Researchers looked at whether simple restoration of justice (“an eye for an eye”) is enough for us or if we also want the offender to understand just what they did wrong. (…)
They concluded that simple equalization of suffering is not enough—we also want the offender to know just why they were punished (for their bad or mean-spirited behavior).
It’s about Professor Daryl Bem and his cheerful case for ESP.
According to “Feeling the Future,” a peer-reviewed paper the APA’s Journal of Personality and Social Psychology will publish this month, Bem has found evidence supporting the existence of precognition. (…)
Responses to Bem’s paper by the scientific community have ranged from arch disdain to frothing rejection. And in a rebuttal—which, uncommonly, is being published in the same issue of JPSP as Bem’s article—another scientist suggests that not only is this study seriously flawed, but it also foregrounds a crisis in psychology itself. (…)
Over seven years, Bem measured what he considers statistically significant results in eight of his nine studies. In the experiment I tried, the average hit rate among 100 Cornell undergraduates for erotic photos was 53.1 percent. (Neutral photos showed no effect.) That doesn’t seem like much, but as Bem points out, it’s about the same as the house’s advantage in roulette. (…)
“It shouldn’t be difficult to do one proper experiment and not nine crappy experiments,” the University of Amsterdam’s Eric-Jan Wagenmakers, co-author of the rebuttal, says. (…)
Before PSI, Bem made his biggest splash in the nonacademic world with a politically incorrect but weirdly compelling theory of sexual orientation. In 1996, he published “Exotic Becomes Erotic” in Psychological Review, arguing that neither gays nor straights are “born that way”—they’re born a certain way, and that’s what eventually determines their sexual preference.
“I think what the genes code for is not sexual orientation but rather a type of personality,” he explains. According to the EBE theory, if your genes make you a traditionally “male” little boy, a lover of sports and sticks, you’ll fit in with other boys, so what will be exotic to you—and, eventually, erotic—are females. On the other hand, if you’re sensitive, flamboyant, performative, you’ll be alienated from other boys, so you’ll gravitate sexually toward your exotic—males.
EBE is not exactly universally accepted.
photos { Irina Werning, Back to the future, Mechi 1990 & 2010, Buenos Aires | more }
The Kepler observatory was launched into orbit in early 2009. Its mission: to search for planets in solar systems other than our own. Their recent results point to a staggering number of planets that share the galaxy with us, many of which orbit their sun in a habitable temperature zone: between 0 and 100 °C. This means that water-based life such as ourselves would neither freeze nor boil away, assuming that the planet has atmospheric pressure similar to Earth. (…)
Based on the approximate value of 100 billion stars in our galaxy, scientists with Kepler estimate at least 50 billion planets (one out of every two stars is expected to have a planet). And 500 million or so of those planets are in the habitable temperature zone.
New research out of Brigham Young University finds that couples who wait to have sex are happier, and that delaying sex could lead to a healthier marriage. “I think it’s because [those who waited] learned to talk and have the skills to work with issues that come up,” says scientist Dean Busby, the study’s lead author. (…)
It’s possible for a man to be allergic to his own semen, according to Dutch scientists who have been studying post-orgasmic illness syndrome, a condition in which men develop flu-like symptoms after ejaculating.
photo { Dominico Albion | more }
How Systems Design Themselves
A given system can be divided into a number of subsystems. Conway gives the example of the public transportation system, which consists on the top level of buses, trains, planes, etc. On the next level an airplane can be split up into subsystems for structure, propulsion, … and so on.
To illustrate this concept the author draws the following picture. The circles represent a (sub)system and the lines the connections between them. (…)
The system and its design group are related. For a given subsystem x there will be a design group (X) which designed this subsystem. The same holds true for the connections between subsystems (eg. x and y). If they are connected, we know that the design teams X and Y had to communicate at some point in time to design the interface.
So the design of the finished system is dependent on the preexisting design of the design group.
photo { Tony Stamolis }
When adding up the benefits from three centuries of species discoveries, I’m tempted to start, and also stop, with Sir Hans Sloane.
A London physician and naturalist in the 18th century, he collected everything from insects to elephant tusks. And like a lot of naturalists, he was ridiculed for it, notably by his friend Horace Walpole, who scoffed at Sloane’s fondness for “sharks with one ear, and spiders as big as geese!” Sloane’s collections would in time give rise to the British Museum, the British Library, and the Natural History Museum, London.
