These are hugely powerful forces that define what we want and how we view ourselves. What I want to argue for is not that we should give up on our ideas of success, but that we should make sure that they are our own. We should focus in on our ideas and make sure that we own them, that we’re truly the authors of our own ambitions. Because it’s bad enough not getting what you want, but it’s even worse to have an idea of what it is you want and find out at the end of the journey that it isn’t, in fact, what you wanted all along.
{ Alain de Botton | TED video | Thanks Tim }
photo { Simen Johan }
She said damn fly guy I’m in love with you
Although female orgasms were reportedly most commonly experienced during foreplay, their vocalizations were reported to occur most frequently before and simultaneous with male ejaculation. So basically the women’s sex noises most frequently accompanied their partner’s orgasm. Why? It turns out, it’s because they wanted to help their partners out. Sixty-six percent reported making noise to accelerate their partner’s ejaculation. Ninety-two percent believed these vocalizations upped their partner’s self-esteem (87 percent reported vocalizing for this purpose). Other reported reasons included speeding things up, “to relieve discomfort/pain, boredom, and fatigue in equal proportion, as well as because of time limitations.”
photo { Johan Renck }
Saw me kissin’ on the sofa (It wasn’t me)
Common sense or ‘folk psychology‘ is what your average person in the street uses to make sense of human behaviour. It says people have affairs because their relationship is unsatisfying, that people steal because they want money and that people give to charity because they want to help people.
Scientists tend to say ‘well, it’s a bit more complicated than that’ but talk of conditional risk factors for behaviour won’t get you very far in a dinner table discussion so ‘folk psychology’ is a culturally agreed form of psychology that is acceptable to use in everyday explanation.
I’ve just been alerted to a fascinating study in the journal Public Understanding of Science looks at how the enthusiasm for pop neuroscience has encroached on ‘folk psychology’ to create a form of ‘folk neuropsychology’ where brain-based explanations are now becoming acceptable in everyday explanation.
artwork { Pole Edouard }
She even caught me on camera (It wasn’t me)
Whenever we are doing something, one of our brain hemispheres is more active than the other one. However, some tasks are only solvable with both sides working together.
PD Dr. Martina Manns and Juliane Römling of the Ruhr-Universität Bochum are investigating, how such specializations and co-operations arise. Based on a pigeon-model, they are proving for the first time in an experimental way, that the ability to combine complex impressions from both hemispheres, depends on environmental factors in the embryonic stage. (…)
First the pigeons have to learn to discriminate the combinations A/B and B/C with one eye, and C/D and D/E with the other one. Afterwards, they can use both eyes to decide between, for example, the colours B/D. However, only birds with embryonic light experience are able to solve this problem.
{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }
Imagine the smell of an orange. Have you got it? Are you also picturing the orange, even though I didn’t ask you to? Try fish. Or mown grass. You’ll find it’s difficult to bring a scent to mind without also calling up an image. It’s no coincidence, scientists say: Your brain’s visual processing center is doing double duty in the smell department.
No one will ever know you, only what you let them see
People using Google’s email service, Gmail, on a relatively new BlackBerry smartphone may have noticed recently that some contacts now have small photos next to their names. They may have been surprised to see them there – after all, these are not photos taken by the BlackBerry itself, and its manufacturer Research In Motion has struck no data-sharing deal with Google.
Those images appear because Google has taken a profile photo users uploaded to Google+, its social network, and incorporated it into their contacts’ Gmail address book.
This is just one example of how Google is increasingly combining the information it holds about its users from its dozens of products, which range from a search engine and maps to Android smartphones, flight checkers and language translation apps.
One line in Google’s privacy policy, which came into force on Thursday, explains how it is able to do this: “If other users already have your email or other information that identifies you, we may show them your publicly visible Google Profile information, such as your name and photo.”
But when, in late January, Google published this new document detailing how it is combining the personal information it holds about its users from its dozens of different products, many privacy advocates, data protection officials and state regulators let their simmering distrust of the internet company boil over. “Google didn’t ask us if we, their customers, minded our data being merged and used in new ways,” said Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group, a digital activist. “Most people will have no choice but to put up with the change. That is wrong.”
related { How Google—and 104 Other Companies—Are Tracking Me on the Web }
Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy as a Whole
Japanese researchers build a gun capable of stopping speakers in mid-sentence.
What are the reasons some people never make it to the second date?
In the philosophy of religion, the problem of evil is the question of how to explain evil if there exists a deity that is omnibenevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient.
Some philosophers have claimed that the existences of such a god and of evil are logically incompatible or unlikely.
Attempts to resolve the question under these contexts have historically been one of the prime concerns of theodicy.
Some responses include the arguments that true free will cannot exist without the possibility of evil, that humans cannot understand God, that suffering is necessary for spiritual growth or evil is the consequence of a fallen world. Others contend that God is not omnibenevolent or omnipotent.
To him again: tell him he wears the rose of youth upon him
Since when did being a writer become a career choice, with appropriate degree courses and pecking orders? Does this state of affairs make any difference to what gets written?
