Playing Moderately Hard to Get — Undergraduate college student participants imagined a potential romantic partner who reciprocated a low (reciprocating attraction one day a week), moderate (reciprocating attraction three days a week), high (reciprocating attraction five days a week), or unspecified degree of attraction (no mention of reciprocation). Participants then rated their degree of attraction toward the potential partner. […] The results support the notion that playing moderately hard to get elicits more intense feelings of attraction from potential suitors than playing too easy or too hard to get. [Interpersona]
Woman caught sneaking into U.S. in suitcase
Man arrested after Google+ sends automated invitation to ex with restraining order.
They approached fellow college students of another gender and asked one of three questions: (a) “Would you go out with me tonight?” (b) “Would you come over to my apartment tonight?” or (c) “Would you go to bed with me tonight?”
Divorced individuals face complex situations when they have children with different ex-partners, or even more, when their new partners have children of their own. The physics of custody.
Participants had worse memory for objects when they took photos of them.
Childhood amnesia kicks in around age 7
Walking through doorways causes forgetting
When writing essays on disgust, teenage girls in Lucknow, India, listed, among other things, feces, urine, toilets, sweat, menstrual blood, cut hair, impurities of childbirth, vomit, open wound, saliva, dirty feet, bad breath, nose picking, dirty nails, clothes that have been worn, flies, maggots, lice, mouse in a curry, rats, stray dog, meat, fish, pigs, garbage dump, sick person, beggars, touching someone of lower caste, crowded trains, kissing in public, betrayal. […] Women in Burkina Faso mentioned feces, dirty latrine, dirty food, diarrhea, flies on food, sores, rubbish in the yard, worms, sexual relations before a child is weaned, smelly drains, dirty clothes, sick people, pigs, vomit. [Natural History]
At the beginning, Walter pursues synthesis using pseudoephedrine. This is used in the real world, as well as in Breaking Bad by many meth cooks. However, by applying his knowledge of chemistry, his experimental abilities, and a half-way professional lab set-up, Walter is able to achieve much better results. The base substance, pseudoephedrine is a plant-based phenyl ethylamine alkaloid and is used commercially in treatments for nasal and sinus congestion and can be extracted from these treatments. Due to the restrictions on sale, an extensive procurement network is required, which generally means involving a large number of drug addicts, in order to secure the necessary quantities. As the drug addicts can really only acquire the smallest of quantities each time by this “smurfing”, which involves either getting prescriptions for it or stealing it, the availability of this base substance is always a critical factor. [Chemistry Views ]
Why didn't the creator of Hashtag patent the concept?
"Jelly" has been a closely guarded secret. […] Now, it has revealed itself. It's a way to ask your friends questions. Watch the video and be not amazed. Watch as, for the first time ever, a dude takes a picture of a tree in the woods and sends it to someone else because he doesn't know what he's looking at—Yahoo! Answers for the bourgeoisie. Have you ever posted on Facebook, asking if anyone knows a good barber? Or tweeted to your followers asking if "House of Cards" is any good? That's Jelly—a search engine that uses your friends—only more convoluted than ever before. […] Jelly says "it's not hard to imagine that the true promise of a connected society is people helping each other." This truly is a revolution in engorged, cloying, dumbstruck rhetoric, a true disruption of horse shit. With Jelly, "you can crop, reframe, zoom, and draw on your images to get more specific"—you can also do that with countless other apps. But that doesn't matter—this is a vanity project, remember. It's an opportunity for Biz Stone to Vimeopine on the nature of human knowledge, interconnectedness, and exotic flora. It's an app for the sake of apps—a software Fabergé egg. [ValleyWag]
App Turns Smartphone Into Virtual Cane for the Blind
How To Make Your Face (Digitally) Unforgettable
Research shows eye-reflections in photos could be used to identify criminals.
That’s particularly useful in Japan and South Korea where streets are rarely numbered in chronological order but in other ways such as the order in which they were constructed. How Google Cracked House Number Identification in Street View
The 14-nanometer silicon chips that are now heading to mobile phones and elsewhere may eventually reach 7nm or even 5nm, but that may be it. Moore's Law created a stable era for technology, and now that era is nearing its end.
