Apple and Google will compete like crazy for our data because once they have it we’ll be their customers forever. iCloud’s real purpose: kill Windows.
Why Apple Isn’t in the Dow. Only ExxonMobil is bigger in the U.S. than Apple. While it might add 1,000 points to the Dow if it were on board, its high stock price would distort the index.
When James Brown died on Christmas Day 2006, he left behind a fortune worth tens, maybe hundreds, of millions of dollars. The problem is, he also left behind fourteen children, sixteen grandchildren, eight mothers of his children, several mistresses, thirty lawyers, a former manager, an aging dancer, a longtime valet, and a sister who’s really not a sister but calls herself the Godsister of Soul anyway. All of whom want a piece of his legacy.
Happiness can kill, claim scientists, after discovering that people who are too full of joy die younger than their more downbeat peers.
The study by a variety of universities analysed the details of children from the 1920s to old age.
They found people whose school reports rated them “highly cheerful” died younger than their more reserved classmates. This is because they are likely to lead more carefree lives full of danger and unhealthy lifestyle choices, it is believed. (…)
Researchers also discovered that trying too hard to be happy often ended up leaving people feeling more depressed than before. (…)
Results of the study revealed that the key to true happiness was simple: meaningful relationships with friends and family members.
“The strongest predictor of happiness is not money, or external recognition through success or fame. It’s having meaningful social relationships.”
The normal human ratio is around 105 boys for every 100 girls, a natural evolutionary ratio that takes into account the fact that more boys tend to die before reaching adulthood. But in China today, the ratio is 121 boys for every 100 girls; in India the ratio is 112 boys for every 100 girls. (…)
In her thorough and compelling new book, Unnatural Selection, Hvistendahl explains why these trends will have far-reaching effects. She argues that the sex imbalance could prove devastating to social stability across the developing world, sparking crime, human trafficking, and - if history is any guide - even war.
After the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the George W. Bush administration flooded the conquered country with so much cash to pay for reconstruction and other projects in the first year that a new unit of measurement was born.
Pentagon officials determined that one giant C-130 Hercules cargo plane could carry $2.4 billion in shrink-wrapped bricks of $100 bills. They sent an initial full planeload of cash, followed by 20 other flights to Iraq by May 2004 in a $12-billion haul that U.S. officials believe to be the biggest international cash airlift of all time.
This month, the Pentagon and the Iraqi government are finally closing the books on the program that handled all those Benjamins. But despite years of audits and investigations, U.S. Defense officials still cannot say what happened to $6.6 billion in cash.
Nite Moves, a Latham, New York-based adult dancing club that features pole- and couch-dancing, had been seeking to argue that erotic dances counted as “dramatic or musical arts performances,” thereby qualifying for a tax exemption. A Tribunal had rejected that claim.
This means that Nite Moves must pay up on a $125,000 tax bill dating back to 2005 — though the club is appealing the ruling. (…)
To distinguish erotic dancing from, say, ballet, the court finds that real art requires you to go to school. In other words, stripping — or at least, the stripping that goes down at Nite Moves — doesn’t count as art because anyone can do it.
Some unusual solar readings, including fading sunspots and weakening magnetic activity near the poles, could be indications that our sun is preparing to be less active in the coming years.
The results of three separate studies seem to show that even as the current sunspot cycle swells toward the solar maximum, the sun could be heading into a more-dormant period, with activity during the next 11-year sunspot cycle greatly reduced or even eliminated.
One argument against treating aging is that it is not a disease. To an extent, this view stems from the fact that the word aging refers to different things. One is the experience of the passage of time. Another is the acquisition of experience and wisdom that can come from living long. To avoid confusion with these benign aspects, biologists use the term “senescence” for the increasing frailty and risk of disease and death that come with aging. Put more precisely, then, the question at hand is this: Is human senescence a disease?
One approach to defining illness has been to compare a given condition to good health. Is someone’s condition typical of a person of a given gender or age? For instance, the possession of ovaries is healthy for a woman, but not a man. Likewise, one might consider muscle wasting to indicate serious disease in a 20-year-old, but not a 90-year-old. Given that everyone who lives long enough will eventually experience senescence, I can appreciate the view that it is a normal condition and therefore not pathological. Still, from my perspective as someone working on the biological basis of aging, it is hard not to see it as a disease.
