There’s an old joke - um… two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of them says, “Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.” The other one says, “Yeah, I know; and such small portions.” Well, that’s essentially how I feel about life.
Ask a social scientist about the keys to happiness and you’re likely to hear that it’s better to buy experiences than buy possessions. What you’re unlikely to hear is a good explanation for why experiences make people happier.
Two Cornell psychologists, Emily Rosenzweig and Thomas Gilovich, attempted to answer this question by examining regret rather than satisfaction in the aftermath of a purchase. They theorized that with material purchases the strongest regret stems from action (i.e. buying the wrong thing), whereas with experiential purchases the strongest regret comes from inaction (not having the experience.) The result is that those who make a purchase are more likely to feel regret when buying a material good, and therefore buying a material good leads to comparatively less happiness.
photo { Erwin Olaf }
‘The illusion which exalts us is dearer to us than ten thousand truths.’ –Pushkin
Very little research has investigated whether smells really do evoke vivid and emotional memories, more than other sensory cues. What follows is a new, rare attempt. (…)
“It could be argued that a necessary implication of the Proust phenomenon is that odors are more effective triggers of emotional memories than other-modality triggers,” the researchers said. “Under such strong assumptions the results reported here do not confirm the Proust phenomenon. Nonetheless, our findings do extend previous research by demonstrating that odor is a stronger trigger of detailed and arousing memories than music, which has often been held to provide equally powerful triggers as odors.”
photo { Stephanie Gonot }
Fringe
The idea that our universe is embedded in a broader multidimensional space has captured the imagination of scientists and the general population alike.
This notion is not entirely science fiction. According to some theories, our cosmos may exist in parallel with other universes in other sets of dimensions. Cosmologists call these universes braneworlds. And among that many prospects that this raises is the idea that things from our Universe might somehow end up in another.
A couple of years ago, Michael Sarrazin at the University of Namur in Belgium and a few others showed how matter might make the leap in the presence of large magnetic potentials. That provided a theoretical basis for real matter swapping.
Today, Sarrazin and a few pals say that our galaxy might produce a magnetic potential large enough to make this happen for real. If so, we ought to be able to observe matter leaping back and forth between universes in the lab. In fact, such observations might already have been made in certain experiments.
photo { Adam Lampton }
Lucas, who is 67 and still in possession of the full pompadour
Danilo is the only person allowed to cut my hair, really. He’s just the most magical, amazing human being. He’s on the whole Rooney Mara thing—he created her look for Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.
‘The various languages placed side by side show that with words it is never a question of truth, never a question of adequate expression; otherwise, there would not be so many languages.’ –Nietzsche
I’d say that in about half of my business conversations, I have almost no idea what other people are saying to me. The language of internet business models has made the problem even worse. When I was younger, if I didn’t understand what people were saying, I thought I was stupid. Now I realize that if it’s to people’s benefit that I understand them but I don’t, then they’re the ones who are stupid.
image { Adrian Piper }
I finally figured out how to make my dick 8 inches long. Fold it in half.
I missed a great story circulated by my first New York roommates about how our scuzzball landlord is now embroiled in a legal fracas for renting a 1.5 million Tribeca apartment to a guy who runs a basement sex loft out of it offering “flaming massages.” The neighbors are so mad they keep smearing dog feces on the door. I could have lived without this news, but I’m happier now that I have it.
(…)
The messages Facebook hides in an obscure folder labeled “Other.”
Is this it there
One small company reinvents a $30 billion market
EagleView uses aerial photography and 3-D modeling to produce on-demand reports for accurate measurements of almost every roof in the country. No ladder, no tape measurers and no perilous, time-consuming estimates.
The aged sisters draw us into life: we wail, batten, sport, clip, clasp, sunder, dwindle, die: over us dead they bend.
{ John Banasiak }
Everyone wants the same, everyone is the same: whoever feels different goes willingly into the madhouse.
Group settings can diminish expressions of intelligence, especially among women
Research led by scientists at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute found that small-group dynamics — such as jury deliberations, collective bargaining sessions, and cocktail parties — can alter the expression of IQ in some susceptible people. “You may joke about how committee meetings make you feel brain dead, but our findings suggest that they may make you act brain dead as well,” said Read Montague, who led the study.
