In 1995, a team of researchers taught pigeons to discriminate between Picasso and Monet paintings. […] After just a few weeks’ training, their pigeons could not only tell a Picasso from a Monet – indicated by pecks on a designated button – but could generalise their learning to discriminate cubist from impressionist works in general. […] For a behaviourist, the moral is that even complex learning is supported by fundamental principles of association, practice and reward. It also shows that you can train a pigeon to tell a Renoir from a Matisse, but that doesn’t mean it knows a lot about art.

[…]

What is now indisputable is that different memories are supported by different anatomical areas of the brain. […] Brain imaging has confirmed the basic division of labour between so-called declarative memory, aka explicit memory (facts and events), and procedural memory, aka implicit memory (habits and skills). The neuroscience allows us to understand the frustrating fact that you have the insight into what you are learning without yet having acquired the skill, or you can have the skill without the insight. In any complex task, you’ll need both. Maybe the next hundred years of the neuroscience of memory will tell us how to coordinate them.

[…]

Chess masters have an amazing memory for patterns on the chess board – able to recall the positions of all the pieces after only a brief glance. Follow-up work showed that they only have this ability if the patterns conform to possible positions in a legal game of chess. When pieces are positioned on the board randomly, however, chess grandmasters have as poor memories as anyone else.

{ The Guardian | Continue reading }

The practice by some Chinese parents of adopting girls and raising them as future wives for their biological sons

Scientists have figured out how to store electricity in ‘paper’

52 things I learned in 2015

By the end of this century, Africa will be home to 39% of the world’s population, almost as much as Asia, and four times the share of North America and Europe put together.

A 200-year history of interest rates shows that the real aberration looks like the 7.3 percent average experienced in the United States from 1970 to 2007. [NY Times]

Women can navigate better when given testosterone, study finds

There’s no such thing as a male or female brain, study finds. More: They found that between 23% and 53% of individuals (depending on the sample) had brains with both “male-end” and “female-end” features. In contrast, the percentage of people with only “female-end” or only “male-end” brain features was small, ranging from zero to 8%.

Why Is the Human Vagina So Big?

Living together is basically the same as marriage, study finds

There’s one really big problem with the case for Craig S. Wright as Satoshi

What Satoshi Did

Search Engine Censys Knows the Internet’s Dirty Little Security Secrets

Here’s what it would take for self-driving cars to catch on

Chinese researchers unveil brain powered car

Intelligent anti-explosion, anti-fire and anti-odour WiFi-enabled rubbish bins appear in China

Who’s investigating fake Chinese goods? Fake investigators

In this study, we investigate cross-linguistic patterns in the alternation between UM, a hesitation marker consisting of a neutral vowel followed by a final labial nasal, and UH, a hesitation marker consisting of a neutral vowel in an open syllable.

…a general expletive (oh fuck!), a personal insult (you fuck!), a cursing expletive (fuck you!), an emphatic intensifier (fucking marvellous!), in pronominal form (like fuck), as an idiomatic set phrase (fuck all), and for a destinational usage (fuck off!). Being fluent at swearing is a sign of healthy verbal ability

Deaths by this and that in Shakespeare’s plays

British pop singer Morrissey’s debut novel, “List of the Lost”, won the award for the worst sex scene of the year

Picasso’s muse Sylvette David, 1954 More: She has since changed her name to Lydia

The Real Face of Jesus

Controllable 3D model of a person made from photos

Liquid ASS [More: (used by US military to harden medics]

In Women After All: Sex, Evolution, and the End of Male Supremacy, Melvin Konner argues that male domination is an anomaly of human history, not a natural state for the human species. Specifically, Konner suggests that male supremacy is largely an effect of an oppressive social arrangement, namely civilization, which began with the invention of agriculture when humans began to form permanent settlements. Permanent settlements enabled men to be able to accumulate resources and allowed population densities to increase mainly through higher birth rates. Higher population densities placed more intense pressure on the land’s resources. Therefore, it became necessary for men to form coalitions with neighbors to defend against intruders. Power became concentrated in the hands of a few men, leading to a stratified society where male supremacy and female subordination reigned and male violence and war intensified. Today, Konner argues that technology limits the need for the muscle and strength of men, and male domination has outlived its purpose and is maladaptive. Therefore, empowering women is the next step in human evolution. Through empowering women, equality between the sexes will be restored and man-made disasters, such as wars, sex scandals, and financial corruption, will significantly decrease or be eliminated since women (who Konner claims are less emotional than men) will be in positions of leadership and power.

