In December last year, a new research paper revealed how a protein called perforin – the ‘bullet’ of the immune system – kills rogue cells in our body.

How these immune pore-forming proteins function has been a key question since the discovery of “haemolytic complement proteins” in the 1890s by the Nobel laureate Jules Bordet. Bordet was the first to notice that the human immune system was capable of punching holes in target cells.

But as Professor Joe Trapani, head of the Cancer Immunology Program at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre and one of the authors of the paper, says, “Until now, perforin has been a real black box. No-one has really known how it all fits together to form a pore”.

{ Wellcome Trust | Continue reading }

painting { Gustav Klimt, Beethoven Frieze, 1902 }

{ Robert Lane Green, You Are What You Speak | Continue reading }

{ TJ Proechel }

{ thekingoflimbs.com }

Hugh Hefner already has his final resting place picked out and paid for: a crypt next to Marilyn Monroe’s in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles. Not that he has plans to use it anytime soon. Hefner, who will turn 85 in April, lives these days what appears to be the life of an invalid, or even of a cosseted mental patient: wearing pajamas all day; rarely venturing out of the house; taking most of his meals in his bedroom — the menu seldom varying, the crackers and potato chips carefully prescreened to remove any broken ones. He is hard of hearing in his right ear and has an arthritic back that causes him to lumber a little when he walks. But he is in otherwise enviable shape for an octogenarian. (…)

A couple of weeks later, Hefner was on the business pages, trying to buy back his own company. (…) Hefner startled even his own board by announcing that he wanted to make Playboy Enterprises, which he took public in 1971, private again. He offered the stockholders $5.50 a share, or more than 30 percent beyond what the stock was trading for. But this was slim consolation to investors who had been unhappily watching Hefner live like a sultan at their expense while the value of their shares declined to single digits from a high of $32.19.

Strictly speaking, Playboy Enterprises, and not Hefner, owns the Playboy Mansion, a 1920s Gothic-style spread southwest of Hollywood. Hefner pays rent and covers non-business-related expenses­. The company pays for the upkeep of the house and grounds, and the salaries of the 80-employee staff, which includes a round-the-clock kitchen crew and a team of 13 who take care of Hef’s personal and business needs. Last year Hefner’s bill was $800,000, while the company kicked in $2.3 million. (…)

A late bloomer sexually, Hefner didn’t masturbate until he was 18, and after years of foreplay, he finally managed to lose his virginity when he was 22. (…)

Mr. Playboy’s heyday was the ’70s, when, as the money poured in, Hefner took to wearing pajamas round the clock, working from his bedroom, where he also slept with pretty much whomever he chose, and jetting around in the Big Bunny, his customized DC-9. The ’80s, though, were his anni horribiles. Overexpanded, the business went sour, Hefner clashed with the Reagan administration and the Moral Majority and in 1985 he suffered a stroke, in part brought on, he insisted, by the unfavorable publicity surrounding the 1980 murder of the Playmate Dorothy Stratten.

Hefner now says that his 1989 marriage to Kimberley Conrad, January Playmate of the Month the year before, was an attempt to seek refuge — a “safe harbor from the waves.” (…) He and Conrad broke up in 1998, though they did not divorce until 12 years later. “During the marriage I was faithful,” he said to me emphatically, “and she was not.” (Hefner, for all his advanced views, clings to the double standard and has never entirely got over his first wife’s admission that while they were engaged she had an affair with a high-school coach.)

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

related { Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion is being investigated by the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health after 100 people reported becoming sick after attending a fundraiser and party there earlier this month. }

{ Wallace Kirkland/LIFE | Robert Rauschenberg and His Wife Prepare Artwork, Circa 1951. Pete Wentz says: “Here Rauschenberg is at the forefront of what will become live art or street art. It’s interesting that he’s doing it inside, of course.” }

Women tend to be better than men at reading other people’s subtle facial cues, especially cues from the eyes. Because of the gender difference in cognitive empathy – the ability to notice and correctly interpret body language – psychobiologists have hypothesized that testosterone levels could play a role in “mind reading” ability, or lack thereof.

