The years see what the days will never know
{ In June 1998, the market capitalization of Microsoft + Intel was worth $339 billion, vs. $3.5 billion for Apple. | WolframAlpha via Barry Ritholtz }
Every day, the same, again
Truck driver nearly explodes when air hose lodges in his buttocks during freak accident.
Man admits driving 51 miles with wife on van hood.
Artist says city erased mural it paid him to paint.
Family finds $45,000 in new home, then returns it.
‘Balloon boy’ parents say they’ll sell balloon (to raise money for Japan).
Members of Congress tend to outperform the stock market with their personal investments.
Interview With A Somali Pirate.
The authors of the current study believe that better decisions come with a full bladder.
Study: Teams work best when members are physically close together.
Exploring asexuality, an under-the-radar but increasingly outspoken sexual orientation.
Polygamy is the key to a long life.
Long commutes cause obesity, neck pain, loneliness, divorce, stress, and insomnia.
Age, gender and social advantage affect success in quitting smoking.
Human impacts of rising oceans will extend well beyond coasts.
Were human ancestors ’stay-at-home dads’?
New research suggests we generate more creative ideas for other people than for ourselves.
A year adds up to big changes in brain. Third grade a turning point in how kids solve math problems.
The seemingly never-ending quest for the true identity of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” took a notable step forward last week when the Italian media reported that a skeleton found in a former convent in Florence could be the remains of Lisa Gherardini del Giocondo — the 16th century woman who is believed to have been the model for the world’s most famous painting.
The secret to a successful raid lies in the operational cycle.
The U.S. Postal Service Nears Collapse.
What should Apple buy with its billions? A carrier.
Apple’s Deals May Transform Digital Music.
Why hasn’t the Internet helped the American economy grow as much as economists thought it would?
How I Failed, Failed, and Finally Succeeded at Learning How to Code.
Grindr: Welcome to the World’s Biggest, Scariest Gay Bar.
How Gays Helped Make and Remake America.
How did “gay” come to mean “homosexual”?
Carl Jung, part 1: Taking inner life seriously.
Eighty-one Years. Seventy-nine Movies. Two Oscars. Gene Hackman has delivered some of the grittiest and most memorable performances of the past fifty years. In a rare interview, the legend talks about acting, his late-blooming career as an author, and what he despises most in other men.
Sexual repression, dark alleys, great detectives, ornate prose. Why we all love a Victorian murder.
Mapping 19,993 Trees in Central Park.
The Curious World of Zombie Science.
How can I make my own spaceship?
Be ready to amputate entire chapters. It will be painful. Practical Tips on Writing a Book.
Stories from The Onion as interpreted by Facebook.
A lot of information can be gathered from just observing stools. Color, texture, consistency, and other ‘properties’ can give clues to what is happening in digestion. Related: Untitled, 2010.
Leap into the void. Related: 1960.
Boyfriend scenes. [video]
Terry Moore: How to tie your shoes. [video]
‘The history of the world is the history of a privileged few.’ –Henry Miller
The nothing to hide argument is one of the primary arguments made when balancing privacy against security. In its most compelling form, it is an argument that the privacy interest is generally minimal to trivial, thus making the balance against security concerns a foreordained victory for security. Sometimes the nothing to hide argument is posed as a question: “If you have nothing to hide, then what do you have to fear?” Others ask: “If you aren’t doing anything wrong, then what do you have to hide?”
In this essay, I will explore the nothing to hide argument and its variants in more depth. Grappling with the nothing to hide argument is important, because the argument reflects the sentiments of a wide percentage of the population. In popular discourse, the nothing to hide argument’s superficial incantations can readily be refuted. But when the argument is made in its strongest form, it is far more formidable.
In order to respond to the nothing to hide argument, it is imperative that we have a theory about what privacy is and why it is valuable.
Holding his arms arched over his head, twice
We speculate that mobile phones negatively affect sperm quality in men and may impair male fertility. Men with poor sperm quality planning for pregnancy should be advised not to use cell phone extensively.
‘Think in the morning. Act in the noon. Eat in the evening. Sleep in the night.’ –William Blake
Perfectionism can be positive or negative, depending upon whether you’re striving to live up to your own high standards or straining to meet the expectations of others.
Endeavoured to hail it by emitting a kind of a whistle, holding his arms arched over his head, twice
Do mobile phones cause cancer?
The International Agency for Research into Cancer (IARC), which is part of the World Health Organisation, convened a panel of 31 experts to look at the available evidence. Their verdict: “radiofrequency electromagnetic fields” – the sort given off by mobile phones – belong to “Group 2B”, which means that they “possibly” cause cancer in humans.
‘Obscenity is a cleansing process, whereas pornography only adds to the murk.’ –Henry Miller
In the first years of the twenty-first century, New York City police officers had six different siren noises at their fingertips to alternate and overdub as they attempted to bore through stagnant traffic. The “Yelp” is a high-pitched, rapidly oscillating, jumpy sound that suggests a small dog with large teeth has hold of your thigh and is not about to let go. The “Wail” is the classic keening noise that the Furies might release while pursuing vengeance. The “Hi-Lo,” or “European,” is whiney, forlorn—prone to depression, but undeniably civilized. The “Air-Horn” is vulgarity incarnate—a burp, a rasp, an all-out bursty blast. The “Fast” or “Priority” resembles a hysteric who’s just mainlined crystal meth. The “Manual” is an outcast loner raising its rifle in a solitary low-to-high pulse.
