The sorites paradox (from Ancient Greek: sōreitēs, meaning “heaped up”) is a paradox that arises from vague predicates.

The paradox of the heap is an example of this paradox which arises when one considers a heap of sand, from which grains are individually removed.

Is it still a heap when only one grain remains?

If not, when did it change from a heap to a non-heap?

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

photo { Christian Chaize }

If there’s one topic likely to generate spit-flecked ire, it is the controversy over the potential health threat posed by cell phone signals.

That debate is likely to flare following the publication today of some new ideas on this topic from Bill Bruno, a theoretical biologist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

The big question is whether signals from cell phones or cell phone towers can damage biological tissue.

On the one hand, there is a substantial body of evidence in which cell phone signals have supposedly influenced human health and behavior. The list of symptoms includes depression, sleep loss, changes in brain metabolism, headaches and so on.

On the other hand, there is a substantial body of epidemiological evidence that finds no connection between adverse health effects and cell phone exposure.

What’s more, physicists point out that the radiation emitted by cell phones cannot damage biological tissue because microwave photons do not have enough energy to break chemical bonds.

The absence of a mechanism that can do damage means that microwave photons must be safe, they say.

That’s been a powerful argument. Until now.

Today, Bruno points out that there is another way in which photons could damage biological tissue, which has not yet been accounted for.

He argues that the traditional argument only applies when the number of photons is less than one in a volume of space equivalent to a cubic wavelength.

When the density of photons is higher than this, other effects can come into play because photons can interfere constructively.

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }

photo { George Tice }

In a notification sent to all service providers and hosting companies in Turkey on Thursday (28 April), the Telecommunication Communication Presidency (TİB) forwarded a list of banned words and terms. (…)

[Some of the banned words:] Adrianne, Animal, Sister-in-law, Blond, Beat, Enlarger, Nude, Crispy, Escort, Skirt, Fire, Girl, Free, Gay, Homemade, Liseli (’high school student’).

{ Bianet | Continue reading }

{ Kill Devil Hills is a town in Dare County, North Carolina, USA. Nearby Kitty Hawk is frequently cited as the location of the Wright brothers‘ first controlled, powered airplane flights on December 17, 1903. The flights actually occurred in Kill Devil Hills. | Wikipedia | Continue reading Photo: First flight of the Wright Flyer I, December 17, 1903, Orville piloting, Wilbur running at wingtip. }

{ Greenwich Village Historic District Designation Report, 1969 | PDF }

In a relationship, who do you think is more likely to say “I love you” first – men or women?

In a recent study, 64% of participants were likely to think women were the first to say they were in love, and these professions were estimated to occur close to 2 months into a relationship. The stereotype is that women are more interested in relationships, especially serious relationships, and are therefore more likely to confess their feelings sooner than men.

When looking at actual relationships, however, men were more likely to profess their feelings first. 62% of participants reporting on past relationships and 70% reporting on current relationships stated that the man said “I love you” first. On average, men started thinking about professing their love about 3 months into the relationship whereas women in the study started thinking about it closer to 5 months into the relationship.

{ eHarmony | Continue reading }

photo { Eric Antoine }

Let’s consider the butterfly. One of the most taxing movements in sports, the butterfly requires greater energy than bicycling at 14 miles per hour, running a 10-minute mile, playing competitive basketball or carrying furniture upstairs. It burns more calories, demands larger doses of oxygen and elicits more fatigue than those other activities, meaning that over time it should increase a swimmer’s endurance and contribute to weight control.

So is the butterfly the best single exercise that there is? Well, no. The butterfly “would probably get my vote for the worst” exercise, said Greg Whyte, a professor of sport and exercise science. (…)

Ask a dozen physiologists which exercise is best, and you’ll get a dozen wildly divergent replies. (…)

Sticking with an exercise is key, even if you don’t spend a lot of time working out. The majority of the mortality-related benefits from exercising are due to the first 30 minutes of exercise. A recent meta-analysis of studies about exercise and mortality showed that, in general, a sedentary person’s risk of dying prematurely from any cause plummeted by nearly 20 percent if he or she began brisk walking (or the equivalent) for 30 minutes five times a week. If he or she tripled that amount, for instance, to 90 minutes of exercise four or five times a week, his or her risk of premature death dropped by only another 4 percent. So the one indisputable aspect of the single best exercise is that it be sustainable. From there, though, the debate grows heated.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

photo { Indlekofer and Knoepfel }

This study sets out to focus on the nature of changes some major interjections have gone through. (…)

Historically, interjections have been regarded as marginal to language. Latin grammarians described them as non-words, independent of syntax, signifying only feelings or states of mind. Nineteenth-century linguists regarded them as paralinguistic, even non-linguistic phenomena. (…)

Traditional classification of interjections to primary and secondary might help us to narrow down our focus. In keeping with this classification, the words from other word classes (e.g., hell, boy, and Jesus), when used as interjections, construct the category of secondary interjections, and all the other interjections that have already appeared in the dictionary such as wow, oops, ouch, yuck, and whoa form the primary group. The latter interjections are, in point of fact, emotion-expressive so much so that they cannot be expressed by means of other words or phrases.

