Those festivals ain’t my thing. Elon Musk keeps trying to get me to go to Burning Man. No thank you. […]
I used to date Ivanka, you know. […] Twelve years ago. Tommy Hilfiger, who was working with my daughter Kidada, said,“Ivanka wants to have dinner with you.” I said, “No problem. She’s a fine motherfucker.” She had the most beautiful legs I ever saw in my life. Wrong father, though.
Normal consciousness relies, at least in part, on the brain’s Default Mode Network (DMN), according to neuroscientist Robin Carhart-Harris, head of psychedelic research in the brain sciences division of the Imperial College of London medical school. The DMN is a network of interacting brain regions that acts as a cognitive transit hub, integrating and assimilating information. As the name implies, it’s the usual system of organization for your mind. Carhart-Harris says the DMN “gives coherence to cognition” by connecting different regions of the brain, and is considered the “orchestrator of the self.”
Carhart-Harris and his colleagues found what seems to be an important function of the DMN inadvertently. While studying brain networks, they got curious about what changes might occur when people are under the effects of hallucinogens. In studies analyzing the effects of psilocybin on brain wave oscillation and blood flow, they found that when the DMN was inactive, an alternate network of consciousness seemed to arise.
When some study subjects tested psilocybin, they reported a strong sense of interconnectedness, as well as spiritual, magical, and supernatural feelings.
In the alternate mode, brains produced a different world that offered other sensations and realizations than in everyday life. In this mode, the self wasn’t the protagonist of the narrative. Meanwhile, scans of blood flow and brain wave oscillations showed new, unusual—but orderly and synchronous—connections forming between cortical regions, as if the brain was reorganizing its network. This led Carhart-Harris to posit that the DMN generates the feeling we each have that we’re individuals, a feeling that manifests very strongly as reality. And that means we can temporarily switch off, or mute, this part of the brain.
According to the famous work of Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga, “split brain” patients seem to experience a split in consciousness: the left and the right side of their brain can independently become aware of, and respond, to stimuli. Split brain patients are those who underwent surgery to sever the corpus callosum, the nerve tract connecting the two hemispheres of the brain.
art { Leah Schrager }
There is no robust evidence of nonhuman suicides, notwithstanding countless opportunities for such self-killings, if they occurred, to be documented by the world’s farmers, animal breeders, naturalists, and scientists. We are left with anecdote and fable, including the scorpion’s self-sting, proffered by Peña-Guzmán as an example of animal suicide despite clear evidence that scorpions cannot sting themselves to death.
Scorpions are immune to their own venom, presumably because selection has eliminated the germ lines of scorpions that were not so protected. The ubiquity of such specific, self-preserving adaptations connects to a third, theoretical, problem with animal suicide: the absence of a coherent explanation as to how selection could favour and maintain such a capability. […]
Suicide is not observed in nonhumans for a straightforward evolutionary reason: any genes that permitted suicide would have been eliminated along with the suicides’ bodies. Any animal that, in the absence of restraints, was capable of escaping its pain and suffering by self- killing would be expected to seize the opportunity, because some pain is unavoidable in the Malthusian theatre in which selection plays out, and because pain is designed to motivate action to escape. A suicidal animal, if it appeared, would face a predictable and severe adaptive problem – the kind of problem that selection would expectably and powerfully have addressed in the evolutionary past.
The most parsimonious explanation for the apparent absence of suicide among younger children, the severely cognitively impaired, and nonhuman animals, is that these populations lack the cognitive wherewithal to conceive and enact it.
acrylic on canvas { Olivier Mosset, Untitled, 1970 }
KODAKOne is a Flawed Concept that Will Never Deliver Promised Benefits. The KODAKCoin Team has Zero Credibility. Kodak KashMiner is a Scam. KODAKOne is a Sham. Below we provide the basis for why we think the equity is worthless.