Not a bad legacy for one lifetime. But it pales beside the result of a collecting trip to Jamaica, on which Sloane also invented milk chocolate.
We still scoff at naturalists today. We also tend to forget how much we benefit from their work. (…) Large swaths of what we now regard as basic medical knowledge came originally from naturalists.
photos { Simen Johan | Roxanne Jackson }
A review of more than 160 studies of human and animal subjects has found “clear and compelling evidence” that – all else being equal – happy people tend to live longer and experience better health than their unhappy peers.
photo { Richard Avedon, Veruschka, New York, 1972 }
Not only do insincere apologies fail to make amends, they can also cause damage by making us feel angry and distrustful towards those who are trying to trick us into forgiving them.
Even sincere apologies are just the start of the repair process. Although we expect the words “I’m sorry” to do the trick, they don’t do nearly as much as we expect.
photo { Richard Misrach }
Jay Traver had begun to notice an uncomfortable crawling sensation under her skin. Scalp spots had bothered her for years but despite her best efforts – she was, after all, a renowned professor of zoology – she couldn’t identify the parasites.
Over the seasons the bugs had spread across her body and eventually invaded her eyes, ears and nostrils, raising her discomfort to fever pitch. Doctors seemed mystified but by the summer of 1950 she had made a breakthrough.
Strong caustic soaps seemed to help control the infestation and she had dug some of the bugs out of her skin with her nails to identify them as dermatophagoides – a mite never previously known to infect humans.
photo { Süleyman Gezgin }
Piracy is the Future of Television
The convergence of television and the Internet is in its early stages, and the two media will increasingly interconnect over the coming years. A number of services are currently competing to become the dominant protocol for consumption of TV content via the Internet. This paper examines the major services that are currently available for downloading or streaming television programs online, both legal and illegal. We propose that, of the options now available to media users, illegal downloading is the most usable and feature-rich, and bears the greatest potential for pioneering new modes of audience engagement, as well as new global revenue streams, related to television products.
{ Abigail De Kosnik, University of California, Berkeley | PDF | Continue reading }
photo { William Eggleston }
Today, any brand has a potential army of credible, unpaid spokespeople that are willing to work on its behalf. And this army is the exact same group of people who are willing to work against it.
This is the new world of what I call the “post-positioning era” of branding. In the post-positioning era of branding, what you say about your product or service matters almost nothing at all, and what I, the consumer, can do with it matters completely.
The new conditions of brand success:
1. Deliver a kick-ass product.
2. Be honest.
Our ability as advertisers to contrive and disseminate an emotional response through advertising is diminishing rapidly. And brand exposure is not the same as brand experience. A single one-star review on Yelp trumps 60 seconds of Super Bowl airtime.
{ Jamie Monberg/Fast Company | Continue reading | Related: poster }
{ Charlie Engman }
On January 3, 1889, two policemen approached Nietzsche after he caused a public disturbance in the streets of Turin, Italy. What actually happened remains unknown, but the often-repeated tale states that Nietzsche witnessed the whipping of a horse at the other end of the Piazza Carlo Alberto, ran to the horse, threw his arms up around the horse’s neck to protect it, and collapsed to the ground.
In the following few days, Nietzsche sent short writings — known as the “Wahnbriefe” (”Madness Letters”).
To his former colleague Burckhardt, Nietzsche wrote: “I have had Caiaphas put in fetters. Also, last year I was crucified by the German doctors in a very drawn-out manner. Wilhelm, Bismarck, and all anti-Semites abolished.” Additionally, he commanded the German emperor to go to Rome in order to be shot and summoned the European powers to take military action against Germany.
On January 6, 1889, Burckhardt showed the letter he had received from Nietzsche to Overbeck. The following day, Overbeck received a similarly revealing letter, and decided that Nietzsche’s friends had to bring him back to Basel. Overbeck traveled to Turin and brought Nietzsche to a psychiatric clinic in Basel. By that time, Nietzsche appeared fully in the grip of insanity.
