{ The spring/summer 2010 round of catwalk shows, which ended last month, was a watershed moment for the bloggers and the fashion industry. In New York, as photograph after photograph appeared of Tavi, a 13-year-old blogger from the suburbs of Chicago [above photo], embracing famous designers such as Yohji Yamamoto and Alexander Wang, it suddenly became clear that the fashion establishment must now share shoulder space with, as one blogger has put it, “outsiders looking in”. | Financial Times | Continue reading }

Taser gun used on 10-year-old girl who ‘refused to take shower.’

Would-be Seattle ninja impaled on fence.

A man whose bowel was damaged in a ‘ripped in half’ motorcycle crash has been fitted with a bionic bottom that enables him to go to the toilet using a remote control.

Malawi: HIV drugs used to ferment local gin and feed poultry.

Russian police have arrested three homeless people suspected of eating a 25-year-old man and selling other bits of the corpse to a local kebab house.

A French woman whose fiance asked her to marry him two days before he was killed in a car crash has been granted a posthumous white wedding.

A British scientist says she is Belle de Jour, the anonymous blogger whose accounts of life as a call girl were turned into books and a TV series.

Live strippers ad campaign halted in Las Vegas.

The curious case of gay-porn-star identical twins.

The cards ask: Do you know who killed me? The South Carolina Department of Corrections started selling these decks in its prison canteens for $1.72 about a year ago. Each card asks that you please call 888-CRIME-SC if you have any information about a case.

German police searched a home in connection with an alleged extortion scheme targeting former supermodel Cindy Crawford and her family.

The father of the boy who once accused Michael Jackson of molestation has committed suicide in NJ.

USPS to end saturday service?

Nouriel Roubini: “Based on my best judgment, it is most likely that the unemployment rate will peak close to 11% and will remain at a very high level for two years or more.”

Cheap money and fiscal stimulus seem to have averted a second Great Depression. But policy makers haven’t been able to generate enough spending, public or private, to make progress against mass unemployment. And China’s weak-currency policy exacerbates the problem, in effect siphoning much-needed demand away from the rest of the world into the pockets of artificially competitive Chinese exporters.

A carry trade is when you borrow from a currency with a low interest rate, and then invest in a currency with a higher interest rate. Say the US interest rate is 3%, and the Chinese interest rate is 5%. Borrow at 3%, invest at 5%, make 2%.

The Dow gained more than 53 percent from its March trough, while the S&P is up over 61 percent from its springtime low. That’s just not normal; it’s too much, too soon.

If the economy’s stagnant, why are stocks up? It’s possible that the stock market is just getting it wrong again. Plus: Why the crisis isn’t going away.

Oil production is reaching its limit: The basics of what this means.

The world is running out of uranium and nobody seems to have noticed. The coming nuclear crisis.

The number of Americans who lack dependable access to adequate food shot up last year to 49 million, the largest number since the government has been keeping track.

The nothing-can-be-believed chaos of the financial crisis created a golden opportunity for Zero Hedge, a blog run by a mysterious ex-hedge-funder with a dodgy past and conspiracy theories to burn.

Japanese contractors owed billions by Dubai firms. Related: Burj Dubai – Tallest Tower & Armani Hotel Opening 2009.

Lesbians are better at raising children than conventional couples, a senior member of the Government’s parenting academy has said.

Patients with empathic, attentive doctors recover more quickly from the common cold.

Men often treat their friends better than women do.

A European study shows that, over time, even the most sophisticated readers can be manipulated.

Most women don’t need a mammogram in their 40s and should get one every two years starting at 50, a government task force said Monday, a major reversal that conflicts with the American Cancer Society’s long-standing position.

Most people know their own vote is hardly worth it when weighed against the effort involved in getting registered and actually going to vote, let alone when weighed against all the other people voting. Why do people bother voting?

Artists have long described the powerful linkage of smell and the past. Why is smell so sentimental?

The world’s biggest single flower attracts insects by mimicking rotting meat.

Floaters are deposits of various size, shape, consistency, refractive index, and motility within the eye’s vitreous humour, which is normally transparent.

How much power does the human brain require to operate?

