Paradoxically we initially like narcissists more because of their exploitative, entitled behaviour—but it doesn’t last long. (…)

There are all sorts of paradoxes in the way narcissists behave. Here are three that this research helps explain:

1. Why do people continue to behave selfishly when it only ruins their relationships with others?

2. Why do narcissists devalue others when they are so dependent on them for admiration?

3. Why don’t narcissists spot the cycle of early attraction followed by rejection?

The first two are partly explained by the fact that narcissistic behaviour is, at first, attractive to other people. Behaving selfishly seems to bring them a rush of admiration which they get addicted to, while devaluing others when the inevitable rejection comes, covering it up by searching out new people to worship them.

The reason narcissists fail to spot this cycle may well be that friends and partners never hang around long enough to tell them in such a way that they actually believe it and want to do something about it.

{ PsyBlog | Continue reading }

graphic design { Casper Sormani }

Sometimes you hear a word for the first time and think: “Of course.” How better to describe Paris Hilton than as a “celebutante” or the frequent tabloid target Alec Baldwin as “the bloviator”? (Thanks, New York Post!)

Now make room for “prehab.”

Prehab made its debut on Feb. 23, the handiwork of GlasgowRose, a commenter on Gawker, after a publicist for Charlie Sheen announced that the star of “Two and a Half Men” was entering rehab as a “preventative measure.”

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

A respected scientist set out to determine which drugs are actually the most dangerous — and discovered that the answers are, well, awkward. (…)

The list, printed as a chart with the unassuming title “Mean Harm Scores for 20 Substances,” ranked a set of common drugs, both legal and illegal, in order of their harmfulness - how addictive they were, how physically damaging, and how much they threatened society. Many drug specialists now consider it one of the most objective sources available on the actual harmfulness of different substances.

That ranking showed, with numbers, what Nutt was fired for saying out loud: Overall, alcohol is far worse than many illegal drugs. So is tobacco. Smoking pot is less harmful than drinking, and LSD is less damaging yet.

{ The Boston Globe | Continue reading }

Andy was one of my best friends. We hung out together several nights a week for over ten years. We used to go to Studio 54 — an amazing place.

{ Jerry Hall interview | Index magazine | Continue reading }

photo { Andy Warhol and Jerry Hall, Studio 54, NYC, late 70s }

{ Noritoshi Hirakawa, The reason of life, 1998 }

{ Beate Müller, Parody: dimensions and perspectives, 1997 }

Scientists have proposed that the way food smells could possibly be related to the sounds we hear when we consume them.

They note that there could be a connection between smell and sound, a hybrid sense they call “smound.”

{ Discover | Continue reading }

artwork { Yves Klein, F 88, 1961 }

Women are up to nine times more likely to suffer from cold hands and feet than men, I read last week. We feel changes in temperature and the seasonal chill more. Did this surprise me? Not a bit . (…)

There are many theories as to why women suffer from this problem. Women have more evenly distributed fat layers, providing internal insulation. But while the result is that our blood supply favours protecting our core organs and trunk over our extremities, it means less blood flows to the hands and feet.

Men on the other hand have more heat-generating muscle mass, better supplied by blood vessels, increasing blood flow and, therefore, warmth.

Foot expert Margaret Dabbs says another reason why women’s feet in particular get colder than men’s is because our skin is thinner. (…)

Avoid alcohol or caffeine as both increase blood flow to the skin, so while you might feel warmer, your body is losing heat. (…)

Mood can influence our temperature - people who are lonely or socially excluded feel the cold more.

{ Daily Mail | Continue reading }

The global economy is poised to enter a new phase of robust, dependable growth. Technological and economic historian Carlota Perez calls it a “golden age.” Such ages occur roughly every 60 years, and they last for a decade or more, part of a long cycle of technological change and financial activity.