Senescence is a process involving dysfunction and deterioration at the molecular, cellular and physiological levels. This endemic malfunction causes diseases of aging. Even if one ages well, escaping the ravages of cancer or type II diabetes, one still dies in the end, and one dies of something. Moreover, in evolutionary terms, aging appears to serve no real purpose, meaning it does not contribute to evolutionary fitness. Why, then, has aging evolved?
The main theory dates back to the 1930s and was developed by J. B. S. Haldane and, later, Peter Medawar—both of University College London—and by the American biologist George C. Williams of the State University of New York, Stony Brook. It argues that aging reflects the decline in the force of natural selection against mutations that exert harmful effects late in life. An inherited mutation causing severe pathology in childhood will reduce the chances of reproduction and so disappear from the population. By contrast, another mutation with similar effects—but which surfaces after a person’s reproductive years—is more likely to persist. Natural selection can even favor mutations that enhance fitness early in life but reduce late-life health. This is because the early-life effects of genes have much stronger effects on fitness. Consequently, populations accumulate mutations that exert harmful effects in late life, and the sum of these effects is aging. Here evolutionary biology delivers a grim message about the human condition: Aging is essentially a multifactor genetic disease. It differs from other genetic diseases only in that we all inherit it. This universality does not mean that aging is not a disease. Instead, it is a special sort of disease.
We are prejudiced against all kinds of other people, based on superficial physical features: We react negatively to facial disfigurement; we avoid sitting next to people who are obese, or old, or in a wheelchair; we favor familiar folks over folks that are foreign. (…)
It makes immediate sense that people would develop aversions against people who actually have infectious diseases. But why does it also lead to these aversions to perfectly healthy people? Because it’s impossible to directly detect the presence of bacteria and viruses and other microscopic parasites; and so we’re forced to use crude superficial cues. Consequently, we make mistakes. Some of those mistakes lead to the irrational avoidance of things (including people) that pose no infection risk at all.
Here’s an example: Animal feces is loaded with parasites that can make you ill. So if something looks like a pile of dog poop, you probably won’t eat it. That’s smart. But what if I took some delicious chocolate fudge and molded it into the shape of poop? Research by Paul Rozin and his colleagues shows that a lot of people still won’t eat it – even though they know it’s fudge! These people aren’t responding to any rational appraisal of infection risk; they are responding – automatically and aversively – to appearances.
The same principle applies in our interactions with other people.
Why is it that men so often self-destruct? (…) We men just make bad decisions. We can’t help it. We’re men.
Women, on the other hand, do almost everything better. We’ve known this intuitively for a long time. If you didn’t, just ask your wife or your mother. But now there’s a raft of evidence that suggests women are better at everything — including investing.
A new study by Barclays Capital and Ledbury Research found that women were more likely to make money in the market, mostly because they didn’t take as many risks. They bought and held. Women trade this way because they aren’t as confident — or perhaps as overconfident — as men, the study found.
Sometimes when I’m lying on my back looking at the sky or the ceiling or some other light-colored background, I swear I can see specks and what looks like little threads floating by. They seem to move when I move my eyes, leading me to believe they’re actually on my eyes. Is there some optical phenomenon that allows us to focus that close? Is there a name for this effect?
Floaters are deposits of various size, shape, consistency, refractive index, and motility within the eye’s vitreous humour, which is normally transparent.
Since these objects exist within the eye itself, they are not optical illusions but are entoptic phenomena.
One specific type of floater is either called Muscae volitantes (from the Latin, meaning ‘flying flies’), or mouches volantes (from the French), and consist of small spots. These are present in most people’s eyes and are attributed to minute remnants of embryonic structures in the vitreous humor.
The Obama administration is leading a global effort to deploy “shadow” Internet and mobile phone systems that dissidents can use to undermine repressive governments that seek to silence them by censoring or shutting down telecommunications networks.
The effort includes secretive projects to create independent cellphone networks inside foreign countries, as well as one operation out of a spy novel in a fifth-floor shop on L Street in Washington, where a group of young entrepreneurs who look as if they could be in a garage band are fitting deceptively innocent-looking hardware into a prototype “Internet in a suitcase.”
Financed with a $2 million State Department grant, the suitcase could be secreted across a border and quickly set up to allow wireless communication over a wide area with a link to the global Internet.
