The inscription refers to the most famous public demonstration of ether as an anesthetic during surgery. On October 16th, 1846 a crowd of doctors and students gathered in the surgical amphitheater at Massachusetts General Hospital to watch as a dentist named William T.G. Morton instructed a patient to inhale the fumes from an ether-soaked sponge. After the patient was sufficiently sedated, a surgeon removed a tumor from his neck. When the patient awoke from his ether-induced stupor, the surgeon asked how he felt, to which he reportedly replied, “feels as if my neck’s been scratched.”

{ Smells like science | Continue reading }

installation { Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset, Interstage, 2005 | wax figure, plaster body, iron, aluminium, wood | 300 x 250 x 851 cm }

A new study from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden shows that the brain has built-in mechanisms that trigger an automatic reaction to someone who refuses to share. The reaction derives from the amygdala, an older part of the brain. The subjects’ sense of justice was challenged in a two-player money-based fairness game, while their brain activity was registered by an MR scanner. When bidders made unfair suggestions as to how to share the money, they were often punished by their partners even if it cost them. A drug that inhibits amygdala activity subdued this reaction to unfairness.

{ Karolinska Institutet | Continue reading }

image { Wayne Belger’s Yama (Tibetan Skull Camera) }

…SCVNGR, a $100-million company that makes location-based apps to rival Foursquare and Groupon. (…)

Priebatsch is 22 years old. He’s also worth millions. And not just because he’s had a “Projects” folder on a hard drive since he was 8, made tens of thousands of dollars every month on a startup when he was 16, and dropped out of college after freshman year. He’s the man in charge because he sensed something three years ago that most of the rest of us did not: that a generation raised on video games would want to keep playing a game in real life. “I found out that basically the real world was essentially the same game as Civilization [an old computer game], just with slightly better graphics, maybe, and slightly slower.”

The story of SCVNGR begins with the story of Priebatsch and that game of Sid Meier’s Civilization. His aunt gave it to him when he was a kid, and its premise was simple: Build an ancient civilization strong enough to take over the world. Priebatsch, the son of a biotech entrepreneur and Morgan Stanley VP, was forbidden from watching TV, but could play on the computer. Spending hours with the game, he quickly became addicted not to conquering the world but conquering the game. “The fact that the game was designed by someone always made me think that someone had built it with their own biases,” he says, “I would essentially mine the game into a series of algorithms and know exactly what to do at any given time.”

Priebatsch, like an undergrad reading Marx for the first time, started to look at everything through this new worldview. “I have a much broader definition of game than most other people,” he says, explaining that games are just systems of challenges, rewards, and biases. After years of playing games, Priebatsch felt ready to actually build one.

{ Fortune | Continue reading | Thanks Tim }

“I’ve never felt threatened by Facebook. (…) Facebook has the most to lose because it has a history of altering its privacy policies and not doing the most to protect the privacy of its users,” said Priebatsch. “Facebook will be like Google, Microsoft and IBM before them – they’ve been dominant for maybe a year and I’d give them maybe four more years.”

{ Guardian | Continue reading }

related { 18 months ago, Groupon didn’t exist. Today, it has over 70 million users in 500-odd different markets, is making more than a billion dollars a year, has dozens if not hundreds of copycat rivals, and is said to be worth as much as $25 billion. What’s going on here? | Reuters | full story }

{ Kevin Cyr }

The widely publicized hack of Sony’s computer networks is worse than previously thought, also affecting 24.6 million Sony Online Entertainment network accounts. (…)

Add this to the 77 million accounts that may have been compromised last week, and Sony is responsible for one of the largest recorded data breaches.

{ Computer World | Continue reading }

Remember, after the recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan, those stories about wallets filled with money being found and turned-in to the authorities, still stuffed with cash? That’s one positive aspect of Japanese culture, but does it also make them too trusting? (…)

“For whatever reason (low crime rate, maybe?),” my reader says, “the Japanese cannot seem to get their heads around the fact that unencrypted cardholder data sitting on servers in unsecured areas and being transmitted across public networks is a bit of a risk. Every other country in Asia has grasped this easy concept, but not Japan. (…)

I can’t imagine such exposed servers having not been repeatedly explored by bad guys over the past two years.  That information isn’t just vulnerable, it is gone.

{ Robert X. Cringely | Continue reading }

{ Japan earthquake, aftermath }

There’s no such thing as a free lunch, and that goes for your brain, too. Every time you amass the willpower to do anything, it has mental costs. (…)

Starting an activity seems to take a larger of willpower and other resources than keeping going with it. Required activation energy can be adjusted over time – making something into a routine lowers the activation energy to do it. (…)

This is a major hurdle for a lot of people in a lot of disciplines – just getting started.