What are the odds that intelligent, technically advanced aliens would look anything like the ones in films, with an emaciated torso and limbs, spindly fingers and a bulbous, bald head with large, almond-shaped eyes? What are the odds that they would even be humanoid? I argue that the chances are close to zero.

Recent, wistful pictures of the Moon show the Apollo landing sites, including Apollo 11’s lunar module, still resting at the site where it was left 40 years ago. [pics]

The producer who acquired licensing rights to the Winnie-the-Pooh works and characters from A. A. Milne in 1930 has been suing Disney for rights infringement since 1991.

In his brief essay “Gli scacchisti irritabili” (“The 
Irritable Chess Players”) of 1985, Primo Levi elaborates a set of symmetries between the act of literary creation and the playing of a game of chess.

Some of the concepts that Kazantzakis attributes to Nietzsche appear to be based on a mistaken interpretation of Nietzsche by Lichtenberger, according to which man is a particle of the divine substance, the eternal Will. For the real Nietzsche, the mysteries of sexuality constitute the only form of eternal life.

If you examine philosophy-department offerings around America, you’ll find staple courses in “Philosophy of Law,” “Philosophy of Art,” “Philosophy of Science,” “Philosophy of Religion,” and a fair number of other areas that make up our world. Why, then, don’t you find “Philosophy of Journalism” among those staple courses?

Adam Smith in 10 minutes.

Brooklyn chef goes ballistic, throws live lobster on patrons, shouts “You think my fish is not fresh? Look how fresh this is!”

As part of a corruption investigation into the Newspaper and Mail Deliverers Union, NYPD officers raided the circulation departments of four major NY newspaper.

New York City webcams.

Even the star that goes on the tree in Rockefeller Center has some work done every once in a while.

When is the best time of day to break bad news to someone? In the evening.

Undercover with a Michelin inspector. Conceived in France at the beginning of the last century, the Michelin guide today has editions in twenty-three countries and is one of the best-selling restaurant guides in the world.

An expert’s three-step process to cure your fear of mice.

20 of the most shameless cultural franchises.

The world’s largest book, “Bhutan: A Visual Odyssey Across the Last Himalayan Kingdom,” by Michael Hawley.

Vodafone NZ’s Symphonia features 1000 cellphones syncing 53 different ringtone alerts from 2000 sent messages to reconstruct Tchaikovsky’s 1812 overture.

The definitive guide to becoming a seasoned all-you-can-eat buffeter.

Oxford word of the year: Unfriend (verb). Unrelated: Start using these words.

Ed Benguiat is an American typographer who crafted over 600 typefaces including Tiffany and Bookman. He also designed logotypes for The New York Times, Playboy, the original Planet of the Apes film and Super Fly. Related House Industries typefaces: Ed Benguiat and Planet of the Apes.

How to make your own book in 3,000 simple steps.

Man-Wolf sightings in Wisconsin.

The Mr. Pac-Man Car.

Autocomplete Me.

.–.

Salvador Dali and his anteater in Paris.

{ Cy Twombly, Untitled, 1969 | Oil and crayon on canvas | Quote }

The pride expression is a fairly specific signal of high status. (…) The pride display may be best viewed as a gestalt signal in which the sum of various parts (expanded body posture, small smile, head tilt back, arms extended) transmits an automatically interpreted message. (…)

Pride expression sends a message that is distinct from that of happiness, consistent with a growing body of research suggesting that distinct positive emotions, such as pride and happiness, may have evolved to serve distinct functions. (…)

The high-status signal sent by pride expression also appears to be distinct from any message sent by anger. Previous research has shown that displays of anger lead observers to judge individuals as more professionally qualified than individuals displaying sadness. Thus, anger seems to convey a sense of power or competence, at least relative to a low-power (and presumably low-status) emotion such as sadness. Yet, the present findings suggest that the anger expression does not convey high status to the same extent as pride; in fact, when compared with pride, anger was relatively more associated with low status. (…)

The current results demonstrate that high-status perceptions of the pride expression are unelaborated and automatic. Indeed, this is the first research to suggest that our ability to rapidly and involuntarily assess social status may be due, in part, to our ability to automatically recognize and interpret displays of pride.