A black crack of noise in the street here, alack, bawled, back. Loud on left Thor thundered: in anger awful the hammerhurler.
I’ve long heard that the Port Authority is one of many public spaces across the country that uses classical music to help control vagrancy: to drive the homeless away. (…)
In 2001, police in West Palm Beach, Fla., blasted Mozart and Beethoven on a crime-ridden street corner and saw incidents dwindle dramatically. (…)
Some sources report that Barry Manilow is as effective as Mozart in driving away unwanted groups of teens.
‘Nothing is more succinct and articulate than just doing the jerk-off hand motion.’ –GS Elevator
In a nutshell, a roadshow involves taking borrowers (bond issuers) to meet potential investors. A roadshow is a series of back-to-back investor meetings and group investor lunches, all sandwiched in between market update calls and flights to the next city, where the process repeats itself. (…)
The worst job, by far, on any roadshow is that of the analyst. Analysts are the pledges of the financial world. It’s where everyone has to take his two or three years of licks after coming out of the training program. It’s masochism born out of stupidity. What at first seems like the big time soon turns into eighteen hour days, seven days a week, all of it mindless crap like churning out pitch books and just about any other shit work the Associates don’t want to do.
On roadshows, analysts are responsible for carrying pitch books and prospectuses, which can be fucking heavy. In addition, they oversee all logistics (hotels, flights, cars, etc.) and most importantly, do anything the client asks. All of this has to be done without fucking up – period. The job fucking sucks, but all analysts want to do it.
When I was an analyst, if another bank was responsible for roadshow logistics and I wasn’t traveling with them, I would often give their analyst intentionally incorrect information, the wrong floor, or the wrong tower, anything to make them look bad. Although the banks may be working together on one deal, we’re always competing for the next one.
{ GS Elevator | Continue reading }
When asked about his job at cocktail parties, Alan Johnson has a curiosity-piquing line. “You know those big paydays on Wall Street?” he says, typically waiting a beat to deliver the punch line. “I have something to do with them.”
Mr. Johnson, a consultant who speaks with a light twang from his native Alabama, has never worked for a bank. Nor will his company, Johnson Associates, pay million-dollar bonuses to any of its 12 employees this year. But as one of the nation’s foremost financial compensation specialists, Mr. Johnson is among a small group of behind-the-scenes information brokers who help determine how Wall Street firms distribute billions of dollars to their workers.
“The misunderstanding many people have about this industry is that pay is whimsical,” Mr. Johnson said in a recent interview at his company’s Manhattan office. “It’s not.”
Compensation consulting is an obscure corner of the management consulting industry, where practitioners operate in the shadows of high finance. Large Wall Street banks, as well as hedge funds and private equity shops, rely on such consultants to help them structure bonus payouts and devise severance packages, and to provide data on what competitors pay.
“You can give them some insights,” Mr. Johnson said of his clients, who have included the boards of Credit Suisse and Lehman Brothers. “You can say to them, ‘You’re being too wimpy this time,’ or, ‘You were being too aggressive last time.’ ”
This year’s bonus season, which began in late December and will continue until February at some companies, is expected to be the worst for industry employees since 2008, as regulatory measures and economic uncertainty have cut deeply into profits and made pay pools smaller.
In his annual compensation survey, a closely watched report that was sent to roughly 800 of the company’s clients in November, Mr. Johnson estimated that bonuses in the industry would fall 20 to 30 percent from last year’s levels.
That would still leave employees at firms like Goldman Sachs, where the average worker took home $430,700 in total compensation in 2010, much better off than workers in other industries. But it would represent further slippage from the sector’s highs before the crisis.
Bonus math in a financial downturn is a delicate art. Because the payments typically make up at least half of an employee’s yearly pay, erring on the low side can mean losing a star performer to a rival firm.
