You knew what you wanted and you fought so hard. Just to find yourself sitting in a golden cage.
The physiology of the dream state may be one reason why sexual content is so often reported. In the REM state, our muscles are in paralysis but the body is in a state of excitement. Even though sleep paralysis doesn’t feel like a dream, it has been shown in the lab that the expeirence occurs during REM intrusion after awakening or just after falling asleep. In REM sleep, whenever it occurs, men typically get erections, and women’s genitalia become engorged. Orgasms have been documented countless times in dream labs, and in sexual lucid dreams it is possible to experience orgasm too. Dreaming sleep is simply a sexy place to be.
Even when we are scared, and sometimes because we are scared, sexual excitement does not diminish. Sexuality and terror are deeply intertwined, neurologically speaking. So it’s not that outlandish to believe the medieval court documents in which men tell of being forced to have sex with mysterious she-demons and witches, even though this testimony was used in service of misogyny and the destruction of indigenous religious practices.
{ Dream Studies | Continue reading }
An incubus (from the Latin, incubo, or nightmare) is a demon in male form who, according to a number of mythological and legendary traditions, lies upon sleepers, especially women, in order to have sex with them. Its female counterpart is the succubus.
An incubus may pursue sexual relations with a woman in order to father a child, as in the legend of Merlin. Religious tradition holds that repeated intercourse with an incubus or succubus may result in the deterioration of health, or even death.
It is a very very curious vision of the world, very new: to see people as quantities, as packages of power
{ Morad Bouchakour }
Still you have to get rid of it someway. They don’t care. Complimented perhaps.
Light swearing at the start or end of a persuasive speech can help influence an audience.
The problem is that we run the risk of losing credibility and appearing unprofessional.
To see whether swearing can help change attitudes, Scherer and Sagarin (2006) divided 88 participants into three groups to watch one of three slightly different speeches. The only difference between the speeches was that one contained a mild swear word at the start: “…lowering of tuition is not only a great idea, but damn it, also the most reasonable one for all parties involved.” The second speech contained the ‘damn it’ at the end and the third had neither.
When participants’ attitudes were measured, they were most influenced by the speeches with the mild obscenity included, either at the beginning or the end.
{ PsyBlog | Continue reading }
Is expressing thanks a powerful motivator or just a social nicety?
According to positive psychologists, saying ‘thank you’ is no longer just good manners, it is also beneficial to the self.
Studies have suggested that being grateful can improve well-being, physical health, can strengthen social relationships, produce positive emotional states and help us cope with stressful times in our lives.
artwork { Roy Lichtenstein, Grrrrrrrrrrr, 1965 }
All quiet on Howth now. The distant hills seem. Where we.
Like a Middle Eastern version of Las Vegas, Dubai’s biggest challenge is water, which may be everywhere in the gulf but is undrinkable without desalination plants. These produce emissions of carbon dioxide that have helped give Dubai and the other United Arab Emirates one of the world’s largest carbon footprints. They also generate enormous amounts of heated sludge, which is pumped back into the sea.
The emirates desalinate the equivalent of four billion bottles of water a day. But their backups are thin: at any given time, the region has, on average, an estimated four-day supply of fresh water.
photo { Nicholas Haggard }
O tell me and I loved you better nor you knew
Born to German parents in what is now part of Poland, Germaine Krull (1897-1985) had an unconventional childhood that seemed to prime her for an independent life.
Her father, an engineer who moved the family frequently from city to city, largely educated her himself.
He also let her dress as a boy for some years, as she was inclined to do, perhaps foreshadowing her open-mindedness toward women’s social and sexual roles.
Krull’s father’s progressive views on social justice also seem to have predisposed her to involvement with radical politics.
Professional training in photography in Munich gave Krull a means to make her way through the world, as both observer and activist.
Krull learned a soft-focus, “pictorialist” style in school but soon undermined the false lyricism associated with it in a series of nudes from the early ’20s that are almost like satires of lesbian pornography.
