‘Tragedy is when I cut my finger… Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die.’ –Mel Brooks
{ sorry, unsourced photos/email }
New York City… You are now rockin w/
All NYC parades to be cut by 25% and restricted to 5 hours in a $3.1M money-saving move [with nice pic] Plus: Police announce Parade crackdown.
M.T.A. to lay off more than 1,000 employees.
Central Park’s latest coyote visitor was spotted on the ice of The Pond.
Every day, the same, again
Frustrated owner bulldozes home Ahead of foreclosure.
The Chinese, for example, eat dog (as well as cats, but I’m going to focus on dogs here).
Diapers’ contents could change way of finding intestinal disease. The procedure uses fecal samples rather than the oft-dreaded colonoscopy.
Stalker pheasant terrorises English village. He has reportedly attacked men, women, children, baby-strollers, bikes, dogs and even cars.
Topless sledging proves surprisingly popular.
Foot-long surgical instrument found in the abdomen of a woman who was operated on five months ago.
Lower Merion School District sued for cyber spying on students.
Woman shoots at hubby after he refused to give her some of their tax return money.
Police officer says divine intervention is fighting crime.
Even in a recovery, some jobs won’t return.
Guess who produced the most toxic CDOs?
Business culture steers flow of ideas, study says.
Does the U.S. produce too many scientists?
Can blogs change traditional scientific writing?
NASA research finds the last decade was the warmest on record, and 2009 one of warmest years.
Why the media seems biased when you care about the issue.
Why winning is a mental construct.
The complex relationship between age and scientific creativity.
Insincere flattery. New research suggests that one’s initial conscious reaction - discounting the flattery as a self-serving ploy - may mask a more durable implicit positive emotional association with the flatterer.
The top ten bioethics stories of the decade.
ICU room assignment can affect survival.
Up to 20 percent of combat soldiers and an estimated 1.4 million U.S. civilians sustain traumatic brain injuries each year. But the mechanics behind these injuries have remained mysterious. New research suggests exactly how a blow to the brain disrupts this complex organ.
Synthetic lethality: A new way to kill cancer cells.
Ibuprofen may ward off Parkinson’s
Placebo treatments stronger than doctors thought. [?]
Stop funding homeopathy, say British MPs.
Hot and heavy matter runs a 4 trillion degree fever.
Cellphone traces reveal you’re so predictable.
Can you trust a Facebook profile?
Non-private person: Openness is becoming the default social norm.
What babies know and we don’t.
Imagine how our world would change if, when the truth really mattered, it became impossible to lie.
The case against banning the word ‘retard.’
Advice for artists seeking gallery representation.
4 people who faced disaster—and how they made it out alive. Realted: 5 unexpected survival kit essentials.
The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook.
A history of media technology scares, from the printing press to Facebook.
Flash is old. Apple’s preferred media architecture, HTML5, is the future of the web.
Computers turn flat photos into 3-D buildings.
What is pornography? If you know something is happening and can’t see it, there might still be some appeal.
What happened to all the angry, powerful women in ’90s rock?
Is an animal’s agility affected by the position of its eyes?
Feature documentary about The Doors.
With the death of JD Salinger last week, a remarkable era in US literature came to its end.
Club DJ-ing can’t be that hard, can it?
My gun will shoot anybody’s anus. and Xzibit use his dick like a Visa.
The odds an adult ever uses swear words in conversation is 1 in 1.27.
Tequila balls, the Kabukicho version of jello shots.
An evening stroll through Mumbai: Just down the street from the Gateway of India, across from the Royal Bombay Yacht Club, is the Gupta Juice Center.
The 10 craziest Facebook groups.
What drug dealers can teach the digital world. [video]
If surgeons remove part of your brain, how do they fill up the space?
CIA forced to complete all scheduled torture in one hectic weekend.
I’ve spent six years on your trail, six long years, on your trail
Armand: Don’t you believe in love, Marguerite?
Marguerite: I don’t think I know what it is.
Armand: Oh, thank you.
Marguerite: For what?
Armand: For never having been in love.
photo { Thomas Ruff, Nudes ez14, 1999 }
So slowly goes the night
What’s your permanent age?
