quote out of context
Sperm ejection neutralized on average 80% of an ejaculate, and while larger ejaculates suffered a higher ejection risk, smaller ejaculates suffered more intense ejection.
(via marginal revolution)
Irene
Our New York and East Coast friends, keep us posted.
fyi
That was the twenty-five-thousandth post.
notes for a potential screenplay
One thing that could be explored, other than the fractious nature of self, is the shifting patterns of human sexuality, fantasy, relationships, the dynamic of sexual interaction and need at a particular moment, and how contradictory that can appear or be from one experience to the next. Also the reverberation of that played out in memory and self-consciousness.
from the comments
I’ve been making my way through the entire archives of Paul Bloks in Prospect Magazine, where he wrote about his experiences as a neuropsychologist. While I can’t say that the introduction to this awesome field has made me doubt my recent choice of career change, I am sure that I’ll be closely following the research and developments by Bloks and those like him. Where psychiatry searches for drugs to mostly tamper unconventional psychological experience, the field of neuropsychology seems to hold space for the curiosity of human life. The ways we make sense of ourselves and the world around us, in relation to how operational our brains are. What I find myself asking is, what’s a fully operational brain? Aside from all the physical expectations of what should be included and excluded inside our skulls, how can there be a standard amidst our diversity? And if we decide, someday, on a criterion for brain performance, will we unwittingly be further subjugating the extraordinary or unorthodox among us?
Dark Dark Dark – Celebrate
hat tip to Matt Novak
barack obama is your new bicycle
The book too.
‘And that Proustian love is a propulsive force that drives me to write better sentences’
Tim Carmody shares some thoughts on tweets that become viral:
What people really seem to love are oblique, unexpected pop culture references that hit a particular niche. They’re tweets that say: “this message was only for you; now share it with everyone you know.”
And collects his tweets that have:
When I was 7-10 years old, if you’d told me there’d be a machine that would let me read new things all day, I’d have fainted from happiness.
from the comments
P.S. This lovely (and somewhat sad) girl makes me think of a moth.
spam name
Cathi Blanca.
Interim TV Editor of Film.com
As many of you know, I am a lady journalist who writes about movies and does interviews, and have been since 2007. Man, 2007 — I was twenty-one and thought I knew everything, especially how to write. I read Pajiba at the time, and they had a new writer whom I wrote an email to, congratulating him on the new job. It turned out he was someone else, someone who liked my writing and wanted to give me a job. I was too privileged to realize this didn’t just happen to people, especially not to people who want to write about movies for a living. My editor helped me enormously, getting me in contact with the right people, and I started to do interviews and write critically about film. Then things got really tough, the economy tanked and [ed. note: I just stopped writing here, see? NOT GREAT.]
“In a way he was like the country he lived in. Everything came too easily to him. But at least he knew it. ” — A Country Made of Ice Cream
Well, I’m still figuring out how to write, but people have had faith in me, and I’m proud to say that today marks the end of my first week and a half of acting as the Editor of the TV portion of Film.com. It’s only until November, and then I’m not quite sure what will happen, there’s some ideas though and all of them good. It’s quite a change, a lot more pressure being the head of a department with writers that report to me, a lot more money, and I’m embarrassed to say it’s… hard, working every day. Knowing that there are things that I must do every day no matter what is kind of a useful grounding system though. Yes, “work”. Too privileged, really. I don’t know everything, especially about how to write, but I feel proud of where I am, but it still doesn’t feel like enough. Today the world, tomorrow the moon.
headline of the day, II
FDA warns of strangulation with massage machine
tweet of the day
quote out of context
Ian McEwan makes a telling point. “What I believe but cannot prove,” he says, “is that no part of my consciousness will survive my death.” His enlightened fellow Edge contributors will take this as a given, but they may not appreciate its significance, which is that belief in an afterlife “divides the world crucially, and much damage has been done to thought as well as to persons by those who are certain that there is a life, a better, more important life, elsewhere.” The natural gift of consciousness should be treasured all the more for its transience.
headline of the day
Wrestling Sisters Take Down Hit-And-Run Suspect In Oklahoma
a screenshot from the documentary
caption for a photograph without the photograph
“There is a famous image of me standing on a ledge around 1700 feet up on the Northwest Face of Half Dome,” explained Alex seen here reenacting that photograph. “My back is to the cliff wall and below is a sheer drop. It is part of the route to the top and has to be traversed by all climbers of Half Dome, with or without rope. Some climbers wade down and edge themselves across with their arms along the ledge. Some climbers sit on their backsides and edge themselves across that way. I felt though, that walking across it was cooler. It is around a foot wide at the start, but narrows to six inches by the end. By the end, the cliff wall bows out and pushes your back forwards so that you are literally peering over the sheer drop.”