{ Azim F. Shariff and Jessica L. Tracy, Knowing Who’s Boss: Implicit Perceptions of Status From the Nonverbal Expression of Pride, 2009 | PDF | Continue reading | via OvercomingBias }

For all its tumult — erupting stars, colliding galaxies, collapsing black holes — the cosmos is a surprisingly orderly place. Theoretical calculations have long shown that the entropy of the universe — a measure of its disorder — is but a tiny fraction of the maximum allowable amount.

A new calculation of entropy upholds that general result but suggests that the universe is messier than scientists had thought — and slightly further along on its gradual journey to death, two Australian cosmologists conclude. (…) Tthe collective entropy of all the supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies is about 100 times higher than previously calculated. Because supermassive black holes are the largest contributor to cosmic entropy, the finding suggests that the entropy of the universe is also about 100 times larger than previous estimates.

Entropy quantifies the number of different microscopic states that a physical system can have while looking the same on a large scale. For instance, an omelet has higher entropy than an egg because there are more ways for the molecules of an omelet to rearrange themselves and still remain an omelet than for an egg, notes cosmologist Sean Carroll of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

A black hole is the entropy champ because there are myriad ways for all the material that has fallen into it to be arranged microscopically while the black hole retains the same numerical values for its observable properties — charge, mass and spin.

{ ScienceNews | Continue reading }

This world is arranged as it had to be if it were to be capable of continuing with great difficulty to exist; if it were a little worse, it would be no longer capable of continuing to exist. Consequently, since a worse world could not continue to exist, it is absolutely impossible; and so this world itself is the worst of all possible worlds.

{ Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, II, 46, 1818 }

artwork { Georgia O’Keeffe, Abstraction Blue, 1927 }

{ Eric Testroete | costume for Halloween 2009 | more }

Orchidaceae, the Orchid family, is the largest family of the flowering plants.

The Royal Botanical Gardens of Kew list 880 genera and nearly 22,000 accepted species, but the exact number is unknown (perhaps as many as 25,000) because of taxonomic disputes.

The number of orchid species equals about four times the number of mammal species, or more than twice the number of bird species. It also encompasses about 6–11% of all seed plants.

About 800 new orchid species are added each year.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

Most of us have genes that make us as hardy as dandelions: able to take root and survive almost anywhere. A few of us, however, are more like the orchid: fragile and fickle, but capable of blooming spectacularly if given greenhouse care. So holds a provocative new theory of genetics, which asserts that the very genes that give us the most trouble as a species, causing behaviors that are self-destructive and antisocial, also underlie humankind’s phenomenal adaptability and evolutionary success. With a bad environment and poor parenting, orchid children can end up depressed, drug-addicted, or in jail—but with the right environment and good parenting, they can grow up to be society’s most creative, successful, and happy people.

{ The Atlantic | Continue reading }

related { Japanese researchers extract vanilla from cow dung. }

illustration { Octavio Ocampo }

{ Richard Avedon, New York Life#4, Lower East Side, New York, October 26, 1949 }

We are apparently now in a situation where modern technology is changing the way people behave, people talk, people react, people think, and people remember. And you encounter this not only in a theoretical way, but when you meet people, when suddenly people start forgetting things, when suddenly people depend on their gadgets, and other stuff, to remember certain things. This is the beginning, it’s just an experience. But if you think about it and you think about your own behavior, you suddenly realize that something fundamental is going on. (…)

As we know, information is fed by attention, so we have not enough attention, not enough food for all this information. And, as we know — this is the old Darwinian thought, the moment when Darwin started reading Malthus — when you have a conflict between a population explosion and not enough food, then Darwinian selection starts. And Darwinian systems start to change situations. And so what interests me is that we are, because we have the Internet, now entering a phase where Darwinian structures, where Darwinian dynamics, Darwinian selection, apparently attacks ideas themselves: what to remember, what not to remember, which idea is stronger, which idea is weaker. (…)

It’s the question: what is important, what is not important, what is important to know? Is this information important? Can we still decide what is important? And it starts with this absolutely normal, everyday news. But now you encounter, at least in Europe, a lot of people who think, what in my life is important, what isn’t important, what is the information of my life. And some of them say, well, it’s in Facebook. And others say, well, it’s on my blog. And, apparently, for many people it’s very hard to say it’s somewhere in my life, in my lived life.

