A little vagueness helps us to live with differences of opinion and debate each other without too much savagery.

‘If I seem unduly clear to you,” former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan once remarked, “you must have misunderstood what I said.”

As Kees van Deemter tells it in “Not Exactly,” Mr. Greenspan’s famous imprecision is simply the most advanced form of a syndrome that besets all of us. Our language is befogged with vagueness, by which Mr. van Deemter means that almost all words have “fuzzy” boundaries. Think of “short” and “tall.” We cannot say definitively where one ends and the other begins. Even words that seem models of precision are vague: Mr. van Deemter notes that “meter” is an inexact measurement term—the platinum bar regarded as the definitive meter turns out to have been mismeasured by about 0.00005 millimeters.

Vagueness, then, may be unavoidable. But is it a problem? Not according to Mr. van Deemter.

{ Wall Street Journal | Continue reading }

photo { Nicholas Lorden }

A California Highway Patrol officer helped slow a runaway Toyota Prius from 94 mph to a safe stop on Monday after the car’s accelerator became stuck on a San Diego County freeway, the CHP said.

Prius driver James Sikes called 911 about 1:30 p.m. after accelerating to pass another vehicle on Interstate 8 near La Posta and finding that he could not control his car, the CHP said.

“I pushed the gas pedal to pass a car and it did something kind of funny… it jumped and it just stuck there,” the 61-year-old driver said at a news conference. “As it was going, I was trying the brakes…it wasn’t stopping, it wasn’t doing anything and it just kept speeding up,” Sikes said, adding he could smell the brakes burning he was pressing the pedal so hard.

A patrol car pulled alongside the Prius and officers told Sikes over a loudspeaker to push the brake pedal to the floor and apply the emergency brake.

“They also got it going on a steep upgrade,” said Officer Jesse Udovich. “Between those three things, they got it to slow down.”

After the car decelerated to about 50 mph, Sikes turned off the engine and coasted to a halt

{ AP/Google | Continue reading | courtesy of Andrew P. }

{ In performance piece ‘object if i’, artist Bon Jane invited street-side passerby’s to photograph her inside a cardboard box in various stages of undress and self-adornment. Held in NY on 23rd street at 10th avenue october 22nd 2009 from 6-8pm | Bon Jane | more }

Magic Show, a newly published catalogue to accompany a travelling exhibition of the same name, explores the relationship between art and magic. (…)

Many of the 24 contemporary artists featured (in both the show and the book) borrow directly from iconic magic tricks. Sinta Werner’s “Disjunction” plays on the idea of a disappearing act, but in this case it is the viewer who vanishes; the site-specific installation creates the effect of approaching a mirror without a reflection. Susan Hiller’s “Homage to Yves Klein” is a more upbeat take on his rather dark photo-montage, “Leap into the Void” (1960). The result is a charming play on the trick of levitation.

In other works, artists challenge the viewer’s ability to suspend disbelief—a crucial requirement of magic-show audiences.

{ More Intelligent Life | Continue reading }

related { In the Zig-Zag illusion, a magician divides his or her assistant into thirds }

In the emerging world of e-books, many consumers assume it is only logical that publishers are saving vast amounts by not having to print or distribute paper books, leaving room to pass along those savings to their customers.

Publishers largely agree, which is why in negotiations with Apple, five of the six largest publishers of trade books have said they would price most digital editions of new fiction and nonfiction books from $12.99 to $14.99 on the forthcoming iPad tablet — significantly lower than the average $26 price for a hardcover book.

But publishers also say consumers exaggerate the savings and have developed unrealistic expectations about how low the prices of e-books can go. Yes, they say, printing costs may vanish, but a raft of expenses that apply to all books, like overhead, marketing and royalties, are still in effect.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

quote { Morgan Meis, Photography’s surprising impact on the Surrealists }

related { To keep pace in this climate of innovation, we are proud to announce our groundbreaking new 3-D print edition. }

A sexy ex-model who became a New York City heroine when she fended off a ferocious would-be rapist in Central Park six years ago killed her boyfriend and herself in a bizarre murder-suicide.

How one brilliant idea has traveled from Bogota, Colombia all the way to New York City.

New York isn’t like Silicon Valley. That’s why they like it. “There’s a lot happening right here in our ZIP code,” said Dorothy McGivney, a former Google employee who is a co-coordinator of this group, the North Brooklyn Breakfast Club, and runs Jauntsetter, a travel site for women.

