In late 1929, Alfred E. Smith, the leader of a group of investors erecting the Empire State Building, announced that they were increasing the height of the building to 1,250 feet from 1,050. Mr. Smith, a past governor of New York, denied that competition with the 1,046-foot-high Chrysler Building was a factor. “We are measuring its rise by principles of economic investment rather than spectacular standards,” he told The New York Times.

The extra 200 feet, it was announced, was to serve as a mooring mast for dirigibles so that they could dock in Midtown, rather than out in Lakehurst, N.J., the station used by the German Graf Zeppelin. Mr. Smith said that at the Empire State Building, airships like the Graf, almost 800 feet long, would “swing in the breeze and the passengers go down a gangplank”; seven minutes later they would be on the street.

But the Germans, who dominated dirigible technology, had not asked for a docking station, and passenger traffic on dirigibles was still minuscule. The mast camouflaged the quest for boasting rights to the world’s tallest building, an ambition to which it seemed indecent to admit.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

photo { Lewis W. Hine, Welders on the Empire State Building, circa 1930 }

{ North Korea’s Next Leader: A Guide to the Succession Struggle | North Korea After Kim Jong Il: Four Scenarios | PDF }

When we think today of Don Juan, we think, voluntarily or involuntarily, of ‘Mozart’s Don Juan.’ Mozart did for Don Juan what Goethe did for Faust—made his representation the prototype of all others.

{ Pierre Jean Jouve, Le Don Juan de Mozart, 1957 | Søren Kierkegaard’s Interpretation of Mozart’s Opera Don Giovanni : An Appraisal and Theological Response | PDF }

The Fed issued the usual statement at the end of their meeting this week, and Fed watchers poured over the words, looking carefully for any sign of change in Fed policy. The consensus seems to be that the most important change was the statement concerning inflation, the first such change in over a year.

“Measures of inflation are currently at levels somewhat below those the Committee judges most consistent, over the longer run, with its mandate to promote maximum employment and price stability.”

The next (and only other real) change was:

“The Committee will continue to monitor the economic outlook and financial developments and is prepared to provide additional accommodation if needed to support the economic recovery and to return inflation, over time, to levels consistent with its mandate.”

Translation: inflation may be getting too low, but don’t worry, we are on the job. (…)

Anyway, the Fed seems to be setting us up for another round of quantitative easing. That is Fed speak for buying a few trillion or so dollars of government debt and injecting said cash into the economy. (…)

Recessions are by definition deflationary, but if we go into recession when inflation is already as low as it is, the Fed will be behind the curve. But telling us they are going to start easing because they are worried about a recession is not a good recipe for a positive market reaction.

So? Why not just say that they are worried about the lack of inflation, “at levels somewhat below those the Committee judges most consistent, over the longer run, with its mandate to promote maximum employment and price stability.” That way they are not fighting a weak economy but rather something that everyone understands, i.e., deflation.

{ John Mauldin | Continue reading | PDF }

Over the last century, 98pc of the world’s tiger population has been wiped out, first by big game hunters, and latterly by poachers, who kill these magnificent creatures and hack them to pieces.

And for what? Well, money, for one thing. The rarer tigers become, the more valuable they are to the poachers, who sell their bones and organs on the black market for traditional Chinese medicines. (…) which is said to have aphrodisiac qualities. (…)

Scientific studies have shown that the claims made for tiger penises are, if you’ll pardon the expression, bollocks. But so far that’s failed to prevent the carnage escalating.

There are only a few thousand tigers left in the wild. They could well disappear off the face of the planet within 10 years.

{ The Evening Herald | Continue reading }

{ Raoul Ubac, Dessin pour un torse II, 1972 | John Maeda, ad for Absolut Vodka, I.D. Magazine, 1997 }

Truck driver impaled by flying canoe.

Texting by lifeguards is raising safety concerns.

Family-law and criminal defense lawyer squatted an office at the Empire State Building for seven months.

