A study using census data from nine countries shows that religion there is set for extinction, say researchers.

The study found a steady rise in those claiming no religious affiliation.

The team’s mathematical model attempts to account for the interplay between the number of religious respondents and the social motives behind being one.

The result, reported at the American Physical Society meeting in Dallas, US, indicates that religion will all but die out altogether in those countries.

The team took census data stretching back as far as a century from countries in which the census queried religious affiliation: Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland.

{ BBC | Continue reading }

Our problem with public cell phone conversations has nothing to do with how cool he thinks he is, or even his stupid voice. It’s all in our heads.

Science has proven that hearing half a conversation, as you’re forced to do when close to a cell phone user, is inherently more distracting to the human brain. In one experiment, people were asked to try to concentrate on a task in total silence, and then while overhearing two people conversing with each other. They performed equally well both times. But when half a conversation was played, performances dropped dramatically.

{ 6 Things That Annoy You Every Day (Explained by Science) | Cracked | Continue reading }

Jeannie asks, “Why are you here?” and Charlie, dead-panned, replies, without regret: “Drugs.” And then he slowly disarms her bitchiness with his outrageously sexy insouciance, transforming her annoyance into delight (they end up making out).

That’s when we first really noticed Charlie Sheen, and it’s the key moment in his movie career (it now seems to define and sum up everything that followed). He hasn’t been as entertaining since. Until now. In getting himself fired from Two and a Half Men, this privileged child of the media’s sprawling entertainment Empire has now become its most gifted prankster. And now Sheen has embraced the post-Empire, making his bid to explain to all of us what celebrity means in that world. Whether you like it or not is beside the point. It’s where we are, babe. We’re learning something. (…)

Post-Empire isn’t just about admitting doing “illicit” things publicly and coming clean—it’s a (for now) radical attitude that says the Empire lie doesn’t exist anymore, you friggin’ Empire trolls. To Empire gatekeepers, Charlie Sheen seems dangerous and in need of help because he’s destroying (and confirming) illusions about the nature of celebrity. He’s always been a role model for a certain kind of male fantasy. Degrading, perhaps, but aren’t most male fantasies? (I don’t know any straight men who fantasize about Tom Cruise’s personal life.) Sheen has always been a bad boy, which is part of his appeal—to men and women. There’s a manly mock-dignity about Sheen that both sexes like a lot. What Sheen has exemplified and has clarified is the moment in the culture when not giving a fuck about what the public thinks about you or your personal life is what matters most—and what makes the public love you even more (if not exactly CBS or the creator of the show that has made you so wealthy). It’s a different brand of narcissism than Empire narcissism.

{ Bret Easton Ellis | Continue reading }

Why is it that some of us can’t live without an iPod perpetually connected to our ears while others couldn’t care less about music?

Our love of listening to tunes may be influenced by whether or not we carry a particular gene.

Researchers have discovered that a gene with the snappy name arginine vasopressin receptor 1A (AVPR1A), is found more frequently in people who relish a good toe-tapper. (…)

Studies have also found genetic traits associated with being tone deaf. Other genes have been found to relate to absolute pitch, aka “perfect pitch” (being able to name a certain note just by hearing it).

{ Elements Science | Continue reading }

Forty years ago, on March 21, 1971, Hunter S. Thompson and a Chicano activist attorney named Oscar Zeta Acosta drove from Los Angeles to Las Vegas to talk over an article Thompson was writing about the barrios of East L.A. When the account of their journey appeared in Rolling Stone in November of that year, Thompson and Acosta had morphed into Raoul Duke and his 300-pound Samoan attorney and the trunk of their car, the Great Red Shark, had become a rolling drug dispensary. (…)

Fear and Loathing compresses two separate trips Thompson took to Las Vegas that spring – the first to cover a motorcycle race called the Mint 400, the second to cover the National District Attorneys’ Conference on Drug Abuse – into a single hellish week of drug consumption and debauchery.

{ The Millions | Continue reading }

On 29 April 1971, Thompson began writing the full manuscript in a hotel room in Arcadia, California, in his spare time. (…)

In November 1971, Rolling Stone published the combined texts of the trips as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream as a two-part article illustrated by Ralph Steadman. (…)

The New York Times said it is “by far the best book yet on the decade of dope.”

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

photo { Thompson and Acosta, 1971 }

{ The New York Times paywall is costing the newspaper $40-$50 million to design and construct, Bloomberg has reported. And it can be defeated through four lines of Javascript. | Nieman Journalism Lab | full story | image: New York Times Magazine cover by John Maeda }

related:

{ Through a special agreement with more than 800 newspapers worldwide, the Newseum displays these front pages each day on its website. }

How do you distill the past 40 years addiction research into ten essential messages? (…)

1. Addiction is fundamentally about compulsive behavior
In normal behaviors, the control in our brains is top down. In addiction the cortex (the decision making bit of the brain) becomes ‘eroded’ to a ‘dehumanised’ compulsion.

(…)

2. Compulsive drug seeking starts outside conscious thought

(…)

3. Addiction is about 50% inherited, but it’s much more complicated than that…


(…)

4. 75-90% of those asking for help from services have diagnosable mental health problems including depression, social phobia and post traumatic stress disorder.