Da repercussions
Speakers with a foreign accent are perceived as less believable than native speakers. A new study shows this isn’t just because of prejudice towards ‘outsiders’. It also has to do with the fluency effect, one manifestation of which is our tendency to assume that how easily a message is processed is a mark of its truthfulness. The effort required to understand an accented utterance means that the same fact is judged as less credible when uttered by an accented speaker, compared with a native speaker. This remains true even if the accented speaker is merely passing on a message from a native speaker.
photo { Christophe Kutner }
Ask Lictor Hackett or Lector Reade of Garda Growley or the Boy with the Billyclub
Casino-resort developer Steve Wynn is betting big on the art market this fall. Mr. Wynn has enlisted Christie’s to auction off a Roy Lichtenstein painting for at least $40 million at its major sale of contemporary art on Nov. 10 in New York.
The 1964 painting, “Ohhh…Alright…,” depicts a pixilated redheaded woman clutching a telephone. (…) Mr. Wynn bought the work from a New York gallery, Acquavella, a few years ago. Before that, the painting belonged to actor and writer Steve Martin. Mr. Martin confirmed he once owned the work; Mr. Wynn declined to comment.
“Ohh…Alright…” has never been auctioned off before, but it has been shown to collectors on the private marketplace, dealers say. Most notably, it was included in a not-for-sale show of the artist’s “Girls” series two years ago at New York’s Gagosian Gallery. (…)
At the market’s peak two years ago, Christie’s privately brokered the sale of another 1964 Lichtenstein redhead, “Happy Tears,” for roughly $35 million, up from the $7.1 million the auction house got for that same work six years earlier, according to Brett Gorvy, Christie’s international co-head of postwar and contemporary art.
{ Wall Street Journal | Continue reading }
No one except Wynn himself might have imagined it, but in the past two years, the Las Vegas resort mogul has become one of the world’s most successful art dealers/warehousers. Looking at the fruit of one large purchase Wynn made in March 1998 (just one of many acquisitions he or his company has made), he appears to be looking at a potential 40 percent to 50 percent appreciation on an investment of $50 million.
Beginning in November 1996, Mirage Resorts President and CEO Steve Wynn began collecting art for the opening of Bellagio, an upscale resort in Las Vegas. Yet even before Bellagio and the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art opened in October 1998, Wynn had become an art dealer, trading the works he acquired.
While Wynn picked out art for his company to purchase, he also bought for himself. Most notable is a group of seven contemporary paintings for $50 million from New York dealer William Acquavella on March 9, 1998. The math (admittedly, somewhat speculative), shows that Wynn has sold three of the paintings for around $37 million and two others worth about $4 million for undisclosed prices. And he still owns two that are worth over a total of $20 million, easily. Here’s a list of the paintings in question and, where possible, information on what has become of them.
Robert Rauschenberg, Small Red Painting, 1954
Combine painting, ca. 28 x 21 x 5 in.
Wynn ‘98 valuation: $3.4 million
Sold after Bellagio opened
Buyer and sale price are unknownCy Twombly, Untitled, 1961
Acrylic, colored crayons and graphite on canvas, 40 x 58 in.
Wynn ‘98 valuation: $847,458
Sold before Bellagio opened
Buyer and price are unknownFranz Kline, August Day, 1957
Oil on canvas, 92 x 78 in.
Wynn ‘98 valuation: $2.5 million
Sold to PaceWildenstein, where it was for sale at $4 million
Presumed net to Wynn: around $3.2 millionRoy Lichtenstein, Torpedo…Los!, 1963
Oil on canvas, 68 x 80 in.
Wynn ‘98 valuation: $12.7 million
Sold spring ‘98 for around $14 million to Microsoft architect guru Charles SimonyiJasper Johns, Highway, 1959
Encaustic and collage on canvas, ca. 34 x 27 in.
Wynn ‘98 valuation: $9.3 million
Sold summer ‘99 for around $20 millionWillem de Kooning, Police Gazette, 1955
Mixed media on canvas, ca. 43 x 40 in.
