‘Nothing can be destroyed, except by a cause external to itself.’ –Spinoza
As she walked home with silent companions, a thick fog seemed to compass her mind
Research conducted by a UCLA behavior lab found that women tend to avoid their fathers during periods of peak fertility, suggesting an evolutionary adaptation against inbreeding in humans. An examination of cell phone records found that ovulating women were half as likely to engage in conversation with their fathers and spoke to them for half as long than during low fertility periods. (…)
The reluctance to engage in conversations with fathers could not be attributed to an impulse to avoid all parental control during ovulation. In fact, the researchers found that women actually increased their phone calls to their mothers during this period of their cycle.
photo { Logan White }
Now you see! Respect. S.V.P. Amn. Anm. Amm. Ann.
Humans are known to play it safe in a situation when they aren’t sure of the odds, or don’t have confidence in their judgments. We don’t like to choose the unknown.
And new evidence from a Duke University study is showing that chimpanzees and bonobos, our closest living primate relatives, treat the problem the same way we do.
In studies conducted at the Tchimpounga Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Republic of Congo and Lola ya Bonobo Sanctuary in Democratic Republic of Congo, researchers found the apes prefer to play it safe when the odds are uncertain.
related { Neuroscience of instinct: How animals overcome fear to obtain food }
photo { Matthew Farrant }
She was a girl who knew how to be happy even when she was sad. And that’s important—you know.
{ Paco Peregrin }
You know when fluoridation first began?
The discovery that natural clay forms a protective shell around tiny air bubbles has profound implications for our theories about the origin of life on Earth.
One of the great mysteries in biology is the origin of cell membranes, the protective layers that completely surround the complex chemical soup in which many of life’s most delicate processes take place.
DNA and its attendant biochemical machinery can only operate in the carefully controlled environment that the cell membrane creates. But curiously, one of the important jobs that this machinery does is to create the chemical building blocks that then self-assemble into the membrane itself. So that creates a paradox: the membrane cannot form without the biochemical machinery but this will not work without the protection of the cell membrane.
The puzzle is which came first. How could cell membranes have evolved without biochemical machines to manufacture the building blocks? And alternatively, how could the biochemical machines have evolved without the crucial protection that cell membranes provide? It’s a chicken and egg problem.
In recent years, an answer has emerged. It very much looks as if the cell membranes came first and the evidence comes from numerous studies that show how simple organic molecules can self-assemble into bubble-like structures called vesicles.
Various groups have shown how these vesicles can form not only in the prebiotic soup that probably existed early in Earth’s history but also on the surface of ultracold crystals that we know to exist in interstellar space.
By this way of thinking, the vesicles provided a protective environment in which the molecules of life slowly evolved.
Today, we get another option. Anand Bala Subramaniam at Harvard University and a few pals have discovered that this process of vesicle formation also happens in a naturally occurring clay called montmorillonite. That’s the kind of stuff that might clogg your boots after a hike.
artwork { Dominic McGill }
When first he saw. Alas! Full tup. Full throb.
A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind
We developed a smartphone technology to sample people’s ongoing thoughts, feelings, and actions and found (i) that people are thinking about what is not happening almost as often as they are thinking about what is and (ii) found that doing so typically makes them unhappy.
{ ScienceMag }
photo { Cyril Lagel }
Lordy Daw and Lady Don! Uncle Foozle and Aunty Jack!
Pont St. Esprit is a small town in southern France. In 1951 it became famous as the site of one of the most mysterious medical outbreaks of modern times.
As Dr’s Gabbai, Lisbonne and Pourquier wrote to the British Medical Journal, 15 days after the “incident”:
The first symptoms appeared after a latent period of 6 to 48 hours. In this first phase, the symptoms were generalized, and consisted in a depressive state with anguish and slight agitation.
After some hours the symptoms became more clearly defined, and most of the patients presented with digestive disturbances… Disturbances of the autonomic nervous system accompanied the digestive disorders-gusts of warmth, followed by the impression of “cold waves”, with intense sweating crises. We also noted frequent excessive salivation.
The patients were pale and often showed a regular bradycardia (40 to 50 beats a minute), with weakness of the pulse. The heart sounds were rather muffled; the extremities were cold… Thereafter a constant symptom appeared - insomnia lasting several days… A state of giddiness persisted, accompanied by abundant sweating and a disagreeable odour. The special odour struck the patient and his attendants.
