And Edy Boardman was rocking the chubby baby to and fro in the pushcar
{ Carli Davidson }
If the way which I have pointed out as leading to this result seems exceedingly hard, it may nevertheless be discovered
{ Dutch 1,000-guilder banknote featuring Spinoza }
Something unappeased, unappeasable
4 billion years before present: the surface of a newly formed planet around a medium-sized star is beginning to cool down. It’s a violent place, bombarded by meteorites and riven by volcanic eruptions, with an atmosphere full of toxic gases. But almost as soon as water begins to form pools and oceans on its surface, something extraordinary happens. A molecule, or perhaps a set of molecules, capable of replicating itself arises.
This was the dawn of evolution. Once the first self-replicating entities appeared, natural selection kicked in, favouring any offspring with variations that made them better at replicating themselves. Soon the first simple cells appeared. The rest is prehistory.Billions of years later, some of the descendants of those first cells evolved into organisms intelligent enough to wonder what their very earliest ancestor was like. What molecule started it all? (…)
When biologists first started to ponder how life arose, the question seemed baffling. In all organisms alive today, the hard work is done by proteins. Proteins can twist and fold into a wild diversity of shapes, so they can do just about anything, including acting as enzymes, substances that catalyse a huge range of chemical reactions. However, the information needed to make proteins is stored in DNA molecules. You can’t make new proteins without DNA, and you can’t make new DNA without proteins. So which came first, proteins or DNA?
artwork { Chris Ofili }
All’s well at Mrs. Wells
The projection of vagina, uterine cervix, and nipple to the sensory cortex in humans has not been reported.
The aim of this study was to map the sensory cortical fields of the clitoris, vagina, cervix, and nipple, toward an elucidation of the neural systems underlying sexual response.
Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we mapped sensory cortical responses to clitoral, vaginal, cervical, and nipple self-stimulation.
The genital sensory cortex, identified in the classical Penfield homunculus based on electrical stimulation of the brain only in men, was confirmed for the first time in the literature by the present study in women applying clitoral, vaginal, and cervical self-stimulation, and observing their regional brain responses using fMRI.
Activation of the genital sensory cortex by nipple self-stimulation was unexpected, but suggests a neurological basis for women’s reports of its erotogenic quality.
photo { Richard Kern }
For from this fact alone it arises that the mind afterwards conceiving the said thing is affected with the emotion of pleasure or pain, that is, according as the power of the mind and body may be increased or diminished
In recent years, economists and psychologists have joined forces to unravel the secrets of human happiness. “The Happiness Equation” is one researcher’s attempt to share his field’s discoveries with a broad audience. Nick Powdthavee, an economist at the University of York, deftly explains the main determinants of happiness: the small effect of money, the great effect of marriage and friends, the massive effect of personality. Even extremely good news (such as winning the lottery) and extremely bad news (such as losing a spouse) rarely changes an individual’s happiness for more than a couple of years. Mr. Powdthavee also explores the effect of happiness on success: Happiness today predicts higher job performance, better relationships and more years of health in the future.
photo { Louis Stettner, Christmas Eve, Ile Saint-Louis, 1950 }
related { Ten Powerful Steps to Negotiating a Higher Salary }
‘There is no individual thing in nature, than which there is not another more powerful and strong. Whatsoever thing be given, there is something stronger whereby it can be destroyed.’ –Spinoza
Most bacterial infections can be treated with antibiotics such as penicillin, discovered decades ago. However, such drugs are useless against viral infections, including influenza, the common cold, and deadly hemorrhagic fevers such as Ebola.
Now, in a development that could transform how viral infections are treated, a team of researchers at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory has designed a drug that can identify cells that have been infected by any type of virus, then kill those cells to terminate the infection.
researchers tested their drug against 15 viruses, and found it was effective against all of them — including rhinoviruses that cause the common cold, H1N1 influenza, a stomach virus, a polio virus, dengue fever and several other types of hemorrhagic fever.
The drug works by targeting a type of RNA produced only in cells that have been infected by viruses. “In theory, it should work against all viruses,” says Todd Rider, a senior staff scientist in Lincoln Laboratory’s Chemical, Biological, and Nanoscale Technologies Group who invented the new technology.
{ MIT | Continue reading | Thanks Glenn! }
How are you? Just keeping alive, M’Coy said.
If we don’t reverse the current trend in food prices, we’ve got until August 2013 before social unrest sweeps the planet, say complexity theorists.
What causes riots? That’s not a question you would expect to have a simple answer.
But today, Marco Lagi and buddies at the New England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge, say they’ve found a single factor that seems to trigger riots around the world.