I’ve observed that everyone has a permanent age that appears to be set at birth. For example, I’ve always been 42-years old. I was ill-suited for being a little kid, and didn’t enjoy most kid activities. By first grade I knew I wanted to be an adult, with an established career, car, house and a decent tennis game. I didn’t care for my awkward and unsettled twenties. And I’m not looking forward to the rocking chair. If I could be one age forever, it would be 42.
When I ask people about their permanent age, they usually beg it off by saying they don’t have one. But if you press, you always get an answer. And the age they pick won’t surprise you. Some people are kids all their lives. They will admit they are 12-years old. Other people have always had senior citizen interests and perspectives. If you’re 30-years old in nominal terms, but you love bingo and you think kids should stop wearing those big baggy pants and listening to hip-hop music, your permanent age might be 60.
Another way to divide people is by asking if they live in the present or the future. I live in the future. I don’t dwell on the past. I’m always thinking about what’s next. (….) Some people are locked in the past; it sneaks into all of their conversations and colors their perceptions more than it should. They spend their lives either consciously or unconsciously trying to turn the future into the past. They tend to be unhappy.
photo { Steve Buscemi by Abbey Drucker }
‘Every moment is the last because it is unique.’ –Marguerite Yourcenar
Erotomania is a type of delusion in which the affected person believes that another person, usually a stranger, is in love with him or her.
The illness often occurs during psychosis, especially in patients with schizophrenia or bipolar mania.
Erotomania is also called de Clérambault’s syndrome, after the French psychiatrist Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault (1872–1934).
The term erotomania is often confused with obsessive love, obsession with unrequited love, or hypersexuality (hypersexuality replaces the older concepts of nymphomania (furor uterinus) and satyriasis.).
The Reagan assassination attempt occurred in Washington, D.C. on Monday, March 30, 1981.
President Reagan and three others were shot and wounded by John Hinckley, Jr. with a .22-caliber pistol.
Reagan was the first serving United States president to survive being shot in an assassination attempt.
{ Reagan assassination attempt | Wikipedia | Continue reading | Google Images | Related: In a 1982 speech, President Ronald Reagan declared illicit drugs a threat to America’s national security, putting a too-literal gloss on the phrase “war on drugs.” }
The motivation behind Hinckley’s attack stemmed from an obsession with actress Jodie Foster due to erotomania. While living in Hollywood in the late 1970s, he saw the film Taxi Driver at least 15 times, apparently identifying strongly with Travis Bickle, the lead character.
Hinckley arrived in Washington, D.C. on Sunday, March 29, getting off a Greyhound Lines bus and checking into the Park Central Hotel. He had breakfast at McDonald’s the next morning, noticed U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s schedule on page A4 of the Washington Star, and decided it was time to make his move.
Knowing that he might not live to tell about shooting Reagan, Hinckley wrote (but did not mail) a letter to Foster about two hours prior to the assassination attempt, saying that he hoped to impress her with the magnitude of his action.
{ Wikipedia | Continue reading | The Trial of John Hinckley, 1982 | Hinckley bought two identical .22-caliber revolvers in Rocky’s Pawn Shop in Dallas on Oct. 3, 1980 | Photos: John Hinckley, Jr. | Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver. }
It’s all the streets you crossed, not so long ago
The promise—and the hype—of changing your DNA through behavior.
Studies showing how experience alters genes have been few and far between—which is why a new one on smoking and diet caught my eye.
The study of these kinds of changes in genes is called epigenetics. Crucially, the changes do not involve alterations of gene sequences, those famous A’s, T’s, C’s, and G’s that the Human Genome Project figured out. (…)
Scientists are now making specific, actionable discoveries in epigenetics. This week, for instance, researchers are reporting that eating leafy green vegetables, folate (found in these veggies as well as in some fruits and in dried beans and peas), and multivitamins can affect the epigenetics of genes involved in lung cancer in a way that could reduce the risk of getting the disease, especially from smoking.
