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Laurel said:
The psychological origins of waiting (... and waiting, and waiting) to work

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Like most writers, I am an inveterate procrastinator. In the course of writing this one article, I have checked my e-mail approximately 3,000 times, made and discarded multiple grocery lists, conducted a lengthy Twitter battle over whether the gold standard is actually the worst economic policy ever proposed, written Facebook messages to schoolmates I haven’t seen in at least a decade, invented a delicious new recipe for chocolate berry protein smoothies, and googled my own name several times to make sure that I have at least once written something that someone would actually want to read.

Lots of people procrastinate, of course, but for writers it is a peculiarly common occupational hazard. One book editor I talked to fondly reminisced about the first book she was assigned to work on, back in the late 1990s. It had gone under contract in 1972.

I once asked a talented and fairly famous colleague how he managed to regularly produce such highly regarded 8,000 word features. “Well,” he said, “first, I put it off for two or three weeks. Then I sit down to write. That’s when I get up and go clean the garage. After that, I go upstairs, and then I come back downstairs and complain to my wife for a couple of hours. Finally, but only after a couple more days have passed and I’m really freaking out about missing my deadline, I ultimately sit down and write.”

Over the years, I developed a theory about why writers are such procrastinators: We were too good in English class. This sounds crazy, but hear me out.​
- read the full article Why Writers Are the Worst Procrastinators (from The Atlantic)​
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oh my god. this is entirely, utterly me.
 
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The moon has a distinctive smell. Ask any Apollo moonwalker about the odiferous nature of the lunar dirt and you'll get the same answer.

With NASA's six Apollo lunar landing missions between 1969 and the end of 1972, a total of 12 astronauts kicked up the powdery dirt of the moon, becoming an elite group later to be tagged as the "dusty dozen."

From the modest 2.5 hour "moonwalk" of Apollo 11 to the forays totaling just over 22 hours outside a spacecraft on Apollo 17, NASA's Apollo landing crews could not escape tracking lunar material inside their moon lander homes.

Decades later, moonwalkers and lunar scientists are still trying to appreciate exactly what the moon's aroma brings to the astronaut's nose.​
- read the full article The Moon Smells: Apollo Astronauts Describe Lunar Aroma (from Space.com)​
 
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image courtesy woodleywonderworks (Flickr)

A terrifying jihadist group is conquering and butchering its way across big swaths of Iraq and Syria. Planes are falling out of the sky on what seems like a weekly basis. Civilians are being killed in massive numbers in the Israel-Gaza conflict. Others are falling prey to Ebola in West Africa. The world, in short, is falling apart.

That’s how it feels, at least, to those of us who sit at a blessed remove from the death and destruction, but who are watching every bloody moment of it via cable news and social media. It raises an important question: In an age when we can mainline bad news 24/7 if we so choose, what’s the psychological impact of all this exposure to tragedy at a distance?

Mary McNaughton-Cassill, a professor at the University of Texas–San Antonio and leading researcher on the connection between media consumption and stress, said the current trend of breathless, protracted coverage of tragedy and calamity can be traced back to the Oklahoma City bombings. “That was really the first event where it really went viral, just 24 hours of news coverage, and that’s really become the norm,” she said.

Almost two decades later, news outlets — facing pressure from an endlessly multiplying array of competitors all zeroing in on the same stories — have greater incentive than ever before to ramp up their coverage of scary, emotionally wrenching stories. The outlets all feel “they have to be sensational, they have to grab your attention,” said McNaughton-Cassill. It can be hard, sometimes, not to see media coverage as an “unrelenting flow” of negativity, especially when it’s so loudly amplified by social media.
[...]
So when people overestimate the world’s awfulness, there do appear to be real consequences. And while, as has eternally been the case, there are certainly pockets of the planet that really are getting worse on a daily basis (Syria), on a broader level there’s solid evidence — perhaps gathered most comprehensively by Steven Pinker — that the world is in the midst of a decades-long trend of actually becoming better: safer and healthier and more humane. We just have the bad stuff shouted into our ears louder than ever before.​
- read the full article What All This Bad News Is Doing to Us (from NYMag's Science of Us)​
 
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A loyal dog in India refused to leave a graveside for two weeks after the death of his teenage owner.

