He announced his presence by that gentle Rumboldian cough which so many have tried (unsuccessfully) to imitate
So then the citizens begin talking
{ A landlocked country is a country entirely enclosed by land, or whose only coastlines lie on closed seas. There are 48 landlocked countries in the world, including partially recognized states. | Wikipedia | Continue reading }
Not to brag or anything but I almost had sex tonight
Marriage as Punishment
Popular discourse portrays marriage as a source of innumerable public and private benefits, happiness, companionship, financial security, and even good health. Complementing this view, our legal discourse frames the right to marry as a right of access, the exercise of which is an act of autonomy and free will.
However, a closer look at marriage’s past reveals a more complicated portrait. Marriage has been used - and importantly, continues to be used - as state-imposed sexual discipline.
Until the mid-twentieth century, marriage played an important role in the crime of seduction. Enacted in a majority of U.S. jurisdictions in the nineteenth century, seduction statutes punished those who ’seduced and had sexual intercourse with an unmarried female of previously chaste character’ under a ‘promise of marriage.’ Seduction statutes routinely prescribed a bar to prosecution for the offense: marriage. The defendant could simply marry the victim and avoid liability for the crime. However, marriage did more than serve as a bar to prosecution. It also was understood as a punishment for the crime. Just as incarceration promoted the internalization of discipline and reform of the inmate, marriage’s attendant legal and social obligations imposed upon defendant and victim a new disciplined identity, transforming them from sexual outlaws into in-laws.
Avant de refaire le monde, on va commencer par refaire des merguez
What occurred to Newton was that there was a force of gravity, which of course everybody knew about, it’s not like he actually discovered gravity– everybody knew there was such a thing as gravity. But if you go back into antiquity, the way that the celestial objects, the moon, the sun, and the planets, were treated by astronomy had nothing to do with the way things on earth were treated. These were entirely different realms, and what Newton realized was that there had to be a force holding the moon in orbit around the earth. This is not something that Aristotle or his predecessors thought, because they were treating the planets and the moon as though they just naturally went around in circles. Newton realized there had to be some force holding the moon in its orbit around the earth, to keep it from wandering off, and he knew also there was a force that was pulling the apple down to the earth. And so what suddenly struck him was that those could be one and the same thing, the same force.
(…)
I’m not sure it’s accurate to say that physicists want to hand time over to philosophers. Some physicists are very adamant about wanting to say things about it; Sean Carroll for example is very adamant about saying that time is real. You have others saying that time is just an illusion, that there isn’t really a direction of time, and so forth. I myself think that all of the reasons that lead people to say things like that have very little merit, and that people have just been misled, largely by mistaking the mathematics they use to describe reality for reality itself. If you think that mathematical objects are not in time, and mathematical objects don’t change — which is perfectly true — and then you’re always using mathematical objects to describe the world, you could easily fall into the idea that the world itself doesn’t change, because your representations of it don’t.
There are other, technical reasons that people have thought that you don’t need a direction of time, or that physics doesn’t postulate a direction of time. My own view is that none of those arguments are very good. To the question as to why a physicist would want to hand time over to philosophers, the answer would be that physicists for almost a hundred years have been dissuaded from trying to think about fundamental questions. I think most physicists would quite rightly say “I don’t have the tools to answer a question like ‘what is time?’ - I have the tools to solve a differential equation.” The asking of fundamental physical questions is just not part of the training of a physicist anymore.
(…)
On earth, of all the billions of species that have evolved, only one has developed intelligence to the level of producing technology. Which means that kind of intelligence is really not very useful. It’s not actually, in the general case, of much evolutionary value. We tend to think, because we love to think of ourselves, human beings, as the top of the evolutionary ladder, that the intelligence we have, that makes us human beings, is the thing that all of evolution is striving toward. But what we know is that that’s not true. Obviously it doesn’t matter that much if you’re a beetle, that you be really smart. If it were, evolution would have produced much more intelligent beetles. We have no empirical data to suggest that there’s a high probability that evolution on another planet would lead to technological intelligence. There is just too much we don’t know.
photo { Luisa Opalesky }
Another slice of bread and butter: three, four: right. She didn’t like her plate full.
