A new study, published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, suggests there’s a link between bestiality and penile cancer.

During the research, led by urologist Stenio de Cassio Zequi, 492 men from rural Brazil were examined. 118 of these men had been diagnosed with penile cancer. 45 percent of the group that suffered from penile cancer had sexual relations with animals.

Of those men who had sexual relations with animals, 59 percent reported having sex with animals for one to five years and 21 percent had been doing it for more than five years. Sexual interaction occurred as often as daily and included animals such as horses, cows, pigs, and chickens.

{ United Academics | Continue reading }

The sun strikes every square meter of our planet with more than 1,360 watts of power. Half of that energy is absorbed by the atmosphere or reflected back into space. 700 watts of power, on average, reaches Earth’s surface. Summed across the half of the Earth that the sun is shining on, that is 89 petawatts of power. By comparison, all of human civilization uses around 15 terrawatts of power, or one six-thousandth as much. In 14 and a half seconds, the sun provides as much energy to Earth as humanity uses in a day. (…)

It’s small wonder, then, that scientists and entrepreneurs alike are investing in solar energy technologies to capture some of the abundant power around us. Yet solar power is still a miniscule fraction of all power generation capacity on the planet. There is at most 30 gigawatts of solar generating capacity deployed today, or about 0.2 percent of all energy production. (…)

Over the last 30 years, researchers have watched as the price of capturing solar energy has dropped exponentially. There’s now frequent talk of a “Moore’s law” in solar energy. (…)

The cost of solar, in the average location in the U.S., will cross the current average retail electricity price of 12 cents per kilowatt hour in around 2020, or 9 years from now. (…) 10 years later, in 2030, solar electricity is likely to cost half what coal electricity does today.

{ Scientific American | Continue reading | via/more: Overcoming Bias }

photo { Eylül Aslan }

This week Apple introduced a new feature for the iPhone in its Apple Store app. The feature, called EasyPay, allows people to take a picture of the bar code of a product with the phone’s camera and then buy the product on the spot, using their iTunes account.

For now, use of iTunes as a traveling wallet is modest; you can use it to buy the cheaper accessories in an Apple store. The phone’s location tracker has to be on, too, so Apple can verify that you are in one of its stores.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

photo { Tina Modotti, Hands of the Puppeteer, Mexico, 1929 }

Men and women are what is termed sexually dysmorphic in terms of finger lengths. In women, the index and ring fingers are generally the same length, while in men the index finger is generally shorter.

Researchers from UC Berkeley created a stir in 2000 when they reported that lesbian women tended to have a ratio of the two finger lengths that was more typical of men. But the situation was more complicated for men. The team found no difference in the ratio between gay and straight men unless they had several older brothers — a factor which had previously been linked to being homosexual. Such men were found to have an unusually low ratio of the finger lengths.

Other recent research has suggested that men with a lower ratio have a more symmetrical face and are more attractive to women, a phenomenon known as the “sexy ratio.”

{ LA Times | Continue reading }

The longer a man’s ring finger when compared with his index finger, the longer the length of his penis, according to Korean researchers.

{ ABC | Continue reading }

The length of a man’s fingers can provide clues to his risk of prostate cancer, according to new research.

{ BBC | Continue reading }

The length of a man’s fourth finger has been linked to his libido.

{ Daily Mail | Continue reading }

Men with longer ring fingers more likely to be rich.

{ Telegraph | Continue reading }

photo { Erica Segovia }

We’re not always aware of how we are making a decision. Unconscious feelings or perceptions may influence us. Another important source of information—even if we’re unaware of it—is the body itself. (…)

In a new study, Eerland and colleagues Tulio Guadalupe and Rolf Zwaan found that surreptitiously manipulating the tilt of the body influences people’s estimates of quantities, such as sizes, numbers, or percentages. (…)

How many Number 1 hits did Michael Jackson have in the Netherlands? The answers were all between 1 and 10. As expected, participants gave smaller estimations when leaning left than when either leaning right or standing upright. There was no difference in their estimates between right-leaning and upright postures.

The researchers point out that body posture won’t make you answer incorrectly if you know the answer.

