Blowin’ up like my name is Joe Bazooka, I’m a super-dooper MC party pooper
{ via blondezombies }
Every day, the same, again
Police jail man for rubbing a hamburger on his wife’s face during an argument.
Florida woman accused of hitting man with raw steak.
The hostage business. Kidnapping in the developing world is a grim byproduct of globalization, and a shadowy ransom industry has grown to protect and retrieve the victims.
Money changes what we think is fair, research finds.
We tend to think that no-one would confess to a crime that they didn’t commit but there are numerous high profile cases where this has happened. There is now a growing amount of research on what personal and situational factors trigger false confessions.
In general, start high in negotiations, start low in auctions. An article in the latest edition of Current Directions in Psychological Science reviews studies on the best starting points to increase the final price in either negotiations or auctions.
Psychologists find a drug-free way for fears to be unlearned. It’s hoped the discovery will lead to improved therapeutic techniques for people with phobias or intrusive traumatic memories. More: Rewriting fearful memories by bringing them back to mind.
People who chew gum report feeling less stressed.
People identify the sexual orientation of strangers as fast as 50 milliseconds.
Coffee consumption associated with reduced risk of advanced prostate cancer. Plus: Exercise reduces death rate in prostate cancer patients. Also: Between 2002 and 2003, American women experienced a 7 percent decline in breast cancer incidence.
Dirty babies get healthier hearts.
Can you give your muscles a better workout simply by changing your shoes? Reebok claims you can.
How to have a good time in New York without a Wall Street bonus.
Between 1939 and 1941, and again in the mid-1980s, the city photographed every house and building in the five boroughs. New York City is exploring a deal with Google to digitize part of the collection in exchange for the right to use the images on the company’s searchable maps.
A graphic history of magazine income over the last decade. More: Newspaper circulation over the last two decades.
The airplane publication has become an institution, a subject of mockery and fascination.
Cutsy animated video from Google Japan to calm privacy jitters re Streetview.
Eight ways in-vitro meat will change our lives.
What are hiccups? Why do we hiccup?
Which countries’ children have the worst teeth?
Winners and losers as the dollar falls. Related: Fear not the falling dollar!
Review of Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate.
Is the Secret Service responsible for keeping the president from getting drunk?
Why Popeye popped onto Google’s homepage.
Evolution of the hipster (2000-2009).
Inner ear hair cells at 21,000x magnification.
Rocking chair with integrated lamp powered by the chair’s rocking motion.
It’s in Las Vegas. Architect Frank Gehry’s latest, an institute dealing with brain disease.
Beat is for Sonny Bono, beat is for Yoko Ono
When Thomas Mann was a child his father contrived an experiment to teach him and his siblings a lesson about appetite. “Our father assured us,” Mann writes, “that once in our lives we could eat as many cream puffs … and cream rolls at the pastry shop as we wanted. He led us into a sweet smelling Paradise, and let the dream become reality - and we were amazed how quickly we reached the limit of our desire, which we believed to be infinite.” Here the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. We need only to experiment with our greed to discover that it is only in our fantasies that we are excessive; in reality our appetite is sensible; is, as we like to say, self-regulating - we know when we have had enough. (…)
When we are greedy, the psychoanalyst Harold Boris writes, we are in a state of mind in which we “wish and hope to have everything all the time”; greed “wants everything, nothing less will do”, and so “it cannot be satisfied”. Appetite, he writes in a useful distinction, is inherently satisfiable. So the excess of appetite we call greed is actually a form of despair. Greed turns up when we lose faith in our appetites, when what we need is not available. In this view it is not that appetite is excessive; it is that our fear of frustration is excessive. Excess is a sign of frustration; we are only excessive wherever there is a frustration we are unaware of, and a fear we cannot bear.
photo { Peter Sutherland }
And Doctor Bliss slipped me a preparation and I fell asleep with Livery Stable Blues in my ear
Sounds played as you sleep can reinforce memories.
Ken Paller and his colleagues at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois asked people to memorise which images and their associated sounds – such as a picture of a cat and a miaow – were associated with a certain area on a computer screen and then to take a nap. They played half the group the sounds in their sleep, and these people were better at remembering the associations than the rest when they woke up.
