‘The love of stinking.’ –Nietzsche
{ aversion | panic | Thanks Tim }
related { Dick Stain Donald Trump got zero comments for the Stock Market Drop }
‘Falsity consists in the privation of knowledge, which inadequate, fragmentary, or confused ideas involve.’ –Spinoza
Beliefs in witches and sorcerers are disturbing and calamitous. Sterility, illness, death, rainstorms, burnt-down houses, bald spots, attacks from wild animals, lost foot races, lost reindeer races, the puzzling behavior of a friend or spouse – the enigmatic, the impactful, the bothersome – all can spark suspicions of neighbors using magic and dark powers; all can precipitate violence. The suspects are sometimes normal humans, learned in dark magic, but other times, rumored to be odious and other. They devour babies, fornicate with their menstruating mothers, and use human skulls for sports. They become bats and black panthers, house pythons in their stomachs, and direct menageries of attendant nightbirds. They plot the destruction of families and then dance in orgiastic night-fests. […]
In nearly every documented society, people believe that some misfortunes are attributable to malicious group mates employing magic or supernatural powers. Here I report cross-cultural patterns in these beliefs and propose a theory to explain them.
Using the newly-created Survey of Mystical Harm, I show that several conceptions of evil, mystical practitioners recur around the world, including sorcerers (who use learned spells), possessors of the evil eye (who transmit injury through their stares and words), and witches (who possess superpowers, pose existential threats, and engage in morally abhorrent acts).
I argue that these beliefs develop from three cultural selective processes — a selection for effective-seeming magic, a selection for plausible explanations of impactful misfortune, and a selection for demonizing myths that justify mistreatment. Separately, these selective schemes produce traditions as diverse as shamanism, conspiracy theories, and campaigns against heretics — but around the world, they jointly give rise to the odious and feared witch. […]
Societally-corrosive beliefs can persist when they are intuitively appealing or serve some believers’ agendas. […]
People are more likely to attribute injury to mystical harm when they lack alternative explanations. […]
The greater the impact of the misfortune, the more likely people are to attribute it to mystical harm.
‘And above all, away with the body, this wretched idée fixe of the senses.’ –Nietzsche
We present a new tool that provides a means to measure the psychological and cultural distance between two societies and create a distance scale with any population as the point of comparison. Since psychological data is dominated by samples drawn from the United States or other WEIRD nations, this tool provides a “WEIRD scale.” […]
Decades of psychological research designed to uncover truths about human psychology may have instead uncovered truths about a thin slice of our species – those who live in Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic (WEIRD) nations. […]
Just how psychologically different are the nations of the world compared to each other and to the over-scrutinized United States? Many hard drives have been filled with the ways in which China and Japan differ from the United States and Canada, but just how psychologically distant is the culture of China from Japan, the United States from Canada, or Azerbaijan from Zambia? Here we introduce a robust method for quantifying this distance. […]
[We compared] the cultural differences between regions of the four largest populations—China, India, United States and European Union. These analyses reveal that the cultural differences between regions of the overscrutinized United States are considerably smaller than the European Union, China, or India. […]
The Far East has always held a certain exoticism, which may have driven a generation of cultural psychologists to document the many ways in which East Asian societies differ from the West. However, the most extensively researched East Asian nations aren’t anywhere near the extreme on the WEIRD scale and some are barely halfway. Moreover, there is considerable diversity within China, let alone between China, Japan, and Hong Kong. This diversity has been exploited by other researchers, for example, showing the role of agriculture on individualism and collectivism, but nowhere the levels performed within the United States, where we know state by state differences in psychological differences such as tightness-looseness. […]
Relatively little attention has been paid to the Middle East and Africa both by the World Values Survey and the psychological sciences. However, given the relative cultural distance to the United States and Africa’s large genetic, linguistic, and likely cultural variation, we have every reason to suspect the WEIRD scale will continue to stretch as we map out these psychological terra incognita. These regions, as well as other underrepresented regions, such as the South Pacific, may in fact hold a treasure trove of findings for the next wave of cultural psychologists.
{ SSRN | PDF }
The Knight Antonius Block: I want knowledge!…
Study provides insight into the neurobiology of dying. Investigators performed continuous patient monitoring following Do Not Resuscitate - Comfort Care orders in patients with devastating brain injury to investigate the mechanisms and timing of events in the brain and the circulation during the dying process.