One night in 1971, files were stolen from an F.B.I. office near Philadelphia. They proved that the bureau was spying on thousands of Americans. The case was unsolved, until now. [NY Times]
Tighter Access To U.S. Deaths List Has Researchers Grim.
There are many philosophical questions surrounding the notion of lying. Is it ever morally acceptable to lie? Can we acquire knowledge from people who might be lying to us? More fundamental, however, is the question of what, exactly, constitutes the concept of lying. According to one traditional definition, lying requires intending to deceive. More recently, Thomas Carson has suggested that lying requires warranting the truth of what you do not believe. This paper examines these two prominent definitions and some cases that seem to pose problems for them. Importantly, theorists working on this topic fundamentally disagree about whether these problem cases are genuine instances of lying and, thus, serve as counterexamples to the definitions on offer. To settle these disputes, we elicited judgments about the proposed counterexamples from ordinary language users unfettered by theoretical bias. The data suggest that everyday speakers of English count bald-faced lies and proviso lies as lies. Thus, we claim that a new definition is needed to capture common usage. [Philosophical Psychology]
Increase in the number of books challenged or banned across the U.S. in 2013.
Three computer scientists at Stony Brook University in New York think they found some rules through a computer program that might predict which books will be successful. The algorithm had as much as 84 percent accuracy when applied to already published manuscripts. If so, it comes much too late for the more than 20 book editors who turned down J.K. Rowling's first manuscript about a boy wizard named Harry Potter. They said it is the first study to correlate between a book's stylistic elements and its popularity and critical acclaim. [Inside Science]
@GSElevator Shopping Book Proposal
Kanye West’s Attorneys File Suit Over ‘Coinye West’
First bitcoin ATM to debut in NYC You put in US dollars and receive bitcoins back on your phone.
High cost of living, fewer part-time jobs drive artists out of New York.
Magyar was immersed in a long-running techno-art project called Stainless, creating high-resolution images of speeding subway trains and their passengers, using sophisticated software he created and hardware that he retrofitted himself.
Vanished New York from 2001 to 2013
The Secret World of Men Who Dress Like Dolls
The Paranoid and Obsessive Life of a Mid-Level Bookie
The photo features a real soldier and his girlfriend, according to a San Diego TV station, and the ad is inspired by a real married couple, according to the website of SnoreStop, the company using the ad. […] The ad is selling a throat spray that is supposed to help people stop snoring and thus keep them “together.” [Military Times]
This study solicited the views of 20 young males who exposed their underwear by wearing saggy pants.
Are Germans dour, Brits reserved, and Americans brash? The Inaccuracy of National Character Stereotypes
The community of people who consume their own urine every morning to boost their immunity.
Fate of bones and wood in the Antarctic sea
10 Animals That Went Extinct in 2013
Sometime between 360 and 390 million years ago, a group of fishes made the move to life on land. How do you move a leg that was once a fin?
A mathematical pattern of movement called a Lévy walk describes the foraging behavior of animals from sharks to honey bees, and now for the first time has been shown to describe human hunter-gatherer movement as well.
This study investigated the relationship between foot size and human balance performance.
University study looks at the impact of doing exercise on women’s breasts.
Ballet Dancers doing splits in an MRI scanner [hip study]
What are the most common months for birthdays?
What is the best position to use a laptop?
Facial hair trends from 1842 to 1972
“Synapse the Electronic Magazine,” all issues, as PDFs
Why do we have numbers like 12 and 60 in our system of time units?
What does the 'B' in Benoit B Mandelbrot stand for? Benoit B Mandelbrot. (Mathematician Mandelbrot coined the word fractal – a form of geometric repetition.) [Guardian ]
'Fractal Orgy' Is the First Ever Raw Fractal To Be Banned
One of the most popular puzzles ever created was the Get Off the Earth puzzle, invented by America's premier puzzlist, Sam Loyd, in 1898.
Roman Emperors, Up To AD 476 And Not Including Usurpers, In Order Of How Hardcore Their Deaths Were
This Self-Cleaning Plate May Mean You’ll Never Have To Do The Dishes
This machine is the first step toward a 3-D food printer.
This one is based on a wolf's penis.
Marijuana Overdoses Kill 37 in Colorado On First Day of Legalization
"Everything not saved will be lost"