And on the cool check in
What do we know about the relationship between mental illness and jazz?
A review of biographical material of 40 famous jazz musicians of the period from 1945 to 1960 excluding those who were still alive, was studied and rated for psychiatric diagnoses according to the DSM IV classification.
Results:
• 10% (4) had family psychiatric disorder
• 17,5% (7) had unhappy or unstable early lifes
• 52,5% (21) were addicted to heroin some time during their lives.
• 27,5 (11) were dependent on alcohol and 15% (6) abused alcohol
• 8% (3) were dependent on cocaine
• 8% (3) had psychotic disorder
• 28,5% (11) had mood disorders
• 5% (2) had anxiety disorders
• 17,5% (7) had sentsation seeking tendencies such as disinhibition and thrill and adventure seeking. This has been linked to borderline personality disorder
• 2 killed themselfs later in life
When the music’s over, turn out the lights
{ The 4 big myths of profile pictures: It’s better to smile, You shouldn’t take your picture with your phone or webcam, Guys should keep their shirts on, Make sure your face is showing. | OK Trends | Full story }
Tony: [Showing Tramp the menu] Now, tell me, what’s your pleasure? A la carte? Dinner? [Tramp barks] Aha, Okay. Hey, Joe! Butch-a he say he wants-a two spaghetti speciale, heavy on the meats-a ball.
It should come to no surprise that restaurant owners adjust their menus to increase check totals overall and to promote the items that bring in the most profit. We told you earlier today that when there were no dollar signs on the menu, customers spent more.
As Dave Pasegic of the Restaurant Resource Group notes, a menu …
is the only piece of printed advertising that you are virtually 100 percent sure will be read by the guest. Once placed in the guest’s hand, it can directly influence not only what they will order, but ultimately how much they will spend.
And the strategies used to promote high-profit items are very intriguing.
People don’t read menus from top to bottom — or at least, their gaze doesn’t necessarily linger at the top. For example ….
… the National Restaurant Association recommends that chefs place the dishes they want to sell on the center of the inside right page of their menu.
photo { Terry Richardson }
And Martha all I had was you and all you had was me
Physicists and cosmologists have long noted that the laws of physics seem remarkably well tuned to allow the existence of life, an idea known as the anthropic principle.
It is sometimes used to explain why the laws of physics are the way they are. Answer: because if they were different, we wouldn’t be here to see them.
To many people, that looks like a cop out. One problem is that this way of thinking is clearly biased towards a certain kind of carbon-based life that has evolved on a pale blue dot in an unremarkable corner of the cosmos. Surely there is a more objective way to explain the laws of physics.
Enter Raphael Bousso and Roni Harnik at the University of California, Berkeley and Stanford University respectively. They point out that the increase in entropy in any part of the Universe is a decent measure of the complexity that exists there. Perhaps the anthropic principle can be replaced with an entropic one?
Today, they outline their idea and it makes a fascinating read. By thinking about the way entropy increases, Bousso and Harnik derive the properties of an average Universe in which the complexity has risen to a level where observers would have evolved to witness it.
photo { Jocelyn Lee }
Miss Maggie M’Gill, she lived on a hill
{ In 1999 ‘Prozac’ – the trade name of fluoxetine – was named on of the ‘Products of the century’ by Fortune magazine. In 2007 Eli Lilly began to market fluoxetine for dogs under the name Reconcile. In this incarnation it’s chewable, tastes like beef and is intended to treat something called ‘canine separation anxiety’. | Frontier Psychiatrist | Continue reading }
‘I look at models like a farmer looks at his potatoes.’ –Helmut Newton
The brain processes fearful faces more quickly when seen out of the corner of the eye than when viewed straight on. Dimitri Bayle and colleagues, who made their finding using magnetoencephalography (MEG) brain scanning, believe this bias has probably evolved because threats are more likely to come from side-on.
If only tonight we could sleep in a bed made of flowers
I stopped eating pork about eight years ago, after a scientist happened to mention that the animal whose teeth most closely resemble our own is the pig. Unable to shake the image of a perky little pig flashing me a brilliant George Clooney smile, I decided it was easier to forgo the Christmas ham. A couple of years later, I gave up on all mammalian meat, period. I still eat fish and poultry, however and pour eggnog in my coffee. My dietary decisions are arbitrary and inconsistent, and when friends ask why I’m willing to try the duck but not the lamb, I don’t have a good answer. Food choices are often like that: difficult to articulate yet strongly held. (…)
But before we cede the entire moral penthouse to “committed vegetarians” and “strong ethical vegans,” we might consider that plants no more aspire to being stir-fried in a wok than a hog aspires to being peppercorn-studded in my Christmas clay pot.
Plants are lively and seek to keep it that way. The more that scientists learn about the complexity of plants — their keen sensitivity to the environment, the speed with which they react to changes in the environment, and the extraordinary number of tricks that plants will rally to fight off attackers and solicit help from afar — the more impressed researchers become, and the less easily we can dismiss plants as so much fiberfill backdrop, passive sunlight collectors on which deer, antelope and vegans can conveniently graze. (…)
Just because we humans can’t hear them doesn’t mean plants don’t howl. Some of the compounds that plants generate in response to insect mastication — their feedback, you might say — are volatile chemicals that serve as cries for help. Such airborne alarm calls have been shown to attract both large predatory insects like dragon flies, which delight in caterpillar meat, and tiny parasitic insects, which can infect a caterpillar and destroy it from within.
illustration { Kirsty Whiten }
Riders on the storm, into this house we’re born
Bayesian probability is a great model of rationality that gets lots of important things right, but there are two ways in which its simple version, the one that comes most easily to mind, is extremely misleading.