{ ScienceDaily | Continue reading }
Oxygen deprivation results in brain injury. For years, researchers have been studying the underlying processes in animals: within 20 to 40 seconds, the brain enters an ‘energy-saving mode’ - it becomes electrically inactive, and all interneuronal communication ceases. Within a few minutes, the brain’s fuel reserves have become depleted that maintain the uneven distribution of ions between the inside and outside of nerve cells, and the ion gradients start to break down. This breakdown takes the form of a massive wave of electrochemical energy release in the form of heat, which is known as ’spreading depolarization’. More vividly described as a ‘brain tsunami’, this energy loss spreads through the cortex and other areas of the brain, triggering pathophysiological cascades which gradually poison the nerve cells. Importantly, this wave remains reversible up to a certain point in time: nerve cells will recover fully if circulation is restored before this point is reached. However, if circulation remains disrupted, the cells will die. Until now, recordings of electrical brain activity obtained from human subjects have been of limited applicability, and experts have been divided as to the transferability of results from animal-based research. […]
“We were able to show that terminal spreading depolarization is similar in humans and animals. Unfortunately, the research community has been ignoring this essential process of central nervous system injury for decades, all because of the mistaken assumption that it does not occur in humans,” explains Prof. Dreier.
paint on plaster { Eduardo Paolozzi, Targets, 1948 }
You got a question, you ask the 8 ball
One of the curious features of language is that it varies from one place to another.
Even among speakers of the same language, regional variations are common, and the divide between these regions can be surprisingly sharp. […]
For example, the term “you guys” is used most often in the northern parts of the US, while “y’all” is used more in the south.
How can you face your problem if your problem is your face
From 1936-1972, approximately 50,000 lobotomies were performed in the US. The majority of these occurred during the “lobotomy boom” which occurred in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Curiously, the lobotomy’s popularity coincided with a consensus within the medical community that it was ineffective. […]
Physician Walter Freeman performed approximately 10% of all US lobotomies during his medical career (El-Hai 2005). Although the procedure was widely used, it swiftly fell out of favor when the FDA approved the first antipsychotic drug in 1954. […]
In this paper, we propose the lobotomy’s popularity and longevity in the US was the result of the incentives generated by the institutional structure of mental health provision. Primarily, we note that funding for public mental hospitals and asylums were provided by state and federal governments on a very low per capita basis. This served to constrained revenues. Lobotomized patients were easier to manage (their brain damage often made them docile), and the procedure was comparatively cheaper than other treatment methods. These factors, in conjunction with little incentive to effectively treat patients provided by bureaucratic oversight, motivated physicians to perform cost and conflict minimizing treatment.
In contrast, physicians operating in private mental hospitals and asylums were funded by the patients, their caregivers, or through philanthropic donations. […] [L]obotomy was less used in private mental hospitals.
acrylic, oil, oilstick and paper collage on three hinged wooden panels { Jean-Michel Basquiat, Self-Portrait, 1981 }
We are condemned to an observer role in our own nightly dreams, which excludes any possibility of looking forward or backward in time
Let us consider a counterfactual history in which Szilard invents nuclear fission and realizes that a nuclear bomb could be made with a piece of glass, a metal object, and a battery arranged in a particular configuration. What happens next? Szilard becomes gravely concerned. He sees that his discovery must be kept secret at all costs. But how? His insight is bound to occur to others. He could talk to a few of his physicist friends, the ones most likely to stumble upon the idea, and try to persuade them not to publish anything on nuclear chain reactions or on any of the reasoning steps leading up to the dangerous discovery. (That is what Szilard did in actual history.)
Here Szilard faces a dilemma: either he doesn’t explain the dangerous discovery, but then he will not be effective in persuading many of his colleagues to stop publishing; or he tells them the reason for his concern, but then he spreads the dangerous knowledge further. Either way he is fighting a losing battle. The general advance of scientific knowledge will eventually make the dangerous insight more accessible. Soon, figuring out how to initiate a nuclear chain reaction with pieces of metal, glass, and electricity will no longer take genius but will be within reach of any STEM student with an inventive mindset.