This doesn’t mean that the world’s political and economic problems will go away. But whereas the details of long cycles vary, the overall pattern of progress remains the same: An economy spends 30 years in what Perez calls “installation,” using financial capital (largely from investors) to put in place new technologies. Ultimately, overinvestment and excessive speculation lead to a financial crisis, after which installation gives way to “deployment”: a time of gradually increasing prosperity and income from improved goods and services.

{ Policy Innovations | Continue reading }

I maintain that in the present environment there is no such thing as a return to self-sustaining growth. There will be no return to the supposedly normal conditions, which were in fact, from a historical point of view, highly abnormal, of the 1990s and 2000s.

What one needs is to set a strategic direction for renewal of economic activity. We need to create the institutions that will support that direction.

{ Interview with James K. Galbraith | MM News | Continue reading }

Financial bubbles are a way of life now. They can upend your industry, send your portfolio into spasms and leave you with whiplash. And then, once you’ve recovered, the next one will hit.

Or so you might think, as a veteran of two gut-wrenching market declines and a housing bubble over the last decade.

There’s plenty of reason to expect more surprises, given the number of hedge funds moving large amounts of money quickly around the world and the big banks making their own trades. (…)

If you want to better insulate yourself from bubbles — however often they may inflate — there are plenty of things you can do.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

photo { Richard Avedon, Veruschka, dress by Bill Blass, New York, January 1967 }

related { Employment for adult males is at record lows | charts }

previously { A ‘doomsday cycle’ has infiltrated the economic system and could lead to disaster after the next financial crisis. }

Nearly the entire hit was recorded on closed-circuit TV cameras, from the time the team arrived at Dubai’s airport to the time the assassins entered Hamas military leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouh’s room. The cameras even caught team members before and after they donned their disguises. The only thing the Dubai authorities have been unable to discover is the true names of the team. But having identified the assassins, or at least the borrowed identities they traveled on, Dubai felt confident enough to point a finger at Israel. (Oddly enough several of the identities were stolen from people living in Israel.)

After Dubai released the tapes, the narrative quickly became that the assassination was an embarrassing blunder for Tel Aviv. Mossad failed spectacularly to assassinate a Hamas official in Amman in 1997— the poison that was used acted too slowly and the man survived—and it looks like the agency is not much better today. Why were so many people involved? (The latest report is that there were 26 members of the team.) Why were identities stolen from people living in Israel? Why didn’t they just kill Mr. Mabhouh in a dark alley, one assassin with a pistol with a silencer? Or why at least didn’t they all cover their faces with baseball caps so that the closed-circuit TV cameras did not have a clean view?

The truth is that Mr. Mabhouh’s assassination was conducted according to the book—a military operation in which the environment is completely controlled by the assassins. At least 25 people are needed to carry off something like this. You need “eyes on” the target 24 hours a day to ensure that when the time comes he is alone. You need coverage of the police—assassinations go very wrong when the police stumble into the middle of one. You need coverage of the hotel security staff, the maids, the outside of the hotel. You even need people in back-up accommodations in the event the team needs a place to hide.

I can only speculate about where exactly the hit went wrong. But I would guess the assassins failed to account for the marked advance in technology. Not only were there closed-circuit TV cameras in the hotel where Mr. Mabhouh was assassinated and at the airport, but Dubai has at its fingertips the best security consultants in the world. (…)

Not completely understanding advances in technology may be one explanation for the assassins nonchalantly exposing their faces to the closed-circuit TV cameras, one female assassin even smiling at one.

{ The Wall Street Journal | Continue reading }

Network theory: A key to unraveling how Nature works

In the last two decades, network theory has emerged as a way of making sense of everything from the World Wide Web to the human brain. Now, as ecologists have begun applying this theory to ecosystems, they are gaining insights into how species are interconnected and how to foster biodiversity.

{ Carl Zimmer | Continue reading }

photo { David Lachapelle, Pamela Anderson, Secret Garden, 2001 }

{ Dolphin clit stimulator | Vibrator a doppio effetto }

related:

{ 1 | 2. Spam email. | Related: Most men ‘unhappy with penis ops’ }

unrelated:

{ 1 | 2 }

My dad loved mysteries, and he wowed us all with his ability to guess whodunnit every single time.

