What’s your permanent age?

I’ve observed that everyone has a permanent age that appears to be set at birth. For example, I’ve always been 42-years old. I was ill-suited for being a little kid, and didn’t enjoy most kid activities. By first grade I knew I wanted to be an adult, with an established career, car, house and a decent tennis game. I didn’t care for my awkward and unsettled twenties. And I’m not looking forward to the rocking chair. If I could be one age forever, it would be 42.

When I ask people about their permanent age, they usually beg it off by saying they don’t have one. But if you press, you always get an answer. And the age they pick won’t surprise you. Some people are kids all their lives. They will admit they are 12-years old. Other people have always had senior citizen interests and perspectives. If you’re 30-years old in nominal terms, but you love bingo and you think kids should stop wearing those big baggy pants and listening to hip-hop music, your permanent age might be 60.

Another way to divide people is by asking if they live in the present or the future. I live in the future. I don’t dwell on the past. I’m always thinking about what’s next. (….) Some people are locked in the past; it sneaks into all of their conversations and colors their perceptions more than it should. They spend their lives either consciously or unconsciously trying to turn the future into the past. They tend to be unhappy.

{ Scott Adams | Continue reading }

photo { Steve Buscemi by Abbey Drucker }

The Galton board, also known as a quincunx or bean machine, is a device for statistical experiments named after English scientist Sir Francis Galton. It consists of an upright board with evenly spaced nails (or pegs) driven into its upper half, where the nails are arranged in staggered order, and a lower half divided into a number of evenly-spaced rectangular slots. The front of the device is covered with a glass cover to allow viewing of both nails and slots. In the middle of the upper edge, there is a funnel into which balls can be poured, where the diameter of the balls must be much smaller than the distance between the nails. The funnel is located precisely above the central nail of the second row so that each ball, if perfectly centered, would fall vertically and directly onto the uppermost point of this nail’s surface.

Each time a ball hits one of the nails, it can bounce right (or left) with some probability P (and q = 1 - P). For symmetrically placed nails, balls will bounce left or right with equal probability, so P = q = 1/2. If the rows are numbered from 0 to ^{N - 1}, the path of each falling ball is a Bernoulli trial consisting of ^N steps. Each ball crosses the bottom row hitting the ⁿth peg from the left (where ^{0≤ n ≤ N - 1}) If and only if it has taken exactly ⁿ right turns, which occurs with probability

{ Wolfram MathWorld | Continue reading }

from the archives { The whole system—the nine thousand polystyrene balls dropping through a pegboard of 330 precisely cantilevered nylon pins, the real-time photoelectric counters tallying (by LED readout) the segmented heaps forming below, the perennially balky bucket-conveyor for resetting an experimental run—had all been painstakingly constructed and calibrated in order first to exemplify, and then to defy, what the Victorian statistician Francis Galton dubbed the “Law of Frequency of Error.” | Cabinet | Continue reading }

It may seem strange to identify a sensation of temperature with the visual realm of color sensation. However, experiments have demonstrated a difference of five to seven degrees in the subjective feeling of heart or cold between a workroom painted in blue-green and one painted in red-orange. That is, in the blue-green room the occupants felt that 59° F was cold, whereas in the red-orange room they did not feel cold until the temperature fell to 52 - 54° F. Objectively, this meant blue-green slows down the circulation and red-orange stimulates it.

Similar results were obtained in an animal experiment. A racing stable was divided into two sections, the one pointed blue, the other red-orange. ln the blue section, horses soon quieted down after running, but in the red section they remained hot and restless for some time. It was found that there was no flies in the blue section, and a great many in the red section.

{ Johannes Itten, The Art of Color, 1920 }

Work and boredom.– Looking for work in order to be paid: in civilized countries today almost all men are at one in doing that. For all of them work is a means and not an end in itself. Hence they are not very refined in their choice of work, if only it pays well. But there are, if only rarely, men who would rather perish than work without any pleasure in their work. They are choosy, hard to satisfy, and do not care for ample rewards, if the work itself is not the reward of rewards. Artists and contemplative men of all kinds belong to this rare breed, but so do even those men of leisure who spend their lives hunting, traveling, or in love affairs and adventures. All of these desire work and misery if only it is associated with pleasure, and the hardest, most difficult work if necessary. Otherwise, their idleness is resolute, even if it spells impoverishment, dishonor, and danger to life and limb. They do not fear boredom as much as work without pleasure; they actually require a lot of boredom if their work is to succeed. For thinkers and all sensitive spirits, boredom is that disagreeable “windless calm” of the soul that precedes a happy voyage and cheerful winds. They have to bear it and must wait for its effect on them. Precisely this is what lesser natures cannot achieve by any means. To ward off boredom at any cost is vulgar, no less than work without pleasure.

{ Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 42, 1882 | Read more: Wikipedia }

Jeanette’s Taxidermy proudly introduces Pet Pillows as an alternative way to remember your pet. Each pet pillow is hand made from the fur of your pet and made into a pillow that you can display. On one side of the pillow is your pet’s fur and the other side of the pillow is your choice of fabric. These soft, huggable pillows are a great way to enjoy your cherished pet and is an inexpensive alternitave to taxidermy.

Prices: $65 for a cat, $75-$125 for a dog, $150 for a horse.

Freeze your pet immediately upon passing to insure there will be no hair slippage.

Double bag to insure no freezerburn.

Ship packages ONLY on Mondays to prevent carrier mishaps. All frozen animals must be shipped next day air to insure against spoilage.

{ Thanks Shampoo! | The site Jeanettestaxidermy.com doesn’t exist anymore | Jeanette’s Taxidermy profile on Muley Madness | Read more: Woman who turns pets into pillows faces death threats and Taxidermist Jeanette Hall standing with her pedestal mounted horse | The story behind this photo }

For someone who remembers the old days, the food is the most startling thing about modern England. English food used to be deservedly famous for its awfulness–greasy fish and chips, gelatinous pork pies, and dishwater coffee. Now [in 1998] it is not only easy to do much better, but traditionally terrible English meals have even become hard to find. What happened?

Maybe the first question is how English cooking got to be so bad in the first place. A good guess is that the country’s early industrialization and urbanization was the culprit. Millions of people moved rapidly off the land and away from access to traditional ingredients. Worse, they did so at a time when the technology of urban food supply was still primitive: Victorian London already had well over a million people, but most of its food came in by horse-drawn barge. And so ordinary people, and even the middle classes, were forced into a cuisine based on canned goods (mushy peas!), preserved meats (hence those pies), and root vegetables that didn’t need refrigeration (e.g. potatoes, which explain the chips).

But why did the food stay so bad after refrigerated railroad cars and ships, frozen foods (better than canned, anyway), and eventually air-freight deliveries of fresh fish and vegetables had become available? Now we’re talking about economics–and about the limits of conventional economic theory. For the answer is surely that by the time it became possible for urban Britons to eat decently, they no longer knew the difference. The appreciation of good food is, quite literally, an acquired taste–but because your typical Englishman, circa, say, 1975, had never had a really good meal, he didn’t demand one. And because consumers didn’t demand good food, they didn’t get it. Even then there were surely some people who would have liked better, just not enough to provide a critical mass.

And then things changed. Partly this may have been the result of immigration. (Although earlier waves of immigrants simply adapted to English standards–I remember visiting one fairly expensive London Italian restaurant in 1983 that advised diners to call in advance if they wanted their pasta freshly cooked.) Growing affluence and the overseas vacations it made possible may have been more important–how can you keep them eating bangers once they’ve had foie gras? But at a certain point the process became self-reinforcing: Enough people knew what good food tasted like that stores and restaurants began providing it–and that allowed even more people to acquire civilized taste buds.

So what does all this have to do with economics? Well, the whole point of a market system is supposed to be that it serves consumers, providing us with what we want and thereby maximizing our collective welfare. But the history of English food suggests that even on so basic a matter as eating, a free-market economy can get trapped for an extended period in a bad equilibrium in which good things are not demanded because they have never been supplied, and are not supplied because not enough people demand them.

{ Paul Krugman, Supply, demand, and English food, 1998 | more }

{ McCarthy, From The Damned, 1986 | Last FM | Listen }

Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic (absorbs heat)?

First, we must know how the mass of Hell is changing over time. So we need to know the rate at which souls are moving into Hell and the rate at which they are leaving. I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to Hell, it will not leave.

Therefore, no souls are leaving. As for how many souls are entering Hell, let’s look at the different religions that exist in the world today. Most of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell. Since there is more than one of these religions and since people do not belong to more than one religion, we can make the assumption that all souls go to Hell. With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially.

Next, we look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell because Boyle’s Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the volume of Hell has to expand proportionately as souls are added. This gives two possibilities:

(1) If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase until all Hell breaks loose.

