“Literally’’ (…)

It’s a word that has been misused by everyone from fashion stylist Rachel Zoe to President Obama, and linguists predict that it will continue to be led astray from its meaning. There is a good chance the incorrect use of the word eventually will eclipse its original definition.

What the word means is “in a literal or strict sense.’’ Such as: “The novel was translated literally from the Russian.’’

“It should not be used as a synonym for actually or really,’’ writes Paul Brians in “Common Errors in English Usage.’’

{ Boston Globe | Continue reading }

{ Balls in boxes offer a simple system for studying geometry across a series of spatial dimensions. A ball is the solid object bounded by a sphere; the boxes are cubes with sides of length 2, which makes them just large enough to accommodate a ball of radius 1. In one dimension (top left) the ball and the cube have the same shape: a line segment of length 2. In two dimensions (top right) and three dimensions (bottom) the ball and cube are more recognizable. As dimension increases, the ball fills a smaller and smaller fraction of the cube’s internal volume. In three dimensions the filled fraction is about half; in 100-dimensional space, the ball has all but vanished, filling only 1.8 × 10^–70 of the cube’s volume. | An Adventure in the Nth Dimension | American Scientist | full story }

If you ask a person when “middle age” begins, the answer, not surprisingly, depends on the age of that respondent. American college-aged students are convinced that one fits soundly into the middle-age category at 35. For respondents who are actually 35, middle age is half a decade away, with 40 representing the inaugural year. (…) Recently, a large sample of Swiss participants spanning several generations agreed with one another that middle-aged people are those who are between 35 to 53 years of age.

However, the precise chronological point at which we formally enter “middle age” is of little importance. (…) We’ve all heard of the dreaded “midlife crisis,” but what, exactly, is it? Furthermore, does it even exist as a scientifically valid concept? (…)

“Midlife crisis” was coined by Elliott Jacques in 1965. (…) According to him, the midlife crisis is such a crisis that many great artists and thinkers don’t even survive it. (…) He decided to crunch the numbers with a “random sample” of 310 such geniuses and, indeed, he discovered that a considerable number of these formidable talents—including Mozart, Raphael, Chopin, Rimbaud, Purcell, and Baudelaire—succumbed to some kind of tragic fate or another and drew their last breaths between the ages of 35 and 39. “The closer one keeps to genius in the sample,” Jacques observes, “the more striking and clear-cut is this spiking of the death rate in midlife.” (…)

Basically, argues Jacques, around the age of 35, genius can go in one of three directions. If you’re like that last batch of folks, you either die, literally, or else you perish metaphorically, having exhausted your potential early on in a sort of frenzied, magnificent chaos, unable to create anything approximating your former genius. The second type of individual, however, actually requires the anxieties of middle age—specifically, the acute awareness that one’s life is, at least, already half over—to reach their full creative potential. (…) Finally, the third type of creative genius is prolific and accomplished even in their earlier years, but their aesthetic or style changes dramatically at middle age, usually for the better. (…)

The phrase “midlife crisis” didn’t really creep into suburban vernacular as a catchall diagnosis until the late 1970s. This is when Yale’s Daniel Levinson, building on the stage theory tradition of lifespan developmentalist Erik Erikson, began popularizing tales of middle-class, middle-aged men who were struggling with transitioning to a time where “one is no longer young and yet not quite old.”

{ Scientific American | Continue reading }

Placing a value on a company is always a tricky business. History is filled with examples of disastrous valuations that are hard to credit in retrospect. The dotcom bubble of the late 90s is one of the best known examples.

And yet crazy valuations continue apace. One current bubble involves social media companies such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Groupon and, of course, Facebook. In July, the latter announced that it had 750 million users, an astronomical number that is dwarfed only by the company’s valuation which stands at anything from $65 billion to north of $100 billion.

By that measure, the company’s current and future users will each have to generate a remarkable amount of income for the company, numbers that reek of the boom and bust economics of the dotcom era.