And then when I was around, oh, I dunno, somewhere between 10 and 12, he told me just how easy his little trick was.

Here’s the thing about television mysteries. Unlike real life, somebody picks and chooses what scenes to put in a movie. Unlike real life, it costs extra money to have to film unnecessary scenes that do not advance the narrative.  Therefore, there will never be an utterly irrelevant scene, again, unlike real life.

So when, for instance, you are watching an hour long mystery and it shows the characters eating at a restaurant and then leaving and one of them goes back in because he forgot to leave a tip? That’s a clue, that is. While that might happen and mean nothing in real life, it’s only put in the television show for one of two reasons- it is significant to the narrative, or it’s a red herring.

{ The Common Room | Continue reading }

{ Using a mathematical concept called sparsity, the compressed-sensing algorithm takes lo-res files and transforms them into sharp images. | Wired | Full story }

{ Jan Maarten Voskuil }

The average American, according to the Clean Air Council, creates 4.6 pounds of trash per day. Much of the trash is non-biodegradable, meaning that it will accumulate, and not necessarily where we’d like it to, if left unchecked.

Californians Against Waste estimates that Americans consume some 84 billion plastic bags a year (the product of roughly 12 million barrels of oil)—many of which, along with many other forms of terrestrial waste, are collecting in an area in the northern Pacific Ocean known as the Eastern Garbage Patch, a floating mass now more than twice the size of Texas.

The mandate of consumerism requires a certain amnesia about what we waste: It encourages us to forget the old and buy the new. Confronting the physical reality of our waste, however, might force a reexamination of our relationship to rampant consumerism.

The sudden interest in found-object art at the recent exhibitions seemed to suggest that the art world was prepared to encourage precisely that sort of reexamination —or so I thought before I actually attended them. (…)

What, however, is one to make of Richard Prince’s pieces, around the corner from Arman’s? The photographs are of Marlboro ads, carefully cropped to remove any ad copy. Prince argues that the iconic Marlboro cowboy, when removed from its original advertising context, encapsulates a certain segment of the American mythos. Perhaps, but the images never are removed from their advertising context—Marlboro’s images are enough of a cultural mainstay that we’re perfectly capable of identifying them without the Marlboro logo. The brand is far stronger than Prince’s effort at artistic dislocation. The primary effect of Prince’s appropriation, rather than rescuing our detritus from obscurity, is merely to extend the reach of advertising into the gallery and the museum. One can hardly claim this is a radical political act, certainly not one that runs counter to consumerism.

{ Pop Matters | Continue reading }

somehow related { Damien Hirst, Appropriation | Wikipedia }

painting { Zhong Biao, Dark Lens, 2002 }

Psychologists have used an inventive combination of techniques to show that the left half of the brain has more self-esteem than the right half. The finding is consistent with earlier research showing that the left hemisphere is associated more with positive, approach-related emotions, whereas the right hemisphere is associated more with negative emotions.

{ BPS | Continue reading }

Iain McGilchrist has recently published ‘The Master and his Emissary’ a book which posits that the division of the brain into two hemispheres is essential to human existence, making possible incompatible versions of the world, with quite different priorities and values.

{ Interview | Frontier Psychiatrist | Continue reading }

illustration { Kristian Hammerstad }

It’s tempting to try to sort out the good Derrida from the bad but the longer I try the more it all seems bad. (…)

In his early work Derrida makes two valid points.

1. Much of the philosophical tradition attempts to reduce all of existence to a single fundamental concept such as God, Spirit or Being, to derive everything from one idea which is itself somehow not part of the world, creating an inverted pyramidal relationship of emanation between the many and the one.

2. The same tradition also tends to treat the written sign as something secondary, external to and dependent on the immediacy of speech.

