Keeping the dead buried was a matter of grave concern in 19th-century America. As medical schools proliferated after the Civil War, the field grew increasingly tied to the study of anatomy and practice of dissection. Professors needed bodies for young doctors to carve into and the pool of legally available corpses—executed criminals and body donors—was miniscule. Enter freelance body snatchers, dispatched to do the digging. By the late 1800s, the illicit body trade was flourishing. […]
Inventors got to work. Their solution? Explosives.
Philip. K Clover, a Columbus, Ohio artist, patented an early coffin torpedo in 1878. Clover’s instrument functioned like a small shotgun secured inside the coffin lid in order to “prevent the unauthorized resurrection of dead bodies,” as the inventor put it. If someone tried to remove a buried body, the torpedo would fire out a lethal blast of lead balls when the lid was pried open.
{ Atlas Obscura | Continue reading }
art { Roy Lichtenstein, Mirror #2 (Six Panels), 1970 }
flashback |
April 3rd, 2017
Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, sees Superman as a great example of what not to look for in the search for alien life.
{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }
photo { Melanie Schiff, Spit Rainbow, 2006 }
unrelated { Gilbert Baker, creator of the rainbow flag, has died }
photogs |
April 3rd, 2017
Simulation suggests 68 percent of the universe may not actually exist
According to the Lambda Cold Dark Matter (Lambda-CDM) model, which is the current accepted standard for how the universe began and evolved, the ordinary matter we encounter every day only makes up around five percent of the universe’s density, with dark matter comprising 27 percent, and the remaining 68 percent made up of dark energy, a so-far theoretical force driving the expansion of the universe. But a new study has questioned whether dark energy exists at all, citing computer simulations that found that by accounting for the changing structure of the cosmos, the gap in the theory, which dark energy was proposed to fill, vanishes.
{ New Atlas | Continue reading }
art { Portia Munson, Her Coffin, 2016 }
mystery and paranormal, space |
March 31st, 2017
How much water goes into a cup of tea? Somewhere around 30 litres of water is required for tea itself, 10 litres for a small dash of milk and a further 6 litres for each teaspoon of sugar. This means that a simple cup of tea with milk and two sugars could actually require 52 litres of water.
{ ResearchGate | Continue reading }
related { A Corpus Study of ‘Cup of [tea]’ and ‘Mug of [tea]’ | PDF }
oil on canvas { Roy Lichtenstein, Bread in Bag, 1961 }
economics, food, drinks, restaurants, water |
March 2nd, 2017
Heterosexual men were most likely to say they usually-always orgasmed when sexually intimate (95%), followed by gay men (89%), bisexual men (88%), lesbian women (86%), bisexual women (66%), and heterosexual women (65%).
Compared to women who orgasmed less frequently, women who orgasmed more frequently were more likely to: receive more oral sex, have longer duration of last sex, be more satisfied with their relationship, ask for what they want in bed, praise their partner for something they did in bed, call/email to tease about doing something sexual, wear sexy lingerie, try new sexual positions, anal stimulation, act out fantasies, incorporate sexy talk, and express love during sex.
Women were more likely to orgasm if their last sexual encounter included deep kissing, manual genital stimulation, and/or oral sex in addition to vaginal intercourse.
{ Archives of Sexual Behavior | Continue reading }
pocelain, china paint and luster { Jessica Stoller, Untitled (frosted bust), 2012 }
sex-oriented |
February 22nd, 2017
Whereas women of all ages prefer slightly older sexual partners, men—regardless of their age—have a preference for women in their 20s. Earlier research has suggested that this difference between the sexes’ age preferences is resolved according to women’s preferences. This research has not, however, sufficiently considered that the age range of considered partners might change over the life span.
Here we investigated the age limits (youngest and oldest) of considered and actual sex partners in a population-based sample of 2,655 adults (aged 18-50 years). Over the investigated age span, women reported a narrower age range than men and women tended to prefer slightly older men. We also show that men’s age range widens as they get older: While they continue to consider sex with young women, men also consider sex with women of their own age or older.