How can you boost your sleep learning capacity?
As a rule, hit the hay after learning something new – late-night TV and Xbox marathons are a no-no.
That is, of course, unless the skill you hope to learn is a computer game: when Sidarta Ribeiro of the Edmond and Lily Safra International Institute of Neuroscience in Natal, Brazil, got people to play shoot-’em-up video game Doom before bed, those who dreamed about the game during their sleep were better players the next day.
{ NewScientist | Continue reading | Cosmos magazine | Read more }
photo { Malerie Marder }
:)
How do you rank yourself among writers (living) and of the immediate past?
I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile– some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket, which I would now like to trace in reply to your question.
The bold adventurer, holding up Excalibur
Why does the universe looks the way it does?
This seems on the one hand a very obvious question. On the other hand, it is an interestingly strange question, because we have no basis for comparison. The universe is not something that belongs to a set of many universes. We haven’t seen different kinds of universes so we can say, oh, this is an unusual universe, or this is a very typical universe. Nevertheless, we do have ideas about what we think the universe should look like if it were “natural”, as we say in physics. Over and over again it doesn’t look natural. We think this is a clue to something going on that we don’t understand.
One very classic example that people care a lot about these days is the acceleration of the universe and dark energy. In 1998 astronomers looked out at supernovae that were very distant objects in the universe and they were trying to figure out how much stuff there was in the universe, because if you have more and more stuff — if you have more matter and energy — the universe would be expanding, but ever more slowly as the stuff pulled together. What they found by looking at these distant bright objects of type 1A supernovae was that, not only is the universe expanding, but it’s accelerating. It’s moving apart faster and faster. Our best explanation for this is something called dark energy, the idea that in every cubic centimeter of space, every little region of space, if you empty it out so there are no atoms, no dark matter, no radiation, no visible matter, there is still energy there. There is energy inherent in empty spaces.
{ A Conversation with Sean Carroll | Edge | Continue reading }
artwork { Lucio Fontana, Concetto Spaziale, 1958-60 }
Kissed my sweetheart by the chinaball tree
Bad Sex in Fiction Awards 2009
Let’s have sex, they think simultaneously, couples having strange mind-reading powers after months and months of trying to figure each other out. (…)
She holds him tight and squeezes her body to his, sending delightful sailing boats tacking to and fro across the ocean of his back. With her fingertips she sends foam-flecked waves scurrying over his skin. (…)
Their tongues met and he felt himself dissolve, like wax melting in the heat. She stepped back slightly and removed his clothes, one by one, and then led him to the thick fur rug in front of the fire. She moaned softly as he entered her.
Picture you upon my knee, just tea for two
{ Meret Oppenheim, Object, 1936 | Fur-covered cup, saucer, and spoon, cup. | The Erotic Object: Surrealist Sculpture from the Collection | MoMA, until January 4, 2010 }
‘Il y a le visible et l’invisible. Si vous ne filmez que le visible, c’est un téléfilm que vous faites.’ –Jean-Luc Godard
A 1956 memo to Playboy photographers listed Hefner’s criteria for the centerfolds. The model must be in a natural setting engaged in some activity “like reading, writing, mixing a drink.” She should have a “healthy, intelligent, American look—a young lady that looks like she might be a very efficient secretary or an undergrad at Vassar.” Many centerfolds feature the implied presence of a man: a flash of trouser leg in the corner, a pipe left on a table. These props transform the pinups into seduction scenarios. Their premise is simple: by identifying with the absent man, a viewer can enter the scene.
related { Playboy outsourcing most magazine operations }
Music was like electric sugar and Zuzu Bolin played ‘Stavin’ Chain’
Art’s link with money is not new, though it does continue to generate surprises. On Friday night, Christie’s in London plans to auction another of Damien Hirst’s medicine cabinets: literally a small, sliding-glass medicine cabinet containing a few dozen bottles or tubes of standard pharmaceuticals: nasal spray, penicillin tablets, vitamins and so forth. This work is not as grand as a Hirst shark, floating eerily in a giant vat of formaldehyde, one of which sold for more than $12 million a few years ago. Still, the estimate of up to $239,000 for the medicine cabinet is impressive — rather more impressive than the work itself.