In making the first point, Derrida is using the work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure to critique the search for a foundation of meaning, something the latter’s theory of signs as conventional and arbitrary would seem to rule out as impossible. In making the second point, he turns on Saussure for not taking his own ideas far enough, for trying to protect the purity of speech from the parasitic corruption of the sign.

It is partly from trying to avoid the trap of a new master concept that Derrida refuses to adopt a stable, consistent vocabulary for the exposition of his ideas.

{ S. Shirazi/Print Culture | Continue reading }

related { Derrida and yummyburgers | NY mag }

The Feb. 27 magnitude 8.8 earthquake in Chile may have shortened the length of each Earth day.

JPL research scientist Richard Gross computed how Earth’s rotation should have changed as a result of the Feb. 27 quake. Using a complex model, he and fellow scientists came up with a preliminary calculation that the quake should have shortened the length of an Earth day by about 1.26 microseconds (a microsecond is one millionth of a second).

Perhaps more impressive is how much the quake shifted Earth’s axis. Gross calculates the quake should have moved Earth’s figure axis (the axis about which Earth’s mass is balanced) by 2.7 milliarcseconds (about 8 centimeters, or 3 inches). Earth’s figure axis is not the same as its north-south axis; they are offset by about 10 meters (about 33 feet).

By comparison, Gross said the same model estimated the 2004 magnitude 9.1 Sumatran earthquake should have shortened the length of day by 6.8 microseconds and shifted Earth’s axis by 2.32 milliarcseconds (about 7 centimeters, or 2.76 inches).

{ Nasa.gov | Continue reading }

Breast implant stopped bullet, saved woman’s life, says cosmetic surgeon.

Drinking, smoking russian chimpanzee sent to rehab by zookeepers.

Woman live-tweets her abortion to ‘demystify’ procedure, receives death threats.

A Colorado family and an Arizona nonprofit are fighting in court over who gets the head of a woman who died this month, along with a $50,000 annuity she left behind.

Man was charged with beating another man at a motel with a Worcestershire sauce bottle and a fire extinguisher.

Argument over a parking space escalated, ended up with a shoot-out between a man and the police.

Ohio police officers get drunk as part of a training exercise on how to give field sobriety tests.

Man crushed by own car in own garage. [New Zealand Herald]

Burglar freed after 3 hours in chimney.

Singer of Norwegian satanic blackmetal band Gorgoroth, sentenced to 14 months in prison for beating a 41-year-old man and threatening to drink his blood.

A massive aquarium tank housing hundreds of sharks in a Dubai shopping center sprang a leak Thursday, sending shoppers fleeing and prompting the mall owners to close large parts of the building.

Brazilian tourist Joao Lucio DeCosta Sobrinho and his girlfriend were at an underwater viewing area when they suddenly saw a whale with a person in its mouth. SeaWorld experienced trainer died when a killer whale grabbed her with his mouth and dragged her underwater as horrified witnesses watched. More: Colleagues will continue working with whale that killed trainer.

‘Zombies’ have free speech rights too, US court rules.

Orange County jury convicted accused serial killer Rodney Alcala, 66, of five counts of murder.

More than a third of ecstacy seized globally in 2008 was bound for Australia. In Iraq, valium is the most often abused prescription drug.

Circumcision: Zimbabwe’s latest anti-HIV weapon.

When will China lead the world? Don’t hold your breath.

Underwater home-owers: Demand principal reductions. It only requires basic math skills for all parties to recognize that it is in the banks interest to avoid foreclosures. Underwater borrower with this knowledge — and the cojones — should let the bank know they understand simple math: Foreclosures = 50% bank loss.

Sweating your mortgage? Maybe it’s time to bring in friendly outside investors. How to IPO your house.

Do I need maths to be an economist?

Can humans distinguish between sequences of real and randomly generated financial data? Scientist have developed a new test to find out. What does it show? It shows that humans are good at pattern recognition. Nothing more and nothing less.

