Every few weeks, photographs of old paintings arrive at Martin Kemp’s eighteenth-century house, outside Oxford, England. (…) Kemp scrutinizes each image with a magnifying glass, attempting to determine whether the owners have discovered what they claim to have found: a lost masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci.

Kemp, a leading scholar of Leonardo, also authenticates works of art—a rare, mysterious, and often bitterly contested skill. His opinions carry the weight of history; they can help a painting become part of the world’s cultural heritage and be exhibited in museums for centuries, or cause it to be tossed into the trash. His judgment can also transform a previously worthless object into something worth tens of millions of dollars. (His imprimatur is so valuable that he must guard against con men forging not only a work of art but also his signature.)

{ New Yorker | full story | PDF }

painting { Leonardo’s ‘lost’ Christ, sold for £45 in 1956, now valued at £120m | Guardian | full story }

Earlier this year, Michael Stipe turned 51, and his band, R.E.M., released its 15th full-length album. In early March, we sat down at his kitchen counter in downtown New York City over sushi to talk about his career.

I came to New York for the first time with Peter Buck at age 19. We spent a week living out of a van on the street in front of a club in the West 60s called Hurrah. It’s where Pylon played. I saw Klaus Nomi play there. And Michael Gira’s band before he did Swans-they all wore cowboy boots and were so cool and had great hair. I was so jealous. I bought Quaaludes at the urinal for everyone and we all got stoned-I mean, totally fucked up-and we watched Klaus Nomi and Joe King Carrasco. I sat on a couch with Lester Bangs at this party someone threw for Pylon and the only thing to eat was jelly beans and cheesecake. (…)

What happened in 1983?

I stopped taking drugs. There were a lot of things that led up to it. One thing was that a lover died. An ex of mine died in a car wreck and I was really trashed when I found out about it and I couldn’t cry. I woke up the next morning and I said, “That’s it,” so I quit then. It was horrible. A bunch of people died around that time and she was one of them. I wrote a song about her-that was when I still did pull from autobiographical material. I didn’t really have my voice until after that. Also, AIDS had landed and I was terrified. I was very scared, just as everyone was in the ’80s. It was really hard to be sexually active and to sleep with men and with women and not feel you had a responsibility in terms of having safe sex. And this was the Reagan years, where they were talking about internment camps for HIV-positive people and people with AIDS. The straight community was freaking out because, in their minds, this was a “gay” disease, and bisexual people were passing AIDS from the gay community to the straight community.

{ Interview | Continue reading }

You probably already know whether you’re a morning or evening person, but if you’re not sure, here are two ways to figure it out:

1) On weekends, or when you don’t have to wake up at any particular time, when do you naturally wake up? If the answer is more than an hour or so different from when you wake up on weekdays, chances are you’re an evening person by nature. Morning people tend to wake up just as early on weekends as they do during the week.

2) Regardless of how much sleep you’ve gotten, when do you find that you have the most energy? If your energy peaks in the morning and dwindles by late afternoon, you’re a morning person. If it peaks later in the evening - you guessed it - you’re an evening person. (…)

The debate over whether it’s better to be a night owl or an early bird has been going on for centuries. (…) Research on the advantages and disadvantages of each “chronotype” has yielded mixed results, in part because it is difficult to conduct this research experimentally. (…)

Evolutionary psychologists have suggested that a preference for late hours may suggest a higher level of intelligence because being a night owl is presumably an evolutionary novel preference, though this hypothesis is controversial.

{ Psych Your Mind | Continue reading }

painting { Edward Hopper, Summer Interior, 1909 }

Honey Space presents “Panties For Diamonds - A Psychodramatic Audition For Love In The Age Of Abandonment,” the New York debut of collaborative team INNER COURSE.

In this installation and three-act performance, Ms. Kleinpeter and Ms. Lopez flirt with antiquated methods of psychological inquiry within an environment generated by their analysis of the Other. Herein Actors/Audience become emotional accomplices in an unscripted narrative through role-play, interrogation and Softing. Participants will be guided through an assortment of exercises designed to cleanse the palate of perception - inviting new space to permeate.


INNER COURSE performs Tuesday through Saturday from 1-6 pm. Appointments may be booked at innercourse@honey-space.com.