{ LifeHacker | Continue reading }

{ Michel Foucault, This is not a pipe, 1968 | full text }

A new study of itch adds to growing evidence that the chemical signals that make us want to scratch are the same signals that make us wince in pain.

The interactions between itch and pain are only partly understood, said itch and pain researcher Diana Bautista.

The skin contains some nerve cells that respond only to itch and others that respond only to pain. Others, however, respond to both, and some substances cause both itching and pain.

{ UC Berkeley | Continue reading }

We sat around night after night getting stoned and trying to come up with original ideas to make money. Since Bo was broke, we decided that we would do two banks, one after the other, and use the distraction of the first to reduce the police presence at the second. We also wanted a natural barrier between the banks, some type of separation that would slow down the response from the first bank to the second. The simplest would be mountains or a river, something natural. (…)

Finally, we decided on our first bank, which was staffed by women. It was about two-and-a-half miles from the big bridge. It was sort of on the edge of a residential area. There was an easy exit to the main street and an adjacent residential street where we could change cars or follow the street all the way back to the bridge on-ramp by staying off the main avenue. For some reason, cops always want to go to the bank after it’s been robbed. They know you won’t be there, but they still go.

{ Crime Magazine | Continue reading }

{ In 1993, a convicted murderer was executed. His body was given to science, segmented, and photographed for medical research. In 2011, we used photography to put it back together. | 12:31 | more | Thanks Tim }

Danish researchers attempted to establish standard mortality ratios for the drugs cannabis, cocaine, amphetamine, MDMA (ecstasy) and opioids (e.g. heroin). (…)

In brief, the results showed the following: (…)

3. Pot smokers showed 5x increase in mortality rates (compared to the general population). (…)

4. Cocaine and amphetamine users showed 6x death rates of the general population. (…)

5. Opiod users show increased mortality rates. Findings for both stimulants and opioids are in accordance with studies from other countries. Users of Heroin and other opioids showed by far the highest mortality rates of all drugs of abuse.

6. Ecstasy (MDMA) users did not show increased mortality rates.

{ Neuropoly | Continue reading }

screenshot { Harvey Keitel in Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant, 1992 )

A psychology study from Hong Kong suggests that, among men, the impulses to make love and war are deeply intertwined.

In a 2002 book, Chris Hedges compellingly argued that war is both an addiction and a way of engaging in the sort of heroic struggle that gives our lives meaning.

Evolutionary psychologists, on the other hand, see war as an extension of mating-related male aggression. They argue men compete for status and resources in an attempt to attract women and produce offspring, thereby passing on their genes to another generation. This competition takes many forms, including violence and aggression against other males — an impulse frowned upon by modern society but one that can be channeled into acceptability when one joins the military.

It’s an interesting and well-thought-out theory, but there’s not a lot of direct evidence to back it up. That’s what makes “The Face That Launched a Thousand Ships,” a paper just published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, so intriguing.

A team of Hong Kong-based researchers led by psychologist Lei Chang of Chinese University conducted four experiments that suggest a link between the motivation to mate and a man’s interest in, or support for, war.

{ Miller-McCune | Continue reading }

In contrast to the widespread idea that some people have good lives and others bad, I think that while some lives are better than others, no lives are good enough to count as (non-comparatively) good. (…)

Whatever view one might have about what makes a life good or bad, human lives fall short on the good things but abound in the bad. (…)

Consider pleasures and pains. Most lives contain both, to varying degrees, but there is an unfortunate asymmetry between these that seems to apply to even the best of lives. The upshot of this is that there is much more pain than pleasure. (…)

People tend to forget how much of their lives are spent tired, hungry, thirsty, in pain and being either too hot or too cold or in need of voiding their bladders and bowels. The same is true of how much time people spend bored, stressed, anxious, fearful, frustrated, irritated, sad, and lonely, to name but a few examples. Also unnoticed is how bad the worst parts of a life are. They often, but not always, come later in life, but the life as a whole cannot be evaluated without considering them. Moreover, we spend a very short period of time in our prime. Most of a person’s life, for those who live to old age, is spent in steady decline.