{ The Age of Informavore / A Talk With Frank Schirrmacher | Edge | Continue reading }

photo { Richard Kern }

Greene and Paxton had hypothesized that if deciding to be honest is a conscious process—the result of resisting temptation—the areas of the brain associated with self-control and critical thinking would light up when subjects told the truth. If it is automatic, those areas would remain dark.

What they found is that honesty is an automatic process—but only for some people.

{ Seed magazine | Continue reading }

artwork { Alexander Calder, Big Red, 1959 | Sheet metal and steel wire }

Fictitious entries, also known as fake entries, Mountweazels, and Nihilartikels, are deliberately incorrect entries or articles in reference works such as dictionaries, encyclopedias, maps and directories. Entries in reference works normally originate from a reliable external source, but no such source exists for a fictitious entry.

The neologism Mountweazel was coined by the The New Yorker magazine based on a fictitious entry for Lillian Virginia Mountweazel in the 1975 edition of the New Columbia Encyclopedia. Another term, Nihilartikel, is of uncertain origin, combining the Latin word nihil, “nothing” with German Artikel, “article.” There is also the specific term “trap street.”

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

A trap street is a fictitious street included on a map, often outside the area the map covers, for the purpose of “trapping” potential copyright violators of the map, who will be unable to justify the inclusion of the “trap street” on their map.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

The town of Agloe, New York was invented by map makers but eventually became a real place.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

{ The Year 2038 Problem: Example showing how the date would reset at 03:14:08 UTC on 19 January 2038. | Wikipedia | Continue reading }

{ Vincent Van Gogh, Olive Trees with the Alpilles in the Background (1889) and Wheat Field with Cypresses (1889) }

{ Vincent Van Gogh, The Church at Auvers (1890), View of Arles with Irises (1888) and At Eternity’s Gate (1890) }

My dear Theo,

Yesterday Gauguin and I went to Montpellier to see the museum there. (…)

Gauguin and I talk a lot about Delacroix, Rembrandt &c.

The discussion is excessively electric. We sometimes emerge from it with tired minds, like an electric battery after it’s run down. (…)

Gauguin said to me this morning, when I asked him how he felt: ‘that he could feel his old self coming back’, which gave me great pleasure.

As for me, coming here last winter, tired and almost fainting mentally, I too suffered a little inside before I was able to begin to remake myself. (…)

As regards setting up a life with painters as pals, you see such odd things and I’ll end with what you always say, time will tell.

{ Letter from Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, 17 or 18 December 1888 | Continue reading | More: 902 letters from and to Van Gogh }

On 23 December 1888, frustrated and ill, Van Gogh confronted Gauguin with a razor blade. In panic, Van Gogh left their hotel and fled to a local brothel. While there, he cut off the lower part of his left ear lobe. He wrapped the severed tissue in newspaper and gave to a prostitute named Rachel, asking her to “keep this object carefully.”

Gauguin left Arles and never saw Van Gogh again.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

{ Press release entitled “? Bowie,” dating from 1966, in which the 19 year-old David Jones explains why he has adopted the stage name David Bowie, “There are too many David Jones’s.” | Christie’s }

Why do women eat salads on dates? A new study suggests it’s all for show.

Researchers at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, observed 469 individuals in 266 groups at three cafeterias on campus. Sitting at a distance of at least 10 meters (damn Canadians and their metric system), the researchers watched these people in a natural setting and recorded how many people were sitting at each table, of what gender the people were, and estimated the caloric content of what each one was eating.

The findings were pretty clear:

1) Females chose foods with significantly fewer calories when eating with men rather than women. (Note to Jezebel: word “female” is in the study!)

2) Women’s food choices weren’t affected just by a man being present, but in proportion to how many men were present — more men equaled fewer calories.

{ True/Slant | Continue reading }

Allow me to explain “The cat is on the roof” to those of you who are unfamiliar with the joke. It goes like this: Bob goes on vacation. He asks his moron brother to take care of his cat. After a few days on vacation, Bob calls to say hi. The moron brother blurts out “Your cat is dead.”

Bob is beside himself with grief. And he chastises his moron brother for breaking the news to him in such an abrupt manner. The moron brother asks how he could have done it better.

