What a surprise that big name philosophers, who in previous years did not hesitate to share their profound wisdom in a language that was philosophical but plain, nuanced but direct, now seemed to be hiding behind words. It was as if there was something they could not say. Their presentations became more academic, their focus more narrowed. The absence of a theme was obvious and that, I believe, was the only theme.

We are in a moment of cultural stagnation where the only thing to say is that we have nothing to say. The great contemporary philosophers of our age are in intellectual retreat. Something about this historical moment is leaving the discipline of Western philosophy blind. The great minds seem aware of a presence, but unable to get to it directly. So they fill the air with empty words that, while philosophically interesting, simply serve as a placeholder, a time-filler while events unfold.

{ Micah M. White/Adbusters | Continue reading }

In 1966, William Labov, the father of sociolinguistics, discovered that many people with New York accents — the stock Noo Yawk kind — didn’t like the way they talked. It was kind of sad. Labov found widespread “linguistic self-hatred,” he reported. People from New York and New Jersey described their own speech as “distorted,” “sloppy” and “horrible.” No wonder those great old accents came to be regarded as a class giveaway, to be thrown over in the name of assimilation, refinement and the acquisition of Newscaster English.

But that was the ’60s, back before the never-ending you-tawkin-t’me aria was enshrined in movies like “Mean Streets,” “Saturday Night Fever,” “Working Girl” and, of course, “Taxi Driver.” Before long, people were consciously cultivating the once-despised dialect. Now an extra-hammy version of the accent — which thrives in the New York City area, including northern New Jersey — is a point of fighting pride, most recently among the brawling bozos on MTV’s captivating and incendiary reality show “Jersey Shore.”

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

Johnny Boy: Y’know Joey Clams…
Charlie: Yeah.
Johnny Boy: …Joey Scallops, yeah.
Charlie: I know him too, yeah.
Johnny Boy: …yeah. No. No, Joey Scallops is Joey Clams.
Charlie: Right.
Johnny Boy: Right.
Charlie: …they’re the same person!
Johnny Boy: Yeah!
Charlie: ‘ey!
Johnny Boy: ‘ey…

{ Mean Streets, 1973 }

artwork { Mo Maurice Tan }

{ Rachel’s new blog }

NY dairy farmer kills 51 cows then turns gun on himself, ending his own life.

Four children found living in feces. Investigators claim they found no food inside the home except a single pack of Raman Noodles.

The Indonesian government has apologised to a woman who lost her leg when a military rocket slammed into her house after a test launch.

Crowbar assault in maggot farm raid.

People in the funeral industry estimate that around 1 percent of cremated remains are not claimed.

Woman sues Metra after toilet explodes on train. She used a toilet on the train, and upon flushing, the contents exploded out and “splattered” her, the suit claims.

Bestiality ban in Netherlands. In a 2007 survey, the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad found that distributors in the Netherlands were responsible for some 80 percent of bestiality videos worldwide.

New Zealand teenager auctioned her virginity online for $32,000 to raise tuition money. More than 1,200 made bids.

Mystery of hanged man’s corpse is revealed.

Britain and the US face a new al-Qaeda terror threat from so-called suicide body bombers with explosives surgically inserted inside them. Related: Intelligence officials say al-Qaeda will try to attack U.S. in next 6 months.

In the midst of two wars and the fight against Al Qaeda, the CIA is offering operatives a chance to peddle their expertise to private companies on the side — a policy that gives financial firms and hedge funds access to the nation’s top-level intelligence talent.

Related: A humanitarian mission to aid Haitian earthquake victims turned into a major embarrassment in Puerto Rico on Friday as pictures emerged of doctors drinking, mugging for cameras and brandishing firearms amid the victims’ suffering.

Singapore gets ready to open its first casinos.

AIG plans to pay $100 million in another round of bonuses.

Greedy appraisers, who put lofty valuations on properties to please lenders and line their pockets, played a large role in the housing bubble. Are they the new organized crime?

In the next industrial revolution, atoms are the new bits.

Google economist explains why you won’t pay for online news.

What happened to Second Life?

Video games by the numbers.