Wynn ‘98 valuation: $11.9 million
Remains in Wynn’s collectionJackson Pollock, Frieze, 1953-55
Oil, enamel and aluminum paint on canvas, ca. 26 x 86 in.
Wynn ‘98 valuation: $9.3 million
Remains in Wynn’s collection
bonus:
videos { Wynn Las Vegas TV Commercial, 2005 | Encore Las Vegas TV Commercial, 2008 }
All Tuesday week afternoon she was hunting to match that chenille but at last she found what she wanted at Clery’s summer sales, the very it
{ 10cc , I’m Not In Love, Making of documentary | Thanks Tim }
‘Boo, you’re through! Hoo, I’m true!’ –James Joyce
Cars kill a lot more people than spiders, bats, snakes and wolves, but why don’t we fear them in the same visceral way? (…)
Although some of us fear snakes more than others, all baby humans, chimps and monkeys are equally jumpy when confronted with a black plastic snake. That aversion probably grew out of the pressures of life in the jungle eons ago. Back then, encounters with certain snakes were a matter of life and death, and a healthy fear of snakes kept our ancestors alive long enough to procreate.
In the field of evolutionary psychology, the belief is that instinctive fears became hard-wired in our biology, through genes or other inheritance, during the time (the Stone Age) and place (the African jungle and savannah) of our development into the Homo sapiens we are today.
But some new thinking suggests that these adaptations might date back before the Stone Age, and some, perhaps, to more recent times. (…)
Fear of heights is so widespread and understandable that psychologists consider it a normal fear. (…) Other phobias that persist into modern times may have been fixed much more recently than snakes and spiders, say in the late Paleolithic age, about 100,000 years ago, or even more recently.
Take fainting in response to seeing blood or surgical instruments. Fainting, Bracha posits, might have been an adaptive female response to the frequent raiding bands in the early hunting-and-gathering societies. You might have been less likely to be murdered if you fainted at the sight of a sharp stick.
Then there are the fears that point to inherently dangerous things and that no doubt have an “adaptive” function, except that they’ve gotten out of hand. Fears of dirt, rats, mice and insects are obviously self-protective, since all these carry diseases. But most vermin-spread diseases probably were not a serious problem before people began creating cities several thousand years ago.
Instinctual repulsion to some of these critters, Bracha hypothesizes, might have arisen in the Neolithic period, which started about 10,000 years ago.
So why do some of us appear to be addicted to fear, as evidenced by the popularity of increasingly horrifying horror movies? (…)
“They are people who need strong feelings of arousal, and they get those from horror movies as well as sexy movies. Low-sensation-seekers don’t like to be aroused by unpleasant things. High-sensation-seekers can enjoy any vicarious experience if it’s strong enough.”
photo { Helmut Newton }
The slight contretemps claimed her attention but in two twos she set that little matter to rights
{ Few recent thinkers have woven such a beautiful braid of art and science as Benoît B Mandelbrot, who has died aged 85 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (The B apparently doesn’t stand for anything. He just felt like adding it.) Mandelbrot was a provocative mathematician, a subversive geometer. He left a beautiful legacy in visual art, for Mandelbrot was the man who named and explained fractals – those complex, apparently chaotic yet geometrically ordered shapes that delight the eye and fascinate the mind. They are icons of modern understanding of the universe’s complexity. The Mandelbrot set, one of the most famous fractal designs, is named after him. With its fizzing fringe of crystal-like microforms blossoming out of a conjunction of black circles, this fractal pattern looks crazy but is the outcome of geometrical calculations. | The Guardian | full story }
Or the birds start their treestirm shindy. Look, there are yours off, high on high!