In an extraordinary display of loyalty, Tommy the dog went without food and water for 15 days and braved the hot days and cold nights in Chennai, southern India, as he guarded the burial site of his master, Bhaskar Shri, 18, who died in a car accident Aug. 2.

The young construction worker had adopted the dog five years ago and the two quickly became inseparable.

But when Bhaskar was killed in a car accident earlier this month, the pup couldn't leave his side.
[...]
Dawn Williams, an animal rescue officer working with Blue Cross of India, finally helped the famished dog.

“I first spotted the brown dog sitting on a fresh grave one evening as I happened to walk past in the first week of August, but at the time I didn't think anything of it,” Williams recalled. “But on Aug. 13 I was in the area again while on a different rescue mission and saw him again. He was sitting in the same spot in the same position. It looked like he hadn't moved for weeks.”​
- read the full article Dog spends 15 days without food while guarding burial site of Indian owner (from New York Daily News)​
 
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image courtesy avlxyz (Flickr)

Maybe you’ve seen them in a specialty shop, or tasted the tangy leaves in your favorite curry, but the kaffir lime, as it’s commonly known in North America and beyond, is in serious need of a name change.

Or so says Veronica Vinje, a master’s student in Intercultural and International Communications at Royal Roads University in Victoria, British Columbia, the woman behind the @KaffirNoMore‘s Twitter campaign, an initiative to rename the kaffir lime (henceforth referred to as the k-lime) because of the racist nature of the k-word.

The k-word – a term that comes from the Arabic word kafir, meaning non-believer or infidel – is a highly offensive, even legally actionable, racial slur in South Africa. However, as Vinje states on the Twitter account, the @KaffirNoMore campaign is not about the history of the term, but removing the word from our vocabulary before it becomes totally engrained.
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- read the full article Why the Name ‘Kaffir Lime’ Is Wildly Offensive to Many (from Modern Farmer)​
 
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HOMEWARD BOUND: In the last two years, researchers have transplanted four dozen Retuerta horses from the Doñana National Park in southern Spain to the Campanarios de Azaba Reserve near the Portuguese border, with the hope of not only saving the ancient breed from extinction but also of restoring a long-lost ecosystem on the Iberian Peninsula, where genetically similar horses once roamed.

Conservationists are reintroducing large animals to areas they once roamed, providing ecologists with the chance to assess whether such “rewilding” efforts can restore lost ecosystems.

Last fall, in the far west of Spain, a small crowd applauded as two dozen dark brown horses trotted gingerly out of a temporary holding pen in the Campanarios de Azaba Reserve—5 square kilometers (about 2 square miles) of rolling grassland sprinkled with mature oak trees. The new arrivals are not just any old nags. They are Retuerta horses, an ancient breed with a close genetic resemblance to the wild horses that roamed Iberia millennia ago.

Transported from Doñana National Park in southern Spain, the last refuge of the breed, the newcomers joined 24 other Retuertas, also from Doñana, that have lived in the reserve since 2012. Managers brought the animals north not only to ensure their survival but also to restore natural grazing, which played a key role in shaping the ecosystem until about 8,000 years ago, when people began to cultivate crops on the Iberian Peninsula. With humans now abandoning such traditional farming areas due to dwindling productivity and the lure of better economic opportunities in towns and cities, conservationists are wagering that the introduction of large herbivores like the Retuertas will help to re-create a healthy, self-managing ecosystem that supports a greater diversity of species.

The Retuertas, like the Sayaguesa cattle that managers released into the reserve in 2012, are, in effect, ecological replacements for their extinct cousins—wild horses and large, wild cattle known as aurochs, both depicted in nearby Paleolithic rock carvings. The animals are among the first additions in a small-scale, open-air experiment designed to test the long-theorized and oft-debated idea of rewilding—that selective reintroductions can revive lost ecological processes and restore damaged ecosystems to a more “natural” state.​
- read the full article Where the Wild Things Were (from The Scientst)​
 
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A lot of things have changed since the 19th century. When Barkham Burroughs wrote his Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information in 1889, he devoted a full chapter to the "secrets of beauty," and for good reason. To quote Burroughs, "If women are to govern, control, manage, influence and retain the adoration of husbands, fathers, brothers, lovers or even cousins, they must look their prettiest at all times." Here are 11 of his tips for doing just that.

