So, this is about the word “so.” (…) “So” may be the new “well,” new “um,” new “oh” and new “like.” No longer content to lurk in the middle of sentences, it has jumped to the beginning, where it can portend many things: transition, certitude, logic, attentiveness, a major insight.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

Last year, grammatical tragedy struck in the heart of England when Birmingham City Council decreed that apostrophes were to be forever banished from public addresses. To the horror of purists and pedants alike, place names such as St Paul’s Square were banned and unceremoniously replaced with an apostrophe-free version: St Pauls Square.

The council’s reasoning was that nobody understands apostrophes and their misuse was so common in public signs that they were a hindrance to effective navigation. Anecdotes abounded of ambulance drivers puzzling over how to enter St James’s Street into a GPS navigation system while victims of heart attacks, strokes and hit ‘n’ run drivers passed from this world into the (presumably apostrophe-free) next.

Why the confusion? Part of the reason is that apostrophes are not particularly common in the English language: In French they occur at a rate of more than once per sentence on average. In English, they occur about once in every 20 sentences. So English speakers get less practice.

But the rules governing apostrophes are also more complex in English. In both French and English, apostrophes indicate a missing letter, such as the missing i in that’s or the v in e’er. But in English, apostrophes also indicate the possessive (or genitive) case. They are used to show that one noun owns another: St James’s Street is the street belonging to St James.

The complexity is compounded because in English, the plural is often formed by adding an s. So the word boys means more than one boy. How then do you form the possessive to indicate, for example, a ball belonging to the boys? Is it the boy’s ball or the boys’s ball or the boys’ ball?

And then there are the exceptions. Pronouns, for example, do not take a possessive apostrophe: you can’t say I’s ball or me’s bat. The truth is that knowing when to use an apostrophe is not always easy.

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading | Mind your p’s and q’s: or the peregrinations of an apostrophe in 17th Century English | PDF }

photo { Marco Ovando }

Our busy lives sometimes feel like they are spinning out of control, and we lose track of the little things we can do to add meaning to our lives and make our loved ones feel appreciated. A new article in Personal Relationships points the way to the methods of gratitude we can use to give a boost to our romantic relationships, and help us achieve and maintain satisfaction with our partners.

Humans are interdependent, with people doing things for each other all the time. Simply because a person does something for another does not mean that the emotion of gratitude will be felt. In addition to the possibility of not even noticing the kind gesture, one could have many different reactions to receiving a benefit from someone else, including gratitude, resentment, misunderstood, or indebtedness.

Positive thinking has been shown to have a longstanding constructive effect on our emotional life. Extending these positive emotions and gratitude to our romantic partners can increase the benefit of positive thinking tenfold, say the authors of this new study. (…)

The authors propose that the emotion of gratitude is adaptive, and ultimately helps us to find, remind, and bind ourselves to people who seem to care about our welfare. (…)

However, the authors are quick to warn that the everyday emotional response of indebtedness did not facilitate relationship maintenance. Indebtedness implies a need to repay kind gestures. This may work to help to keep relationships in working order, but will not yield as many benefits or long-term growth in the relationship as an expression of gratitude.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

How love and sex can influence recognition of faces and words: A processing model account

A link between romantic love and face recognition and sexual desire and verbal recognition is suggested. When in love, people typically focus on a long-term perspective which enhances global perception, whereas when experiencing sexual encounters they focus on the present which enhances a perception of details. Because people automatically activate these processing styles when in love or sex, subtle reminders of love versus sex should suffice to change ways of perception. Global processing should further enhance face recognition, whereas local processing should enhance recognition of verbal information.

In two studies participants were primed with concepts and thoughts of love versus sex. Compared to control groups, recognition of verbal material was enhanced after sex priming, whereas face recognition was enhanced after love priming. In Experiment 2 it was demonstrated that differences in global versus local perception mediated these effects. However, there was no indication for mood as a mediator.

