Mario is basically the most famous video game character ever. (…) His entire existence is focused on saving the incredibly helpless and abduction-prone Princess Peach, who has been kidnapped by Bowser so many times she keeps a toothbrush at his place. (…)

In Super Mario Bros. 2, you can switch among four characters at any time, and every single one of them is better than Mario. In fact, there’s no reason to ever pick anyone but the Princess, because she, like Tails, can fucking fly.

For short distances, anyway. (…) And years later she shows up in her own DS game, still with the ability to fly…

…and oh by the way she can freaking surround herself with a ball of psychic hellfire.

That game is the only one that gets the logic right: It’s Mario who gets kidnapped, and she has to go save his ass. Not only does this make more sense considering her arsenal, but we can’t figure out how she ever allows herself to get kidnapped in the first place.

{ Cracked | Continue reading }

photo { Victor Cobo }

{ William Gedney, Kentucky, 1964/1972 | More: Ahorn magazine }

Imagine that someone committed a murder. Now imagine that the murderer risked his own life to save another person. Would you forgive the murderer for his crime?

No?

So, how many lives would the murderer need to save to balance out his original sin?

5?

10?

In one study, the median answer was 25.

This is an example of what psychologists call the negativity bias, which is a powerful part of the human mind.

{ The Atlantic | Continue reading }

images { 1 | 2 }

Cognition researchers should beware assuming that people’s mental faculties have finished maturing when they reach adulthood. So say Laura Germine and colleagues, whose new study shows that face learning ability continues to improve until people reach their early thirties.

Although vocabulary and other forms of acquired knowledge grow throughout the life course, it’s generally accepted that the speed and efficiency of the cognitive faculties peaks in the early twenties before starting a steady decline. This study challenges that assumption.

{ BPS | Continue reading }

painting { Diego Velázquez, Las Meninas (Spanish for “The Maids of Honour”), 1656 | Las Meninas has long been recognised as one of the most important paintings in Western art history. Foucault viewed the painting without regard to the subject matter, nor to the artist’s biography, technical ability, sources and influences, social context, or relationship with his patrons. Instead he analyses its conscious artifice, highlighting the complex network of visual relationships between painter, subject-model, and viewer. For Foucault, Las Meninas contains the first signs of a new episteme, or way of thinking, in European art. It represents a mid-point between what he sees as the two “great discontinuities” in art history. | Wikipedia }

It’s hard to imagine some of Vincent van Gogh’s signature works without the vibrant strokes of yellow that brightened the sky in “Starry Night” and drenched his sunflowers in color. But the yellow hues in some of his paintings have mysteriously turned to brown — and now a team of European scientists has figured out why.

Using sophisticated X-ray machines, they discovered the chemical reaction to blame — one never before observed in paint. Ironically, Van Gogh’s decision to use a lighter shade of yellow paint mixed with white is responsible for the unintended darkening, according to a study published online Monday in the journal Analytical Chemistry.

“This is the kind of research that will allow art history to be rewritten,” because the colors we observe today are not necessarily the colors the artist intended, said Francesca Casadio, a cultural heritage scientist at the Art Institute of Chicago who was not involved in the work.

In a number of Van Gogh’s paintings, the yellow has dulled to coffee brown — and in about 10 cases, the discoloration is serious, said Koen Janssens, an analytical chemist at Antwerp University in Belgium who co-wrote the study.

{ LA Times | Continue reading }

drawing { Van Gogh, Sorrow, 1882 }

{ lcdsoundsystem.com | Continue reading }

{ 1968-75: How ‘X-Rated’ Became Synonymous With ‘Porn’ | full story }

{ Computer’s depiction of the “average” female face by country. | Daily Mail | More: Mike Mike, The Face of Tomorrow }

Whether she were a woman who had read too many poems, as Evgenie Pavlovitch supposed, or whether she were mad, as the prince had assured Aglaya, at all events, this was a woman who, in spite of her occasionally cynical and audacious manner, was far more refined and trustful and sensitive than appeared. There was a certain amount of romantic dreaminess and caprice in her, but with the fantastic was mingled much that was strong and deep.

{ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, ‪The idiot‬, 1868-69 | Continue reading | Or: Wikisource }

What happens in our bodies when we kiss?

In a good kiss, our pupils dilate, which is one of the reasons we close our eyes, our pulse quickens, and our breathing can deepen and become irregular. But we’re also hard at work on a subconscious level. Scent plays a really powerful role in whether it’s a good kiss or not. Women are actually most attracted to the natural scents of men who have a different set of genes called the major histocompatability complex that codes for immunity. We’re most attracted to people whose MHC genes have a lot of diversity from ours—the advantage of that would be if you reproduce, that child’s probably going to have a stronger immune system, and so be more likely to survive to pass on their genes. This isn’t something that we’re consciously aware of, but we do seem to know if something feels off. And actually, more than half of men and women—fifty-eight per cent of women, fifty-nine per cent of men—report ending a budding relationship because of a bad kiss.