In total, about 150 people suffered some symptoms. About 25 severe cases developed the “delirium”. 4 people died “in muscular spasm and in a state of cardiovascular collapse”; three of these were old and in poor health, but one was a healthy 25-year-old man.
‘Stay with me tonight; you must see me die.’ –Mozart
The documents of Mozart’s life — letters, memoirs of friends, portraits, bureaucratic files — have long been scrutinized at a microscopic level. So when his name was discovered two decades ago in a Viennese archive from 1791, it caused a stir.
The archive showed that an aristocratic friend and fellow Freemason, Prince Karl Lichnowsky, had sued Mozart over a debt and won a judgment of 1,435 florins and 32 kreutzer in Austrian currency of the time (nearly twice Mozart’s yearly income) weeks before the composer died.
The entry was a mystery. No other information about the judgment has come to light, although scholars have generally assumed that it concerned a loan connected with a trip the two men made to Berlin.
Now a Mozart scholar, Peter Hoyt, has come up with a theory about the details: that the judgment stemmed from a loan of 1,000 thalers in Prussian currency made on May 2, 1789, the day the prince and his coach departed Berlin without Mozart, leaving him in need of money for his own transportation.
If true, the conclusion could add depth and texture to our understanding of Mozart’s anxieties over financial problems at the end of his life and of his reception during one of his last journeys.
If you won’t release me stop to please me up the leg of me
How do you convert the whizz-bang acrobatics of Spider-Man into a live Broadway show? (…)
The show – directed by the award-winning creator of The Lion King, Julie Taymor, and with music by Bono and The Edge of U2 – had to be stopped five times to correct faulty technical equipment. (…) Reeve Carney, playing the superhero, was left swinging helplessly above the audience.
It took stage hands almost a minute to catch Carney by the feet to drag him down, and later there was some heckling.
I had four in the morning and a couple of the lunch and three later on, but your saouls to the dhaoul, do ye. Finnk. Fime. Fudd?
When people are anxious they release a chemical signal that’s detectable on a subconscious level by those close to them. That’s the implication of a new study that collected sweat from people as they completed a high-rope obstacle course, and then tested the effect of that sweat on study participants as they played a gambling game.
Katrin Haegler’s team placed the sweat samples inside odourless tea bags which were attached with an elastic band to the underside of the gambling participants’ noses. For comparison, the participants were also exposed to sweat collected from non-anxious riders of an exercise bike.
When exposed to the anxious sweat, the participants took longer to decide over, but were more likely to bet on the highest risk scenarios. (…) In other words, the detection of another person’s anxiety made them more willing to take risks. Quite why this should be remains unclear.
photo { Gary Lee Boas }
By bronze, by gold, in oceangreen of shadow
Blue space: The importance of water for preference, affect, and restorativeness ratings of natural and built scenes
Although theorists have suggested that aquatic environments or “blue space” might have particular restorative potential, to date there is little systematic empirical research on this issue. (…)
Whereas aquatic features (rivers, lakes, coasts) are frequently present in visual stimuli representing natural environments they are rarely incorporated in stimuli portraying built environments. (…)
The current research collated a set of 120 photographs of natural and built scenes, half of which contained “aquatic” elements. Proportions of “aquatic”/“green”/“built” environments in each scene (e.g. 1/3rd, 2/3rds) were also standardised. (…)
As predicted, both natural and built scenes containing water were associated with higher preferences, greater positive affect and higher perceived restorativeness than those without water.
{ Science Direct }
photo { Harri Peccinotti, Pirelli Calendar, 1969 }
Rain was falling on the chapel, on the garden, on the college. It would rain for ever, noiselessly.
It’s time modern women got down on our knees for something other than a yoga class — to really worship his penis. (…) How do you practice phallus worship? Make love to his penis. Not him, his penis. (…)
Perfect BJ Prep
First: Get down on your knees, grasp that big boy and look at it. Have you ever really done that? A penis is a beautiful thing. Each one is a different work of art.
Under these two aspects, it is really the same; but as development takes place, it receives different names.