A new study in PNAS validates this hypothesis by demonstrating that a dose of testosterone can make women lose some of their cognitive empathy.

{ ICHS | Continue reading }

We perceive our own bodies in many different ways. We can look at our bodies, feel touch on our bodies, and also feel our body from within, as when we experience our hearts racing or butterflies in our stomachs. One way to check how good people are at perceiving their body from within is to ask them to count their heartbeats over a few seconds, but without taking their own pulse. Neuroscientists believe that the more accurate people are at this task, the better their perception of internal bodily states is. Can our ability to detect our own heartbeat tell us something about our body-image, that is, the conscious and mainly visual representation of how our body looks like?

To answer this question, we, first, measured how good people are at feeling their body from within, using the heartbeat counting task. We then measured how good people are at perceiving their own body-image from the outside, by using a procedure that tricks them into feeling that a fake, rubber hand is their own hand.

The less accurate people were in monitoring their heartbeat, the more they were influenced by the illusion. (…)

It seems that a stable perception of the body from the outside, what is known as “body image”, is partly based on our ability to accurately perceive our body from within, such as our heartbeat.

{ Body in Mind | Continue reading }

photo { Corrado Dalcò }

“My lover thrust his hand through the hole,” she says, “and my insides groaned because of him.”

This ode to sexual consummation can be found in—of all places—the Bible. (…)

What does the Bible really say about sex?

{ Newsweek | Continue reading }

Acoels, which are thought to be older than both Protostomes (mouth develops before the anus) and Deuterostomes (anus first). But now a team of evolutionary biologists is suggesting that Acoles belong within the group of Deuterostomes. This even though Acoles don’t have a separate mouth and anus at all, but an opening that serves both functions.

{ Pleiotropy | Continue reading }

Computers are getting faster. Everybody knows that. Also, computers are getting faster faster — that is, the rate at which they’re getting faster is increasing.

True? True.

So if computers are getting so much faster, so incredibly fast, there might conceivably come a moment when they are capable of something comparable to human intelligence. Artificial intelligence. All that horsepower could be put in the service of emulating whatever it is our brains are doing when they create consciousness — not just doing arithmetic very quickly or composing piano music but also driving cars, writing books, making ethical decisions, appreciating fancy paintings, making witty observations at cocktail parties.

If you can swallow that idea, and Kurzweil and a lot of other very smart people can, then all bets are off. From that point on, there’s no reason to think computers would stop getting more powerful. They would keep on developing until they were far more intelligent than we are. Their rate of development would also continue to increase, because they would take over their own development from their slower-thinking human creator. (…)

We will successfully reverse-engineer the human brain by the mid-2020s. By the end of that decade, computers will be capable of human-level intelligence. Kurzweil puts the date of the Singularity at 2045. In that year, he estimates, given the vast increases in computing power and the vast reductions in the cost of same, the quantity of artificial intelligence created will be about a billion times the sum of all the human intelligence that exists today.

{ Time | Continue reading }

In September 2010, Wright, his editor, the New Yorker fact-checking team and the magazine’s editor-in-chief, David Remnick, met for eight hours with the spokesman for the Church of Scientology, Tommy Davis, along with Davis’ wife and four lawyers representing the church, to discuss the facts in the piece.

{ NPR | Continue reading | Why screenwriter and director Paul Haggis resigned from the Church of Scientology after spending nearly 35 years with it | The New Yorker | full story }

photo { David Stewart }

{ Memory Tapes, Green Knight (CREEP Remix) | mp3 }

I’ve published several books, won adoring reviews, and even sold a few copies. But I’ve made almost no money and had my heart broken. Here’s everything you don’t want to know about how publishing really works.

Being the author of several critically acclaimed, moderately successful books has given me an extraordinary, exciting, occasionally lucrative, quite public life. It has also broken my heart.

Nothing makes me happier than writing. And, thanks to the rules that govern publishing today, nothing I’ve ever done for a living — housecleaning, data entry, creating campaigns for big-name, cutthroat ad agencies, full-time motherhood — has been as hard on me as being a writer.