How important is a couple’s first kiss?

A first kiss has the power to shape the future of a relationship for a particular couple. Of course, there are other factors that play a role, but kissing is really nature’s ultimate litmus test. It puts us right up close so that we can sense whether this is someone we want to continue a relationship with.

{ New Yorker | Continue reading }

A recent meta-analysis has indicated that falling in love can take a little as a fifth of a second and can produce similar euphoric effects to cocaine.

“These results confirm love has a scientific basis,” says Stephanie Ortigue who conducted the study at Syracuse University. (…)

Ortigue claims that while this is interesting in terms of being a neuroscience curiosity it could have potential therapeutic possibilities for those suffering depression after heartbreak.

{ B Good Science | Continue reading }

related { Researchers have identified five distinct styles of communicating romantic interest. }

painting { Gustav Klimt, Water Serpents I, 1904–1907 }

At its heart, cancer is caused when our genes – the instructions encoded in the DNA found within our cells – go wrong. Without the correct instructions, cells start to multiply out of control, fail to die when damaged, and begin to spread around the body.

Scientists studying the precise nature of these microscopic – yet potentially disastrous – errors have found all kinds of weird and wonderful mistakes. These range from very specific ‘typos’ to large scale rearrangements.

To use an analogy, if the entire DNA of a cell (its genome) is a bit like a recipe book, then some genetic faults are the equivalent of simply changing ‘tomato’ into ‘potato’, while others are akin to ripping whole pages out and shuffling them around.

But recent revolutionary research from scientists in the US and UK has revealed a completely different – and catastrophic – way for DNA to get messed up.

Published in the prestigious journal Cell, this groundbreaking work comes from the Cancer Genome Project team, who brought us the first fully mapped cancer genomes at the end of 2009. Since then they’ve been busy analysing DNA from samples taken from many different types of cancer and trying to spot interesting patterns in the data.

Since the 1970s, the prevailing view has been that cancers ‘evolve’ gradually, picking up a few new faults each time a cell divides.  This idea is supported by plenty of research into cancer genomes over the years.

But in their latest investigations, the Cancer Genome team noticed a few examples that bucked this trend. (…)

Within our cells, our DNA is arranged into individual pieces known as chromosomes, and 46 chromosomes are found in virtually all human cells.  If the entire DNA of a cell is analogous to an instruction manual, then chromosomes would be individual ‘chapters’.

In a few cancer samples, the scientists found that one or two whole chromosomes had been literally shattered to pieces and stitched back together in a haphazard way – not so much shuffling the pages of the genetic recipe book as completely ripping them to pieces and randomly gluing the bits back together. The researchers call this “chromothripsis” – thripsis being Greek for “shattered into pieces”.

This didn’t seem to be a vanishingly rare event either. Two to three per cent of cancers studied by the team so far show the signs of chromothripsis (across a wide range of different cancer types). And in some cancer types it seemed to be even more common – for example, around a quarter of bone cancer samples had shattered chromosomes.

{ Cancer Research UK | Continue reading }

artwork { Pablo Picasso, Weeping Woman, 1937 }

{ Agnes B and Colette vandalized by Kidult }

Here’s a paper from 1985 titled, EEG during masturbation and ejaculation. In this study, they had three men masturbate and ejaculate while undergoing EEG (ElectroEncephaloGraphy). (…)

The authors didn’t really do any strong quantitative analyses of their EEG. More just qualitative observations. The methods in this paper are a great read, though. They recorded 14 channel scalp EEG. In addition, they also recorded:

“Anal Contractions” with a “pressure-sensitive anal probe”.

“Penile Tumescence” with a “mercury strain gauge”. Unfortunately, “[t]he masturbatory movements interfered with the recording”.

“Wrist Accelerometer” that was “taped to the dorsum of the hand (right) used in masturbation”.

And the procedures really give you a sense of the beauty of the entire setup: “Subjects were instructed to avoid unnecessary movements, and their compliance was verified by video monitoring of head and torso throughout the session. (…) The average length of masturbation to the first anal contraction was 402 seconds.”

{ Oscillatory Thoughts | Continue reading }

photo { David Stewart }

Can the lost art of whistling make a comeback?

“No great or successful man ever whistles,” said New York University philosophy professor Charles Gray Shaw in 1931. “Whistling is an unmistakable sign of the moron. It’s only the inferior and maladjusted individual who ever seeks emotional relief in such a bird-like act as that of whistling,” he concluded.

Today, Shaw’s words probably wouldn’t elicit a response, but in those days whistling was viewed in a decidedly positive light. In the 1920s and ’30s, whistlers were accepted as professional artists, traveling with Big Bands and becoming household names in their own right. There were even schools—a total of nine, scattered around the U.S.—where one could go to study whistling, including Agnes Woodward’s Los Angeles School of Artistic Whistling.

Ordinary people enjoyed whistling—while walking down the street, doing chores, and of course, while they worked. (…) But it’s been at least a half-century since whistling was prominent in popular culture, and people who whistle in public today are likely to be greeted with looks of disapproval.

