‘The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat.’ –Lily Tomlin
A prisoner who has commited a crime is before a judge. The judge sentences the prisoner to death by hanging, but adds a cruel twist to the sentence. The prisoner is to be hanged on one of the following seven days – but it must be a surprise which day it is. The prisoner is not allowed to know. Returning to his cell the prisoner is a bit disturbed. His lawyer tells him not to worry.
“Look,” the lawyer says, “they can’t hang you at all now. The judge has made it a condition that you must be surprised. But think about it. If you make it to Saturday without being hung then Sunday is the last day they could do it. But then it wouldn’t be a surprise would it? So that makes Saturday the last day they could possibly hang you. But hang on – if Saturday is the last possible day then it also can’t be a surprise to hang you then. So that make Friday the last possible day – and so on back through all the days of the week. They can’t possibly hang without breaking the judge’s orders?
The prisoner is comforted by this line of reasoning and stops worrying about the prospect of being hung at all. When on Wednesday he is taken from his cell and hung.
Eddie Grace’s Buick got four bullet holes in the side
As airport security employees scan luggage for a large variety of banned items, they may miss a deadly box cutter if they find a water bottle first. According to new research at Duke University, identifying an easy-to-spot prohibited item such as a water bottle may hinder the discovery of other, harder-to-spot items in the same scan. (…)
Missing items in a complex visual search is not a new idea: in the medical field, it has been known since the 1960s that radiologists tend to miss a second abnormality on an X-ray if they’ve found one already. The concept — dubbed “satisfaction of search” — is that radiologists would find the first target, think they were finished, and move on to the next patient’s X-ray.
Half a mo. Maximum the second.
Ruby Mazur, creator of the Rolling Stones’ lips-and-tongue logo, received a call most artists only dream about.
A native New Yorker and a Las Vegas resident since 2000, Mazur has been invited by the prestigious Whitney Museum of American Art in New York to show a retrospective exhibition of his entire collection of paintings.
“That’s heavy, man,” Mazur said Thursday. The Whitney is considered among the worlds’ top contemporary museums.
Las Vegans might get first peek at the exhibition. Mazur not only has a one-man exhibition at Art de Vignettes at the Fashion Show Mall on July 22, but the Whitney might launch the exhibition here, Mazur said.
His Stones’ logo was selected in 1971 after Mick Jagger asked Mazur to create it. It made an immediate splash.
“I did it over a weekend and when I took it to his house on Mullholland Drive (in Hollywood), I gave it to him outside by his pool. He got so excited he pushed me, and I fell back into the pool, fully dressed.”
The logo remains the Stones’ emblem.
“It made me,” Mazur said.
He’s done more than 3,000 album covers, including childhood pal Billy Joel ’s “Cold Spring Harbor,” Elton John ’s “Friends,” and the soundtrack album cover and artwork for the advertising campaign for “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.”
{ Las Vegas Review Journal, 2000 | Rubymazurgallery.com }
photo { Tim Barber }
Cold comfort. Pious fraud but quite right: otherwise they’d have one old booser worse than another coming along, cadging for a drink. Queer the whole atmosphere of the. Quite right. Perfectly right that is.
Does red wine always go with red meat? How about white wine with fish and chicken?
Forget the rules. Francois Chartier says it’s more important to match food and wine with their molecular aromas.
In “Papilles et Molecules (Taste Buds and Molecules),” named 2010’s Best Innovative Culinary Book in the World at the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards in Paris, the Canadian master sommelier provides a detailed reference guide for doing just that. (…)
Chartier examined the aromatic molecules behind our sense of taste and matched food and wine to their corresponding molecular families. He then developed simple charts that explain how to achieve perfect culinary synergy.
re-photo { Richard Prince }
His eyes wandering over the multicoloured hoardings
Did you know, for example, that when you take the list of Fortune 100 companies in 1966 and compare it with the Fortune 100 in 2006, 66 of those companies don’t even exist anymore? Another 15 still exist but aren’t on the list any longer, while only 19 of them are still there. Similarly, ample research and statistics show that for a variety of industries very successful firms have trouble staying successful.
You could call it arrogance or, more kindly, naivete but there is a certain blindness at play; blindness to the dangers of continuing a previously successful course of action for too long.
How does it happen? Over the years, companies begin to focus on the thing that made them successful (a particular product, service, production method, etc.). Initially that serves them well and they become even better at it. It will also come at the expense of other products, processes, and viewpoints that the company considers less important and off the mark, that are discarded or brushed aside.