{ NY Art Beat | Continue reading }

related { Begging for change on Houston Street nude, browsing books at the NYU Library nude, buying a street hot dog nude – photographer Erica Simone created this series of self-portraits exposing herself all over New York City doing typical New York City things. | Animal NY | photos }

Memory includes both learning and then some sort of recollection. (…) Each time something is remembered it is actually recreated. The problem is that each time a memory is recreated it can be changed — dramatically or subtly. This occurs more often than we might think. (…)

This leads into point 2 — memory is unreliable. (…) These type of memories are called flashbulb memories. While they can be quite accurate, researchers have shown that they are often affected by news coverage after the fact or discussions with others. Further, how confident people are about these types of memories does not strongly relate to how accurate the memories are. (…)

This leads into point 3 — false memories are common. (…) False memories are often strongly emotional. While emotion can help strengthen memories, it also sets them up to potentially be more unreliable because emotions change over time, which changes can affect connected memories.

{ BrainBlogger | Continue reading }

Assuming that we are uniformly rational and concerned only with advancing our material interests provided good enough predictions about our behavior—or so we thought—and convinced us that we are best off designing systems as though we are selfish creatures. Moreover, people who don’t cooperate can ruin things for everyone, so to save ourselves from freeloaders we built systems by assuming the worst of everyone. (…)

The widespread conviction about the power of self-interest is based on two long-standing, partly erroneous, and opposing assumptions about getting people to cooperate. One of them inspired the philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan in 1651: Humans are fundamentally and universally selfish, and governments must control them so that they don’t destroy one another in the shortsighted pursuit of self-interest. The second is Adam Smith’s alternative solution: the invisible hand. Smith’s 1776 book, The Wealth of Nations, argued that because humans are self-interested and their decision making is driven by the rational weighing of costs and benefits, their actions in a free market tend to serve the common good. Though their prescriptions are very different, both the Leviathan and the invisible hand have the same starting point: a belief in humankind’s selfishness.

{ Yochai Benkler/Harvard Business Review | Continue reading }

photo { Rory Watson }

{ The man who founded a religion based on The Big Lebowski. When he saw the Coen brothers’ hit movie, Oliver Benjamin had an epiphany, and he is now the “Dudely Lama” of The Church of the Latter-Day Dude in Chiang Mai. | CNN | full story }

There is this fountain of youth inside the adult brain that actively makes new neurons. Yet we don’t know how this fountain is constructed or maintained.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

photo { Allan Macintyre }

According to a report in the March issue of The Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, 54 percent of men and 42 percent of women are unhappy with the frequency of sex in their long-term relationships.

A prime reason that couples go out of sync sexually lies in the brain’s reward circuitry. It’s a set of mechanisms that work together to drive all motivation, libido, appetite, and—when out of kilter—addiction. Therefore, it governs your attraction (or lack thereof) to each other between the sheets. It works subconsciously, which is why neither of you can will yourself to enjoy sex if the magic isn’t happening.

{ Good Men Project | Continue reading }

“Porn” stimulates strong sexual desire and satisfaction in ways detached from many of the contextual features that usually accompany such desire and satisfaction in real and praiseworthy sex. Critics complain that this detachment is often bad or unhealthy.

Metaphorical applications of this porn concept include food porn, gadget porn, shelter porn, and chart porn. “X porn” refers to stimuli that induce desires and/or satisfactions usually related to X, but detached in possibly unhealthy ways from context that ideally accompanies X. Food porn, for example, might entice you to eat foods with poor nutrition, or distract you from socializing while eating.

{ Overcoming Bias | Continue reading }

photo { Aaron Wojack }

Double amputee Iraq war veteran dies after he was flung off roller coaster at 50 mph.

Hitler ordered sex dolls to be sent to Nazi soldiers in an effort to prevent them contracting syphilis from prostitutes.

An exotic-animal owner who made headlines last summer when one of his bears mauled a woman to death has died after apparently choking on a sex toy.

Google Maps sends park-goers to private home.

Father accused of eating child’s eye out. The father was found in the backyard, where he chained himself to a tree and began hacking at his leg with a pickax while yelling incoherently.

Wi-Fi–Hacking Neighbor Sentenced to 18 Years.

Police in Florida said a landlord upset about being owed rent set his tenant’s boxer shorts on fire while he was still wearing them.

Man’s Penis Cut Off By Wife: How Could Doctors Make a New One? related: Woman accused of cutting off husband’s penis said he ‘deserved’ it.

Semi-truck Accident Spills Millions of Bees on Highway. The honeybees were on their way to North Dakota from Bakersfield, California.

How did more than 160 million women go missing from Asia? The simple answer is sex selection, but beyond that, the reasons for a gap half the size of the U.S. population are not widely understood.

The Billion-Dollar Bank Heist. How the financial industry is buying off Washington—and killing reform.