Controversy rages over robot vasectomy reversal in Florida.

Need an artery? just print one out.

Why do human testicles hang like that? Related: On the origin of descended scrotal testicles [PDF]

Why I don’t have a girlfriend: An application of the Drake Equation to love in the UK [PDF]

Do humans and even monkeys tend to rationalize their choices?

Asexual organisms are extremely rare. But bdelloid rotifers have been reproducing without sex for millions of years. And now, researchers say they can explain how the tiny creatures have pulled it off for so long.

Painful memories that cause distress could soon be a thing of the past. Recent studies suggest memories can be manipulated, edited - and even deleted.

Physicist discovers how to teleport energy.

Moon may have formed in natural nuclear explosion, according to a new theory of lunar formation.

What actually gets taught on a homeopathy course.

In search of the world’s hardest language.

Virginia Woolf’s mental illness may have defined her craft.

Madness Manifest: Creativity, Art and the Margins of Mental Health.

Writers have been imagining the end of the world since soon after it began, but today’s practitioners deliver a new kind of bleakness.

In the hope that you might consider bringing your much-rumoured memoir to The House of Eliot … An open letter to Morrissey.
Leonardo da Vinci’s Resume.

This issue of the Annual Review of Critical Psychology mobilises an exploration and consideration of the utility of Lacan’s psychoanalysis for critical psychology in particular, and for critical research/theory/practice in general.

Among its crimes against humanity, Nazi Germany may have stolen more than five million cultural objects from the countries it conquered, including thousands of the world’s greatest artistic masterpieces. As the American and British armies and their allies began pushing back onto the Continent, an unusual front-line military unit with too few men and too little equipment accompanied them—members of the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives section (MFAA).

Times Square may have been Disneyfied, but it’s still home to the dirtiest hotel in New York.

A short history of restaurant criticism in New York.

New York City’s 5th annual pillow fight, Saturday, April 3, 2010.

Wearing me: a tale of T-shirt.

The fake freeway sign that became a real public service.

The membrane separating advertising and content has been torn.

What Was Advertising? The Invention, Rise, Demise, and Disappearance of Advertising Concepts in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Europe and America [PDF]

When doing the right thing could backfire.

How to be successful, famous, and wrong.

Secrets of the Tokyo underground.

Mythogeography: A Guide to Walking Sideways, a guide book that accompanies the rediscovery of slowly traversed space.

Next stop on the Viagra World Sex Tour: Finland.

Michael Jackson commemorative logo.

The 6 weirdest things women do to their vaginas.

Trucker’s delight [video/NSFW]

Exreme.

{ Hélio Oiticica, Sêco 14, 1957 | gouache on board | Galerie Lelong, 528 W. 26th Street, NYC | until February 6, 2010 }

You can’t buy happiness, but you can at least inherit it, said British and Australian researchers, after studying a thousand pairs of identical and non-identical twins. Their Eureka! on happiness is: Genes control half the personality traits that make people happy, while factors such as relationships, health and careers are responsible for the rest of our well-being.

The researchers identified common genes in identical twins that result in certain personality traits and predispose people to happiness. Sociable, active, stable, hardworking and conscientious people tend to be happier, the researchers reported in Psychological Science.

{ The Hindu | Continue reading }

More than a century ago, an Irish economist named Francis Edgeworth imagined a futuristic device that he called a hedonimeter. It would be, Edgeworth speculated, “an ideally perfect instrument, a psychophysical machine.” His hedonimeter would measure happiness by “continually registering the height of pleasure experienced by an individual.”

This may sound more like something out of science fiction than an idea from the annals of economic history. But Edgeworth’s fantasy grew out of his utilitarian approach to economics, with its assumption that the best way to make choices and allocate resources was to aim to maximize happiness in society. Today, the idea that happiness can indeed be measured and quantified remains at the heart of a new science of happiness.

Over the last few decades, psychologists, neuroscientists, sociologists, behavioral economists and other social scientists have been busy using cold, hard data to try to fill in some of the blank spaces on the map of human happiness. It turns out that no hedonimeter is necessary. Much of the latest data on happiness is generated simply by asking people how they feel. (…)

As historian of happiness Darrin McMahon said in a paper he presented at a 2006 Notre Dame conference on the subject, people “have never been as preoccupied, never been as obsessed, I would argue, with happiness as they are right now.”