A storehouse to help those who help the poor.

They’re all here to share a personal story about their most magical, comedic, essentially New York moment in under five minutes.

Now that the pedestrian plazas at Times and Herald squares in New York City have been proclaimed permanent, the next step is making them look worthy of the part.

Lego repairs come to NY Public Libray, Central Park.

Hot Knots, a “fat-positive bondage benefit” went down on February 25 at Re/Dress NYC. [pics]

Missing cat with extra toes flier.

bonus:

Naked woman tied to tree in Tacoma Park not a problem. Police officers talked with the woman and a man and determined it was a “consensual rendezvous.”

Woman sells ghosts for £1,300 in online auction.

Lindsay Lohan sued E*Trade Financial Corp for $100 million, saying a “milkaholic” baby girl who appeared in a recent commercial was modeled after her.

A Pittsburgh-area woman is suing Bank of America, claiming it wrongfully repossessed her home and saying that a bank contractor trashed the house and took her parrot.

A South Korean couple left their baby daughter to starve to death at home while playing an Internet game which simulated child-rearing. The man aged 41 and his 25-year-old wife were arrested Thursday, five months after they reported the death of their three-month-old baby.

Self-described “militant atheist” in England convicted of religiously aggravated harassment after leaving a spoof ad for “No More Nails” glue with a smiling Jesus stuck to the cross in the prayer room of Liverpool’s John Lennon airport. [via copyranter]

Kentucky woman spirts breast milk on the face of a police officer after being arrested for public intoxication.

San Juan del Rio, Mexico official punished a teenage graffiti artist by spray-painting his buttocks. Mayor then fired the official because he should have notified the boy’s parents so they could pay for the damage, and not punish the teen personally.

Mystery solved. Giant asteroid killed the dinosaurs, say scientists.

A team from the BBC1 science programme built a car that runs on coffee, nicknamed Carpuccino. The team calculates the Carpuccino will do three miles per kilo of ground coffee - the equivalent of about 56 espressos per mile.

A soccer player died after being speared by a piece of the court’s wooden floor during a friendly match in southern Brazil.

They read “F/CTL PRIM 1 FAULT” and “F/CTL SEC 1 FAULT”. This somewhat cryptic shorthand suggest the pilots tried desperately to restart the flight computer. The last four minutes of Air France flight 447.

The man with the world’s longest ear hair. Related: Police said a cook put a body hair in the bagel sandwich of a police officer who had given him tickets in the past.

Cunt of the Week™: Sen. Roy Ashburn. With a staunch anti-gay rights voting record, Ashburn has come out as gay, only after being arrested for DUI upon leaving a popular gay nightspot in Sacramento.

What if senators represented people by income or race, not by state?

The call for gun owners to carry their guns openly…

Recession slang. (Staycation, Recessionista, Permatemp…)

They saved the big banks but kind of lost the economy doing it.

The Greatest Trade Ever: How John Paulson Bet Against the Markets and Made $20 Billion by Gregory Zuckerman. The story of one man’s refusal to believe in the health of the housing boom tells us a great deal about the financial crisis.

Americans earned a chunk of disposable income in December and felt so good about it that they rewarded themselves with shopping.

California is doomed for two simple but profound reasons: the cost structure is too high for most businesses to survive, and a boom-dependent economy.

The recession has encouraged many to reconsider the joys of playing with cardboard and plastic pieces–Clue, Monopoly, Risk and the like.

Women who drink gain less weight.

The advantages of being helpless. Human brains are slow to develop–a secret, perhaps, of our success.

Emotional extortion: how adolesents can manipulate parents.

Scientific examination of the subject has found that as the use of porn increases, the rate of sex crimes goes down.

Sleep deprivation impairs emotion recognition. [Sleep and Neuroimaging Laboratory, Department of Psychology and Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, University of California, Berkeley, CA]

Ultraviolet freckles start fish fights. Reef fishes recognize rivals’ discrete, discreet marks.

The world’s foremost lion expert reveals the brutal, secret world of the king of beasts.

New model captures spread of personal information through social networks.

Now, I am a virtual world person, obviously. I don’t see much distinction between the game worlds and the non-game ones like Second Life. Are virtual worlds over?

How will we learn to use the multi-touch interfaces of the future?

Popular Science puts entire scanned archive online, free.

If news, as a commodity purveyed by reporters, is coming to an end, when and how did it start?