{ I Will Wow You! Pragmatic Interjections Revisited | Studies in Literature and language | Continue reading | PDF }

Is it true “W” can be used as a vowel?

Sure. Try “how,” which is phonetically equivalent to “hou,” as in house.

{ The Straight Dope | Continue reading }

Brazilian man has claimed his wife attempted to kill him by putting poison into her vagina and inviting him to drink from the furry cup.

Man arrested for singing ‘Kung Fu Fighting.’ Police arrested the singer on racism charges after a man reportedly of Chinese descent complained about his performance of the song.

California gangster’s tattoo of crime scene helps solve murder.

Student yawned so hard during lecture that she couldn’t close her mouth. Holly was taken to Northampton General Hospital where her jaw was eventually freed by forcing 26 wooden splints in her mouth.

Psychologists warn that therapies based on positive emotions may not work for Asians.

Man dressed as cow crawled into a Walmart on all fours and stole 26 Gallons of Milk.

People who overuse credit believe products have unrealistic properties.

A study at a US Buddhist retreat suggests eastern relaxation techniques can protect our chromosomes from degenerating.

The Cognitive System Theory introduced here provides the first fully scientific model of how the hominid brain works, and explains how its two masterstrokes of cognitive development are achieved for each and every one of us in childhood.

Authors compare the frequency of swear words in London teens to the same from an earlier study in East Coast American adolescents.

Investigating behavioural mimicry in the context of stair/escalator choice.

A study discovered that birds which are able to breed in the city center tend to have larger brains.

Researchers at Queen’s University have found a strong association between computer and Internet use in adolescents and engagement in multiple-risk behaviors, including illicit drug use, drunkenness and unprotected sex.

Drinking energy beverages mixed with alcohol may be riskier than drinking alcohol alone.

The brain regions responsible for what might be considered “willpower” show more activity in those who have quit smoking.

Even without symptoms, genital herpes can spread.

Engineering researchers at the University of Southern California have made a significant breakthrough in the use of nanotechnologies for the construction of a synthetic brain. They have built a carbon nanotube synapse circuit whose behavior in tests reproduces the function of a neuron, the building block of the brain.

A new kind of plastic that can repair itself when exposed to ordinary light has been unveiled by scientists in the U.S. for the first time.

Carnegie Mellon researchers build time machine to visually explore space and time.

More than 30 years after they left Earth, NASA’s twin Voyager probes are now at the edge of the solar system.

Can a complete novice become a golf pro with 10,000 hours of practice?

“Can we get the public to think of porn as something that they’re willing to pay for again? We’ll see.” A Denton lawyer devotes his life to fighting America’s porn thiefs.

When you buy an iPhone app, AT&T gets nothing. When you buy an Android app, Verizon gets a cut.

A Contrarian View of Copyright: Hip-Hop, Sampling, and Semiotic Democracy.

The Medieval Origins of Anti-Semitic Violence in Nazi Germany.

Why do we say a “pair of pants” when there’s only one of them?

Shit-faced: a brief history of the word.

Interview With a Trading Legend. (A thirty-year track record (audited) of 41.6% compound returns.)

He’s built a career concocting high-concept fragrances like “Wet Mitten” and “Clean Baby Butt.” Now Christopher Brosius is attempting his next olfactory experiment: creating a perfume you can’t even smell.

The officers were on a training mission, exploring the 4.3 miles of catacombs that twist beneath the 16th arrondissement of Paris. They found 3,000 square feet of subterranean galleries, strung with lights, wired for phones, live with pirated electricity, uncovered a bar, lounge, workshop, dining corner and small screening area.

Sagrada Familia: Gaudí’s cathedral is nearly done, but would he have liked it?

Why is there so many violent crime at fast-food restaurants?

Like all of the other water bodies in Central Park, Turtle Pond is man-made – filled with New York City drinking water. However, you wouldn’t want to drink this water, since it’s filled with five kinds of turtles who live in the Pond year round. Many of these turtles started out as pets in city apartments, but eventually outgrew their urban accommodations, and were brought to the Park by their former owners.

Why do New Yorkers wear so much black?

This is a recording of Allen Ginsberg reading his poem, “America” over Tom Waits’s “Closing Time.” Listen to it naked.

Does every other movie lately seem to have a shot of the leading man casually walking away from a vehicle he’s just blown up?

There’s a form of neurotoxic honey, genuinely known as “mad honey,” created by bees taking nectar from the rhododendron ponticum flower.