O, sublime Trumpet full of strange piercing sounds
The aim of the present paper was to evaluate the current state of knowledge on the perception of facial attractiveness and to assess the opportunity for research on poorly explored issues regarding facial preferences. (…) In spite of thousands of studies conducted, facial attractiveness research may be regarded as rather poorly progressed, although prospects for it are good. (…)
1. The meaning of attractiveness. A researcher may tell a judge how to interpret the notion of “attractiveness,” or the judge may him- or herself explicitly or implicitly define the meaning of the attractiveness. Qualities of attractiveness are able to be distinguished in terms of a spouse, a lover, a friend, or a co-worker, etc. People may judge FacA in individuals of their own sex in order to estimate their competitiveness on the mate market, or they may make a judgement about their own facial attractiveness (FacA) to estimate their own competitiveness, or they may assess FacA of their children so as to decide about how much should be invested in them, etc.
2. The characteristics of the judge. Many factors influence an individual’s pattern of facial preferences (FacP): genes, cultural norms and fads, lifetime experience, biological, ecological, physiological and psychological state of the judge, his knowledge or idea about the owner of the face examined, and the perceived similarity of the examined face to his own face [Kościński 2008].
3. The face’s category. The perception of the judge as to affiliation of the face to a category (e.g., sexual, age, racial) may influence their assessment of the face and, thereby, the judgement of FacA. For example, a face of androgynous appearance may be taken for male or female one, which can influence its perception [Webster et al. 2004].
Thus, the assessment of FacA is the method by which a person maps a facial image onto various evaluative judgements about the “imagined” owner of a face. The scope of research on FacA should comprise all biologically and socially significant forms of facial assessments (i.e., various senses of attractiveness and various facial categories) made by judges having diverse traits.
{ Krzysztof Koscinski, Current status and future directions of research on facial attractiveness, Anthropological Review, Vol. 72, 45–65 (2009) | PDF | Continue reading }
O, sublime Trumpet full of strange piercing sounds [follow-up]
The way in which the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me, we here name face. (…)
The face brings a notion of truth which is not the disclosure of an impersonal Neuter, but expression: the existent breaks through all the envelopings and generalities of Being to spread out in its “form” the totality of its “content,” finally abolishing the distinction between form and content. (…)
…to receive from the Other beyond the capicity of the I, which means exactly: to have the idea of infinity.
Kiss the boot of shiny, shiny leather, shiny leather in the dark
What is nostalgia good for? A Standard Life study suggests 28 to 40-year-olds don’t plan for the future because they prefer to reminisce about past times. (…)
In recent years, psychologists have been trying to analyse the powerful and enduring appeal of our own past - what Mr Routledge calls the “psychological underpinnings of nostalgia”.
“Why does it matter? Why would a 40-year-old man care about a car he drove when he was 18?” he asks. It matters, quite simply, because nostalgia makes us feel good.
Once nostalgia was considered a sickness - the word derives from the Greek “nostos” (return) and “algos” (pain), suggesting suffering due to a desire to return to a place of origin. (…)
“Nostalgia is a way for us to tap into the past experiences that we have that are quite meaningful - to remind us that our lives are worthwhile, that we are people of value, that we have good relationships, that we are happy and that life has some sense of purpose or meaning.” (…)
Nostalgia is usually involuntary and triggered by negative feelings - most commonly loneliness - against which it acts as a sort of natural anti-depressant by countering those feelings.
Wrapped the hills in a blanket of Patterson’s curse
You might have seen news reports about a recent study showing that religious people are no healthier than non-religious. (…)
Working out the relationship between religion and health is actually quite complicated. If you take the straightforward approach the answer is clear: religious people are unhealthier and die younger than the non-religious.
The reason for that is obvious. Religious people tend to be poorer and less well educated. As a result, most studies try to work out whether religious people are healthier after adjusting for these differences.
So the key question boils down to this: which differences should you adjust for? Your decision on this will affect the answer you get. (…)
Most studies adjust for basic demographic factors. Older people and women are more likely to be religious, and both these affect your chances of heart attacks. Most studies also adjust for education and income level. (…)
But there are also a host of lifestyle factors that make heart disease more likely (smoking, lack of exercise, overeating). Here’s where it starts to get more difficult, because religion could definitely cause you to be a nonsmoker.