Every scene of the film utilizes the six colours of the spectrum, with manipulations of hue, value and chroma, according to the nature of the specific location. Colour in Eyes Wide Shut often has a symbolic role to play, communicating visually, for example, a psychological aspect of a character. Most of EWS was filmed using existing light sources such as the lamps that are visible in the frame. The amount of light reflecting off a shape determines the colour and vividness of its hue; and as a result of EWS using low light levels a series of optical illusions relating to hue results. Depending on the amount of light and the angle of the camera, a shape can be here one shade and then there another shade. Herein is a list of the most noticeable examples:
a. In Ziegler’s bathroom in 17, to the far left there is a smallish square (aftershave?) bottle on a shelf under a mirror. The first time the bottle becomes visible, near the beginning of the scene, the liquid inside is a distinctly high value chromatic blue. At the end of the scene, the camera angle having shifted, the liquid in the bottle, still on the left-hand side of the screen, now looks distinctly light green.
Although it’s set in New York, there are only the most fleeting glimpses of the real city, courtesy of a Second Unit.
The ‘Long Island’ mansions were found in the Home Counties, the ‘Greenwich Village’ streets constructed at Pinewood Studio or faked in corners of central London.
The exterior of the mansion of Victor Ziegler (Sydney Pollack, replacing Harvey Keitel), is the Consulate General of the Republic of Poland, East 37th Street at Madison Avenue in the real New York.
The party interior, though, where Dr Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) attends to a guest after she ODs on a speedball, was filmed at Luton Hoo, Hotel, Golf and Spa, near Luton in Bedfordshire.
The interior of ‘Club Sonata’, the New York jazz club, is Madame JoJo’s, Brewer Street, in Soho, London.
Most of the ‘Greenwich Village’ street scenes were shot on huge and elaborately detailed sets at Pinewood (the proliferation of T-junctions is a dead giveaway), but for a few shots, London streets were dressed as New York.
{ Movie-locations.com | Continue reading }
Kubrick — born and raised in the Bronx but for many years an expatriate who refused to fly–didn’t go near Manhattan in the 90s, and the movie clearly reflects that. (…)
The film credits a lighting cameraman but no director of photography, which has led critic Kent Jones to surmise correctly that Kubrick shot most of it himself.
illustration { Lil Fuchs }
The partial becomes complete; the crooked, straight; the empty, full; the worn out, new.
The universe seems vast, distant, and unknowable. It is, for example, unimaginably large and old: The number of stars in our galaxy alone exceeds 100 billion, and the Earth is 4.5 billion years old. In the eyes of the universe, we’re nothing. (…)
Clearly, our brains are not built to handle numbers on this astronomical scale. While we are certainly a part of the cosmos, we are unable to grasp its physical truths. (…) However, there actually are properties of the cosmos that can be expressed at the scale of the everyday. (…)
It turns out that there is one supernova, a cataclysmic explosion of a star that marks the end of its life, about every 50 years in the Milky Way. The frequency of these stellar explosions fully fits within the life span of a single person, and not even a particularly long-lived one. So throughout human history, each person has likely been around for one or two of these bursts that can briefly burn brighter than an entire galaxy.
On the other hand, while new stars are formed in our galaxy at a faster rate, it is still nice and manageable, with about seven new stars in the Milky Way each year. So, over the course of an average American lifetime, each of us will have gone about our business while nearly 550 new stars were born.
photo { 美撒guo }
‘The mind can only imagine anything, or remember what is past, while the body endures.’ –Spinoza
{ Young Kyu Yoo }
In short, my dear Goddess, Old Future’s divided
The World in 2036
Most of the technologies that are now 25 years old or more will be around; almost all of the younger ones “providing efficiencies” will be gone, either supplanted by competing ones or progressively replaced by the more robust archaic ones. So the car, the plane, the bicycle, the voice-only telephone, the espresso machine and, luckily, the wall-to-wall bookshelf will still be with us.
