There are only seven plots in all of fiction — in all of human life, really — and chances are you’re living one of them.

Plenty of people have tried to boil things down for ease of interpretation or just to get their screenplay moving. Dr. Johnson was the first to suggest “how small a quantity of real fiction there is in the world; and that the same images have served all the authors who have ever written,” but he wandered off for an ale and left the idea where it lay. (…)

In 2004 journalist Christopher Booker put it in a doorstopper of a book, The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories, and made an awfully good case that writers are all fiddling with a mere handful of stories, like songwriters with a few tunes in their pocket.

Overcoming the Monster: The Monster is your boss, mother, ex-spouse, the little voice in your head… (…)

Rags to Riches: This plot inhabits our dreams. All reality shows are rags-to-riches tryouts, as are romance novels and junior hockey games. (…)

The Quest: People go on trips, like Homer in The Odyssey and guys in road-trip movies like The Hangover. (…)

Voyage and Return: This plot sends hapless innocents into a strange landscape where they have to cope with oddity, danger and separation from all they know and love. (…)

Comedy: This is the oldest plot of all (see Aristophanes in 425 BC), based on confusion, misunderstanding and lack of self-knowledge. (…)

Tragedy: This is the most complicated plot of all.

{ Toronto Star | Continue reading }

The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations is a descriptive list which was created by Georges Polti, a French writer from the mid-19th century, to categorize every dramatic situation that might occur in a story or performance.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

Humans have a perplexing tendency to fear rare threats such as shark attacks while blithely ignoring far greater risks like unsafe sex and an unhealthy diet. Those illusions are not just silly—they make the world a more dangerous place. (…)

What they found, and what they have continued teasing out since the early 1970s, is that humans have a hell of a time accurately gauging risk. Not only do we have two different systems—logic and instinct, or the head and the gut—that sometimes give us conflicting advice, but we are also at the mercy of deep-seated emotional associations and mental shortcuts.

Even if a risk has an objectively measurable probability—like the chances of dying in a fire, which are 1 in 1,177—people will assess the risk subjectively, mentally calibrating the risk based on dozens of subconscious calculations. If you have been watching news coverage of wildfires in Texas nonstop, chances are you will assess the risk of dying in a fire higher than will someone who has been floating in a pool all day. If the day is cold and snowy, you are less likely to think global warming is a threat.

{ Discover | Continue reading }

{ Use our 100 percent urine lures to create the illusion predators are present in the area. Great for photographers, gardeners, hunters and wildlife enthusiasts. Due to changes in shipping regulations, we cannot ship this item to California. | Amazon | via/related: FastConmpany | The 10 Best Amazon Reviews }

related { 8 Ridiculous Products for Sale on Amazon (For One Penny) }

Most shocking among UNICEF’s findings is that, despite pervasive discrimination against women, female-headed households in the poorest countries have, on average, better health and economic outcomes than male-headed, two-parent households. Taken together, these statistics suggest that men are nothing less than a complete waste of national resources; one might even wonder why the development community is devoting itself to such slow-motion efforts as microloans to women when the wholesale isolation or expulsion of men (after their sperm is collected and stored) could lift these countries out of poverty much faster.

{ The New Atlantis | Continue reading }

Women today are entering adulthood with more education, more achievements, more property, and, arguably, more money and ambition than their male counterparts. This is a first in human history, and its implications for both sexes are far from simple.

{ CATO Unbound | Continue reading }

photo { Garry Winogrand, Opening, Frank Stella Exhibition, The Museum of Modern Art, 1970 }

Back in the day, when bad guys used telephones, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies would listen in with wiretaps. As long as phone companies cooperated—and they had to, by law—it was a relatively straightforward process. The Internet, however, separated providers of communications services—Skype, Facebook, Gmail—from those running the underlying infrastructure. Thus, even if the FBI obtains a suspect’s traffic data from their Internet service provider (ISP)—Comcast, Verizon, etc.—it may be difficult to make sense of it, especially if the suspect has been using encrypted services. This loophole has not been lost on child pornographers, drug traffickers, terrorists, and others who prize secret communications.