“Someone on Wall Street might go apoplectic when he heard he got $3 million and another guy got $3.5 million,” Mr. Johnson said.
previously { Today is the day when many at Goldman are finding out what their bonus will be. And it’s “really ugly.” }
photo { Brian Finke }
FRANK SINATRA FAN PARKING ONLY
“I only remember meeting him once,” she said. “Fred had some of the guys over, and Joe Sims was sitting right here. He was interested in all the Sinatra stuff. Then when he was leaving, he said something to me. He said, ‘The one problem with that collection is that Frank Sinatra can’t sing.’ I said, ‘Excuse me?’ He looked me right in the eye and said, ‘Frank Sinatra can’t sing.’ The hackles on my neck stood up. Literally. I mean it. When Fred came back, I said, ‘He’s bad news, Fred. I can tell you right now, he’s bad news.’ But Fred pooh-poohed it. He said something like, ‘Ah, you don’t know what you’re talking about.’”
It is the central mystery of the case. (…) By all accounts, Fred Thomas had lived an exemplary life of loyalty and leadership, with a devoted wife, a son nearby, a secure pension income, and a dream home to show for it. Joe Sims (…) was a man of unsavory associations and catastrophic divorces, a man who when he tells the truth, tells it slant, a man who stands accused of raping his stepdaughter in a house with her old swing set still planted in the backyard.
Strobe lights make everything sexy, yeah
What can make camping even more enjoyable? Self-cleaning clothes. And I don’t mean jumping into the river with your clothes on, but simply just leaving them out in the sun. At least, that’s what we may be able to do one day with the self-cleaning cotton developed by Chinese researchers. (…)
The team evaluated the self-cleaning properties of the new cotton fibres based on the removal of methyl orange, a dye commonly used in textiles. The dye breaks down with exposure to visible light by a process known as photocatalytic degradation. With just two hours of exposure to visible light, about 70% of the dye was removed from the cotton fibres.
photo { Coley Brown }
Till death do us part
When things are bad, and I mean really bad, horribly you-are-in-the-jaws-of-death bad, sometimes you have to let go of something. Like a tail.
The leopard gecko can, when hassled, have its tail fall off. Losing a limb (autotomy) is not a particularly unusual trick for this species. Lots of animals can drop legs and tails if necessary. But this one is noteworthy because if it does so, the tail doesn’t just come off, but it will continue to twist and writhe for up to several minutes after the tail has been separated from the rest of the body. (…)
Higham and Russell show that that the tail is doing at least two things. One is a slow, rhythmic swinging, and occasionally, much faster contortions that made the tail flip or jump around. The flips tend to fade out faster than the slower swinging, though.
He risked a second nervous look at the strong, almost cruel lines of her face
In fact, it was because of my feminism that I wanted to like Erotic Capital: Whether from nature or nurture, women have traditionally excelled at “soft skills” like taking the emotional temperature of others, listening, adjusting one’s behavior to any given situation, and cooperating. These all happen to be skills that, until fairly recently, have been undercompensated in the workplace. In Hakim’s book I anticipated a deftly written argument that would reclaim the value of women’s work so that maybe we’d eventually start paying people in the professions that make use of those skills — say, teaching and nursing — their true value.
That’s the book I wanted to read. The book I actually read was more like this: Men supposedly have higher sex drives than women, creating a “male sex deficit,” which means men are always in a state of wanting more of what women supply. (…) So women who are willing to address that deficit, by either having actual sex with men suffering from it or presenting themselves in an enchanting manner to exploit it, have erotic capital that can be traded for other forms of capital.
Erotic capital has many guises: from “trophy wives” whose skilled self-presentation becomes a part of a man’s public persona, to men or women who style themselves in such a way as to garner attention at their workplace, to women with otherwise limited means who sell their erotic capacity (whether forthrightly, as with sex workers and performers, or more covertly, as with sales jobs) to establish themselves. It’s “sell yourself” meets “sex sells.” What’s most surprising about all this is that Hakim seems to think she’s saying something new. (…)
That she fails to name a single feminist who has actually come out against presenting oneself well (as opposed to presenting oneself as stereotypically feminine) indicates that she’s attacking a straw feminist, not an actual one. Where are the radical feminists urging women to not use their people skills on the job? Who are these radical feminists who blame women for wearing makeup to work instead of directing their critiques at institutions that demand women do so? Hakim falsely asserts that feminists have been fighting for the eradication of charisma and charm instead of the eradication of coyness and the deployment of sex appeal as woman’s strongest — or only — weapons.