{ University of Notre Dame | Continue reading }

read more { Happiness: Cognition, Experience, Language | Collegium, Volume 3, 2008 }

In the late 1970s, while working as a chiropractor and naturopath in Fergus, Ont., James Wilson began noticing patients with circadian rhythms out of whack.

They had trouble waking up in the morning, needed caffeine to get through the day, and felt a drop in energy mid-afternoon. Their second wind came at 11 p.m., revving them up for three hours.

Their deepest sleep, work permitting, was between 7 and 9 in the morning. They felt tired and unable to concentrate.

Their condition improved, Wilson says, when he treated their adrenal glands, boosting the hormones involved in regulating the body’s daily rhythms and dealing with stress.

His diagnosis was based on the pioneering work of the late Montreal endocrinologist Dr. Hans Selye. Modern life, Wilson concluded, is so relentlessly stressful that adrenal glands get overworked, burn out and produce lower levels of hormones needed to cope with stress.

Wilson says he coined the term “adrenal fatigue,” calling it the “21st century stress syndrome.”

{ Toronto Star | Continue reading }

Why do some clubbers shake it like a Polaroid picture while others prefer to perch on a bar stool? British psychologist Peter Lovatt, who has conducted rigorous field work in nightclubs, believes he can explain why some booty shaking is hot — and some is not. It’s all about your hormones. (…)

“Men can communicate their testosterone levels through the way they dance,” said Lovatt. “And women understand it — without noticing it.” (…) In women, the link between dancing style and testosterone levels were similar — but the reaction of men was just the opposite.

{ Spiegel | Continue reading }

photo { Arseni Khamzin }

{ J. D. Salinger, literary recluse, dies at 91 | Plus: Bunch of phonies mourn J.D. Salinger | via Joe }

The economist Jovanovic wrote, about a quarter of a century ago, “efficient firms grow and survive; inefficient firms decline and fail”. What he meant is that the market is Darwinian; it will rule out the least efficient firms, with habits and practices that make them perform comparatively badly, and it will make sure efficient firms prosper, so that only good business practices prevail.

Yeah right.

When you look around you, in the world of business, one sometimes can’t help wonder where Darwin went wrong… How come we see so many firms that drive us up the wall, how come we see silly business practices persist (excessive risk taking, dubious governance mechanisms, corporate sexism, grey suits and ties to name an eclectic few), and how come so many - sometimes well-educated and intelligent - people continue to have an almost unshakable belief that the market really is efficient, and that it will make the best firms prevail if you just give it time?

{ Freek Vermeulen | Continue reading }

Six months is all it took to flip Europe’s climate from warm and sunny into the last ice age, researchers have found.

They have discovered that the northern hemisphere was plunged into a big freeze 12,800 years ago by a sudden slowdown of the Gulf Stream that allowed ice to spread hundreds of miles southwards from the Arctic.

Previous research had suggested the change might have taken place over a longer period — perhaps about 10 years.

The new description, reminiscent of the Hollywood blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow, emerged from one of the most painstaking studies of past climate changes yet attempted.

{ Times | 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 }

Pharmaceutical companies are always on the lookout for secondary drug targets. After all, if you invest billions developing a single drug, you would be more than happy to sell it as a treatment for two, three, or more different ailments. Sildenafil citrate was developed to treat angina and hypertension. During phase I clinical trials, it was found that Sildenafil induces penile erections. The drug was branded Viagra, and the rest is history. Eflornithine, an anti-cancer drug, is also effective against the agent of African Sleeping Sickness, Trypanosoma brucei. African Sleeping Sickness belongs to a group of diseases known as “neglected diseases”, for which drug development is not profitable. However, having a drug already on hand makes it easier to market in affected areas.

Another example of polypharmacology is a drug that binds to multiple targets in the human body. This could be used for overcoming drug resistance, a known problem with cancer. Cancer tumours often develop a resistance to anti-cancer drugs because the protein that the drug bind to mutates, and no longer binds the drug. However, if the drug acts by binding redundantly to several proteins, it would be more effective, since several mutations would be required to effect drug resistance.