To catch up with the new technologies of malfeasance, FBI director Robert Mueller traveled to Silicon Valley last November to persuade technology companies to build “backdoors” into their products. If Mueller’s wish were granted, the FBI would gain undetected real-time access to suspects’ Skype calls, Facebook chats, and other online communications

{ Boston Review | Continue reading }

It’s one of the worst-kept secrets of family life that all parents have a preferred son or daughter, and the rules for acknowledging it are the same everywhere: The favored kids recognize their status and keep quiet about it. (…) The unfavored kids howl about it like wounded cats. And on pain of death, the parents deny it all. (…)

65% of mothers and 70% of fathers exhibited a preference for one child, usually the older one. (…) “The most likely candidate for the mother’s favorite was the firstborn son, and for the father, it was the last-born daughter. ” (…)

Firstborns have a 3-point IQ advantage over later siblings. (…)

Not all experts agree on just what the impact of favoritism is, but as a rule, their advice to parents is simple: If you absolutely must have a favorite (and you must), keep it to yourself.

{ Time | Overcoming Bias | Continue reading }

{ Philippe Parreno, Argentina vs. Netherlands 1978, Medina, 2003, and Space World, Kitakyushu, 2003 | more | Quote: Red-green color blindness | Wikipedia }

Women have breasts, whereas men have flat chests (but still with nipples on them). Why?

Women are the only primates who are busty all the time, even when they aren’t nursing. Alternative theories exist, but most scientists think breasts are an evolutionary trick for snagging men; though they’re actually filled with fat, not milk, they signal a woman’s bountiful ability to feed her children.

Breasts also help men figure out who to pursue to achieve reproductive success. Prepubescent girls don’t have breasts, and the breasts of post-menopausal women are often shrunken and saggy. A full, buoyant bosom can therefore demonstrate fertility.

Men aren’t trying to trick women into thinking they can breastfeed, so they don’t have breasts. They do, however, have nipples: This is because the genes that code for nipple development switch on in utero, and at a very early embryonic stage — even before the genes gear up that turn us into males or females. (…)

Whatever your sex, everyone starts off as a woman in the womb. For the first several weeks a developing embryo follows a “female blueprint,” from reproductive organs to nipples. Only after about 60 days does the hormone testosterone kick in (for those of us with a Y chromosome), changing the genetic activity of cells in the genitals and brain. But by then those mammary papillae aren’t going anywhere.

{ Men vs. Women: Key Physical Differences Explained | Continue reading }

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The patent world is undergoing a change of seismic proportions. A small number of entities have been quietly amassing vast treasuries of patents. These are not the typical patent trolls that we have come to expect. Rather, these entities have investors such Apple, Google, Microsoft, Sony, the World Bank, and non-profit institutions. The largest and most secretive of these has accumulated a staggering 30,000-60,000 patents.

{ SSRN | Continue reading }

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An Australian technology expert has discovered Facebook tracks the websites its users visit after they leave the social networking site. Nik Cubrilovic said his tests showed Facebook did not delete its tracking cookies when you logged out but modified them, maintaining account information and other unique tokens that could identify you.

So whenever you visited a web page containing a Facebook button or widget, your browser was still sending the details back to Facebook, said Mr Cubrilovic. “Even if you are logged out, Facebook still knows and can track every page you visit,” he wrote in a blog post. “The only solution is to delete every Facebook cookie in your browser, or to use a separate browser for Facebook interactions.”

{ Sydney Morning Herald | Continue reading }

Facebook filed paperwork today to start FB PAC, a political action committee that will support candidates dedicated to protecting the online privacy of ordinary Americans at any cost. Kidding! The PAC will fund candidates who support “giving people the power to share,” i.e. stripping them of what few government privacy protections remain.

