Triple-Decker Weekly, 25

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The way that the visual centers of men and women's brains works is different, finds new research.
Missing tourist in Iceland joins search for herself. Five Ukrainian women, in an Ukrainian art museum. They are sleeping, or rather pretending to sleep, dressed up as Sleeping Beauty. Men come along and kiss them, on the lips, with each man allowed only one kiss. They have all signed legally binding contracts. If a woman responds to a kiss by opening her eyes and “waking,” she must marry the man. The man must marry the woman. […] There are five Sleeping Beauties total; each takes turns, sleeping on the raised white satin bed for two hours at a time. […] On September 5, the first Sleeping Beauty in Polataiko’s exhibition awoke to a kiss from another woman. Both of them were surprised. […] Now the Sleeping Beauty must wed her “prince.” […] Gay marriage is not allowed in the Ukraine,… Read More...

Triple-Decker Weekly, 24

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If one day is not exactly 24 hours and is in fact 23 hours 56 mins, shouldn't the error add up, and shouldn't we see 12AM becoming noon at some point in time?
At 12 or 13, we started taking buses to New York City and going to raves. I’d wear 60-inch wide jeans called Aura’s E, which was a brand by this girl in Long Island named Aura. I shaved my eyebrows completely off, pierced everything on my face, put platforms on my running sneakers… I’d work day and night in the mall upstate so that I could buy my rave tickets and take bus trips to get all the cool clothes in the city. I found out about everything from shops like Liquid Sky and Satellite Records––they would put flyers out and you had to call hotlines to find out all the rave info. [David Benjamin Sherry] The death of an autoerotic asphyxiation fan ended up providing science with some valuable observations of what happens during choking. On Twitter recently, I've… Read More...

Triple-Decker Weekly, 23

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The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states
Robot learns to recognise itself in mirror. Chinese family car can be driven by remote control. Researchers at the University of Copenhagen have shown that 30 minutes of daily training provide an equally effective loss of weight and body mass as 60 minutes. You walk into your shower and find a spider. You are not an arachnologist. You do, however, know that any one of the four following options is possible: a. The spider is real and harmless. b. The spider is real and venomous. c. Your next-door neighbor, who dislikes your noisy dog, has turned her personal surveillance spider (purchased from “Drones ‘R Us” for $49.95) loose and is monitoring it on her iPhone from her seat at a sports bar downtown. The pictures of you, undressed, are now being relayed on several screens during the break of an… Read More...

Triple-Decker Weekly, 22

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The principal psychological features of any war are hatred, hostility, violence, uncertainty (or fog of war), friction, fear, danger, irrationality, chance, and luck.
Man texts, 'I need to quit texting,' before driving into ravine. Japanese company will 3D print your fetus for $1,275. Pupil dilation reveals where a person’s sexual response falls on the spectrum from gay to straight. Study Finds Germans Incapable of Enjoying Life. When Nietzsche says, as he frequently does, that "the truth is terrible" he has in mind three kinds of terrible truths: (1) the terrible "existential" truths about the human situation (the inevitability of death and suffering); (2) the terrible "moral" truth that "life is essentially something amoral"; and (3) the terrible "epistemic" truth that most of what we think we know about the world around us is illusory. These terrible truths raise Schopenhauer's question: why continue living at all? Nietzsche's answer, from early in his career to the very end, is that only viewed in terms of… Read More...

Triple-Decker Weekly

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Is barefoot running really better?
Scientists have worked out that modern pop music really is louder and does all sound the same. [Reuters] The near-death experience (NDE) is a phenomenon of considerable importance to medicine, neuroscience, neurology, psychiatry, philosophy and religion. Unfortunately, some scientists have been deterred from conducting research upon the NDE by claims that NDE's are evidence for life after death, and sensationalist media reports which impart the air of a pseudoscience to NDE studies. Irrespective of religious beliefs, NDE's are not evidence for life after death on simple logical grounds: death is defined as the final, irreversible end. Anyone who 'returned' did not, by definition, die -- although their mind, brain and body may have been in a very unusual state. […] All features of a classic NDE can be reproduced by the intravenous administration of 50 - 100 mg of ketamine.… Read More...