I’ve been out of climbing long enough not to know who Alex Honnold is, but Jesus, to be twenty-six with the gift of physicality this guy obviously has….
(via the browser)
The story of Gadafy’s invisible daughter
Yesterday in the terracotta-coloured section of Bab al-Azizia where the Gadafy family lived, I came across a room which seemed to be part-study, part-lounge. Its contents – including a Sex and the City DVD box set; CDs of the Backstreet Boys; cellulite treatments; WellWoman vitamin supplements and stuffed toys – hinted that it belonged to a young woman.
Amid the bookshelves lined with medical textbooks and copies of Col Gadafy’s Green Book, I found passport photographs of a woman, dressed in medical garb, who appeared to be in her mid- 20s.
Some of the rebels sifting through the room’s contents shouted excitedly: “It’s Hana, it’s Hana, the daughter Gadafy lied about. This was her room.”
(via @tcarmody)
Edsel Ford’s 1934 Model 40 Special Speedster
Inspired by a visit to Europe in 1932 and penned by none other than E.T. Gregorie, Ford chief designer at the time, the Roadster began life as a 1934 Model 40 frame before going under the knife for substantial revisions. Stretched a full inch over factory dimensions and saddled substantially lower to the ground, the vehicle boasts a rear-pitched cockpit, long nose and custom aluminum bodywork. A classic Ford Flathead V8 powers the rear wheels.
There’s a video at the link of the restored car’s unveiling that gives perspective on Edsel Ford’s influence on the move away from the functionality of the Ford Model A to more elegantly designed vehicles.
AatmaStudio’s iPhone 5 Concept
This is pure masturbation, but I really like the idea of the laser projected keyboard.
Richard Dawkins’ thoughts on Rick Perry, and by extension on a frighteningly large American political class
A politician’s attitude to evolution is perhaps not directly important in itself. It can have unfortunate consequences on education and science policy but, compared to Perry’s and the Tea Party’s pronouncements on other topics such as economics, taxation, history and sexual politics, their ignorance of evolutionary science might be overlooked. Except that a politician’s attitude to evolution, however peripheral it might seem, is a surprisingly apposite litmus test of more general inadequacy. This is because unlike, say, string theory where scientific opinion is genuinely divided, there is about the fact of evolution no doubt at all. Evolution is a fact, as securely established as any in science, and he who denies it betrays woeful ignorance and lack of education, which likely extends to other fields as well. Evolution is not some recondite backwater of science, ignorance of which would be pardonable. It is the stunningly simple but elegant explanation of our very existence and the existence of every living creature on the planet. Thanks to Darwin, we now understand why we are here and why we are the way we are. You cannot be ignorant of evolution and be a cultivated and adequate citizen of today.
I think I found a Dawkins article Andrew can get behind?
Extras for Experts
Five fictions from Mike Topp at Hart House Review.
Gloss
Renner has a fiction at Brooklyner.
from the comments
Cindy, my little friends the birds were really quiet before the quake hit. I was out in the garden and wondered where they were. They’ve been hiding all week. I look for them everyday as I go around picking up the pots of Angel’s Trumpet that keep getting knocked over by aftershocks. Now the birds are up in the trees, invisible, but causing a ruckus. Hurricane Irene?
We are living in interesting times.
quote out of context
But I have to imagine you’re not dead. Do you have something else in mind?
I was thinking of becoming an alcoholic. Because one of the things I’ve always prided myself in, in these first 59 years of my life, is being a controlled drinker. I think now is the time to throw off the training wheels, and see if maybe in the last decade and a half of my life, I can be an accomplished, functional alcoholic. And that’s starting tonight.What are you drinking?
I’m just drinking some cheap red. Some cheap, Argentinian Malbec. Because it’s one thing to be an alcoholic, it’s another thing to be a bankrupt alcoholic. So you have to drink the cheap stuff.