(…)

5. Addiction is a chronic relapsing disorder in the majority


(…)

6. Different therapies appear to produce similar treatment outcomes 


(…)

7. “Come back when you are motivated” is no longer an acceptable therapeutic response


(…)

10. Change takes time


{ Binge Inking | Continue reading }

screenshot { The Naked Gun, 1988 }

One the big questions that trouble cosmologists and particle physicists is the distribution of matter and antimatter in the Universe. It certainly looks as if matter dominates the cosmos but looks can be deceiving. We may just live in a corner of the universe that happens to be dominated by matter.

Today, we find there’s a little extra antimatter in our corner thanks to the work of the STAR collaboration at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory in the US.

These guys banged together 10^9 gold nuclei at energies of 200 GeV and spotted 18 antinuclei of helium-4 in the ensuing wreckage. That’s an impressive achievement by an standards–at the very least we now know antihelium-4 can exist.

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }

photo { Edward Weston }

When we hear the word “universe,” we think that means everything: every star, every galaxy, everything that exists. But in physics, we’ve come upon the possibility that what we’ve long thought to be everything may actually only be a small part of something that is much, much bigger. The word “multiverse” refers to that bigger expanse, the new totality of reality, and our universe would be just a piece of that larger whole.

Scientists have many proposals. In some, the other universes have the same laws of physics and the same particles making up matter. So except perhaps for some environmental differences, pretty much what we see here is what happens there. In some multiverse proposals, the other universes could be radically different from what we know, the particles could be different, the laws of physics could appear different. And in others—ones that frankly don’t compel me—even the kinds of mathematics that govern the physics in those realms might be different from the math that we are familiar with.

{ Research/Columbia University | Continue reading }

image { Mars and Beyond, Disney, 1957 }

A federal judge rejected Google’s $125 million class-action settlement with authors and publishers, delivering a blow to the company’s ambitious plan to build the world’s largest digital library and bookstore. (…)

The court’s decision throws into legal limbo one of Google’s most ambitious projects: a plan to digitize millions of books from libraries.

The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers sued Google in 2005 over its digitizing plans. After two years of painstaking negotiations, the authors and publishers devised with Google a sweeping settlement that would have helped to bring much of the publishing industry into the digital age.

The deal turned Google, the authors and the publishers into allies who defended the deal against an increasingly vocal chorus of opponents that included academics, copyright experts, the Justice Department and foreign governments. (…)

The deal would have allowed Google to make millions of out-of-print books broadly available online and to sell access to them, while giving authors and publishers new ways to earn money from digital copies of their works. Yet the deal faced a tidal wave of opposition from Google rivals like Amazon and Microsoft, as well as some academics, authors, legal scholars, states and foreign governments. The Justice Department opposed the deal, fearing that it would give Google a monopoly over millions of so-called orphan works, books whose right holders are unknown or cannot be found.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

AT&T is paying $1300 per T-Mobile subscriber and by the time the deal is finished extra costs will probably raise that to $1400 or more.

Were I [Verizon CEO] Seidenberg, then, I’d spend right up to that level to snag customers from T-Mobile. Anything under $1300 is a bargain.

{ Robert X. Cringely | Continue reading | AT&T needs T-Mobile most for its WiFi }

Mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese, meatloaf…they may be bad for your arteries, but according to an upcoming study, they’re good for your heart and emotions. The study focuses on “comfort food” and how it makes people feel. (…)

In another experiment, eating chicken soup in the lab made people think more about relationships, but only if they considered chicken soup to be a comfort food—a question they’d been asked long before the experiment, along with many other questions, so they wouldn’t remember it.

{ APS | Continue reading }

Researchers who have spent the last two years studying the security of car computer systems have revealed that they can take control of vehicles wirelessly.

The researchers were able to control everything from the car’s brakes to its door locks to its computerized dashboard displays by accessing the onboard computer through GM’s OnStar and Ford’s Sync, as well as through the Bluetooth connections intended for making hands-free phone calls. They presented their findings this week.

{ Technology Review | Continue reading }

An emerging body of research is suggesting that spending time alone, if done right, can be good for us — that certain tasks and thought processes are best carried out without anyone else around, and that even the most socially motivated among us should regularly be taking time to ourselves if we want to have fully developed personalities, and be capable of focus and creative thinking.

There is even research to suggest that blocking off enough alone time is an important component of a well-functioning social life — that if we want to get the most out of the time we spend with people, we should make sure we’re spending enough of it away from them.

{ The Boston Globe | Continue reading }

photo { Helmut Newton }

Humans are asymmetric animals. Early in our embryonic development, the heart turns to the left. The liver develops on the right. The left and right lungs have distinct structure. (…)

When it comes to handedness, another basic human asymmetry, which reflects the structure and function of the brain, the reversed pattern is relatively common, and for all that, not easily understood. (…)

The riddle of what underlies handedness remains. Its proportions — roughly 90 percent of people are right-handed and 10 percent left-handed — stay consistent over time.

Hand dominance (whether left or right) is related to brain asymmetry. And that, Dr. Francks said, “is not at all understood; we’re really at the very beginning of understanding what makes the brain asymmetrical.”