As a result, firms are too late to adapt to fundamental changes in their business environments such as new competitors, different customer demand, radical new technologies, or business models. The historical examples of Laura Ashley, Atari, Digital Equipment, Tupperware, or Revlon come to mind.
{ Harvard Business Review/Freek Vermeulen | Continue reading }
‘Nuclear power and electric cars mean $0.99 gasoline.’ –David Crane
Officials from the U.S. Department of the Treasury, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the United States Secret Service today unveiled the new design for the $100 note. Complete with advanced technology to combat counterfeiting, the new design for the $100 note retains the traditional look of U.S. currency. (..)
There are a number of security features in the redesigned $100 note, including two new features, the 3-D Security Ribbon and the Bell in the Inkwell. These security features are easy for consumers and merchants to use to authenticate their currency.
The blue 3-D Security Ribbon on the front of the new $100 note contains images of bells and 100s that move and change from one to the other as you tilt the note. The Bell in the Inkwell on the front of the note is another new security feature. The bell changes color from copper to green when the note is tilted, an effect that makes it seem to appear and disappear within the copper inkwell.
Nicky’s methods of betting weren’t scientific, but they worked. When he won, he collected. When he lost, he told the bookies to go fuck themselves.
It was followed in late 1936 by Life, the picture magazine, which was an astonishing newsstand success: “By the end of 1937 . . . circulation had reached 1.5 million — more than triple the first-year circulation of any magazine in American (and likely world) history.” But then, as throughout much of its existence, Life was troubled by high production costs and insufficient advertising revenues.
Luce’s empire grew to include “The March of Time,” first a radio broadcast and then a newsreel for theatrical distribution, and finally, in 1954, the slow-growing but eventually phenomenally successful Sports Illustrated.
The empire was called Time, Incorporated, a name that no longer exists. In 1990 — 23 years after Luce’s death — it merged with Warner Brothers and has since been known as Time Warner, a partnership that has seen its rough times but is now “one of the three largest media companies in the United States.” It is “a powerful and successful company, although the magazine division that had launched the company [is] weakening fast in the digital world of the twenty-first century.” Time, which was required reading in the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, even for those who detested it, seems now to be waiting-room reading; Fortune retains relatively strong circulation but seems primarily known for its “Fortune 500″ rankings; and Sports Illustrated, though still widely read, is no longer noteworthy, as it once was, for superb journalism that at times reached the lower rungs of literature.
High brown boots with laces dangling. Well turned foot. What is he fostering over that change for?
…Mr. Sibayan’s prize was the equivalent in the world of rarefied coffees: dung containing the world’s most expensive coffee beans.
Costing hundreds of dollars a pound, these beans are found in the droppings of the civet, a nocturnal, furry, long-tailed catlike animal that prowls Southeast Asia’s coffee-growing lands for the tastiest, ripest coffee cherries. The civet eventually excretes the hard, indigestible innards of the fruit — essentially, incipient coffee beans — though only after they have been fermented in the animal’s stomach acids and enzymes to produce a brew described as smooth, chocolaty and devoid of any bitter aftertaste.
As connoisseurs in the United States, Europe and East Asia have discovered civet coffee in recent years, growing demand is fueling a gold rush in the Philippines and Indonesia, the countries with the largest civet populations.
photo { Christophe Kutner }
I’m looking at you right now. I’m seeing you for the very first time right this minute.
Social psychologists have long observed that humans have a reliable ability to “read” each other. Now evidence is growing that we accomplish this through social signaling, an ancient system of communication that depends on non-verbal communication rather than speech. Pentland and colleagues have concluded that they can often predict outcomes of interactions between people when they observe and quantify these signals. Recent advances in monitoring technology and in computing capabilities make this data collection and analysis—which Pentland calls “reality mining”—possible.
photo { Johan Willner }
New York City… You are now rockin w/
Missing Florida boy found in NYC.
Marc Jacobs bookstore on Bleecker. Maybe it’s a stealth Marc Jacobs, like those stealth Starbucks we once heard about. As the Huffington Post mused, “You can imagine where this un-branding campaign could lead. A little neighborhood burger place run by McDonald’s? A little neighborhood hardware store owned by Home Depot? A little neighborhood five-and-dime operated by Wal-Mart?”
MoMA’s naked-art exhibit has a growing problem.