Many of us cling to the notion that memory is a reliable record and trawling through it can be similar to flipping through an old photo album. But what about the memories - sometimes vivid in nature - of things that never were?
Examining the false stories that we can create for ourselves is the aim of a new initiative led by artist Alasdair Hopwood. As part of a residency at the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit led by Chris French at Goldsmiths College, University of London, Hopwood aims to explore what false memories reveal about our sense of identity.
To do this, he has created the False Memory Archive, a collection of people’s fabricated recollections either jotted down after talks he has given or submitted online at the project’s website. (…)
For Hopwood, examining the ways we deceive ourselves through memory is perhaps a natural progression. He has worked with fellow artists as part of the WITH Collective on projects that expose and poke fun at the many ways we style our public selves. “Identity is not fixed,” he says. Instead, it shifts depending on the company we are in, and even the format of the interaction - be it social media or in person. We’re extraordinarily preoccupied with sculpting our identities, as the glut of self-help books and pseudoscientific methods for personal development demonstrates.
photo { Dennis Lan }
She blinked up out of her avid shameclosing eyes, mewing plaintively and long, showing him her milkwhite teeth
As you read these words, try paying attention to something you usually never notice: the movements of your eyes. While you scan these lines of text, or glance at that ad over there or look up from the screen at the room beyond, your eyes are making tiny movements, called saccades, and brief pauses, called fixations. Scientists are discovering that eye movement patterns — where we look, and for how long — reveals important information about how we read, how we learn and even what kind of people we are.
Researchers are able to identify these patterns thanks to the development of eye-tracking technology: video cameras that record every minuscule movement of the eyes. Such equipment, originally developed to study the changes in vision experienced by astronauts in zero-gravity conditions, allows scientists to capture and analyze that always-elusive entity, attention. The way we move our eyes, it turns out, is a reliable indicator of what seizes our interest and of what distracts us. (…)
Eye movements are so closely tied to the way we think and act that they can even reveal information about our personalities. In a study published this month in the journal Cognition, researcher Evan Risko and his coauthors asked experimental subjects to complete a questionnaire gauging their levels of curiosity, defined as a desire for new knowledge and new experiences. The scientists then used eye-tracking equipment to record the eye movements of participants as they viewed a series of scenes. People who tested as highly curious, Risko reported, looked at many more elements of the pictures, restlessly moving their eyes around the scenes. “Who a person is,” he concluded, “relates to how they move their eyes.”
images { 1. Robert Longo | 2. Floris M. Neusüss }
Let me buy a brick and get the other on cossimy
Benford’s Law, also known as the rule of first-digits, is a rule that says in data sets borne from real-life (perhaps sales of coffee or payments to a vendor), the number 1 should be the first digit in a series approximately 30% of the time, instead of 11% as would happen had a random number between one and nine been generated.
The rule was first developed by Simon Newcomb, who noticed that in his logarithm books the first pages showed much greater signs of use than those pages at the end. Later the physicist Frank Benford collected some 20,000 observations to test the theory, which he too stumbled upon.
Benford found that the first-digits of a variety of things in nature, like elemental atomic weights, the areas of rivers, and the numbers that appeared on front pages of newspapers, started with a one more often than any other digit.
The reason for that proof is the percentage difference between consecutive single-digit numbers. Say a firm is valued at $1 billion. For the first digit to become a two (or to reach a market cap of $2 billion), the value of the firm will need to increase by 100%. However, once it reaches that $2 billion mark, it only needs to increase by 50% to get to $3 billion. That difference continues to decline as the value increases.
Retweet if you like bagels
Peter Singer says if there is a range of ways of feeding ourselves, we should choose the way that causes the least unnecessary harm to animals. Most animal rights advocates say this means we should eat plants rather than animals. (…)
Published figures suggest that, in Australia, producing wheat and other grains results in:
• at least 25 times more sentient animals being killed per kilogram of useable protein
• more environmental damage, and
• a great deal more animal cruelty than does farming red meat.
related { American Meat Consumption Down 12.2% Since 2007. }
photo { Kelsey Bennett }
Congratulations, you’ve lived to see another day. Here’s your reward. Bills and bullshit.