The US may be on the verge of making among the biggest and least-necessary financial mistakes in world history. The eurozone might be on the verge of a fiscal cum financial crisis that destroys not just the solvency of important countries but even the currency union and, at worst, much of the European project.

EU considers ban on ratings agencies, followed ire when Moody’s downgraded Portugal’s rating to “junk” status.

In December, the Los Angeles Times reported — very briefly — that from 2007 to 2008, life expectancy in the United States declined by 0.1 year.

Scientists have found a “superbug” strain of gonorrhea in Japan that is resistant to all recommended antibiotics and say it could transform a once easily treatable infection into a global public health threat.

A daily pill costing 25¢ has dramatically reduced the transmission of HIV to both men and women in three African countries.

‘Last dinosaur’ supports asteroid extinction theory. A new fossil discovery has suggested that dinosaurs were alive right up until the asteroid impact, and did not go extinct gradually due to climate change or changes in sea level, as previous theories have proposed.

A new map suggests that around 1.2 percent of all stars may have been capable of supporting complex life at some point in the history of the galaxy.

The exact origin of our planet’s water, which covers about 70 percent of Earth’s surface, is still a mystery to scientists.

Drug Reverses ‘Accelerated Aging’ in Human Cells. The discovery has implications for the treatment of several diseases—as well as normal aging in healthy people.

Our dreams lose their colour as we get older.

Does crying really make you feel better?

Study reveals how decision-makers complicate choice.

A review published in Perspectives on Psychological Science reports scenarios in which happiness is not a good thing. The authors claim that not all types and degrees of happiness are equal, and that the pursuit of happiness can actually make people feel worse, instead of better.

Study demonstrates how memory can be preserved — and forgetting prevented.

Family meals remain important through teen years, expert says.

Patients who participate in medical trials are rarely asked about their religious beliefs, so we should be grateful for any studies that do. Here’s one.

Male smokers less likely to need joint replacement surgery of hip or knee.

Higher cigarette taxes don’t deter all smokers. Price increases don’t persuade wealthier smokers or those aged 25 to 44 to butt out.

14 Fun Facts About Naked Mole Rats.

Rhesus monkeys have a form of self awareness not previously attributed to them.

How influential are mass media portrayals of chimpanzees in television, movies, advertisements and greeting cards on public perceptions of this endangered species?

From the clothes and sunglasses you wear to computer hard drives and even cleaning products, nanotechnology – often inspired by the natural world – plays a big part in the manufacture of many familiar products.

Researchers presented nine-month old babies with paintings by the cubist painter Picasso and the impressionist Monet. Their first aim was to see if the babies could tell the difference between the two painting styles. Next they checked the babies could distinguish between different paintings by the same artist

In this project we use various visualization techniques to compare artistic developments of Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) and Mark Rothko (1903-1970). (The same techniques can be used to compare any other cultural image sets.)

Algorithms for Solving Rubik’s Cubes.

Jakarta is one of the biggest cities in the world. With 10 million inhabitants, it is the most populous in south east Asia and the 10th biggest on the planet. Lighting such a city at night is an expensive business. Jakarta has over 200,000 street lights, which cost the equivalent of about $17 million dollars to run in 2007. The city has plans to double the number of street lights but would obviously like to minimize costs.

The iPhone 6 May Be Completely Cord Free, Charge Wirelessly.

Why write a quine in one language when you can write one in 11 languages.

How Digital Detectives Deciphered Stuxnet.

Remember our story last week, discussing the copyright issues of monkeys taking photographs of themselves using a photographer’s camera that he had left alone? News agency asked us to remove photos.

Even major oil companies admit that we are reaching peak oil–the point when the maximum rate of petroleum production is reached and begins to go into an unstoppable decline. We may have also reached peak car usage in our major cities.

Is exportation of hazardous waste the future solution, in the face of unsustainable methods? This paper reviews past experiences with such disposal practices and highlights their unsustainability due to the risks of contamination of ecosystems, the food chain, together with ground and drinking water supplies.

This article argues that queering anarchism means complexifying it. Theoretical Polyamory: Some Thoughts on Loving, Thinking, and Queering Anarchism.

Is there a difference between nudity on the internet and online pornography?

Jessi Slaughter, the screen name of an 11-year-old from Florida, is the most recent flotsam of this phenomenon known as cyber-bullying.

It took four generations to build Anheuser-Busch, the biggest brewery in America and the maker of Budweiser beer. And only one for it to come apart.

Ground-breaking pop star David Bowie has been accused of many things during his career, often for perfectly good reasons.