Kodak Says Scammers Are Already Selling Fraudulent KodakCoins
How an American company made a fortune selling bodies donated to science
Los Angeles International Airport testing facial recognition technology
Mercedes-Benz apologizes to Chinese for quoting Dalai Lama
An Ancient Virus May Be Responsible for Human Consciousness
We found that sleep loss impaired objective working memory performance in women, but not in men.
One thing we often do believe without much evidence is that others will believe just about anything. The only domain where we are really gullible is our estimate of other people’s gullibility./a>
Sex differences in human brain structure are already apparent at one month of age
We find that approximately one-quarter of bitcoin users and one-half of bitcoin transactions are associated with illegal activity
Dozens of entrepreneurs, made newly wealthy by blockchain and cryptocurrencies, are heading en masse to Puerto Rico this winter. They want to build a crypto utopia, a new city where the money is virtual and the contracts are all public. [NY Times]
To begin the discussion of how the oceans formed, I must take you back to the birth of earth itself, along with the rest of our solar system. [PDF | excerpted from The Oceans, A Deep History, by Eelco J. Rohling ]
Bamboozle Structures and Honeycombs [PDF]
Origins of the Sicilian Mafia: The Market for Lemons
Has Artificial Intelligence Cracked the Voynich Manuscript’s Mysterious Code?
“Anyone who pays for more than half of their stuff in self checkout is a total moron.” Self-checkout theft has become so widespread that a whole lingo has sprung up to describe its tactics.
Nine months after the Ukrainian revolution, Manafort’s family life also went into crisis. The nature of his home life can be observed in detail because Andrea’s text messages were obtained last year by a “hacktivist collective”—most likely Ukrainians furious with Manafort’s meddling in their country—which posted the purloined material on the dark web. The texts extend over four years (2012–16) and 6 million words. Manafort has previously confirmed that his daughter’s phone was hacked and acknowledged the authenticity of some texts. […]
When he called home in tears or threatened suicide in the spring of 2015, he was pleading for his marriage. The previous November, as the cache of texts shows, his daughters had caught him in an affair with a woman more than 30 years his junior. It was an expensive relationship. According to the text messages, Manafort had rented his mistress a $9,000-a-month apartment in Manhattan and a house in the Hamptons, not far from his own. He had handed her an American Express card, which she’d used to good effect. “I only go to luxury restaurants,” she once declared on a friend’s fledgling podcast, speaking expansively about her photo posts on social media: caviar, lobster, haute cuisine.
The affair had been an unexpected revelation. Manafort had nursed his wife after a horseback-riding accident had nearly killed her in 1997. “I always marveled at how patient and devoted he was with her during that time,” an old friend of Manafort’s told me. But after the exposure of his infidelity, his wife had begun to confess simmering marital issues to her daughters. Manafort had committed to couples therapy but, the texts reveal, that hadn’t prevented him from continuing his affair. Because he clumsily obscured his infidelity—and because his mistress posted about their travels on Instagram—his family caught him again, six months later. He entered the clinic in Arizona soon after, according to Andrea’s texts. […]
By the early months of 2016, Manafort was back in greater Washington, his main residence and the place where he’d begun his career as a political consultant and lobbyist. But his attempts at rehabilitation—of his family life, his career, his sense of self-worth—continued. He began to make a different set of calls. As he watched the U.S. presidential campaign take an unlikely turn, he saw an opportunity, and he badly wanted in. He wrote Donald Trump a crisp memo listing all the reasons he would be an ideal campaign consigliere—and then implored mutual friends to tout his skills to the ascendant candidate. […]
In 2006, Rick Gates, who’d begun as a wheel man at the old firm, arrived in Kiev. (Gates did not respond to multiple requests for comment on this article.) Manafort placed him at the helm of a new private-equity firm he’d created called Pericles. He intended to raise $200 million to bankroll investments in Ukraine and Russia. […]
Manafort had always intended to rely on financing from Oleg Deripaska to fund Pericles. In 2007, Manafort persuaded him to commit $100 million to the project, a sum that would have hardly made a dent in the oligarch’s fortune. On the eve of the 2008 global financial crisis, he was worth $28 billion.