Man without mortgage loses home in foreclosure.

Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II made bid for poverty grant to heat her palaces. Related: The Queen has been forced to give up the ultimate right to manage the Palace’s financial affairs in a secret deal signed by Palace aides and the Government.

California gynecologist used an electrocautery device to carve and burn his patient’s name on her removed uterus, after performing a hysterectomy. The doctor called it a “friendly gesture.”

Nudists and swingers at war in France.

An estate agent showed prospective buyers around an £800,000 house while the owner lay dead on her sofa.

16-year-old was found dead after somehow becoming entangled in a Bowflex exercise machine.

In the latest in a series of unusual efforts to make Paris green, the city is now offering residents free sparkling water.

Argentina sells DNA as world demands more beef. Exports of bovine semen have increased ten-fold in the last decade.

People form impressions about the personality of politicians simply from the way they move, according to a new study.

New study links political connections to corporate corruption.

Religion causes a chronic biasing of visual attention.

What happens in the brain when you hear an accent–and why you are less likely to trust the speaker.

Children who regularly use the abbreviated language of text messages are actually improving their ability to spell correctly, research suggests.

Developing language skills appears to be more important for boys than girls in helping them to develop self-control and, ultimately, succeed in school.

Can’t focus? Maybe it’s the wrong time of month. New Concordia research links hormones with attention and learning.

Previously, only orchids were known to trick insects into copulating with them. It’s thought that this is a way to enhance pollination. Now, a new tease has been found.

How To Destroy A Black Hole. Astrophysicists think they know how to destroy a black hole. The puzzle is what such destruction would leave behind.

When Will the First Earth-like Planet Be Discovered?

The first Earth-like planet orbiting another star will be announced in May next year, if the discovery of extrasolar planets continues at its present rate, say researchers.

The existence of magnetic fields on cosmologically large scales is an unsolved problem in astrophysics.

How on earth can concentric carbon nanotubes turn into diamond after an intense bomabrdement of radiation?

Examining infidelity: What makes people cheat?

What are the mechanisms by which neurons differentiate to achieve the spectacular complexity of the brain? UCSD’s Nick Spitzer explains what we know about this process. [video]

Evolution of National Nobel Prize Shares in the 20th Century.

What Does Video Game Research Really Say? Part 1/Part 2.

A study found that playing video games can improve contrast sensitivity, which is the ability to detect slight changes in shades of gray before they become indistinguishable from a uniform background.

Is weight loss associated with increased risk of early mortality?

Why Are Cell Phone Conversations So Distracting?

A scientific research study analyzes when to buy airline and theater tickets.

The Animal Kingdom’s Top 10 Strange Hunting Strategies.

For years, Meredith Maran believed her dad molested her. She talks about “recovered memory,” and finding the truth. Why I falsely accused my father.

To mark GoodFellas’s anniversary, GQ interviewed nearly sixty members of the cast and crew, along with some noteworthy admirers of the picture.

The Lingo of “The Big Lebowski.”

The New York Review of Books: Two books about the TV series The Wire.

Apple Said to Negotiate With Publishers Over Digital Newsstand.

“2053″ - This is the number of nuclear explosions conducted in various parts of the globe from 1954-1998. [video]

Property Taxes in America.

Houston Pet Cremation Services. For Ashes Returned, add $35.00 (includes black ceramic urn).

The Homer Simpson escalator.

52 ways to die in a cave.

Japanese hair removal commercial.

