No person can feel exactly how another person feels. No matter how much training in communication you might have and how much attention and time you spend listening to another person you will never fully be able to grasp all the aspects of the other person’s inner experience. By listening to the other person you might get an idea, a feeling of understanding. But what you feel will always in some way be referenced to your own experiences. By consciously and subconsciously observing the other person’s body language you might add another aspect to the understanding of the situation. However the perception will always be interpreted in your own complex framework of feelings and expectations – and as such the other person’s feelings could be misunderstood. These be the feelings about religion, political views, love, child rearing – or pain.

When it comes to pain this challenge in communication is extremely important. Although it is a terribly present and at times all consuming sensation to the sufferer, no doctor, nurse or even spouse can ever feel it. And yet it is most often another person than the sufferer who holds the key to the alleviation of the pain.
Feeling understood, feeling accepted, feeling heard and feeling trusted are essential feelings for most people in many aspects of life. When it comes to suffering an illness, this in some way has its own healing power. Likewise mistrust and feeling denied or dismissed might increase the suffering.

{ DoloTest | Continue reading }

photo { Diane Arbus }

There’s a long line of research that associates marriage with reducing unhealthy habits such as smoking, and promoting better health habits such as regular checkups. However, new research is emerging that suggests married straight couples and cohabiting gay and lesbian couples in long-term intimate relationships may pick up each other’s unhealthy habits as well.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

Forget about the S&P downgrade, which has had ZERO impact on the global equity markets. The downgrade was supposed to mean that it would be more likely that the US government would not be able to pay its debt than previously assumed. IF the markets took this warning seriously, then they would have attached a higher risk premium to US government bonds. Of course, the opposite occurred. US bonds soared in price. In other words, investors, both here and abroad, voted with money as loudly as possible that they view the US government debt as a very safe haven in a time of financial turmoil

So if it wasn’t the S&P downgrade which caused this downward cascade in the global equity markets, then what was it? By far, the most important factor currently driving the market’s bear trends is Europe or, more specifically, the future of the euro and the European Monetary Union.

{ New Economic Perspectives | Continue reading }

Last week’s record volatility in U.S. stocks ended after four days. The anxiety it instilled among mutual-fund investors may linger for years.

Investors pulled a net $23.5 billion from U.S. equity funds in the week ended Aug. 10, the most since October 2008, when markets were reeling from the collapse a month earlier of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., the Investment Company Institute said yesterday. The period tracked by the Washington-based trade group included three of the unprecedented four consecutive days in which the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index rose or fell by at least 4 percent.

The roller-coaster ride was unnerving for fund investors who have already endured the bursting of the Internet bubble in 2000, a 57 percent collapse in the S&P 500 Index (SPX) from October 2007 to March 2009 and the one-day plunge in May 2010 that briefly erased $862 billion in value from U.S. shares. The debacles, combined with falling home prices, unemployment above 9 percent and a lack of trust in government to bring down spending, may sour individual investors on domestic stock funds for an additional three to five years, according to Andrew Goldberg, a market strategist at JPMorgan Funds in New York.

{ Bloomberg | Continue reading }

related { Some Hedge Funds Are KILLING It This Quarter }

SF bay area craigslist > san francisco > housing > room/share wanted
$1000 Best. Roommate. Ever.
Date: 2011-08-18, 3:39PM PDT

Konichiwa bitches. Are you looking for the most kick-ass fucking roommate that ever lived? If so, look no further. You fucking found him. I’m a 25-year-old professional marketing agent with experience at bad-ass companies in New York Fucking City. That’s right! What you know about experience? I graduated from Auburn University in Alabama, and moved to NYC at the ripe, tender age of 22. After deciding that New York was a stinky shit-hole, I moved back to Alabama to cultivate more professional experience. Why? So I can make millions of dollars and not have to post shit like this on Craigslist.

Anyway, so I landed this job with a marketing firm in San Francisco, and I have no fucking clue where to live. Honestly, I’m moving there in 3 weeks, so I don’t give a shit if I have to sleep in your bathtub.

A bit about me: I’m respectful, quiet, clean and I won’t bother any of your shit. If you leave shit out, I’m just like, “Oh fuck I better not mess with this shit, because it’s not mine.” I turn off lights. I clean toilets. Fuck it. I’ll even cook for you. That’s right! My dad is a chef and taught me everything there is to know about cooking southern cajun cuisine. I’ll fry green tomatoes, cover them with marinated crab meat and smother that shit in bearnaise. EVERY. GODDAMN. NIGHT. Don’t eat meat? That’s fucking FANTASTIC! I’ll make a zucchini and yellow squash carpaccio that will knock your fucking socks off.

I also read a lot. I fucking LOVE books. Vonnegut, Palahniuk, Hawthorne. All that shit. I read Tuesday’s with Morrie the other day. It’s a sad story, but I learned something about life, love, knowledge and the pursuit of something greater than myself. Fucking smart. Do you like movies? I fucking love them. We can watch the shit out of some movies together if you like, or go get drinks, or work out, hike, play video games or play a game of one-on-one basketball, or I don’t have to talk to you at all. It’s completely UP TO YOU!

