I forget where I read this tip, but I have used it many times with great success. It starts with the notion that most women change their hair all the time. You might not notice, but a woman is very aware of these small deviations in everything from highlights to length to fluffiness. I’m probably not using the official hairdresser terms, but you get the idea. It’s different every day, at least according to the woman who owns the hair. To me, hair is either brown or it isn’t, and you either have some or you don’t. The rest is beneath my radar.

So here’s the tip. When you see a woman who you haven’t seen for a few weeks, you can pay her this compliment, and it works every time. Say, “You’ve done something with your hair. I like it.”

The woman will feel flattered that you noticed anything beyond her hair’s very existence and its degree of brownness. She might even wonder if you can be her new gay friend. But she will confirm that something is indeed different and offer many details about how it got there. You can use that time to think about your hobbies.

So far, this idea isn’t mine. I just forget where I stole it from. But I did add a twist to it that I will claim credit for. You know how embarrassing it is when you introduce yourself to someone you think is a stranger at a gathering and the person says, “We met a few weeks ago.” This is a sure tipoff that you consider the person non-memorable. If the person is a woman, you can use the hair trick to save yourself. Simply look surprised that you have met before then pretend you are having a flash of recognition, and add “Of course! But your hair is different today. It threw me.”

Now you have flipped it from being the idiot who can’t remember a new person for a few weeks into a person who has such intense memory for detail that any deviation is the same as a mask.

Yes, I’ve used that method often. I can’t say it works every time, but it sure beats my old method of arguing that I must look like some other person and I just arrived in town an hour ago.

{ Scott Adams }

photo { Imp Kerr & Associates, NYC }

In the 55 years since Albert Einstein’s death, many scientists have tried to figure out what made him so smart.

But no one tried harder than a pathologist named Thomas Harvey, who lost his job and his reputation in a quest to unlock the secrets of Einstein’s genius. Harvey never found the answer. But through an unlikely sequence of events, his search helped transform our understanding of how the brain works.
How that happened is a bizarre story that involves a dead genius, a stolen brain, a rogue scientist and a crazy idea that turned out not to be so crazy.

The genius, Einstein, died April 18, 1955, at Princeton Hospital in Princeton, N.J. Within hours, the quiet town was swarming with reporters and scientific luminaries, and people who simply wanted to be near the great man one last time, says Michael Paterniti, a writer who did a lot of research on the events of that day.

“It was like the death of the prophet,” Paterniti says. “And so it got a little bit crazy.”

Things got especially crazy for Thomas Harvey, who performed the autopsy on Einstein. During the procedure, he removed the brain to examine it, which is routine.

But instead of placing the brain back in the skull, Harvey put it in a jar of formaldehyde, Paterniti says.

“And out of that complete, sort of melee of the moment, he made off with the brain, and it was under somewhat dubious circumstances,” Paterniti says.

Harvey later said Einstein’s older son Hans Albert had given him permission to take the brain. But the Einstein family denied this.

In any event, Harvey lost his job and was denounced by many colleagues. But he kept the brain. His justification, Paterniti says, was a sense of duty to science. (…)

Along the way, Harvey told Paterniti how he had tried to fulfill his duty to science by periodically sending bits of Einstein’s brain to various neuroscientists. (…) One scientist who’d asked for samples was Marian Diamond at the University of California, Berkeley. She wanted pieces from four areas in Einstein’s brain. (…)

At the time, the 1980s, most scientists still believed all the important work in the brain was done by neurons. And researchers had already learned from other samples of Einstein’s brain that he didn’t have a lot of extra neurons.

But Diamond was fascinated by another type of brain cell, called a glial cell. Glia means glue. And the assumption back then was that glial cells were just glue holding a brain together.

Diamond wanted to see if there were more of the glial cells known as astrocytes and oligodendrocytes in Einstein’s brain. So she counted them and found that there were, especially in the tissue from an area involved in imagery and complex thinking. (…)

Discoveries about the role of glia in the brain have caused a revolution of sorts in the world of neuroscience during the past couple of decades.

“Now we can see scores of ways in which astrocytes could be involved in many cognitive processes,” Fields says. “And now it’s not so crazy to find that there were abnormally high numbers of astrocytes in the parts of Einstein’s brain involved in imagery and mathematical ability and that sort of thing.”

{ NPR | Continue reading }

Body Image Distortion

In their study, Longo and his colleagues asked volunteers to place their left hand palm-side-down underneath a board and to then estimate the size of their hand. (…) As it turns out, volunteers consistently overestimated the width of their hand—sometimes by up to 80%.

