And the world can’t erase his fantasies
If there’s one thing that’s certain, it’s that humans, like other living things, will continue to evolve. “Evolution is unstoppable,” says Lawrence Moran of the University of Toronto in Canada. But that doesn’t mean that humans are marching on a path toward becoming giant-brained, telepathic creatures out of Star Trek. All it means is that the human genome will continue to change from generation to generation.
Each baby’s DNA carries about 130 new mutations. Most of them have no effect on our well-being. People can pass these neutral mutations down to their offspring without harm, and over time, a small fraction of them will end up spreading across entire populations, or even the entire species, thanks to random luck.
photo { Shooting the ‘Decade From Hell’ cover photo. }
related { If Darwin didn’t rock your world, this should. }
Can I tell ‘em I really never had a gun?
{ You fire a bullet, and it explodes where you tell it to. That’s the essence of the XM25, a gun that fires explosive rounds able to neutralize enemies camped out behind cover. Soldiers in urban environments can fire over or past walls sheltering their enemies, and the bullets will explode on the other side. | Time | more | Related: The evolution of the human capacity for killing at a distance | audio }
A thousand miles an hour through the rain
Aliens from outer space are already among us on earth, say Bulgarian government scientists who claim they are already in contact with extraterrestrial life.
Work on deciphering a complex set of symbols sent to them is underway, scientists from the country’s Space Research Institute said.
They claim aliens are currently answering 30 questions posed to them.
Lachezar Filipov, deputy director of the Space Research Institute of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, confirmed the research.
He said the centre’s researchers were analysing 150 crop circles from around the world, which they believe answer the questions.
“Aliens are currently all around us, and are watching us all the time,” Mr Filipov told Bulgarian media.
“They are not hostile towards us, rather, they want to help us but we have not grown enough in order to establish direct contact with them.”
“The human race was certainly going to have direct contact with the aliens in the next 10 to 15 years,” he said.
And the world is like an apple whirling silently in space, like the circles that you find, in the windmills of your mind
Alan Turing (1912 – 1954) was an English mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, and computer scientist, who also wrote papers over a whole spectrum of subjects, from philosophy and psychology through to physics, chemistry and biology. He was influential in the development of computer science and providing a formalisation of the concept of the algorithm and computation with the Turing machine (1934-1936).
In 1999, Time Magazine named Turing as one of the 100 Most Important People of the 20th Century for his role in the creation of the modern computer, and stated: “The fact remains that everyone who taps at a keyboard, opening a spreadsheet or a word-processing program, is working on an incarnation of a Turing machine.”
During the Second World War, Turing was recruited to serve in the Government Code and Cypher School, located in a Victorian mansion called Bletchley Park. The task of all those so assembled — mathematicians, chess champions, Egyptologists, whoever might have something to contribute about the possible permutations of formal systems — was to break the Enigma codes used by the Nazis in communications between headquarters and troops.
Because of secrecy restrictions, Turing’s role in this enterprise was not acknowledged until long after his death. And like the invention of the computer, the work done by the Bletchley Park crew was very much a team effort. But it is now known that Turing played a crucial role in designing a primitive, computer-like machine that could decipher at high speed Nazi codes to U-boats in the North Atlantic.
In 1948, Turing, working with his former undergraduate colleague, D. G. Champernowne, began writing a chess program for a computer that did not yet exist. In 1952, lacking a computer powerful enough to execute the program, Turing played a game in which he simulated the computer, taking about half an hour per move. The game was recorded.
In 1950, his Turing test was a significant and characteristically provocative contribution to the debate regarding artificial intelligence.
After 1952, Turing became interested in chemistry and worked on mathematical biology. He wrote a paper on the chemical basis of morphogenesis, and predicted oscillating chemical reactions, which were first observed in the 1960s.
Turing’s homosexuality resulted in a criminal prosecution in 1952.
In January 1952 Turing picked up 19-year-old Arnold Murray outside a cinema in Manchester. After Murray helped an accomplice to break into his house, Turing reported the crime to the police. During the investigation, Turing acknowledged a sexual relationship with Murray. Homosexual acts were illegal in the United Kingdom at that time, and so both were charged with gross indecency under Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, the same crime that Oscar Wilde had been convicted of more than fifty years earlier.
Turing was given a choice between imprisonment or probation conditional on his agreement to undergo hormonal treatment designed to reduce libido. He accepted chemical castration via female hormone injections, one of the side effects of which was that he grew breasts.
On 8 June 1954, Turing’s cleaner found him dead; he had died the previous day. A post-mortem examination established that the cause of death was cyanide poisoning. When his body was discovered an apple lay half-eaten beside his bed, and although the apple was not tested for cyanide, it is speculated that this was the means by which a fatal dose was delivered. An inquest determined that he had committed suicide.