{ Byte Size Biology | Continue reading }

baltimore craigslist
Personal Texting Assistant
Date: 2009-06-23, 11:39PM EDT

Looking for an assistant to help in texting duties -

replies
deleting texts
alerting of new texts
reading texts
filtering text

I get 40 - 50 texts an hour, I cant handle my workload plus texting responsibilities. My phone gets too full and needs deleted every couple hours. This is a full time position and you must be where ever I am at, because my phone is always with me. Serious inquiries only.

Last week, I read a few articles in relation to results from a recent Australian Hotel Association (AHA) survey, revealing that women are consistently more likely to pilfer than men. Millions of dollars a year in the hotel industry, are lost to theft; from tiny soft face towels, to larger items like statues. Essentially, anything not nailed down. (…)

While exploring other topics on the subject matter to cover, I learned about the different tactics reportedly used by women to steal.  Did you know about Crotch Walking? Taken directly from- Associated Content.com: Shoplifting Statistics and Tactics, explains it as, “Crotch walking is a theft tactic that is cleverly performed by women. They simply wear a full dress or skirt into the store; place an item between their thighs, and walk out of the business like it is any other normal shopping day. Women with stronger thighs have been known to shoplift larger ticket items like electronics.” 

{ Bust | Continue reading }

…walk around. First walk normally, with your arms swinging. Then try it with your arms folded. Finally, do it with your arms and legs on each side in phase, swinging forwards and back at the same time – a “tick-tocking” motion. (…)

If you have carried out this little experiment, then you will probably have noticed that the second and third ways of walking are more difficult. But why? The answer – as it is for many important questions in biomechanics – is more complicated than you might think. (…)

One might assume that we already know all about how the organs and whole bodies of organisms – particularly Homo sapiens – work. Movements and forces at the macroscopic scale are, after all, relatively straightforward to measure and subject only to the laws of classical physics. Moreover, the anatomy of our bodies has been mapped for hundreds of years compared with the 10 years for which we have had comprehensive guides to the human genome. Surprisingly, however, research by biomechanics – people who combine expertise in both biology and physics – continues to uncover and fill hitherto undreamed-of areas of our ignorance about ourselves.

{ Physics World | Continue reading }

Several great psychology and neuroscience studies were published in 2009. Below I’ve chosen 10 that I think are among the most noteworthy. (…)

1. If you have to choose between buying something or spending the money on a memorable experience, go with the experience. (…)

8. Turns out, saying you’re sorry really is important—and not just to you. (…)

9. We can become bored with just about anything, but there may be a way to reverse the habituation blues.

{ True/Slant | Continue reading }

Is there life after death? Theologians can debate all they want, but radiation oncologist Dr. Jeffrey Long says if you look at the scientific evidence, the answer is unequivocally yes. Drawing on a decade’s worth of research on near-death experiences — work that includes cataloguing the stories of some 1,600 people who have gone through them — he makes the case for that controversial conclusion in a new book, Evidence of the Afterlife. (…)

Medically speaking, what is a near-death experience?
A near-death experience has two components. The person has to be near death, which means physically compromised so severely that permanent death would occur if they did not improve: they’re unconscious, or often clinically dead, with an absence of heartbeat and breathing. The second component [is that] at the time they’re having a close brush with death, they have an experience. [It is] generally lucid [and] highly organized.

{ Time | Continue reading }

illustration { Jong Myung Hwang }

So Wiseman has written a self-help book of his own, a collection of techniques built on findings from academic research in psychology.

Call it evidence-based self-help. The book is called 59 Seconds, for the time it’s supposed to take to practice each of the bits of advice Wiseman lays out within: Looking to seduce someone? Take your date to an amusement park or on a vigorous run, for research shows that attraction increases along with heart rate. Think someone’s prone to telling you white lies? Correspond more with them by e-mail, for research shows people are less likely to prevaricate when there’s a written record that could trip them up later.

{ Freakonomics | Continue reading | Interview }