The world will face severe biological and electronic pandemics, another gift from globalisation. (…)
Companies that are currently large, debt-laden, listed on an exchange and paying bonuses will be gone. Those that will survive will be the more black swan-resistant—smaller, family-owned, unlisted on exchanges and free of debt. There will be large companies then, but these will be new—and short-lived. (…)
Science will produce smaller and smaller gains in the non-linear domain, in spite of the enormous resources it will consume; instead it will start focusing on what it cannot—and should not—do.
artwork { David Askevold, The Ghost Of Hank Williams, 1979 }
I just reach for style, I’m hot I breaks it down
What is 357 times 289? No pencils allowed. No calculators. Just use your brain. (…)
The brain is, in the words of neuroscientist Floyd Bloom, “the most complex structure that exists in the universe.” Its trillions of connections let it carry out all sorts of sophisticated computations in very little time. You can scan a crowded lobby and pick out a familiar face in a fraction of a second, a task that pushes even today’s best computers to their limit. Yet multiplying 357 by 289, a task that demands a puny amount of processing, leaves most of us struggling.
For psychologists, this kind of mental shortcoming is like a crack in a wall. They can insert a scientific crowbar and start to pry open the hidden life of the mind. The fact that we struggle with certain simple tasks speaks volumes about how we are wired. It turns out the evolution of our complex brain has come at a price: Sometimes we end up with a mental traffic jam in there.
photo { RJ Shaughnessy }
On the wings of time _______ flies away
I wondered for probably the millionth time why I am always running late.
This time, I vowed, I was going to find out.
I turned to an obscure field of neuroscience for answers. The scientists who work on the problem of time in the brain sometimes refer to their area of expertise as “time perception” or “clock timing.” What they’ve discovered is that your brain is one of the least accurate time measurement devices you’ll ever use. And it’s also the most powerful.
When you watch the seconds tick by on a digital watch, you are in the realm of objective time, where a minute-long interval is always 60 seconds. But to your brain, a minute is relative. Sometimes it takes forever for a minute to be over. That’s because you measure time with a highly subjective biological clock.
Your internal clock is just like that digital watch in some ways. It measures time in what scientists call pulses. Those pulses are accumulated, then stored in your memory as a time interval. Now, here’s where things get weird. Your biological clock can be sped up or slowed down by anything from drugs to the way you pay attention. If it takes you 60 seconds to cross the street, your internal clock might register that as 50 pulses if you’re feeling sleepy. But it might register 100 pulses if you’ve just drunk an espresso. That’s because stimulants literally speed up the clock in your brain (more on that later). When your brain stores those two memories of the objective minute it took to cross the street, it winds up with memories of two different time intervals.And yet, we all have an intuitive sense of how long it takes to cross a street. But how do we know, if every time we do something it feels like it a slightly different amount of time? The answer, says neuroscientist Warren Meck, is “a Gaussian distribution” - in other words, the points on a bell curve. Every time you want to figure out how long something is going to take, your brain samples from those time interval memories and picks one. (…)
Your intuitive sense of how much time something will take is taken at random from many distorted memories of objective time. Or, as Meck puts it, “You’re cursed to be walking around with a distribution of times in your head even though physically they happened on precise time.”
Your internal clock may be the reason why you can multitask. Because nobody - not even the lowly rat - has just one internal clock going at the same time.
At the very least, you’ve got two internal clocks running. One is the clock that tracks your circadian rhythms, telling you when to go to sleep, wake up, and eat. This is the most fundamental and important of all your internal clocks, and scientists have found it running even in organisms like green algae. The other clock you’ve likely got running is some version of the interval time clock I talked about earlier - the one that tells you how long a particular activity is going to take.
photo { Logan White }
‘We believe no evil till the evil’s done.’ –La Fontaine
Imagine American history without organized crime. (…)
In Chicago and New York, Italian and Jewish gangsters operated many of the most important early jazz clubs. Al Capone, who controlled several of the clubs in Chicago that introduced jazz to mainstream audiences, was an aficionado of the music and was the first to pay performers a better than subsistence wage. (…) According to the scholar Jerome Charyn, “There would have been no ‘Jazz Age,’ and very little jazz, without the white gangsters who took black and white jazz musicians under their wing.” (…)
Though famous for their ultra-masculinity, gangsters were nonetheless instrumental in fostering and protecting the gay subculture during the hostile years of World War II and the 1950s. Vito Genovese and Carlo Gambino, leaders of the largest and most powerful crime families in New York, began investing in gay bars in the early 1930s.
By the 1950s, most of the gay bars in New York were owned by the mob. Because of the mafia’s connections with the police department and willingness to bribe officers, patrons of mob-owned bars were often protected from the police raids that dominated gay life in the 1950s.