The summer of 2007 saw the first broaching of the possibility that a seventh instrument might be added to the ensemble.
The Rumbler™.
{ Cabinet | Continue reading | NY Times | N.Y.P.D. Sirens | audio }
‘Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition for our existence.’ –Sholem Asch
Why we remember some scenes from early childhood and forget others has long intrigued scientists—as well as parents striving to create happy memories for their kids. One of the biggest mysteries: why most people can’t seem to recall anything before age 3 or 4.
Now, researchers in Canada have demonstrated that some young children can remember events from even before age 2—but those memories are fragile, with many vanishing by about age 10, according to a study in the journal Child Development this month.
‘Genius is the recovery of childhood at will.’ –Arthur Rimbaud
The great thing about cities, the thing that is amazing about cities is as they grow, so to speak, their dimensionality increases. That is, the space of opportunity, the space of functions, the space of jobs just continually increases. And the data shows that. If you look at job categories, it continually increases. I’ll use the word “dimensionality.” It opens up. And in fact, one of the great things about cities is that it supports crazy people. You walk down Fifth Avenue, you see crazy people. There are always crazy people. Well, that’s good. Cities are tolerant of extraordinary diversity.
This is in complete contrast to companies. The Google boys in the back garage so to speak with ideas of the search engine, were no doubt promoting all kinds of crazy ideas and maybe having even crazy people around them. Well, Google is a bit of an exception, because it still tolerates some of that. But most companies start out probably with some of that buzz. But the data indicates that at about 50 employees to a hundred that buzz starts to stop. A company that was more multi dimensional, more evolved, becomes uni dimensional. It closes down.
Indeed, if you go to General Motors or you go to American Airlines or you go to Goldman Sachs, you don’t see crazy people.
‘By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.’ –Cioran
When we hear about stalkers, we generally think of men. But there are certainly women who stalk [estimated at 6% to 26% of stalkers] and now we have some research to give us information on identifying them. Like their male stalker counterparts, women who make threats are more likely to be violent; women who write letters are less likely to be violent; and women [and men] who stalk their prior sexual intimates are the most likely to be violent.
This research article was based on a large database of stalkers (N=1005) from which a sample of 143 female stalkers was gathered.
And after him came a young woman with wild nodding daisies in her hand
Can you imagine getting off a roller coaster ride and falling in love with the first attractive person you see as you leave the ride? Likely not.
But in fact, classic social psychology experiments have shown that sometimes people do misattribute feelings of fear and anxiety to sexual attraction.
More generally, researchers have found that when people feel physiologically aroused (think racing heart, sweaty palms), they use environmental cues to help them determine why they are feeling that way.
‘War is over… If you want it.’ –John Lennon
Very few studies have used an evolutionary approach to help understand fictional heroes, and none have directly addressed how the sex of the author might influence the characteristics of the hero. If evolved behavioral differences in the sexes have influenced the subconscious tendencies of human males and females, these differences should be reflected in the fictional characters each creates. Based on sexual selection and inclusive fitness theory, I predicted that females will be more likely than males to create heroes who have family members, and that family members will be more important in the plotlines of female-generated stories. Information collected from twenty children’s fantasy novels published after 1994 display the predicted trends.
In addition, male authors often created parents who were problematic (insane, irresponsible, or evil), something the female authors never did.
artwork { Nina Hoffmann }
Hey bro I got somethin’ that’ll blow ya mind
There is an extensive literature dealing with English imperative sentences.
As is well known, these sentences have no overt grammatical subject: (1) Close the door. There is general agreement among scholars that these sentences have deep structures involving an underlying subject, “you,” which is deleted by a transformation.
There is a widespread misconception that utterances such as (2) Fuck you, which also appear to have the form of a transitive verb followed by a noun phrase and preceded by no overt subject, are also imperative. This paper will study the syntax of sentences such as (2).
The official adventures of, Flash
{ 1. Image of a tree with a steganographically hidden image. The hidden image is revealed by removing all but the two least significant bits of each color component and a subsequent normalization. | 2. Image of a cat extracted from the tree image. | Wikipedia | full article }
‘All of this beauty of old times is an effect of and not a reason for nostalgia. I know very well that it is our own invention. But it’s quite good to have this kind of nostalgia, just as it’s good to have a good relationship with your own childhood if you have children. It’s a good thing to have nostalgia toward some periods on the condition that it’s a way to have a thoughtful and positive relation to your own present.’ –Michel Foucault
{ Jeff Luker }
The whirr of flapping leathern bands and hum of dynamos from the powerhouse
On the day his country exploded, Santiago Bilinkis stayed at home and watched the riots on television with his wife and infant son. It was painful. In Buenos Aires, one of the world’s great cities, looters were attacking grocery stores. Bilinkis’s bank account—along with every other account in the country—had been frozen by executive decree three weeks earlier. Argentina was out of money.
This was December 20, 2001, a Thursday. (…)
The meltdown of 2008—which nearly destroyed the world’s banking system, sent the United States into its worst recession in 80 years, and put half of Western Europe on the brink of economic collapse—barely registered in Argentina. Andy Freire, Bilinkis’s co-founder at Officenet, told me that he finds it hard not to laugh when his American friends complain about their problems. “Retail sales fall 5 percent in the U.S., and people say it’s a major crisis,” Freire says. “Our sales went down 65 percent in a single month. That’s a crisis.”