{ Prada Marfa is a permanently installed sculpture by artists Elmgreen and Dragset, situated 2.3 km (1.4 miles) northwest of Valentine, Texas. Designed to resemble a Prada store, the building is made of “adobe bricks, plaster, paint, glass pane, aluminum frame, MDF, and carpet.” The installation’s door is nonfunctional. On the front of the structure there are two large windows displaying actual Prada wares, shoes and handbags, picked out and provided by Miuccia Prada herself from the fall/winter 2005 collection; Prada allowed Elmgreen and Dragset to use the Prada trademark for this work. A few days after Prada Marfa was officially revealed, the installation was vandalized. The building was broken into and all of its contents (six handbags and 14 right footed shoes) were stolen, and the word “Dumb” and the phrase “Dum Dum” were spray painted on the sides of the structure. The sculpture was quickly repaired, repainted, and restocked. The new Prada purses do not have bottoms and instead hide parts of a security system that alerts authorities if the bags are moved. | Wikipedia }
Every day, the same, again
Redheads rejected by sperm banks.
Man Killed In Train Accident Sued By Woman His Flying Body Parts Injured. [Several witnesses said he was smiling as the train hit him.]
Sweden dealt a symbolic blow to the global fight against digital music and film piracy by recognizing a group that promotes file-sharing across the Internet as a religion.
Woman auctions space on her bottom for tattoo.
Officially known as “Compensation Communication Day,” today is the day when many at Goldman are finding out what their bonus will be. And it’s “really ugly” today, according to one Goldman employee.
For the first time since 1965, homicide drops off list of top 15 causes of death in the US.
Vinyl sales rose by 39 percent in 2011.
Babies can tell whether you made a mistake or not from the tone of your voice.
What’s the Most Dangerous Over-the-Counter Drug?
The G-Spot: Myth or Anatomical Mystery?
Two new sequencing machines will read a human genome in 24 hours.
In 1997, The Lancet published a medical study of three genuine Haitian zombies.
A New York psychoanalyst reveals her concerns about the profession.
Koro, the fear that the genitals are fatally shrinking into the body.
Not all appearances of name-brand items in movies result from product placement.
What’s the best animal to slice open and crawl inside to stay warm? Assuming a bitterly cold day (9 degrees Fahrenheit), a stiff wind (12 miles per hour), and a 500-kilogram cow with half its insides scooped out, and factoring in the heat produced by the resident human, my assistant Una estimates the cow’s body would lose about 3 degrees per hour. She concludes you’d have right around 15 hours, best case, before hypothermia set in.
‘Hacker’ Journalism - A New Utopia for the Press?
Have you looked at the number of white papers out there lately? And how they all suck? At the collateral? At the websites? At the press releases and the fatuous corporate blogs? Enterprise writing does not “go viral.”
26 reasons not to trust what you read in the newspaper.
Five ways the digital camera changed us.
The 20 Hardest Corporate Interviews In America.
Top 10 Bands With Members Who Don’t Play Anything.
7 surf sicknesses. [thanks tim]
6 Things Movies Love to Get Wrong About The Workplace.
Jeet Kune Do is a hybrid martial arts system and life philosophy founded by martial artist Bruce Lee with direct, non classical and straightforward movements.
Machinima is the use of real-time 3D computer graphics rendering engines to create a cinematic production. Most often, video games are used to generate the computer animation.
Feature-length film, The Trashmaster, made entirely in Grand Theft Auto IV.
Robert De Niro’s real taxicab driver’s license from 1975.
Google’s Mapping Tools Spawn New Breed of Art Projects.
Vermin Supreme (2012 Presidential Candidate). [video]
Helping the retarded to know God.
Camera Store Gets Virtual Tour From Google Street View.
Have you every wondered which part of the other side of the earth is directly below you?