The situation looks hopeless, but Szilard does not give up. He decides to take a friend into his confidence, a friend who is also the world’s most famous scientist—Albert Einstein. He successfully persuades Einstein of the danger (again following actual history). Now Szilard has the support of a man who can get him a hearing with any government. The two write a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. After some committee wranglings and report-writing, the top levels of the U.S. government are eventually sufficiently convinced to be ready to take serious action.
What the U.S. government did, after having digested the information provided by Einstein and Szilard, […] was to launch the Manhattan Project in order to weaponize nuclear fission as quickly as possible. […]
But how would things have played out if there had been an easy way to make nukes? Maybe Szilard and Einstein could persuade the U.S. government to ban all research in nuclear physics (outside high-security government facilities)? […] Let us suppose that President Roosevelt could somehow mobilize enough political support to drive through a ban, and that the U.S. Supreme Court could somehow find a way of regarding it as constitutionally valid. We then confront an array of formidable practical difficulties. All university physics departments would have to be closed, and security checks initiated. A large number of faculty and students would be forced out. Intense speculations would swirl concerning the reason for all these heavy-handed measures. Groups of physics PhD students and faculty banned from their research field would sit around and speculate about what the secret danger might be. Some of them would figure it out. And among those who figured it out, some would feel compelled to use the knowledge to impress their colleagues; and those colleagues would want to tell yet others, to show they were in the know. Alternatively, somebody who opposed the ban would unilaterally decide to publish the secret, maybe in order to support their view that the ban is ineffective or that the benefits of publication outweigh the risks. […] Even if, by some miracle, the secret never leaked in the United States, scientists in other countries would independently discover it, thereby multiplying the sources from which it could spread. […]
An alternative approach would be to eliminate all glass, metal, or sources of electrical current. Given the ubiquity of these materials, such an undertaking would be extremely daunting. […] Metal use is almost synonymous with civilization, and would not be a realistic target for elimination. Glass production could be banned, and existing glass panes confiscated; but pieces of glass would remain scattered across the landscape for a long time. Batteries and magnets could be seized, though some people would have stashed away these materials before they could be collected by the authorities. […]
We now know that one cannot trigger a nuclear explosion with just a sheet of glass, some metal, and a battery. Making an atomic bomb requires several kilograms of fissile material, which is difficult to produce. We pulled out a grey ball that time. Yet with each act of invention, we reach into the urn anew.
Let us introduce the hypothesis that the urn of creativity contains at least one black ball. We can refer to this as the vulnerable world hypothesis . Intuitively, the hypothesis is that there is some level of technology at which civilization almost certainly gets destroyed unless quite extraordinary and historically unprecedented degrees of preventive policing and/or global governance are implemented.
related { Nick Bostrom on the Great Filter | PDF }
Every day, the same, again
Small Nuclear War Could Reverse Global Warming for Years
Emile Ratelband, 69, wants to change the date of birth on his passport from March 11, 1949 to March 11, 1969. He says he has had a check-up and is “biologically” 25 years younger than his date of birth claims.
Ellenstein, 57, donated sperm anonymously in his 20s and early 30s to make some extra cash. This past year, thanks to online tools, including DNA test kits, he discovered that he has at least 24 biological children.
we propose that instances of orgasmic dysfunction in many women may be a byproduct of an inability to find and/or retain high-quality male partners. Related: Women’s orgasm obstacles | PDF
Did the Victorians have faster reactions?
“How does it work?” vs. “What are the laws?” Two conceptions of psychological explanation [PDF]
Can hypnotic suggestibility measured online?
Hackers erase 6,500 sites from the Dark Web in one attack
Scott Galloway: Over the past decade, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google have aggregated more economic value and influence than nearly any other commercial entity in history. The breakup of big tech should and will happen. [More: The Four — What to do (July 2017) + How the traditional rules of business don’t apply to the Big Four, September 2018 ]
Google Turns 20: How an Internet Search Engine Reshaped the Wolrd
A bra that falls off when you clap your hands (new patent)
New artists who show their work early in a relatively small network of 400 venues are all but guaranteed a successful art career, the study said. By contrast, artists who exhibit mainly in lower-level galleries and midtier institutions are likely to remain stuck in that orbit.
How I Accidentally Wound Up Running an Outlaw Biker
I Found the Best Burger Place in America. And Then I Killed It.