In 1898 and 1899, Nietzsche suffered from at least two strokes which partially paralysed him and left him unable to speak or walk. After contracting pneumonia in mid-August 1900, he had another stroke during the night of August 24 / August 25, and then died about noon on August 25.
{ Wikipedia | Continue reading | Photos: Nietzsche in 1899 }
Man arrested for driving more than 3 miles in reverse.
Bank robber sues police after being arrested with his underpants on show.
Toddler spends 4 hours locked in bank vault.
Porn Machet Murder. Charley Chase recalls, “I only worked with him once. It was a boy-girl scene and it was terrible.”
Every year forensic scientist Brendan Nytes sees a few cases where a dead rat or mouse is found in box of cereal, a jug of vinegar or a loaf of marble rye. His job is to distinguish genuine contamination from the surprising number of cases involving the intentional introduction of a dead rodent to a perfectly wholesome food product.
The world’s biggest family: Ziona Chan has 39 wives, 94 children and 33 grandchildren.
Caravaggio’s crimes exposed in Rome’s police files.
Jurors Less Likely to Convict Defendants Wearing Glasses, Say Lawyers and 2008 Study.
Here’s Why France Isn’t An Economic Backwater.
The Myth of Japan’s “Lost Decades.”
Japan’s status as our (i.e. the West’s) economic and cultural horizon peaked in the 1980s. So much has changed. Whatever happened to Japan?
A new study explores how your last name influences how fast you buy stuff.
State by State Housing Market Infographic (US).
The study tested the difference between moral forecasting and moral action—and the reasons behind any mismatch. The findings look encouraging: People act more morally than they would have predicted.
Clinicians have often referred to ultrasound technology as the “stethoscope of the future,” predicting that as the equipment shrinks in size, it will one day be as common at the bedside as that trusty tool around every physician’s neck. According to a new report in the New England Journal of Medicine, that day has arrived.
A new medical device controlled via smartphone could help doctors detect cancer more quickly.
Researchers recently unveiled the first complete millimeter-scale computing system that is about the size of the letter “N” on the back of a penny. The computing system – the tiniest fabricated to date – is a prototype of an implantable eye pressure monitor for glaucoma patients.
Genetic evidence now spotlights the United States as the source of recent fire ant invasions in the rest of the world. Red fire ants cause at least $6 billion a year in damage and control requirements in the United States alone.
Why does polygamy continue at all, if it’s so bad for a woman’s reproductive success?
Publishers Weekly doesn’t like my work very much. Before you roll your eyes and/or get all excited at the prospect of a classic “I can’t believe I got a bad review!” hypersensitive-author meltdown, let me hasten to add that I have absolutely no interest in refuting anything they’ve ever written about my books.
Charlie Sheen: Coke, Hookers, Hospital, Repeat.
The Tippling Club, Singapore, where molecular mixology is married with chic design and cutting-edge gastronomy. More: tipplingclub.com And: Molecular mixology.
Do all cities have neighborhoods?
Designing a city for safe protests.
Why Backroom Deals Aren’t So Bad.
Representative Men, by Ralph Waldo Emerson.
The Perplexing Choice in Existence Predicament: An Existential Interpretation of Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. [PDF]
How to Make Oyakodon (Japanese Chicken and Egg Rice Bowl) and Okonomiyaki (Japanese Assorted Pancake).
6 Subtle Ways You’re Getting Screwed at the Grocery Store.
The methods for treating jellyfish stings vary, and many remedies can do more harm than good. One exception is the application of vinegar, which according to several studies can deactivate the venomous nematocysts that jellyfish release.
13 Ways of Looking at Pac-Man.
10 Realistically Awkward Movie Sex Scenes.
5 Amazing Things Invented by Donald Duck. (Scrooge McDuck Did Inception First)
Thoughts on design. A collection of articles written by Paul Rand.
“Smack My Bitch Up” performed by The Beatles. [Thanks Glenn]
Dead Island, Video game trailer. [Thanks James]
Life presents all too many situations in which we’re forced to place our trust in people we’ve no particular reason to trust. The classic example is driving: you can buy the safest car available, and take all the advanced driving tests you like, but hitting the road is still ultimately a matter of entrusting your fate to hundreds of strangers – people who, by definition, you’d never leave your kids with, and who might, for all you know, be drunk, high, overtired, hallucinating, prone to uncontrollable violent outbursts, convinced they’re immortal deities from alien planets, or just massively stupid.