The relation between treating-as and seeing-as is not straightforward
Coordinated universal time (UTC) is the time scale used all over the world for time coordination. It was established in 1972, based on atomic clocks, and was the successor of astronomical time, which is based on the Earth’s rotation. But since the atomic time scale drifts from the astronomical one, 1-second steps were added whenever necessary. In 1972 everybody was happy with this decision. Today, most systems we use for telecommunications are not really happy with these “leap” seconds. So in January member states of the International Telecommunications Union will vote on dropping the leap second. (…)
We are using a system that breaks time. The quality of time is continuity. This is why a majority in the international community want to change the definition of UTC and drop the leap second. (…)
It was agreed some years ago that we should not think of any kind of adjustment in the near future, the next 100 or 200 years. In about the year 2600 we will have a half-hour divergence. However, we don’t know how time-keeping will be then, or how technology will be. So we cannot rule for the next six or seven generations.
O heaven above me, thou modest one! thou glowing one! O thou, my happiness before sunrise!
I’ve covered these highly counter-intuitive findings before and the title of that article sums it up: Weather Has Little Effect on Mood.
Most of us intuitively think the weather has quite a strong effect on our mood. Many assume that the rain and cold weather depresses us and sun and warmth perks us up.
So why don’t we see this effect in the research?
That’s the question a new study by Klimstra et al. (2011) tries to answer.
And it turns out this is true. In fact Klimstra et al. found four distinct groups:
1. Unaffected
2. Summer lovers
3. Summer haters
4. Rain haters
photo { Mark Rice }
Gun pop, heart stop, homie this is heavy
In the Cayman Islands, genetically modified mosquitoes are on the prowl. The insects are all male, and they’ve been engineered so that all their offspring die before reaching adulthood. By having sex with local females, they could father a new generation that perishes prematurely, before it gets the chance to spread diseases like dengue fever.
These GM insects, engineered by Luke Alphey at the University of Oxford, are part of a growing number of initiatives designed to fight disease by pitting mosquitoes against mosquitoes. Alphey’s tactic of breeding mosquitoes that beget unfit larvae is just one approach. Some groups are trying to make the insects more resistant to the disease-causing parasites they carry. Others have loaded them with life-shortening bacteria that outcompete those parasites. (…)
But all of these recent attempts to turn mosquitoes into malaria- and dengue-killing machines have something in common: The modified mosquitoes need to have lots of sex to spread their altered genes through the wild population. They must live long enough to become sexually active, and they have to compete successfully for mates with their wild peers. And that is a problem, because we still know surprisingly little about the behavior and ecology of mosquitoes, especially the males. How far do they travel? What separates the Casanovas from the sexual failures. What affects their odds of survival in the wild? How should you breed the growing mosquitoes to make them sexier?
Stuff the ice chest
{ On the campaign trail with Mitt Romney. And Bad Lip Reading. | thanks joshua }
People love it, which is different than saying they have fun. Fun comes and goes.
Announcing products before they are ready gives the competition time to respond, raises customer expectations, and opens a company up to the carping of critics who are bashing an idea rather than an actual product. Companies that fail to grasp the power of secrecy do so at their peril. (…) Steve Jobs once said that not talking about the inner workings of the company is something he borrowed from Walt Disney. The creator of the original Magic Kingdom felt the magic the public attributed to Disney would be diminished by excessive focus on what went on behind the scenes. (…)
The splendid central cafeteria, Caffe Macs, features separate stations for fresh sushi, salad, and desserts and teems with Apple employees. They pay for their meals, by the way, unlike at Google. (…) “There’s only one free lunch at Apple, and it’s on your first day,” said a former employee. (…)
For new recruits, keeping secrets begins even before they learn which building they’ll be working in. Many employees are hired into so‑called dummy positions, roles that aren’t explained in detail until after they join the company.
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead
{ Moai are monolithic human figures carved from rock on the Chilean Polynesian island of Easter Island between the years 1250 and 1500. The 887 statues’ production and transportation is considered a remarkable creative and physical feat. The tallest moai erected, called Paro, was almost 10 metres (33 ft) high and weighed 82 tons; the heaviest erected was a shorter but squatter moai at Ahu Tongariki, weighing 86 tons; and one unfinished sculpture, if completed, would have been approximately 21 metres (69 ft) tall with a weight of about 270 tons. | Easter Island Statue Project | Wikipedia }