Deripaska handed his money to Paul Manafort because he trusted him. […] Manafort used Deripaska’s money to buy a telecommunications firm in Odessa called Chorne More (“Black Seas,” in English) at a cost of $18.9 million. He also charged a staggering $7.35 million in management fees for overseeing the venture.
But months after the Chorne More purchase, the 2008 financial crisis hit, gutting Deripaska’s net worth. It plummeted so far that he needed a $4.5 billion bailout from the Russian state bank to survive. The loan included an interest payment in the form of abject humiliation: Putin traveled to one of Deripaska’s factories and berated him on television.
As Deripaska’s world came crashing down, his representatives asked Manafort to liquidate Pericles and give him back his fair share. Manafort had little choice but to agree. But that promise never translated to action. An audit of Chorne More that Rick Gates said was under way likewise never materialized. Then, in 2011, Manafort stopped responding to Deripaska’s investment team altogether. […]
The FBI investigation into Yanukovych’s finances came to cover Manafort’s own dealings. Soon after the feds took an interest, interviewing Manafort in July 2014, the repatriations ceased. Meanwhile, Manafort struggled to collect the money owed him by Yanukovych’s cronies. To finance his expensive life, he began taking out loans against his real estate—some $15 million over two years, his indictment says. This is not an uncommon tactic among money launderers—a bank loan allows the launderer to extract clean cash from property purchased with dirty money. But according to the indictment, some of Manafort’s loans were made on the basis of false information supplied to the bank in order to inflate the sums available to him, suggesting the severity of his cash-flow problems. All of these loans would need to be paid back, of course. And one way or another, he would need to settle Deripaska’s bill. […]
The Reagan administration had remade the contours of the Cold War, stepping up the fight against communism worldwide by funding and training guerrilla armies and right-wing military forces, such as the Nicaraguan contras and the Afghan mujahideen. This strategy of military outsourcing—the Reagan Doctrine—aimed to overload the Soviet Union with confrontations that it couldn’t sustain.
All of the money Congress began spending on anti-communist proxies represented a vast opportunity. Iron-fisted dictators and scruffy commandants around the world hoped for a share of the largesse. To get it, they needed help refining their image, so that Congress wouldn’t look too hard at their less-than-liberal tendencies. Other lobbyists sought out authoritarian clients, but none did so with the focused intensity of Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly. The firm would arrange for image-buffing interviews on American news programs; it would enlist allies in Congress to unleash money. Back home, it would help regimes acquire the whiff of democratic legitimacy that would bolster their standing in Washington.
Oil on linen { Suzan Frecon, lantern, 2017 }
We explored the effect of revealing or conservative attire on perceptions of women’s leadership competence. We also used eye-tracker technology to determine whether looking at sexualized body parts (i.e., breasts, hemline) was related to lower perceptions of leadership competence and electability.
A female candidate for a student senate presidency at a U.S. university wearing revealing clothing was perceived by 191 college students as less honest and trustworthy, electable, and competent than one wearing conservative clothing. Sexualized body parts were looked at longer when the candidate was wearing revealing clothing compared to conservative clothing. Furthermore, mediation analyses indicated that the revealing clothing led participants to gaze at sexualized body parts, which, in turn, led to perceiving the candidate as less honest/trustworthy, which lowered their evaluations of her competence and electability.
These findings suggest that viewing a woman in a sexy outfit can lead others to stare more at her body and make negative evaluations of her personal attributes.
art { Corinne Dodenhoff }
Politics is not the most important thing in the world. It’s just the one people talk about the most. […] Your spouse and others around you matter more to your happiness than the government does. […] Very few of the things that irritate you or bring you joy have anything to do with the government. […]
Go to the party even when you don’t want to. Nine times in 10, you’ll be bored and go home early. But the 10th time, you will have a worthy experience or meet an interesting person. […]
Save 25 percent of your income. […]
That thing you kinda want to do someday? Do it now. […] Don’t wait until you have the time to really relax and enjoy it. That will be approximately three decades from now, and it’s highly possible you won’t be able to enjoy it.