On 10 September 2009, following an Internet campaign, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown made an official public apology on behalf of the British government for the way in which Turing was treated after the war.
‘Avec Françoise, nous partageons les tâches à la maison. J’apporte la poussière, elle nettoie.’ –Jacques Dutronc
While there is a tendency to think that only men treat women in a sexist way, a new study shows that both men and women participate in maintaining a gender hierarchy in our society. Sexism has been discussed in the professional literature for decades as an issue of social hierarchy.
However, only a few researchers have directly tested the role that social hierarchy plays in sexism on a day to day basis.
Some of the motivation for supporting the gender hierarchy is the widespread belief that social hierarchy is of general importance.
The study, which explores the role of men and women in maintaining the gender hierarchy in society, was conducted by a researcher from the University of Miami and his daughter. (…)
The two most significant findings are that both men and women respond in a more hostile way to a woman who violates sex-role expectations, than to one who adheres to them. Secondly, that the more an individual supports social hierarchy in general (that some people should have more power and resources than others), the more hostile they responded toward a woman who violated sex-role expectations.
Wisdom was a teapot, pouring from above
Whenever a new corporate or governmental scandal erupts, onlookers ask “Where were the lawyers?” Why would attorneys not have advised their clients of the risks posed by conduct that, from an outsider’s perspective, appears indefensible? When numerous red flags have gone unheeded, people often conclude that the lawyers’ failure to sound the alarm must be caused by greed, incompetence, or both.
A few scholars have suggested that unconscious cognitive bias may better explain such lapses in judgment, but they have not explained why particular situations are more likely than others to encourage such bias. This article seeks to fill that gap. Drawing on research from behavioral and social psychology, it suggests that lawyers’ apparent lapses in judgment may be caused by cognitive biases arising from partisan kinship between lawyer and client.
The article uses identity theory to distinguish particular situations in which attorney judgment is likely to be compromised, and it recommends strategies to enhance attorney independence and minimize judgment errors.
{ Cassandra Burke Robertson, Judgment, Identity, and Independence, 2009 | via The Situationist }
While your feet are stompin, and the jam is pumpin
{ David AdeyPump, 2006 | Pump is comprised of a mechanical animal respirator with small breathing tubes attached to a football that has been completely re-surfaced by drywall screws, screwed into it like some overstuffed and oversized pin cushion. | Art As Authority | more }
{ David Adey, Anatomic Particulars, 2007 }
Where is he from, Uranus?
{ One of the great mysteries of our Solar System is why Uranus is tilted on its side. Collision-Free theory explains why. | Photo taken by the spacecraft Voyager 2 in 1986 }
In the muddy street with the fireworks and leaves
Heavy police sawhorses of rough wood with a stenciled warning — “Police Line Do Not Cross” — have been a visible staple of New York’s landscape for decades. But now they are being demoted.
Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said that wooden sawhorses were being phased out. The last ones owned by the New York Police Department, made by inmates in upstate prisons, are being relegated to dull duty at street fairs and other low-impact events.
The glory, the front-row seats to history, will go to the interlocking gray aluminum partitions that the police call “French barriers.”
It’s like a first-grade detective in Midtown Manhattan being busted to overnight patrolman on the outskirts of Staten Island.
From a few hundred French barriers bought in the early 1990s, there are now about 12,000 (seven feet long and $70 each). Just 3,200 veteran wooden sawhorses (14 feet long and $60 each) remain. Other cities like Chicago and Philadelphia also use both types.
related:
{ Top, fake badges for assistant chief and patrolman; bottom, real detective and patrolman badges. | In New York, some officers don’t wear their badges on patrol. Instead, they wear fakes. Called “dupes,” these phony badges are often just a trifle smaller than real ones but otherwise completely authentic. Officers use them because losing a real badge can mean paperwork and a heavy penalty, as much as 10 days’ pay. | NY Times | Continue reading }
‘An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom.’ –Baudelaire
What’s going to happen, economically and politically, over the next few years? Nobody knows, of course. But I have a vision — what I think is the most likely course of events. It’s fairly grim — but not in the approved way. (…)
Start with the short-term economics. What we’re in right now is the aftermath of a giant financial crisis, which typically leads to a prolonged period of economic weakness — and this time isn’t different. A bolder economic policy early this year might have led to a turnaround, but what we actually got were half-measures. As a result, unemployment is likely to stay near its current level for a year or more. (…)
All the wise heads will tell us that 8 or 9 percent unemployment — maybe even 10 percent — is the “new normal”, and that only irresponsible people want to do anything about the situation. So what I see is years of terrible job markets, combined with political paralysis.