{ APS | Continue reading }

At the turn of the 20th century, finding a new form of radiation could put a physicist’s career on the fast track. Wilhelm Röntgen changed the world by discovering X-rays in 1895. Soon thereafter, Ernest Rutherford and Paul Villard identified three different kinds of radiation, dubbed alpha, beta, and gamma rays, emitted by radioactive compounds. In 1903 French scientist René Blondlot added to the frenzy with his announcement of N-rays, a strangely democratic form of radiation emitted by wood, iron, living organisms—just about anything at all.

Some 300 scientific papers were written about N-rays. There was just one problem: They weren’t real. A skeptical physicist named Robert Wood visited Blondlot’s lab and secretly removed a key part of his apparatus; this had no effect on Blondlot’s perception of N-rays, showing that they were purely a product of the imagination. (…)

The modern version of the search for new kinds of radiation is the search for new forces of nature. And while there may be unknown forces waiting to be discovered, we can say with great confidence that such forces must be so feeble that only a professional physicist like me would really care. (…)

According to modern physics, the world is fundamentally composed of particles interacting via forces. Over the course of the 20th century, researchers discovered many new particles interacting in many different ways. But it gradually became clear that the vast majority of such particles are merely different combinations of smaller ones, and the great variety of interactions boils down to just a few forces. When the dust settled in the 1970s, we were left with two kinds of elementary particles: quarks, which group into heavier composites like protons and neutrons; and lighter particles called leptons, like the electron and the neutrino, which can move freely without bunching into heavier combinations.

Amazingly, these particles interact through just four different forces. Two are familiar—gravity and electromagnetism. (…) The other two forces are the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force. (…)

How can we be so sure there aren’t other forces that we just haven’t yet been clever enough to find? The answer is, we can look for them. We know where to look, and indeed we have looked. Other forces are not out there, at least not to any significant extent. Any new force we might someday discover must be so impotent over everyday distances that there’s no way it can affect the macroscopic world. If it could, we would already have found it.

{ Discover | Continue reading }

painting { Linnea Strid }

According to a new paper, the brains of male-to-female transexuals are no more “female” than those of men. (…) But is it so simple? (..)

Structural MRI scans were used to compare the size of various brain structures between three groups of volunteers: heterosexual men, heterosexual women and the transexuals (or “MtF”s as I will call them for short) who were diagnosed with gender dysphoria and were “genetically and phenotypically males”.

There were 24 in each group, which makes it a decent sized study. None of the MtFs had started hormone treatment yet, so that wasn’t a factor, and none of the women were on hormonal contraception.

The scans showed that the non-transsexual male and female brains differed in various ways. Male brains were larger overall but women had increases in the relative volumes of various areas. Male brains were also more asymmetrical.

The key finding was that on average, the MtF brains were not like the female ones. There were some significant differences from the male brains, but they weren’t the same differences that distinguished the females from the males. (…)

There could be all kinds of chemical and microstructural differences that don’t show up on these scans.

There are lots of people with severe epilepsy, for example, whose brains clearly differ in some major way from people without epilepsy, yet they look completely normal on MRI.

{ Neuroskeptic | Continue reading }

photo { Bruce Davidson }

{ Daniel Everett }

First we need to differentiate between two kinds of innovation and think about their effects. The first kind of innovation is geared toward brute maximization of production. It is typically centralized and makes use of economies of scale. Examples might include an assembly line factory or a big, coal-fired power plant. Because these innovations tend to be centralized, they introduce points of control. The capital is typically fixed and therefore easy to tax and regulate. It’s well known in the development literature that it’s really hard for governments to control rural peasants who live off the grid. Once they move to the cities and plug into centralized services, it is easier to require them to send their children to school, for instance. Because these innovations introduce points of control, I will call them technologies of control.

On the other hand, not all innovations are about brute maximization of production. Some are about producing things that we already know how to produce in ways that have ancillary benefits. An important ancillary benefit is evading control. Examples of these innovations include 3D printers and solar power. The evasion of control that is possible with 3D printers is the subject of Cory Doctorow’s short story Printcrime. And portable solar power cells can make people harder to control by supplying electricity without the need to register an address, have a bank account, stay put, and so on. These are obvious examples, but control can be evaded through more subtle innovations as well.