This single factor is the price of food. Lagi and co say that when it rises above a certain threshold, social unrest sweeps the planet.
photo { Shaun Gladwell }
No, she’s married, with a kid, finally split up with Sid
We should expect men to be more self-aware, transparent, and simple regarding their feelings about short-term sexual attractions, while women have more complex, layered, and opaque feelings on this subject. In contrast, women should be more more self-aware, transparent, and simple regarding their feelings about long-term pair-bonding, while men have more complex, layered, and opaque feelings on this subject. By being more opaque on sensitive subjects, we can keep ourselves from giving off clear signals of an inclination to betray.
She lives in the doorway of an old hotel, and the radio is playing opera, all she ever says is go to Hell
Do extraverts have more numerous and deeper social relationships? (…)
Recognising that our relationships aren’t monolithic, the researchers treated social networks as a set of three layers. The inner support group contains those people (typically around five) that you would turn to in a crisis. Around this are a further ten-odd people, a sympathy group who would be deeply affected by your death. Finally there is an outer layer of more variable size, containing people connected to you by weak ties. (…)
The researchers found extraverts had more people in every layer – more weak ties, but also more individuals they contacted frequently. Although larger social networks have been reported before, this study finds the effect after controlling for age, a potential confound in other studies. However, extraversion didn’t affect emotional closeness to their network: weak ties with occasional contacts don’t appear stronger in extraverts.
screenshot { Andrei Tarkovsky, The Mirror, 1975 }
Procrastination is like a credit card, it’s a lot of fun until you get the bill.
{ How the internet has all but destroyed the market for films, music and newspapers. The author of Free Ride warns that digital piracy and greedy technology firms are crushing the life out of the culture business. | Guardian | full story }
Well my baby’s so fine, even her car looks good from behind
Intuition is one of those iffy concepts. Its purpose, use, and ontology have been heavily debated in its long and contentious history. Western proverbial jargon illustrates this: we’ve been told that he who hesitates is lost, but shouldn’t we look before we leap? And believe that we shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but don’t the clothes make the man?
Now, psychology is weighing in. However, in place of armchair-rationality, it is using empirical data to illustrate how we actually behave. With concrete data, it seems like the intuition debate could finally be put to rest. But the opposite has occurred. Psychology has shown both the powers and perils of intuition only to complicate matters. (…)
First, there is a question about perception: How much do we see? (…)
Second, there is a question about judgment and decision-making: Should I go with my gut? Or think things through?
oil on canvas { Ingres, Comtesse d’Haussonville, 1845 }
‘Ask no questions and you’ll hear no lies.’ –James Joyce
It seems hard to imagine that anyone of sound mind would take the blame for something he did not do. But several researchers have found it surprisingly easy to make people fess up to invented misdemeanours. Admittedly these confessions are taking place in a laboratory rather than an interrogation room, so the stakes might not appear that high to the confessor. On the other hand, the pressures that can be brought to bear in a police station are much stronger than those in a lab. The upshot is that it seems worryingly simple to extract a false confession from someone—which he might find hard subsequently to retract.
They can’t hurt you unless you let them
Having pain that persists creates a lot of stress, but there are many people who can limit the effect on their life and carry on. These people seem to return to their everyday activities even if their pain hasn’t settled. Then there are the other people. This group have much more trouble managing with their pain. They have more disability, more distress, seek more treatments and the impact of their pain spreads from the direct effect on their life, to effects on people around them.
If we could identify, then treat the risk factors that can lead to trouble recovering from pain, we might be able to limit the long term effects that chronic pain can have on people and our community. While maybe 25 years ago the factors were thought to be biomechanical, or things like the extent of tissue damage – and yes, these do have some effect – over time it has become clear that psychosocial factors play an important role. (…)
Catastrophising has been identified as a risk factor for greater disability and distress. Catastrophising is the tendency to “think the worst” and has been viewed as an independent risk factor for longterm disability for some time.
‘This guy’s ringtone is ‘Everything She Wants,’ and someone has been calling him every four minutes for the last half hour.’ –Sasha Frere-Jones
What could be wrong with a gentleman opening a door for a lady? According to some social psychologists, such acts endorse gender stereotypes: the idea that women are weak and need help; that men are powerful patriarchs. Now a study has looked at how women are perceived when they accept or reject an act of so-called “benevolent sexism”* and it finds that they’re caught in a double-bind. Women who accept help from a man are seen as warmer, but less competent. Women who reject help are seen as more competent, but cold.
Then gay youth was mine, truth was mine
{ In May 2010, a tattered and brittle map was discovered in storage at the Brooklyn Historical Society. Experts identified it as a rare item, a Bernard Ratzer “Plan of the City of New York” map in its 1770 state. Until then, only three copies were thought to exist. After a painstaking restoration to remove layers of shellac and grime and repair dozens of breaks, the map is now behind plexiglass and ready to be displayed to the public. | NY Times | full story }
Every day, the same, again
Swedish man arrested after trying to split atoms in his kitchen.
California man gets stuck in manhole with legs in the air trying to get lost wallet. [with photo]
Live rat found in loaf of bread was actually a mouse.
Group of Tibetan Buddhists buy 534 live lobsters and free them off a boat in the Atlantic.