Though brain asymmetries exist in our closest primate relatives, there seems to be general consensus that the human brain is more profoundly asymmetric, and that understanding that asymmetry will show us much about who we are and how our brains work.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

Even if Japan’s nuclear crisis is contained, its earthquake and tsunami now seem certain to be, economically speaking, among the worst natural disasters in history, with total losses potentially as high as two hundred billion dollars. In response, fearful investors sent the Nikkei down almost twenty per cent on the first day of trading after the tsunami, and it’s still down more than ten per cent. Yet, while the fear is understandable, this may turn out to have been an overreaction: history suggests that, despite the terrifying destruction and the horrific human toll, the long-term impact of the quake on the Japanese economy could be surprisingly small.

{ New Yorker | Continue reading }

The first day of spring arrives on varying dates (from March 19-21) in different years for two reasons: Our year is not exactly an even number of days; and Earth’s slightly noncircular orbit, plus the gravitational tug of the other planets, constantly changes our planet’s orientation to the sun from year to year.

This year, spring started Sunday, March 20, at 7:21 p.m. EDT (23:21 UTC). That’s when the so-called vernal equinox occurs.

{ LiveScience | Continue reading }

{ The Systems Theory Framework of Career Development | PDF }

Man posing as officer pulls over undercover police vehicle.

Gay couple spent the last 20 years pretending a baby doll named Digby is their son.

Avalanche victims buried in Canada die significantly quicker than those buried in Switzerland.

Man busted for polygamy after unfriending wife No. 1.

Man charged with stabbing four people, killing one, after he became enraged because people were criticizing him for being flatulent, police said.

Philadelphia magazine fired editor Larry Platt for giving a framed photo of his testicle to a female employee.

Vegetarian throws meal at flight attendant.

Coyote Attacks: An Increasing Suburban Problem.

Quentin Tarantino Sues Neighbor Over Pet Birds.

U.S. millionaires say $7 million not enough to be rich.

In the last five years, full-fledged adults have seemingly given up the telephone — land line, mobile, voice mail and all.

Banking on a Paywall at The New York Times. Related: New York Times paywall: wishful thinking or just crazy? And: Here’s what the New York Times paywall looks like (to Canadians).

A study of magicians’ fake movements.

An afternoon nap tunes out negative emotions, tunes in positive ones.

The mathematics of being nice.

Study explains why birds crash into buildings.

New gadget provides fresh insight into goose-bumps.

Stress affects the balance of bacteria in the gut and immune response.

How Network Theory Can Prevent Extinctions.

Two stars caught fusing into one. Astronomers observe a merger in action for the first time.

Current computer graphics are fairly well known and understood. But how did we get here? The evolution of computer graphics is intertwined with textual display, and it is difficult to consider the two separately.

The Digital Crimes Unit at Microsoft, working with the US authorities, has managed to lay the smack down on the world’s largest spam network, Rustock.

How the iPhone Led to the Sale of T-Mobile USA.

How did a British polytechnic graduate become the design genius behind £200billion Apple?

The King of LSD.

Owsley Stanley died last weekend in a car crash in Australia, where he lived. It was Owsley who gave acid to Jimi Hendrix, Pete Townshend and Brian Jones (among many others) at the legendary Monterey Pop Festival of 1967. It was Owsley who agreed to deliver a lifetime supply of LSD to John Lennon. [NY Times, Rolling Stones]

John Hoke was fired from the federal government in 1962 because he wanted to build a boat powered by the sun.

The evolving design of cemeteries.

Cannibals Seeking Same: A Visit To The Online World Of Flesh-Eaters.

The 44-year-old ex-heavyweight champion is in bed by 8 and often up as early as 2 in the morning, at which point he takes a solitary walk around the gated compound in the Las Vegas suburb where he lives while listening to R&B on his iPod. Tyson then occupies himself with reading (he’s an avid student of history, philosophy and psychology), watching karate movies or taking care of his homing pigeons, who live in a coop in the garage, until 6, when his wife, Lakiha (known as Kiki), gets up.

Fire is a rare species: the professional boxer-model-actress.

What if your wife were a porn star?

Stan Lee on Which Superhero Has the Best Penis.

Sean Parker, the Napster founder and 31-year-old Facebook billionaire, paid $20 million to buy 40 West 10th Street, one of the best townhouses in Greenwich Village. More: As a teenage computer hacker in the Washington, DC, suburbs a decade and a half ago, Sean Parker had acceptable technology skills but none of the out-and-out wizardry of a Bill Gates or a Steve Jobs.

Was Monopoly originally meant to teach people about the evils of capitalism?

Russian Anarcho-Punk zine: PunkWay #5, winter 2011

How Much Radiation Do We Absorb Every Day?

7 Ways Larry Page Is Defining Google’s Future.

World’s Top Scientific Cities.

How Shar-Pei dogs got their wrinkles.

Ambient music and live NYPD police radio.

The JWT Salt Lick BBQ truck at SXSW is so good if you were a cow you would eat yourself. [Thanks Glenn]

Do you use a hand sanitizer?