(2) If Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in Hell, then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over. So which is it?

If we accept the postulate given to me by my Professor during my Freshman year that, “it will be a cold day in Hell before I pass you”, and take into account the fact that I passed his class, then number 2 must be true, and thus I am sure that Hell is exothermic and has already frozen over.

The corollary of this theory is that since Hell has frozen over, it follows that it is not accepting any more souls and is therefore, extinct…

{ via Albany.edu }

Is Heaven hotter than Hell?

The temperature of heaven can be rather accurately computed. Our authority is the Bible, Isaiah 30:26 reads, Moreover, the light of the moon shall be as the light of the sun and the light of the sun shall be sevenfold as the light of seven days. Thus, heaven receives from the moon as much radiation as the earth does from the sun, and in addition seven times seven (forty nine) times as much as the earth does from the sun, or fifty times in all. The light we receive from the moon is one ten-thousandth of the light we receive from the sun, so we can ignore that. With these data we can compute the temperature of heaven: The radiation falling on heaven will heat it to the point where the heat lost by radiation is just equal to the heat received by radiation. In other words, heaven loses fifty times as much heat as the earth by radiation. Using the Stefan-Boltzmann fourth power law for radiation

(H/E)⁴ = 50

where E is the absolute temperature of the earth, 300°K (273+27). This gives H the absolute temperature of heaven, as 798° absolute (525°C).

The exact temperature of hell cannot be computed but it must be less than 444.6°C, the temperature at which brimstone or sulfur changes from a liquid to a gas. Revelations 21:8: But the fearful and unbelieving… shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone.” A lake of molten brimstone [sulfur] means that its temperature must be at or below the boiling point, which is 444.6°C. (Above that point, it would be a vapor, not a lake.)

We have then, temperature of heaven, 525°C (977°F). Temperature of hell, less than 445°F). Therefore heaven is hotter than hell.

{ Applied Optics, 1972 }

photo { Mark Thiessen }

The Voynich Manuscript has been dubbed “The Most Mysterious Manuscript in the World.” It is named after its discoverer, the American antique book dealer and collector, Wilfrid M. Voynich, who discovered it in 1912, amongst a collection of ancient manuscripts kept in villa Mondragone in Frascati, near Rome.

No one knows the origins of the manuscript. Experts believe it was written in between the 15th and 17th centuries. The manuscript is small, seven by ten inches, but thick, nearly 235 pages.

Its pages are filled with hand-written text and crudely drawn illustrations. The illustrations depict plants, astrological diagrams, and naked women. The women could represent creation and rebirth of consciousness.

These illustrations are strange, but much stranger is the text itself, because the manuscript is written entirely in a mysterious, unknown alphabet that has defied all attempts at translation.

It is an alphabetic script, but of an alphabet variously reckoned to have from nineteen to twenty-eight letters, none of which bear any relationship to any English or European letter system. The text has no apparent corrections. There is evidence for two different “languages” (investigated by Currier and D’Imperio) and more than one scribe, probably indicating an ambiguous coding scheme.

Apparently, Voynich wanted to have the mysterious manuscript deciphered and provided photographic copies to a number of experts. However, despite the efforts of many well known cryptologists and scholars, the book remains unread. There are some claims of decipherment, but to date, none of these can be substantiated with a complete translation. (…)

The Voynich Manuscript first appears in 1586 at the court of Rudolph II of Bohemia, who was one of the most eccentric European monarchs of that or any other period. Rudolph collected dwarfs and had a regiment of giants in his army. He was surrounded by astrologers, and he was fascinated by games and codes and music. He was typical of the occult-oriented, Protestant noblemen of this period and epitomized the liberated northern European prince. He was a patron of alchemy and supported the printing of alchemical literature. (…)

Over its recorded existence, the Voynich manuscript has been the object of intense study by many professional and amateur cryptographers, including some top American and British codebreakers of World War II fame (all of whom failed to decipher a single word). This string of failures has turned the Voynich manuscript into a famous subject of historical cryptology, but it has also given weight to the theory that the book is simply an elaborate hoax - a meaningless sequence of arbitrary symbols. (…)

By current estimates, the book originally had 272 pages in 17 quires of 16 pages each. Only about 240 vellum pages remain today, and gaps in the page numbering (which seems to be later than the text) indicate that several pages were already missing by the time that Voynich acquired it. A quill pen was used for the text and figure outlines, and colored paint was applied (somewhat crudely) to the figures, possibly at a later date.