No disputing tastes, of course, if yours lean toward the aesthetic contemplation of an orderly medicine cabinet. Buy it, and you acquire a work of art by the world’s richest and — by that criterion — most successful living artist. Still, neither this piece nor Mr. Hirst’s dissected calves and embalmed horses are quite “by” the artist in a conventional sense. Mr. Hirst’s name rightfully goes on them because they were his conceptions. However, he did not reproduce any of the medicine bottles or boxes in his cabinet (in the way that Warhol actually recreated Brillo boxes), nor did he catch a shark or do the taxidermy.
In this respect, the pricey medicine cabinet belongs to a tradition of conceptual art: works we admire not for skillful hands-on execution by the artist, but for the artist’s creative concept. (…)
Since the endearingly witty Marcel Duchamp invented conceptual art 90 years ago by offering his “ready-mades” — a urinal or a snow shovel, for instance — for gallery shows, the genre has degenerated. Duchamp, an authentic artistic genius, was in 1917 making sport of the art establishment and its stuffy values. By the time we get to 2009, Mr. Hirst and Mr. Koons are the establishment.
Does this mean that conceptual art is here to stay? That is not at all certain, and it is not just auction results that are relevant to the issue. To see why works of conceptual art have an inherent investment risk, we must look back at the whole history of art. (…)
The appreciation of contemporary conceptual art, on the other hand, depends not on immediately recognizable skill, but on how the work is situated in today’s intellectual zeitgeist. That’s why looking through the history of conceptual art after Duchamp reminds me of paging through old New Yorker cartoons. Jokes about Cadillac tailfins and early fax machines were once amusing, and the same can be said of conceptual works like Piero Manzoni’s 1962 declaration that Earth was his art work, Joseph Kosuth’s 1965 “One and Three Chairs” (a chair, a photo of the chair and a definition of “chair”) or Mr. Hirst’s medicine cabinets. Future generations, no longer engaged by our art “concepts” and unable to divine any special skill or emotional expression in the work, may lose interest in it as a medium for financial speculation and relegate it to the realm of historical curiosity.
In this respect, I can’t help regarding medicine cabinets, vacuum cleaners and dead sharks as reckless investments. Somewhere out there in collectorland is the unlucky guy who will be the last one holding the vacuum cleaner, and wondering why.
{ Denis Dutton/NY Times | Continue reading }
The best explanation of the art market may be that it is inexplicable, which is one reason its alchemy continues to fascinate and capture headlines. In no other market do we lavish wealth on such useless and arbitrary things. Advanced systems of trade that are usually the facilitators of market intelligence—international public auctions and historical price indexes—only offer a false sense of comprehension while further distorting art’s valuation.
Yet if such things could be measured in degrees, the art market of today seems more unexplainable than ever. The prices paid for certain types of post-war and contemporary art continues to outpace prices for older work as well as recent art of greater nuance. Tens of millions of dollars may still chase after art of dubious formal qualities—factory-made work by Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, smears by Francis Bacon and silkscreens by Warhol.
Big money’s relationship to “cheap” contemporary art is a recent phenomenon. It began in the 1960s, as Pop Art commercialized the avant-garde—not just selling the avant-garde, but also involving commercialism in defining the avant-garde. Whereas many Abstract Expressionists died before striking it rich, several of the avant-garde artists who came of age in the 1960s experienced a more profitable fate. (…)
In 2006, Tobias Meyer infamously remarked that “the best art is the most expensive because the market is so smart.” The quote received wide circulation because of its patent absurdity. A market is only as smart as the people who control it, and the art market has proved to be a dull creature when it comes to appreciating a broad range of artistic qualities. But to give Meyer credit, the market can be very smart about the art that speaks to it.
The art market has a unique talent for promoting art about the market. Since exhibition history enhances value, the collectors of what we might call “market art” have a vested interest in seeing their work take up space in traditional public collections. They often have the financial leverage to make it happen. In this way, the hedge-fund collector Steven A. Cohen could place Damien Hirst’s shark tank on temporary loan at the Metropolitan Museum. The oversized trinkets of Jeff Koons start appearing at the same time in the museum’s rooftop gallery.