One way is that it is too easy to assume that all our thoughts are conscious – in fact we are aware of only a tiny fraction of what goes on in our minds, perhaps only one part in a thousand. We have to deal with not only “running on error-prone hardware”, but worse, relying on purposely misleading inputs. Our subconscious often makes coordinated efforts to mislead us on particular topics. (…)
We may see one part in a thousand of our minds, but that fraction pales by comparison to the fact that we are each only one part in seven billion of living humanity.
Taking this fact seriously requires even bigger changes to how we think about rationality. OK, we don’t need to consider it for topics that only we can influence. But for most interesting important topics, it matters far more what the entire world does than what we personally do.
‘The sadness will last forever.’ –Van Gogh
Tom alerted me to this fantastic brief case published in the British Medical Journal where a builder is admitted to hospital in great pain after a nail penetrated all the way through his boot. But it turned out that the pain was entirely psychological, as the nail had missed his foot by sliding between his toes. (…)
This isn’t really the nocebo effect, where ’side-effects’ appear after having taken nothing but a placebo, but more similar to what doctors might describe in its persistent form as somatisation disorder where physical symptoms appear that aren’t explained by tissue damage.
Are you a lucky little lady in the City of Light, or just another lost angel
A paper by Mark Grinblatt and two Finnish guys whose names I can’t pronounce (Linnainmaa & Keloharju), took data from Finnish military IQ tests, and combined them with transactional data on the Helsinki Stock Exchange. The paper is cleanly titled, “Do Smart Investors Outperform Dumb Investors?”
From the abstract:
This study analyzes whether high IQ investors exhibit superior investment performance. It combines equity return, trade, and limit order book data with two decades of scores from an intelligence test administered to nearly every Finnish male of draft age. Controlling for wealth, trading frequency, age, and determinants of the cross-section of stock returns on each day, we find that high IQ investors exhibit superior stock-picking skills, particularly for purchases, which earn up to 11% more per year than the purchases of below average IQ nvestors.
photo { Justine Reyes }
‘There’s hell, there’s darkness, there’s the sulphurous pit, burning, scalding, stench, consumption; fie, fie, fie! pah, pah!’ —Shakespeare
Abstract painting is nearing its centenary. Although what exactly abstraction is, who first achieved it, and when and where, are questions open to interpretation, the best art-historical thinking dates its inception to around 1912, when Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Robert Delaunay, Piet Mondrian and Arthur Dove quite separately made their breakthroughs across two continents. (…)
It would be easy to make the argument that abstraction has long since settled into its comfortable dotage–that it has become an art choking on good taste and mannered reticence. On this view, abstraction was deposed by movements of the 1960s such as Pop Art, with its rehabilitation of vernacular imagery and its immersion in demotic culture; Conceptual Art, with its emphasis on language and critical context; and even Minimalism, which (despite its inheritance from the Constructivist strain within abstraction) laid such great stress on what its foremost detractor decried as mere “objecthood” that a boundary was fatally breached between art and everyday things.
artwork { Mark Rothko, No. 14, 1960 }
Trying to figure out where you are and where you’re going
‘Grid cells’ that act like a spatial map in the brain have been identified for the first time in humans, according to new research by UCL scientists which may help to explain how we create internal maps of new environments. (…)
Grid cells represent where an animal is located within its environment, which the researchers liken to having a satnav in the brain.
photo { Jocelyn Lee }
Noon burn gold into our hair
{ The notion that the speed of thought could be measured, just like the density of a rock, was shocking. Yet that is exactly what scientists did. | Discover | Full story }
My favorite thing is me coming to visit you, and then you ask, How about a small smackeral of honey?
I’m the Crawlin’ King Snake and I rule my den
The art boom of 2004-07 saw such staggering growth, particularly in contemporary art, that it is hardly surprising that art is increasingly being commoditised, bundled into funds and flagged up as an alternative asset class.
But while most people can recognise a Warhol or a Picasso at 10 paces, they have far less knowledge of the complex issues inherent in trading something that is almost always heterogeneous, in an opaque and unregulated market. (…)
The editor of this book, Clare McAndrew (…) makes the fundamental point that “one of the most important economic features of the market is that it is essentially supply-driven … increased demand … cannot necessarily increase supply … and instead elevates prices”. (…)
Moreover, how do you assess the price of a painting when four Picasso portraits of Dora Maar, all from the 1940s and of comparable size, can sell for between $4.5m and $85m within a three-year period?
You said you’d stand by me in the middle of Chapter Three
Analyses of classic authors’ works provide a way to “linguistically fingerprint” them, researchers say.
The relationship between the number of words an author uses only once and the length of a work forms an identifier for them, they argue.
Analyses of works by Herman Melville, Thomas Hardy, and DH Lawrence showed these “unique word” charts are specific to each author.
Researchers also suggest each author pulls their works from a hypothetical “meta book”. One description of this concept might be a framework for the way an author uses language. It is from this framework that all their works are ultimately derived.
photo { Andy Tew }
‘The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time.’ –Nietzsche
Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche, who went on to become a prominent supporter of Adolf Hitler, systematically falsified her brother’s works and letters, according to the Nietzsche Encyclopedia.
Christian Niemeyer, the publisher, said he wanted to clear the revered thinker’s reputation by showing the “criminally scandalous” forgeries by his sister had tainted his reputation ever since.
related { Nitezsche page | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy }
‘Take me, I am the drug.’ –Salvador Dalí
{ The Crayola’s Law: The number of colors doubles every 28 years | Weather Sealed | Full story }