The illustrations of the manuscript shed little light on its contents, but imply that the book consists of six “sections”, with different styles and subject matter. Except for the last section, which contains only text, almost every page contains at least one illustration. The sections, and their conventional names, are: The “herbal” section, Astronomical, Cosmological, Pharmaceutical. (…)

The text was clearly written from left to right, with a slightly ragged right margin. Longer sections are broken into paragraphs, sometimes with “bullets” on the left margin. There is no obvious punctuation. The ductus (the speed, care, and cursiveness with which the letters are written) flows smoothly, as if the scribe understood what he was writing when it was written; the manuscript does not give the impression that each character had to be calculated before being put on the page.

The text consists of over 170,000 discrete glyphs, usually separated from each other by thin gaps. Most of the glyphs are written with one or two simple pen strokes. While there is some dispute as to whether certain glyphs are distinct or not, an alphabet with 20-30 glyphs would account for virtually all of the text; the exceptions are a few dozen “weird” characters that occur only once or twice each.

Wider gaps divide the text into about 35,000 “words” of varying length. These seem to follow phonetic or orthographic laws of some sort; e.g. certain characters must appear in each word (like the vowels in English), some characters never follow others, some may be doubled but others may not.

Statistical analysis of the text reveals patterns similar to natural languages. For instance, the word frequencies follow Zipf’s law, and the word entropy (about 10 bits per word) is similar to that of English or Latin texts. Some words occur only in certain sections, or in only a few pages; others occur throughout the manuscript. There are very few repetitions among the thousand or so “labels” attached to the illustrations. In the herbal section, the first word on each page occurs only on that page, and may be the name of the plant.

On the other hand, the Voynich manuscript’s “language” is quite unlike European languages in several aspects. For example, there are practically no words with more than ten “letters”, yet there are also few one or two-letter words.

The distribution of letters within the word is also rather peculiar: some characters only occur at the beginning of a word, some only at the end, and some always in the middle section.

The text seems to be more repetitious than typical European languages; there are instances where the same common word appears up to three times in a row. Words that differ only by one letter also repeat with unusual frequency.

There are only a few words in the manuscript written in a seemingly Latin script. In the last page there are four lines of writing which are written in (rather distorted) Latin letters, except for two words in the main script. The lettering resembles European alphabets of the 15th century, but the words do not seem to make sense in any language.

Also, a series of diagrams in the “astronomical” section has the names of ten of the months (from March to December) written in Latin script, with spelling suggestive of the medieval languages of France or the Iberian Peninsula. However, it is not known whether these bits of Latin script were part of the original text, or were added at a later time. (…)

Dr. Leonell Strong, a cancer research scientist and amateur cryptographer, tried to decipher the Voynich manuscript. Strong said that the solution to the Voynich manuscript was a “peculiar double system of arithmetical progressions of a multiple alphabet”. Strong claimed that the plaintext revealed the Voynich manuscript to be written by the 16th century English author Anthony Ascham, whose works include A Little Herbal, published in 1550. Although the Voynich manuscript does contain sections resembling an herbal, the main argument against this theory is that it is unknown where Anthony would have obtained such literary and cryptographic knowledge. (…)

The first section of the book is almost certainly an herbal, but attempts to identify the plants, either with actual specimens or with the stylized drawings of contemporary herbals, have largely failed. Only a couple of plants (including a wild pansy and the maidenhair fern) can be identified with some certainty. Those “herbal” pictures that match “pharmacological” sketches appear to be “clean copies” of these, except that missing parts were completed with improbable-looking details. In fact, many of the plants seem to be composite: the roots of one species have been fastened to the leaves of another, with flowers from a third.

{ Ellie Crystal | Continue reading | Images | Wikipedia }

Its language is unknown and unreadable, though some believe it bears a message from extraterrestrials. Others say it carries knowledge of a civilisation that is thousands of years old.

But now a British academic believes he has uncovered the secret of the Voynich manuscript, an Elizabethan volume of more than 200 pages that is filled with weird figures, symbols and writing that has defied the efforts of the twentieth century’s best codebreakers and most distinguished medieval scholars.

According to computer expert Gordon Rugg of Keele University, the manuscript represents one of the strangest acts of encryption ever undertaken, one that made its creator, Edward Kelley, an Elizabethan entrepreneur, a fortune before his handiwork was lost to the world for more than 300 years. (…)

But now the computer expert and his team believe they have found the secret of the Voynich manuscript.