So how much is Facebook really worth? Today, Peter Cauwels and Didier Sornette, econophysicists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, inject a little sanity into the debate. They argue that it is actually easier to value social media companies than other firmS because their revenue is so obviously based on a singe simple metric: the number of users.

All that is required is a reasonable model of user growth and a good understanding of the profit each user can generate.

For Facebook, user growth is pretty straightforward. Cauwels and Sornette argue that although Facebook’s growth has been exponential in the past, this cannot continue if only because of the finite number of people on the planet. Instead, Facebook user numbers will eventually level off, following a classic s-shaped curve.

Indeed, they say Facebook’s growth has already changed. In 2010, they say it switched from exponential to s-shaped.

The only question now is how high it will reach. Cauwels and Sornette offer three scenarios in which Facebook eventually plateaus at a base case of 840 million, a high growth case of 1.1 billion or a case of extreme growth reaching 1.8 billion users within a few years.

Cauwels and Sornette then calculate a value for the company based on the prospect of each user generating $1 profit per year, the approximate average over the last five years. This gives a value in the base case of $15 billion, in the high growth case of $20 billion and in the extreme growth case of $33 billion.

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }

When scientists delve into studies of the co-evolution of plants and their pollinators, they have something of a chicken/egg problem—which evolved first, the plant or its pollinator? Orchids and orchid bees are a classic example of this relationship. The flowers depend on the bees to pollinate them so they can reproduce and, in return, the bees get fragrance compounds they use during courtship displays (rather like cologne to attract the lady bees). And researchers had thought that they co-evolved, each species changing a bit, back and forth, over time.

But a new study in Science has found that the relationship isn’t as equal as had been thought. The biologists reconstructed the complex evolutionary history of the plants and their pollinators, figuring out which bees pollinated which orchid species and analyzing the compounds collected by the bees. It seems that the orchids need the bees more than the bees need the flowers—the compounds produced by the orchids are only about 10 percent of the compounds collected by the bees. The bees collect far more of their “cologne” from other sources, such as tree resin, fungi and leaves.

{ Smithsonian Magazine | Continue reading }

sculpture { Edgar Orlaineta }

follow-up to { UC Berkeley scientists developed a “decoder” that can reconstruct our visual experiences }

{ Occupy Wall Street is an ongoing series of demonstrations in New York City }

quote { L’Argent des autres, 1978 }

The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and Harvard researchers both independently studied the correlation between believing in hell and economic development. Each analyzed years of data from dozens of countries, and in each case the results were the same: The more a population believes in hell, the less corrupt and more prosperous their country’s economy is.

{ Cracked | The 5 Weirdest Things That Control the Global Economy | Continue reading }

Women who take the Pill tend to select male partners who are less attractive and worse in bed, but more reliable over the course of long-term relationships, a new study suggests.

Researchers investigated whether the use of oral contraception influenced how women selected the future father of their children. (…)

“Such women may, on average, be less satisfied with the sexual aspects of their relationship but more so with non-sexual aspects. Overall, women who met their partner on the Pill had longer relationships - by two years on average - and were less likely to separate.”

The researchers questioned 2,519 women in the United States, Czech Republic, Britain and Canada who had had at least one child.

{ Cosmos | Continue reading }

Exploding toilet injures woman at the General Services Administration building in Washington.

Researchers begin counting grains of sand on Cornish beach.

Woman ‘Punked’ by Stupid Toyota Viral Campaign Sues for $10 Million.

Florida Court Rules Pasting Kids’ Faces on Naked Adult Bodies is Not Child Porn.

Man who drove off cliff ate bugs, leaves for 6 days, doctor says.

A virus spread by oral sex may cause more cases of throat cancer in men than smoking, researchers say.

A higher proportion than ever of teenage guys are using a condom the first time they have sex, according to a new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report.

British Airways is offering its frequent flyers the chance to trade in their air miles for a place on a course instructing passengers how to survive plane crashes. [Thanks Tim]

Assisted suicide machine for sale in Kevorkian auction.

Japan robot with 24 high-tech fingers washes hair.

About 100 million Americans, nearly half of all adults, are unmarried. [NY Times]

Billions in Unemployment Benefits Paid in Error.

