Category: interesting

Some find these numbers to be incredible.

The Department of Justice estimated that 25 percent of college women will be victims of rape or attempted rape before they graduate.

Minimum 97,000 cases of sexual assault or date rape each year. Study [pdf] from the Department of Justice.

Stop the world. Do not sleep. Fix this.

Washington Post tidbits as the story is told:

…the mine’s [original] stash of emergency food – two spoonfuls of tuna and half a glass of milk per man every 48 hours …finally through the roof of the miners’ shelter, the workers had run out of food and had not eaten in 48 hours.

…the men on a 12-hour shift schedule, using the headlights of trucks to simulate sunlight.

…a new shelter, a drier area about 200 yards farther down the shaft. They had already spent days reinforcing the roof.

Drilling will spill 18,000 gallons of water into their chambers …plans to construct drainage and holding pools and canals to shunt water away from the miners’ living quarters.

I searched many pages failing to find the original link, faint praise for the wonderfully silly photo of a dressed chicken. But surprise, I did discover that Mary the Genji-robed chicken received the New Yorker’s 2009 Critterati Award.

A sleeping bag that makes it easy to ‘go’ in the cold.

They call it the Dreamwalker.

It even has pockets.

HA!

An audit of the regrets of the dying:

Number 5: ‘I wish that I had let myself be happier’.
Many did not realize until the end that happiness is a choice.

“The printed book is about to vanish at extraordinary speed.”

Oxford English Dictionary ‘will not be printed again’ – Telegraph

“Books are about to vanish; reading is about to expand.”

Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic

People are weird…
No No, it’s WEIRD people that are weird…
Yeh that’s what I just said. People are weird…
But I’m saying that it’s WEIRD people that are weird…
I just said that. What were you saying about weird people?
Yo! I said a typical North American is WEIRD. Oh, never mind.

We are the weirdest people in the world.

Growing up in an industrial-era environment with plenty of ’90-degree lines and carpentered edges’ has led WEIRD people to be susceptible to deception.

Dr. Henrich says, “If you’re a Westerner, your intuitions about human psychology are probably wrong or at least there’s good reason to believe they’re wrong.”

If WEIRD people are indeed weird, it is the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution that have made them so.

We live in this world with police and institutions and pre-packaged food, TV, the Internet, watches and clocks and calendars. Our heads are loaded with all this information for navigating those environments. So we should expect our brains to be distorted.

20 Things I’ve Learned From Traveling Around the World for Three Years

The problem with America is that we suffer from the same problem as the rest of the world: an obsession with American news.

OK. Let’s tell a story about two groups of men in their seventies and eighties, in vans.

They are driven two hours north to a sprawling old monastery in New Hampshire, and dropped off 22 years earlier, in 1959. Yes, 22 years earlier, in 1959.

The group who went first stayed for one week and were asked to pretend they were young men, living in the 1950s.

The second group, who arrived the week afterward, were told to stay in the present and simply reminisce about that era.

Both groups were surrounded by mid-century mementos—1950s issues of Life magazine and the Saturday Evening Post, a black-and-white television, a vintage radio—and they discussed the events of the time: the launch of the first U.S. satellite, Castro’s victory ride into Havana, Nikita Khrushchev and the need for bomb shelters.

…Before and after the experiment, both groups of men took a battery of cognitive and physical tests, and after just one week, there were dramatic positive changes across the board. …Both groups were stronger and more flexible. Height, weight, gait, posture, hearing, vision—even their performance on intelligence tests had improved. Their joints were more flexible, their shoulders wider, their fingers not only more agile, but longer and less gnarled by arthritis.

But the men who had acted as if they were actually back in 1959 showed significantly more improvement. Those who had impersonated younger men seemed to have bodies that actually were younger.

Boy oh boy. There oughta be a boomer rejuvenator resort in every county!

tip to Deric Bownds

Windows 95 is 15 years old. I can hardly believe the distance, the changes….

Windows 95: n.  —32 bit extensions and a graphical shell for a 16 bit patch to an 8 bit operating system originally coded for a 4 bit microprocessor written by a 2 bit company that can’t stand 1 bit of competition.

Raytheon says its millimeter wave ‘heat ray’ is safe and “offers the best non-lethal solution available”. Inmates in the Los Angeles jail system will soon find out.

An ‘intolerable heating sensation’.

“In a dorm assault, where you might have 150 inmates screaming, we can’t stop that assault until we gather a response force, and we’re hoping to utilize the technology to target the inmate that is precipitating the attack and stop it until we can bring in the cavalry.

“And if I was someone intent on murdering another human being, we need to know if [the pain] will be intense enough to cause me to stop, and there is no way to know other than to use it.”