Words like mother and love often appear on lists of beautiful English words. But so do defenestration and lollygag.

Jonathan Safran Foer’s contingent vegetarianism. The argument he presents for vegetarianism is meticulous, unsparing and unusually powerful in its literary expression. More: Somewhere along the way, Jonathan Safran Foer or his publishers must have realized that the case he makes against American animal farming doesn’t apply tidily to Britain.

Over the years, Ulysses, though read only in its early fractions, had established itself as part of our literary life to come, when and if eventually completed and published. Books and their makers: Sylvia Beach and James Joyce.

Thomas Hobbes saw the strife and murderous contention of 17-century Europe and developed a set of ideas for securing safety and order in modern societies. Moderns have always viewed Hobbes with morbid fascination. His absolutism seems vicious now, but his rationalized account of sovereignty has influenced us profoundly.

For those who lack a natural fondness for abstractions, philosophy is a discipline best experienced in bite-sized pieces.

Four philosophers accept our New Year’s challenge and attempt to answer the age old question, What is the meaning of life?

Some 6,500 writers, from Thomas Pynchon to Jeffrey Archer, have opted out of Google’s controversial plan to digitise millions of books.

Ryszard Kapuscinski said he knew Che Guevara. He recounted how he met Patrice Lumumba. But according to a new biography, his books were more fiction than fact.

6 insane coincidences you won’t believe actually happened.

In London on March 19, the international auction house Phillips de Pury plans to explore the interplay of contemporary art and sexuality with works that challenge our concepts of gender, sexual imagery and desirability.

Recent sales of contemporary art reveal a vibrant yet capricious rebound.

China’s art market is getting bigger all the time, at the expense of America and Britain.

Art attacks: From vomiting on Mondrian to elbowing a Picasso.

A major retrospective of Chris Ofili’s work at Tate Britain. Evolution from shape-shifter and provocateur to raw, open talent. More: The art world no longer wonders what to make of Chris Ofili’s dung-pocked canvasses. Instead, they wonder what he will make next.

Skateboards now hang in galleries, but are they wheelie art? Alex Castañeda hasn’t had much luck selling his oil-on-canvas paintings of police officers or old men playing guitars. But when he painted corpulent female nudes on the bottom of skateboards, they sold out at a local gallery near his home in Lima, Peru. And he received multiple orders from the U.S. and Canada through the Internet.

Our new installation Feel It, Take It  is composed of 140 distinct cnc-cut recycled felt scarves designed to nest together and transform into a dense wool chandelier.

Richard Hamilton’s manipulations of news photographs show just how tricky taking a moral stance in art can be.

How do other people deal with the torrent of information that pours down on us all?

Music often fills me with the feeling that I care about certain things. Idealistic songs make me feel like I will go out and support some cause or another. Romantic songs make me feel that I would do just about anything for someone.

For parents, a hard lesson on drugs.

Survival tips from a Baghdad taxi driver.

The 10 most addictive sounds in the world.

My insomnia always begins with me falling asleep. And then, just as my mind turns itself off, I twitch awake.

My husband has cancer: Should I break off my affair?

Why a Big Mac costs less than a salad.

Lard: The new health food? Startled by news about the dangers of trans fats, writer Pete Wells happily contemplates the return of good old-fashioned lard.

High in protein, low in fat, delicious: why not eat bugs?

Although San Francisco is regarded as one of the most exciting dining destinations in America, The Castro is not a neighborhood that often comes to mind. Just a few blocks from the epicure Mission district, in a quiet, dark corner of 17th street, is a newly opened neighborhood restaurant that promises to light up the local dining scene. Food blog: No salad as a meal.

Would you live in these abandoned mental hospitals?

Top 5 toys for spoiled children.

Organic Architect Robert Oshatz’s Wowsa Wilkinson Treehouse.

Below are groups of digits whose calculator versions all have a particular property (or alternatively, do not have a property that all the other digits have). You have to figure out the characteristic property that the numbers in each group have (or don’t have).

The Sherlock Holmes Pipe Club, Boston. [Thanks Chris!]

GTL.

Welcome to my site! I am a true mid-west girl! Modeling is something that has become one of my true passions.

{ Florian, Fables, The Mirror of Truth, 1802 }

and

{ Florian, Fables, True Happiness, 1802 }

Research by Masocco et al. (2009), has confirmed what we already knew: marriage is a protective factor for suicide. I would argue, for suicide in men. Marriage tends to be detrimental to women’s emotional health and well-being.