1. Bathe often(ish)...

At least once a week, but if possible, a lady should "take a plunge or sponge bath three times a week."

2. ... in a household cleaning solution.

What's better than soap? Ammonia. "Any lady who has once learned its value will never be without it." Just a capful or so in the bath works as well as soap and cleans the pores "as well as a bleach will do."

3. Wash your eyes...

Nothing is as attractive as a sparkling eye. The best way to achieve this is by "dashing soapsuds into them." If that's not your style, perfume dropped into the eyes is a reasonable alternative. For the same bright-eyed look without the burn, "half a dozen drops of whisky and the same quantity of Eau de Cologne, eaten on a lump of sugar, is quite as effective."

4. ... but don't wash your hair.

Water is "injurious" to the hair. Instead, wipe "the dust of the previous day" away on a towel. You can also brush your hair during any long, idle breaks in the day. 30 minutes is a good hair-brushing session.

5. And never, ever wash your face.

Simply rub the skin with "an ointment of glycerine" and "dry with a chamois-skin or cotton flannel." One "beautiful lady" is admired who had "not washed her face for three years, yet it is always clean, rosy, sweet and kissable."​
- read the full article How to Be Handsome: 11 Really Terrible 19th-Century Beauty Tips (from Mental Floss)​
 
Out and About in the East Village

In this weekly feature, East Village-based photographer James Maher provides us with a quick snapshot of someone who lives and/or works in the East Village.

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Name: Jack Sal
Occupation: Artist
Location: New York Public Library, 10th between A and B
Date: 5:45 pm Thursday July 31

I’m from Connecticut. I moved to the city about two years after graduate school. I lived in SoHo from around ’81 to ’83. People would go to the local bars like Puffy’s in Tribeca or Fanelli’s – Fanelli’s only if you were a figurative painter. I remember at Puffy’s the idea was that you’d learn how to drink whiskey, smoke Camels and show your slides. There was only one local place where you would get food, and if you didn’t make it by 6 p.m., that was it — you’d have to walk all the way to Chinatown. There were a lot of artists but it was a mix of people. There were the wives and husbands of the artists and there were still factories.

I got bought out. I was a SoHo refugee. Someone bought the building and I had to leave and then I ended up buying a building in the neighborhood. It was affordable.

On 6th Street, when I moved in, all the storefronts used to be small shops, like aluminum, metalworkers or upholsterers of furniture. You used to be able to go to Canal Street and buy surplus equipment, surplus materials, and now you can’t find a local metal cutter or welder. Then the galleries happened. Literally it was like mushrooms. People were using storefronts. The galleries went with the boom and bust of the late ‘80s.

It got pretty rough down here with crack and all of that. When I was renovating the building with my partners, two of whom were photographers, William Wegman and Timothy Greenfield-Sanders. We would renovate and at night they’d come and steal the tools and you’d go back on the street in the morning and buy them off a blanket and get back to work. We had the lot line windows bricked up because they would just break through all the time. I remember if you left a pencil on your dashboard you’d find your window smashed. I had a friend who would leave his car open because he said it was easier to get a guy who was sleeping in it out than it was to buy a new window or lock, although after awhile I wouldn’t drive in his car because it was smelly.

I’m an artist. I do conceptual, installation. I began as a photographer tied up with The ICP. I’m one of the founders of the education department in the ‘80s. I often do work where I do research about the place and use that within the context of the work. I often use photographic materials or materials that change with time.

We’re actually leaving now. It has more to do with personal and building situations. I mean, there are still very interesting restaurants and places here, but it just doesn’t feel the same. Not that I’m not being nostalgic for finding crack vials, but you used to be able to discover a place, a restaurant or a store, and it would be interesting because someone was trying something, but now it feels like someone is just trying to find a formula.