Times change, and with them what, where, and how people eat. In fifteenth-century London a man could be hanged for eating meat on Friday. An ancient Roman was expected to wear a wreath to a banquet. The potato in sixteenth-century Europe was believed to cause leprosy and syphilis. As of two years ago, 19% of America’s meals were being eaten in cars.
Conatus (Latin for effort; endeavor; impulse, inclination, tendency; undertaking; striving) is a term used in early philosophies of psychology and metaphysics to refer to an innate inclination of a thing to continue to exist and enhance itself. This “thing” may be mind, matter or a combination of both.
Over the millennia, many different definitions and treatments have been formulated by philosophers. Seventeenth-century philosophers René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, and Gottfried Leibniz, and their Empiricist contemporary Thomas Hobbes made important contributions.
The history of the term conatus is that of a series of subtle tweaks in meaning and clarifications of scope developed over the course of two and a half millennia. Successive philosophers to adopt the term put their own personal twist on the concept, each developing the term differently such that it now has no concrete and universally accepted definition.
Close relationships, and romantic relationships in particular, are characterized by the small acts of kindness we do for each other. Today you will be doing the dishes, paying for dinner, or taking out the trash, and tomorrow he will be taking you to the airport, putting gas in the car, or buying the groceries. Many of these small acts become so commonplace in relationships that they go unnoticed (how often do you thank your partner for taking out the trash, washing your dishes, or picking up the groceries, especially if it’s become their “job”?). However, when you do notice those small acts, and feel grateful for your partner’s thoughtful behaviors, research shows that both you and your partner benefit.
In 1846, an Irish immigrant named Alexander Turney Stewart opened a store in New York City unlike any that Americans had seen before. Located downtown, on the east side of Broadway, what became known as the Marble Dry Goods Palace was a huge emporium that offered luxury and everyday items alike. Stewart’s innovations as a retailer were numerous: He introduced what are believed to have been the first in-store fashion shows in America. He lavishly appointed his interiors, in striking contrast to the merely functional look of shops up to that point. And he was the first in the nation to use the street-level plate-glass windows as a display for merchandise.
Then there was A. T. Stewart’s most important innovation: His products came with price tags. At that time, in most stores, prices were set by haggling. The result was a frustrating dance between customer and salesperson, who parried back and forth until they managed to arrive at (in the words of one retail historian) “a price which neither party to the transaction considered robbery.” Stewart saw that this experience left buyers feeling taken advantage of, and it encouraged salespeople to squeeze the most from every transaction rather than build long-term relationships with customers. So he marked each product with a fixed price.
Customers embraced the new “no haggling” policy, and the Marble Palace became an enormous success. Sixteen years after the store’s debut, Stewart opened an even bigger one, the Cast Iron Palace at Broadway and 10th Street, which occupied a full city block and at the time was reputedly the largest retail establishment in the world. Stewart’s success—and his idea—did not go unnoticed by other merchants, and soon a plethora of other large stores, from Gimbels to Macy’s to Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia, abandoned haggling and adopted fixed prices. Within a generation, the price tag became ubiquitous; by the late 19th century, fixed prices seemed inseparable from the retail experience.
Almost a century and a half after Stewart’s innovation, a man named Pierre Omidyar opened another store unlike any that Americans had seen before: eBay.
Our house in the western Catskills overlooks the Pepacton Reservoir, a 20-mile ribbon of water between Margaretville and Downsville. Maps on the Internet, depending on their scale and detail, will show you where the reservoir is in relation to nearby towns and roads. What they won’t show you, although every resident of the area knows about them, are the four towns — Arena, Shavertown, Union Grove and Pepacton — that were flooded in the middle ‘50s so that the reservoir could be constructed. (Today, after more than 50 years, resentment against New York City remains strong.) (…)
An apparently empirical project like geography is, and always has been, interpretive through and through. “The map has always been a political agent”(Lize Mogel), has always had a “generative power” (Emily Eliza Scott), and that power can only be released and studied by those who approach their work in the manner of literary critics.
related { Some maps contain deliberate errors or distortions, either as propaganda or as a “watermark” helping the copyright owner identify infringement if the error appears in competitors’ maps. The latter often come in the form of nonexistent, misnamed, or misspelled trap streets. | Wikipedia }
Flaming dessert injures four at Florida restaurant; waiter poured too much booze on bananas foster.
Inside the Weird World of Medical Studies.