Praise-r-cise. The Christian alternative. [PRAISERCISE FITNESS]

It is a cliché that the brain is the “largest sex organ,” but the repetition of the phrase doesn’t make it any less true. The mechanics of its role during sex are less obvious and less well understood than that of the body’s other sex organs, but by using brain imaging scans, neuroscientists have begun to get a sense of what parts of the brain light up during sex, especially at the moment of orgasm. (…)

One early study of orgasms suggests that the subjective experience of orgasm is very similar between men and women. Despite having different anatomies, men and women seem to be hard-wired to experience sexual pleasure in the same way. But does this translate to a similarity in the brain? (…)

Much more so than men’s brains, female brains go mysteriously silent during orgasm. In particular, the left lateral orbitofronal cortex and the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, areas involved in self-control and social judgment, respectively, are deactivated. Brain activity also fell in the amygdala, suggesting a similar, albeit more drastic, drop in vigilance and emotion as in men. “At the moment of orgasm, women do not have any emotional feelings,” Holstege was quoted as saying.

{ Big Think | Continue reading }

painting { Mark Sheinkman, Lourel, 2010 | oil, alkyd and graphite on linen }

During his lifetime, Franz Kafka burned an estimated 90 percent of his work. After his death at age 41, in 1924, a letter was discovered in his desk in Prague, addressed to his friend Max Brod. “Dearest Max,” it began. “My last request: Everything I leave behind me . . . in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others’), sketches and so on, to be burned unread.” Less than two months later, Brod, disregarding Kafka’s request, signed an agreement to prepare a posthumous edition of Kafka’s unpublished novels. “The Trial” came out in 1925, followed by “The Castle” (1926) and “Amerika” (1927). In 1939, carrying a suitcase stuffed with Kafka’s papers, Brod set out for Palestine on the last train to leave Prague, five minutes before the Nazis closed the Czech border. Thanks largely to Brod’s efforts, Kafka’s slim, enigmatic corpus was gradually recognized as one of the great monuments of 20th-century literature.

The contents of Brod’s suitcase, meanwhile, became subject to more than 50 years of legal wrangling. While about two-thirds of the Kafka estate eventually found its way to Oxford’s Bodleian Library, the remainder — believed to comprise drawings, travel diaries, letters and drafts — stayed in Brod’s possession until his death in Israel in 1968, when it passed to his secretary and presumed lover, Esther Hoffe. After Hoffe’s death in late 2007, at age 101, the National Library of Israel challenged the legality of her will, which bequeaths the materials to her two septuagenarian daughters, Eva Hoffe and Ruth Wiesler. The library is claiming a right to the papers under the terms of Brod’s will. The case has dragged on for more than two years. If the court finds in the sisters’ favor, they will be free to follow Eva’s stated plan to sell some or all of the papers to the German Literature Archive in Marbach. They will also be free to keep whatever they don’t sell in their multiple Swiss and Israeli bank vaults and in the Tel Aviv apartment that Eva shares with an untold number of cats.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

The performer-writer Ann Liv Young belongs to the movement in the arts that was labeled Sensation in the 1990s. She performed “Snow White” naked, apart from a Disney mask on her face, while heavily pregnant. Dildos and masturbation have been part of her theatrical fare. At MoMA P.S. 1 in February she insulted a fellow artist’s work (accompanied by urination and masturbation) until management turned the lights off on her. And on Friday and Saturday she performed a one-woman “Cinderella” at the Issue Project Room in Gowanus, Brooklyn. In this, she converses with members of the audience and also urinates and defecates onstage. (…)

Waiting 10 minutes for someone to defecate onstage is boring.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

unrelated { Upcoming free museum days in NYC }

illustration { Mathias Schweizer’s Malamerde }

{ Middle finger sculpture at American Apparel CEO Dov Charney’s LA home | Maurizio Cattelan message to Italy’s bankers. }

Where are you right now? Maybe you are at home, the office or a coffee shop—but such responses provide only a partial answer to the question at hand. Asked another way, what is the location of your “self” as you read this sentence? Like most people, you probably have a strong sense that your conscious self is housed within your physical body, regardless of your surroundings.



But sometimes this spatial self-location goes awry. During a so-called out-of-body experience, for example, one’s self seems to be transported outside the physical body into a surreal perspective—some people even believe they are viewing their bodies from above, as though their true selves were floating. In a related experience, people with a delusion known as somatoparaphrenia disown one of their limbs or confuse another person’s limb for their own. Such warped perceptions help researchers understand the neuroscience of selfhood.