Palate has a lovely, fine and persistent mousse and plenty of rich, buttery fruit yet a streak of acidity that keeps it fresh
{ Scan processor studies by Woody Vasulka & Brian O’Reilly, generated by Woody using a Rutt-Etra Scan Processor in the 1970’s | via Creative Applications }
related:
{ Joy Division’s debut album, Unknown Pleasures, 1979 | The front cover image comes from an edition of the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Astronomy, and was originally drawn with black lines on a white background. It presents successive pulses from the first pulsar discovered, PSR B1919+21. }
I remember way back then when everything was true, and when we would have such a very good time, such a fine time, such a happy time
While we in the US spent our Thursday eating turkey and watching football, the rest of the world’s markets went into a downward spiral as Dubai announced it wanted its lenders to give the country a six-month moratorium on some $80-90 billion in debt. This has the potential to be the largest sovereign debt default since Argentina. (…)
Let’s look at some facts about Dubai. It is one of the Arab Emirates; but unlike its neighbor Abu Dhabi, oil is only about 6% of the economy. While the foundations of the country were built with oil, the country has diversified into finance, real estate, tourism, trading, and manufacturing. It is a small country, with a little under 1.5 million residents, but with less than 20% being natural citizens - the rest are expatriates. The gross domestic product is around US $50 billion.
Dubai has become a byword for thinking large. The world’s tallest building, underwater hotels, the largest manmade islands (plural), indoor snow skiing in the desert… For links to more information try this from Wikipedia: “The large-scale real estate development projects have led to the construction of some of the tallest skyscrapers and largest projects in the world, such as the Emirates Towers, the Burj Dubai, the Palm Islands and the world’s second tallest, and most expensive hotel, the Burj Al Arab.” The list goes on and on.
UBS suggests that the $80-90 billion in debt may not include rather large off-balance-sheet debt (where have we seen that one?). So, a country with a GDP of $50 billion borrows $100 billion. They build massive projects, which are now among the most expensive real estate in the world. The latest manmade island plans for one million people to buy property there. Seriously. Talk about Field of Dreams.
Then came the credit crunch. Property values dropped by as much as 50%. Sales, say the developers in understatements, have slowed. Seems there was a lot of debt used to speculate on real estate, not to mention buying Barney’s, Las Vegas casinos, banks, etc. And while US banks have little exposure, it seems England has about 50% or so of the debt, with the rest of Europe having the lion’s share of the remainder. Admittedly, the estimates seem to confuse the debt of Dubai with that of Abu Dhabi, so it is hard to know a reliable number, other than that European banks are the most exposed.
Now, here’s the deal. Abu Dhabi has the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, at over $650 billion. Dubai has a “mere” $15 billion. If they cared to, Abu Dhabi could write a small check and make all the problems disappear. It just seems that they are not ready to do that, at least not yet. Abu Dhabi already got the world’s tallest building on past debt problems.
Once again, back is the incredible, the rhyme animal
When Steve Jobs returned to Apple the company had just completed a fiscal year where they lost about $1 billion on $7 billion in revenue. The company was worth about $4 billion. Rivals like HP and Dell were worth about $62 billion and $8 billion, respectively.
Today Apple is worth a staggering $184 billion on revenues of $36.5 billion and net income of $8 billion. The company is now worth far more than HP and Dell combined. Hewlett Packard is worth just $119 billion, and Dell is worth $28 billion. You could throw another Dell in there and Apple would still be worth more.
And One Eyed Myra, the queen of the galley who trained the ostrich and the camels
You’re mugged by a man with a patch over one eye. You describe him and his distinctive appearance to the police. They locate a one-eyed suspect and present him to you in a video line-up with five innocent “foils”. If this suspect is the only person in the line-up with one eye, prior research shows you’re highly likely to pick him out even if, in all other respects, he actually bears little resemblance to your mugger. So the challenge is: How to make police line-ups fairer for suspects who have an unusual distinguishing feature?
Police in the USA and UK currently use two strategies - one is to conceal the suspect’s distinguishing feature (and tell the witness they’ve done so); the other is to use make-up, theatrical props or Photoshop to adorn the other members of the line-up with the same distinctive feature. Now Theodora Zarkadi and her colleagues have compared both approaches and found the fairer method is to replicate the unusual feature.