{ Evolutionary Psychology | Continue reading }

From Charlie Spies, D.C. based counsel to Right to Rise [independent super PAC supporting Jeb Bush’s campaign for President], to Donald Trump attorney Alan Garten

Dear Mr. Garten:

[…]

It is possible you are confusing Right to Rise [RTR] with any number of federal independent expenditure-only committees (i.e. “Super PACs”) that have exercised their First Amendment rights to educate the public about your client’s public statements and stances on important public policy issues. We suggest you consult the Federal Election Commission’s (”FEC”) website (www.fec.gov) to familiarize yourself about the differences between Leadership PACs and Super PACs, or perhaps skim through the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC or the D.C. Circuit’s decision in Speechnow.org v. FEC. They are both very helpful and might clear up some of your confusion.

In addition, although RTR has no plans to produce any advertisements against your client, we are intrigued (but not surprised) by your continued efforts to silence critics of your client’s campaign by employing litigious threats and bullying. Should your client actually be elected Commander-in-Chief, will you be the one writing the cease and desist letters to Vladimir Putin, or will that be handled by outside counsel? As a candidate for President, your client is a public figure and his campaign should, and will, be fact-checked. The ability to criticize a candidate’s record, policies and matters of public importance lies at the heart of the First Amendment, as courts have repeatedly recognized. If you have the time between bankruptcy filings and editing reality show contracts, we urge you to flip through the Supreme Court’s decision in New York Times v. Sullivan. If your client is so thin-skinned that he cannot handle his critics’ presentation of his own public statements, policies and record to the voting public, and if such communications hurts his feelings, he is welcome to purchase airtime to defend his record. After all, a wall can be built around many things, but not around the First Amendment.

Lastly, in light of your confusion over the difference between Leadership PACs and Super PACs, we have to assume you may also be unaware of the FEC’s prohibition on a federal candidate’s use of corporate resources for campaign purposes. Although your client may think he is above the law and be accustomed to using lawsuits to bail out his failed business deals, the Federal Election Campaign Act and the FEC’s Regulations nonetheless apply to him and his campaign. Perhaps the attached complaint, filed today, will serve as a reminder of your client’s legal obligations under federal election laws. Just as your client is attempting to quickly learn the basics of foreign policy, we wish you personally the best in your attempts to learn election law.

Cordially,
Charles Spies

{ Washington Post | Continue reading }

Why do dogs tilt their heads when we talk to them?

Biologist here. Head tilting allows an animal to gain information about the vertical placement of the sound (how far up/down it is, relative to the axis of the skull). It is assumed that canids do head-tilting to try to localize a sound better. This is backed up by the fact that canids do a lot of head-tilting when hunting small prey that are hidden behind grass or snow.
 Generally — as bilaterally symmetrical animals, mammals already get pretty good information on left-right placement of a sound, due to the fact that we have an ear on the left and a different ear on the right — that means we can get left/right info by things like, time of arrival of the sound at each ear, and loudness of the sound in each ear. But up/down information (how high or low the sound source is) for a sound that is coming from directly in front can be difficult to figure out. This is a challenge for a predator that is typically approaching prey that are right in front. The head tilt solves this problem by offsetting the two ears vertically so that sounds from lower down will hit the lower ear first, and will also be ever so slightly louder in the lower ear, and vice versa for sounds coming from higher up. […]

With domestic dogs looking at a human, typically they already know the sound is coming from the human; they seem to just instinctively add the head tilt when hearing a puzzling sound, even if they’re pretty sure where it’s coming from.

{ 99trumpets/reddit | Continue reading }

A new study published in The Lancet, following one million middle-aged women in Britain for 10 years, finds that the widely held view that happiness enhances health and longevity is unfounded.

“Happiness and related measures of well-being do not appear to have any direct effect on mortality,” the researchers concluded. […]

Researchers decided to look into the subject because, he said, there is a widespread belief that stress and unhappiness cause disease. […]

The new study says earlier research confused cause and effect, suggesting that unhappiness made people ill when it is actually the other way around.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

Stolen circumcision ambulance found after tip-off

Envy key motivator behind many Facebook posts, contributes to a decrease in mental well-being among users

Social stress messes up the hippocampus

Research shows that texts that end with a period really do come off as insincere

Ignorance may be bliss… but negative mood can make us more realistic

Sleep interruptions worse for mood than overall reduced amount of sleep, study finds

For people in relationships, sexual frequency is not significantly associated with well-being at a frequency greater than once a week.