Triple-Decker Weekly

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A number of shark species go in for oophagy, or uterine cannibalism.
Why is the letter Z associated with sleep? New coating technology promises self-cleaning cars. Smoking Banned Inside Santa Monica Residences. Mating can be dangerous. At least 100 years ago, biologists began to speculate that sex in the animal kingdom could be a very risky business. The noises can attract predators, the male is distracted and he has less energy to fight off an attacker or to run away. Perhaps that is why males almost always attempt to finish so quickly. [LA Times] Women in love less likely to initiate sex, finds study. The rise in women seeking a perfect vagina. Men's friendships with women 'driven by sexual attraction.' Two Myths and Three Facts About the Differences in Men and Women's Brains. Part of the mythology of love promises that loving couples will always want and enjoy sex together, unproblematically, freely and… Read More...

Triple-Decker Weekly

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One definition is that a Type III error occurs when you get the right answer to the wrong question.
"They wanted to know if I had something in my pockets." US man with huge penis stopped at airport. Idaho farm hosts 'weed dating' for singles. A woman says a man claiming to be with a TV show sucked her toe inside an east Georgia Walmart. One definition is that a Type III error occurs when you get the right answer to the wrong question. [Graph Pad] Most people think that even though it is possible that they are dreaming right now, the probability of this is very small, perhaps as small as winning the lottery or being struck by lightning. In fact the probability is quite high. Let’s do the maths. [OUP] At some point in evolution, our ancestors switched from walking on all four limbs to just two, and this transition to bipedalism led to what is referred… Read More...

and that alone is love, that which never becomes something else

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every case is a case of love.
we landed in LA after a 6 hour flight. a friend of aloha’s at the baggage claim who was on our flight, that she didn’t see, appeared wearing a big pair of black sunglasses to hide her big dilated pupils with her head covered in a black jacket hood, whose name was hayley. i slept 3 hours last night the dome-shaped brain muscle. the diane airbus seat 12A, it desiccated my fluids. she was so happy to see aloha omahgah. she offered for us to stay in LA and have dinner and sleep over at her place. i called my parents to tell them about the new plan. we picked up our car at the budget lot, we drove to hayley’s apartment, it was on mccarthy drive, near wilshire boulevard. hayley works at universal music, always has gossips, walked us… Read More...

Triple-Decker Weekly

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When we observe other people we attribute their behavior to their character rather than to their situation. When we think about things that happen to us the opposite holds.
Hollie Stevens (January 4, 1982 – July 3, 2012), American pornographic actress, "Queen of Clown Porn," has passed away. [SF Weekly | Wikipedia] Bees can 'turn back time,' reverse brain aging. When we observe other people we attribute their behavior to their character rather than to their situation – my wife’s carelessness means she loses her keys, your clumsiness means you trip over, his political opinions mean that he got into an argument. When we think about things that happen to us the opposite holds. We downplay our own dispositions and emphasise the role of the situation. Bad luck leads to lost keys, a hidden bump causes trips, or a late train results in an unsuccessful job interview – it’s never anything to do with us. This pattern is so common that psychologists have called it the fundamental attribution error.… Read More...

Triple-Decker Weekly

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I don’t diagnose people I haven’t met.
FEI announces that cloned horses can compete in international competitions. No evidence of aquatic humanoids has ever been found. Survey: 25% of Female Facebook Users Admit to Posting Unflattering Photos of Friends on Purpose. International timekeepers added a second to the clock at midnight universal time Saturday, June 30, going into July 1. How exactly could a squid ‘inseminate’ your mouth? The fact that the concept Americans refer to as “karma” exists across so many different cultures seems both nonsensical and reasonable at the same time. On one hand, there is no evidence that karma actually exists. On the other hand, the belief that “what goes around comes around” is clearly one that leads to more cooperation, increased altruism, and a better chance a society will thrive. […] The fact that karma is useful at the community level doesn’t fully… Read More...

Triple-Decker Weekly

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Life, like bowling, is full of complicating factors, unpredictable variables, plenty of times when there is no right answer.
Hot enough to cook an egg on a sidewalk? Scientists create Wi-Fi that can transmit seven Blu-ray movies per second. You see a shopper trip over in a busy street. Someone else can help. That's what you tell your conscience. This is the Bystander Effect in action - the dilution of our sense of responsibility in the presence of other people - and it's been demonstrated in numerous studies over many years. But life is complicated and psychologists have begun looking at the circumstances that can nullify or even reverse the effect. [BPS] Disease has changed since 1812. People have different diseases, doctors hold different ideas about those diseases, and diseases carry different meanings in society. […] Disease is always generated, experienced, defined, and ameliorated within a social world. Patients need notions of disease that explicate their suffering. Doctors need… Read More...