Being an author is the culmination of a lifelong dream. And — because the sales of each book I write determine my ability to remain one — being an author has ruined many of my greatest lifelong pleasures. (…)

Believe me, I know I’m lucky to be published at all. I’ve read enough talented unpublished writers to realize just how arbitrary that privilege is. I’m more fortunate still to have had publishers who made significant investments in my books, editors who have gone to the mat for me, an agent I admire and trust. For more than a decade I’ve earned a reasonable living as a writer, raised a child as a writer, had a mostly great time being one. (…)

In the 10 years since I signed my first book contract, the publishing industry has changed in ways that are devastating — emotionally, financially, professionally, spiritually, and creatively — to midlist authors like me. You’ve read about it in your morning paper: Once-genteel “houses” gobbled up by slavering conglomerates; independent bookstores cannibalized by chain and online retailers; book sales sinking as the number of TV channels soars. What once was about literature is now about return on investment. What once was hand-sold one by one by well-read, book-loving booksellers now moves by the pallet-load at Wal-Mart and Borders — or doesn’t move at all. (…)

Book 1: Contract signed 1994. Book published 1996. Advance: $150,000.

(…)

Sales: I don’t ask. No one seems to care. Final tally: Hardcover/paperback sales combined are 10,000 copies.

Current status: Out of print. Small but loyal cult following; 10 years later adoring fans still show up at readings, clutching well-worn copies, eager to tell me how book changed their lives.

The Desperate Years: 1996-98

(…)

Agent submits new manuscript to Editor Who Still Loves Me (despite disappointing sales of first book). EWSLM, enthused, takes manuscript to pub board. Sales director rejects new book, citing losses incurred by first one. EWSLM acknowledges to agent: It’s not the book being rejected; it’s the author. (…)

Agent offers EWSLM unprecedented deal: If publisher will buy new book, we’ll forgo advance to help defray losses from first one. EWSLM gently advises agent to “pursue other avenues.” Agent gently advises me to “pursue other genres.” (…)

Question to potential new agent: “Do you think changing agents will help my career?”

New agent’s answer (in so many words): “It sure can’t hurt.”

Book 3: Contract signed 1998. Book published 2001. Advance: $10,000

Book takes two years, intensive research, mostly joy to write.

Book rejected by 10 publishers; lone editor making offer promises to “make up for the modest advance with great publicity on the back end.” Desperate to “get back in the game,” I accept advance that’s less than 10 percent of first one from editor who never returns my calls, continues to misspell my name.

Book 4: Contract signed 2002. Book published 2004. Advance: $80,000

Book takes two years, hellish research, difficult and delightful to write. (…)

Book 5

New book proposal written overnight, submitted to editor of Book 4. Editor loves idea, pitches to pub board. Pub board loves idea, agrees to make offer. Editor/agent have celebratory lunch. (…)

Three weeks after celebratory lunch, normally overly optimistic agent calls, sounding near tears. “It’s bad, Jane. They’re not going to make an offer.”

{ Jane Austen Doe/Salon | Continue reading }

Finnegans Wake is a work of comic fiction by Irish author James Joyce, significant for its experimental style and resulting reputation as one of the most difficult works of fiction in the English language. Written in Paris over a period of seventeen years, and published in 1939, two years before the author’s death, Finnegans Wake was Joyce’s final work.

Joyce invented a unique polyglot-language or idioglossia solely for the purpose of this work. This language is composed of composite words from some sixty to seventy world languages, combined to form puns, or portmanteau words and phrases intended to convey several layers of meaning at once, which many critics believe attempts to recreate the experience of sleep and dreams. Owing to the work’s expansive linguistic experiments, stream of consciousness writing style, literary allusions, free dream associations, and its abandonment of the conventions of plot and character construction, Finnegans Wake remains largely unread by the general public.