A normal adult will die after eating 480 bananas. How Much [X] Could You Eat Before It Would Kill You?

Concert etiquette demands that audiences of classical concerts avoid inept noises such as coughs. and yet, coughing in concerts occurs more frequently than elsewhere, implying a widespread and intentional breach of concert etiquette.

A 30,000+ word blog post about how to write about information and make it spread

They’re like, “The internet is public.” A lot of things are public, but it doesn’t mean they’re for you. For instance, you can walk down the street and you can look into all of your neighbors’ windows should they have chanced not to draw the curtains. If you really lean in, you can listen to all kinds of conversations that are too quiet for you to just overhear. You can do all kinds of things in public that you should not do. Are you walking down the street, interrupting random twosomes or threesomes of people to add your two fucking sentences? You’re not, so why are you on my Twitter? Why are you talking to me?

{ Sarah Nicole Prickett / Mask | Continue reading }

photo { Leah Schrager }

Penrose and many others argue from practical considerations, Godel’s theorem, and on philosophical grounds, that consciousness or awareness is non-algorithmic and so cannot be generated by a system that can be described by classical physics, such as a conventional computer, but could perhaps be generated by a system requiring a quantum (Hilbert space) description. Penrose suspects that aspects of quantum physics not yet understood might be needed to explain consciousness. In this paper we shall see that only known quantum physics is needed to explain perception.

{ James A. Donald | Continue reading }

photo { Martin Parr }

Court tells millionaire yoga troll Bikram Choudhury that poses can’t be copyrighted

Game company made $71,145 on Black Friday by selling nothing for $5 a pop

Words can deceive, but tone of voice cannot. Voice tone analyses of therapy sessions accurately predict whether relationships will improve.

New research hypothesizes that men eat more in front of women to “show off.”

What would happen if scientists could trick the brain into thinking broccoli tastes like chocolate? How our brains perceive the flavor of food

Scientists have figured out how to shock the salt out of seawater

Wearing a magnetic wrist strap or a copper bracelet did not appear to have any meaningful therapeutic effect, beyond that of a placebo

Humans can sleep for days when living alone underground, experiments show

What else is possible if space and time can change?

If a forecaster is only 50% certain that precipitation will happen over 80 percent of the area, PoP (chance of rain) is 40% (i.e., .5 x .8).

Why do we forget people’s names when we first meet them?

What Happens When You Can’t Talk to Yourself?

I Asked New York Cabbies Who They Were Talking to on the Phone

Why Can’t We Build a Splash-Proof Toilet?

Our Roomba Vacuumed The House With Dog Shit

Is human placenta a wonder drug, or is it just another Japanese health fad? [Thanks Tim]

Tobias Frere-Jones is back in business

That mysterious, anonymous novel satirizing tech culture is now available from a major publishing house

A Chinese artist vacuumed up Beijing’s smog and made a brick from what he collected

Touch is a powerful tool for communicating positive emotions. However, it has remained unknown to what extent social touch would maintain and establish social bonds. We asked a total of 1,368 people from five countries to reveal, using an Internet-based topographical self-reporting tool, those parts of their body that they would allow relatives, friends, and strangers to touch. These body regions formed relationship-specific maps in which the total area was directly related to the strength of the emotional bond between the participant and the touching person. Cultural influences were minor. […]

[T]ouching by strangers was primarily limited to the hands and upper torso. Genitals and buttocks formed clear “taboo zones” that only the emotionally closest individuals were allowed to touch. Frequency of social contact with an individual did not predict the area available for social touch, confirming that the experienced bond between the individuals, rather than mere familiarity, modulates social touching behavior in dyads. […]

Skin is the largest organ and the clearest border between individuals and the world. Already 19-wk-old fetuses touch themselves and anticipate self-oriented touches. Skin-to-skin contact is also one of the earliest communication channels promoting attachment between the infant and the caregiver. Recent work has revealed a special class of unmyelinated C-tactile afferents that respond selectively to slow pleasurable stroking. Stimulating these fibers activates insular cortex and possibly provides the sensory pathway for emotional and affiliative touching. Our results imply that this kind of social touch is interpreted in context-dependent fashion depending on the interaction partner. Such social coding of touch seems to occur at early processing stages in the brain, as recent neuroimaging work has established that the human primary somatosensory cortex is involved in discriminating between interpersonal and physical aspects of social touch.

