Despite being about as familiar and as commonplace as you can get, we still don’t have a clear understanding of why humans yawn.


We know we start yawning early. We know we yawn when we’re tired. We know we yawn when we’re bored. And we know that yawning can sometimes be contagious. But the function, the why, has been elusive.

A new paper by Giganti and Zilli ties together a couple of yawning’s features: that the amount people yawn varies throughout the day, and that yawns can be contagious. But does the contagiousness of yawns vary throughout the day? (…)

They tested their subjects several times on a single day. (…) Yawns are most contagious at 7:30 pm. (…)

The paper suggests there are at least two kinds of yawns, a spontaneous yawn and a yawn in a social setting. Maybe the reason yawns have thwarted our efforts to understand them is that a single explanation for yawns you make alone completely fail when you try to apply it to yawns you make around other people.

{ NeuroDojo | Continue reading }

photos { Peter Beard, Self-portrait in Mouth of Crocodile, Kubi Fara, 1965 | Helmut Newton, Crocodile Eating Ballerina, 1983 }

{ Nancy Allen’s Empty Dollhouse | more }

{ Dominic McGill | Enlarge | more }

{ 1 | 2 | 3 }

{ Kim Beom, Horse Riding Horse (After Eadweard Muybridge), 2008 | screenshot }

{ Deceptive AssVertising | Copyranter }

{ Pre-photoshopped Playboy centerfolds }

{ Patricia Piccinini }

unrelated { San Francisco bans Happy Meals. The city’s board of supervisors votes to forbid restaurants from giving away toys with meals that have high levels of calories, sugar and fat. | LA Times | full story }

{ Flag of the International Federation of Vexillological Associations. | Vexillology is the scholarly study of flags. The Latin word vexillum means “flag.” The term was coined in 1957 by the American scholar Whitney Smith. It was originally considered a sub-discipline of heraldry. It is sometimes considered a branch of semiotics. | Wikipedia | Continue reading }

{ The Neistat Brothers, Bible Porn 2, 2007 }

The Ford Crown Victoria has long been the most widely used vehicle in New York City’s taxi fleet. But Ford is retiring the Crown Vic next year, and that means NYC needs to find a replacement.

Enter the Taxi of Tomorrow competition, a project created by city officials to find the next major taxi model.

So far, the city has narrowed the competition down to three finalists. The winner, which will be picked next year, will have an exclusive contract to provide the city with taxi cabs.

{ Fast Company | Continue reading }

In 2007, TLC’s Board of Commissioners approved a new package of taxi stickers. Smart Design, a design firm, produced and donated the new logo designs to TLC.


Taxi drivers and owners purchased the stickers from authorized printers.

The 4 stickers (per vehicle side) in the logo package were: a fare panel, the NYCTAXI sticker, the medallion number and a checker stripe decal.

{ NYC.gov | Continue reading }

Every scene of the film utilizes the six colours of the spectrum, with manipulations of hue, value and chroma, according to the nature of the specific location. Colour in Eyes Wide Shut often has a symbolic role to play, communicating visually, for example, a psychological aspect of a character. Most of EWS was filmed using existing light sources such as the lamps that are visible in the frame. The amount of light reflecting off a shape determines the colour and vividness of its hue; and as a result of EWS using low light levels a series of optical illusions relating to hue results. Depending on the amount of light and the angle of the camera, a shape can be here one shade and then there another shade. Herein is a list of the most noticeable examples:

a. In Ziegler’s bathroom in 17, to the far left there is a smallish square (aftershave?) bottle on a shelf under a mirror. The first time the bottle becomes visible, near the beginning of the scene, the liquid inside is a distinctly high value chromatic blue. At the end of the scene, the camera angle having shifted, the liquid in the bottle, still on the left-hand side of the screen, now looks distinctly light green.

{ Notes on Eyes Wide Shut, a film by Stanley Kubrick | a shot-by-shot commentary of Part I of the film by J. S. Bernstein | PDF }

Although it’s set in New York, there are only the most fleeting glimpses of the real city, courtesy of a Second Unit.

The ‘Long Island’ mansions were found in the Home Counties, the ‘Greenwich Village’ streets constructed at Pinewood Studio or faked in corners of central London.

The exterior of the mansion of Victor Ziegler (Sydney Pollack, replacing Harvey Keitel), is the Consulate General of the Republic of Poland, East 37th Street at Madison Avenue in the real New York.

The party interior, though, where Dr Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) attends to a guest after she ODs on a speedball, was filmed at Luton Hoo, Hotel, Golf and Spa, near Luton in Bedfordshire.

The interior of ‘Club Sonata’, the New York jazz club, is Madame JoJo’s, Brewer Street, in Soho, London.

Most of the ‘Greenwich Village’ street scenes were shot on huge and elaborately detailed sets at Pinewood (the proliferation of T-junctions is a dead giveaway), but for a few shots, London streets were dressed as New York.

{ Movie-locations.com | Continue reading }

Kubrick — born and raised in the Bronx but for many years an expatriate who refused to fly–didn’t go near Manhattan in the 90s, and the movie clearly reflects that. (…)

The film credits a lighting cameraman but no director of photography, which has led critic Kent Jones to surmise correctly that Kubrick shot most of it himself.

{ Jonathan Rosenbaum }

illustration { Lil Fuchs }

{ Ernst Haeckel, Kunstformen der Natur, 1899-1904 | Ernst Haeckel (1834 – 1919) was an eminent German biologist, naturalist, philosopher, physician, professor and artist who discovered, described and named thousands of new species, mapped a genealogical tree relating all life forms, and coined many terms in biology, including ecology. | Wikipedia | Continue reading }

{ via copyranter }

{ Richard Kern }

The rite of exorcism, rendered gory by Hollywood and ridiculed by many modern believers, has largely fallen out of favor in the Roman Catholic Church in the United States.

There are only a handful of priests in the country trained as exorcists, but they say they are overwhelmed with requests from people who fear they are possessed by the Devil.

Now, American bishops are holding a conference on Friday and Saturday to prepare more priests and bishops to respond to the demand. The purpose is not necessarily to revive the practice, the organizers say, but to help Catholic clergy members learn how to distinguish who really needs an exorcism from who really needs a psychiatrist, or perhaps some pastoral care.

“Not everyone who thinks they need an exorcism actually does need one,” said Bishop Thomas J. Paprocki of Springfield, Ill., who organized the conference. “It’s only used in those cases where the Devil is involved in an extraordinary sort of way in terms of actually being in possession of the person.

“But it’s rare, it’s extraordinary, so the use of exorcism is also rare and extraordinary,” he said. “But we have to be prepared.”

{ NY Times | Continue reading | related: In Rare Cases, Pope Justifies Use of Condoms }

photos { 1. Brassaï, Graffiti, 1933 | 2. Santiago Mostyn }

{ Sean Penn photographed by Ron Galella, NYC, 1986 | Raoul Ubac, Nu couché, 1939 }

{ xkcd }

{ RichardGregory.com }