And you, old sir, we are told you prospered once
She weaves secrets in her hair
Cuddling and caressing are important ingredients for long-term relationship satisfaction, according to an international study by the Kinsey Institute, which queried committed, middle-aged couples from five countries. But contrary to stereotypes, tenderness was more important to the men than to the women. Also contrary to expectations, men were more likely to report being happy in their relationship, while women were more likely to report being satisfied with their sexual relationship.
photo { Jeremy and Claire Weiss }
‘Give me but one firm spot on which to stand, and I will move the earth.’ –Archimedes
Female sexuality is particularly enigmatic, simply because the sex function in women is so much more complex than that of their male counterparts. A study conducted by Dutch scientist Gert Holstege showed that while the areas in male brains activated during orgasm were not surprising, the activated areas in the female brains were slightly different. For one, the female brain becomes noticeably silent in certain areas, like in the lateral orbitofrontal cortex and the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, two areas in the brain that process feelings and thoughts associated with self-control and social judgement. Holstege noted that “at the moment of orgasm, women do not have any emotional feelings.” (…)
Even women in good health have a difficult time achieving climax. Reportedly, 10% of women have never had an orgasm, and as many as 50% of women have trouble being aroused.
You know why, mister? Cause you drove a Hyundai to get here tonight, I drove an eighty thousand dollar BMW. *That’s* my name.
{ Left: Motorola logo, 1955 | Right: Wyldewood Golf & Country Club logo, 1963 }
Papa one-eyed Jack
On 7 July 1688 the Irish scientist and politician William Molyneux (1656–1698) sent a letter to John Locke in which he put forward a problem which was to awaken great interest among philosophers and other scientists throughout the Enlightenment and up until the present day. In brief, the question Molyneux asked was whether a man who has been born blind and who has learnt to distinguish and name a globe and a cube by touch, would be able to distinguish and name these objects simply by sight, once he had been enabled to see. (…)
For reasons unknown Locke never replied to the letter.
artwork { Alan Bur Johnson }
You see a locomotive probably thinking it’s a train
Imagine you are a single, heterosexual woman. You meet a nice man at the driving range, or on a blind date. You like him and he likes you. You date, you get engaged, you get married. You decide to have a child together, so you go off the pill. One morning you wake up and look at your husband, and it’s like seeing him through new eyes. Who is this stranger you married, and what did you ever see in him?
After some articles made the news when they suggested mate preferences change on hormonal contraception, this seemed to be the scenario in the heads of many women. Is my pill deceiving me? What if my birth control is making me date the wrong man?
Several articles over the years have demonstrated that women prefer men with more masculine features at midcycle, or ovulation, and more feminine features in less fertile periods. Based on body odor, women and men also often prefer individuals with MHC (major histocompatibility complex) that are different from theirs, which may be a way for them to select mates that will give their offspring an immunological advantage. These findings have been replicated a few times, looking at a few different gendered traits. And as I suggested above, other work has suggested that the birth control pill, which in some ways mimics pregnancy, may mask our natural tendency to make these distinctions and preferences, regarding both masculinity and MHC.
image { Thanks Glenn! }
Drunk: My man, what is happenin’? Sun Ra: Everything is happenin’.
Geographical metaphors such as centre-periphery or First-Second-Third World are widely used to describe the world economic system. This paper discusses the role of metaphors in geographical representations and proposes some guidelines for the analysis and classification. This methodology is then applied to a sample of well known textual metaphors used to describe the world economic scenario, including ideas of a First-Second-Third World, North-South, core-periphery, Global Triad, global network, flat and fluid world. The classification is linked to the debates originating such metaphors, and it will be used in order to propose some concluding remarks on the possibility of development of new geographical metaphors.