Sometimes I play guitar. Are you going to love getting baked and listening to Bob Dylan and Pink Floyd? LIVE? WHENEVER THE FUCK YOU WANT? Of course you are! I’ll take requests and learn any song you like, because I have the voice of an angel and the acoustical stylings of James Fucking Taylor. AWWWWWW SHIT YEA!

A lot of people ask me, “Hey, you’re from Alabama. Are you racist?” And, the answer to that question is, no. I’m not racist or judgmental at all. I love everyone. I’m a secular humanist. I FUCKING LOVE PEOPLE. That’s the only requirement to being a secular humanist actually. You have to like other human beings and want to help them for no other reason than they are human regardless of race, religion or sexual preference. WTF?!!!? Pretty fucking cool right?

I own almost nothing! I’m driving my car from Alabama to California in which I’ll be transporting two duffelbags of clothes, one laptop computer, one guitar, one cell-phone with charger, 8 pairs of shoes, one picture frame, probably some condoms and a shitload of beef jerky and Pringles for the trip. Though, you can expect the jerky to be gone upon my arrival. Unless you’d like me to pick up some on my way into the city. See?! I’m the most considerate person you’ve ever met. I’m offering to buy you shit already!

Am I interested in your pad? You can bet my nomadic ass I am! I only require 4 walls, a ceiling and a floor to shelter me from the elements. Other than that, anything else will be considered a convenient plus. I’m taking being a roommate to the next level. Email me! I’ll hook yo ass up with Facebook links, background checks, credit reports, phone numbers, resumes, references, awards, sexual history, pictures of karate trophies and a list of the top 10 women I’d like to bang before I die. If you want a next-generation roommate who consistently blows your fucking mind with awesomeness, then hit me up. I’m ready to give you money.

{ Craigslist }

The idea of the Paleo diet has been around for decades, but it’s really taken off over the last couple of years. It’s based on the idea that while humans have been eating for approximately 200,000 years, we’ve been farming for only about the last 10,000 or so. Farming introduced easily produced grains into our society, and bread, pasta, and other starch-heavy and processed foods into our diets. Evolution is too slow, the story goes, for us to have adapted to this new diet. So these “new” foods are responsible for many specific health problems we encounter, as well as a general feeling of un-wellness that most of us unwittingly life with. By returning to the diet of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, the proponents of Paleo claim, we can restore our happiness, health, and waistlines.

I had to give it a shot. And you know what? It’s been pretty great. After a few weeks, I’ve lost weight, I feel better, and the two-hour-plus sluggish period that used to follow lunch just about every day is gone. That’s while eating sort of like a pig—meat, vegetables, nuts, eggs, fish, all cooked with butter and scarfed down with gleeful self-contentment. I get hungry less often, and when I do it’s a different sort of hunger; not nagging and brain-debilitating, but more natural-feeling and subtle, almost healthy.

{ The Atlantic | Continue reading }

artwork { Kinke Kooi }

{ What we can say is that the clues in the Somerton Beach mystery (or the enigma of the “Unknown Man”) add up to one of the world’s most perplexing cold cases. It may be the most mysterious of them all. | Smithsonian | full story }

{ Carli Davidson }

{ Dutch 1,000-guilder banknote featuring Spinoza }

4 billion years before present: the surface of a newly formed planet around a medium-sized star is beginning to cool down. It’s a violent place, bombarded by meteorites and riven by volcanic eruptions, with an atmosphere full of toxic gases. But almost as soon as water begins to form pools and oceans on its surface, something extraordinary happens. A molecule, or perhaps a set of molecules, capable of replicating itself arises.
This was the dawn of evolution. Once the first self-replicating entities appeared, natural selection kicked in, favouring any offspring with variations that made them better at replicating themselves. Soon the first simple cells appeared. The rest is prehistory.

Billions of years later, some of the descendants of those first cells evolved into organisms intelligent enough to wonder what their very earliest ancestor was like. What molecule started it all? (…)

When biologists first started to ponder how life arose, the question seemed baffling. In all organisms alive today, the hard work is done by proteins. Proteins can twist and fold into a wild diversity of shapes, so they can do just about anything, including acting as enzymes, substances that catalyse a huge range of chemical reactions. However, the information needed to make proteins is stored in DNA molecules. You can’t make new proteins without DNA, and you can’t make new DNA without proteins. So which came first, proteins or DNA?

{ NewScientist | Continue reading }

artwork { Chris Ofili }

The projection of vagina, uterine cervix, and nipple to the sensory cortex in humans has not been reported.

The aim of this study was to map the sensory cortical fields of the clitoris, vagina, cervix, and nipple, toward an elucidation of the neural systems underlying sexual response.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we mapped sensory cortical responses to clitoral, vaginal, cervical, and nipple self-stimulation.

The genital sensory cortex, identified in the classical Penfield homunculus based on electrical stimulation of the brain only in men, was confirmed for the first time in the literature by the present study in women applying clitoral, vaginal, and cervical self-stimulation, and observing their regional brain responses using fMRI.