A new paper offers examples of rare bodily illusions that are not confined to a single limb, nor are they complete out-of-body experiences—they are somewhere in between. These illusory body perceptions, described in the September issue of Consciousness and Cognition, could offer novel clues about how the brain maintains a link between the physical and conscious selves, or what the researchers call “bodily self-consciousness.”

{ Scientific American | Continue reading }

photo { Imp Kerr & Associates, NYC }

The world is more complex and less controllable than ‘rational’ planners believe. There are two main reasons for this. First, as behavioural economics tells us, agents - be they individuals, institutions or governments - do not necessarily behave rationally; their responses when confronted by new information or a different set of incentives may be hard to anticipate.

Second, as the study of networks shows, our tastes and preferences can be altered directly by the behaviour of others and can change over time. Natural selection is now believed to favour social learning strategies that specify when and whom to copy. It seems that humans are particularly adept at this. (…)

In the late 1990s, a group of epidemiologists, sociologists and physicists analysed a database of individuals and their sexual contacts. The results were published in Nature, one of the world’s leading scientific journals. They found that most people have only a few sexual partners, but that a small number have hundreds or even thousands. The real originality of the paper was its finding that the structure of the pattern of the contacts closely reflected a recently discovered type of network that is described as ‘scale-free’.

Such networks are important in the natural sciences, and more of them - at least, good approximations of the scale-free pattern - have been discovered in the human world. The internet, for example, has these properties. A few sites receive a massive number of hits, while most get very few. A whole industry has grown up in American marketing circles trying to find these influential ‘hubs’. (…)

Another important type of network that makes life even more complicated is the ‘small-world’ network. When we delve into the maths, there are considerable similarities between a scale-free and a small-world network. But their basic social structure is different. In the scale-free network, there are a few agents who have huge potential influence. The small world is much more like overlapping sets of ‘friends of friends’. The additional feature is that, while no one has a large number of connections, a few agents may have ‘long-range’ connections to others who are remote from their immediate cliques. However, these individuals may be even harder to identify in practice than the hubs of a scale-free network, precisely because they themselves are not distinguished by having an unusual number of connections.


{ RSA Journal | Continue reading }

The World Wide Web, with its potential to connect people globally, was paradoxically a technology that connected people locally.


{ RSA Journal | Continue reading }

Rumors of the web’s memory are greatly exaggerated.


Jeffrey Rosen has an engaging piece in the Times about privacy and the web that touches on issues of forgiveness and reputation and how the Internet has basically screwed that up for all of us; the upshot being that because your Facebook profile never really goes away, your sins are plastered on the world’s largest wall for all to see forever. 

Here’s the thing. They’re probably not. Forever, that is.

{ Big Questions Online | Continue reading }

As data volumes continue to grow, it’s clear that the Internet’s infrastructure needs upgrading. What’s not clear is who is going to pay for it.

{ Der Spiegel | Continue reading }

photo { Manuel Vazquez }

We make a mistake when we think of cancer as a noun. It is not something you have, it is something you do. Your body is probably cancering all the time. What keeps it under control is a conversation that is happening between your cells, and the language of that conversation is proteins. Proteomics will allow us to listen in on that conversation, and that will lead to much better way to treat cancer.

{ Edge | Continue reading }

I’m sure most of you have heard of the twin paradox “in which a twin makes a journey into space in a high-speed rocket and returns home to find he has aged less than his identical twin who stayed on Earth.” This paradox has been worked out for special relativity in Minkowski spacetime. Recently, Boblest et al. worked out the details using general relativity for an expanding universe. (…)

The twins in the paper have names: Eric and Tina. Eric stays on Earth while Tina accelerates away from Earth with constant acceleration α = 9.8 m/s² until her clock shows 5 years have past. Then she decelerates by the same magnitude coming to a complete stop after ten years then begins her journey back to earth accelerating then decelerating in the same 5 year intervals. Finally, after 20 years has transpired on her clock she has returned to earth being now 20 years old. (…) Eric is nearly 350 years old when Tina returns.