‘To restore silence is the role of objects.’ –Samuel Beckett
{ Ever wonder about the left-behind houses you pass while driving, or the houses buried back off country roads? This writer excavates a lost house’s history. | Ever wondered if your home was haunted ? | More: Lost magazine | latest issue | Lost Magazine | previous issues }
Until my seas are dried up
It is hard to think of another writer as great as Mark Twain who did so many things that even merely good writers are not supposed to do. Great writers are not meant to write bad books, much less publish them. Twain not only published a lot of bad books, he doesn’t appear to have noticed the difference between his good ones and his bad ones. Great writers are not meant to care more about money than art. Twain cared so much about money that what little he writes about his art in his autobiography is almost entirely, and obsessively, about the business end of things: his paychecks, his promotional tours, his financial disputes with publishers, his venture capital investments in publishing and printing technology. He stops and starts Huckleberry Finn over and again to devote vast amounts of his time and energy to losing $190,000 (roughly $4 million today) in a doomed typesetting machine, and nearly bankrupts himself. Great writers are expected to be interested in ideas; they should associate themselves with at least a few convictions. Apart from a frontier notion of freedom, Twain never met an idea he could not reduce to a joke. He doesn’t even appear to have been wedded to his own skepticism. (…)
Everywhere he went, including the White House, he was always the biggest star in the room. (…)
Twain mentions that in the good old days the post office delivered him a letter from Europe at his home in Hartford, Connecticut, addressed to:
Mark Twain
God Knows Where
A sense of identity through time
Sense-perception—the awareness or apprehension of things by sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste—has long been a preoccupation of philosophers. One pervasive and traditional problem, sometimes called “the problem of perception”, is created by the phenomena of perceptual illusion and hallucination: if these kinds of error are possible, how can perception be what it intuitively seems to be, a direct and immediate access to reality? The present entry is about how these possibilities of error challenge the intelligibility of the phenomenon of perception, and how the major theories of perception in the last century are best understood as responses to this challenge.
{ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | Continue reading }
Phenomenology is the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view. The central structure of an experience is its intentionality, its being directed toward something, as it is an experience of or about some object. An experience is directed toward an object by virtue of its content or meaning (which represents the object) together with appropriate enabling conditions.
Phenomenology as a discipline is distinct from but related to other key disciplines in philosophy, such as ontology, epistemology, logic, and ethics. Phenomenology has been practiced in various guises for centuries, but it came into its own in the early 20th century in the works of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and others. Phenomenological issues of intentionality, consciousness, qualia, and first-person perspective have been prominent in recent philosophy of mind. (…)
The Oxford English Dictionary presents the following definition: “Phenomenology. a. The science of phenomena as distinct from being (ontology). b. That division of any science which describes and classifies its phenomena. From the Greek phainomenon, appearance.” In philosophy, the term is used in the first sense, amid debates of theory and methodology. In physics and philosophy of science, the term is used in the second sense, albeit only occasionally.
Light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.
{ There are about 2,000 species of fireflies, a type of beetle that lights up its abdomen with a chemical reaction to attract a mate. That glow can be yellow, green or pale-red. In some places the firefly dance is synchronized, with the insects flashing in unison or in waves. The lightshow has also been beneficial to science—researchers have found that the chemical responsible for it, luciferase, is a useful marker in a variety of applications, including genetic engineering and forensics. | Smithsonian magazine | full article }
‘Transcendence constitutes selfhood.’ –Heidegger
First impressions are important, and they usually contain a healthy dose both of accuracy and misperception. But do people know when their first impressions are correct? They do reasonably well, according to a recent study.
Sometimes after meeting a person for the first time, there is a strong sense that you really understand him or her—you immediately feel as if you could predict his or her behavior in a variety of situations, and you feel that even your first impression would agree with those of others who know that person well. That is, your impression feels realistically accurate (Funder, 1995, 1999). Other times, you leave an interaction feeling somewhat unsure about how accurate your impression is—it is not clear how that individual would behave in different situations or what his or her close friends and family members would say about him or her. Are such intuitions about the realistic accuracy of one’s impressions valid? That is, do people know when they know? The current studies address this question by examining the extent to which people have accuracy awareness—an understanding of whether their first impressions of others’ personalities are realistically accurate.
{ Social Psychological and Personality Science | Continue reading }
photo { Harry Callahan }
I heard your end would be covering my fee
Enthusiasm for The Wire is hardly limited to law professors, but the series does seem to hold a special appeal for us, especially if we teach criminal law and criminal procedure. What accounts for that appeal? Not, I think, the widely praised realism of The Wire, at least not in the most obvious ways. The series does have an almost visceral sense of place, and it does show, in grim detail, many of the ways the criminal justice system goes wrong. But the loving attention to Baltimore does little to explain the particular pull the series has for those of us who teach and write about criminal justice, and the institutional failures that the series spotlights—the futility of the war on drugs, the cooking of crime statistics, the often casual brutality of street-level policing—are, let’s face it, hardly news. Even among law professors, it’s hard to imagine any documentary about those failures, no matter how accurate, generating the kind of excitement The Wire has generated.