Triple-Decker Weekly

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Real Rock Drummer for NON-pussy band (L.A.)
 “Deception has been studied as an almost exclusively individual-level phenomenon,” said Tripp Driskell. “You have a hard-nosed detective on one side of a desk and a suspect on the other. But there are many situations today, especially in security settings, in which the opportunity exists to question two or more suspects. The bottom line is that there are many occasions in which people conspire to lie or to deceive. In fact, many terrorist acts are carried out jointly by multiple participants or conspirators, and initial encounters with these suspects are likely to be in a group setting. We believe that the key to distinguishing truthful dyads from deceptive dyads is the concept of transactive memory. Two people describe an event differently if they had actually performed that event together versus if they did not but are fabricating a story about… Read More...

Triple-Decker Weekly

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[Malcolm Gladwell,] “or the enthusiasm which takes off its coat”: History will revere Bill Gates, forget Steve Jobs.
[Malcolm Gladwell,] "or the enthusiasm which takes off its coat": History will revere Bill Gates, forget Steve Jobs. You know the young Marx – I don’t idealise Marx, he was a nasty guy, personally – but he has a wonderful logic. He says: ‘You don’t simply dissolve marriage; divorce means that you retroactively establish that the love was not the true love.’ When love goes away, you retroactively establish that it wasn’t even true love. […] I especially hate when they come to me with personal problems. My standard line is: ‘Look at me, look at my tics, don’t you see that I’m mad? How can you even think about asking a mad man like me to help you in personal problems, no? [Slavoj Žižek] A couple of online articles have discussed whether you would be conscious of being shot… Read More...

Have you read Stendhal?

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Our misfortunes, Doctor, they come from wrong ideas we have about what happens to us.
The experiments conducted at S-76 were designed to identify methods to discern truth from falsehood. They involved the use of people without their knowledge, psychotropics, and literature. The subjects were referred to as books. They were wearing gag bits. They were taught to enjoy confinement and reverse chronological order. The criteria of truth were: 1) the power to follow many paths simultaneously; 2) pliancy (words and fabricated sensations were transformed into first impressions with the ability to alter judgement, taste, and behavior); 3) accumulation (until it reached a limit where the “truth,” in the form of knowledge fragments, became detrimental to stereohell as a whole, which set an upper limit on the size stereohell could reach); 4) an ensemble of laws [the Facilities?]; 5) a second ensemble of laws enclosing the whole system [possibly stereohell itself]; 6) differences and repetitions.… Read More...

Triple-Decker Weekly

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Doug said he hated sleeping with John because his body was very hairy, and he didn’t like the way John smelled.
Dead toddler reanimates at own wake to ask for some water, then re-dies. Over the past half-century, pop hits have become longer, slower and sadder, and they increasingly convey “mixed emotional cues,” according to a study just published in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts. […] Analyzing Top 40 hits from the mid-1960s through the first decade of the 2000s, they find an increasing percentage of pop songs are written using minor modes, which most listeners—including children—associate with gloom and despair. [Pacific Standard] The phenomenon is called “priming”: We aren’t aware that we have perceived a certain stimulus, but it can be proved that we still respond to it. […] Psychologists distinguish between a "System 1" and a "System 2," which control our actions. System 1 represents what we may call intuition. It tirelessly provides us with… Read More...

The questioning of experience and the images of the Same

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If two simulations are different from each other, they still are one same simulation.
In 2009, an important experiment dubbed Tria-S took place at S-77, a facility built at the immediate vicinity of the Judge's Room and supervised by ?????? (until [his] death in 2011). A research team led by ??????? performed several reality tests, and their results turned out to prove that the phenomenon studied was not a simulation. ??????? and [her] team discovered that, under certain circumstances, circular simulations were replicable regardless of the distance separating them from their source. Furthermore, each simulation always seemed to be what the other was as if the two were one. Their movements were perfectly synchronized. Their speeds were matching. The only differences, random and rare, were negligible (torsions, radiometric variations, elasticity of the sides). ??????? and her team proposed the theory that, despite their multiplicity, the simulations were one single gigantic simulation. To understand what… Read More...