Saddam Hussein memorial plaque appears on London bench
Why 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’
How the seven rules of Soviet disinformation are being used to create today’s fake news stories
like a honeymoon we up in the hotel
Evolutionarily minded researchers have hypothesized that women advertise their ovulatory status by wearing red or pink, but many of these studies have been based on relatively small samples of women who have self-reported their clothing choices, an unorthodox practice in the biological study of coloration. […] We found no evidence that women are particularly inclined to wear red or pink during peak fertility.
5 On Your Side
movies and shows have been using the fake 555 numbers since as far back as the 1950s. […]
The number 555-2368 has risen to particularly rarefied air […] dialing 555-2368 will get you the Ghostbusters, the hotel room from Memento, Jim Rockford of The Rockford Files, and Jaime Sommers from The Bionic Woman, among others. […]
Since 1994, 555 numbers have actually been available for personal or business use. […] except for 555-0100 through 555-0199, which were held back for fictional use.
Too much thinking leads to bad choices
Achieving most goals in everyday life requires persistence. Despite an abundance of relevant theoretical and empirical work, no theory details the universal causes of persistence (and non-persistence) across all goal types and settings. To address this gap in the literature, we introduce the Continuing and Returning Model of persistence. […]
[T]he goals that people pursue in daily life are varied and complex. These goals may be concrete or abstract, short-term or of indefinite length. They vary in difficulty, importance, and in how they work with or against other goals that a person holds. Some goals are intended to be started and finished in one continuous episode, but other goals are episodic, meaning that pursuit occurs across multiple episodes. People’s most important goals (the ones that they most want to accomplish) are typically not achieved in one episode of pursuit.
Everyday goals can be episodic for many reasons. Goals can be episodic by their nature (e.g., “write daily”), but more often they are episodic by choice. Breaking a goal into smaller tasks can be beneficial, as can taking breaks to rest and recover. People manage many goals in daily life and minimally have goals to eat, sleep, and maintain their social relationships. People often cannot focus on one goal at a time; instead, they manage multiple goals, allocating their time and attention among competing behavioral choice options. Thus, factors unrelated to focal goals can affect their persistence. Even goals intended to be pursued in one continuous episode (e.g., writing an email) are often deliberately stopped or interrupted by factors unrelated to someone’s motivation for the focal goal such scheduled events, other prioritized goals, and extraneous thoughts. The potentially episodic nature of everyday goal pursuit and the fact that everyday persistence can be influenced by factors external to the goal has implications for how and why persistence occurs and fails to occur. […]
In contrast to the intuitive notion that persistence is inherently good and reflective of commitment to the focal goal or to one’s personal character, the Continuing and Returning Model depicts persistence as goal pursuit process that is dynamic, multiply determined, and separable from goal attainment and other metrics of success. Persistence is not a binary behavior but rather a process that is affected by many factors. Furthermore, persistence is not always adaptive. Indeed, sometimes persistence reflects inefficient goal pursuit. Similarly, non- persistence isn’t always maladaptive. People who stop pursuing a goal are often prioritizing or accommodating other important goals, people, or events.
related { How The Brain Switches Between Different Sets Of Rules }
oil on wood panel { Leonardo da Vinci, Lady with an Ermine, 1488-1490 }
Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies.
The ship of Theseus is a thought experiment that raises the question of whether a ship that has had all of its components replaced remains fundamentally the same object.
Suppose that the famous ship sailed by the hero Theseus in a great battle has been kept in a harbour as a museum piece. As the years go by some of the wooden parts begin to rot and are replaced by new ones. After a century or so, all of the parts have been replaced. Is the “restored” ship still the same object as the original?
{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }
Does the Human Body Really Replace Itself Every 7 Years?
Recent research has confirmed that different tissues in the body replace cells at different rates, and some tissues never replace cells. So the statement that we replace every cell in the body every seven years or every ten years is wrong. […]
Neurons in the cerebral cortex are never replaced.
Fat cells are replaced at the rate of about 10% per year in adults. […]
Cardiomyocyte cells [muscle cells of the heart] are replaced at a reducing rate as we age. At age 25, about 1% of cells are replaced every year. Replacement slows gradually to about 0.5% at age 70. Even in people who have lived a very long life, less than half of the cardiomyocyte cells have been replaced. Those that aren’t replaced have been there since birth.