{ Gawker | Continue reading }

{ If you are wondering why Tumblr just raised $85 million, all you have to do is look at its pageviews. | Tumblr, Now Bigger Than Wikipedia | The Porn and Spam Behind Tumblr’s Meteoric Rise }

When a person meets you for the first time they ask themselves two questions. The answers to these two questions will have all sorts of knock-on effects for how they think about you and how they behave towards you.

Professor Susan Fiske of Princeton University has shown that all social judgements can be boiled down to these two dimensions:

1. How warm is this person?
The idea of warmth includes things like trustworthiness, friendliness, helpfulness, sociability and so on. Initial warmth judgements are made within a few seconds of meeting you.

2. How competent is this person?
Competency judgements take longer to form and include things like intelligence, creativity, perceived ability and so on.

{ PsyBlog | Continue reading }

photo { Garry Winogrand, Mayor John Lindsay with New York City Police, 1969 }

With each passing day bringing us new predictions in the form of research reports, white papers, analyses, and plain old rants on what a Greek default would mean for the Eurozone, for the Euro, for markets, and for the world in general, it is clear that absolutely nobody knows what will happen. Alas, since this topic will be with us for a while until the can kicking finally fails, many more such prognostications will be forthcoming. Today, we present three different pieces, one from Reuters, which gives a 30,000 foot perspective, one a slightly more technical from Citi, looking at a Greek default from a rates point of view, and lastly, a primer from Goldman’s Huw Pill, looking at the aftermath of the current situation for the euro area, with or without a Greek bankruptcy. While we have no idea what will happen to global markets should Greece default, and it will, we are 100% certain that we will present many more such analyses in the future as more and more people piggyback on the Cassandra bandwagon.

{ Zero Hedge | Continue reading }

related { Six reasons why Greece should default }

I predict that if we were to poll professional economists a century from now about who is the intellectual founder of the discipline, I say we’d get a majority responding by naming Charles Darwin, not Adam Smith. Smith, of course, would be the name out of 99% of economists if you asked the same question today. My claim behind that prediction is that in time, not next year, we’ll recognize that Darwin’s vision of the competitive process was just a lot more accurate and descriptive than Smith’s was. I say Smith’s–I really mean Smith’s modern disciples. Neoclassical economists. I think Smith was amazed that when you turn selfish people loose and let them seek their own interests, you often get good results for society as a whole from that process. I don’t think anybody had quite captured the logic of that narrative anywhere near as clearly as Smith had before he wrote. So, it’s a hugely important contribution. Smith, however, didn’t say you always got good results. He was quite circumspect about the claim. (…)

You go back and read Smith–it’s amazing his insights all across the spectrum have held up. Where I think he missed, or at any rate his modern disciples have missed a key feature of competition was–he saw clearly in a way that I don’t think others do yet, that competition favors individual actors. That’s what it does. Correct. Sometimes in the process it helps the larger group, but there are lots and lots of instances in which competition acts against the interests of the larger group. (…)

Familiar example from the Darwinian domain is the kinds of traits that have evolved to help individual animals do battle with one another for resources that are important. Think about polygynous mating species, the vertebrates; for the most part the males take more than one mate if they can. Obviously the qualifier is important; if some get more than one mate, you’ve got others left with none; and that’s the ultimate loser position in the Darwinian scheme. You don’t pass your stuff along into the next generation. So, of course the males fight with each other. If who wins the fights gets the mates, then mutations will be favored that help you win fights. So, male body mass starts to grow. Not without limit, but well beyond the point that would be optimal for males as a group.

{ Robert Frank/EconTalk | Continue reading }

Hildegard of Bingen was a twelfth century nun, possibly with repressed lesbian desires, who had visions, was a proto-scientist, advised the Pope, composed music, and, er, wrote about the role of the brain in the female orgasm.