Four Nasty Conditions Bad Sunglasses Could Give You.

11 Grammatically Incorrect Movie Titles.

CMYK: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Key.

Unicorn in real life. [videos]

Sperm retrievial machine via China and Sperm Bank ATM.

Probably the first time breast groping has been used in a political poster.

The lion was a gift, but after it died, the pelt and bones were presented to a taxidermist who had never seen a lion.

Meanwhile, on the BBC.

“It is a surprise that a jellyfish — an animal normally considered to be lacking both brain and advanced behavior — is able to perform visually guided navigation, which is not a trivial behavioral task,” said lead researcher Anders Garm of the University of Copenhagen. (…)

Box jellyfish have 24 eyes of four different types, and two of them — the upper and lower lens eyes — can form images and resemble the eyes of vertebrates like humans. The other eyes are more primitive. It was already known that box jellyfish’s vision allows them to perform simpler tasks, like responding to light and avoiding obstacles.

In the new study, scientists found that one species of the cube-shaped box jellyfish, Tripedalia cystophora, uses its upper lens eyes, which are mounted on four cuplike structures, to make sure it stays close to the prop roots of mangrove trees that define its habitat.

{ LiveScience | Continue reading | Neurophilosophy }

artwork { Ellen Gallagher, DeLuxe, 2004–05 [detail] | currently on view at the MoMA, NYC }

Scientists have untangled some — but not nearly all — of the mysteries behind our love and hatred of certain foods. (…)

Our tongues perceive only five basic tastes: sweet, sour, bitter, salty and “umami,” the Japanese word for savory. (…)

“We as primates are born liking sweet and disliking bitter,” said Marcia Pelchat, who studies food preferences at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. The theory is that we’re hard-wired to like and dislike certain basic tastes so that the mouth can act as the body’s gatekeeper.

Sweet means energy; sour means not ripe yet. Savory means food may contain protein. Bitter means caution, as many poisons are bitter. Salty means sodium, a necessary ingredient for several functions in our bodies. (By the way, those tongue maps that show taste buds clumped into zones that detect sweet, bitter, etc.? Very misleading. Taste receptors of all types blanket our tongues — except for the center line — and some reside elsewhere in our mouths and throats.)

Researchers have found only one major human gene that detects sweet tastes, but we all have it. By contrast, 25 or more bitter receptor genes may exist, but combinations vary by person. Some genetic connections are so strong that scientists can predict fairly accurately how people will react to certain bitter tastes by looking at their DNA.

{ Washington Post | Continue reading }

A new study finds that when a ball appears to magically change size in front of their eyes, female dogs notice but males don’t. The researchers aren’t sure what’s behind the disparity, but experts say the finding supports the idea that—in some situations—male dogs trust their noses, whereas females trust their eyes.

{ Science magazine | Continue reading }

photos { Eylül Aslan }

With the steep decline in populations of many animal species, scientists have warned that Earth is on the brink of a mass extinction like those that have occurred just five times during the past 540 million years.

Each of these “Big Five” saw three-quarters or more of all animal species go extinct. (…)

Biologists estimate that within the past 500 years, at least 80 mammal species have gone extinct–from a starting total of 5,570 species. The team’s estimate for the average extinction rate for mammals is less than two extinctions every million years, far lower than the current extinction rate for mammals. (…)

If currently threatened species–those officially classed as critically endangered, endangered, and vulnerable–actually went extinct, and that rate of extinction continued, the sixth mass extinction could arrive in as little as 3 to 22 centuries.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

It has been estimated that the earth alone could accommodate twenty million times its present population, living at 120 per square meter in a 2000-story building covering the entire earth. It would take us 890 years, at our present rate of growth, to get to that point.

{ via EconLib | Continue reading }

painting { Eric Thor Sandberg }

Criminology has yet to achieve full recognition as an independent discipline. (…)

When criminology began to make claims as an independent discipline, it came under heavy attack and the knowledge it produces was criticized as a producer of and product of power–knowledge. (…)

As a case in point, political violence and armed conflict have traditionally been neglected by criminologists, as some consider them to lie outside the realm of the discipline. Criminology has shied away from the study of atrocities, genocide, human rights violations, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, particularly from a perspective that centres on imbalances of social power within societies. However, since the late 1990s and particularly since the beginning of the new millennium, criminologists have been looking beyond terrorism and have started to investigate a multiplicity of topics, such as genocide, torture, child soldiers, war, crimes against humanity, and so on.

{ Muse | Continue reading }

Sony’s huge PlayStation Network (PSN) has been down for a week now following the theft of ID and credit card data on some or all of the gaming and video entertainment network’s 77 million customer accounts. Readers have been asking for comment but I stay out of these things unless I have something new to contribute. That something finally comes a week into the crisis as gamers begin to wonder why the network is still not back in operation and speculate on what this all means to Sony? It’s a huge loss of face, of course, but beyond that the damage to Sony is minimal. And the upside for PSN members, including those involved in the many emerging class action lawsuits, is likely to be bupkes. Nothing.