{ Eli Dourado | Continue reading }

photo { Arnold Odermatt }

In this paper, the author considers an argument against the thesis that humans are irrational in the sense that we reason according to principles that differ from those we ought to follow.

The argument begins by noting that if humans are irrational, we should not trust the results of our reasoning processes. If we are justified in believing that humans are irrational, then, since this belief results from a reasoning process, we should not accept this belief. The claim that humans are irrational is, thus, self-undermining.

The author shows that this argument and others like it fail for several interesting reasons. In fact, there is nothing self-undermining about the claim that humans are irrational; empirical research to establish this claim does not face the sorts of a priori problems that some philosophers and psychologists have claimed it does.

{ SSRN | Continue reading }

photo { Lars Tunbjörk, Software company, New York, 1997 | More: Lars Tunbjörk at Amador Gallery, NYC, until Nov. 19 }

Roy Lichtenstein’s 1961 painting of a man looking through a peephole sold for $43.2 million last night in New York, one of 13 records set at an auction of contemporary art by Christie’s International. (…) The Lichtenstein, the top lot, was one of 16 guaranteed artworks, 10 of which were backed by third parties, the auction house said. At the equivalent sale in 2010, only seven lots were guaranteed. (…)

The Lichtenstein, from the collection of Courtney Ross, the widow of former Time Warner Chief Executive Officer Steven J. Ross, had a high estimate of $45 million. She was guaranteed an undisclosed minimum price financed by third parties. The painting was acquired at auction in 1988 for $2.1 million.

Lichtenstein’s previous record of $42.6 million was set a year ago for “Ohhh… Alright…” (1964), depicting a sexy redhead on the phone.

{ Bloomberg | Continue reading }

A dash is one of several kinds of punctuation mark. Dashes appear similar to hyphens, but differ from them primarily in length, and serve different functions. The most common versions of the dash are the en dash (–) and the em dash (—).

The en dash, n dash, n-rule, or “nut” (–) is traditionally half the width of an em dash. In modern fonts, the length of the en dash is not standardized, and the en dash is often more than half the width of the em dash. The widths of en and em dashes have also been specified as being equal to those of the upper-case letters N and M respectively, and at other times to the widths of the lower-case letters.

(…)

The em dash (—), m dash, m-rule, or “mutton,” often demarcates a break of thought or some similar interpolation stronger than the interpolation demarcated by parentheses, such as the following from Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine:

At that age I once stabbed my best friend, Fred, with a pair of pinking shears in the base of the neck, enraged because he had been given the comprehensive sixty-four-crayon Crayola box—including the gold and silver crayons—and would not let me look closely at the box to see how Crayola had stabilized the built-in crayon sharpener under the tiers of crayons.

It is also used to indicate that a sentence is unfinished because the speaker has been interrupted. For example, the em dash is used in the following way in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22:

He was Cain, Ulysses, the Flying Dutchman; he was Lot in Sodom, Deirdre of the Sorrows, Sweeney in the nightingales among trees. He was the miracle ingredient Z-147. He was—
”Crazy!” Clevinger interrupted, shrieking. “That’s what you are! Crazy!”
”—immense. I’m a real, slam-bang, honest-to-goodness, three-fisted humdinger. I’m a bona fide supraman.”

Similarly, it can be used instead of an ellipsis to indicate aposiopesis, the rhetorical device by which a sentence is stopped short not because of interruption but because the speaker is too emotional to continue, such as Darth Vader’s line “I sense something; a presence I’ve not felt since—” in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

Aaron Lefkove was struggling to raise close to $200,000 to open a New England-style clam shack in a Gowanus, Brooklyn, storefront.

Bank loans were out of reach. “We didn’t have the kind of collateral they wanted,” said Mr. Lefkove, a 31-year-old punk rocker and publisher’s copywriter, nostalgic for family visits to Bigelow’s New England Fried Clams in Rockville Centre, N.Y.