Contrary to earlier suggestions, men’s sexual activity thus reflects also their own age range, although their potential interest in younger women is not likely converted into sexual activity. Homosexual men are more likely than heterosexual men to convert a preference for young individuals into actual sexual behavior, supporting female-choice theory.
{ Evolutionary Psychology | PDF }
related { Longest ever personality study finds no correlation between measures taken at age 14 and age 77 }
photo { Joan Crawford photographed by George Hurrell, 1932 }
relationships, time |
February 7th, 2017
Postmodernism has, to a large extent, run its course [despite having made the considerable innovation of presenting] the first text that was highly self-conscious, self-conscious of itself as text, self-conscious of the writer as persona, self-conscious about the effects that narrative had on readers and the fact that the readers probably knew that. […] A lot of the schticks of post-modernism — irony, cynicism, irreverence — are now part of whatever it is that’s enervating in the culture itself.
{ David Foster Wallace | Continue reading }
photo { Francesca Woodman, Self-portrait at 13, Boulder, Colorado, 1972 | Photography tends not to have prodigies. Woodman, who committed suicide in 1981 at age 22, is considered a rare exception. | NY Review of Books | full story }
ideas, photogs |
February 7th, 2017
Our objective was to analyze the association between consumption of hot red chili peppers and mortality. […] The frequency of hot red chili pepper consumption was measured in 16,179 participants at least 18 years of age. […]
Consumption of hot red chili peppers was associated with a 13% reduction in the instantaneous hazard of death. Similar, but statistically nonsignificant trends were seen for deaths from vascular disease, but not from other causes. In this large population-based prospective study, the consumption of hot red chili pepper was associated with reduced mortality.
{ PLOS | Continue reading }
photo { Stephen Shore, Albuquerque, New Mexico, June 1972 }
food, drinks, restaurants, health, photogs |
February 7th, 2017
As men are generally more short-term oriented in their sexuality than women, and given that cigarette and alcohol use are still considered masculine behaviors, we explored if female smoking and drinking can function as a short-term mating strategy. […]
The experiment showed that young men perceive women who use cigarettes and alcohol as being more sexually unrestricted. Furthermore, tobacco and (especially) alcohol use brought some short-term attractiveness benefits to women. In short-term mating contexts, drinking enhanced women’s attractiveness, whereas occasional smoking was found equally desirable as not smoking. However, in long-term mating contexts, frequent drinking and all smoking behavior harmed women’s desirability.
{ Evolutionary Psychology | Continue reading }
art { Edvard Munch, Girls on the Bridge, 1902 }
food, drinks, restaurants, psychology, relationships, sex-oriented, smoking |
January 23rd, 2017
People are often the most aggressive against the people to whom they are closest—intimate partners. Intimate partner violence might be partly a result of poor self-control. Self-control of aggressive impulses requires energy, and much of this energy is provided by glucose derived from the food we eat. We measured glucose levels in 107 married couples over 21 days. To measure aggressive impulses, participants stuck 0–51 pins into a voodoo doll that represented their spouse each night, depending how angry they were with their spouse. To measure aggression, participants blasted their spouse with loud noise through headphones. Participants who had lower glucose levels stuck more pins into the voodoo doll and blasted their spouse with louder and longer noise blasts.
{ PNAS | PDF }
art { Sergei Eisenstein. Untitled, c. 1931 }
food, drinks, restaurants, psychology, relationships |
January 23rd, 2017
The ability to choose should let people create more enjoyable experiences. However, in a set of 5 studies, people who chose repeatedly during ongoing consumption exhibited a greater drop in enjoyment compared with those who received a series of random selections from the same set of liked stimuli.
{ American Psychology Association | Continue reading }
related { This questionnaire was designed to test your ability to choose at random }
psychology |
January 23rd, 2017
The travel booking systems used by millions of people every day are woefully insecure and lack modern authentication methods. This allows attackers to easily modify other people’s reservations, cancel their flights and even use the refunds to book tickets for themselves.
{ Computer World | Continue reading }
related { By posting a picture of your boarding pass online, you may be giving away more information than you think }
airports and planes, spy & security, technology |
January 3rd, 2017
future |
January 1st, 2017
Male contraceptive blocked by drug companies who make billions from the female pill