{ Current Protocols | Continue reading }

artwork { Geneviève Gauckler }

Tila Tequila’s face turned bloody this past Friday at the Gathering of the Juggalos, and I was onstage behind her when it happened. (…) This was the first year the Gathering of the Juggalos, an annual Midwestern pilgrimage for Insane Clown Posse fans, had scheduled a Ladies’ Night. (…) It’s worth noting that Insane Clown Posse fans routinely throw things at these annual Gatherings–many times at each other; many times at the humans onstage.

There were several rubber dildos hurled at her–pretty sure the sex toys missed her, but it was hard to keep track at the time– along with beer cans, Faygo containers, Stryofoam cups, liquor bottles, cigarettes, mustard, half a lemon, a pizza slice, a pearl bracelet, a pudding cup, an unopened can of ICP’s self-branded energy drink Spazmatic, part of a watermelon allegedly soaked in feces and urine, a clothed baby doll, a mini Mag Lite, a bag of chicken tenderloin. When Tequila first came out, a sign reading CUNT was there to greet her.

{ Village Voice | Continue reading | Tila Tequila suffers cuts, but escapes juggalos attack | CNN }

Remember Me is a beautifully streamlined ceramic dildo designed by Coco de Mer & Adele Brydges. The vintage style logo and exquisite silver locket is engraved with the words, Lovers, Adventurers and Dreamers. (…) Open up the silver locket to reveal a little mirror, which is perfect for looking, exploring and loving yourself, and on the other side insert a picture of a long-distance lover to remember them and re-create memories.

{ Coco de Mer }

What does your poker face look like? If it’s the traditional, stern, emotionless expression, you may want to consider practising a new one. (…)

‘Contrary to the popular belief that the optimal face is neutral in appearance,’ the researchers said, ‘poker players who bluff frequently may actually benefit from appearing [friendly,] trustworthy, since the natural tendency seems to be inferring that a trustworthy-looking player bluffs less.’ Before you try this out at your local poker den, remember the findings apply when you’re up against new opposition and there’s little other information to go on.

{ BPS | Continue reading }

photo { Richard Corman }

[$12 a pack] It’s been six weeks since New York’s state government raised the cigarette tax to $4.35 a pack, and guess what? Cigarette sales have fallen by 35 percent. (…)

The crazy-high price of cigarettes here is sending New Yorkers over the state border to, say, Pennsylvania, where a pack of cigarettes can be obtained for around $5, or Jersey, where they’re $7ish. People are also heading to Indian reservations, where, according to a friend who does exactly this, you can get a carton for $22, and where sales have apparently gone up a whopping 300%.

{ Village Voice | Continue reading }

photo { Petra Collins }

Twenty years ago, a green laser would set you back $100,000 and occupy a good-sized dining room table. Today, you can buy a green laser pointer the size of a ball point pen for $15.

These devices create coherent green light in a three step process. A standard laser diode first generates near infrared light with a wavelength of 808nm. This is focused onto a neodymium crystal that converts the light into infrared with a wavelength of 1064nm. In the final step, the light passes into a frequency doubling crystal that emits green light at a wavelength of 532nm.

All this can easily be assembled into a cigar-sized package and powered by a couple of AAA batteries.

The result are devices generally advertised to have a power output of 10mW.

Today, Jemellie Galang and pals from the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Maryland say they’ve found worrying evidence that the output of some green laser pointers is much higher and more insidious. They describe one $15 green laser pointer that actually emits ten times more infrared than green light.

Galang and co are under no illusion as to the potential consequences of this. “This is a serious hazard, since humans or animals may incur significant eye damage by exposure to invisible light before they become aware of it,” they say.

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }

It’s hot outside.

But there is hot and then, to use the scientific term, there is hot. There is also hot as we experience it today, of course, in our super-chilled buildings and ventilated apartments, and hot as it was felt a century ago when an indoor breeze meant your cousin was blowing on your belly.

Take, for example, July 3, 1901, when 200 deaths and 300 cases of heat prostration were caused in New York City as the temperatures reached — and one could be excused for adding “only” here — 99 degrees.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

related { Fort Tilden State Park feels like the city’s best-kept secret—an unspoiled island oasis, tantalizingly close to Manhattan. Even on a weekend at the height of summer, you’ll get a 50-yard stretch of beach to yourself. }

Google Street View captures ‘dead girl.’ Neighbors contact police after seeing ominous image online.

To attract future customers, cemeteries hold parties. Graveyards Plan Concerts, Sky-Diving, Clowns; ‘Meet Us Before You Need Us.’

A 78-year-old man rode a Pittsburgh-area roller coaster 90 times in one day.

An engineer has unveiled the world’s largest barbecue, the ‘God-grilla,’ a £10,000 monster which can cook seven whole lambs, three pigs or two cows at the same time.

Salon owner blames power provider for customer’s bald head.

Survey: Most Conn. high school students have sex.

College students can bet on their own academic success.

The winner of the Clovermead Bees & Honey Bee Beard Competition raises his arms triumphantly, while the losers were left feeling a bit stung.

NYC to get hundreds of countdown clock crosswalks.

Gary Loveman left a Harvard Business School professorship to join Harrah’s Entertainment. By putting his theories about customer service into practice, he built the world’s biggest gaming company. Then came the crash. How to survive in Vegas.

Dov Charney, American Apparel CEO, Declares Hipsterdom “Over.” [Thanks Tim]

You can’t anticipate everything.

Left hemisphere already specialised for language by two months of age.

Birth control pill equally effective for women regardless of their weight.

Study suggests boys and girls not as different as previously thought.

Today’s superheroes send wrong image to boys, say researchers.

A new mathematical model of human throwing action suggests that current thinking about the biomechanical origin of error is wrong.

How badly does it hurt? Research examines the biomedical diagnosis of pain.

In what we suspect is a world first, this week’s cover was created with the help of a technique called neuromarketing, a marriage of market research and neuroscience that uses brain-imaging technology to peek into people’s heads and discover what they really want.

During the Cretaceous, the oceans were ruled not by sharks or aquatic mammals, but by large, predatory marine reptiles. Among these, the dominant ocean predator was the Mosasaur.

Black holes are among the most exotic of astrophysical objects and consequently one of the most deeply studied. White holes, on the other hand, are largely ignored by astrophysicists. A new study explains why astronomers have never seen one of these weird objects.

6 reasons why you’ll never upload your mind into a computer.

Interview with Peter Norvig, the director of research at Google.

How to Install Flash on your iPhone (The Easy Way).

Seven Years as a Freelance Writer, or, How To Make Vitamin Soup.

Scrax, polkadodge, papcastle… Many of the words shut away in the OED’s vault are profoundly useful.

Speechwriting and diplomatic technique, and the way messages are sent/received both explicitly and implicitly.

Roles of the President’s White House economic advisors.

How I Learned to Fly (In a Week).

On Sept. 25, some of New York City’s best street-cart food sellers will gather on Governors Island to determine the 2010 winner in the Vendy Awards.

So, I began to create a scale of evil. I ended up at first with just a few numbers on my scale, but I then got it up to 22 of which the first one was “not evil,” just justified homicide.  Number two was crimes of passion, all the way up to 22 where there was usually a serial killer subjecting victims to prolonged torture.

Shm-reduplication is a form of reduplication in which the original word or its first syllable (the base) is repeated with the copy (the reduplicant) beginning with shm- (sometimes schm-).

50 dancers from the Paris Opera Ballet danced under the Louvre’s glass pyramid entrance before being joined by 250 people who had earlier signed up to the “flashmob” performance.

YouTube - Interview with Stallone on Expandables.

Goliath casket.

Morse Code class from 1941.

…and on my computer monitor.

Religion for retarded [mp3].

Someone once told me…

Is The Child The Father of the Man?

One of the fundamental themes (and a continuing debate) in developmental psychology concerns the continuity or discontinuity of temperament and personality from infancy through the rest of a child’s life and into adulthood.

Some researchers believe that they have found evidence for the continuity of relatively stable personality traits through development. Despite the clear importance of environmental stressors and other random events, the evidence seems fairly clear that the personality traits that dictate the response pattern to such life events in adulthood is fairly predictable based on early childhood temperament.

{ Scientopia | Continue reading }

photo { Bill Owens }

Over the past few months, we have learned about extraordinary levels of excessively bad corporate behavior.

As bad as the Bailouts were from an economic, wealth transfer, and moral hazard perspectives, it turns out that the grim reality was an order of magnitude worse than previously believed.

We have since learned that many TARP recipients, bailed out banks and other ne’er-do-wells were actively engaged in cooking their books. I don’t mean various FASB 157 permission to lie, and other legal but nefarious activities. I am referring to the 2002-2007 era of scams, frauds, and outright theft.

The public’s righteous indignation over the lack of just desserts for the perpetrators of these frauds has morphed since September 2008 into an unresolved, unfocused anger. When this all plays out, we might very well see bonus clawbacks, fines and penalties, disgorgement of ill gotten gains, and criminal arrests for some of the major names at the biggest brokerage houses.

Why do I think that 2 years later, some justice might be done? The truth is slowly coming out, as insiders provide testimony, release papers, and even offer up recordings of conversations to various investigators and prosecutors.

{ Barry Ritholtz | Continue reading }

photo { American Standard (remix), a work based on 4 x 5 negatives Simone Bergantini bought in Brooklyn at a secondhand shop }

CM: What is the relation between richardsonmag.com and the print version?

Andrew Richardson: You’ll see in the print version you have the QR codes and if you have a QR reader on your phone you can scan it and that will open up the online version where you can watch say a film that is referred to in the print version or a translation of an article while you have the magazine in front of you. So you have this Analog Digital interface. What we have on the website is not really a reflection of the magazine, it’s an ancillary device to the magazine and then what we’ve started doing now is blogging…So we have a ‘feed’ section on the site where we put up something every day or every couple of days, something that interests us… That’s what’s exciting in a way; the magazine is a beautiful object, a resolved rigorous publication, whereas the website is a much more spontaneous easy way of communicating. We have 4 or 5 different contributors and they each bring their own sort of thing to the mix. There is a gay point of view, a lesbian, a straight girl, straight guy- different types of people who are sharing things that they are interested in. It’s very important that this magazine is not a ‘straight’ magazine, it’s all sex and we try to represent that in the blog as well.

{ MODELS.com MDX | Continue reading | Richardsonmag.com }

{ via thisisnthappiness }

{ Laurent Nivalle }

Are most people nice, happy, trustworthy and interesting? Or do people usually strike you as cold, grumpy and not to be trusted? How you answer can tell us something about you. In a recent psychology article, Wood et al. explore “perceiver effects”, or in other words how your own personality affects your perception of others.

They show that our personality affects perceptions of others with respect to one major factor: how positively we view other people. If we see others as relatively happy, we are also likely to think that they are more trustworthy, nice, interesting and have fewer anti-social tendencies. Seeing others in a more positive light is related to being happy, satisfied with life and emotionally stable yourself.

{ Kris-Stella Trump | Continue reading }

photo { Marc Van Dalen }

We can see each other, but we can never know exactly what’s going on in the other’s head.

It’s partly why psychological science is so hard and it’s why understanding how we are viewed by others is so hard.

Research shows that we normally try to work out how others see us by thinking about how we view ourselves, then extrapolating from that. The problem with this approach is that to varying degrees we all suffer from an ‘egocentric bias’: because we’re locked inside our own heads, we find it difficult to see ourselves objectively. In some ways all the information we have clouds our judgement. (…) People trying to put themselves in the other person’s shoes were awful at the task. (…) But, when participants thought about their future selves, a technique that encourages abstract thinking, suddenly people’s accuracy shot up.

{ PsyBlog | Continue reading }

Mysterious and possibly nefarious trading algorithms are operating every minute of every day in the nation’s stock exchanges.

What they do doesn’t show up in Google Finance, let alone in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. No one really knows how they operate or why. But over the past few weeks, Nanex, a data services firm has dragged some of the odder algorithm specimens into the light.

The trading bots visualized in the stock charts in this story aren’t doing anything that could be construed to help the market. Unknown entities for unknown reasons are sending thousands of orders a second through the electronic stock exchanges with no intent to actually trade. Often, the buy or sell prices that they are offering are so far from the market price that there’s no way they’d ever be part of a trade. The bots sketch out odd patterns with their orders, leaving patterns in the data that are largely invisible to market participants.

{ The Atlantic | Continue reading }

artwork { Jean-Michel Basquiat }

related { Quants: The Alchemists of Wall Street | video | Thanks Douglas }

Whether we like it or not, today’s couples feel far less encumbered by the legal, social, and moral strictures of traditional marriage and its obligations. Increasing numbers are negotiating what they mean by “fidelity” and how they wish to define monogamy in their relationship.

If there’s anything fundamental to the meaning of marriage in Western society, it’s monogamy. In fact, monogamy may be the only thing that remains essential to most people’s idea of marriage. People no longer marry for economic, dynastic, or procreative reasons, as they did for millennia; they can’t be compelled to marry by law, religion, or custom; they don’t need to marry to have sex or cohabit or even produce and raise children. But throughout all of this staggering change, the requirement and expectation of monogamy as the emotional glue that keeps the whole structure of marriage from collapsing under its own weight has remained constant.

Given the almost universal public denunciation and disapproval of infidelity (which doesn’t exclude the barely hidden schadenfreude at the deliciously scandalous goings-on of celebrities, famous preachers, major political figures, sports heroes, or even your office coworker caught in flagrante), you’d think that infidelity must be quite rare. At least nice people don’t do it—we wouldn’t do it.

Except that we would and we do—much more than most people seem to realize. As a culture committed, in theory, to monogamy, our actions tell a different story. It isn’t just that, as therapists, we need to understand that infidelity happens—we all know that already. What some of us may not realize is how often it happens. Research varies, but according to some surveys, such as those reported by Joan Atwood and Limor Schwartz in the 2002 Journal of Couple & Relationship Therapy, 55 percent of married women and 65 percent of married men report being unfaithful at some point in their marriage. Up to one-half of married women have at least one lover after they’re married and before the age of 40.

{ Psychotherapy Networker | Continue reading }