It has to be said, too, that there are important ways in which The Wire isn’t all that realistic. It is not particularly good, for example, at capturing the workaday feel of law enforcement. Any number of less celebrated television programs—Barney Miller, Cagney & Lacey, Hill Street Blues, even Law & Order—have done a better job of that. Nor, for the most part, does The Wire seem especially perceptive about leadership. The organizational dynamics of law enforcement, and the compromised politics of city government, often have a crazed, over-the-top feel in the series—entertaining, but not strikingly true to life. In these respects, and some others, The Wire aims less for verisimilitude than for the power of myth.
Nonetheless much of what makes The Wire so gripping—and, I think, much of what makes it especially gripping for professors of criminal law and criminal procedure—does seem to have to do with a certain kind of realism. It isn’t detailed accuracy about institutional failures, or the drug trade, or post-9/11 Baltimore, but something at once bigger and more basic: the dimensions of human and moral complexity that criminal justice work, in pretty much any time or place, will inevitably bring to the surface.
{ David Alan Sklansky, Confined, Crammed, and Inextricable: What The Wire Gets Right, 2011 | SSRN | Continue reading }
‘The function of the discourse is not in fact to create ‘fear, shame, envy, an impression’ etc, but to conceive the inconceivable, i.e., to leave nothing outside the words.’ –Roland Barthes
Each culture has its agreed-upon list of taboo words and it doesn’t matter how many times these words are repeated, they still seem to retain their power to shock. Scan a human brain, swear at it, and you’ll see its emotional centres jangle away.
Recent research has shown that this emotional impact can have an analgesic effect, and there’s other evidence that strategically deployed swear words can make a speech more memorable. But it’s not all positive. A new study suggests that swear words have a dark side. Megan Robbins and her team recorded snippets of speech from middle-aged women with rheumatoid arthritis, and others with breast cancer, and found those who swore more in the company of other people also experienced increased depression and a perceived loss of social support.
photo { Calvin Sawer }
‘Don’t wait to be hunted to hide.’ –Samuel Beckett
One way to study a network is to break it down into its simplest pattern of links. These simple patterns are called motifs and their numbers usually depend on the type of network.
One of the big puzzles of network science is that some motifs crop up much more often than others. These motifs are clearly important. Remove them (or change their distribution) and the behaviour of the network changes too. But nobody knows why.
Today, Xiao-Ke Xu at Hong Kong Polytechnic University and friends say they know why and the answer is intimately linked to the existence of rich clubs within a network.
Let’s step back for a bit of background. In many networks, a small number of nodes are well connected to large number of others. The group of all well-connected nodes is known as the “rich club” and it is known to play an important role in the network of which it is part.
Rich clubs are particularly influential in a specific class of network in which the number of links between nodes varies in a way that is scale free (ie follows a power law).
This is an important class. It includes the internet, social networks, airline networks and many naturally occurring networks such as gene regulatory networks.
photo { Jimi Franklin }
‘The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.’ –Samuel Beckett
{ Amy Stein }
The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new
On 26 September 1991, eight “bionauts,” as they called themselves, wearing identical red Star Trek–like jumpsuits (made for them by Marilyn Monroe’s former dressmaker) waved to the assembled crowd and climbed through an airlock door in the Arizona desert. They shut it behind them and opened another that led into a series of hermetically sealed greenhouses in which they would live for the next two years. The three-acre complex of interconnected glass Mesoamerican pyramids, geodesic domes, and vaulted structures contained a tropical rain forest, a grassland savannah, a mangrove wetland, a farm, and a salt-water ocean with a wave machine and gravelly beach. This was Biosphere 2—the first biosphere being Earth—a $150 million experiment designed to see if, in a climate of nuclear and ecological fear, the colonization of space might be possible.
artwork { Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Duel after the Masquerade, 1857 }
With money, you get honey
Nortel Networks, the bankrupt Canadian telecom company, came that much closer to disappearing completely yesterday with the cash sale of its portfolio of 6000 patents for $4.5 billion to a consortium of companies including Apple, EMC, Ericsson, Microsoft, Research In Motion (RIM), and Sony. The bidding, which began with a $900 million offer from Google, went far higher than most observers expected and only ended, I’m guessing, when Google realized that Apple and its partners had deeper pockets and would have paid anything to win. This transaction is a huge blow to Google’s Android platform, which was precisely the consortium’s goal.
\-/ \-/ \-/ \-/ \-/ Tequila shots for everyone!
University of Oxford Writing and Style Guide decided that writers should, “as a general rule,” avoid using the Oxford comma.
Here’s an explanation from the style guide: As a general rule, do not use the serial/Oxford comma: so write ‘a, b and c’ not ‘a, b, and c.’