photo { Harry Callahan, Eleanor and Barbara, Chicago, 1953 }
Only a FOOL would buy IKEA furniture. Instead I just download instructions and keep emailing their service dept to say that I am missing a piece, until they ship me all the pieces over a six month period
{ @jasonarewhy }
Why the Victorian era saw a surge in female births and war begets boys
There is empirical evidence that heavy sexual activity increases the chances that conception will occur before the most fertile time of the female cycle, as the woman may be pregnant by then. And the data also suggest that, possibly for hormonal reasons, such conceptions are slightly more likely to be boys. “It doesn’t take much imagination to suppose that the ends of wars, with servicemen home on leave or returning home, are associated with fairly intense sex – more babies were born in the UK in 1919 than any other year in history. Put all these together and you get the conclusion – frantic fornication breeds boys.”
[…]
Which brings us back to the mysterious surge of female births in the late Victorian period. Could it be that, in the same vein in which heavy sexual activity increases the sex ratio, a trend towards sexual inactivity lowers it? “Victorian morality” distinguished itself through a set of values that espoused sexual restraint, with an increased condemnation of masturbation and sexual activity in general, repressing any form of sexuality other than penetrative intercourse. And indeed, statistics reflect a steady decline of sexual activity throughout the Victorian period, reaching its lowest point in the year 1898. But as there was less sex going on, conception tended to occur around the most fertile time of the months, bestowing a (relative) excess of baby girls on the Victorians.
{ Rolf Degen | Continue reading }
Hypothesis 1
Up to circa two decades age, it was generally supposed – but without hard supporting evidence – that pregnant women exposed to adverse environmental circumstances were at increased risk of foetal loss, and that male foetuses were at greater risk than female foetuses; and that therefore the liveborn infants produced by stressed women contained a higher proportion of daughters. That hard evidence has now been accumulated in a series of papers by Catalano and colleagues, and others.
Using time-series analysis, it has been shown that the Sex ratios at birth (SRB) briefly declined, slightly but significantly, some three to five months after many catastrophic and other adverse events e.g. the terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001; the Troubles in Northern Ireland (1969–1998), the Breivik shooting in 2011 in Norway, the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012 in Connecticut; the assassination of President Kennedy [though the effect in this case was more marked in non-White than White births]. […]
Thus there is overwhelming evidence that sex ratios at birth are partially controlled by maternal stress-induced selective culling of frail males in utero, resulting in a conception cohort with a low sex ratio at birth. It has also been postulated that the ratio may be skewed because of fertilization of non-optimally matured oocytes under these circumstances. Moreover, it has also been hypothesized that higher coital rates will lead to ejaculation of newly formed spermatozoa cells, possibly leading to a preponderance of Y-sperm since it is also hypothesized that X-sperm age faster and are eliminated earlier.
However, it will be appreciated that selective culling of frail males during pregnancy cannot explain some of the established variations of SRB. First, it cannot explain why some reported sex ratios are higher than prevailing norms. Second, it cannot explain why these norms almost always exceed 0.5 (equal numbers of males and females).
Hypothesis 2
It has been hypothesized that human sex ratios at birth are partially controlled by the parental hormone levels of both parents around the time of conception. Ex hypothesi, high levels of testosterone (in either parent) and/or of oestrogen (in the mother), are associated with subsequent male births. And high levels of gonadotrophins (in either parent) are associated with subsequent female births. Most of this evidence is observational and correlational, and is in accordance with the hypothesis of Trivers & Willard.
lithograph { Ellsworth Kelly, Small Blue Curve, 2013 }
Passenger turned away from two flights after wearing 10 layers of clothing to avoid luggage fee
Enormous emotional support peacock denied seat on flight, owner not pleased
Jessica Simpson Sued for Posting Paparazzo’s Picture of Herself on Instagram
meta-analytic results indicate that there is a small relation between service quality and percentage of a bill tipped, racial minority servers tend to be tipped less than White servers, and females tend to be tipped more than males
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) future scenarios allow Paris Agreement targets to be met by deploying technologies that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. However, putting a hypothetical technology into a computer model of future scenarios is rather different than researching, developing, constructing and operating such a technology at the planetary scale required to compensate for inadequate mitigation. [PDF]
We know that the poles have changed places hundreds of times, most recently 780,000 years ago. (Sometimes, the poles try to reverse positions but then snap back into place, in what is called an excursion. The last time was about 40,000 years ago.) We also know that when they flip next time, the consequences for the electrical and electronic infrastructure that runs modern civilization will be dire.