“We’re closing in on a deal,” my agent told me on the phone. The previous Friday, bidding on my first novel had reached six figures.

In 1996, the physicist Alan Sokal perpetrated a hoax on the academic journal Social Text intended to test the intellectual rigor of postmodernist thinking. Jonathan Reynolds reassesses the affair. [the article contains a few errata (like, jacques deleuze)]

Of the five books that I’ve chosen, two of them are analyses of war as a whole, that is to say, Clausewitz On War and Sun Tzu The Art of War. The other three describe the actual experience of war as it is fought, which gives a three-dimensional picture of the whole activity.

The very things that should make politicians less likely to want war – productivity growth, democracy, and trading opportunities – have also made war cheaper. We have more wars, not because we want them, but because we can.

Predictions of the Rapture may have come to nothing but some still insist that the end is nigh. As 2012 approaches, Martin Rees discusses the fate of the planet and its people.

At an unconventional convention in Atlanta in February, conspiracy theorists, UFO researchers, alternative medicine advocates, new patriots, and paranormalists came together to share their “alternative knowledge” with one another and the world.

What happened in the basement of the psych building 40 years ago shocked the world. How do the guards, prisoners and researchers in the Stanford Prison Experiment feel about it now? [Thanks Glenn]

Trinity was founded by Sister Gormly’s religious order, the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, in 1897. Many of America’s most powerful women went to a college you’ve never heard of.

The Curious Evolution of Women in Advertising.

Cognitive neuroscientist Ogi Ogas points out, “Men who send off penis pictures probably aren’t thinking at all, they’re responding to an unconscious, evolutionary urge likely inherited from our primate ancestors.”

Sand-Castle Consultants. Just one consulting gig can garner thousands of dollars, while building a birthday sand castle in an hour can yield a fee of $300.

If there’s one thing most people know about silica gel, the unseen substance that inhabits those little white packets inserted in new shoe boxes, purses, and Asian snack foods, it’s that you’re not supposed to eat it. OK, so, what happens if you eat it? Nothing.

Bone china is a type of porcelain that is composed of bone ash, feldspathic material and kaolin. [Thanks James]

Letter of William MacFarland, product marketing manager for Campbell’s Tomato Soup, to Andy Warhol.

Instead of providing rules, which often render safe but bland results, we believe that ultimately any font can be successfully combined with any other font. Historia Type Specimen.

FLY TO THE HAMPTONS OFF-PEAK FOR AS LITTLE AS $29.

This map of Manhattan, for example, follows a similar pattern to Fischer’s previous map on where tourists flock. Flickr and Twitter Mapped Together.

A guide for young ladies in Manhattan from 1939.

Manhattan in the 1940s. [pics] Related: New York 75 years from now.

Is Walt Disney’s frozen body buried under Disneyland?

9 PERSONS MAX

Russian Ad Watch: selling cigarettes to teen girls.

Snooker ball and ball.

Best two-second YouTube video of the week.

Broken Wear, now with 3 extra episodes. [video]

Internet websites and print journals are always trotting out essays by writers and editors and agents and readers about how nobody reads any longer—the reason being, these essays declare, that publishing houses simply want to crank out the cheapest book they can get by with, preferably in e-book format. This is certainly true. Major publishing houses are, without a doubt, money-grubbing book factories so intent on repeating the same paperback thrillers penned by ghostwriters that they increasingly treat serious literary writers without respect, not only financially, but also personally and artistically. All of this is true. But implicit in this argument, is that the writer is doing nothing wrong—and, is in fact generating engaging, progressive, striking works of art, which are in turn, rejected and incinerated by the publishing houses. And this, unfortunately, is certainly false. American realist writers—the vast majority of them—are also to blame for the no-one-is-reading crisis, because they have essentially ceased corresponding with and affecting American society, and their works have in turn, grown boring.

{ Ben Clague/Ugarte | Continue reading }

photo { Mustafah Abdulaziz }

Susan Hughes, from Albright College in Pennsylvania, asked 1,041 college students questions about their kissing preferences, styles, attitudes and behaviors.

- Men and women reported having kissed a similar number of people in their lives; 14 was the average number for both men and women.


- About 50% of men would have sex without kissing their partner first; only 10% of women would do so.


- Men want to kiss someone based on their perception of facial attraction, women focus more on a man’s teeth in deciding if they would like to kiss him.


- Kissing seems to be more important before sex and much less so after.


- Overall, kissing is more important for women than for men in having a satisfying sexual experience.