Except for giving up driving, there’s not much you can do about this. But it was only a few months back, heeding the urgings of several writers on productivity, that I came to realise that a somewhat analogous, if mercifully less lethal, situation pertained in many areas of my life – because I wasn’t keeping a “waiting-for list”.
The argument runs as follows: multiple times a day, at work or outside it, most of us make requests of people – underlings, superiors, friends, service providers – and simply assume they’ll follow through. (…)
Based on an unscientific survey of my acquaintances, what proportion of people have a systematic way to keep track of who they’re waiting to hear back from? Zero per cent, approximately.
It turns out that keeping a “waiting-for” list is like being handed a pair of x-ray spectacles for peering inside your colleagues’ lives. Based on what does or doesn’t get crossed off the list, as people do or don’t get back to me, I’m pretty sure I now know who’s on top of things, and who’s inefficient or just lazy, their email inboxes backed up like clogged drains.
What happens after Yahoo acquires you.
Whether it’s Flickr, Delicious, MyBlogLog, or Upcoming, the post-purchase story is a similar one. Both sides talk about all the wonderful things they will do together. Then reality sets in. They get bogged down trying to overcome integration obstacles, endless meetings, and stifling bureaucracy. The products slow down or stop moving forward entirely. Once they hit the two-year mark and are free to leave, the founders take off.
Language reveals ancient definitions of happiness. It is a striking fact that in every Indo-European language, without exception, going all the way back to ancient Greek, the word for happiness is a cognate with the word for luck. Hap is the Old Norse and Old English root of happiness, and it just means luck or chance, as did the Old French heur, giving us bonheur, good fortune or happiness. German gives us the word Gluck, which to this day means both happiness and chance.
What does this linguistic pattern suggest? For a good many ancient peoples—and for many others long after that—happiness was not something you could control. It was in the hands of the gods, dictated by Fate or Fortune, controlled by the stars, not something that you or I could really count upon or make for ourselves. (…)
Enter the 17th and 18th centuries, when a revolution in human expectations overthrew these old ideas of happiness. It is in this time that the French Encyclopédie, the Bible of the European Enlightenment, declares in its article on happiness that everyone has a right to be happy. It is in this time that Thomas Jefferson declares the right to pursue happiness to be a self-evident truth, while his colleague George Mason, in the Virginia Declaration of Rights, speaks of pursuing and obtaining happiness as a natural endowment and right. And it is in this time that the French revolutionary leader St. Just can stand up during the height of the Jacobin revolution in France in 1794 and declare: “Happiness is a new idea in Europe.” In many ways it was.
This perspective lies behind our belief that suffering is inherently wrong, and that all people, in all places, should have the opportunity, the right, to be happy.
In October 2009 John Walkenbach noticed that the price of the Kindle was falling at a consistent rate, lowering almost on a schedule. By June 2010, the rate was so unwavering that he could easily forecast the date at which the Kindle would be free: November 2011.
In August, 2010 I had the chance to point it out to Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon. He merely smiled and said, “Oh, you noticed that!” And then smiled again. When I brought it to the attention of publishing veterans they would often laugh nervously. How outrageous! they would say. It must cost something to make? The trick was figuring out how Amazon could bundle the free Kindle and still make money. My thought was the cell phone model: a free Kindle if you buy X number of e-books.
But last week Michael Arrington at TechCruch reported on a rumor which hints at a more clever plan: a free Kindle for every Prime customer of Amazon. Prime customers pay $79 per year for free 2-day shipping, and as of last week, free unlimited streaming movies (a la Netflix). Arrington writes:
In January Amazon offered select customers a free Kindle of sorts – they had to pay for it, but if they didn’t like it they could get a full refund and keep the device. It turns out that was just a test run for a much more ambitious program. A reliable source tells us Amazon wants to give a free Kindle to every Amazon Prime subscriber.
artwork { Marc Newson, Voronoi Shelf, 2006 | white Carrara marble }
related { Netflix Adds Subtitles to More Streaming Content, Stirs Up Controversy. }
{ Breast Milk Ice Cream A Hit At London Store | NPR | full story }