‘Expensive’ placebos work better than ‘cheap’ ones, study finds
You can now buy “premium” water that’s not only free of GMOs and gluten but certified kosher and organic. Never mind that not a single drop of water anywhere contains either property or is altered in any way by those designations.
The Effects of Various Music on Angry Drivers’ Subjective, Behavioral, and Physiological States — Angry drivers with self-selected music showed more aggressive driving behavior.
teaching people about bias in those contexts can be counterproductive
The Break-Up Check: Exploring Romantic Love through Relationship Terminations
New technology allows users to face-swap porn stars with their favorite celebrities
The occult shops of Singapore: talismans, corpse oil and witches [Thanks Tim]
Sperm competition theory can be used to generate the hypothesis that men alter the quality of their ejaculates as a function of sperm competition risk.
We investigated whether men produce a higher-quality ejaculate when primed with cues to sperm competition (i.e., imagined partner infidelity), relative to a control prime. Men (n = 45) submitted two masturbatory ejaculates—one ejaculate sample for each condition (i.e., sperm competition and control conditions). Ejaculates were assessed on 17 clinical parameters. The results did not support the hypothesis: Men did not produce higher-quality ejaculates in the sperm competition condition relative to the control condition.
C-print { Trevor Paglen, PAN (Unknown, USA-207), 2010 }
We’d all like to be a little happier.
The problem is that much of what determines happiness is outside of our control. Some of us are genetically predisposed to see the world through rose-colored glasses, while others have a generally negative outlook. Bad things happen, to us and in the world. People can be unkind, and jobs can be tedious.
But we do have some control over how we spend our leisure time. That’s one reason why it’s worth asking which leisure time activities are linked to happiness, and which aren’t.
In a new analysis of 1 million U.S. teens, my co-authors and I looked at how teens were spending their free time and which activities correlated with happiness, and which didn’t.
[…]
Every year, teens are asked about their general happiness, in addition to how they spend their time. We found that teens who spent more time seeing their friends in person, exercising, playing sports, attending religious services, reading or even doing homework were happier. However, teens who spent more time on the internet, playing computer games, on social media, texting, using video chat or watching TV were less happy.
In other words, every activity that didn’t involve a screen was linked to more happiness, and every activity that involved a screen was linked to less happiness. The differences were considerable: Teens who spent more than five hours a day online were twice as likely to be unhappy as those who spent less than an hour a day.
Of course, it might be that unhappy people seek out screen activities. However, a growing number of studies show that most of the causation goes from screen use to unhappiness, not the other way around. […]
A similar trend might be occurring for adults: My co-authors and I previously found that adults over age 30 were less happy than they were 15 years ago, and that adults were having sex less frequently.
Drawing on the past well-being literature, the authors propose that a person’s chronic happiness level is governed by 3 major factors: a genetically determined set point for happiness, happiness-relevant circumstantial factors, and happiness-relevant activities and practices.
If you write clearly, then your readers may understand your mathematics and conclude that it isn’t profound. Worse, a referee may find your errors. Here are some tips for avoiding these awful possibilities.
1. Never explain why you need all those weird conditions, or what they mean. For example, simply begin your paper with two pages of notations and conditions without explaining that they mean that the varieties you are considering have zero-dimensional boundary. In fact, never explain what you are doing, or why you are doing it. The best-written paper is one in which the reader will not discover what you have proved until he has read the whole paper, if then
2. Refer to another obscure paper for all the basic (nonstandard) definitions you use, or never explain them at all. This almost guarantees that no one will understand what you are talking about
[…]
11. If all else fails, write in German.
photos { Left: William Henry Jackson, Pike’s Peak from the Garden of the Gods, Colorado Midland Series, ca.1880 | Right: Ye Rin Mok }
Of all the criticisms aimed at fracking, charges that it might increase the incidence of STDs – specifically gonorrhea – are seldom heard.