{ PNAS | Continue reading }

photo { Weegee, Untitled, ca. 1946 }

A growing body of literature has shown that environmental exposures in the period around conception can affect the sex ratio at birth through selective attrition that favors the survival of female conceptuses. Glucose availability is considered a key indicator of the fetal environment, and its absence as a result of meal skipping may inhibit male survival.

We hypothesize that breakfast skipping during pregnancy may lead to a reduction in the fraction of male births. Using time use data from the United States we show that women with commute times of 90 minutes or longer are 20 percentage points more likely to skip breakfast. Using U.S. census data we show that women with commute times of 90 minutes or longer are 1.2 percentage points less likely to have a male child under the age of 2. Under some assumptions, this implies that routinely skipping breakfast around the time of conception leads to a 6 percentage point reduction in the probability of a male child. Skipping breakfast during pregnancy may therefore constitute a poor environment for fetal health more generally.

{ Biodemography and Social Biology | Continue reading }

photo { Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Occasion for Diriment, 1962 }

related { Determinants of online sperm donor success: How women choose }

‘Scrotum Squeezing’ Getting Closer Look From Paralympics Officials

People who drink about three to five cups of coffee a day may be less likely to die prematurely from some illnesses than those who don’t drink or drink less coffee

Our findings showed that people felt less stressed when they checked their email less often

Couples who have sex weekly are happiest. More sex may not always make you happier, according to new research

The effect of wearing different types of textiles on sexual activity was studied in 75 rats

What is stupid? People’s conception of unintelligent behavior

Even the CEO’s Job Is Susceptible To Automation, McKinsey Report Says

Are Successful CEOs Just Lucky?

Color preference in the insane

Since the end of the Second World War, the number of independent states has nearly tripled.

Why New York Subway Lines Are Missing Countdown Clocks

Gluten Free Museum

Period panties

We now have four good Darwinian reasons for individuals to be altruistic, generous or ‘moral’ towards each other. First, there is the special case of genetic kinship. Second, there is reciprocation: the repayment of favours given, and the giving of favours in ‘anticipation’ of payback. Following on from this there is, third, the Darwinian benefit of acquiring a reputation for generosity and kindness. And fourth, if Zahavi is right, there is the particular additional benefit of conspicuous generosity as a way of buying unfakeably authentic advertising.

{ Richard Dawkins | Continue reading }

photo { Todd Fisher }

Indonesia considers crocodiles for prison guards

Coffee hydrates as well as water, study says. The belief that caffeinated drinks such as coffee could cause dehydration is based on a 1928 study that demonstrated caffeine’s diuretic effect.

It costs as much as $4 million to open a new diner these days, compared with $500,000 to $1 million for a higher-end restaurant, because diners require so much storage space for the inventory that their large menus require.

The Air-Conditioning Capacity of the Human Nose

Why Do Most Languages Have So Few Words for Smells?

Human language may be shaped by climate and terrain

What will the English language be like in 100 years?

English Names for fungi 2014

$635 pills of fecal matter cure deadly gastrointestinal infection

What if the gamblers are researchers betting on how each other’s experiments will turn out, and the results are used to improve science itself?

Not even astrology researchers believe in astrology

Astrobiologists Revise the Chances of Finding Advanced ET Civilizations

Last year, Kennedy, a 67-year-old neurologist and inventor, did something unprecedented in the annals of self-experimentation. He paid a surgeon in Central America $25,000 to implant electrodes into his brain in order to establish a connection between his motor cortex and a computer.

What’s worse than a password? A fingerprint. + How to mimic a fingerprint

What is becoming of Deleuze?

Casualty-free casual fighting for free

Baby Born Pregnant with Her Own Twins

First ‘KFC’ to open in Iran shut down after just 24 hours

Diners at his restaurant are presented with an iPod loaded with a recording of crashing waves and screeching gulls to listen to while enjoying an artfully presented plate of seafood

Testosterone levels affect how much makeup women use, study finds

The best way for swarming insects to get the protein and salt they need is to eat each other.

Can scientists agree on a definition of curiosity?

Self-driving delivery robots to hit streets of London in 2016

How does a container port work? And why aren’t America’s shipping ports automated?