Many studies adjust for these lifestyle factors. But you can go a step further - and that’s what they did in this study. (…)They found that religious people smoked less. This was one of only two lifestyle factors that remained after they adjusted for all the demographic differences between the religious and non-religious (age, gender, race, education and income). That’s something that’s commonly observed, and it may be because religion provides social pressure and support to help people quit.
But the study also found that religious people were fatter (again, after adjusting for demographic factors). The effect was large - religious people were 50-60% more likely to be obese.
photo { Katerina Jebb }
You often see people standing with their legs crossed at cocktail parties, so we call this the cocktail party posture
You’re in a crowded shopping mall when suddenly, without any warning, you feel light-headed. Just cross your legs, squeeze your muscles, and ah! You’ve prevented a fainting spell.
Half of us will faint at some time. And for as many as 500,000 Americans, mostly women ages 25 to 40, fainting is a regular experience brought on by simply standing up quickly.
If you’re someone who’s prone to fainting, and your doctor has ruled out an underlying medical condition as the cause, try this European swoon stopper. A recent study shows that the simple act of crossing your legs and tensing your muscles can stop fainting instantly.
photo { Matthew Taplinger }
And I tore out the buckets from a red Corvette
A new way of using the genetic code has been created, allowing proteins to be made with properties that have never been seen in the natural world. The breakthrough could eventually lead to the creation of new or “improved” life forms incorporating these new materials into their tissue.
In all existing life forms, the four “letters” of the genetic code, called nucleotides, are read in triplets, so that every three nucleotides encode a single amino acid.
Not any more. Jason Chin at the University of Cambridge and his colleagues have now redesigned the cell’s machinery so that it reads the genetic code in quadruplets.
In the genetic code that life has used up to now, there are 64 possible triplet combinations of the four nucleotide letters; these genetic “words” are called codons. Each codon either codes for an amino acid or tells the cell to stop making a protein chain. Now Chin’s team have created 256 blank four-letter codons that can be assigned to amino acids that don’t even exist yet.
photo { Maria Petschnig, Born to Perform, 2009 }
There’ll be someone else to hold you
Has everybody forgotten that the arts are recession proof? Yes, of course, revenues shrink, contributions dry up, and expenses continue to rise. (…)
But the arts—the play of the imagination, the need for this parallel universe with its dream logic and its moral reverberations—are not affected by shifts in the housing market or the Dow.
The value of a painting has never been established at auction. The power of a novel has never been determined by the advance the author happened to receive or by the number of copies that eventually sold. The greatness of a theatrical production has nothing to do with how many people attend. Dancers who can barely make their rent go on stage and give opulent performances. Poets, with nothing but a pencil and a piece of paper, erect imperishable kingdoms. And there are millionaires who chose to live with the barebones beauty of a Mondrian or a Morandi.
In my Benzo, 20 inch Lorenzos, smoking on indo
The principle of Occam’s razor suggests that the simplest hypothesis is usually the correct one — or as the character Gil Grissom in “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” succinctly puts it, if you hear hoofbeats, “think horses, not zebras.”
In his lively new book, “Voodoo Histories,” the journalist David Aaronovitch uses Occam’s razor to eviscerate the many conspiracy theories that have percolated through politics and popular culture over the last century, from those that assert that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were actually a United States government plot to those that claim that Diana, Princess of Wales, was murdered at the direction of the royal family or British intelligence.
In most cases, Mr. Aaronovitch notes, conspiracy theorists would rather tie themselves into complicated knots and postulate all sorts of improbable secret connections than accept a simple, more obvious explanation. (…)
Does the Internet, with its increased democratization of information, help spread conspiracy theories or help expose them? Mr. Aaronovitch says that it was obvious that “sites endorsing 9/11 conspiracy theories and those subscribing to them in passing far outnumbered sites devoted to debunking or refuting such theories.”
He writes that the Internet has enabled the “release of a mass of undifferentiated information, some of it authoritative, some speculative, some absurd,” and that “cyberspace communities of semi-anonymous and occasionally self-invented individuals have grown up, some of them permitting contact between people who in previous times might have thought each other’s interests impossibly exotic and even mad.”
You never cared for secrets I’d confide
{ My New Pink Button | Thanks Chris! }