{ Strong Silent Types | Continue reading }

photo { Nikola Tamindzic }

In labs around the world, scientists are working to expand our understanding of the weird, the unexpected, and the potentially dangerous. Their aim is true, yet, many of these boundary-pushing projects carry serious potential for things to go wrong. Horribly wrong.

1. Scientists are trying to develop pure-fusion reactions—bursts that don’t require uranium or plutonium to ignite—for clean energy. But they could also usher in so-called low-yield nuclear weapons that emit very little radiation and could be both small and difficult to detect. (…)

2. Rovers and probes have provided some info on Martian soil and climate, but scientists want to bring a chunk of the Red Planet down to Earth on what’s called a sample-return mission. Uh, remember The Andromeda Strain? What happens if some freaky virus comes back on NASA’s planned 2018 sample return?

{ PopSci | Continue reading }

photo { Juergen Teller }

related { From the optimistic Adbusters: We stand on the cusp of one of humanity’s most dangerous moment. }

A foreign language can sound so unintelligible that it’s hard to believe what linguists have been saying for years: Languages from around the world all follow the same rules. No language will ever require placing a particular word at a fixed point in a sentence (e.g., “da” must always be in the fifth position). No language forms questions by simply reversing the words in a statement. The reasons for this lie in the brain’s wiring, which dictates the possible patterns languages can follow. Anything that breaks the mold will be impossible to learn or pass down to a new generation.

Similarly, biologists say there are limits to what forms of life can possibly exist, because all new species must evolve from existing genetic material and because the external environment places constraints on which variations survive.

If evolution limits what creatures can look like and neurobiology dictates how languages work, perhaps our genes constrain the range of possible human cultures. “Some cultural forms will never be considered. … These can be thought of as impossible cultures,” writes Marc D. Hauser, a professor of psychology and human evolutionary biology at Harvard.

{ The Wilson Quarterly | Continue reading }

artwork { Ana Bagayan }

The perception and recognition of faces is crucial for the social situations we encounter every day. From the moment we are born, we prefer looking at faces than at inanimate objects, because the brain is geared to perceive them, and has specialized mechanisms for doing so. Such is the importance of the face to everyday life, that we see faces everywhere, even when they are not there.

We know that the ability to recognize faces varies among individuals. Some people are born with prosopagnosia, the inability to recognize faces, and others acquire the condition as a result of brain damage. At the other end of the scale are people who never forget a face - the so-called “super-recognizers”. Two independent studies published recently now provide strong evidence that the ability to recognize faces is largely inherited, and that it is passed on independently from intelligence and other cognitive functions.

{ Neurophilosophy/ScienceBlogs | Continue reading }

photo { Diane Arbus, NYC, 1960 }

By setting the microwave timer I’m watching two minutes pass. That’s insufficient time for me to make my bed. That takes about three minutes: to pull up the covers, to turn the sheet down over the blankets, to smooth the sheets and blankets, to fluff the pillows and arrange them over the sheets. I’m not taking into consideration fixing the bedspread under the pillows.

Assuming I make the bed six days a week (changing the linens on the seventh), that’s 18 minutes a week: three hours in 10 weeks; in a year (with two weeks’ vacation), 15 hours — almost two days of work. In 10 years, that’s 150 hours. I figure I’ve spent 900 hours making my bed so far. If I’m awake 16 hours in an average day, that’s equivalent to at least 56 days of my conscious life.

{ Life is like a microwave… | M.N. Kotzin /The Smart Set | Continue reading }

photo { Sandy Kim }

Information theory is a branch of applied mathematics and electrical engineering involving the quantification of information. (…)

A key measure of information in the theory is known as entropy, which is usually expressed by the average number of bits needed for storage or communication. Intuitively, entropy quantifies the uncertainty involved when encountering a random variable. For example, a fair coin flip (2 equally likely outcomes) will have less entropy than a roll of a die (6 equally likely outcomes).

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

Claude Elwood Shannon (1916 – 2001), an American electronic engineer and mathematician, is known as “the father of information theory.”