They have shown that its various word, which appear regularly throughout the script, could have been created using table and grille techniques. The different syllables that make up words are written in columns, and a grille - a piece of cardboard with three squares cut out in a diagonal pattern - is slid along the columns.

The three syllables exposed form a word. The grille is pushed along to expose three new syllables, and a new word is exposed.

Rugg’s conclusion is that Voynichese - the language of the Voynich manuscript - is utter gibberish, put together as random assemblies of different syllables.

{ The Guardian | Wired }

artwork { Paul Klee, Pfeil im Garten (Arrow in the Garden), 1929 | oil and tempera on canvas }

{ Ellsworth Kelly, Sculpture for a Large Wall, 1957 | 104 anodixed aluminum panels | MoMA }

In 1956, when he was 34 years old, Ellsworth Kelly was invited to create a sculpture for the lobby of Philadelphia’s Transportation Building which housed the old Greyhound Bus Terminal. The piece he made, Sculpture for a Large Wall, was the largest work of his career to that point.

{ ArtSeenSoho | Continue reading }

The Ellsworth Kelly “Sculpture for a Large Wall” was sold by Ronald Rubin for about $100,000. Then Matthew Marks turned around and sold it to the Lauder’s for about $1,000,000. The piece was later donated to MoMA by Carole and Ronald Lauder.

It was Kelly’s first sculpture, first commission and one of the first uses of anodized aluminum in fine art in America. The fact that no one complained when this unique masterpiece left Philadelphia while they raised $200,000 to retain Isiah Zagar’s kitschery makes Sid Sachs (director of the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery at the University of the Arts) a very sad man. And the quality of the work and its importance is attested by the fact that MOMA used it every chance it could in ads and bus stop kiosks.

{ Roberta Fallon and Libby Rosof | Continue reading }

When Jeremy Wolfe of Harvard Medical School (…) wanted to illustrate how the brain sees the world and how often it fumbles the job, he flashed a slide of Ellsworth Kelly’s “Study for Colors for a Large Wall” on the screen, and the audience couldn’t help but perk to attention.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

{ The Year 2038 Problem: Example showing how the date would reset at 03:14:08 UTC on 19 January 2038. | Wikipedia | Continue reading }

{ 17 year old Bianca Passarge of Hamburg dresses up as a cat, complete with furry tail, and dances on wine bottles, June 1958. Her performance was based on a dream and she practiced for eight hours every day in order to perfect her dance. | BBC }

Why do people say “um” and “er” when hesitating in their speech?

This question can actually be split into two: why do people say anything at all while hesitating and why do they say “er” and “um” instead of other possible sounds?

To answer the first question, linguists known as conversation analysts have observed that people vocalise in a conversation when they think it is their turn to talk, and there are several ways of negotiating the taking of those turns. One of them is the relinquishing of a turn by the current speaker and another speaker taking the floor. Therefore, silence is often construed as a signal that the current speaker is ready to give up his or her turn.

So, if we wish to continue our speaking turn, we often need to fill the silences with a sound to show that we intend to carry on speaking. If we always thought out thoroughly everything we were going to say in a conversation, or memorised our lines perfectly there would be no hesitation at all. But, as it is, we do a lot of what is called local management, or improvisation, during conversation for many reasons not least because we cannot predict the reactions of our interlocutor. In order to keep the floor while we hesitate, we place dummy words in the empty spaces between our words, much as we might drape our coats on a seat at the cinema to prevent others from taking it.

The second question, as to why “er” and “um” are used instead of say, “ee” or “choo” is not as easy to answer.

“Er”, in British English, is a transcription of the phonetic schwa sound found in unstressed syllables of English words (such as the vowel sound in the first syllable of “potato”). In traditional phonetics this was called the neutral sound because it is the vowel sound produced when the mouth is not in gear, that is, not tensed to say any of the other formed vowels such as “e”. The “um” sound is more difficult to explain unless it is just a bad transcription of the same neutral sound with a consonant that closes the mouth in preparation for another real word.