Activation of the genital sensory cortex by nipple self-stimulation was unexpected, but suggests a neurological basis for women’s reports of its erotogenic quality.

{ The Journal of Sexual Medicine | Continue reading }

photo { Richard Kern }

In recent years, economists and psychologists have joined forces to unravel the secrets of human happiness. “The Happiness Equation” is one researcher’s attempt to share his field’s discoveries with a broad audience. Nick Powdthavee, an economist at the University of York, deftly explains the main determinants of happiness: the small effect of money, the great effect of marriage and friends, the massive effect of personality. Even extremely good news (such as winning the lottery) and extremely bad news (such as losing a spouse) rarely changes an individual’s happiness for more than a couple of years. Mr. Powdthavee also explores the effect of happiness on success: Happiness today predicts higher job performance, better relationships and more years of health in the future.

{ WSJ | Continue reading }

photo { Louis Stettner, Christmas Eve, Ile Saint-Louis, 1950 }

related { Ten Powerful Steps to Negotiating a Higher Salary }

Most bacterial infections can be treated with antibiotics such as penicillin, discovered decades ago. However, such drugs are useless against viral infections, including influenza, the common cold, and deadly hemorrhagic fevers such as Ebola.

Now, in a development that could transform how viral infections are treated, a team of researchers at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory has designed a drug that can identify cells that have been infected by any type of virus, then kill those cells to terminate the infection.

researchers tested their drug against 15 viruses, and found it was effective against all of them — including rhinoviruses that cause the common cold, H1N1 influenza, a stomach virus, a polio virus, dengue fever and several other types of hemorrhagic fever.

The drug works by targeting a type of RNA produced only in cells that have been infected by viruses. “In theory, it should work against all viruses,” says Todd Rider, a senior staff scientist in Lincoln Laboratory’s Chemical, Biological, and Nanoscale Technologies Group who invented the new technology.

{ MIT | Continue reading | Thanks Glenn! }

If we don’t reverse the current trend in food prices, we’ve got until August 2013 before social unrest sweeps the planet, say complexity theorists.

What causes riots? That’s not a question you would expect to have a simple answer.

But today, Marco Lagi and buddies at the New England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge, say they’ve found a single factor that seems to trigger riots around the world.

This single factor is the price of food. Lagi and co say that when it rises above a certain threshold, social unrest sweeps the planet.

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }

photo { Shaun Gladwell }

We should expect men to be more self-aware, transparent, and simple regarding their feelings about short-term sexual attractions, while women have more complex, layered, and opaque feelings on this subject. In contrast, women should be more more self-aware, transparent, and simple regarding their feelings about long-term pair-bonding, while men have more complex, layered, and opaque feelings on this subject. By being more opaque on sensitive subjects, we can keep ourselves from giving off clear signals of an inclination to betray.

{ Overcoming Bias | Continue reading }

Do extraverts have more numerous and deeper social relationships? (…)

Recognising that our relationships aren’t monolithic, the researchers treated social networks as a set of three layers. The inner support group contains those people (typically around five) that you would turn to in a crisis. Around this are a further ten-odd people, a sympathy group who would be deeply affected by your death. Finally there is an outer layer of more variable size, containing people connected to you by weak ties. (…)

The researchers found extraverts had more people in every layer – more weak ties, but also more individuals they contacted frequently. Although larger social networks have been reported before, this study finds the effect after controlling for age, a potential confound in other studies. However, extraversion didn’t affect emotional closeness to their network: weak ties with occasional contacts don’t appear stronger in extraverts.

{ BPS | Continue reading }

screenshot { Andrei Tarkovsky, The Mirror, 1975 }

{ How the internet has all but destroyed the market for films, music and newspapers. The author of Free Ride warns that digital piracy and greedy technology firms are crushing the life out of the culture business. | Guardian | full story }

Intuition is one of those iffy concepts. Its purpose, use, and ontology have been heavily debated in its long and contentious history. Western proverbial jargon illustrates this: we’ve been told that he who hesitates is lost, but shouldn’t we look before we leap? And believe that we shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but don’t the clothes make the man?

Now, psychology is weighing in. However, in place of armchair-rationality, it is using empirical data to illustrate how we actually behave. With concrete data, it seems like the intuition debate could finally be put to rest. But the opposite has occurred. Psychology has shown both the powers and perils of intuition only to complicate matters. (…)

First, there is a question about perception: How much do we see? (…)

Second, there is a question about judgment and decision-making: Should I go with my gut? Or think things through?

{ Why We Reason | Continue reading }

oil on canvas { Ingres, Comtesse d’Haussonville, 1845 }

It seems hard to imagine that anyone of sound mind would take the blame for something he did not do. But several researchers have found it surprisingly easy to make people fess up to invented misdemeanours. Admittedly these confessions are taking place in a laboratory rather than an interrogation room, so the stakes might not appear that high to the confessor. On the other hand, the pressures that can be brought to bear in a police station are much stronger than those in a lab. The upshot is that it seems worryingly simple to extract a false confession from someone—which he might find hard subsequently to retract.

{ The Economist | Continue reading }