a thousand faces, 1
On the matter of certain flying pests
With apologies to Cindy
The Decision To Hide Was Flawed.
One from my recent trip to Crete. I wanted there to be a body in the trunk under the tarp and sack, so,
I didn’t look. I figured not looking means it might be true!
London, Claro & J.G. Ballard
I finally got around to posting some photos/jaded thoughts from London, this first dispatch whilst reading Claro’s Electric Flesh & this second dispatch whilst reading J.G. Ballards’s The Drowned World. Apologies to anyone who likes London, I wasn’t feeling it.
From the Library of Congress Archive: Photos of the 30’s & 40’s
Great color photos from The Great Depression and World War II from the Library of Congress Flickr page.
(Via Fashion-Incubator)
religion and relationships
Attractive competitors for mates make people more religious.
Social psychologists had volunteers view dating profiles of either attractive men or women and told them these were fellow students participating at an online dating site. They were then asked to rate, on a 10-point scale, the extent to which they agreed with statements like, “I believe in God,” “We’d be better off if religion played a bigger role in people’s lives,” and “Religious beliefs are important to me in my everyday decisions.”
The volunteers appeared more religious when exposed to attractive members of their own sex.
1967 Oldsmobile Barris 70-X Toronado
Starting bid: $227,770.
Two words
grammatical goat
Women should bare 40% of their bodies
At least, if they want to attract men:
The findings were based on work by four female researchers, who discreetly observed women at one of the city’s biggest nightclubs from a balcony above the dance floor.
Using tape recorders hidden in their handbags, the researchers took note of what female clubbers were wearing and how many times they were approached by men asking them to dance.
For the purposes of the study, each arm accounted for 10 per cent of the body, each leg for 15 per cent and the torso for 50 per cent.
Women who revealed around 40 per cent of their skin attracted twice as many men as those who covered up.
However, those who exposed any more than this also fared worse. Experts believe that showing too much flesh puts men off because it suggests they might be unfaithful.
Will extraterrestrials look like us?
Shermer debates Dawkens on the subject:
I replied to Dawkins that if something like a smart, technological, bipedal humanoid has a certain level of inevitability because of how evolution unfolds, then it would have happened more than once here. In his 2001 book Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, Robert Wright argues that our existence precludes other terrestrial intelligences of our level from arising. But Neandertals were as close as one can get to a counterfactual experiment: they had hundreds of thousands of years to themselves in Europe without our interference and showed nothing like the technological and cultural progress of the modern humans who displaced them. Dawkins’s rejoinder to me is enlightening:
(via marginal revolution)
New Oxford American Dictionary’s Word of the Year
across the playing field
The domes of the Immaculate Heart of Mary are visible beyond the skatepark fence on Polish Hill.
Spam considered, 14th century to the present
Open Book TV: Graham Parker at Brooklyn Navy Yard from Graham Parker on Vimeo.
An interview with Eminent Man of Science and Art Graham Parker, by way of whom we have seen this lovely chart.
Chart Showing the Aggregate Number of Idiots and the Proportion of Males and Females, White or Colored, Native or Foreign, at the Ninth Census 1870; also the increase since 1860.
Excerpted from the Statistical atlas of the United States based on the results of the ninth census 1870 with contributions from many eminent men of science and several departments of the government Comp. under the authority of Congress by Francis A. Walker, M. A., superintendent of the ninth census.
(by way of Eminent Man of Science and Art Graham Parker; entire census report at loc.gov)
How to Ship Anything
This is a superbly informative article about streamlining and simplifying shipping, particularly international shipping, on a small business scale. I suspect I don’t get the quantity of shipping orders Joel does, but I wish I had half the technology that he has at my disposal. Here is the tutorial’s payoff:
Shipping an international order now takes about 35 seconds, down from 3 minutes, and can be done by anyone, whether or not they have SQL and Mail Merge skills. Domestic orders are even faster since they don’t need customs forms. Most of all, it’s all really fun.
No knowledge of SQL or Mail Merge required almost sounds like cheating.
A man is lifted off his feet by a gust of wind
via Austin Kleon via The Guardian
language and gestures
Language and gestures are processed in the same part of the brain.
“Our results fit a longstanding theory which says that the common ancestor of humans and apes communicated through meaningful gestures and, over time, the brain regions that processed gestures became adapted for using words,” Braun said. “If the theory is correct, our language areas may actually be the remnant of this ancient communication system, one that continues to process gesture as well as language in the human brain.”
Liu Bolin, The Invisible Man
These are all analog. Meaning, no Photoshop or trick photography. Simply one man and paint.
Try to find him in the last image.
Amazing.
(via marginal revolution)
A=A
math is what exists and what exists is math
The Challenge For Indie Game Developers
Jason Rohrer pegs it in the beginning of a NYT article on the grassroots movement in the game industry:
The face of the enemy flashed across a 20-foot screen. “That’s right,” Jason Rohrer announced. “It’s Roger Ebert.” There were a few boos, as several hundred people stirred in their seats. The film critic’s cherubic face stared at the audience. “Ebert said video games can’t be art,” Rohrer said. “He issued all of us a direct challenge. And we need to find an answer.”
Jellyfish swarm in warming oceans
A blood-orange blob the size of a small refrigerator emerged from the dark waters, its venomous tentacles trapped in a fishing net. Within minutes, hundreds more were being hauled up, a pulsating mass crowding out the catch of mackerel and sea bass.
Donald Barthelme’s Syllabus
There was a time when I fought against an impatience with reading, concealing, with partisanship, the fissures in my education. I confused difficulty with duplicity, and that which didn’t come easily, I often scorned. Then, in my last year of college in Gainesville, Florida, I was given secondhand a list of eighty-one books, the recommendations of Donald Barthelme to his students. Barthelme’s only guidance, passed on by Padgett Powell, one of Barthelme’s former students at the University of Houston and my teacher at the time, was to attack the books “in no particular order, just read them,” which is exactly what I, in my confident illiteracy, resolved to do.
(Anyone know the official pronunciation of Barthelme? It’s been driving me crazy going on twenty years.)
(via kottke)
Luca Trevisani, The Weaving Constellation
Part of an exhibition at the Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery called Evidence of the Paranormal.
the sex toy party project
“I’m concerned about promiscuity also,” Vetter said. “And to be honest, I don’t have the solution. … My concern is these students are in this developmental phase, and I don’t think it’s a good developmental practice to just tell somebody to just sit around and masturbate. I don’t think that promotes relationships.”
Warshing up.
I’m washing the dishes right now, the computer is resting on the counter. Camera Obscura is playing, I am typing this post which I will post in a few seconds. I am wearing a red cardigan and a brown dress. Tell me a kind of story that you think I might like to hear.