{ The Eternal Universe | Continue reading }

By what age do children recognise that plagiarism is wrong?

To view plagiarism as an adult does, a child must combine several pieces of a puzzle: they need to understand that not everyone has access to all ideas; that people can create their own ideas; and that stealing an idea, like stealing physical property, is wrong.

{ BPS | Continue reading }

images { Left: Maurizio Cattelan, Bidibidobidiboo, 1996 | Right: Print ad for Seidl Confiserie, 2008. Advertising Agency: Serviceplan München/Hamburg, Germany. Maurizio Cattelan was not credited. }

So what does fascinate me in the animal? The first thing that fascinated me is that every animal has a world. It is curious because many people do not have a world. They live the life of everyone’s life, no matter who, no matter what. Animals have worlds. An animal world, what is it? It is sometimes extraordinary limited. And this is it that moves me. Finally the animals react to very few things. Several sorts of things.

(…)

So the very first characteristic of the animal is the existence of specific, peculiar animal worlds; and it is perhaps, sometimes, the poverty of those worlds, the reduced character of those worlds that interest me a lot.

For example, we have been previously talking about animals such as the tick. The tick responds or reacts to three things. Three stimuli. Nothing more in a nature that is a huge nature, three stimuli, that’s all. It tends towards the edge of a branch, attracted by light. It can wait on top of that branch for years without eating, without anything, totally amorphous. Well, it waits for a ruminant, an herbivore, an animal that passes under its branch, ready to drop; it is a kind of an olfactory stimulus. The tick smells the animal passing under its branch. The second stimulus; the light then the smell. Then, once fallen on the back of the poor animal, it will look for the least hairy area. Here a tactile stimulus. And it sinks into the skin. It does not care about anything else. In a swarming nature, the tick extracts three things. This is what makes a world.

(…)

It is not enough to have a world to be an animal. What absolutely fascinated me are the issues of territory. Because constituting a territory is nearly the birth of art.

(…)

If someone would ask me what an animal is, I would answer “a being on the lookout”. It is a being fundamentally on the lookout. (…) The writer is on the lookout. So is the philosopher. You see, the ears of an animal. Well it does nothing without being on the watch. An animal never keeps still. While eating, it has to watch out if anything is happening in its back, on its sides, etc. Such an existence on the lookout is terrible.

{ Gilles Deleuze’s ABC Primer, with Claire Parnet | PDF | Read more | Video 1, Video 2 }

photo { unsourced }

{ Agnes Thor }

Most of us know, but often forget, that handwriting is not natural. We are not born to do it. There is no genetic basis for writing. Writing is not like seeing or talking, which are innate. Writing must be taught.

About 6,000 years ago, the Sumerians created the first schools, called tablet houses, to teach writing. They trained children in Sumerian cuneiform by having them copy the symbols on one half of a soft clay tablet onto the other half, using a stylus. When children did this — and when the Sumerians invented a system of representation, a way to make one thing symbolize another — their brains changed.

Maryanne Wolf explains the neurological developments writing wrought: “The brain became a beehive of activity. A network of processes went to work: The visual and visual association areas responded to visual patterns (or representations); frontal, temporal, and parietal areas provided information about the smallest sounds in words …; and finally areas in the temporal and parietal lobes processed meaning, function and connections.”

The Sumerians did not have an alphabet — nor did the Egyptians, who may have gotten to writing earlier. Which alphabet came first is debated; many consider it to be the Greek version, a system based upon Phoenician. Alphabets created even more neural pathways, allowing us to think in new ways (neither better nor worse than non-alphabetic systems, like Chinese, yet different nonetheless).

{ Miller-McCune | Continue reading }

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