New York is no longer the source place that it used to be. It’s essential to be here but it’s not essential to live here. I thought I’d never say that about New York. Now it’s very different. It’s very expensive. I don’t know how someone without a significant income, or who is not accumulating significant debt, can stay here. Anyone.

I have in the past rented some of my spaces out and there are young people who come and they work I don’t know how many hours a week and then they sort of blow off steam and then they go on vacation. That seems to be the cycle. I mean, everyone for their own, but it doesn’t seem very self-nurturing or self-generating. It’s not like a moral view but why now are brunches advertised as all you can drink? I don’t drink myself but I can imagine having one or two Bloody Mary’s at lunch, but the idea that you’d go out to get drunk on Sunday morning or Sunday afternoon is indicative of this culture of numbness.

Now there’s a bar next door to me that makes $23 dollar drinks. They have created this self-illusion of selectivity by not letting people in. They call you when they’re ready, so you feel even more like, ‘Oh I got in.’ It’s always full other than Monday night. There’s always a crowd outside waiting. As my girlfriend is saying, ‘What are these young people going to be like after years of drinking.’ What kind of effect physically and mentally is it going to have and also in terms of what their expectations are going to be, because if you’ve been numbing yourself for a long while, when you stop it’s not necessarily going to get better.

It says a lot about America. New York is and always has been a kind of experiment for the United States because unlike the rest of the country, by default it’s been a kind of forced mixed, immigrant, old, established, rich, poor, it has all the defects of American culture with all the benefits as well. So you get this kind of hotbed of both the triumph of what’s good and the hell and horror of what’s bad. You get people who are buying $1.3 million apartments in what used to be a $300 rent-stabilized place. That extreme is not healthy.


James Maher is a fine art and studio photographer based in the East Village.
 
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There are a number of euphemisms for female thinness that do not require a man to make the impolite admission of his exclusive attraction to women with very little body fat. Though “active” and “full of energy” make respectable showings, they are a distance second and third from “a woman who takes care of herself.” It seems a benign enough request, but one quickly learns that this man is not especially concerned that she has regularly scheduled self-care sessions like time with friends or spa days with a good book. He isn’t asking that her household finances be in order and that she be self-actualized. He is asking her to be thin. When he says “herself,” he means “her body.”

I am not especially bothered by men who desire thin women. They are just as susceptible to messages that these are the women that they should find most attractive as women are to messages that they should look like them. The more troubling kind of man has a caveat about a woman’s thinness. She must not be “obsessed” or “overly concerned” with it. Or at least not visibly so. She mustn’t always order salads or freak out when she doesn’t make it to the gym. Watching her eat a cheeseburger—or better yet, a steak—even oddly enthralls him. (I’m sure there’s a Freudian explanation about the appeal of watching big things go into small ones for that but I haven’t found it yet.) An Instagram trend of thin women posing with calorie-dense foods that functions partly to appeal to this desire has even made headlines recently as the “You Did Not Eat That” account has gained popularity. But the impulse to pretend is understandable. For a thin woman to betray the reality of her diet and regimen for staying that way would spoil the fantasy of a woman who is preternaturally inclined to her size rather than personally preoccupied by it.​
- read the full article You’re Right, I Didn’t Eat That (from The New Inquiry)​
 
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n 2004, Elizabeth Armstrong and Laura Hamilton—sociologists at the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor and the University of California–Merced, respectively—infiltrated a dorm at a Midwestern university in an effort to better understand the female college experience. The researchers interviewed more than 50 women (all of them white) from the start of their freshman year and followed them to shortly after their graduations, asking them questions about, for example, their perceptions of ‘‘a girl who is known for having sex with a lot of guys.’’ That question was an unexpected dud, yielding few thoughts from the young women in their sample. Then the college women realized that the researchers weren’t really asking for their opinions about promiscuous women. They were asking for their thoughts about “sluts”—a campus stigma that had almost nothing to do with students’ real sexual experiences, but everything to do with their social class.