{ Ask a Naturalist | Continue reading }
Your lungs are six weeks old - and your taste buds just ten days! […]
Liver cells only have a life span of around 150 days. […] “I can take 70 per cent of a person’s liver away in an operation and around 90 per cent of it will grow back within two months,” explains David Lloyd, consultant liver surgeon at Leicester Royal Infirmary. […]
Your eyes are one of the few body parts that don’t really change during your life. The only part that is constantly being renewed is the cornea, the transparent top layer.
{ Daily Mail | Continue reading }
A collection of the replacement rates of different cells in our body:
[…]
We note that hair elongates at about 1 cm per month while fingernails grow at about 0.3 cm per month, which is about the same speed as the continental spreading in plate tectonics that increases the distance between North America and Europe.
{ Cell Biology by the Numbers | Continue reading }
For decades, scientists believed that neurogenesis—the creation of new neurons—whirs along nicely in the brains of embryos and infants, but grinds to a halt by adulthood. But from the 1980s onward, this dogma started to falter. Researchers showed that neurogenesis does occur in the brains of various adult animals, and eventually found signs of newly formed neurons in the adult human brain. Hundreds of these cells are supposedly added every day to the hippocampus—a comma-shaped structure involved in learning and memory. The concept of adult neurogenesis is now so widely accepted that you can find diets and exercise regimens that purportedly boost it.
The trouble is: This stream of fresh neurons might not actually exist.
In a new study, and one of the biggest yet, a team led by Arturo Alvarez-Buylla at the University of California at San Francisco completely failed to find any trace of young neurons in dozens of hippocampus samples, collected from adult humans.
{ The Atlantic, March 2018 | Continue reading }
People as old as 79 may still generate new brain cells, US researchers said Thursday. […] Using autopsied brain samples from 28 people who died suddenly between the ages of 14-79, researchers looked at “newly formed neurons and the state of blood vessels within the entire human hippocampus soon after death.” […]
A study last month led by Arturo Alvarez-Buylla of the University of California in San Francisco found the opposite, however.
{ Medical Express, April 2018 | Continue reading }
The generation of cells in the human body has been difficult to study, and our understanding of cell turnover is limited. Testing of nuclear weapons resulted in a dramatic global increase in the levels of the isotope 14C in the atmosphere, followed by an exponential decrease after 1963.
We show that the level of 14C in genomic DNA closely parallels atmospheric levels and can be used to establish the time point when the DNA was synthesized and cells were born. We use this strategy to determine the age of cells in the cortex of the adult human brain and show that whereas nonneuronal cells are exchanged, occipital neurons are as old as the individual, supporting the view that postnatal neurogenesis does not take place in this region.
{ Cell | PDF }
If the cells of our skin are replaced regularly, why do scars and tattoos persist indefinitely?
The cells in the superficial or upper layers of skin, known as the epidermis, are constantly replacing themselves. This process of renewal is basically exfoliation (shedding) of the epidermis. But the deeper layers of skin, called the dermis, do not go through this cellular turnover and so do not replace themselves. Thus, foreign bodies, such as tattoo dyes, implanted in the dermis will remain.
inkjet and acrylic on canvas { imp kerr (b.1980), not confirmed as alive, 59th st, nyc, 1977, 2018 }
6′50 for a O, blink, a kilo is out the door
On Friday, representatives of more than 60 nations, gathered in Versailles, France, approved a new definition for the kilogram.
Since the 19th century, scientists have based their definition of the fundamental unit of mass on a physical object — a shining platinum iridium cylinder stored in a locked vault in the bowels of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) in Sevres, France. A kilogram was equal to the heft of this aging hunk of metal, and this cylinder, by definition, weighed exactly a kilogram. If the cylinder changed, even a little bit, then the entire global system of measurement had to change, too.
With Friday’s vote, scientists redefined the kilogram for the 21st century by tying it to a fundamental feature of the universe — a small, strange figure from quantum physics known as Planck’s constant, which describes the smallest possible unit of energy. […]
Though the newly defined kilogram won’t affect your bathroom scale, it will have practical applications in research and industries that depend on meticulous measurement. […]
The kilogram prototype, known as “Le Grand K,” was made by humans and is subject to all our limitations. It is inaccessible — the safe containing the cylinder can be opened only by three custodians carrying three separate keys, an event that has happened fewer than a dozen times in the object’s 139-year history. And it is inconsistent — when Le Grand K was examined in the 1980s, it weighed several micrograms less than it was supposed to. This meant that anyone who made products based on the standards had to reissue their weights. Manufacturers were furious. Lawmakers were called. Metrologists, people who study measurements, were accused of incompetence.
