Public restrooms are a great place to find bacteria, as the authors of the new study euphemistically put it, “because of the activities that take place there and the high frequency of use by individuals with different hygienic routines.” Furthermore, different neighborhoods within bathrooms probably house different communities of bacteria. To perform a census on these hidden but lively communities, researchers sampled surfaces in six men’s rooms and six women’s rooms at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Genetic sequencing of these samples told them which species of bacteria were present. Out of all the bacterial types that turned up, there were 19 phyla of bacteria present in every bathroom.

{ inkfish | Continue reading }

illustration { Wendy MacNaughton, Meanwhile, The San Francisco Public Library }

“I had an orgasm in an MRI scanner.”

Dad claims twins came from sperm stolen by ex-girlfriend. [more]

Gynecologist faces charge for secret photos.

Two dolphins who died after two-day techno party at marine park ‘were fed drugs by ravers.’

Portland woman takes pictures naked, inside dead horse.

A leading Nigerian comic actor arrested on suspicion of ingesting drugs to smuggle to Europe was on Friday freed on bail after 25 closely monitored bowel movements produced nothing suspicious.

Fox News Viewers Less Informed Than Those Who Read No News.

Scores of cameras across the city capture 1,800 images a minute and download the information into a rapidly expanding archive that can pinpoint people’s movements all over town.

The study reveals that firms headed by CEOs with wider faces (relative to facial height) achieved superior financial performance.

Two years ago the Bank of New York Mellon CEO almost left to run Bank of America, but he changed his mind and the board welcomed him back. That’s when the trouble started.

Welcome to America’s Lost Decade. The “Japanization” of America may be here, as the U.S. begins a long period of weak growth.

‘Do Not Litter’ Signs Can Be Counterproductive. When signs prohibiting certain behaviors are blatantly ignored, it inspires others to act in antisocial ways.

Seasonal affective disorder (SAD) makes people avoid risk in fall and winter.

Displaying cleavage provokes other women.

Why our brains make us laugh.

Psychopaths’ brains show differences in structure and function.

The “multiple reflection error” — yet another way that we misunderstand mirrors.

We’re Nowhere Near Artificial Brains.

What’s the maximal frame rate humans can perceive?

New experiments confirm it: some particles move faster than light.

A self-portrait of Leonardo da Vinci, which was lost for 500 years, has been restored using simple techniques and free software.

But, says Waldfogel, “consumers don’t care about the well-being of the recording industry. We care about the existence of good new products.” Is piracy damaging these new releases?

Palantir, the War on Terror’s Secret Weapon. A Silicon Valley startup that collates threats has quietly become indispensable to the U.S. intelligence community.

Have you heard that people writing about clothing on the Internet is kind of a big thing right now? Women’s Wear Daily jumped on the hottest trend from 2007 and ran a story about fashion bloggers, and how they make money. (One-word answer: Shilling.)

A Statistical Scientist Meets a Philosopher of Science: A Conversation between Sir David Cox and Deborah Mayo, 2011

Philosophy of Mind: An Overview.

Roland Barthes was one of the major theorists of culture of the twentieth century. A six-essay series by political theorist Andrew Robinson. Part 1, Part 2.

A week ago I had dinner with a respected drug policy expert who disapproves of drug legalization because he sees big negative externalities from alcohol use, and expects legalizing other drugs to make that worse. Which makes some sense. But the picture changes once one realizes that alcohol’s disruptive effects are mostly in our heads.

Why Shouldn’t You Shop While Hungry?

How Yelp is killing chain restaurants.

How Does Google AdWords Work?

Hidden iPhone Tricks: Secret Keyboard and Panoramic Photos.

Save Money by Only Buying Things You’ll “Wear Out.”

The Sketchbook of Susan Kare, the Artist Who Gave Computing a Human Face.

How to make red wine.

The World’s Worst Sex Change Surgeon.[video/Thanks Aj]

His photo series is the product of five year’s unprecedented access and international investigation into the practice of cryonics.

Christian Bermudez: the birdhouse project.

The world’s first website made out of chocolate.

Dr. T. Kenard Thomson – “Manhattan Extended”, 1922.

When Sharon Roseman was five years old, something strange happened. She was playing a game with her friends, and when she took off her blindfold–she didn’t know where she was. [audio]

A well a everybody’s heard about the bird.

Prompted by various books and movies, I’ve decided to make a bucket list of all the things I want to do before I die. The problem is, I don’t know how to limit myself. (…)

My suggestion is that you focus your thinking by making a reverse bucket list of all the things you are positive you don’t want to do.

{ The Atlantic | Continue reading }

painting { Gustave Caillebotte, Gardeners, 1875-77 }

Is it true Thanksgiving was invented by the editor of Harper’s Bazaar?

Right idea, wrong magazine. Thanksgiving as we know it today — at least on the scale we know it — is largely the creation of Mrs. Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, one of the first women’s magazines. Mrs. Hale spent 36 years browbeating public officials high and low before finally getting Thanksgiving declared a national holiday in 1863.

{ The Straight Dope | Continue reading }

The majority of studies testing this theory have examined men and women’s responses to hypothetical infidelity scenarios in which participants must choose which type of infidelity (sexual or emotional) is more distressing or upsetting.

Although studies using this forced-choice methodology generally find that a higher proportion of men than women choose the sexual infidelity as more distressing, reliance on this methodology has led to a number of serious challenges, including: (a) that sex differences in jealousy are not replicable with continuous measures of jealousy, and (b) that sex differences in jealousy do not emerge when people report their reactions to actual infidelity experiences.

{ Evolutionary Psychology | Continue reading }

photo { Rankin }

related { Which Infidelity Type Makes You More Jealous? Decision Strategies in a Forced-choice Between Sexual and Emotional Infidelity. }

“Did you know that 95% the universe is dark matter?” (…) “What about dark energy?” (…)

It is true that most of the universe is made up of things that can’t be seen, and whose presence is inferred by its effects on the things that can be seen. But what effects do we see? And how does that translate to a percentage of the universe that remains a mystery?

Galaxies rotate, and when we use gravitational laws to predict what that rotation should look like, we find that they should behave like the solar system–the farther away something is from the central mass (in the case of the solar system, the sun, and in the case of a galaxy, the supermassive black hole at the center), the slower it should orbit; the gravitational force on Pluto, for instance, is much smaller than the gravitational force on Mercury, because it’s much farther away from the sun. A star at the fingertip of an arm of the galaxy should orbit more slowly than we do. However, that’s not really what happens: galaxies have flat rotation curves, meaning that objects farther away from the supermassive black hole don’t really orbit more slowly than things closer to it.

What this implies is that there is lots of mass spread throughout the galaxy–that most of the mass isn’t just at the center–and that the spread-out mass has a large gravitational effect on the galaxy’s rotation.

{ Smaller Questions | Continue reading }

photos { 1. Pearly | 2. Natalia Arias }

related { Computer simulations suggest that a giant planet was kicked out of our solar system billions of years ago, saving Earth in the process. But how solid are those simulations? }

I think for a long time there was an assumption that men were the proper human beings and women were sort of an inferior copy; and the question was: Could women be almost as good as men? Then there was a brief period of arguing that there were no differences, that they were equal. But since about 1980 almost all the literature on gender differences either says women are better or some say there are still no differences. But it’s become sort of taboo to see men as superior in any way. I look at things as the world is more built on tradeoffs, and any lasting difference is likely to be because of a tradeoff. So, being better at one thing is likely to be connected to being not as good at something else. (…)

A lot of people argue that women are more social than men. What are some of the other dimensions that women are allegedly superior to men in tradeoffs? Being more social is an important one. I think being less aggressive and competitive and all those things. I think there’s just general assumption that it would be better if men were more like women, and the Psychology of Men’s groups and the American Psychological Association say that there’s a lot of assumptions that men should change to be more like women. More empathetic, express themselves better, show their feelings, cry more–those sort of things. (…)