Armstrong and Hamilton’s work culminated in a book called Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality, as well as a new study in the June issue of Social Psychology Quarterly focused squarely on the slut question. As the sociologists got to know these women, they watched as they stratified into what they defined as “high status” and “low status” social groups, with high-status women typically emerging from affluent homes around the country and rising through the Greek system, and low-status ones coming from local middle- and working-class backgrounds and coalescing into friend groups boxed out of sorority life. They found that the groups had different conceptions of what constituted a campus slut, with the low-status women pinning sluttiness on “rich bitches in sororities,” and the high-status women aligning sluttiness with women they perceived as “trashy,” not “classy.”
[...]
Still, the researchers found, women “were convinced that actual sluts existed and organized their behaviors to avoid this label”—it’s just that the system was more about policing women’s looks, fashion, and conversational styles than criticizing the notches on their bedposts.​
- read the full article Are You a Slut? That Depends. Are You Rich? (from Slate)​
 
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Heather Havrilesky at 33, photographed by the DMV

I’m 43 years old now, damn it, and my life is amazing. So why am I comparing myself to some styled professional?

Ten years ago, when that last driver’s licence photo was taken, I was 33 years old and weighed 125 pounds. In the photo, my face is lean and tan because I went hiking every single morning. I worked from home and made good money as a freelance writer. I read a lot. I adopted house plants. I wrote songs on my guitar. I was so young, I had no idea how young I was.

But before you go flipping between the 33-year-old, with her broad smile, and the 43-year-old, with her vague look of world-weariness, keep in mind all the things that happened in the 10 years in between: I dumped my boyfriend. I found a full-time job. I bought a house. I got married. My stepson moved in. I had a daughter. I wrote a book. I had another daughter. I quit my job. A close friend died of cancer.

When you glance from one licence to the next, you don’t see the long nights I spent tossing and turning, working up the courage to ditch my boyfriend. You don’t see me painting the walls of my house alone, trying to accept my uncertain future. You can’t see me driving through the south of Spain with my future husband, or big and pregnant a year later, pulling weeds out of my front yard in a fit of hormonal mania. You don’t hear the breast pump — ahwooonga, ahwoonga — or feel that sinking guilt I had when I left the baby at day care for the first time. You don’t see me at the beach with my kids, smearing sunscreen on my face and hoping that no one eats sand when I’m not looking. You don’t see my hands shaking as I crush up pills, trying to help my friend die a peaceful death of colon cancer, wondering if there even is such a thing.

A lot can happen in 10 years. You can’t be carefree forever. But when I was just 33, I thought that I would never have the bad taste to grow old, let alone allow it to depress me. I thought I was better than this. What is youth, but the ability to nurse a superiority complex beyond all reason, to suspend disbelief indefinitely, to imagine yourself immune to the plagues and perils faced by mortal humans? But one day, you wake up and you realise that you’re not immune.​
- read the full article Awaiting renewal (from Aeon)​
 
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The Vanilla Fudge Room is from an early draft of Roald Dahl's most famous novel.

The remaining eight children, together with their mothers and fathers, were ushered out into the long white corridor once again.

"I wonder how Augustus Pottle and Miranda Grope are feeling now?" Charlie Bucket asked his mother.

"Not too cocky, I shouldn't think" Mrs Bucket answered. "Here – hold on to my hand, will you, darling. That's right. Hold on tight and try not to let go. And don't you go doing anything silly in here, either, you understand, or you might get sucked up into one of those dreadful pipes yourself, or something even worse maybe. Who knows?"

Little Charlie took a tighter hold of Mrs Bucket's hand as they walked down the long corridor. Soon they came to a door on which it said:

THE VANILLA FUDGE ROOM

"Hey, this is where Augustus Pottle went to, isn't it?" Charlie Bucket said.

"No", Mr Wonka told him. "Augustus Pottle is in Chocolate Fudge. This is Vanilla. Come inside, everybody, and take a peek."​
- read the full article A previously unpublished chapter of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (from The Guardian)​
 
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"Don’t Tell Me To Smile: A No-Nonsense Guide to Street Harassment"

-A zine by Arlene Barrow (whatwepretend) and Annie Barrow (malheureuseandmaladroite)

whatwepretend

malheureuseandmaladroite

This is a link to a PDF of the zine if you want to print a copy yourself!

http://www.*********.com/view/bc2zzmammmfr4te/Zine_copy.pdf
 
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Former Playboy bunnies from around the U.S. and as far away as Jamaica and London got together in Baltimore recently to remember the heyday of Hugh Hefner’s nightclubs, reconnect with old friends and swap a few war stories.