We’ll also want an entirely new spin on the Jailhouse Blues, ladies & gentleman; the Directed Energy Assault Intervention Blues.

Other tech on the horizon:

—an LED Incapacitator pulsing high-intensity light and color,
—front-line audio video feed from riot officers to command center,
—peek-around cameras and through-the-wall radar,
—urban-scale unmanned aerial vehicles,
—drug, chemical and contraband sniffers…

Operated by a joystick, the AID system ’emits a focused beam of wave energy that travels at the speed of light, penetrating the skin to a depth of 1/64 of an inch and producing a heating sensation that causes targeted individuals to flee. The sensation will immediately cease when the targeted individual moves away from the beam.’

More than 14,000 human effect tests completed !

Tim Vine: “I’ve just been on a once-in-a-lifetime holiday. Never again.”

A massive traffic jam in China.

Crawling nine 10 days for 60 miles !

Killing time playing cards, drivers complain locals are gouging them for food and drink.

@crookery: Now that he’s 7 shades of average I guess we go back to calling golfer Woods by his given name Eldrick.

The full text of this snippet is behind a Science paywall. Greg Miller’s headline is a question, Is Pharma Running Out of Brainy Ideas? His entire abstract questions.

On 4 February, GlaxoSmithKline announced that it planned to pull the plug on drug discovery in some areas of neuroscience, including pain and depression. A few weeks later, news came that AstraZeneca was closing research facilities in the United States and Europe and ceasing drug-discovery work in schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, and anxiety.

These cutbacks by two of the top players in drug development for disorders of the central nervous system have raised concerns that the pharmaceutical industry is pulling out, or at least pulling back, in this area. In direct response to the cuts at GSK and AstraZeneca, the Institute of Medicine Forum on Neuroscience and Nervous System Disorders organized a meeting in late June that brought together leaders from government, academia, and private foundations to take stock.

But the biggest problem, researchers say, is that there is almost nothingin the pipeline that gives any hope for a transformation in the treatment of mental illness. That’s worrying, they say, because the need for better treatments for neurological and psychiatric disorders is vast.

Hundreds of millions of people are afflicted worldwide. Yet for some common disorders, like Alzheimer’s disease, no truly effective treatments exist; for others, like depression, the existing drugs have limited efficacy and substantial side effects.

“Knowing no better, artists in the 16th century took the bare stone at face value. Michelangelo and others emulated what they believed to be the ancient aesthetic, leaving the stone of most of their statues its natural color.”

UV light makes pigment remaining on ancient Greek statues glow. A Smithsonian slideshow recreates glittering color among Greek armor, fashion and architecture. [story here]

‘The genius behind the Parthenon’s sculptures was the architect and artist Phidias. It was said that he alone among mortals had seen the gods as they truly are.’

Interesting, important & a wee bit hilarious research on kids today. For example, they cannot write in cursive.

They have never worried about a Russian missile strike. They didn’t know IBM ever made typewriters. DNA fingerprinting has always existed.

Hundreds of channels is routine. They never look at their wrist for the time and will not understand if you point at your wrist to ask. Tapping keyboards as toddlers, their first computer is in a museum. As ancient dorm room phone jacks are removed, email is also too slow.

Rock bands always play the White House. The Post Office has always been going broke. The nation has never approved of the job Congress is doing.

Linda Holmes at NPR proposes this list to junk:

This list isn’t about the mindset of the class of 2014. It’s about the mindset of the people who write it. It’s about what makes them feel ancient. It’s not about how college students think at 18; it’s about how we think at 40 and 50 and 60.

Sports Illustrated series ‘Where Are They Now’

Tyson: I was addicted to rehab. I was like the poster boy, because I would go to like five meetings a day.

Tyson: You know, people say, “My god is better than your god.” But how do we prove whose god is better? And this is when it gets really interesting. This is how we prove whose god is better than whose: [by saying,] “I’m going to kill you, or you’re going to kill me first.” And that’s real godly. That’s real godly. Yeah. I bet you people think, I wonder who would win a fight with the Prophet Mohammad and Jesus? These are sick people. This is crazy, you know what I mean?

Tyson: Listen: I was in St. Tropez, in the South of France. In Ibiza, Spain. I was in Monte Carlo. I was in the Ukraine, Russia, all those places, for three months. From Russia I went to Lisbon, Portgual, from Portugal I went to Amsterdam. In Amsterdam I met this drug dealer, right? And he sees that I like getting high, and he wants to be my buddy, right? This guy goes and gets me a big rock of cocaine. So pretty soon I got a party going on. I got everything: I got these rugby players. I got these naked girls, I got all these … everything’s going on in the room. Plus I also had this girl with me that I picked up in Romania. But then [the dealer he met in Amsterdam] saw how much of a mess I was. He came in and kicked everybody out of my room! All the nude people, all the people having sex. He said, “I feel so bad I ever gave him that stuff.”