{ NewScientist }

artwork { Kitagawa Utamaro }

Compulsive hoarding is a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), a neurobiological condition, most likely genetically based. OCD comes in a wide variety of forms, of which hoarding is only one. Compulsive hoarders may collect only certain types of things, or they may indiscriminately save everything. We are not talking here about collecting things that are valuable or important such as art, coins, or stamps. (…)

Some of the things most commonly saved include newspapers, magazines, lists, pens, pencils, empty boxes, pamphlets, old greeting cards, junk mail, old appliances, outdated books and even assorted labels, string, rubber bands, plastic containers, bottles, and bottle caps. In the most extreme cases, people have been known to save such things as empty matchbooks, used tissues, old cigarette butts, bird feathers, old cars, discarded paper cups, used aluminum foil, paper towels, lint, and hairs. Some of these sufferers will even rummage through other people’s trash, and bring home obvious junk that to them, seems quite useful or repairable. (…)

In 1932, Homer Lusk Collyer (1881–1947) purchased a building across the street at 2077 Fifth Avenue for $8,000. He planned to divide it into apartments and to rent them. This plan was never realized, as he suffered a stroke in 1933, becoming blind as the result of hemorrhages in both of his eyes. With one exception, he was reportedly never seen outside of his home again.

Homer’s brother, Langley Collyer (1885–1947), gave up his job to nurse his brother back to health. No physician was ever consulted. Langley apparently believed that the cure for his brother’s blindness was for him to eat 100 oranges a week, and to keep his eyes closed at all times, in order to rest them. The brothers possessed a large library of medical books, and it would seem that Langley felt he had the information and knowledge necessary to treat his brother.

{ OC Foundation | Continue reading }

Burglars tried to break into the house because of unfounded rumors of valuables, and neighborhood youths had developed a fondness for throwing rocks at the windows. They boarded up the windows. In an attempt to exclude burglars, Langley used his engineering skills to construct booby traps and tunnels among the collection of items and trash that filled the house. The house soon became a maze of boxes, complicated tunnel systems consisting of junk and trash rigged with trip wires. Homer and Langley Collyer lived in “nests” created amongst the debris that was piled to the ceiling.

Their gas, telephone, electricity and water having been turned off because of their failure to pay the bills, the brothers took to warming the large house using only a small kerosene heater. For a while, Langley attempted to generate his own energy by means of a car engine. Langley began to wander outside at night; he fetched their water from a post in a park four blocks to the south (presumably Mount Morris Park, renamed Marcus Garvey Park in 1973). He also dragged home countless pieces of abandoned junk that aroused his interest. In 1933, Homer, already crippled by rheumatism, went blind. Langley devised a remedy, a diet of one hundred oranges a week, along with black bread and peanut butter. He also began to hoard newspapers, so that his brother could catch up with the news once his sight returned. (…)

On March 21, 1947, an anonymous tipster phoned the 122nd police precinct and insisted there was a dead body in the house. A patrol officer was dispatched, but had a very difficult time getting into the house at first. There was no doorbell or telephone and the doors were locked; and while the basement windows were broken, they were protected by iron grillwork. Eventually an emergency squad of seven men had no choice but to begin pulling out all the junk that was blocking their way and throw it out onto the street below. The brownstone’s foyer was packed solid by a wall of old newspapers, folding beds and chairs, half a sewing machine, boxes, parts of a wine press and numerous other pieces of junk.

A patrolman, William Baker, finally broke in through a window into a second-story bedroom. Behind this window lay, among other things, more packages and newspaper bundles, empty cardboard boxes lashed together with rope, the frame of a baby carriage, a rake, and old umbrellas tied together. After a two-hour crawl he found Homer Collyer dead, wearing just a tattered blue and white bathrobe. (…) But Langley was nowhere to be found. For weeks there was no sign of Langley.

On Saturday, March 30, false rumors circulated that Langley had been seen aboard a bus heading for Atlantic City, but a manhunt along the New Jersey shore turned up nothing. Two days later, the police continued searching the house, removing 3,000 more books, several outdated phone books, a horse’s jawbone, a Steinway piano, an early X-ray machine, and even more bundles of newspapers. More than nineteen tons of junk had been removed, just from the ground floor of the three-story brownstone. Still unable to find Langley, the police continued to clear away the brothers’ stockpile for another week, removing another 84 tons of rubbish from the house.