{ Yves Klein, Empreinte du fond d’une baignoire vide don’t l’eau avait été colorée de vermillion, COS 2, 1960 | Yves Klein Archives | Continue reading }
‘As I lay stretched upon the beach of Nice, I began to feel hatred for birds which flew back and forth across my blue sky, cloudless sky, because they tried to bore holes in my greatest and most beautiful work.’ –Yves Klein
Who is Yves Klein, and what’s the story behind his unearthly color? Lolling on a beach in 1947, a teenage Klein carved up the universe of art between him and two friends. Painter Arman Fernandez chose earth, Claude Pascal words, while Klein claimed the sky. (…)
Klein’s first public exhibit in 1954 featured monochrome canvases in several shades—orange, pink, yellow as well as blue—but the audience’s placid reception enraged him, as if it were “a new kind of bright, abstract interior decoration,” as Weitermeier puts it. Klein’s response was to double down exclusively on what he considered the world’s most limitless, enveloping color: blue [International Klein Blue].
With the help of Parisian paint dealer Edouard Adam, he suspended pure ultramarine pigment—the most-prized blue of the medieval period— in a synthetic resin called Rhodopas, which didn’t dull the pigment’s luminosity like traditional linseed oil suspensions. Their much-vaunted patent didn’t apply to the color proper, but rather protected Klein’s works made with the paint, which involved rolling naked ladies in the new hue and transferring their body-images to canvas.
Invitees to two simultaneous 1957 exhibits received an blue-drenched postcard in the mail, complete with an IKB postage stamp actually canceled by the French postal service (an authentic touch Klein probably bribed his postman for).
Photograph of a performance by Yves Klein at Rue Gentil-Bernard, Fontenay-aux-Roses, October 1960, by Harry Shunk
In one of the best-known photographs in art, the French artist Yves Klein projects himself confidently into space, seemingly as heavenbound as a Titian angel, while all unawares the banal figure of a cyclist goes about his earthbound business. The irony of Le saut dans le vide (Leap into the void, 1960) is that an image so faithful to Klein’s artistic quest should be a fake, a confection manufactured in the darkroom by him and the photographer who took the shot, Harry Shunk.
Klein’s performance, staged for a one-off newspaper he was planning, involved the taking of two pictures. First, Shunk photographed the street empty of all save the cyclist. Then Klein, a keen exponent of judo, climbed to the top of a wall and dived off it a dozen times — onto a pile of mats assembled by the members of his judo school across the road. The two elements were then melded to create the desired illusion.
The image, which has had a lasting influence on performance art, was expressive of Klein’s intent to explore the metaphorical void central to his work, a neutral zone free of prior prejudices. It was also a criticism of Nasa’s space travel plans, for Klein the ultimate folly of an over-materialistic world. Yet though the montage was executed under his direction, the presence of Shunk — who became a rather forgotten figure — should not be ignored.
Bertha Supple told that once to Edy Boardman, a deliberate lie
The preface paradox was introduced by David Makinson in 1965.
The argument runs along these lines:
It is customary for authors of academic books to include in the preface of their books statements such as “any errors that remain are my sole responsibility.” Occasionally they go further and actually claim there are errors in the books, with statements such as “the errors that are found herein are mine alone”.
(1) Such an author has written a book that contains many assertions, and has factually checked each one carefully, submitted it to reviewers for comment, etc. Thus, he has reason to believe that each assertion he has made is true.
(2) However, he knows, having learned from experience, that, in spite of his best efforts, there are very likely undetected errors in his book. So he also has good reason to believe that there is at least one assertion in his book is not true.
Thus he can rationally believe that the book both does and does not contain at least one error.
{ Wikipedia }
I’ll wait. And I’ll wait. And then if all goes. What will be is.
Placebos – the inert substances taken by control groups in clinical trials – are often assumed to be harmless sugar pills or something along those lines. New research has found that actually it’s impossible to know what’s in placebos because there’s precious little documentation of what exactly is used in clinical trials.
Out of 176 research studies published in four of the biggest international medical journals, only one in five fully disclosed the composition of the placebo treatment. This lack of transparency suggests that all sorts of things could be being used, some of which might be having some sort of physiological effect and compromising the validity of findings on the study drug.