“I liquidated my 401(k) and my I.R.A. as well,” Mr. Lefkove said. “I even sold my guitars.”

It wasn’t enough. He and a partner reached out to friends and family and used their own credit cards. Still not enough. “We picked up investors — some became partners, some would get a return, everyone was structured differently,” he said. “Even that was not enough.”

So to help get his restaurant, Littleneck, over the finish line, the next stop was Kickstarter.com — a Web site that solicits donations to finance art, technology and business projects. Promising little more than good karma, some discounts and a T-shirt, he raised $13,000 from 162 donors — $5,000 more than his goal. With the help of a few final investors, the 38-seat restaurant began serving fried clams and lobster rolls last month. (…)

John Fraser used Kickstarter to raise about $24,000 for his short-lived but well-reviewed pop-up restaurant, What Happens When. And the Brooklyn Grange rooftop farm in Long Island City, Queens, raised more than $20,000 that way.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

Human beings are notoriously terrible at knowing when we’re no longer hungry. Instead of listening to our stomach – a very stretchy container – we rely on all sorts of external cues, from the circumference of the dinner plate to the dining habits of those around us. If the serving size is twice as large (and American serving sizes have grown 40 percent in the last 25 years), we’ll still polish it off. And then we’ll go have dessert.

Consider a clever study done by Brian Wansink, a professor of marketing at Cornell. He used a bottomless bowl of soup – there was a secret tube that kept on refilling the bowl with soup from below – to demonstrate that how much people eat is largely dependent on how much you give them. The group with the bottomless bowl ended up consuming nearly 70 percent more than the group with normal bowls. What’s worse, nobody even noticed that they’d just slurped far more soup than normal.

{ Wired | Continue reading }

photo { Annee Olofsson }

Food allergies are weird. Basically, you eat something, it gets broken down, and sometimes the food has proteins in it that the body doesn’t digest. In food allergy sufferers, the immune system will recognize this foreign protein and raise hell about it (i.e. trigger inflammation). When you’ve inadvertently ingested some disease-causing bacteria, this is a great response; when you’ve eaten a chocolate bar that has brushed against peanut dust in some factory, this response is just unfortunate. (…)

A future without food allergies? Quite possibly.

{ Try Nerdy | Continue reading }

photo { Erwin Olaf }

A sociological content analysis of advertising catalogues with the eye-tracking method

Is it possible to look at something without actually noticing it? Is it possible to see something in the picture that is not really there? The answers to these philosophical questions can be obtained by comparing the results of eye-tracking tests combined with interviews based on sociological theories. (…)

The respondents, in line with our expectations, turned out to be familiar with the catalogue investigated. All of them provided the correct name of the company. When asked to describe in their own words the situations presented, the respondents would stress the fact that they show “the ideal” world. (…)

While most attention should be given to watching the advertisements, we constitute our dreams of a perfect life, environment and the items that furnish it.

{ Qualitative Sociology Review | Continue reading | PDF }

In particle physics, an elementary particle or fundamental particle is a particle not known to have substructure; that is, it is not known to be made up of smaller particles. If an elementary particle truly has no substructure, then it is one of the basic building blocks of the universe from which all other particles are made.

In the Standard Model, the elementary particles consist of the fundamental fermions and the fundamental bosons:

Fermions:

• Quarks (up, down, charm, strange, top, bottom)
• Leptons (electron, electron neutrino, muon, muon neutrino, tau, tau neutrino)

Bosons:

• Gauge bosons (gluon, W and Z bosons, photon)
• Higgs boson

Of these, only the Higgs boson remains undiscovered, but efforts are being taken at the Large Hadron Collider to determine whether it exists or not.

Additional elementary particles may exist, such as the graviton, which would mediate gravitation. Such particles lie beyond the Standard Model.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

What’s the deal with witches and broomsticks? (…)

Harner notes that since antiquity many hallucinogenic plants have been known throughout the world, including some species of the potato family such as jimsonweed, devil’s-weed, mad apple, etc., as well as potato cousins like mandrake, henbane, and belladonna.