When I was young and worked briefly at Goldman, the firm was a pig and let even the very junior staffers understand precisely how its pigginess worked so that they would improve upon it when they grew up.

The consumer psychology of mail-in rebates.

Economists, especially those who cross the disciplinary boundary into psychology, have recently begun informing us about what makes people happy. The entire field of behavioral economics — the term used to describe the intersection of economics and psychology — has about it a maverick temperament, as if its practitioners are determined to disprove the silly notion that people know what is best for them.

An interview with propulsion physicist Marc Millis. All about space travel, time travel, quantum tunneling & zero-G Sex.

The hottest science experiment on the planet. In a Long Island lab, gold particles collide to form a subatomic stew far hotter than the sun.

Psychotropics and youth, Part 2 – The solutions. Unrelated: Internet lures kids into porn addiction.

To salt or not to salt? [read more]

How Google’s algorithm rules the web.

After taming the Web, Google is now helping researchers see the world with fresh eyes.

Last year, less than 2 percent of all books sold were e-books.

How to learn just about anything online… For free.

What do gombo, hidden cameras and advertorials have in common? Hint: Each is a part of mainstream journalism somewhere in the world.

Once I applied to give a talk at an academic conference, and the conference chairman asked me to rewrite the abstract to make it more “Yale Post-Graduate like.” Um, what? I can’t tell you how pissed off I get when academics act like “serious academic writing” only means completely unintelligible word-Calculus.

Nietzsche was a composer (and not just of books).

Here is what Virgina Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, said about Jane Austen in 1876.

Good poems about ugly things.

The Big Book Of Lesbian Horse Stories.

What knowledge is necessary for virtue?

The gallery’s curator, David Zelikovsky, said that the police forced Ms. Hanford, 26, out of the gallery’s storefront. Ms. Hanford is part of the gallery’s latest exhibit by Brian Reed. She stands fully naked under a suspended web made of various objects including shark eggs and teeth, beads and clay pipes.

The Warhol Foundation on trial. [In response to What Is a Warhol?: An Exchange.]

Starburst takes viewers on a journey through the explosion and development of color photography in America. [Starburst: Color Photography in America 1970 – 1980, Cincinnati Art Museum.]

Christopher Capone is the direct grandson of the most notorious gangster in history, Al Capone.

50 Cent is being sued by a South Florida woman who says the rapper posted her homemade porno on the Internet.

Stars caught by candid camera. [pics]

Roadside attractions and sights spotted during travels about the country. [Thanks Matthew!]

Cooking with Bruno [video | Thanks JJ]

A day in the life of New York City, in miniature. [Thanks Joe/Jeremy]

Chat roulette. [tutorial video]

DIY RFID (radio frequency identification).

I’m Fine Thank You, personal work.

OK Go. [Thanks Glenn!]

Two music blogs: alain finkielkraut rock + skegnesschilled.

The Indian rope trick is stage magic said to have been performed in and around India about the 1800s. The trick’s existence was almost certainly a hoax invented by John Elbert Wilkie of the Chicago Tribune.

I collect lost luggage, photograph it, and then try to find the owners. Is it your luggage?

Toyota’s “sudden-acceleration” problem+ Dansk Port Teknik, a garage door company.

Scientific evidence for health supplements (green tea, vitamins, snake oil, etc).–This image is a “balloon race”. The higher a bubble, the greater the evidence for its effectiveness.

Yawwwn.

Who says there are no single men in New York?

How often do you think about…

‘To be a follower of Spinoza is the essential commencement of all Philosophy.’ –Hegel

‘I have a precursor, and what a precursor!’ –Nieztsche

‘Spinoza is the Christ of philosophers, and the greatest philosophers are hardly more than apostles who distance themselves from or draw near to this mystery.’ –Gilles Deleuze

{ Robert Heinecken, L is for Lemon Slices, #3, 1971 | photogram with pastel and chalk }