BBC Radio 4′s Great Lives just had a fantastic programme about her where they read out her description of the female orgasm and how it is driven by a ‘sense of heat’ in the brain.

{ Mind Hacks | Continue reading }

photo { Tracey Baran | Thanks Cassandra! | Previously: Leda and the Swan }

The bonds that unite another person to ourself exist only in our mind. Memory as it grows fainter relaxes them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we would fain be cheated and with which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we cheat other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature that cannot emerge from himself, that knows his fellows only in himself; when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.

{ Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, The Sweet Cheat Gone, 1925 }

artwork { Hamish Blakely }

Singing is a cultural universal and an important part of modern society, yet many people fail to sing in tune. Many possible causes have been posited to explain poor singing abilities; foremost among these are poor perceptual ability, poor motor control, and sensorimotor mapping errors. To help discriminate between these causes of poor singing, we conducted 5 experiments testing musicians and nonmusicians in pitch matching and judgment tasks. (…)

The pattern of results across experiments demonstrates multiple possible causes of poor singing, and attributes most of the problem to poor motor control and timbral–translation errors, rather than a purely perceptual deficit, as other studies have suggested.

{ PsycNet | Continue reading }

related { Lifelong musicians experience less age-related hearing problems than non-musicians }

With the growing permeation of online social networks in our everyday life, scholars have become interested in the study of novel forms of identity construction, performance, spectatorship and self-presentation onto the networked medium. This body of research builds upon a rich theoretical tradition on identity constructivism, performance and (re)presentation of self. With this article we attempt to integrate the work of Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello into this tradition.

Pirandello’s classic 1925 novel Uno, Nessuno, Centomila (“One, No One and One Hundred Thousand”) recounts the tragedy of a man who struggles to reclaim a coherent identity for himself in the face of an inherently social and multi-faceted world. Via an innocuous observation of his wife, the protagonist of the novel, Vitangelo Moscarda, discovers that his friends’ perceptions of his character are not at all what he imagined and stand in glaring contrast to his private self-understanding. In order to upset their assumptions, and to salvage some sort of stable identity, he embarks upon a series of carefully crafted social experiments.

Though the novel’s story transpires in a pre-digital age, the volatile play of identity that ultimately destabilizes Moscarda has only increased since the advent of online social networks. The constant flux of communication in the online world frustrates almost any effort at constructing and defending unitary identity projections. Popular social networking sites, such as Facebook and MySpace, offer freely accessible and often jarring forums in which widely heterogeneous aspects of one’s life—that in Moscarda’s era could have been scrupu- lously kept apart—precariously intermingle. Disturbances to our sense of a unified identity have become a matter of everyday life.

Pirandello’s prescient novel offered readers in its day the contours of an identity melee that would unfurl on the online arena some 80 years later.

{ Alberto Pepe, Spencer Wolff & Karen Van Godtsenhoven, Re-imagining the Pirandellian Identity Dilemma in the Era of Online Social Networks | PDF }

In the famous equation E=mc² that equates mass with the energy contained within it, the “c” represents the speed of light. If particles go faster than light, things become troublesome.

Under such a scenario, an observer in a rocket ship traveling near the speed of light who was watching the Gran Sasso experiment taking place, “would detect the neutrino before it was emitted—they’d see it going backwards in time,” said Dr. Turok.

{ WSJ | Continue reading | More: Measurement of the neutrino velocity with the OPERA detector in the CNGS beam | PDF }

It looks like the future is finally here. I wasn’t quite sure how it was going to present itself, but it seems to have come in the form of UC Berkeley scientists who have developed a “decoder” that can measure our brain activity and reconstruct our visual experiences. In other words, 20 years from now we might not ask eye-witnesses to describe a suspect… we’ll just analyze their brain activity and reconstruct the suspect’s image for ourselves.

{ Try Nerdy | full story }

photo { Howard Bond, Car Hood I, Ontario, 1984 }