At school we were taught two opposing visions of the writer as artist. He might be a skilled craftsman bringing his talent to the service of the community, which rewarded him with recognition and possibly money. This, they told us, was the classical position, as might be found in the Greece of Sophocles, or Virgil’s Rome, or again in Pope’s Augustan Britain. Alternatively the writer might make his own life narrative into art, indifferent to the strictures and censure of society but admired by it precisely because of his refusal to kowtow. This was the Romantic position as it developed in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. (…)
As we know, T.S. Eliot rather complicated matters by telling us that the writer had to overcome his personality and find his place in a literary tradition. (…)
Still, none of this prepared us for the advent of creative writing as a “career.” In the last thirty or forty years, the writer has become someone who works on a well-defined career track, like any other middle class professional, not, however, to become a craftsman serving the community, but to project an image of himself (partly through his writings, but also in dozens of other ways) as an artist who embodies the direction in which culture is headed.
photo { Tennesse Williams by Richard Avedon }
related { The digitization of over five million books has created a huge dataset of cultural interest. Now researchers are beginning to tease it apart using powerful number-crunching techniques. | Culturomics and the Google Book Project }
Fish, when it has passed the Hands of a French Cook, is no more Fish
Having adequate personal space is an important aspect of users’ comfort with their environment. In a restaurant, for instance, spatial intrusion by others can lead to avoidance responses such as early departure or a disinclination to spend.
A web-based survey of more than 1,000 Americans elicited behavioral intentions and emotional responses to a projected restaurant experience when parallel dining tables were spaced at six, twelve, and twenty-four inches apart under three common dining scenarios. Respondents strongly objected to closely spaced tables in most circumstances, particularly in a “romantic” context. Not only did the respondents react negatively to tightly spaced tables but they were generally disdainful of banquette- style seating, regardless of table distance.
The context of the dining experience (e.g., a business lunch, a family occasion) is likely to be a key factor in consumers’ preferences for table spacing and their subsequent behaviors. Gender was also a factor, as women were much less comfortable than men in tight quarters. The findings are clear but the implications for restaurateurs are not, because a tight table arrangement has been demonstrated to shorten the dining cycle without affecting spending.
image { Desiree Dolron }
related { Monsters, daemons, and devils: The Accusations of Nineteenth-Century Vegetarian Writers | PDF }
Every day, the same, again
Kids Are Still Getting Drunk By Shoving Vodka-Soaked Tampons Up Their Butts.
Thai teen girls think braces are cute. They’re also deadly. [thanks Tim]
Oklahoma Senator Pickets Personhood Bill With Hilarious, Obscene Sign.
According to a new study, eating cheese can alter your dreams. [thanks Tim]
Billboard promoting literacy night contains spelling mistake.
US Newspaper Ad Revenues Drop To 60Yrs Low.
North Korea Suspends Nuclear Testing. United States offers food aid in exchange for moratorium on uranium enrichment and weapons testing.
Why Russia needs to rebuild its military, by Vladimir Putin.
A mother describes the surprising effect that the pharmaceutical sleeping drug Ambien has had on her brain-damaged son. [NY Times]
Yes, pheromones send signals about your moods, your sexual orientation and even your genetic makeup.
Brain cells know which way you’ll bet.
Do consumers prefer to pay $29 for 70 items or get 70 items for $29?
Showing off in humans: Male generosity as a mating signal.
Does religious background influence sexual orientation?
What’s the best time to be creative? New research finds circadian rhythms in our creativity.
Healthy people seeking amputations are nowhere near as rare as one might think. In May of 1998 a seventy-nine-year-old man from New York traveled to Mexico and paid $10,000 for a black-market leg amputation; he died of gangrene in a motel.
Dotcom didn’t look like a criminal genius. With his ginger hair, chubby cheeks, and odd fashion sense—he often wore black suits and white-on-black wingtip shoes—he looked like he should be setting up a magic table.
He was fired from the company he helped create, YouSendIt. Then the cyberattacks started. A Silicon Valley Tale of Humiliation and Revenge.
Research, no motion: How the BlackBerry CEOs lost an empire.
For the US, the war confirmed its status as a sovereign state and tested the limits of manifest destiny. On this side of the border, the matter is much simpler: if we hadn’t won the War of 1812, we wouldn’t be Canadian.
Which is the best language to learn? French.
We celebrate Nietzsche for being anti-everything, but why is there no anti-Nietzsche?
When did TED lose its edge? When did TED stop trying to collect smart people and instead collect people trying to be smart? Related: A TEDTalk from the future as envisioned by Prometheus director Ridley Scott.
Life as a Landlord. [NY Times ]
The film is in the public domain because the producers failed to renew the copyright in 1973.
National Cheerleaders Convention, Daytona Beach, Florida , 1998.
Japanese Fart Scrolls Are the Best Scrolls.
More and more undeniable sightings of UFOs produced over major cities.
This is the way, step inside
The most destructive of the defense mechanisms are those that involve being deeply out of touch with reality. (…) A classic example is delusion. (…) Another example is denial, an inability to accept reality, both publicly and privately, a classic example being denial of a drug or alcohol addiction. (…)
Even for the healthiest among us, reality can be a bit too harsh to confront head on, but Level 4 defense mechanisms are considered to be generally functional. Some examples include humor, which is sometimes the best way to cope with emotional pain, and sublimation, which involves transforming unacceptable desires into constructive and socially acceptable forms, such as creating art, embarking on a spiritual path, running a marathon, becoming a dentist…
image { Nam June Paik, 9/23/69: Experiment with David Atwood, 1969 }