Girls are where there’s boys with high incomes:

Throughout the industrialized world, young women outnumber young men in urban areas. Such a pattern may be linked to higher male incomes in urban areas.

The argument is that urban areas offer skilled workers better labor markets. Assuming that there are more skilled males than females, this alone would predict a surplus of males.

However, the presence of males with high incomes may attract not only skilled females but also unskilled females. Thus, a surplus of women in urban areas may result from a combination of better labor and marriage markets. – Source: “Sex and the City” from Scandinavian Journal of Economics, 2005, vol. 107, issue 1, pages 25-44

Importantly, oral sex is the ‘sexual revolution of the 21st century’.

“Based on the results of my study, there is a percentage of women (just over 30 per cent) who feel powerful when performing fellatio. Apparently some women find it empowering and believe that it can wield a lot of power.”

“Eighty-two per cent of respondents said that they never used protection when engaging in oral sex, compared to only seven per cent for intercourse; it’s almost like it didn’t occur to them to protect themselves when having oral sex,” said Brea Malacad, Faculty of Education, University of Alberta.

transcranial direct current stimulation
Weak electrical currents are applied to the scalp

Boost your brainpower at the flick of a switch!
Increase verbal and motor skills!
Improve learning and memory!

Neurons in the cerebral cortex tend to be arranged with their information-gathering dendrites pointing outwards, towards the scalp, and their information-transmitting axons projecting inwards. When the positively charged tDCS electrode is close to the dendrites, the current causes active neurons to fire more frequently. The negative electrode does the opposite. So if you know the region of the cortex you want to target, you can zap it with one of the electrodes to either stimulate it or inhibit it. The overall effect of tDCS is to make the excited area work more effectively.

Richard Chi’s research on non-invasive brain stimulation.
New Scientist link. Next Big Future blog post.

Don’t wait! Enhance learning! Raise verbal skills 20%! Escalate memory 110%! Be the first on your block to use the new Ron Popeil Thinking Cap. Improve your brain today! Free shipping to first 500 callers. Major credit card req’d.

Paws to ponder. And a terrific slide show.

The blog at agro.biodiver.se points out we’ve recently decoded dogs’ genetics.

I suppose we’ve tinkered with genomic loci that’s given us a marvelous diversity of dogs.

‘Excuse me, that’s not a mobile mop, that’s Andy, our annotated retroposon lamina Hungarian sheep herder.’

Among organ donors, homicide victims were more likely to have blood types O and B, while suicides showed no differences. Macintosh users have significantly greater anxiety about computers than PC users. Mormons view the afterlife as less pleasant than Jews. On average, there is no difference in the height from which men and women jump to their deaths. A bit of analysis called everything.

As religion becomes a consumer experience.

Ministry is a profession in which the greatest rewards include meaningfulness and integrity. When those fade under pressure from churchgoers who don’t want to be challenged or edified, pastors become candidates for stress and depression.

Further, there’s little measurable difference between the moral behavior of churchgoers and the rest of American society.

American Christianity is not well, and there’s evidence to indicate that its condition is more critical than most realize — or at least want to admit.

Pollsters find that born-again Christians are more likely to divorce (an act strongly condemned by Jesus) than atheists and agnostics, and are more likely to be racist than other Americans.

Penn Jillette on reading the Bible cover-to-cover:

… if you read the Bible or the Koran or the Torah cover-to-cover I believe you will emerge from that as an atheist.

I mean, you can read “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins, you can read “God Is Not Great” by Hitchens… but the Bible itself, will turn you atheist faster than anything.

Christopher Hitchens expressing himself. And he writes too.

Knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light.:

You’ve heard it all right. People don’t have cancer: they are reported to be battling cancer. No well-wisher omits the combative image: You can beat this. It’s even in obituaries for cancer losers, as if one might reasonably say of someone that they died after a long and brave struggle with mortality. You don’t hear it about long-term sufferers from heart disease or kidney failure.

Myself, I love the imagery of struggle. I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient. Allow me to inform you, though, that when you sit in a room with a set of other finalists, and kindly people bring a huge transparent bag of poison and plug it into your arm, and you either read or don’t read a book while the venom sack gradually empties itself into your system, the image of the ardent soldier or revolutionary is the very last one that will occur to you. You feel swamped with passivity and impotence: dissolving in powerlessness like a sugar lump in water.

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