{ Failure | Continue reading }

Pretend for a moment that you are Google’s search engine.

Someone types the word “dresses” and hits enter. What will be the very first result? There are, of course, a lot of possibilities. Macy’s comes to mind. Maybe a specialty chain, like J. Crew or the Gap. Perhaps a Wikipedia entry on the history of hemlines.

O.K., how about the word “bedding”? Bed Bath & Beyond seems a candidate. Or Wal-Mart, or perhaps the bedding section of Amazon.com.

“Area rugs”? Crate & Barrel is a possibility. Home Depot, too, and Sears, Pier 1 or any of those Web sites with “area rug” in the name, like arearugs.com.

You could imagine a dozen contenders for each of these searches. But in the last several months, one name turned up, with uncanny regularity, in the No. 1 spot for each and every term:

J. C. Penney.

The company bested millions of sites — and not just in searches for dresses, bedding and area rugs. For months, it was consistently at or near the top in searches for “skinny jeans,” “home decor,” “comforter sets,” “furniture” and dozens of other words and phrases, from the blandly generic (“tablecloths”) to the strangely specific (“grommet top curtains”).

The New York Times asked an expert in online search, Doug Pierce of Blue Fountain Media in New York, to study this question, as well as Penney’s astoundingly strong search-term performance in recent months. What he found suggests that the digital age’s most mundane act, the Google search, often represents layer upon layer of intrigue. And the intrigue starts in the sprawling, subterranean world of “black hat” optimization, the dark art of raising the profile of a Web site with methods that Google considers tantamount to cheating.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

painting { Franzikus Wendels, In freier Wildbahn 2, 2007/08 }

Is it reasonable to fear death? If you agree with Lucretius, you will say no. In what is known as the Symmetry Argument, Lucretius contends that that the time before our existence is similar to the time of our future non-existence. And since we do not fear the time before we existed, it is not reasonable to fear our future non-existence i.e. death.

However, even if you concede to Lucretius’s argument, the fact remains that the awareness of our mortality generates a significant threat to our psychological well-being. A large corpus of research on terror management theory details how mortality saliency affects our self-esteem, worldview, among others.

In a recent fMRI study, Quilin and colleagues (2011) extends our knowledge on terror management theory by exploring the neural correlates of mortality salience.

{ Psychothalamus | Continue reading }

photo { Tierney Gearon }

First we must ask Why does a woman (or a man, for the matter) vocalize during sex at all? Sure, there might be a host of valid social reasons - one might be to boost the ego of the man [92% of the women in study agreed to this statement, and 87% reported vocalizing for this very purpose] (Brewer and Hendrie, 2010), or to deceive the man that they are a competent lover (68% of women reported wanting to stay with a man even though he never helped her climax) (Brewer and Hendrie, 2010).

But from an evolutionary perspective we must be mindful of a few things: First, men do not vocalize in the same manner as women. Second, comparative evidence in chimps suggests that vocalizations are for attracting more males to a sexual encounter (in order to have more sex), which is further supported by the fact that when chimps are engaging in down-strata copulation (that is, if the women is having sex with someone she ’shouldn’t’ be having sex with) she still makes chimpanzee sex-faces, but fails to make the vocalizations.

{ Psycasm | Continue reading }

painting { Erik Mark Sandberg }

…50-year-old Nobuhiro Komiya who for the last two years has worked tirelessly doing one of the most unlikely and mind boggling of jobs - censoring the unending torrent of hentai manga or pornographic comics which flood Tokyo’s book shops and convenience stores.

“It’s a tough job. (…) It’s totally different to reading manga as a hobby,” he says.

A visit to the Department of Youth Affairs and Public Safety on the 35th floor of Tokyo’s towering Metropolitan Government building, where Komiya and his small team of censors get down to the grisly task of comic book censorship, reveals we are talking about a lot more than the width of Wonder Woman’s bust.

Spread out over the white Formica table-top are the worst of the worst - a hand-picked selection of the weirdest and most shocking examples of hentai from the country which invented it.

“Normal sex doesn’t sell well,” Komiya remarks. School sex, tied-up sex, abnormal sex, sells. So this is what they draw.”

{ NZ Herald | Continue reading }

photo { Asha Schechter }

In December last year, a new research paper revealed how a protein called perforin – the ‘bullet’ of the immune system – kills rogue cells in our body.

How these immune pore-forming proteins function has been a key question since the discovery of “haemolytic complement proteins” in the 1890s by the Nobel laureate Jules Bordet. Bordet was the first to notice that the human immune system was capable of punching holes in target cells.

But as Professor Joe Trapani, head of the Cancer Immunology Program at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre and one of the authors of the paper, says, “Until now, perforin has been a real black box. No-one has really known how it all fits together to form a pore”.

{ Wellcome Trust | Continue reading }

painting { Gustav Klimt, Beethoven Frieze, 1902 }

{ Robert Lane Green, You Are What You Speak | Continue reading }