Liverpool Just Opened Fast-Walking Pedestrian Lanes

The mansion is what real estate experts call a “stigmatized property” — jargon for a listing with a grisly back story

There are approximately 900 actively working mail chutes in New York. As letters grew in size, clogging of the mail chutes became an increasing problem.

Smell expert Sissel Tolaas is on a mission to capture and replicate the “smellscapes” of cities around the world [Thanks Tim]

The Popularity of Music Genres, 2005-present

I renamed some of the paint colors at the hardware store

By licking a wound it heals faster — this is not simply popular belief, but scientifically proven. Our saliva consists of water and mucus, among other things, and the mucus plays an important role. It stimulates white blood cells to build a good defense against invaders.

{ Lunatic Laboratories | Continue reading }

Blood is a bodily fluid in humans and other animals that delivers necessary substances such as nutrients and oxygen to the cells and transports metabolic waste products away from those same cells. […] In vertebrates, it is composed of blood cells suspended in blood plasma. Plasma, which constitutes 55% of blood fluid, is mostly water (92% by volume), and contains dissipated proteins, glucose, mineral ions, hormones, carbon dioxide (plasma being the main medium for excretory product transportation), and blood cells themselves. Albumin is the main protein in plasma, and it functions to regulate the colloidal osmotic pressure of blood. The blood cells are mainly red blood cells, white blood cells (also called leukocytes) and platelets. The most abundant cells in vertebrate blood are red blood cells.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

related { A completely new view of how human blood is made has been discovered by scientists, upending conventional dogma from the 1960s. }

photo { Young Kyu Yoo }

Can people differentiate what they know from what they do not? Several lines of research suggest that people are not always accurate judges of their knowledge and often overestimate how much they know. Research on overconfidence finds that people commonly judge the accuracy of their judgments too favorably and typically overestimate how well they perform everyday tasks relative to other people. Work on the illusion of explanatory depth demonstrates that participants tend to think they have a better understanding of how objects work (e.g., a ballpoint pen) than they can demonstrate when that understanding is put to the test.

At times, people even claim knowledge they cannot possibly have, because the object of their knowledge does not exist, a phenomenon known as overclaiming. For example, in the late 1970s, nearly a third of American respondents expressed an opinion about the “1975 Public Affairs Act” when asked about it directly, even though the act was a complete fiction. Approximately a fifth of consumers report having used products that are actually nonexistent. More recent research has asked participants to rate their familiarity with a mix of real and nonexistent concepts, names, and events in domains such as philosophy, life sciences, physical sciences, and literature. Participants reported being familiar with the real items but also, to a lesser degree, with the nonexistent ones. […]

What underlies assertions of such impossible knowledge? We found that people overclaim to the extent that they perceive their personal expertise favorably. […]

A sizable body of work on how people evaluate their own knowledge suggests that they rely not only on a direct examination of their mental contents but also on a feeling of knowing. Notably, a feeling of knowing is often only weakly predictive of actual knowledge and appears to be informed, at least in part, by top-down inferences about what should be or probably is known. We theorized that such inferences are drawn from people’s preconceived notions about their expertise, inducing a feeling of knowing that then prompts overclaiming.

{ Psychological Science | PDF }

This article examines associations between the Great Recession and 4 aspects of 9-year olds’ behavior - aggression (externalizing), anxiety/depression (internalizing), alcohol and drug use, and vandalism - using the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a longitudinal birth cohort drawn from 20 U.S. cities (21%, White, 50% Black, 26% Hispanic, and 3% other race/ethnicity).

The study was in the field for the 9-year follow-up right before and during the Great Recession (2007-2010; N = 3,311). Interview dates (month) were linked to the national Consumer Sentiment Index (CSI), calculated from a national probability sample drawn monthly to assess consumer confidence and uncertainty about the economy, as well as to data on local unemployment rates.

[W]e find that greater uncertainty as measured by the CSI was associated with higher rates of all 4 behavior problems for boys (in both maternal and child reports). Such associations were not found for girls.

{ Developmental Psychology | Continue reading }

photo { Yosuke Yajima }

Most people own things that they don’t really need. It is worth thinking about why. […]

A policy aimed at curbing luxury shopping might involve higher marginal tax rates or, as a more targeted intervention, a consumption tax. As it becomes harder to afford a Rolex, people will devote more money to pleasures that really matter. Less waste, more happiness.

{ Boston Review | Continue reading }

photo { Teale Coco by Ben Simpson }