Despite these obstacles, readers and commentators have reached a broad consensus about the book’s central cast of characters and, to a lesser degree, its plot. However, a number of key details remain elusive. The book treats, in an unorthodox fashion, the Earwicker family, composed of the father Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, the mother Anna Livia Plurabelle, and their three children Shem the Penman, Shaun the Post, and Issy. Following an unspecified rumour about HCE, the book, in a nonlinear dream narrative, follows his wife’s attempts to exonerate him with a letter, his sons’ struggle to replace him, Shaun’s rise to prominence, and a final monologue by ALP at the break of dawn.

The opening line of the book is a sentence fragment which continues from the book’s unfinished closing line, making the work a never-ending cycle. Many Joycean scholars such as Samuel Beckett and Donald Phillip Verene link this cyclical structure to Giambattista Vico’s seminal text Scienza Nuova (”New Science”), upon which they argue Finnegans Wake is structured.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

On May 11, 1997, chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov resigns after 19 moves in a game against Deep Blue, a chess-playing computer developed by scientists at IBM. This was the sixth and final game of their match, which Kasparov lost two games to one, with three draws.

Kasparov, a chess prodigy from Azerbaijan, was a skillful chess player from childhood. At 21, Kasparov played Anatoly Karpov for the world title, but the 49-game match ended indecisively. The next year, Kasparov beat Karpov to become the youngest world champion in history. With a FIDE (Federation International des Echecs) score of 2800, and a streak of 12 world chess titles in a row, Kasparov was considered the greatest chess player in history going into his match with Deep Blue. (…)

Kasparov first played Deep Blue in 1996. The grandmaster was known for his unpredictable play, and he was able to defeat the computer by switching strategies mid-game. In 1997, Kasparov abandoned his swashbuckling style, taking more of a wait-and-see approach; this played in the computer’s favor and is commonly pointed to as the reason for his defeat.

{ History | Continue reading | IBM archive of Kasparov vs Deep Blue }

It’s a gig actors call “corpse duty,” and in a shrinking market for jobs in scripted TV, dead-body roles are on the rise.

In the past few years, TV dramas have responded to feature-film trends and HDTV, which shows everything in more realistic detail, by upping the violence and delivering more shock value on the autopsy table.

The Screen Actors Guild doesn’t keep figures on corpse roles, but currently, seven of the top 10 most-watched TV dramas use corpse actors, including CBS’s “CSI,” “NCIS” and spinoff “NCIS: Los Angeles.” The new ABC series “Body of Proof” revolve1s around a brilliant neurosurgeon turned medical examiner who solves murders by analyzing cadavers.

It all means more work for extras, casting agents and makeup artists who supply corpses in various stages of decomposition.

{ WSJ | Continue reading }

photo { Christopher Payne, Autopsy theater of St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington DC }

{ Andro Wekua, Wait to Wait, 2006 | 1 wax figure, 1 mechanized rocking chair, uncolored and colored glass, brazen aluminium, bricks, 4 collages, drawing | Andro Wekua interviewed by Maurizio Cattelan }

{ Meyer Vaisman, Green on the Outside, Red on the Inside, 1993 | Photos: Meyer Vaisman | Facebook }

{ Corrado Dalcò }

What distinguishes great entrepreneurs? Discussions of entrepreneurial psychology typically focus on creativity, tolerance for risk, and the desire for achievement—enviable traits that, unfortunately, are not very teachable.

So Saras Sarasvathy, a professor at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, set out to determine how expert entrepreneurs think, with the goal of transferring that knowledge to aspiring founders. (…)

Sarasvathy concluded that master entrepreneurs rely on what she calls effectual reasoning. Brilliant improvisers, the entrepreneurs don’t start out with concrete goals. Instead, they constantly assess how to use their personal strengths and whatever resources they have at hand to develop goals on the fly, while creatively reacting to contingencies.

By contrast, corporate executives—those in the study group were also enormously successful in their chosen field—use causal reasoning. They set a goal and diligently seek the best ways to achieve it.

{ Inc | Continue reading }

photo { Richard Avedon }

related { Sun Tzu: The Enemy of the Bureaucratic Mind }