Hefner, now 88, sent a heartfelt video message, reports reunion organizer Marsha Callender, presiding over 123 former bunnies gathered at sunset on the dining deck of a cruise ship in the city’s Inner Harbor.
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The women at the reunion had gone on to other careers, but for many of them the Playboy gig was their first job (bunnies could be hired as young as 18). “All my kids were born during the time I was with Playboy,” recalled Barbara Holstin, who worked in the New York and Jamaica clubs. “I would go home, put on jeans and be this stay-at-home mom. I changed diapers by day and became glamorous at night.”

That glamour had a pull date, alas: “They called me in one day and said, ‘Sorry, Barbi, but you’re not able to maintain the youthful look for which you were hired.’ I was 32. I went right to the airlines and they hired me.”

Ironically, bunnies could also be penalized for breeding. Susan Thoms Cotton, who worked in the Kansas City Playboy Club from 1970 to 1972, remembers being told to turn in her bunny ears when her pregnancy began to show. “There was no such thing as maternity leave,” she said.​
- read the full article Former Playboy Bunnies Recall Life in Hef’s Clubs (from AARP)​
 
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image courtesy Robbert van der Steeg (Flickr)

The Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count program that Pennebaker and his students built in the early 1990s has, like any computer program, an ability to peer into massive data sets and discern patterns that no human could ever hope to match.

And so after Pennebaker and his crew built the program, they used it to ask all kinds of questions that had previously been too complicated or difficult for humans to ask.
[...]
Specifically, what Pennebaker found was that when the language style of two people matched, when they used pronouns, prepositions, articles and so forth in similar ways at similar rates, they were much more likely to end up on a date.

"The more similar [they were] across all of these function words, the higher the probability that [they] would go on a date in a speed dating context," Pennebaker says. "And this is even cooler: We can even look at ... a young dating couple... [and] the more similar [they] are ... using this language style matching metric, the more likely [they] will still be dating three months from now."​
- read the full article Our Use Of Little Words Can, Uh, Reveal Hidden Interests (from NPR)​
 
As we piled back onto the buses, throughout the weekend, that is the refrain – ‘we are unafraid to die’ — that stuck with many of us, that let us know something is different.

But it is different for different reasons than I might have imagined. What does it mean to be ‘unafraid to die’ in order to bring about change? As those words echoed in my mind, on the bus ride home, I was reminded of Notorious B.I.G., the slain rapper whose debut album ‘Ready to Die’ turns 20 years old this month.

Some of the Ferguson riders are 20 years old. They were birthed in the crucible of the Tupac-Biggie moment, the height of 20th century black nihilism. The same year that Biggie dropped ‘Ready to Die,’ Cornel West published the classic ‘Race Matters.’ In the first chapter, ‘Nihilism in Black America,’ he argued, ‘the major enemy of black survival in America has been and is neither oppression nor exploitation but rather the nihilistic threat — that is loss of hope and absence of meaning. … The self-fulfilling prophecy of the nihilistic threat is that without hope there can be no future, that without meaning there can be no struggle.’

Mike Brown’s death has brought new meaning to local black struggle. His death has come to mean something more, something greater than his life might have been taken to mean, as a poor young black man from a working-class suburb. His death, and officer Darren Wilson’s callous disregard for his life, has made the precariousness of black life visible for a whole new generation of black youth. The precariousness has been made visible and it has been deemed unacceptable – by both the old and the young. One of the riders, a 10-year-old girl from Los Angeles, told us in a church service on Sunday morning, ‘I am here because I am worried about my life. I’m only 10 years old. I should not have to be worried.’