Yet there might be a link – according to a new research paper published in the Journal of Public Health Policy. […]
We find that fracking activity is associated with a 20 per cent increase in gonorrhea.
I argue that the state of boredom (i.e., the transitory and non-pathological experience of boredom) should be understood to be a regulatory psychological state that has the capacity to promote our well-being by contributing to personal growth and to the construction (or reconstruction) of a meaningful life.
oil on canvas { Piet Mondrian, Composition in Black and White, with Double Lines, 1934 }
Dozen camels disqualified from Saudi ‘camel beauty contest’ over use of Botox [Thanks Tim]
Swiss town denies passport to Dutch vegan because she is ‘too annoying’
Strange phenomenon left dog stuck in tree for almost 60 years without rotting
One in five Toys ‘R’ Us stores is located within 15 minutes of another Toys ‘R’ Us
The world’s billionaires – the richest 2,000 people on the planet – saw their wealth increase by a staggering $762 billion in just one year. That’s an average of $381 million apiece. If those billionaires had simply been content with staying at their 2016 wealth, and had given their one-year gains to the world’s poorest people instead, then extreme poverty would have been eradicated.
0% of Icelanders under 25 believe Bible creation story
Singapore’s crime rate is so low that many shops don’t even lock up
People don’t remember changing their minds
Raw intelligence doesn’t reduce conflict. Wisdom does. Such wisdom—in effect, the ability to take the perspectives of others into account and aim for compromise—comes much more naturally to those who grow up poor or working class, according to a new study.
Being too intelligent might make you a less effective leader
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) is responsible for over half of the world’s market for chips, and it’s the world’s largest contract manufacturer. Today it reported revenues driven by demand from cryptocurrency miners for the second consecutive quarter.
50 Cent Makes $8 Million in Bitcoin: “I forgot I did that s***.”
CES Was Full of Useless Robots and Machines That Don’t Work
Teens whose eyes are habitually glued to their smartphones are markedly unhappier, study Specifically, young people’s life satisfaction, self-esteem and happiness plummeted after 2012. That’s the year that the percentage of Americans who owned a smartphone rose above 50 percent.
Mark Zuckerberg’s company is imitating Snap in trying to focus on interactions with “friends and family.” Facebook’s New Mission May Be Impossible
Do ethicists steal more books?
Why do dogs eat poop? [Washington Post]
Why a ‘paperless world’ still hasn’t happened
10 things to know about Garry Winogrand
Burger King | Whopper Neutrality [Thanks GG]
Often, damaged works of art end up in the vaults of insurance companies. Once the owner submits a claim on the damaged piece, a team of experts, appraisers, conservators and adjusters offer specialist advice on the artwork’s condition and devaluation. The economics of selling and repairing the work are weighed up, and generally, if the cost of restoring a work is far beyond what it is worth, the work will be claimed as “total loss”. The insurance company will pay out on the policy and, in exchange, retain the broken piece. The “total loss” artwork is effectively declared worthless, unsalvageable by both insurer and owner. From then on it belongs to the insurance company as salvage.
Some of these pieces, though, end up being exhibited by the Salvage Art Institute (SAI), which calls itself a “haven” for written-off works. Conceived by Elka Krajewska, an artist in New York, in 2009 during a chance meeting with a representative of AXA Art Insurance, it took her until 2012 to jump through enough legal hoops to persuade the insurer to donate some of their total-loss works to the SAI. A selection of these works is now on show in “No Longer Art”, a show at BNKR Space, a gallery in Munich.
welded steel, porcelain, wire mesh, canvas, grommets, and wire { Lee Bontecou, Untitled, 1980–98 }