How unrealistic optimism is maintained in the face of reality. More: The authors said optimism did have important health benefits.

When Given More Choices, People Pick Friends Similar to Themselves.

Spies could hide messages in gene-modified microbes. E. coli bacteria genetically modified to glow in different colours can be used to encode messages.

Ever wondered why women have small bumps around their nipples?

Neurotics experience more immersion when watching films.

People who drink heavily may increase their risk of dying in house fires that should otherwise have been escapable, a new study suggests.

People may be learning while they’re sleeping — an unconscious form of memory that is still not well understood, study suggests.

80% of people’s improvement after taking drugs like Prozac was exactly the same as if they took a sugar pill.

A new study supposedly says women want sex but men want cuddling. Don’t believe it.

How urination urgency can change the way we think.

Fossil Finds Complicate Search for Human Ancestor. A new analysis of a 2-million-year-old hominid shows that it had an intriguing mix of australopithecine and Homo-like traits.

‘Darker Than Black’ Metamaterial Promises Better Solar Cells. Scientists devise a trick to make a material absorb 99 percent of the light that strikes it.

New treatment for kala azar, the most deadly parasitic disease after malaria.

Recent examination of supernovae velocities suggests the universe may be expanding non-uniformly in its acceleration, which implies the laws of physics may vary throughout the cosmos. Is the universe expanding asymmetrically?

How to use augmented reality to provide value. [full thesis | PDF]

Is there an Ultimate Reality? [Thanks Tim]

A Few Questions Regarding the Qualities of Time.

Does Climate Change Cause War?

CIA Says Global-Warming Intelligence Is ‘Classified.’

If cars broadcast their speeds to other vehicles, a simple in-car algorithm could help dissolve traffic jams as soon as they occur, say computer scientists.

As wireless nodes become cheaper and more common, our electronic networks will expand to include many of the non-electronic things you really care about: your missing pants, a new shoelace, and the city’s best produce stand.

Implementing Strategies in Extreme Negotiations.

Role of gender in workplace negotiations. Study finds that women are savvy bargainers who simultaneously negotiate economic outcomes and gender role expectations.

How Alcohol Affects Your Decision-Making Process.

The best way to kill creativity is to encourage it.

Creativity in others makes us uncertain and anxious.

For some time, I have been interested in developing an anthropology of the otherwise.

Print is the new vinyl.

One striking feature of On the Genealogy of Morals concerns how it is written. Nietzsche utilizes a literary style that provokes his readers’ emotions. Recently, Christopher Janaway has argued that this approach is integral to Nietzsche’s philosophical goals: feeling the emotions Nietzsche’s style arouses is necessary for understanding the views he defends. This paper shows that Janaway’s position is tempting but mistaken.

Consider some uses of the word “confident.”

How Google Translate works.

Slang terms for money.

How a rogue trader crashed UBS.

Share Traders More Reckless Than Psychopaths, Study Shows.

Probing the brain of an investor:  How advances in neuroscience are demystifying the markets.

Readers demand an explanation for why markets go up and down. But sometimes, nobody really knows.

In any 48-hour period in 2010, more data was created than had been created by all of humanity in the past 30,000 years. By the year 2020, that same amount of data will be created in a single hour.

Running this story in reverse it’s suddenly clear why Apple didn’t introduce the iPhone 5 this week. It would have been lost in the news of Jobs’s death, killing the marketing value he would have loved. More: Unanswered Steve Jobs questions.

A Sociology of Steve Jobs.

Scott Forstall, the Sorcerer’s Apprentice at Apple.

The bogus message that had just gone out to me and everyone else in her Gmail contact list was this:

How Two Scammers Built an Empire Hawking Sketchy Software.

In this exclusive excerpt from Def Jam Recordings: The First 25 Years of the Last Great Record Label, the forthcoming book about the legendary hip-hop label, key players recall the rise of LL Cool J.

Newburgh, Murder Capital of New York.

A proposal by Architecture Research Office to guard lower Manhattan against flood damage using so-called “soft” infrastructure–marshland, green roofs, and more.