Like a door that keeps revolving in a half forgotten dream
If someone tells you something that isn’t true, they may not be lying. At least not in the conventional sense. Confabulation, a rare disorder resulting from severe brain damage, causes its sufferers to relentlessly invent and believe fictions—both mundane and fantastical—about their lives. If asked where she has just been, a patient might say that she was in the laundry room (when she wasn’t) or that she’s been visiting Scotland with her sister (who’s been dead for 20 years), or even that she isn’t in the room where you’re talking to her, but in one exactly like it, further down the corridor. And could you fetch her hand cream please? These stories aren’t maintained for long periods, but are sincerely believed.
While it only affects a tiny minority of those with brain damage, confabulation tells us something important: that spontaneous, fluid, even riotous creativity is a natural part of the design of the mind. The damage associated with confabulation—usually to the frontal lobes—adds nothing to the brain’s makeup. Instead it releases a capacity for fiction that lies dormant inside all of us. Anyone who has seen children at play knows that the desire to make up stories is deeply embedded in human nature. And it can be cultivated too, most clearly by anarchic improvisers like Paul Merton.
{ Idiolect/Prospect magazine | Continue reading | via MindHacks }
photo { Jessica Craig-Martin }
‘One evening, I sat Beauty in my lap.’ –Rimbaud
{ Pregnant male seahorse | Seahorses are the only species in which males truly become pregnant. }
{ A group of young sea horses }
{ The sex life of seahorses + how to keep seahorses as pets | The Guardian }
Every day, the same, again
Bronx teen gets two years for roasting cat in oven.
Car crash survivor killed by train on way home.
491 fugitives have been deemed America’s Most Wanted. Of these, 461 have been captured.
Maine jail frees wrong inmate.
The number of U.S. households with cellphones increased to 71% from 36% between 1998 and 2005.
Loneliness is contagious, study suggests. More: When one person in a group begins to feel lonely, the negative emotion can spread to others, increasing everybody’s risk for feelings of loneliness.
Paper-thin batteries made from algae.
Scientists have grown meat in the laboratory for the first time. Experts in Holland used cells from a live pig to replicate growth in a petri dish.
Can you be blamed for sleepwalking crimes?
The illusion of time: Perceiving the effect before the cause. A novel temporal illusion, in which the cause of an event is perceived to occur after the event itself, provides some insight into the brain mechanisms underlying conscious perception.
Opposites attract: Monkeys choose mating partners with different genes.
“We started our research seeking men in their twenties who had never consumed pornography. We couldn’t find any.” Are the effects of pornography negligible?
Fear of anxiety linked to depression in above-average worriers.
The study examines shopping through the framework of evolutionary psychology to understand why so many more women enjoy spending a day picking through racks of clothes with friends, while most men can’t get out of the mall fast enough.
More than 20 years after the AIDS virus was identified, researchers have devised the first immunization to protect people against HIV infection. [More: The 50 Best Inventions of 2009 | Time]
Deep below New York City’s bustling streets lies a dangerous world inhabited by sandhogs.
1 in 6 NYPD undercovers mistaken for suspects by fellow officers.
Mayor Bloomberg spent $102M on campaign to win third term - or $175 per vote.
Le Pain Quotidien to operate cafe at Central Park’s Sheep Meadow.
Is your Facebook personality genuine?
How much underworld slang is still used from 80 years ago?
Why do women always feel colder than men?
Why taxing cosmetic surgery is a bad idea.
Three simple ways to abandon your family.
Meredith Dittmar’s clay sculptures.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Suppose a genie appears and gives you two choices. The first option is that he will [thanks] give you $10 million dollars, but everyone else you know will get $20 million apiece.
Choice two: You get $5 million, but no one else gets anything.
As a bonus, the genie offers to erase your memory of having made the choice, so guilt will never be a factor. You will simply wake up the next day in the new situation.
Which option do you choose to maximize your personal happiness?
illustration { Jessica Hische }
previously/related { Rude up thy bird, tayi, tayi }
In its own little way, my body was trying to say that you better stop drinking brandy
What part of the body do you listen with? The ear is the obvious answer, but it’s only part of the story - your skin is also involved.
When we listen to someone else speaking, our brain combines the sounds that our ears pick up with the sight of the speaker’s lips and face, and subtle changes in air movements over our skin. Only by melding our senses of hearing, vision and touch do we get a full impression of what we’re listening to.
{ Not Exactly Rocket Science/ScienceBlogs Times | Continue reading }
photo { Richard Kern }