— Dr. Brittney Cooper, "I am not afraid to die": Why America will never be the same post-Ferguson
 
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The ethics of looking away

It is not difficult to look at naked women on the Internet. There are, after all, a lot of men and women who post nude photos of themselves online hoping for pageviews, extra income, or just exhibitionist titillation. So with the news over the weekend of “leaked” nude photos of various celebrities, can we please all agree not to search these pictures out? If we want to look at nude people, let’s restrict ourselves to photos of people who actually want us to see them nude. It’s not like there’s a lack of them to choose from.
[...]
If Jennifer Lawrence was to pose naked on the cover of Playboy, for example, I’m sure it would be a best-selling issue. But it wouldn’t have the same scandalous, viral appeal as private images stolen from her phone. Because if she shared nude images consensually, then people wouldn’t get to revel in her humiliation. And that’s really the point, isn’t it? To take a female celebrity down a notch? (We have a term for when this is done to non-celebrity women: “revenge porn.”)
[...]
There is an obsessive tendency in American culture with elevating women—young, beautiful women, especially—to celebrity status just to bask in their eventual fall. There’s also a tendency in American culture, meanwhile, to shame women for their sexuality. So I would not be surprised in the days ahead to see arguments as to why this is somehow the fault of the celebrities whose phones were hacked—that these women took the pictures, that they were posing, that generating publicity is part of their job.​
- read the full article What's Wrong With Checking Out Stolen Nude Photos of Celebrities (from The Atlantic)​
 
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Some figures from history lead such remarkable (or notorious) lives that they earn themselves an epithet that remains in use long after their death. More often than not these nicknames are used either to encapsulate a leader’s personality or appearance, or else to sum up the events or legacy of their time in power—but either way, there’s no guarantee it will be complimentary. In fact for every Catherine the Great there’s an Ivan the Terrible. For every William the Conqueror there’s a Vlad the Impaler. And for every Richard the Lionheart there’s an Albert the Peculiar. Sixty of the most bizarre—and in some cases the most unflattering—epithets from history are listed here.

1. ALBERT THE PECULIAR was Duke of Austria from 1395-1404. He was also called “Albert the Patient,” and “Albert the Wonderful.”

2. ALBERT WITH THE PIGTAIL was the father of Albert the Peculiar, and Duke of Austria from 1365-95.

3. ALEXANDER THE POTBELLY was Prince of Suzdal, in western Russia, from 1414-17. Other holders of the same title included “George Longarm,” and “John the Strongbow.”

4. ALFONSO THE DISINHERITED was too young to take the throne when his father Crown Prince Ferdinand of Castile died in 1275, and so instead he was taken into the care of his grandmother. Nine years later the vacant throne was claimed by a usurper, and Alfonso was left with no choice than to renounce all of his family’s claims before he was even old enough to rule.

5. ALFONSO THE SLOBBERER was King of Galicia from 1188-1230. He apparently earned his nickname because he foamed at the mouth when enraged.

6. ANNE, THE QUEEN OF BEES, aka Anne Louise Bénédicte, was Duchess of Maine in France from 1692-1736. She became known as “Queen of Bees” after founding her own chivalric order, The Order of the Honey Bee, in 1703.​
- read the full article 60 of History’s Strangest Royal Epithets (from Mental Floss)​
 
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Readers might think nonfiction books are the most reliable media sources there are. But accuracy scandals haven't reformed an industry that faces no big repercussions for errors.

On the cover of her memoir, The Road of Lost Innocence: The True Story of a Cambodian Heroine, Somaly Mam sits in a field, surrounded by laughing children. “I came to know Somaly Mam, who was enslaved herself but managed to escape and then became the Harriet Tubman of Southeast Asia’s brothels, repeatedly rescuing those left behind,” New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote in the book’s introduction. “As a local person with firsthand experience in the red-light districts, Somaly has a credibility and understanding that no outsider does.”

That was in 2009. This past spring, Simon Marks’s Newsweek article on Mam charged the anti-sex trafficking activist with fabricating her past as a child prostitute. In the fallout, many readers faulted Kristof for lauding her as a heroine; others pointed fingers directly at Mam. Hardly any called out the publishing houses that distributed her book.

Mam’s story gained a mass following with the release of her best-selling memoir, first published in France in 2005. The book’s success helped the activist launch the Somaly Mam Foundation in 2007. Mam was also featured in Mariane Pearl’s In Search of Hope that same year.