Bob explains “Well, for example, you could have told me the cat was on the roof. The next time we talked, you could say the Fire Department is trying to get him down. The next time, you could say the cat fell during the rescue and was in the veterinarian hospital. The next time I called, you could say the cat succumbed to his injuries and passed away. That way I would be prepared for the bad news.”

The moron brother says he understands. Then he adds, “Oh, by the way. Mom is on the roof.”

{ Scott Adams | Continue reading }

illustration { Mike Giant }

Rupert Murdoch said recently that he’s planning to stop Google News from indexing his publications including the Times of London and the Wall Street Journal. Murdoch’s idea is that Google News and the like make it too easy for Internet users to sample news for free rather than paying for it as God and Rupert intended. Mark Cuban, who is very clever but with whom I rarely agree, thinks this is smart on Murdoch’s part, because Twitter is changing the way people find news, effectively disintermediating Google, but not the News Corp. publications, themselves.

It’s funny how Murdoch’s statement made Cuban think of Twitter while it made me think immediately of the A&P.

The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, or A&P, was America’s first national chain of food markets. Hell, it was America’s first self-serve market, first to have store brands, first to advertise nationally, first to have a customer loyalty program (in 1912!), first to publish its own magazine (Womens’ Day, which is still around, though no longer owned by the A&P), and for most of my childhood back in Ohio A&P was the big Kahuna of grocery chains. With $5.4 billion in sales in the mid-1960s, A&P was at least 20 percent bigger than any of its competitors.

But after 105 years of setting the pace for the grocery industry, A&P peaked in the mid-1960s and went into a decline that lasted for at least 15 years and, it can be argued, continues even to this day. A&P, which has had German owners (the Tengelman Group) since the 1970s, is more of a super-regional chain today and doesn’t particularly vie for industry leadership on any measure. What happened in the mid-1960s to hurt A&P was it opted out of being indexed by Google News.

Well not literally, but close enough. A&P management, which back in the mid-60’s was still chosen from the founding Hartford family, decided at that time to abandon shopping centers — retail aggregators as Google is a news aggregator. They reasoned that in most shopping centers the anchor store was an A&P. In their view their supermarket was the main draw for a shopping center and didn’t need any of those other shops or stores to provide traffic. The rest of the shopping center was seen by A&P management as being purely parasitic.

{ Robert Cringely | Continue reading }

related { Interview with Rupert Murdoch | video }

previously { For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. }

photox { The last days of Gourmet magazine }

I personally have known a lot of really smart people and have to say they are more unconventional in their ideas, yet most of their ideas are crazy. If you have ever been to a Mensa meeting (IQ but little formal education), you realize how things like homeopathy, or truthers, get their bearings. If you have ever hung out with PhDs, you know how limited their competence scope is (at research universities they have the same IQ as Mensans, but are more disciplined and less creative). It’s no wonder guys like stereotypical MBAs, who are not so analytical but rather personable and articulate, tend to dominate society. I suspect MBA rule is less catastrophic than PhD or Mensa rule, if only because they aren’t as certain of themselves. This all gets back to the idea there is an optimal IQ, and it’s not 180, but rather, say, 125 (probably the modal IQ for any large group leader, such as Presidents and CEOs).

{ Falken Blog | Continue reading }

photo { Andrew Hetherington }

“I actually think that woman has a point,” said the first to reply. “Most guys are emotionally retarded, especially in their youth. So telling a guy you love him before he has figured out what’s going on in his own head does carry some risk.”

{ Salon | Continue reading }

The catastrophic decline around the world of “apex” predators such as wolves, cougars, lions or sharks has led to a huge increase in smaller “mesopredators” that are causing major economic and ecological disruptions, a new study concludes.

The findings, published today in the journal Bioscience, found that in North America all of the largest terrestrial predators have been in decline during the past 200 years while the ranges of 60 percent of mesopredators have expanded. The problem is global, growing and severe, scientists say, with few solutions in sight.

An example: in parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, lion and leopard populations have been decimated, allowing a surge in the “mesopredator” population next down the line, baboons. In some cases children are now being kept home from school to guard family gardens from brazen packs of crop-raiding baboons. (…)

Primary or apex predators can actually benefit prey populations by suppressing smaller predators, and failure to consider this mechanism has triggered collapses of entire ecosystems.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }