“I love nick [Brooks], but he wasn’t good for me. . . he holds me back. I’m always sad with him. He’s 24 for f sake . . . he wants porn sex! He wants to b drunk or stoned all the time . . . he doesn’t have any goals and stops me from mine.” […] The elder Brooks killed himself with a mail-order helium-tank suicide kit in 2011 at his Upper East Side apartment. He was under indictment for drugging and sexually assaulting 13 starlets during “auditions” for nonexistent films. [NY Post]

A subtle, but significant tweak to Florida’s rules regarding traffic signals has allowed local cities and counties to shorten yellow light intervals, resulting in millions of dollars in additional red light camera fines. [10 News]

“Hasse” which was known in Ystad tavern circles, had a total of 146 wasp stings on the body including 54 on the genitals. He was so bloated that a neighbor thought it was a whale carcass lying on the lawn. [...] The autopsy and scene investigation revealed that “Hasse” tried to have sex with the wasp nest. They found semen on some of the dead wasps and a couple of “Hasse” pubic hair in the entrance of the nest. [...] Angry animal rights activists have reacted strongly to the event. [News Sweden | Thanks GG]

Florida Mayoral Candidate Boasts Endorsement from Jesus Christ.

Swaziland may in fact be the only country to have ever attempted to regulate witch air traffic. The new legislation stipulates that witches on broomsticks flying over Swaziland may not fly higher than 150 meters.

A Manhattan fortune teller will be jailed for a year after taking more than $650,000 in cash from an Upper East Side woman by promising to “cleanse” the money. Swindling soothsayer Janet Miller, 39, also tricked the wealthy victim into turning over paintings and jewelry as “sacrifices” to keep the devil away, and even conned her into buying and handing over a couple of Rolexes — all to exterminate “bad energy,” Manhattan prosecutors charged. [NY Post]

The blindfold is to minimize the shock which the flashlight could cause to the eyes of the medium, who is extremely sensitive during this stage of the phenomena.

You cannot be detained, arrested, or fined for going topless in public in New York. Earlier this year, the Do Not Arrest Topless Women memo was read aloud at NYPD roll calls for 10 straight days. [Thanks GG]

Max Planck’s conception of progress in science: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” [Theory, Evolution and Games Group]

There is no scientific evidence that psychiatric diagnoses such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are valid or useful, according to the leading body representing Britain’s clinical psychologists. In a groundbreaking move that has already prompted a fierce backlash from psychiatrists, the British Psychological Society’s division of clinical psychology (DCP) will on Monday issue a statement declaring that, given the lack of evidence, it is time for a “paradigm shift” in how the issues of mental health are understood. The statement effectively casts doubt on psychiatry’s predominantly biomedical model of mental distress – the idea that people are suffering from illnesses that are treatable by doctors using drugs. Dr Lucy Johnstone, a consultant clinical psychologist who helped draw up the DCP’s statement, said it was unhelpful to see mental health issues as illnesses with biological causes. “On the contrary, there is now overwhelming evidence that people break down as a result of a complex mix of social and psychological circumstances – bereavement and loss, poverty and discrimination, trauma and abuse,” Johnstone said. The provocative statement by the DCP has been timed to come out shortly before the release of DSM-5, the fifth edition of the American Psychiatry Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The manual has been attacked for expanding the range of mental health issues that are classified as disorders. [The Observer]

Every cell in our bodies runs on a 24-hour clock, tuned to the night-day, light-dark cycles that have ruled us since the dawn of humanity. The brain acts as timekeeper, keeping the cellular clock in sync with the outside world so that it can govern our appetites, sleep, moods, and much more. But new research shows that the clock may be broken in the brains of people with depression—even at the level of the gene activity inside their brain cells. It’s the first direct evidence of altered circadian rhythms in the brain of people with depression, and shows that they operate out of sync with the usual ingrained daily cycle. […] In severely depressed patients, the circadian clock was so disrupted that a patient’s “day” pattern of gene activity could look like a “night” pattern—and vice versa. [Futurity | Thanks Tim]

Do these startling longevity studies mean your lifespan could double?

Biological clue to why women live longer than men.

More sleep may decrease the risk of suicide in people with insomnia.

Recent research discovered that an individual can indeed successfully try to be happier, especially when cheery music aids the process.

There was no WiFi switched on during the experiment, and the headband antenna was a sham. Yet 82 of the 147 subjects—more than half—reported symptoms.

The effectiveness of placebo treatment for pain is related to personality traits.

A picture of a large pair of eyes triggers feelings of surveillance in potential thieves, making them less likely to break the rules.

There is plenty of evidence to suggest that brains can produce rather complex behavior without consciousness. Studies in humans show that we perform so much of our complex behavior unconsciously – from driving a car to investing our savings. There’s every reason to believe that most – if not all – non-human animal behavior we see could be being produced by an otherwise intelligent mind that is not producing subjective experiences of its own decision making processes. […] Just because an animal behaves like a human, does this mean we should assume its mind functions in the same way? […] Banana-reaching via unconscious thought for the chimpanzee […] a computer might also be able to solve this problem, but we don’t suggest that computers are conscious. One of the main problems we’re dealing with here is that science does not really have a good definition of consciousness. Yes, it’s some form of subjective experience, but it might come in a variety of forms, and thus animals might be conscious in different ways to humans. […] Scientists have given dolphins the mirror self recognition (MSR) test. Having some kind of awareness of oneself – whether it’s awareness of one’s body or of one’s own mind – is certainly linked to the idea of consciousness. For these tests, dolphins were marked with a kind of dye on their bodies, and if they then swam over to inspect the mark in a mirror, we could conclude that the dolphins must know that it’s themselves they are seeing in the mirror. This then is some kind of self awareness. […] The problem is that being able to recognize one’s body in the mirror (that is, recognizing an external representation of one’s body) might not be the same thing as having a representation of one’s own mind (i.e., a sense of self). So passing the MSR test might not even be a sure test of self-awareness, let alone subjective experience. [Justin Gregg]

After a test showed that Kathleen didn’t have the BRCA breast cancer gene, her surgeon, Dr. Sonya Sharpless, suggested that environmental factors might be implicated. [...] Did a lifetime of using cosmetics cause or contribute to Kathleen’s breast cancer? We don’t know. But here are some facts that every American woman and her loved ones should absorb. The European Union bans nearly 1,400 chemicals from personal care products because they are carcinogenic, mutagenic, or toxic to reproduction. But in the United States, the Food and Drug Administration entrusts safety regulation of cosmetics to a private entity that is housed and funded by the industry’s trade association. To date, this entity has found only eleven chemicals to be “unsafe for use in cosmetics.” The FDA has no oversight of cosmetics products before they come on the market and, unlike the EU, leaves it to the cosmetics industry to determine which ingredients should be banned. [The Investigative Fund]

Disclosures reveal that corporations and lobbying firms award six-figure bonuses to staff who leave to take powerful positions on Capitol Hill.

Using the size of the CEO signature on annual SEC filings to measure CEO narcissism, we find that narcissism is positively associated with several measures of firm overinvestment.

In February 2012, a number of hedge fund traders noted one particular index–CDX IG 9–that seemed to be underpriced. It seemed to be cheaper to buy credit default protection on the 125 companies that made the index by buying the index than by buying protection on the 125 companies one by one. This was an obvious short-term moneymaking opportunity: Buy the index, sell its component short, in short order either the index will rise or the components will fall in value, and then you will be able to quickly close out your position with a large profit. But February passed, and March passed, and April rolled in, and the gap between the price of CDX IG 9 and what the hedge fund traders thought it should be grew. And their bosses asked them questions, like: “Shouldn’t this trade have converged by now?” “Have you missed something?” […] So the hedge fund traders began asking who their counterparty was. It seemed that they all had the same counterparty. And so they began calling their counterparty “the London Whale.” They kept buying. And the London Whale kept selling. And so they had no opportunity to even begin to liquidate their positions and their mark-to-market losses grew, and the risk they had exposed their firms to grew. So they got annoyed. And they went public, hoping that they could induce the bosses of the London Whale to force him to unwind his possession, in which case they would profit immensely not just when the value of CDX IG 9 returned to its fundamental but by price pressure as the London Whale had to find people to transact with. And so we had ‘London Whale’ Rattles Debt Market, and similar stories. The London Whale was Bruno Iksil [a trader working for the London office of JPMorgan Chase]. He had been losing, and rolling double or nothing, and losing again for months. His boss, Ina Drew, took a look at his positions. They found they had a choice: they could hold the portfolio and thus go all-in, or they could fold. They could hold CDX IG 9 until maturity–make a fortune if a fewer-than-expected number of its 125 companies went bankrupt, and lose J.P. Morgan Chase entirely to bankruptcy if more did. Or they could take their $6 billion loss and go home. What could they do if the bet went wrong and they had to eat losses at maturity? J.P. Morgan Chase couldn’t print money. So Drew stood Iksil down, and the hedge fund traders had their happy ending. […] “Why did the interest rate on the Ten-Year Treasury peak at 4%? And why has it gone down since then? And why won’t it go back to its 5%-7% fundamental.” And they looked around. And they found Ben Bernanke. The Washington Super-Whale. […] From my perspective, of course, the hedge fundies’ analogy between the London Whale and the Washington Super-Whale is all wrong. [Brad DeLong]

Is the Canadian Housing Market Falling Apart?

The least racially tolerant countries.

How to Mine Cell-Phone Data Without Invading Your Privacy.

Acxiom knows where you live, where you shop and what you like to do. But it’s not quite the evil data monolith you might expect. A peek inside one of the world’s largest data brokers.

Exploring the Boundaries of Photo Editing. Even top news photographers have their work digitally enhanced these days. Mounting competition in the market for news images is forcing photo-journalists to make their output as dramatic as possible.

Least efficient packing shapes.

Composite and 3-D-printed components will mean jet engines that use 15 percent less fuel.

Make your own invisibility cloak with a 3D printer.

Terahertz image reveals Goya’s hidden signature in old painting. Terahertz radiation occupies the part of the electromagnetic spectrum between the infrared and the microwave.

When Latin lost many of its inflectional exponents and morphed into what is now modern French, the pronouns of Latin, which were used for emphasis only, became obligatory. [Frontiers]
The Romance languages are all the related languages derived from Vulgar Latin. In 2007, the five most widely spoken Romance languages by number of native speakers were Spanish (385 million), Portuguese (210 million), French (75 million), Italian (60 million), and Romanian (23 million). The Romance languages developed from Latin in the sixth to ninth centuries. [Wikipedia]

Fuck You, a magazine of the arts (1962-1971). [via Sunday Reading]

Too much media is going to turn out like too many calories. No one who asks tough questions will ever get “access.” The news media is even worse than you think. 5 corrupting influences are keeping the public from the facts.

The story behind the viral Vine sensation “Ryan Gosling Won’t Eat His Cereal.” [Thanks Tim]

Beethoven’s hair.

Ten Things Romans Used for Toilet Paper.

Robbers target Bieber’s South Africa concert, steal $330,000.

There is a metal band in Brooklyn called Unlocking The Truth that is made up of three 11-year-olds.

Meet the new Google Maps.

Google Images Atari breakout

Urs Fischer, Untitled, 2011.

Bottle opener.

On August 31, 2012, Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki posted four papers on the Internet. The titles were inscrutable. The volume was daunting: 512 pages in total. The claim was audacious: he said he had proved the ABC Conjecture, a famed, beguilingly simple number theory problem that had stumped mathematicians for decades. […] The problem, as many mathematicians were discovering when they flocked to Mochizuki’s website, was that the proof was impossible to read. The first paper, entitled “Inter-universal Teichmuller Theory I: Construction of Hodge Theaters,” starts out by stating that the goal is “to establish an arithmetic version of Teichmuller theory for number fields equipped with an elliptic curve…by applying the theory of semi-graphs of anabelioids, Frobenioids, the etale theta function, and log-shells.” This is not just gibberish to the average layman. It was gibberish to the math community as well. [Caroline Chen/Project Wordsworth]

Last night, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York hosted the 2013 Met Gala. This year’s theme was “Punk: From Chaos To Couture.” For many celebrities, this was the first time they had used the word “punk” in a sentence that wasn’t “Have my assistant get me Daft Punk tickets.” […] “I skipped punk and went straight to couture. I never did punk.” —Andre Leon Talley, editor at large of Vogue/total fucking clown […] “I did not [have a punk phase]. That’s why I think my version of punk for me is not probably the mohawk, typical punk that you’d sort of envision. A little bit more like ‘romantic punk.” —Kim Kardashian, notable reality TV shithead “I don’t think I fully understood the theme.” —Kate Upton, human Viagra for Terry Richardson [Jaded Punk]

They busted the Colombian fugitive despite the breast implants and other cosmetic work that had helped him morph into a very chesty “Rosalinda.’’

Women are more attracted to guitarists than sporty guys.

Physical, Behavioral, and Psychological Traits of Gay Men Identifying as Bears.

Most people do not seem to perceive microexpressions in themselves or others. In the Wizards Project, previously called the “Diogenes Project,” Drs. Paul Ekman and Maureen O’Sullivan studied the ability of people to detect deception. Of the thousands of people tested, only a select few were able to accurately detect when someone was lying. The Wizards Project researchers named these people “Truth Wizards.” To date, the Wizards Project has identified just over 50 people with this ability after testing nearly 20,000 people. Truth Wizards use microexpressions, among many other cues, to determine if someone is being truthful. Scientists hope by studying wizards that they can further advance the techniques used to identify deception. [Wikipedia]

A person named “John Titor” started posting on the Internet one day, claiming to be from the future and predicting the end of the world. Then he suddenly disappeared, never to be heard from again. […] He claimed he was a soldier sent from 2036, the year the computer virus wiped the world. […] Titor responded to every question other posters had, describing future events in poetically-phrased ways, always submitted with a general disclaimer that alternate realities do exist, so his reality may not be our own. [Pacific Standard | johntitor.com]

As digital data expands, anonymity may become a mathematical impossibility.

After checking your bank account, remember to log out, close your web browser, and throw your computer into the ocean. […] For those of you using a smartphone or tablet, the process for securely closing your banking session is very similar, except that you should find the nearest canyon and throw your device into that canyon. We then recommend simply scaling down the cliff face, locating the shattered remnants of your device, and spending the next few weeks traversing the country burying each individual piece in separate holes of varying depths several hundred miles apart. [The Onion | Thanks Tim]

“What people do in cities—create wealth, or murder each other—shows a relationship to the size of the city, one that isn’t tied just to one era or nation,” says Lobo. The relationship is captured by an equation in which a given parameter—employment, say—varies exponentially with population. In some cases, the exponent is 1, meaning whatever is being measured increases linearly, at the same rate as population. Household water or electrical use, for example, shows this pattern; as a city grows bigger its residents don’t use their appliances more. […] If the population of a city doubles over time, or comparing one big city with two cities each half the size, gross domestic product more than doubles. Each individual becomes, on average, 15 percent more productive. Bettencourt describes the effect as “slightly magical,” although he and his colleagues are beginning to understand the synergies that make it possible. Physical proximity promotes collaboration and innovation, which is one reason the new CEO of Yahoo recently reversed the company’s policy of letting almost anyone work from home. […] Remarkably, this phenomenon applies to cities all over the world, of different sizes, regardless of their particular history, culture or geography. Mumbai is different from Shanghai is different from Houston, obviously, but in relation to their own pasts, and to other cities in India, China or the U.S., they follow these laws. [Smithsonian]

Skipping meals can sabotage your shopping – and your diet, according to a new Cornell study. Even short term food deprivation not only increases overall grocery shopping, but leads shoppers to buy 31% more high calorie foods. [EurekAlert]

A new molecule has been created by researchers in Chile that could make teeth ‘cavity proof’, killing the bacteria known to cause caries in less than 60 seconds. Named ‘Keep 32′ after the number of teeth in the mouth, researchers Jose Cordova and Erich Astudillo hope the product could be used in toothpastes, mouthwashes, floss and even food. Chemical trials have shown that the cavity-causing bacteria Streptococcus mutans can be eliminated for hours with the molecule. […] Procter & Gamble and five other chemical giants are fighting for the patent. [British Dental Journal]

A new antibiotic-resistant form of gonorrhoea could be ‘worse than Aids,’ according to some US doctors.

A biopharmaceutical company will know this year whether an antibody produced using a unique technique can prevent chronic migraines.

Why do cardio exercise when you could just do cocaine?

The market for methadone vomit in prison is lively.

Capital punishment in China: A populist instrument of social governance.

Followup: Getting killed by falling objects (pianos, anvils, etc) happens more often than you might think.

Who Me smelled strongly of fecal matter, and was issued in pocket atomizers intended to be unobtrusively sprayed on a German officer. [Thanks Tim]

3D-Printed Gun’s Blueprints Downloaded 100,000 Times In Two Days (With Some Help From Kim Dotcom).

The State Department is forcing Defcad, known as the Pirate Bay of 3D printing, to remove its 3D-printable gun files.

Bulletproof Whiteboards And The Marketing Of School Safety.

Child Abuse Billboard Contains ‘Secret Message’ Not Visible to Adults.

Are all telephone calls recorded and accessible to the US government? A former FBI counterterrorism agent claims that this is the case.

I don’t believe that the NSA could save every domestic phone call, not at this time. Possibly after the Utah data center is finished, but not now.

The future of a home computer controlled by your eyes may be far closer than you think.

Voina (or “War” to give them their English name) are a radical art group concerned with challenging the Russian establishment. [Thanks Yvonne]

The four are members of a new idol group, Machikado Keiki Japan, and stocks play an important part in their performances. “We base our costumes on the price of the Nikkei average of the day. For example, when the index falls below 10,000 points, we go on stage with really long skirts,” Mori explained. The higher stocks rise, the shorter their dresses get. With the Nikkei index ending above 13,000, the four went without skirts altogether on the day of their interview with The Japan Times, instead wearing only lacy shorts. [Japan Times]

What would happen if a large chunk (1/8th) of our Earth was suddenly removed?

Doubling the efficiency of solar devices would completely change the economics of renewable energy. Here is a design that just might make it possible.

10 New Things Science Says About Moms.

Restaurant menu psychology: tricks to make us order more.

The traditional view is that words can’t survive for more than 8,000 to 9,000 years. Linguists identify 15,000-year-old ‘ultraconserved words.’

Ultraconserved words? Really?

Now you can enlarge and denoise your photos, all thanks to basic research.

A blog about trying to find affordable housing in New York City. [Thanks Stella]

Fartscroll. Everyone farts. And now your web pages can too.

Anal Del Ray.

Frances Kaye, a publicity agent, described a movie party she attended at a Palm Springs resort. A live orchestra entertained a thousand-odd guests while a fountain spouted champagne against the backdrop of a desert sky. As partiers circulated, a doctor made rounds like a waiter, dispensing drugs to guests from a bulging sack. On offer were amphetamines and barbituates, standard Hollywood party fare, but guests wanted Miltown. The little white pills “were passed around like peanuts,” Kaye remembered. What she observed about party pill popping was not unique. “They all used to go for ‘up pills’ or ‘down pills,’” one Hollywood regular noted. “But now it’s the ‘don’t-give-a-darn-pills.’” [Andrea Tone/Mindhacks]

The microbiome — the kilogram of microbes that each of us carries around — has been shown to be involved in everything from obesity and type 2 diabetes to behaviour and sexual preferences. The composition and effects of the microbiome are very active areas of research, producing results which have challenged the way we think about the evolution and interactions of organisms, including ourselves. In a paper recently published in the journal Science, researchers showed for the first time that the make up of the microbiome differs between the sexes, linking these differences to changes in hormone levels and disease resistance. […] When female mice were given a testosterone inhibitor along with the bacteria from male mice, the rate of diabetes returned to normal. “It was completely unexpected to find that the sex of an animal determines aspects of their gut microbe composition, that these microbes affect sex hormone levels, and that the hormones in turn regulate an immune-mediated disease,” said Dr. Danska. [Inspiring Science]

Normal vision is essentially a spatial sense that often relies upon touch and movement during and after development, there is often a correlation between how an object looks and how it feels. Moreover, as a child’s senses develop, there is cross-referencing between the various senses. Indeed, where the links between the senses are not made, there may be developmental problems or delays. This should be taken into consideration when training new users of visual prosthetics, artificial retinas, or bionic eyes, suggest researchers in Australia. [EurekAlert]

Hurricane Sandy was the largest storm to hit the northeast U.S. in recorded history, killing 159, knocking out power to millions, and causing $70 billion in damage in eight states. Sandy also put the vulnerability of critical infrastructure in stark relief by paralyzing subways, trains, road and air traffic, flooding hospitals, crippling electrical substations, and shutting down power and water to tens of millions of people. But one of the larger infrastructure failures is less appreciated: sewage overflow. Six months after Sandy, data from the eight hardest hit states shows that 11 billion gallons of untreated and partially treated sewage flowed into rivers, bays, canals, and in some cases, city streets, largely as a result of record storm-surge flooding that swamped the region’s major sewage treatment facilities. To put that in perspective, 11 billion gallons is equal to New York’s Central Park stacked 41 feet high with sewage, or more than 50 times the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The vast majority of that sewage flowed into the waters of New York City and northern New Jersey in the days and weeks during and after the storm. [Climate Central | PDF]

A new report shows that, despite the rapid spread of renewable technologies, the energy produced today is just as “dirty” as it was 20 years ago.

Conversations with evil men. For most of the men I spoke with, it was the story of killing children that was the hardest, the hardest to remember, the hardest to get them to talk about. So that was hopeful, that there did seem to be red lines. What was depressing was that it was the opposite when it came to women.

Men are, by a huge margin, the sex responsible for violent, sexual and other serious crime. The cost of masculine crime.

Record number of killers and rapists being released from upstate prisons, many returning to NYC. The freshly sprung rogues are a dark remnant of the crack epidemic that plagued the city in the 1980s and 1990s, when homicides hit an all-time high and drug dealers ruled entire blocks of the city.

Last summer, in the dead of night, three peace activists penetrated the exterior of Y-12 in Tennessee, supposedly one of the most secure nuclear-weapons facilities in the United States. A drifter, an 82-year-old nun and a house painter. They face trial next week on charges that fall under the sabotage section of the U.S. criminal code

Pennsylvania judge sentenced to 28 years in prison for selling teens to private prisons.

Gypsy law leverages superstition to enforce desirable conduct in Gypsy societies where government is unavailable and simple ostracism is ineffective. According to Gypsy law, unguarded contact with the lower half of the human body is ritually polluting, ritual defilement is physically contagious, and non-Gypsies are in an extreme state of such defilement. These superstitions repair holes in simple ostracism among Gypsies, enabling them to secure social cooperation without government. [PDF]

Google Search Terms Can Predict the Stock Market.

This paper presents 12 facts about the mortgage market. [Fact 2: No mortgage was “designed to fail.”] The authors argue that the facts refute the popular story that the crisis resulted from financial industry insiders deceiving uninformed mortgage borrowers and investors. [PDF]

Google Glass is the future – and the future has awful battery life.

New Camera Inspired by Insect Eyes.

Companies will soon require that workers use their own smartphone on the job. 38% expect to stop providing devices to workers by 2016.

In China, the license plates can cost more than the car.

Cops ticket armless man for not wearing seatbelt.

According to Argentinian tabloid, a Brazilian woman recently attempted to murder her husband using her vagina.

Making sacrifices for your partner after a stressful day may not be beneficial, new UA research suggests.

Greater use of “I” and “me” as a mark of interpersonal distress.

Are Vocal Homophobes Really Just Homosexuals in the Closet?

We decided on a seven-day fast. The plan was to go a full week without eating or drinking anything except water.

How bowling pins are made.

How petals shape up.

Cattle brands, those unique markings seared into animals’ hides with a hot iron, must comply with a rigorous set of standards and are developed using a specific language ruled by its own unique syntax and morphology. […] When it comes to getting your brand approved by the authorities, location is as important as design. The reason? The same brand can be registered in the same country as long as its located on a different part of the animal. [Smithsonian | More: How To Design A Brand]

Invasive predator fish that can live out of water for days to be hunted in Central Park.

Facts that sound like “BS” but are actually true. The city of Chicago was raised by several feet during the 1860s without disrupting daily life or businesses closing down to solve a drainage problem. Entire buildings, shopping centers, sidewalks and hotels were all lifted up manually by laborers using jackscrews while people went about their daily lives, shopped and dined. In one case, a large hotel was raised off the ground even while guests stayed on oblivious of what was going on underneath them.

IBM researchers have produced a microscopic stop-motion film featuring a hero made up of just a few individual atoms.

The world first web page, posted on April 30, 1993.

“This a composite of all of Jerry Sienfeld’s girlfriends,” Richard Prince explains.

Getting old.

so my parents were gone for 2 days and I switched most of our family photos with pictures of steve buscemi…

Sunset Boulevard, 1883.

Man with Tourette Syndrome not allowed to board plane after saying ‘bomb.’

The guy on the roof… why is he hiding behind such heavy pixelation?

Researchers placed an atomic clock on the ground, and another one in a high speed aircraft. The scientists found that less time passed on the clock in the plane. The faster we move, the slower time passes; and if we travel fast enough, theoretically we could go backwards. [IEET]

In the early 1990s, psychiatrist Thomas Wehr conducted an experiment in which a group of people were plunged into darkness for 14 hours every day for a month. It took some time for their sleep to regulate but by the fourth week the subjects had settled into a very distinct sleeping pattern. They slept first for four hours, then woke for one or two hours before falling into a second four-hour sleep. […] In 2001, historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech published a seminal paper, drawn from 16 years of research, revealing a wealth of historical evidence that humans used to sleep in two distinct chunks. […] A doctor’s manual from 16th Century France even advised couples that the best time to conceive was not at the end of a long day’s labour but “after the first sleep”, when “they have more enjoyment” and “do it better”. Ekirch found that references to the first and second sleep started to disappear during the late 17th Century. [BBC]

In 1884, Scientific American asked and answered the famous question, “if a tree were to fall on an uninhabited island, would there be any sound?” […] “If there be no ears to hear, there will be no sound.” [...] Dolphins, for instance, hear 150–150,000 Hz oscillations, whereas humans hear in the range of 20–20,000 Hz. We perceive only as much of reality as our mechanisms of transduction, our sensory organs, afford us. The remainder, the un-transduced portion, is lost to oblivion (or to instrumentation). Transduction induces both veridical representation and editorializing on the biological value of events and objects, such as fright at the apprehension of threat. Morality, perhaps counterintuitively, begins with editorialized sensation. […] Churchland describes her project as examining the platform upon which morality is constructed. Her thesis is that the platform is maternal attachment to young. The largest single factor in human brain evolution is our exaggerated juvenile phase, during much of which we are helpless. This surely exerted strong selective pressure for parental behavior, care for kin. Churchland argues this is the forerunner of care for kith and strangers. Haidt, drawing from cross-cultural psychology, argues that the normative bedrock is not monolithic. He proposes six innate dimensions about which we are predisposed toward moralizing: harm-care, fairness-cheating, liberty-oppression, loyalty-betrayal, authority-subversion and sanctity-degradation. [The American Interest]

Despite an understanding of the perception and consequences of apologies for their recipients, little is known about the consequences of interpersonal apologies, or their denial, for the offending actor. In two empirical studies, we examined the unexplored psychological consequences that follow from a harm-doer’s explicit refusal to apologize. Results showed that the act of refusing to apologize resulted in greater self-esteem than not refusing to apologize. Moreover, apology refusal also resulted in increased feelings of power/control and value integrity, both of which mediated the effect of refusal on self-esteem. [European Journal of Social Psychology/Wiley]

Proponents of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) claim that certain eye-movements are reliable indicators of lying. According to this notion, a person looking up to their right suggests a lie whereas looking up to their left is indicative of truth telling. Despite widespread belief in this claim, no previous research has examined its validity. […] Three studies provided no evidence to support the notion that the patterns of eye-movements promoted by many NLP practitioners aid lie detection. This is in line with findings from a considerable amount of previous work showing that facial clues (including eye movements) are poor indicators of deception. [PLoS]

Face recognition is supposed to be fast. However, the actual speed at which faces can be recognized remains unknown. To address this issue, we report two experiments run with speed constraints. […] Results indicate that the fastest speed at which a face can be recognized is around 360–390 ms. Such latencies are about 100 ms longer than the latencies recorded in similar tasks in which subjects have to detect faces among other stimuli. [Frontiers]

When we recognize someone, we integrate information from across their face into a perceptual whole, and do so using a specialized brain region. Recognizing other kinds of objects does not engage such specific brain areas, and is achieved in a much more parts-based way. […] The composite effect refers to the fact that people find it difficult to recognize the top half of a face if it is shown lined up with the bottom half of a different face, because we can’t help integrating the two halves into a new whole. People have trouble recognizing other primate faces when they are upside down, but only show the composite effect for human faces. [University of Newcastle]

Plastic Surgery Blamed for Making All Miss Korea Contestants Look Alike. Update: The assumption is now that the contestants wore their make-up in a similar style and, more likely, that the same person Photoshopped them.

Their research provides the first evidence that people’s visual biases change when surrounded by members of their own group. “Having one’s group or posse around actually changes the perceived seriousness of the threat,” said Joseph Cesario, lead author on the study and assistant professor of psychology.

Can the friend of my friend be my enemy? Structural balance theory considers the positive or negative ties between three individuals, or triads, and suggests that “the friend of my enemy is my enemy” triangle is more stable and should be more common than “the friend of my friend is my enemy” triangle. Another configuration, “the friend of my friend is my friend,” is considered to also be a stable configuration in the social network. The last possible triangle, “the enemy of my enemy is my enemy,” presages an unstable state, according to the theory. The potential power of structural balance theory is its ability to predict patterns in the structure of the whole social network and also predict changes that occur over time, as unstable triads are expected to change to stable ones. [NIMBioS]

The problem with human-resource managers is that they are human. They have biases; they make mistakes. But with better tools, they can make better hiring decisions, say advocates of “big data”. Software that crunches piles of information can spot things that may not be apparent to the naked eye. […] Some insights are counter-intuitive. […] For customer-support calls, people with a criminal background actually perform a bit better. [Economist]

There were approximately 32 million users of psychedelic drugs in the United States in 2010.

2,000 to 4,000 businesses now producing marijuana for legal purposes. Total sales: $1.2 billion to $1.3 billion last year.

1 million hours of psychiatrist time wasted yearly on phone approval for hospitalization.

Research suggests that mental illnesses lie along a spectrum — but the field’s latest diagnostic manual still splits them apart.

Those scientists had stumbled into a parallel world of pseudo-academia, complete with prestigiously titled conferences and journals that sponsor them. Many of the journals and meetings have names that are nearly identical to those of established, well-known publications and events. [NY Times]

U.S. government to spend $890K on nothing.

There Were Penguins on the Floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

Cocaine Caused Financial Crisis, Ex-UK Drug Czar Says

450,000 people had robot-assisted surgery last year, making Intuitive Surgical, the maker of the da Vinci machine, one of the hottest stocks around. Hospitals across the country embrace the cutting-edge surgical device but criticism is mounting. CNBC’s Herb Greenberg investigates allegations of problems in the operating room in his latest documentary, “The da Vinci Debate.”

The world of underground surgery for healthy people who feel that their limb is not part of their body and needs to be removed.

The kings of the Spanish Habsburg dynasty (1516–1700) frequently married close relatives in such a way that uncle-niece, first cousins and other consanguineous unions were prevalent in that dynasty. In the historical literature, it has been suggested that inbreeding was a major cause responsible for the extinction of the dynasty when the king Charles II, physically and mentally disabled, died in 1700 and no children were born from his two marriages, but this hypothesis has not been examined from a genetic perspective. In this article, this hypothesis is checked by computing the inbreeding coefficient of the Spanish Habsburg kings from an extended pedigree up to 16 generations in depth and involving more than 3,000 individuals. […] It is speculated that the simultaneous occurrence in Charles II of two different genetic disorders […] could explain most of the complex clinical profile of this king, including his impotence/infertility which in last instance led to the extinction of the dynasty. [PLoS | Nature]

Scientists Unsure Why Female Flies Expel Sperm and Eat It.

Woman arrested for trying to sell her kids on Facebook.

Humans feel empathy for robots.

Machines with the ability to attack targets without any human intervention must be banned before they are developed for use on the battlefield, campaigners against “killer robots” urged on Tuesday.

You probably haven’t heard of HD Moore, but up to a few weeks ago every Internet device in the world, perhaps including some in your own home, was contacted roughly three times a day by a stack of computers that sit overheating his spare room. “I have a lot of cooling equipment to make sure my house doesn’t catch on fire,” says Moore, who leads research at computer security company Rapid7. […] Many of the two terabytes (2,000 gigabytes) worth of replies Moore received from 310 million IPs indicated that they came from devices vulnerable to well-known flaws, or configured in a way that could to let anyone take control of them. [Technology Review]

I’d get online and look up and 40 minutes would have gone by, and my reading time for the night would have been pissed away, and all I would have learned was that, you know, a certain celebrity had lived in her car awhile, or that a cat had dialled 911. […] It’s interesting because (1) this tendency does seem to alter brain function and (2) through some demonic cause-and-effect, our technology is exactly situated to exploit the crappier angles of our nature: gossip, self-promotion, snarky curiosity. It’s almost as if totalitarianism thought better of the jackboots and decided to go another way: smoother, more flattering – and impossible to resist. [George Saunders/Guardian]

One way to undermine social media monopolies is to refuse to contribute to the communicational economy they are based upon: don’t generate exploitable signals, stay quiet — and ask how this might be developed as a common response. Given the naturalized assumption that ‘more communication’ will automatically produce ‘more freedom’, suggestions, like this one, that are based on doing less of it might provoke hostility. However, in the case of the social media industries, communication is cultivated not in the interests of freedom, but in the interests of growth; social media wants to capture more of you through your transactions. Moreover, through this process communications are not made ‘more free’ but tend rather to become less open — certainly in the sense that they are commoditized. [First Monday]

Boards of Canada code found hidden in messageboard banner; might include title of new record.

As most of us over at io9 have come to understand, Kinja sucks tremendous balls, but not just any balls; the balls Kinja sucks are actually singularities, over the event horizon of which it has passed, so that it may achieve infinite sucking. [reluctant.meatbag/gawker]

This paper proposes that networks can act as covers which allow actors to participate in markets while maintaining a plausible excuse that they are not. [PDF]

Sites listing an individual’s real name have become common. This shift towards real names is not merely a technical convenience, but a specific political turn. As pseudonyms are often associated with Internet trolling and cyberbullying, it is useful to track the use of pseudonyms in history and to consider many of their positive functions.

Eye Tracker Finds Which Ads Actually Stick, Pushes ‘Cost-Per-Visual’ As New Madison Avenue Currency. [Thanks Tim]

An “electronic tattoo” containing flexible electronic circuits can now record some complex brain activity as accurately as an EEG.

In one study, phantom phone vibrations were experienced by 68% of the people surveyed, with 87% of those feeling them weekly, and 13% daily. [Thanks Tim]

Turning a standard LCD monitor into touchscreen with a $5 wall-mounted sensor.

We’re basically asking the 70 year-old fuselage of a DC-9 to go supersonic. […] Same with the ad industry model. The system is set up to reward layers, reward churn (hours-based work) and reward quick, incremental successes Vs. real ‘innovation’ or cutting edge and efficient ideas that could transform business. Whether that’s evidenced by brand managers who simply need to move the needle in order to get promoted or ad execs who need to get an award to jump up in a position, it’s apparent everybody’s pushing for short term gains, small passes that move the needle just a few points and add enough time and layers to bill. This is what clients are paying for, encouraging and perpetuating. […] One example is media. Often, agencies are presented with a media schedule before there’s even a concept. […] It’s kind of like handing us an expensive megaphone and only then being told to try to soothe a baby to sleep. […] (there are plenty of those ‘innovative’ ideas sitting around anyway, but most don’t get made in a system that rewards overspending Vs. outthinking). [Tim Geoghegan]

New research shows how Shakespeare’s grammatical trickery excites the “language network.”

Vladimir Nabokov, 1969 BBC Interview.

Last Two Speakers of Dying Language Refuse to Talk to Each Other.

Slash (/): Not Just a Punctuation Mark Anymore.

Adobe: We’re working on a Photoshop feature that will help you reduce blur in your photos.

MoMA’s Jackson Pollock Conservation Project.

Kenneth Appel, famous for being part of the team that created the first great computer-aided proof of the “four-color” theorem which says that any map can be colored with four colors without bumping colors against each other, has died.

Decoding The City: The Road Graffiti Placed by Utility Workers.

This month marks 20 years since work started to wipe away one of the most striking features of the Hong Kong landscape for good. A 2.7-hectare enclave of opium parlours, whorehouses and gambling dens run by triads.

Does riding a motorcycle reduce your sperm count?

Why White People are Called Caucasian? [via Sunday Reading]

The Eat-This-Then-Your-Sweat-Will-Smell-Like-Rose-Water Experiment.

Dubai police add Ferrari to fleet of patrol cars weeks after unveiling Lamborghini.

Welcome to adverCar.com, where you get paid to drive to work! Earn up to $100 a month the easy way- by driving as you normally do in a day.  

Crashing Through Manhattan In The Fake Google Driverless Car.

3 September 1967, the day Sweden switched from driving on the left-hand side of the road to the right.

Cell towers disguised (poorly) as trees.

Rocketman.

Videos: Feeling and Retouch.

Has anyone ever been killed by a falling piano?

As life has evolved, its complexity has increased exponentially, just like Moore’s law. Now geneticists have extrapolated this trend backwards and found that by this measure, life is older than the Earth itself. [The Physics arXiv Blog]

Researchers at the University of Leeds may have solved a key puzzle about how objects from space could have kindled life on Earth. While it is generally accepted that some important ingredients for life came from meteorites bombarding the early Earth, scientists have not been able to explain how that inanimate rock transformed into the building blocks of life. This new study shows how a chemical, similar to one now found in all living cells and vital for generating the energy that makes something alive, could have been created when meteorites containing phosphorus minerals landed in hot, acidic pools of liquids around volcanoes, which were likely to have been common across the early Earth. [University of Leeds]

Modern humans are estimated to be about 200,000 years old, but 99% of progress has occurred in the last 10,000 years. What were we doing before that? […] Low Population: Until about 10000 BCE, world population never exceeded 15 million and mostly was around 1 million. Urban World History The present population of the world is 7 billion and 1 million is comparable to the population of a medium size city. When you have just a couple of million people spread in this big wide world, there is little that humanity could collectively build. Even if we assume that early human being could be as productive as us, their civilization could produce less than 1/1000 of what our society could do. Life Expectancy: From that point until 20th century, we had a very low life expectancy (about 30 years). Imagine if we all died by the time we reached 30, how much could we learn from our parents and how much can we teach our kids. Given the low life expectancy of early humans, there was not much time to learn and teach. We just started randomly doing whatever we could to survive. [Quora]

What he found is that employers would rather call back someone with no relevant experience who’s only been out of work for a few months than someone with more relevant experience who’s been out of work for longer than six months. In other words, it doesn’t matter how much experience you have. It doesn’t matter why you lost your previous job — it could have been bad luck. If you’ve been out of work for more than six months, you’re essentially unemployable. [Washington Post]

From assembly line robots to ATMs and self-checkout terminals, each year intelligent machines take over more jobs formerly held by humans; and experts predict this trend will not stop anytime soon. […] “By 2015, robots should be able to assist teachers in the classroom. By 2018, they should be able to teach on their own, and this will cause many teachers to lose their jobs.” […] The ultimate tool to replace doctors could be the nanorobot, a tiny microscopic-size machine that can whiz through veins replacing aging and damaged cells with new youthful ones. This nanowonder with expected development time of mid-to-late 2030s could eliminate nearly all need for human doctors. […] Experts estimate by 2035, 50 million jobs will be lost to machines […] and by the end of the century, or possibly much sooner, all jobs will disappear. Some believe the final solution will take the form of a Basic Income Guarantee, made available as a fundamental right for everyone. […] America should create a $25,000 annual stipend for every U.S. adult, Brain says, which would be phased in over two-to-three decades. The payments could be paid for by ending welfare programs, taxing automated systems, adding a consumption tax, allowing ads on currency, and other creative ideas. [IEET]

Men can’t read women’s emotions, study confirms.

People who worry habitually about separation and abandonment – the “anxiously attached” – tend to be highly skilled at lie detection, an attribute that means they excel at poker.

How Can I Avoid Procrastination?

How does the public engage with the new knowledge that advances in neuroscience produces?

Do Dogs Try to Hide Theft of Food?

Did you know Disney created its own confetti called ‘Flutterfetti,’ which was actually engineered to ‘flutter’ in the air better? Or that the parks will pump out a vanilla scent on Main Street because the smell triggers fond memories? [The Credits]

Man convicted for stealing more than $376,000 worth of copy machine toner while employed by NYC law firm.

Hedge-fund manager John Paulson’s wager on gold wiped out almost $1 billion of his personal wealth in the past two trading days as the precious metal plummeted 13 percent. Paulson started the year with about $9.5 billion invested across his hedge funds, of which 85 percent was in gold share classes. [Businessweek]

Gold Sell-Off Biggest in 30 Years.

What Happened The Last Time We Saw Gold Drop Like This?

Why is gold plunging? The most important factor is that global inflation is falling, reducing gold’s value as a hedge against rising prices.

Did Goldman Sachs release a note encouraging clients to short gold right after receiving the Fed’s FOMC leak information, due to the leak itself?

Cocaine Caused Financial Crisis, Ex-UK Drug Czar Says. [Thanks GG]

Virtual Bitcoin Mining Is a Real-World Environmental Disaster.

Trader pleads guilty to making unauthorized purchase of nearly $1 billion in Apple shares.

Apple is said to be getting very close to nailing down streaming licensing agreements with Universal Music Group and Warner Music.

Nobody really understands why listening to music — which, unlike sex or food, has no intrinsic value — can trigger such profoundly rewarding experiences. Salimpoor and other neuroscientists are trying to figure it out with the help of brain scanners.

Using brainwaves for authentication, instead of passwords.

Facebook Charging $1 Million For New, Intrusive Video Ads That Will Run In Users News Feeds. TV-Like ads can be bought for four broad demographic swaths.

The US Congress has severely scaled back the Stock Act, the law to stop lawmakers and their staff from trading on insider information, in under-the-radar votes that have been sharply criticised by advocates of political transparency. The changes mean Congressional and White House staff members will not have to post details of their shareholdings online. They will also make online filing optional for the president, vice-president, members of Congress and congressional candidates. […] The Stop Trading On Congressional Knowledge – or “Stock” – Act prohibited them from buying or selling stocks, commodities or futures based on non-public information they obtain during the course of their work. It also banned them from disseminating non-public information regarding pending legislation that could be used for investment purposes. […] Political watchdogs were dismayed. “Are we going to return to the days when public can use the internet to research everything except what their government is doing?” asked Lisa Rosenberg of the Sunlight Foundation, which monitors money in politics. [Financial Times]

The Federal Reserve said early Wednesday that it inadvertently e-mailed the minutes of its March policy meeting a day early to some congressional staffers and trade groups. Late this afternoon, the central bank released to reporters a list of more than 150 e-mail addresses that it says received the early e-mail on Tuesday afternoon. (The minutes had been scheduled for release a day later.) The list includes e-mail addresses for dozens of congressional staffers, along with contacts — many of them government-relations executives — at major banks, lobbying firms and trade groups. [WSJ]

We will provide the full list of people who manipulate and cheat the market shortly, but for now we are curious to see how the Fed will spin that EVERYONE got an advance notice of its minutes a day in advance without this becoming a material issue with the regulators, and just how many billions in hush money it will take to push this all under the rug. [Zero Hedge]

In psychology literature, “ask for the moon, settle for less” is known as the “door in the face” (DITF) technique. Unlike the “foot in the door” technique, in which the fulfillment of a small request makes people more likely to fulfill a large request, DITF uses an unreasonable request as a way of making somebody more likely to subsequently fulfill a more moderate request. The technique was first demonstrated by Robert Cialdini’s famous 1975 experiment in which students became more likely to volunteer for a single afternoon after first being asked to volunteer for an afternoon every week for two years. So, can research on DITF shed some light on why pursuing an assault weapons ban didn’t pan out? [peer-reviewed by my neurons]

Let’s say you ran one of the Fortune 10 companies. And for some reason, you wanted to ensure that this business would be hated by its customers, forever. What would you do? […] What I’d do is create a policy that makes it really hard for my company’s employees to ask questions of my company’s customers. I’d make it a struggle to collect feedback. In order to collect any form of feedback, I’d make it so that you had to first ask for permission from an underfunded and understaffed component of the central office of my corporation. Of course I’d also make it take at least six months to get this approval. That way, most of the people who wanted to ask my customers a question were immediately discouraged from doing so. […] I’d staff this office with economists and lawyers. […] Then, just to be especially perverse, what I’d do is encourage my company to use social media. I’d create policies around it, pushing my company to go online on Facebook and Twitter and stuff, and to have “authentic conversations” with our customers. I’d tell them that it was totally cool to use social media to informally do whatever they wanted, except to use that information to inform product or service decisions. This way, my employees will be completely cut off from their customers needs. And the only employees that actually make it to the customers are the people who know how to talk to the economists. That’ll make it so whatever inputs and outputs of my business are so incomprehensible that they’ll just create more frustration rather than solve problems. [And customers will] think they’re giving input to the company without that input actually making it anywhere useful. It’s a machievellian scenario that, sadly, I didn’t make up. This “corporate policy” is actually a law that makes your government act like this, and it’s nefariously named the “Paperwork Reduction Act.” It was the last bill signed into law by Jimmy Carter in 1980. [Information Diet]

A judge whose smartphone disrupted a hearing in his own courtroom has held himself in contempt and paid $25 for the infraction.

There are anecdotal reports that men who wear (Scottish) kilts have better sperm quality and better fertility. But how much is true?

In 1983 psychiatrist Giles Brindley demonstrated the first drug treatment for erectile dysfunction in a rather unique way. He took the drug and demonstrated his stiff wicket to the audience mid-way through his talk.

According to a meta-analysis published in the August edition of the Journal of Family Medicine, colon cleansing provides no known health benefits, only dangerous side effects including, in rare cases, death. [Gastroenterology & Endoscopy News] More: How to Make a Coffee Enema [both via Improbable]

“GB” is a 28 year old man with a curious condition: his optic nerves are in the wrong place. Most people have an optic chiasm, a crossroads where half of the signals from each eye cross over the midline, in such a way that each half of the brain gets information from one side of space. GB, however, was born with achiasma – the absence of this crossover. It’s an extremely rare disorder in humans, although it’s more common in some breeds of animals, such as Belgian sheepdogs. […] In the absence of a left-right crossover, all of the signals from GB’s left eye end up in his left visual cortex, and vice versa. But the question was, how does the brain make sense of it? Normally, remember, each half of the cortex corresponds to half our visual field. But in GB’s brain, each half has to cope with the whole visual field – twice as much space (even though it’s getting no more signals than normal.) [Neuroskeptic]

Struggling, trapped bed bugs are impaled by trichomes on several legs and are unable to free themselves. Scientists document how beans create a natural bedbug trap and, potentially, how it could be used to improve bedbug purging efforts.

Bears In Russia Are Addicted To Jet Fuel, Sniff It To Get High And Pass Out. [Thanks Erwin]

Traveller arrested smuggling live hummingbirds in his trousers.

Mexico City tries to get salt shakers off tables.

Pick up a pay phone anywhere in New York City this month and you will be transported back in time to a critical moment in New York history: 1993. [Thanks Tim]

James Joyce’s grandson describes image on official commemorative coin as an ‘insult,’ says coin fiasco is typical of Ireland’s treatment of his family.

1913: When Hitler, Trotsky, Tito, Freud and Stalin all lived in Vienna.

Andy Warhol took the subject of homosexual obsession to the big screen [in 1965]. The film was “My Hustler.”

The Feminists: The future is distant 1992, and everything’s gone to hell in a handbasket since the female coup.

A man who apparently blew himself up with explosives was known to record video of his neighbors from his property, prompting calls to police from residents. [Thanks Tim]

Why did kamikaze pilots wear helmets?

The revival of an extinct species is no longer a fantasy. But is it a good idea?

During an interview what’s an appropriate answer when asked “where do you see yourself in 5 years?”

The 12 Best Very Small Agencies to Work For in Government.

What does the United States export?

Martin John Callanan used a very powerful 3D microscope to take 400-megapixel images of the lowest denomination coin from each of the world’s 166 active currencies.

11 very unusual elevators.

List of patents for machines that do not and, by their nature, cannot work as described.

‪Turn Empty Water Bottles Into Alcohol Fueled Rockets‬.

Central Park, top view.

Vacuum-Wrapped Tokyo Couples.

Fuck your frame cluster and bench tableau with a cactus on top.

Unhappyhipsters.com