Placebo controlled clinical trials investigate the effects of a particular drug on a disease by comparing people who receive the treatment against patients receiving a placebo, which looks, smells, and tastes the same as the study drug but has no active ingredients. This design accounts for the placebo effect.
image { Ofri Cnaani }
Devils they are when that’s coming on them
Is it OK to cook with extra-virgin olive oil?
One of the main things to consider when evaluating whether it is OK to heat extra-virgin olive oil (or any other oil for that matter) is the smoke point of the oil. The smoke point is the temperature at which visible gaseous vapor from the heating of oil becomes evident. It is traditionally used as a marker for when decomposition of oil begins to take place. Since decomposition incurs chemical changes that may not only result in reduced flavor and nutritional value but also the generation of harmful cancer causing compounds (oxygen radicals) that are harmful to your health, it is important to not heat oil past its smoke point. Inhaling the vapors can also be damaging.
Four dinky sets, three garments and nighties extra, and each set slotted with different coloured ribbons, rosepink, pale blue, mauve and peagreen
Just ask yourself: Which colour do you prefer ? Have you always preferred it, or did your preference change ? Can you tell why you prefer pink to, let’s say, yellow ? If you have no answer to these questions, you may wonder what’s so interesting about colour preferences. And if you have no answer, or no interest in the questions, it’s perhaps because they are not very well shaped.
Let’s first agree that color preference is an important aspect of human behavior. It influences a large number of decisions people make on a daily basis, including the clothes and make up they wear, the way they decorate their homes, the artifacts they buy or create, to name but a few examples. What is more interesting is that color is, in some sense, a superficial quality that seldom influences the practical function of artifacts. What’s more interesting for psychologists, is that we still know very little on which factors actually determine these preferences. We still don’t have a good grasp on what they are, and how to capture them descriptively: some studies have reported universal preferences (for blue rather than red); others. for highly saturated colors ; some, finally, stress cultural and individual differences.
The problem may be that testing for colour preferences has something to do with colour perception, colour labeling and cultural associations - and all these problems are hard to disconnect. Elderly people for instance tend to change their colour preferences, but this may have to do with visual impairement. (…)
Another theory suggests that women, as caregivers who need to be particularly sensitive to, say, a child flushed with fever, have developed a sensitivity to reddish changes in skin color, a skill that enhances their abilities as the “emphathizer.”
Other arguments for innate colour preferences come from animal studies - with some recent surprising discoveries. Animal colour preferences from sexual or social contexts are assumed to have arisen owing to preferences for specific kinds of food, representing a sort of sensory bias.
photo { Tim Barber }
Her wealth of wonderful hair. It was dark brown with a natural wave in it. She had cut it that very morning on account of the new moon.
A new meta-analysis study reveals falling in love can elicit not only the same euphoric feeling as using cocaine, but also affects intellectual areas of the brain. Researchers also found falling in love only takes about a fifth of a second.
Results from Ortigue’s team revealed when a person falls in love, 12 areas of the brain work in tandem to release euphoria-inducing chemicals such as dopamine, oxytocin, adrenaline and vasopression. The love feeling also affects sophisticated cognitive functions, such as mental representation, metaphors and body image. (…)
The findings have major implications for neuroscience and mental health research because when love doesn’t work out, it can be a significant cause of emotional stress and depression. “It’s another probe into the brain and into the mind of a patient,” says Ortigue. “By understanding why they fall in love and why they are so heartbroken, they can use new therapies.” By identifying the parts of the brain stimulated by love, doctors and therapists can better understand the pains of love-sick patients.
The study also shows different parts of the brain fall for love. For example, unconditional love, such as that between a mother and a child, is sparked by the common and different brain areas, including the middle of the brain. Passionate love is sparked by the reward part of the brain, and also associative cognitive brain areas that have higher-order cognitive functions, such as body image.
photo { Chris Verene }