{ European Journal of Social Psychology/Wiley }

photo { Haley Jane Samuelson }

Ever since ancient times, scholars have puzzled over the reasons that some musical note combinations sound so sweet while others are just downright dreadful. The Greeks believed that simple ratios in the string lengths of musical instruments were the key, maintaining that the precise mathematical relationships endowed certain chords with a special, even divine, quality. Twentieth-century composers, on the other hand, have leaned toward the notion that musical tastes are really all in what you are used to hearing.

Now, researchers reporting online on May 20th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, think they may have gotten closer to the truth by studying the preferences of more than 250 college students from Minnesota to a variety of musical and nonmusical sounds. (…)

The researchers’ results show that musical chords sound good or bad mostly depending on whether the notes being played produce frequencies that are harmonically related or not. Beating didn’t turn out to be as important. Surprisingly, the preference for harmonic frequencies was stronger in people with experience playing musical instruments. In other words, learning plays a role—perhaps even a primary one, McDermott argues.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

The C.I.A. and F.B.I. didn’t stop 9/11, so now we have the Department of Homeland Security. Decades of government subsidies for homebuyers helped create the housing crash, so now the government is subsidizing the auto industry, the green-energy industry, the health care sector… (…)

This is the perverse logic of meritocracy. Once a system grows sufficiently complex, it doesn’t matter how badly our best and brightest foul things up. Every crisis increases their authority, because they seem to be the only ones who understand the system well enough to fix it.

But their fixes tend to make the system even more complex and centralized, and more vulnerable to the next national-security surprise, the next natural disaster, the next economic crisis. Which is why, despite all the populist backlash and all the promises from Washington, this isn’t the end of the “too big to fail” era. It’s the beginning.

{ Ross Douthat/NY Times | Continue reading }

Power-knowledge is a concept coined by the French philosopher Michel Foucault. (…)

Both power and knowledge are to be seen as de-centralised, relativistic, ubiquitous, and unstable (dynamic) systemic phenomena. Thus Foucault’s concept of power draws on micro-relations without falling into reductionism because it does not neglect, but emphasizes, the systemic (or structural) aspect of the phenomenon.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

{ 50 Cent, Hate It Or Love It, G-Unit remix}

{ Nightcommunication EP | Andrea Gemolotto, Leo Mas, Sergio Portaluri }

{ The Smiths, This Night Has Opened My Eyes }

{ Martha Argerich plays Ravel, Jeux d’eau }

When making moral judgements, we rely on our ability to make inferences about the beliefs and intentions of others. With this so-called “theory of mind”, we can meaningfully interpret their behaviour, and decide whether it is right or wrong. The legal system also places great emphasis on one’s intentions: a “guilty act” only produces criminal liability when it is proven to have been performed in combination with a “guilty mind”, and this, too, depends on the ability to make reasoned moral judgements.

MIT researchers now show that this moral compass can be very easily skewed. In a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they report that magnetic pulses which disrupt activity in a specific region of the brain’s right hemisphere can interfere with the ability to make certain types of moral judgements, so that hypothetical situations involving attempted harm are perceived to be less morally forbidden and more permissable.

{ Neurophilosophy/Scienceblogs | Continue reading }

sculpture { Paul McCarthy }

Modern men in the throes of a midlife crisis have been known to overhaul their careers, their relationships—even their bodies. Few, though, intentionally induce hallucinations in order to commune with demons and deities and end up creating a text transforming—at least indirectly—the entire field of psychology.

Carl Gustav Jung was 37 when by most accounts he lost his soul. As psychological historian Sonu Shamdasani explained, “Jung had reached a point in 1912 when he’d achieved all of his youthful ambitions but felt that he’d lost meaning in his life, an existential crisis in which he simply neglected the areas of ultimate spiritual concern that were his main motivations in his youth.”

In fact, the dilemma was so profound it eventually caused the father of analytical psychology to undergo a series of waking fantasies. Traveling from Zurich to Schaffhausen, Switzerland, in October 1913, Jung was roused by a troubling vision of “European-wide destruction.” In place of the normally serene fields and trees, one of the era’s pre-eminent thinkers saw the landscape submerged by a river of blood carrying forth not only detritus but also dead bodies. When that vision resurfaced a few weeks later—on the same journey—added to the mix was a voice telling him to “look clearly; all this would become real.” World War I broke out the following summer.

These experiences prompted Jung to question his own sanity. But they also motivated him to embark on what turned out to be a 16-year self-seeking journey documented in a red leather journal titled “Liber Novus” (Latin for “New Book”). It features ethereal, often unsavory passages and shocking yet vibrant images expressing what Jung himself termed a “confrontation with the unconscious.”

Mr. Shamdasani, who got hold of a copy in 1996, took five years to understand it and three years to convince the Jung family to allow the journal’s publication. (…)

The result was W.W. Norton’s “The Red Book: Liber Novus.”

{ Wall Street Journal | Continue reading }

{ How much flatulence would it take to become airborne? | photo: Imp Kerr }

YouTube made two fascinating announcements recently: 1) viewers are now downloading an average of two billion videos per day on the service, and; 2) YouTube is almost showing a profit for Google, its owner.

Think about the glorious inefficiency embodied in that latter statement: two billion downloads per day just to break even. And this is supposed to be the future of television? Hardly.

I think the future of television is Veetle.

{ Robert X. Cringely | Continue reading }

photo { Werner Amann }

When the Conficker computer “worm” was unleashed on the world in November 2008, cyber-security experts didn’t know what to make of it. It infiltrated millions of computers around the globe. It constantly checks in with its unknown creators. It uses an encryption code so sophisticated that only a very few people could have deployed it. For the first time ever, the cyber-security elites of the world have joined forces in a high-tech game of cops and robbers, trying to find Conficker’s creators and defeat them. The cops are failing. And now the worm lies there, waiting…

{ The Atlantic | Continue reading | Thanks Daniel }

Green Buildings: Dow says many buildings are actually getting less efficient

Mike Kontranowski, Strategic Marketing Manager of Dow Building Solution’ Thermax brand of rigid insulating board, presented a sobering analysis of the direction of building efficiency during the Summit. Although buildings of all types have become more energy efficient on a per square foot basis for the past 50 years, many buildings constructed over the past decade have bucked the trend and have begun regressing on energy efficiency. This reversal comes despite newfound interest in “green building” among governments, occupants, and the building owners themselves, and despite the plethora of insulation, window, equipment, and other devices that yield far greater efficiencies. More surprisingly, many of the buildings are LEED (Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design) certified, because energy efficiency is only one of many metrics that accrue points needed for certification.

The proximate cause of the backslide in efficiency is a switch to less expensive aluminum wall studs in place of wood or block in recent years. Because aluminum is such a good conductor of heat, walls that are otherwise well-insulated – with insulation batts installed between the studs – see an overall insulating R-value of the wall drop in half, from 11 or more to 5. Thermal images of walls are particularly poignant, showing relatively small amounts of heat escaping from between the studs, while the studs themselves were lit up like Christmas trees.


{ Lux Research Analyst Blog | Continue reading | via Josh Wolfe }

{ What Makes The Pie Shops Tick? | more }

I am a nerd. This fact was quite apparent to many of those around me growing up, but came as quite a surprise to me. Part of the reason that I was regarded as a nerd was because I wasn’t into sports. (…) Being a nerd, of course, I developed my love through study, through reading. (…)

Through reading, sports ceased to be a private vocabulary—one that every other boy seemed to have had whispered into his ear at infancy, but which had strangely been denied to me—and became instead a new intellectual problem, something else to be considered and solved.

The thrill of sports is and will always be largely visceral. I would have it no other way. But behind the moments of raw action are endless intricacies, seemingly limitless geometries of movement which can be studied and enjoyed in precisely the same way one enjoys science, math or history. I’m sure some people are probably reading that sentence in horror–the division between jock and nerd is so elementary and animalistic I’m surprised Joseph Campbell never wrote about it–but I mean merely that intellectual play in the consideration of sports is little different than in any other subject. There is something universal in the basic pleasure of applying mind to (subject) matter and slowly, gradually, feeling the unknown become the familiar.

{ Freddie deBoer/Wunderkammer | Continue reading }

{ Richard Avedon, Lyal Burr, coal miner, and his sons Kerry and Phillip, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Koosharem, Utah, May 7, 1981 }

{ Avedon’s instructions to his printer. | Scanned from Evidence 1944-1994: Richard Avedon | Amazon | Art Forum book review }

{ Michael Kenneth Williams photographed by TR for Vice }

{ Vice | Continue reading }

{ Marco Ovando photographed by Ari Levanael, T-shirt by Christopher Lee Sauvé }

{ Mothe, Decay of a city | Thanks Colleen }

Singapore, the country with the lowest child mortality rate in the world at 2.5 deaths per 1,000 children, cut its rate by two-thirds between 1990 and 2010. Serbia and Malaysia, which were ranked behind the U.S. in 1990, cut their rates by nearly 70% and now are ranked higher.

The U.S., which is projected to have 6.7 deaths per 1,000 children this year, saw a 42% decline in child mortality, a pace that is on par with Kazakhstan, Sierra Leone and Angola.

“There are an awful lot of people who think we have the best medical system in the world,” said Dr. Christopher Murray, who directs the institute and is an author of the study. “The data is so contrary to that.”

Even many countries that already had low child mortality rates, such as Sweden and France, were able to cut their rates more rapidly than the U.S. over the last two decades. (…)

Murray said high child mortality rates were not limited to black and Latino populations in the U.S. In fact, researchers have found high rates among higher-income whites, a group that traditionally has better access to medical care.

The data instead suggest broader problems with the nation’s fragmented, poorly planned healthcare system, Murray and other healthcare experts say.

{ LA Times | Continue reading }

This weekend, the sun will set in perfect alignment with primary sections of the Manhattan street grid. Manhattanhenge 2010: May 30/31 and July 11/12.

Gino, an Italian restaurant which opened in 1945 on Lexington Avenue near Sixty-first Street, will close after Saturday night’s dinner on May 29th. All the items on the menu appear on a single plastic-covered page and were handwritten in ink sixty-five years ago by the restaurant’s founder, Gino Circiello.

The first time he went to Sardi’s, he believes, was in 1933, six years after it opened at its current location, on West 44th Street. The last time was Tuesday afternoon, when Mr. Herz, 93, a retired theatrical jack-of-all-trades, ate a crabmeat sandwich.

Like so many of the city’s legendary nightspots, the Lion disappeared, replaced by a series of other restaurants on the ground floor of a brownstone on Ninth Street. It reopened last week, as a tavern and restaurant whose owners have labored to restore the spirit of its early-1960s heyday. A Vision of the City as It Once Was.

9/11 attacks linked to increased male baby miscarriages.

Times Square Set for Colorful Makeover Before Summer’s Tourist Rush. [eek!]

Claude Monet’s nympheas at Gagosian Gallery, until June 26, 2010.

The exhibition titled “Salt Rises above the Sky — 25 Years of unique salt artworks by Bettina Werner, 49th floor of 7 World Trade Center, NYC, thru June 10th, 2010.

From Wednesday, May 26 at 12 am through Friday, May 28 at 11:59 pm, the Whitney Museum will remain open for three consecutive days as part of 2010 artist Michael Asher’s Biennial project.

One of the reasons New Yorkers pay $100 a day to be here.

A new crime trend: stealing bull semen.

Chicken costumes banned at Nevada polling places.

Wildlife documentaries infringe animals’ privacy, says report.

Bat fellatio causes a scandal in academia.

Druids use rock and magnets to stop road accidents. Austrian authorities say druids have been so successful in dealing with motorway accident blackspots in one area that they plan to extend the project nationwide.

Instead of being embalmed and placed in a casket for viewing, 22-year-old David Morales Colon was posed on a motorcycle during his wake. The bike was a gift from his uncle. The funeral home owner said it takes special skill to make the body rigid enough to pose, yet not too stiff to put back in a coffin for burial.

Man allegedly sets blaze because of late dinner.

Church repents as Copernicus reburied.

Wielding swords in Samurai Camp is the new aerobics for Japanese women.

Original Creator of Matrix & Terminator Wins $2.5 Billion In Lawsuit.

American Apparel reports $18m first quarter loss. Fashion group faces delisting of its shares in New York.

Can Bloomberg Topple the Ratings Agencies?

Overseas Madoff Investors Settle With Banks.

The Pentagon has now told the public, for the first time, precisely how many nuclear weapons the United States has in its arsenal: 5,113. That is exactly 4,802 more than we need.

A new survey of drug addiction in Afghanistan is expected to show a major rise in drug consumption in the country.

The U.C.L.A. project was an effort to capture a relatively new sociological species: the dual-earner, multiple-child, middle-class American household. So what did they find? The general conclusion is that family life is extremely stressful, a relentless barrage of problems, mishaps and negotiations.

Time gets faster the older you are. Or does it?

Believe it or not, there’s an article in the new journal Frontiers in Cognition entitled “Sexual orientation biases attentional control: a possible gaydar mechanism.”

Koro is the unfounded fear that the genitals are retracting into the body or have disappeared.

The wisdom of herds: How social mood moves the world.

Decreased food intake during hospital stays is an independent risk factor for hospital mortality.

Craig Venter and team have created the first fully functioning, reproducing cell controlled by synthetic DNA. [TED video]

Behavioral therapy can help kids with Tourette disorder.

Seen something pale and round floating in the midst of a thunderstorm? It may be a hallucination.

Five creatures that prove life could exist on other planets (or in space).

The strike on Jupiter last year raises the likelihood of future impacts by an order of magnitude, says a new study. But what does it mean for the Earth?

Einstein’s Other Gravity and the Acceleration of the Universe.

On the motifs distribution in random hierarchical networks.

How a polluted environment can lead to illness.

Home security goes super high-tech. Advancements in technologies could allow individuals to watch their homes.

Interacting with your computer by waving your hands may require just a pair of $1 multicolored gloves and a webcam, say two researchers at MIT who have made a breakthrough in gesture-based computing that’s inexpensive and easy to use.

The real problem at Microsoft is one that every other public company would love to have – they make too much profit. So unlike every other public company, Microsoft traditionally manages its earnings not by cutting expenses but by increasing spending. [from the archives]

It sounds like a kamikaze mission: an upstart with a meager number of users and no capital squaring off against Facebook, a social networking juggernaut with more than 400 million members and a $15 billion valuation.

University of Calgary computer scientists predict a new form of adware may become a threat to computer security through wireless networks.

Martin Gardner, who teased brains with math puzzles in Scientific American for a quarter-century and who indulged his own restless curiosity by writing more than 70 books on topics as diverse as magic, philosophy and the nuances of Alice in Wonderland, died Saturday in Norman, Okla. He was 95.

What Can We Really Know About Authors’ Personalities From Their Works?

Notes on why the novel and the Internet are opposites, and why the latter both undermines the former and makes it more necessary.

Short interview with Marcel Duchamps [video 1, video 2]

Meaner than fiction: Reality TV high on aggression, study shows.

CNN enjoyed its most profitable year ever in 2009. And almost midway through 2010, company executives say that the cable network is on track to improve on that performance.

The final episode of “Lost” was extra-long and attempted to sew up myriad loose plot strands with an emotionally complex denouement. But it still didn’t come close to snaring an audience on par with a regular episode of “NCIS.”

Interview: Lady Gaga discusses fame, the paparazzi – and those health rumors.

I opened Au Bonheur du Jour on 13 April 1999, exactly fifty-three years after the law was passed that meant the destruction of the national register of prostitutes and the closure of some 1,400 brothels, 180 of which were in Paris.

The state of boobies in America.

Umbrella vending machine.

Caviar ATM. [via copyranter | link haze]

updateA new breed of vending machine is proliferating around the world.

Original Creator of Matrix & Terminator Wins $2.5 Billion In Lawsuit. [Thanks Douglas, Dana and Patrixio]

Distribution wanted for freshly funny family film.

Chimp In Cocaine Study Starts Lying To Friends.

{ Anthony Gormley | more }