On April 8, 1947, workman Artie Matthews found the dead body of Langley Collyer just ten feet from where Homer had died. His partially decomposed body was being eaten by rats. A suitcase and three huge bundles of newspapers covered his body. Langley had been crawling through their newspaper tunnel to bring food to his paralyzed brother when one of his own booby traps fell down and crushed him. Homer, blind and paralyzed, starved to death several days later.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

The last name of the title characters of E. L. Doctorow’s new novel, “Homer & Langley,” is Collyer, and the book’s brothers do, in fact, turn out to be versions of those infamous New York pack rats, whose overstuffed Harlem brownstone made their name synonymous with obsessive-compulsive collecting.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

What special affinities appeared to him to exist between the moon and woman?

Her antiquity in preceding and surviving successive tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence: her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising, and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced invariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to inaffirmative interrogation: her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant implacable resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when visible: her attraction, when invisible.

{ James Joyce, Ulysses, Episode 17 | Continue reading }

photo { Marcus Ohlsson | S magazine }

One reason that real violence looks so ugly is because we have been exposed to so much mythical violence. (…) Contemporary film style may give many people the sense that entertainment violence is, if anything, too realistic. Nothing could be farther from the truth. … [They] miss the most important dynamics of violence: that it starts from confrontational tension and fear, that most of the time it is bluster, and that the circumstances that allow this tension to be over­ come lead to violence that is more ugly than entertaining. (…)

A second myth is that fights are long. (…) Whereas most film and stage dramas compress real time to gloss over the dull and routine moments of ordinary life, they expand fighting time by many times over. (…) In reality, most serious fights on the individual or small-group level are extremely short.

{ Randall Collins | via OvercomingBias | Continue reading }

1) Throughout human history social activities have taken place at night. (In fact more than 60 percent of the people Piffer polled met their latest partner in the evening or night.) The evening is commonly reserved for courtship activity — dancing, drinking, having sex. Over time, the male night owl attends more social events, meets more women, and has more sex.

2) “Eveningness” is a sexually dimorphic trait. Across cultures, “more males than females stay up late at night (due to biological differences involving the timing of peak melatonin levels). Piffer speculates that men evolved to stay up late because the most reproductively successful men pass along their genes to subsequent generations. In terms of Darwinian sexual selection, evening orientation benefits males more because it gives them an increased opportunity to acquire multiple lovers — all at one go, or over time. Women, however, don’t achieve greater reproductive success by having sex with more men (it only takes one to get pregnant), which is why fewer women are evening-oriented. Men with an evening orientation have a competitive advantage over men with a morning orientation.

3) Evening-orientation, Piffer speculates, may also be a direct product of sexual selection. That is, women may actively choose night owls over morning birds. Piffer draws on the “cads-versus-dads” theory; that is, women often go for bad boys, especially at a certain stage of life, and men who stay up into the night are likelier to fall into this category.

4) Being a night owl may also be a form of “handicap signaling.” Staying up late at night (possibly drinking and smoking) can take a toll on one’s health. Only a man who is fit and healthy would be able to compensate for his lifestyle. Assuming a man seems unaffected by little sleep, his evening orientation indicates a strong constitution — a sexy quality.

{ Jena Pincott | Continue reading | Continue reading | Circadian Preference and Sexual Selection: A Novel Evolutionary Approach, by Davide Piffer }

photo { Jessica Craig-Martin }

I try to do what Jeff Koons did when he put 1, 2 or 3 New Shelton Wet/Dry vacuums in a Plexiglas box, and added a title. I put news in Plexiglas boxes, and add titles.

It’s rather an experiment than journalism.

It’s about editing news, about the concept “editing/commenting is creating” developed a century ago when philosophers (Nietzsche, Heidegger, Deleuze, Foucault to name a few) made Philosophy by commenting past Philosophy.

Almost everything is quoted and nothing is signed: French writer Marguerite Yourcenar once said that it doesn’t matter who is writing. What matters is that it is written.

Also: Personality is like a collection of traits that we all share, and that we sometimes borrow from each other, but the totality (of qualities and traits) is peculiar to a specific person. That’s how one differs from another, by creating a different mix of existing traits, by tuning these traits to various degrees.

The word personality originates from the Latin persona, which means mask. We spend our life building this mask, and make it attractive, unique, different, coherent… It’s about editing traits and influences. It’s about creating something new from existing material.

artwork { Jeff Koons, New Hoover Convertibles, New Shelton Wet/Dry 10 Gallon Displaced Doubledecker, 1981-87 | Vacuum cleaners, Plexiglas and fluorescent lights | Photo: Thanks Daniel! }

related { Whether your earwax is wet or dry is determined by a mutation in a single gene, scientists have discovered. }