- Overall men prefer wetter kisses with more tongue than do women.


- Both sexes preferred more tongue with long-term partners.


- Men are more than twice as likely to have sex with a bad kisser than are women.


{ eHarmony | Continue reading }

photo { Caitlin Teal Price }

For many philosophers, the scholarly debate around holes began in earnest in 1970, with Lewis and Lewis’s now classic article “Holes” (Australasian Journal of Philosophy 48: 206–212.) The authors presented their paper in a highly unusual format – that of an imaginary discussion between two philosophers, called Argle and Bargle, who are pondering the holes in a piece of Gruyère cheese. Argle believes that every hole has a hole-lining, and therefore the hole-lining is the hole. On the other hand, Bargle points out that even if hole-linings surround holes, things don’t surround themselves. Since the 70’s the philosophical debate around holes has continued and expanded considerably, and has now been complemented with an article by Kristopher McDaniel, assistant professor in the department of philosophy at Syracuse University, NY. The professor outlines the possibilities for a new and more comprehensive category of entities which includes holes, and which he calls “Almost Nothings.”

{ Improbable Research | Continue reading | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy }

photo { Chad Muthard }

{ Isa Wipfli, Shorelines 2008 | more }

How much would someone have to pay you to give up the Internet for the rest of your life? Would a million dollars be enough? Twenty million? How about a billion dollars? “When I ask my students this question, they say you couldn’t pay me enough.”

(…)

Reframe this offer so that it has more time to generate social support, and no way would most people reject it.

At 5% interest, a million dollars pays ~$4,000 a month. So let’s imagine offering people $4,000 to give up TV or internet for one month, and then renewing the offer every month afterward – they could go on or off the plan at will.

{ OvercomingBias | Continue reading }

photo { William Eggleston }

In the late 1990s, Jane Anderson was working as a landscape architect. That meant she didn’t work much in the winter, and she struggled with seasonal affective disorder in the dreary Minnesota winter months. She decided to try meditation and noticed a change within a month. “My experience was a sense of calmness, of better ability to regulate my emotions,” she says. Her experience inspired a new study which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, which finds changes in brain activity after only five weeks of meditation training.

Previous studies have found that Buddhist monks, who have spent tens of thousands of hours of meditating, have different patterns of brain activity. But Anderson wanted to know if they could see a change in brain activity after a shorter period.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading | Related: Meditation as cheap, self-administered morphine }

Why does exercise make us happy and calm? (…) How, at a deep, cellular level, exercise affects anxiety and other moods has been difficult to pin down. The brain is physically inaccessible and dauntingly complex. But a recent animal study from researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health provides some intriguing new clues into how exercise intertwines with emotions, along with the soothing message that it may not require much physical activity to provide lasting emotional resilience.

{ NYT | Continue reading }

photo { T. Harrison Hillman }

Every generation has its life-defining moments. (…) For much of my generation—Generation X, born between 1965 and 1980—there is only one question: “When did your parents get divorced?” (…)

“Whatever happens, we’re never going to get divorced.” Over the course of 16 years, I said that often to my husband, especially after our children were born. Apparently, much of my generation feels at least roughly the same way: Divorce rates, which peaked around 1980, are now at their lowest level since 1970. In fact, the often-cited statistic that half of all marriages end in divorce was true only in the 1970s—in other words, our parents’ marriages. Not ours.

According to U.S. Census data released this May, 77% of couples who married since 1990 have reached their 10-year anniversaries. We’re also marrying later in life, if at all. The average marrying age in 1950 was 23 for men and 20 for women; in 2009, it was 28 for men and 26 for women.

{ WSJ | Continue reading }

photo { Walker Evans, Torn Poster, Truro, Massachusetts, 1930 }

{ Ludwig Wittgenstein was also an enthusiastic amateur photographer | slideshow }

Peter Brabeck-Letmathe chairs Nestlé, the world’s 44th-largest company, which last year earned US$10.5 billion in profits on US$121.1 billion in revenues. He is the consummate international businessman, bargaining hard, overseeing 280,000 employees, outflanking competitors and at ease with heads of state. Yet Brabeck remains incapable of negotiating one simple and irreplaceable ingredient without which his company ceases to exist: water.

He hardly seems a gloomy Malthusian, yet Brabeck foresees “limits to growth” because our global fresh water supply is both finite and being rapidly, stupidly, depleted. The world can sustainably use 4,200 cubic kilometres of water, he notes, but it consumes 4,500 even as aquifers plummet and rivers run dry.

{ China Dialogue | Continue reading }