So, in a 2014 meeting at the BIPM, the metrology community resolved to redefine the kilogram.
{ Washington Post | Continue reading }
On April 7, 1795, the gram was decreed in France to be “the absolute weight of a volume of pure water equal to the cube of the hundredth part of the metre, and at the temperature of melting ice.”
Since trade and commerce typically involve items significantly more massive than one gram, and since a mass standard made of water would be inconvenient and unstable, the regulation of commerce necessitated the manufacture of a practical realization of the water-based definition of mass. Accordingly, a provisional mass standard was made as a single-piece, metallic artifact one thousand times as massive as the gram—the kilogram.
At the same time, work was commissioned to precisely determine the mass of a cubic decimetre (one litre) of water. Although the decreed definition of the kilogram specified water at 0 °C—its highly stable temperature point—the French chemist Louis Lefèvre-Gineau and the Italian naturalist Giovanni Fabbroni after several years of research chose to redefine the standard in 1799 to water’s most stable density point: the temperature at which water reaches maximum density, which was measured at the time as 4 °C. They concluded that one cubic decimetre of water at its maximum density was equal to 99.9265% of the target mass of the provisional kilogram standard made four years earlier.
That same year, 1799, an all-platinum kilogram prototype was fabricated with the objective that it would equal, as close as was scientifically feasible for the day, the mass of one cubic decimetre of water at 4 °C. The prototype was presented to the Archives of the Republic in June and on December 10, 1799, the prototype was formally ratified as the kilogramme des Archives (Kilogram of the Archives) and the kilogram was defined as being equal to its mass.
{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }
Only three countries—Burma (Myanmar), Liberia, and the US—have not adopted the International System of Units as their official system of weights and measures.
bellissima gente, musica spettacolare, emozioni indelebili
The Beast of Gévaudan is the historical name associated with the man-eating gray wolf, dog or wolfdog that terrorized the former province of Gévaudan, in south-central France between 1764 and 1767.
The attacks, which covered an area stretching 90 by 80 kilometres (56 by 50 mi), were said to have been committed by a beast or beasts that had formidable teeth and immense tails according to contemporary eyewitnesses.
Victims were often killed by having their throats torn out. The Kingdom of France used a considerable amount of manpower and money to hunt the animals, including the resources of several nobles, soldiers, civilians, and a number of royal huntsmen.
The number of victims differs according to sources. In 1987, one study estimated there had been 210 attacks; resulting in 113 deaths and 49 injuries; 98 of the victims killed were partly eaten. However, other sources claim it killed between 60 and 100 adults and children, as well as injuring more than 30.
According to modern scholars, public hysteria at the time of the attacks contributed to widespread myths that supernatural beasts roamed Gévaudan, but deaths attributed to a beast were more likely the work of a number of wolves or packs of wolves.
{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }
The Beast preyed almost entirely on women and children living in isolated cottages and hamlets, often as they tended animals or gathered crops in open fields. Men and cattle were not to its liking. Nor, it seemed, were sheep and goats. […]
Sometimes La Bête attacked several times in one day or on successive days, often leaving the victim uneaten. Some witnesses said that it wore an armoured hide, perhaps that of a boar. One surviving victim claimed the beast walked on two legs. Several witnesses saw a man with La Bête.
{ History Today | Continue reading }
The king sent his own gun-bearer and bodyguard, François Antoine. Along with his son and a detachment of men, Antoine traipsed around the forested countryside in search of the beast. In September 1765, he shot and killed a large wolf. He had the body sent to the court at Versailles, received a reward from Louis XV, and accepted the villagers’ gratitude
Two brief months later the attacks recommenced.
For another 18 months, something continued to stalk the villagers of Gévaudan, with a reported 30 to 35 fatalities in that period. […]
Jean Chastel was a local farmer involved in a previous hunt, and thrown in prison [with his son Antoine Chastel] by François Antoine for misleading his men into a bog.
{ Smithsonian | Continue reading }
There were no killings when Jean and Antoine Chastel were in prison. The attacks resumed when they were liberated, and stopped only when Jean Chastel killed the animal.