A few weeks ago I took a break from reading Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities to visit the block of Hudson Street in Manhattan’s West Village where Jacobs lived when she wrote her classic book on urban planning. Jane Jacobs and the Rebirth of New York.

On Christmas Eve 1888, after Gauguin already had announced he would leave, van Gogh suddenly threw a glass of absinthe in Gauguin’s face, then was brought home and put to bed by his companion.

Lamborghini, founded in 1963 by feisty Ferrari hater Ferruccio Lamborghini, built a long line of swoopy exotics that demanded passionate, dedicated drivers. Several ownership changes over the years, including an ill-fated union with Chrysler in the 1980s. Audi’s takeover of the company in 1998 instigated dramatic changes in how the famed cars were conceived, developed and constructed.

10 Things You Probably Don’t Need to Know About Black Porn (…but I’m going to tell you anyway).

What was behind Colonel Thomas Blood’s failed attempt to steal the Crown Jewels during the cash-strapped reign of Charles II and how did he survive such a treasonable act? Nigel Jones questions the motives of a notorious 17th-century schemer.

During the previous generation or so, elites across Europe had moved their clocks forward by several hours. No longer a time reserved for sleep, the night time was now the right time for all manner of recreational and representational purposes. A history of the night in early modern Europe.

What aliens could learn from the stuff we’ve left in space.

6 Famous People Whose Identities We Still Don’t Know.

when I was 19 (I’m 26-27 now) I went into long-term therapy - for psychopathy.

Why do they put a worm in bottles of tequila?

Photo Gallery: Crime Lords of Tokyo.

Cornelia Hediger and her Doppelganger self portraits.

The deepest fruedian penetration the screen will ever show.

The isolator.

Occupy Madison Avenue.

Insult postcard.

Founder of “Parents of Punkers.”

10% discocunt.

I know you’ve thought (and taught) about the fragment as a mode of writing. I’m wondering how your study of the form influences the way you use it.

While writing a book, I’m influenced by things the same way I would imagine most writers are: I look for what I want to steal, then I steal it, and make my own weird stew of the goods. Often while writing I’d re-read the books by Barthes written in fragments—A Lover’s Discourse, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes—and see what he gained from an alphabetical, somewhat random organization, and what he couldn’t do that way. I mostly read Wittgenstein, and watched how he used numbered sections to think sequentially, and to jump, in turn. (…) I re-read Haneke’s Sorrow Beyond Dreams, which finally dissolves into fragments, after a fairly strong chronological narrative has taken him so far.

{ Maggie Nelson/Continent. | Continue reading }

While the Depravity Scale allows a ranking of just how depraved/horrific/ egregious specific behaviors are, the GASP scale allows us to assess the level to which others (or ourselves) are prone to guilt and shame reactions.

There are, perhaps not surprisingly, disagreements among researchers about how to distinguish between guilt and shame. According to some, guilt is largely focused on your behavior (“I did a bad thing”) while shame is focused on your character (“I am a bad person”). Others think that private (that is, not publicly known) bad behaviors cause guilt, where transgressions that are made public cause shame.

{ Keen Trial | Continue reading }

photo { Christopher Payne }

Theorists began in the 1960s to consider the possibility of symmetries that are “broken.” That is, the underlying equations of physics might respect symmetries that are nevertheless not apparent in the actual physical states observed. The physical states that are possible in nature are represented by solutions of the equations of physics. When we have a broken symmetry, the solutions of the equations do not respect the symmetries of the equations themselves.

The elliptical orbits of planets in the solar system provide a good example. The equations governing the gravitational field of the sun, and the motions of bodies in that field, respect rotational symmetry—there is nothing in these equations that distinguishes one direction in space from another. A circular planetary orbit of the sort imagined by Plato would also respect this symmetry, but the elliptical orbits actually encountered in the solar system do not: the long axis of an ellipse points in a definite direction in space.

At first it was widely thought that broken symmetry might have something to do with the small known violations of symmetries like mirror symmetry or the eightfold way. This was a false lead. A broken symmetry is nothing like an approximate symmetry, and is useless for putting particles into families like those of the eightfold way.

But broken symmetries do have consequences that can be checked empirically. Because of the spherical symmetry of the equations governing the sun’s gravitational field, the long axis of an elliptical planetary orbit can point in any direction in space. This makes these orbits acutely sensitive to any small perturbation that violates the symmetry, like the gravitational field of other planets. For instance, these perturbations cause the long axis of Mercury’s orbit to swing around 360° every 2,254 centuries.

In the 1960s theorists realized that the strong nuclear forces have a broken symmetry, known as chiral symmetry.

{ The NY Review of Books | Continue reading }

{ Women defy biology to avoid giving birth on Halloween | full story }

But this misconception about what is a reasonable commute is probably the biggest thing that is keeping most people in the US and Canada poor.

Let’s take a typical day’s drive for this self-destructive couple. Adding 38 miles of round-trip driving at the IRS’s estimate of total driving cost of $0.51 per mile, there’s $19 per day of direct driving and car ownership costs. It is possible to drive for less, but these people happen to have fairly new cars, bought on credit, so they are wasting the full amount.

Next is the actual human time wasted. At 80 minutes per day, the self-imposed driving would be adding the equivalent of almost an entire work day to each work week – so they would now effectively be working 6 workdays per week.

After 10 years, multiplied across two cars since they have different work schedules, this decision would cost them about $125,000 in wealth (if they had for example chosen to put the $19/day into extra payments on their mortgage), and 1.3 working years worth of time, EACH, spent risking their lives daily behind the wheel.

{ Mr. Money Mustache | Continue reading }

related { New York City and Washington have average commutes of about 34 minutes }

According to Maslow we have five needs [diagram]. However, many other people have thought about what human beings need to be happy and fulfilled, what we strive for and what motivates us, they have come up with some different numbers. (…)

David McClelland (1985) proposed that, rather than being born with them, we acquire needs over time. They may vary considerably according to the different experiences we have, but most of them tend to fall into three main categories. Each of these categories is associated with appropriate approach and avoidance behaviours.

Achievement. People who are primarily driven by this need seek to excel and to gain recognition for their success. They will try to avoid situations where they cannot see a chance to gain or where there is a strong possibility of failure.

Affiliation. People primarily driven by this need are drawn towards the achievement of harmonious relationships with other people and will seek approval. They will try to avoid confrontation or standing out from the crowd.

Power. People driven by this need are drawn towards control of other people (either for selfish or selfless reasons) and seek compliance. They will try to avoid situations where they are powerless or dependent. (…)

Martin Ford and C.W. Nichols seem to have gone a bit overboard. Their taxonomy of human goals has two dozen separate factors.

{ Careers in theory | Continue reading }

When tracked against the admittedly lofty hopes of the 1950s and 1960s, technological progress has fallen short in many domains. Consider the most literal instance of non-acceleration: We are no longer moving faster. The centuries-long acceleration of travel speeds — from ever-faster sailing ships in the 16th through 18th centuries, to the advent of ever-faster railroads in the 19th century, and ever-faster cars and airplanes in the 20th century — reversed with the decommissioning of the Concorde in 2003, to say nothing of the nightmarish delays caused by strikingly low-tech post-9/11 airport-security systems. Today’s advocates of space jets, lunar vacations, and the manned exploration of the solar system appear to hail from another planet. A faded 1964 Popular Science cover story — “Who’ll Fly You at 2,000 m.p.h.?” — barely recalls the dreams of a bygone age.


The official explanation for the slowdown in travel centers on the high cost of fuel, which points to the much larger failure in energy innovation. (…)

By default, computers have become the single great hope for the technological future. The speedup in information technology contrasts dramatically with the slowdown everywhere else. Moore’s Law, which predicted a doubling of the number of transistors that can be packed onto a computer chip every 18 to 24 months, has remained broadly true for much longer than anyone (including Moore) would have imagined back in 1965. We have moved without rest from mainframes to home computers to the Internet. Cellphones in 2011 contain more computing power than the entire Apollo space program in 1969.


{ National Review | Continue reading }

Fishes do it; reptiles do it; birds do it; mammals do it; monkeys do it; we do it. It is not about food or sex; it is about passing pains: A hurts B, B vents on C, and so on, until the last one in the chain, be it the omega individual in the hierarchy or an inanimate object, absorbs the entire grudge.

In contrast to sexual selection, research on redirected aggression, a major topic in classical ethology, has been a haphazard sidekick in recent decades, despite occasional bright spots.

David Barash and Judith Lipton’s recent book, Payback, assertively reiterates the importance of the issue in the study of evolutionary psychology and behavioral biology. (…) Payback unfurls a kaleidoscopic diversity of instances of revenge, retaliation, and redirected aggression—the so-called Three Rs—in both animals and humans under a vast array of circumstances.

{ Evolutionary Psychology | Continue reading | PDF }

Ever felt a little incoherent? Or maybe you’ve been in two minds about something, or even in a bit of delicate state. Well, here’s your excuse: perhaps you are in thrall to the strange rules of quantum mechanics. (…)

On one level, you might think, we shouldn’t be surprised that life has a quantum edge. After all, biology is based on chemistry, and chemistry is all about the doings of atomic electrons - and electrons are quantum-mechanical beasts at heart. That’s true, says Jennifer Brookes, who researches biological quantum effects at Harvard University. “Of course everything is ultimately quantum because electron interactions are quantised.”

On another level, it is gobsmacking. In theory, quantum states are delicate beasts, easily disturbed and destroyed by interaction with their surroundings. So far, physicists have managed to produce and manipulate them only in highly controlled environments at temperatures close to absolute zero, and then only for fractions of a second. Finding quantum effects in the big, wet and warm world of biology is like having to take them into account in a grand engineering project, says Brookes. “How useful is it to know what electrons are doing when you’re trying to build an aeroplane?” she asks.

Take smell, Brookes’s area of interest. For decades, the line has been that a chemical’s scent is determined by molecular shape. Olfactory receptors in the nose are like locks opened only with the right key; when that key docks, it triggers nerve signals that the brain interprets as a particular smell.

Is that plausible? We have around 400 differently shaped smell receptors, but can recognise around 100,000 smells, implying some nifty computation to combine signals from different receptors and process them into distinct smells. Then again, that’s just the sort of thing our brains are good at. A more damning criticism is that some chemicals smell similar but look very different, while others have the same shape but smell different. The organic compounds vanillin and isovanillin, for example, smell differently but are two similarly shaped arrangements of the same molecule.

There is an alternative explanation. Around 70 years ago, even before the lock-and-key mechanism was suggested, the distinguished British chemist Malcolm Dyson suggested that, just as the brain constructs colours from different vibrational frequencies of light radiation, it interprets the characteristic frequencies at which certain molecules vibrate as a catalogue of smells.

{ NewScientist | Continue reading }

photo { Steven Brahms }

The “Big Five” factors of personality are five broad domains or dimensions of personality which are used to describe human personality. (…)

Openness to experience – (inventive/curious vs. consistent/cautious). Appreciation for art, emotion, adventure, unusual ideas, curiosity, and variety of experience.

Conscientiousness – (efficient/organized vs. easy-going/careless). A tendency to show self-discipline, act dutifully, and aim for achievement; planned rather than spontaneous behaviour.

Extraversion – (outgoing/energetic vs. solitary/reserved). Energy, positive emotions, surgency, and the tendency to seek stimulation in the company of others.

Agreeableness – (friendly/compassionate vs. cold/unkind). A tendency to be compassionate and cooperative rather than suspicious and antagonistic towards others.

Neuroticism – (sensitive/nervous vs. secure/confident). A tendency to experience unpleasant emotions easily, such as anger, anxiety, depression, or vulnerability.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

related { The Psychology of Unusual Handshakes. }

screenshot { Wallace Shawn quoting Ingmar Bergman in Louis Malle’s My Dinner with Andre, 1981 }