Tribeca Fest overview: 132 movies from April 21 to May 2.
Bleecker Street Station 6 Uptown only. [Thanks Glenn!]
Every day, the same, again
Dying man sells advertising space on his urn.
A convicted cocaine smuggler has been arrested for running what authorities say appears to be a bestiality farm in Washington state in which visitors could engage in all sorts of twisted sex acts with animals. Related: Zoophiles make scientists rethink human sexuality.
Man loses licence after drink-driving in toy Barbie car with a top speed of 4mph.
UK surgeon cut off testicle ‘by mistake.’
Man ‘deliberately vomits’ on police officer at baseball game.
Man wrote and delivered his own obituary to a newspaper, then hanged himself from a local bridge.
Iranian cleric: Women who wear revealing clothing cause earthquakes. Related: FAQs - Common Myths about Earthquakes.
Despite new law, gender salary gap persists.
Male day laborers turn to prostitution.
A 19-year-old Florida teen’s suicide broadcast Wednesday on Justin.tv was a result of an overdose of opiates and benzodiazepine. About 185 people were viewing the feed on the San Francisco-based live-streaming service. The teen had announced his pending suicide on a bodybuilding.com chat forum, which linked to the broadcast.
Researchers say dead gray whale discovered on West Seattle’s Arroyo Beach was filled with garbage.
John Lennon’s LSD stash ‘discovered.’
Does one drug cause the user to be more annoying?
Study suggests indoor tanning may be an addictive behavior.
People lie more in email than when using pen and paper.
Stanley Milgram’s 1960s obedience to authority experiments, in which a majority of participants applied an apparently fatal electric shock to an innocent ‘learner’, are probably the most famous in psychology, and their findings still appall and intrigue to this day. Milgram’s personal archive reveals how he created the ’strongest obedience situation.’
Don’t start group discussions by sharing initial preferences.
Understanding cumulative risk.
Computer brain training doesn’t work.
For anyone who has ever lost a cellphone, remember this: it could be worse. You could be the person who left his phone in a bar in California. And it wasn’t just any phone; it was a supersecret version of the next iPhone. Related: This is Apple’s next iPhone.
Can the iPad topple the Kindle, and save the book business?
U.S. needs new national strategy in era of cyberaggression, UC paper concludes.
Child prodigy explains mysteries of the universe. [video]
How did bedbugs make a comeback?
What is terrorism, anyway? The expert consensus converges on a few key traits.
Woman vs. man: Who’s a better driver?
Will special paint keep my house cooler in summer?
Dede Allen dies at 86; editor revolutionized imagery, sound and pace in U.S. films.
7 unproduced screenplays by famous intellectuals.
Photographer Zed Nelson found over time that the faces looking back at him in countries around the world were becoming more and more alike. Bodies altered in pursuit of beauty.
Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child. [trailer]
A parking garage outside a library in Kansas City, Missouri.
The most obscene use of scrunchies ever in an ad.
Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo. [Thanks JB]
Take it easy T2 it’s called “jogging.”
Creepy anthropomorphised box of Grape-Nuts removes corpse from bed. [ad from 1905]
Where was the chap I saw in that picture somewhere? Ah, in the dead sea, floating on his back, reading a book with a parasol open.
Humanity may split into two sub-species in 100,000 years’ time as predicted by HG Wells, an expert has said.
Evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry of the London School of Economics expects a genetic upper class and a dim-witted underclass to emerge.
The human race would peak in the year 3000, he said - before a decline due to dependence on technology.
People would become choosier about their sexual partners, causing humanity to divide into sub-species, he added.
The descendants of the genetic upper class would be tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent, and creative and a far cry from the “underclass” humans who would have evolved into dim-witted, ugly, squat goblin-like creatures.
But in the nearer future, humans will evolve in 1,000 years into giants between 6ft and 7ft tall, he predicts, while life-spans will have extended to 120 years, Dr Curry claims.
Physical appearance, driven by indicators of health, youth and fertility, will improve, he says, while men will exhibit symmetrical facial features, look athletic, and have squarer jaws, deeper voices and bigger penises.
Women, on the other hand, will develop lighter, smooth, hairless skin, large clear eyes, pert breasts, glossy hair, and even features, he adds. Racial differences will be ironed out by interbreeding, producing a uniform race of coffee-coloured people.
photo { Jackson Eaton | Thanks Bon Jane! }