{ Loren Coleman/FATE | Continue reading }
A 2009 investigation uncovered a potential culprit, Jean Chastel, the man said to have killed the second beast in June 1767. The investigators wondered how Chastel, a farmer, shot La Bête dead when the region’s finest wolf hunters could not. They concluded that La Bête must have been still for sometime, when Chastel shot it. It did not run from, or at, Chastel. Was La Bête tethered? Was this man its keeper?
As for motive, some have suggested that Chastel, or one of his sons, was a serial killer, and La Bête their way of covering up the crimes. Others claim that Chastel’s son had a hyena in his menagerie and a huge red mastiff that sired the monstrous offspring with a female wolf. […]
The body of the animal Chastel shot was taken to Versailles. By the time it reached the king the carcass had rotted and was ordered to be destroyed.
{ History Today | Continue reading }
Jean Chastel’s son Antoine was said to have lived as a hermit on Mount Mouchet, with a menagerie of beasts, including a hyena. Cryptozoologists have speculated that Antoine Chastel might have used this animal to attack the young boys and girls.
{ Loren Coleman/FATE | Continue reading | Note: “Fate is a U.S. magazine about paranormal phenomena” }
acrylic, oilstick and paper collage on canvas { Jean-Michel Basquia, Peter and the Wolf, 1985 }
Rain on your college-ass disco dorm
“Amazon is not too big to fail,” Bezos said, in a recording of the meeting that CNBC has heard. “In fact, I predict one day Amazon will fail. Amazon will go bankrupt. If you look at large companies, their lifespans tend to be 30-plus years, not a hundred-plus years.”
Beyond that road lies despair
The iconic green slime of the Canadian television series You Can’t Do That on Television was developed by accident, according to producer Roger Price — the original idea had been to dump a barrel of food leftovers on a young boy chained in a dungeon, but before it could be used, the contents of the barrel had turned green with mold.
The noxious mixture was dumped on the young boy anyway, and overnight the series had its trademark gag. The show subsequently went through several different slime recipes incorporating ingredients such as lime gelatin dessert powder, flour, oatmeal or Cream of Wheat, baby shampoo, and even cottage cheese (not all necessarily at the same time).
On the show (and subsequently on Nickelodeon since then), the composition of the slime was treated as a closely guarded secret, and some episodes revolved around the cast members trying to discern what the slime was made of.
{ Wikipedia | Continue reading | Thanks Tim }
This is being marketed as “psychedelic soul,” and while it has some rock trappings, I’m having a hard time finding the psych in this
a lot of luck comes from doing things that are interesting, and sort of creating your own luck
image { Bill Arsenault, Nonplussed Some Some More exhibition poster, 1969 }
Like the days of stopping at the Savoy, now we freak
According to the most comprehensive survey of casualties (both fatal and nonfatal), 21 percent of the casualties in World War II were attributable to friendly fire, 39 percent of the casualties in Vietnam, and 52 percent of the casualties in the first Gulf War.
photo { Jason Florio | The Metropolitan Rod and Gun Club, established in 1936, is New York’s longest running sporting firearms club }
“Bergman burned down our home,” said Eric W. Ohlsson, a retired doctor, referring to a scene from the 1968 film “Shame,” in which a barn was used as a flaming prop
Try this experiment: Pick a famous movie—Casablanca, say—and summarize the plot in one sentence. Is that plot you just described the thing you remember most about it? Doubtful. Narrative is a necessary cement, but it disappears from memory.
{ Peter Greenaway | Continue reading }
“I almost always remember where I was and I remember the book itself. I remember the physical object,” says Paul, the editor of The New York Times Book Review, who reads, it is fair to say, a lot of books. “I remember the edition; I remember the cover; I usually remember where I bought it, or who gave it to me. What I don’t remember—and it’s terrible—is everything else.” […] “Memory generally has a very intrinsic limitation,” says Faria Sana, an assistant professor of psychology at Athabasca University, in Canada. “It’s essentially a bottleneck.” The “forgetting curve,” as it’s called, is steepest during the first 24 hours after you learn something. Exactly how much you forget, percentage-wise, varies, but unless you review the material, much of it slips down the drain after the first day, with more to follow in the days after, leaving you with a fraction of what you took in.