My sense is we really have changed the way we bring up children. It’s a much more girl-centered environment. I don’t have as much contact with the schools, but my wife goes there and so on, and she says: It seems like with each decision they have to make, if there’s one way that’s better for boys and one better for girls, they feel like it would be sexist to do the way that’s better for boys, so they just do the way that’s better for girls. Over and over all those decisions get made like that; and especially girls are more desired as students there; they mature a little bit faster. (…) Women generally run the schools and they are making the decisions; and the girls are the better students. And they are trying quite earnestly to be fair to both, but each time it seems, well, we should do it the way that’s better for girls. So, we end up kind of raising our boys like girls, which is probably not going to produce the best results. (…)

The real experts on intelligence come in and say: Well, in adulthood there is a tiny difference; that the male is slightly higher than the female. In measured IQ tests? On IQ tests. But it’s such a small difference as to be trivial. The more meaningful difference is the greater difference at the extremes. My sense is it goes with the difference rates of reproduction. In essence, males are nature’s way of rolling the dice, because if you think of it constantly experimenting, to try a new variation or a new mutation, most of those experiments will turn out badly. Every so often you will have one that turns out well and moves the species forward. So, you want the bad ones to be flushed out of the gene pool right away and not reproduce. Whereas you want the good ones to reproduce a lot. And male reproductive variance is like that. In other words, some men have no children at all, and some men have a lot of children. Whereas women tend to cluster in the middle. Relatively few women throughout history have had no children at all. Certainly fewer women than men have gone childless.

{ Roy Baumeister/EconTalk | Continue reading }

{ The Amazing History and the Strange Invention of the Bendy Straw | Centuries before Darwin, Leonardo guessed through his study of rocks and fossils that the world is far older than Genesis claims }

Sit back, close your eyes, relax for a minute and allow your mind to wander wherever it wants to go. Don’t try to think of anything… Have you ever wondered what is going on inside your brain when your mind isn’t doing anything in particular, just like a moment ago? It turns out quite a lot.

One of the most astonishing qualities of the brain is its voracious appetite for energy. It accounts for only 2% of body weight, yet it burns an amazing 20% of the total calories consumed by the body. So you might think that the brain at rest would be conserving energy until the next task, but this is hardly the case. The energy consumption of the brain at rest decreases by only 5% compared to a brain at full capacity. Scientists have named the energy consumed during rest the brain’s “dark energy,” since the massive energy consumption during this so-called rest period is one of the biggest mysteries in neuroscience today.

{ BrainBlogger | Continue reading }

screenshot { Marley Shelton in Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror, 2007 }

Facebook is steamrolling forward. It now boasts 800 million active users. The company is reportedly preparting for an initial public offering. It’s laying plans to sell a Facebook phone, strengthening its presence on the mobile web. But Facebook’s plans may be hampered by a new backlash against the company’s efforts to get its users to share more of their lives online.

In September, Facebook announced at its annual f8 developers conference that it was upgrading its Open Graph technology. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduced Open Graph in 2010 to let web sites and apps share information about users with Facebook. The revamped Open Graph takes sharing to a new level, allowing apps to automatically share what articles users are reading or what music they’re listening to.

Zuckerberg said the new feature would allow “frictionless experiences” and “real-time serendipity.” At the time, only a few observers found them to be scary. “They are seeking out information to report about you,” wrote developer and blogger Dave Winer. But suddenly, a critical mass of critics are speaking up about the changes, how they affect users and publishers alike.

{ Kevin Kelleher/Teuters | Continue reading }

{ Toilet Paper magazine | Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari | Maurizio Cattelan Launches the Latest Issue of Toilet Paper At His Guggenheim Retrospective }

{ Tim Geoghegan | Right now on the Amazon page for the pepper spray used by Lt. John Pike… }

related { Pepper spray and cocaine, a little known lethal combination }

bonus [thanks Tobias]:

Adding a new chapter to the research that cemented the phrase “six degrees of separation” into the language, scientists at Facebook and the University of Milan reported on Monday that the average number of acquaintances separating any two people in the world was not six but 4.74.