Actress Used CGI Nipples to Fake a Nude Scene.
Kidnappers Introduce Victim’s Girlfriend To Wife.
Cancer-stricken WTC worker gets $0 settlement check.
Minnesota asked MillerCoors brewing company to stop selling its beer in the state because of expired licenses. The Department of Public Safety told the brewer it must stop distribution in Minnesota and devise a plan to pull its product from the shelves, including Coors, Coors Lite, Miller Lite, Miller High Life and 35 other name-brand beers.
Women spend more than $160,000 on make-up during their lifetime, a study claims.
Superheroes Who Share a Power with Dolphins.
Science’s theories on the origins of life on Earth. More: The theory that complex life on our planet owes its existence to the Moon.
Europe’s Plan to Move An Asteroid.
New hints of saltwater on Mars.
How we think about landscapes.
How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man.
Making Music Proves to be Powerful Antidepressant.
Mindless eating: Losing weight without thinking. Dieters may not need as much willpower as they think, if they make simple changes in their surroundings that can result in eating healthier without a second thought.
A new study has found that northern peoples have bigger eyes - and bigger brains.
Creativity dampened by observing anger, but enhanced by sarcasm.
The human impulse to be kind to unknown individuals is not the biological aberration it might seem.
Meanness is often a mask for insecurity. Understanding Mean Girls.
Why we need more mentally ill leaders.
Glow-in-the-dark shark can become invisible.
Harmless snakes avoid danger by mimicking the triangular heads of vipers.
70 percent of 8-month-olds consume too much salt.
Study exposes habit formation in smartphone users.
Global population is expected to hit 7 billion in 2011, up from 6 billion in 1999.
We Wanted Flying Cars, Instead We Got 140 Characters. From 1999 through the present, the VC industry has posted negative mean and median returns, with only a handful of funds having done very well. What happened?
What If You Wrote a Book and Only One Person Read It?
This article examines the use of Twitter by famous people to conceptualize celebrity as a practice.
When they leave, their start up idea gets VC funded. Ex-Google/Microsoft/Yahoo/Facebook-ers Start Ups.
Type “why am I” into a Google search and autocomplete will suggest “why am I here?”
Space, Cyberspace and Interface: The Trouble with Google Maps.
Yes, our children are growing up too soon. But blame capitalism, not sex.
How Nixon stopped backing the dollar with gold and changed global finance, a 40-year-old decision.
Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Clinical Psychology in the United States, 1940–2010.
The World of Blind Mathematicians.
What Are Speed Shows? A New Media Art Phenomenon Swoops Into New York’s Chinatown.
Is your basement the best shelter from a tornado?
How to Build a Stone Wall. [NY Times]
The History and Mystery of the High Five.
How to unlock and start a car - with a text message.
Making of: MTV spot, Balloons. [video]
See if you can figure out how this classic con works.
Honor Your Dead Loved Ones by Stuffing Their Ashes in a Bullet and Shooting It.
Still, you have to go there. There’s something you can’t do unless you get there.
When lost in the desert or a thick forest — terrains devoid of landmarks — people tend to walk in circles. Blindfolded people show the same tendency; lacking external reference points, they curve around in loops as tight as 66 feet (20 meters) in diameter, all the while believing they are walking in straight lines. (…)
The researchers believe that loopy paths follow from a walker’s changing sense of “straight ahead.” With every step, a small deviation is likely added to a person’s cognitive sense of what’s straight, and these deviations accumulate to send that individual veering around in ever tighter circles as time goes on.
related { Where did humans learn to walk? }
I’m a moonlight watchmanic, it’s hard to be romantic
Here is the great irony: S&P (and the rest of the ratings agencies) helped contribute in no small way to the overall economic crisis. The toadies rated junk securitized mortgage backed paper AAA because they were paid to do so by banks.
They are utterly corrupt, and should have received the corporate death penalty (ala Arthur Anderson).
related { Standard & Poor’s removed the United States government from its list of risk-free borrowers for the first time since it was granted an AAA rating in 1917. | Standard & Poor’s (S&P) is a United States–based financial-services company, headquartered in Rockefeller Center in New York City. It is a division of the McGraw-Hill Companies. | S&P’s credit ratings }
photo { Scott Eells }
Come on down to Zookie’s, you’re in a suit of your dreams
Turns out that your name is more influential than you think.
Researchers found that the “speed with which adults acquire items [correlates] to the first letter of their childhood surname.”
This means that when it comes to purchasing goods, people with last names that begin with a letter closer to the end of the alphabet tend to acquire items faster than people with last names that begin with a letter closer to the beginning of the alphabet. They call it the “Last Name Effect,” and hypothesize that it is caused by “childhood ordering structure.”
In their words, “since those late in the alphabet are typically at the end of lines, they compensate by responding quickly to acquisition opportunities.”
photo { Louis Stettner, Rue des Martyrs, 1951 }