{ The Philosophers’ Magazine | Continue reading }

photo { Alex Prager }

There are (at least) two ways to implement a (Star Trek style) transporter:

1. A space-time wormhole takes you “directly” from here to there, or

2. We scan you, send the info, make a new copy at the other end, and destroy the original.

Some people care greatly about transporter type; they’d pay to use type #1, but pay greatly to avoid using type #2.  But regardless of the morality of a type #2 transporter, I’m pretty confident that if cheap type #2 transporters were available, but not type #1, many people would use them often. (…)

A similar relation applies to two types of super-watches. (…) Here are the two ways to make super-watches:

1. Time Machine + Memory Wipe: The second time you push the button you enter a time machine that brings you back to soon after the moment you first pushed the button,  displaced by a few feet.  It also erases all memories you might have acquired since the first time you pushed the button.  And no, you can’t bring anything else with you in the time machine.

2. Limited Time Copier:  When you turn on the watch it makes an exact copy of you and puts that copy a few feet away.  When you turn the watch off, or it automatically turns off, you are destroyed.

{ Overcoming Bias | Continue reading }

Almost every country in the EU last week approved the use of Meat Glue in food. Technically called thrombian, or transglutaminase (TG), it is an enzyme that food processors use to hold different kinds of meat together.

Imitation crab meat is one of the more common applications: it’s made from surimi, a “fish-based food product” made by pulverizing white fish like pollock or hake into a paste, which is then mixed with meat glue so that the shreds stick together and hold the shape wanted for it by its creator.

Chicken nuggets are also often bound with meat glue, as are meat mixtures meant to mold like sausage but without the casing. Meat glue is also used by high-end chefs like New York restaurant WD-50’s Wylie Dufresne, who is famous for his shrimp pasta dish—instead of shrimp with pasta, he just makes the pasta out of shrimp.

{ Discovery | Continue reading }

When we think of demographics that are easily distracted, we tend to think of younger generations, people on their phones over dinner or texting while driving, or only listening to you with one ear while they listen to their ipod with the other. But when we’re talking about cognitive tasks like working memory, the ability to work without distractions is actually highest when you’re younger, and decreases with age. Working memory is the ability to store bits of information and manipulate them over a short period of time. How long the working memory lasts for depends on what you’re trying to remember (say, a string of words that makes sense over a string of numbers that doesn’t), the amount of information you’re trying to process, and on how distracted you are.

{ Neurotic Physiology | Continue reading }

Recently, scientists have begun to focus on how architecture and design can influence our moods, thoughts and health. They’ve discovered that everything—from the quality of a view to the height of a ceiling, from the wall color to the furniture—shapes how we think. (…)

In 2009, psychologists at the University of British Columbia studied how the color of a background—say, the shade of an interior wall—affects performance on a variety of mental tasks. They tested 600 subjects when surrounded by red, blue or neutral colors—in both real and virtual environments.

The differences were striking. Test-takers in the red environments, were much better at skills that required accuracy and attention to detail, such as catching spelling mistakes or keeping random numbers in short-term memory.

Though people in the blue group performed worse on short-term memory tasks, they did far better on tasks requiring some imagination, such as coming up with creative uses for a brick or designing a children’s toy. In fact, subjects in the blue environment generated twice as many “creative outputs” as subjects in the red one.

{ WSJ | Continue reading }

Negotiations trigger anxiety. Across four studies, we demonstrate that anxiety is harmful to negotiator performance.

Compared to negotiators experiencing neutral feelings, negotiators who feel anxious expect lower outcomes, make lower first offers, respond more quickly to offers, exit bargaining situations earlier, and ultimately obtain worse outcomes.

{ Science Direct | Continue reading }

…to recognize that we now live in a different, more constrained world in which prices of raw materials will rise and shortages will be common.

Accelerated demand from developing countries, especially China, has caused an unprecedented shift in the price structure of resources: after 100 years or more of price declines, they are now rising, and in the last 8 years have undone, remarkably, the effects of the last 100-year decline. (…)

The primary cause of this change is not just the accelerated size and growth of China, but also its astonishingly high percentage of capital spending, which is over 50% of GDP, a level never before reached by any economy in history, and by a wide margin. Yes, it was aided and abetted by India and most other emerging countries, but still it is remarkable how large a percentage of some commodities China was taking by 2009. Exhibit 3 shows that among important non-agricultural commodities, China takes a relatively small fraction of the world’s oil, using a little over 10%, which is about in line with its share of GDP (adjusted for purchasing parity). The next lowest is nickel at 36%. The other eight, including cement, coal, and iron ore, rise to around an astonishing 50%! In agricultural commodities, the numbers are more varied and generally lower: 17% of the world’s wheat, 25% of the soybeans, 28% of the rice, and 46% of the pigs.

{ Business Insider | Continue reading }