The original “six degrees” finding, published in 1967 by the psychologist Stanley Milgram, was drawn from 296 volunteers who were asked to send a message by postcard, through friends and then friends of friends, to a specific person in a Boston suburb.

The new research used a slightly bigger cohort: 721 million Facebook users, more than one-tenth of the world’s population.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

painting { Wilhelm Gallhof, The Coral Chain, circa 1910 }

Always ‘God bless’ a sneeze. In most English-speaking countries, it is polite to respond to another person’s sneeze by saying “God bless you.” Though incantations of good luck have accompanied sneezes across disparate cultures for thousands of years (all largely tied to the belief that sneezes expelled evil spirits), our particular custom began in the sixth century A.D. by explicit order of Pope Gregory the Great. A terrible pestilence was spreading through Italy at the time. The first symptom was severe, chronic sneezing, and this was often quickly followed by death. Pope Gregory urged the healthy to pray for the sick.

It’s bad luck to walk under a leaning ladder. This superstition really does originate 5,000 years ago in ancient Egypt. A ladder leaning against a wall forms a triangle, and Egyptians regarded this shape as sacred (as exhibited, for example, by their pyramids). To them, triangles represented the trinity of the gods, and to pass through a triangle was to desecrate them. (…)

Knock on wood to prevent disappointment. Though historians say this may be one of the most prevalent superstitious customs in the United States, its origin is very much in doubt. “Some attribute it to the ancient religious rite of touching a crucifix when taking an oath,” Goldsmith wrote. Alternatively, “among the ignorant peasants of Europe it may have had its beginning in the habit of knocking loudly to keep out evil spirits.”

{ Origins of 9 Common Superstitions | Continue reading }

photo { Loublanc }

From time to time, you will see news of a lobster being caught with some unusual color, like orange, blue, or calico. (…) What determines color in crustaceans generally? It’s a complicated mix.

The most dramatic color variants are caused by genetics. (…)

Bowman investigated this in crayfish decades ago by placing crayfish in normal tanks, tanks painted black, and tanks painted white. Crayfish placed in black tanks had more red coloration, and those in the white tanks, more white coloration. Bowman also noted that animals that had become adapted to the bright white tanks did not darken up again after being placed into black surroundings. There are limits to how flexible the color changes are.

{ Marbled Crayfish News & Views | Continue reading }

{ Future Timeline }

This is what you can really learn about a person by understanding his or her cultural consumption, the movies, music, fashion, media, and assorted other socially inflected ephemera: nothing. Absolutely nothing. The internet writ large is desperately invested in the idea that liking, say, The Wire, says something of depth and importance about the liker, and certainly that the preference for this show to CSI tells everything.

Likewise, the internet exists to perpetuate the idea that there is some meaningful difference between fans of this band or that, of Android or Apple, or that there is a Slate lifestyle and a This Recording lifestyle and one for Gawker or The Hairpin or wherever. Not a word of it is true. There are no Apple people. Buying an iPad does nothing to delineate you from anyone else. Nothing separates a Budweiser man from a microbrew guy. That our society insists that there are differences here is only our longest con.

This endless posturing, pregnant with anxiety and roiling with class resentment, ultimately pleases no one. Yet this emptiness doesn’t compel people to turn away from the sorting mechanism. Instead, it draws them further and further in.

{ Freddie deBoer/The New Inquiry | Continue reading }

drawing { Al Hirschfeld, Raul Julia in The Tempest, 1981 }

{ Recipe Networks Reveal Human Taste Preferences | PDF }

In a world where nearly half the population is male—the sex with higher levels of testosterone and its potential for causing aggressive behavior—the female majority, by better translating emotions into words, must have mitigated countless dangerous conflicts. We should not underestimate the role that may have been played by this verbally skilled, moderating majority in the evolution of language itself.

Of all the calls, hoots, and screeches issued by our chimpanzee relatives, the only ones that sound a little like human speech are the coos exchanged in quiet moods by mothers with their young; the first language may have been “motherese.”

{ The NY Review of Books | Continue reading }

photo { Billy Kidd }