Recent history suggests Sony’s likely gift to users as an apology for losing their personal data will be some period of free credit monitoring and a free month of PSN service.

{ Robert X. Cringely | Continue reading }

The U.S. economy has finally started to create jobs at a reasonable clip. Inflation is still low. Corporate profits are healthy, and surveys of business conditions suggest that the recovery is, as the Federal Reserve recently put it, “on a firmer footing.” So are happy days here again? Hardly.

Last month, consumer confidence plunged, and pundits are still talking about the possibility of a double-dip recession. Some of this can probably be put down to the general atmosphere of geopolitical turmoil—the threat of nuclear catastrophe in Japan, continued debt problems in Europe, political upheaval in the Middle East.

But, economically speaking, the source of the anxiety is something much more specific: high prices at the gas pump. The price of oil has risen thirty dollars a barrel since February and more than forty per cent since last summer, and the fear is that expensive oil may bring stagflation, as it did during the oil crises of 1973 and 1979, or even put the economy back into reverse. (…)

Last month’s drop in consumer confidence was attributed almost entirely to the spike in gas prices, in line with a 2007 study, by the economists Paul Edelstein and Lutz Kilian, showing that spikes in oil prices have often depressed public sentiment in the past.

{ The New Yorker | Continue reading }

image { Edward Ruscha, Lion in Oil, 2002 }

related { China’s energy use should flatten out sometime around 2030 }

Because the concept of love can mean different things across different types of relationships (e.g. friends, children, romantic relationships), researchers have worked at developing models that allow differentiation between varying experiences of love.

This study identifies the key factors underlying the most popular measures of love in use today through meta-analytic factor analysis. Findings reveal that general love, romantic obsession, and practical friendship are important measures in romantic relationships. Love was positively and obsession was negatively associated with relationship satisfaction and length.

{ SAGE | Continue reading }

The mathematical foundations of electronics predict the existence of four fundamental electronic devices. The resistor, capacitor and inductor are well known. The fourth device, the memristor, was only discovered in 2008 and even now remains an exotic piece of kit.

Memristors are electrical elements whose resistance depends on the current that has passed through it in the past, a phenomenon that physicists call a hysteresis. This makes these devices behave like resistors with memory, hence their name.

Memristors have generated considerable interest because they are simple and cheap to make, operate quickly and at low power and have the potential to store information even when the power is switched off.

So it’s no surprise that great things are expected of them and that various plans are afoot to build them into future generations of microchips. (…)

Today, Alexander Stotland and Massimiliano Di Ventra at the University of California-San Diego, reveal a comprehensive analysis of the effects of noise on memristors. Their conclusion is both surprising and reassuring. Not only should memristors be immune to most types of noise, their memory ought to be enhanced by it.

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }

screenshots { 1 | 2 }

Meet Donald Trump’s bankers. Like the characters in the fairy tale The Emperor’s New Clothes, a gaggle of major financial institutions has finally been forced to admit, after lending Trump billions of dollars, that there’s a lot less to the emperor — or at least his empire — than the banks had believed.

Not quite nine months after bailing out Trump with a rescue package that gave him $65 million in new loans and eased credit terms on his bank debt, Trump’s bankers last week stopped the game. Already more than $3.8 billion in the hole and sliding perilously close to a mammoth personal bankruptcy, the brash New York developer had no choice but to accept the dismantling of his vast holdings.

{ Time, May 1991 | Continue reading }

related { Trump Unable To Produce Certificate Proving He’s Not A Festering Pile Of Shit }

unrelated { Why is the Federal Reserve forking over $220 million in bailout money to the wives of two Morgan Stanley bigwigs? }

I’m sure most of you have heard about female ejaculation, the G-spot, and other mysterious beasts associated with the female orgasm. There is, of course, some debate about whether ALL women are capable of ejaculation, what female ejaculation means, where the G spot is located, and even if the G spot exists.

Things we currently know about female orgasm: swelling in genitalia, increases in blood flow to the clitoris, culminating in spasms of various muscle groups and a spike in heart rate and blood pressure.

As far as female ejaculation, there are definitely women who do it, no question there. The question is, what IS it, and is it necessarily a part of orgasm? Some studies have shown that the fluid which ejaculating women spurt contains fluids which are associated with prostate tissue, which some women have, and which lend credence to the idea of a separate ejaculatory ability in women. Other studies show it’s just urine, and still OTHER studies show it’s a mixture of both. (…)

Let’s just put it this way: electrode needles. IN YOUR CLITORIS.

{ Scientopia | Continue reading }

photo { David Ersser, I Need Sexual Healing (Neon), 2007 | Balsa wood }