Trolling through the works of medieval and Renaissance writers, Harner finds a number of instances in which witchy hallucinations follow a potent hit of drugs. How were these drugs administered? Typically in the form of an ointment. Where was this ointment applied? To the skin, of course, but more effectively to the mucous membranes. Where can one find mucous membranes? In the vagina, among other places. How would one apply ointment to one’s vagina? Well, one can always count on one’s fingers, I suppose. But you could also use, uh, a pole. And where might one find a pole in the average peasant household? A broomstick.

Harner buttresses his thesis with some choice quotes. From a witchcraft investigation in 1324: “In rifleing the closet of the ladie, they found a Pipe of oyntment, wherewith she greased a staffe, upon the which she ambled and galloped through thick and thin.” Also this from around 1470: “But the vulgar believe, and the witches confess, that on certain days or nights they anoint a staff and ride on it to the appointed place or anoint themselves under the arms and in other hairy places.”

{ The Straight Dope | Continue reading }

Bluma Zeigarnik was a Russian psychologist who first identified the tendency to remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed or uninterrupted ones in the late 1920′s.

{ BPS | Continue reading }

video still { Pipilotti Rist, I’m Not The Girl Who Misses Much, 1986 }

As an employee in an agency creative department, you will spend most of your time with your feet up on a desk working on an ad. Across the desk, also with his feet up, will be your partner-in my case, an art director. And he will want to talk about movies.

In fact, if the truth be known, you will spend a large part of your career with your feet up talking about movies.

The ad is due in two days. The media space has been bought and paid for. The pressure’s building. And your muse is sleeping off a drunk behind a dumpster or twitching in a ditch somewhere. Your pen lies useless. So you talk movies.

That’s when the traffic person comes by. Traffic people stay on top of a job as it moves through the agency. Which means they also stay on top of you. They’ll come by to remind you of the horrid things that happen to snail-assed creative people who don’t come through with the goods on time.

So you try to get your pen moving. And you begin to work. And working, in this business, means staring at your partner’s shoes. That’s what I’ve been doing from nine to five for over 20 years. (…)

There comes a point when you can’t talk about movies anymore and you actually have to get some work done. You are faced with a blank sheet of paper, and you must, in a fixed amount of time, fill it with something interesting enough to be remembered by a customer who in the course of a day will see, somewhere, thousands of other ad messages.

You are not writing a novel somebody pays money for. You are not writing a sitcom somebody enjoys watching. You are writing something most people try to avoid. This is the sad, indisputable truth at the bottom of our business. Nobody wants to see what you are about to put down on paper. People not only dislike advertising, they’re becoming immune to most of it—like insects building up resistance to DDT. (…) When people aren’t indifferent to advertising, they’re angry at it. (…)

So you try to come up with some advertising concepts that can defeat these barriers of indifference and anger. The ideas you try to conjure, however, aren’t done in a vacuum. You’re working off a strategy—a sentence or two describing the key competitive message your ad must communicate.

In addition to a strategy, you are working with a brand. Unless it’s a new one, that brand brings with it all kinds of baggage, some good and some bad. Ad people call it a brand’s equity. (…)

People generally deny advertising has any effect on them. They’ll insist they’re immune to it. And perhaps, taken on a person-by- person basis, the effect of your ad is indeed modest. But over time, the results are undeniable. Try this on: 1980—Absolut Vodka is a little nothing brand. Selling 12,000 cases a year. That’s nothing. Ten years and one campaign later, this colorless, nearly tasteless, and odorless product is the preferred brand, selling nearly 3 million cases a year. All because of the advertising. (…)

Diet Coke didn’t just happen. Coca-Cola didn’t simply roll it out and hope that people would buy it. Done poorly, they could have cannibalized their flagship brand, Coke. Done poorly, it could have been just another one of the well-intentioned product start-ups that fail in six months. It took a lot of work by both Coca-Cola and its agency, SSCB, to decipher market conditions, position the product, name it, package it, and pull off the whole billion-dollar introduction.

{ Luke Sullivan, Hey, Whipple, Squeeze This | Thanks Tim }