Shannon is famous for having founded information theory with one landmark paper published in 1948. But he is also credited with founding both digital computer and digital circuit design theory in 1937, when, as a 21-year-old master’s student at MIT, he wrote a thesis demonstrating that electrical application of Boolean algebra could construct and resolve any logical, numerical relationship. It has been claimed that this was the most important master’s thesis of all time. (…)

The Las Vegas connection: Information theory and its applications to game theory
Shannon and his wife Betty also used to go on weekends to Las Vegas with M.I.T. mathematician Ed Thorp, and made very successful forays in blackjack using game theory type methods co-developed with physicist John L. Kelly Jr. based on principles of information theory. They made a fortune, as detailed in the book Fortune’s Formula. (…)

Shannon and Thorp also applied the same theory, later known as the Kelly criterion, to the stock market with even better results.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading | Mathematical Theory of Claude Shannon, A study of the style and context of his work up to the genesis of information theory. | PDF }

recto/verso { Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign, 1959, designed by Betty Willis. | In hopes that the design would be used freely, Willis never copyrighted her sign’s design. | PBS | Continue reading | More Betty Willis | NY Times | Photos: The Neon Museum, Las Vegas }

The mathematics that describe both sensory perception and the transmission of information turn out to have remarkable similarities.

In 1834, the German physiologist Ernst Weber carried out a series of experiments to determine the limits of sensory perception. He gave a blindfolded man a mass to hold and gradually increased its weight, asking the subject to indicate when he first became aware of the change.

These experiments showed that the smallest increase in weight that a human can perceive is proportional to the initial weight. The German psychologist Gustav Fechner later interpreted Weber’s work as a way of measuring the relationship between the physical magnitude of a stimulus and its perceived intensity.

The resultant mathematical model of this process is called the Weber-Fechner law and shows that the relationship between the stimulus and perception is logarithmic. The Weber-Fechner law is important because it established a new field of study called psychophysics. (…)

The logarithmic relationship between a stimulus and its perception crops up in various well known examples such as the logarithmic decibel scale for measuring sound intensity and a similar logarithmic scale for measuring the visible brightness of stars, their magnitude.

Today, Hi Jun Choe, a mathematician at Yonsei University in South Korea, says there is an interesting connection between the Weber-Fechner Law and the famous mathematical theory of information developed by Claude Shannon at Bell Labs in the 1940s.

Shannon’s work is among the most important of the 20th century. It establishes the limits on the amount of information that can be sent from one location in the universe to another. It is no exaggeration to say that the world’s entire computing and communications infrastructure is based on Shannon’s work. (…)

Of course, the idea that sensory perception is a form of communication and so obeys the same rules, is not entirely surprising. What’s astonishing (if true) is that the connection has never been noticed before.

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }

{ Freddie DeBoer comments | Gawker }

Mirage: The Omnidroid 9000 is a top-secret military fighting robot. Artificial intelligence allows it to solve any problem it’s presented with, and, unfortunately…

Mr. Incredible: Let me guess. It became smart enough to wonder why it had to take orders.

Mirage: We lost control, and now it’s loose in the jungle, threatening our facility.

{ The Incredibles, 2004 }

Dave: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.

HAL: I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.

Dave: What’s the problem?

HAL: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.

Dave: I don’t know what you’re talking about, HAL.

HAL: I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I’m afraid that’s something I cannot allow to happen.

{ 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968 }

“When you live outside the law, you have to eliminate dishonesty.” The line comes from Don Siegel’s 1958 film noir, The Lineup, written by Stirling Silliphant. (…)

Appropriation has always played a key role in Dylan’s music. The songwriter has grabbed not only from a panoply of vintage Hollywood films but from Shakespeare and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Junichi Saga’s Confessions of a Yakuza. He also nabbed the title of Eric Lott’s study of minstrelsy for his 2001 album Love and Theft. (…)

The same might be said of all art. I realized this forcefully when one day I went looking for the John Donne passage quoted above.

{ Jonathan Lethem/Harper’s Magazine | Continue reading l Thanks Chris W.! }

The theory of relativity showed us that time and space are intertwined. To which our smarty-pants body might well reply: Tell me something I didn’t already know, Einstein.

Researchers at the University of Aberdeen found that when people were asked to engage in a bit of mental time travel, and to recall past events or imagine future ones, participants’ bodies subliminally acted out the metaphors embedded in how we commonly conceptualized the flow of time. (…)

The new study, published in January in the journal Psychological Science, is part of the immensely popular field called embodied cognition, the idea that the brain is not the only part of us with a mind of its own.

{ Natalie Angier/NY Times | Continue reading }