In a Politico post, Kristof cited the fact that Mam’s story had been the subject of two published books as part of what made it so credible. Addressing the issue in the Times, he wrote, “We journalists often rely to a considerable extent on people to tell the truth, especially when they have written unchallenged autobiographies.”

There’s a basic problem with this line of logic, though: Most books are never fact-checked.​
- read the full article Book Publishing, Not Fact-Checking (from The Atlantic)​
 



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Still-Growing Dreadnoughtus Among Largest Dinosaurs Found
By Kelly Gilblom

Dreadnoughtus the dinosaur weighed 65 tons, stretched half the length of an Olympic-size swimming pool and feared nothing, according to scientists who discovered the remains of one of the largest creatures to walk the earth.

The skeleton of Dreadnoughtus, named for the famed World War I battleships, was unearthed in Southern Patagonia in Argentina from 2005 to 2009, according to a paper released today in Scientific Reports. The skeleton, about 45 percent complete including most of the vertebrae from the dinosaur’s 30-foot-long tail, was found by a team of scientists from Drexel University in Philadelphia.

The finding offers scientists new insight into the largest animals that walked the planet, enabling them to understand the creature’s anatomy and how something so big survived on plants. Even at 85 feet long, Dreadnoughtus was still growing.

The creature “weighed as much as a dozen African elephants,” Kenneth Lacovara, an associate professor at Drexel who led the study, said in a statement. “Shockingly, skeletal evidence shows that when this 65-ton specimen died, it was not yet full grown.”

Lacovara chose the name Dreadnoughtus because it means “fears nothing.”
​
- read the full article Still-Growing Dreadnoughtus Among Largest Dinosaurs Found (Bloomberg)​
 
trysail said:



iFLX.XWKOI0o.jpg


Still-Growing Dreadnoughtus Among Largest Dinosaurs Found
By Kelly Gilblom

Dreadnoughtus the dinosaur weighed 65 tons, stretched half the length of an Olympic-size swimming pool and feared nothing, according to scientists who discovered the remains of one of the largest creatures to walk the earth.

The skeleton of Dreadnoughtus, named for the famed World War I battleships, was unearthed in Southern Patagonia in Argentina from 2005 to 2009, according to a paper released today in Scientific Reports. The skeleton, about 45 percent complete including most of the vertebrae from the dinosaur’s 30-foot-long tail, was found by a team of scientists from Drexel University in Philadelphia.

The finding offers scientists new insight into the largest animals that walked the planet, enabling them to understand the creature’s anatomy and how something so big survived on plants. Even at 85 feet long, Dreadnoughtus was still growing.

The creature “weighed as much as a dozen African elephants,” Kenneth Lacovara, an associate professor at Drexel who led the study, said in a statement. “Shockingly, skeletal evidence shows that when this 65-ton specimen died, it was not yet full grown.”

Lacovara chose the name Dreadnoughtus because it means “fears nothing.”
​
- read the full article Still-Growing Dreadnoughtus Among Largest Dinosaurs Found (Bloomberg)​
Click to expand...

OMG that is awesome!
 
female-vikings.jpg


Shieldmaidens are not a myth! A recent archaeological discovery has shattered the stereotype of exclusively male Viking warriors sailing out to war while their long-suffering wives wait at home with baby Vikings. (We knew it! We always knew it.) Plus, some other findings are challenging that whole “rape and pillage” thing, too.

Researchers at the University of Western Australia decided to revamp the way they studied Viking remains. Previously, researchers had misidentified skeletons as male simply because they were buried with their swords and shields. (Female remains were identified by their oval brooches, and not much else.) By studying osteological signs of gender within the bones themselves, researchers discovered that approximately half of the remains were actually female warriors, given a proper burial with their weapons.​
 
Mikes-Hot-Honey-600x450.jpg


If you've seen hot honey at a restaurant, you were probably at Paulie Gee's. In 2010, Kurtz began an apprenticeship at the Greenpoint pizza joint and presented owner Paul Giannone with a bottle of his homemade hot honey. Giannone loved it and decided to serve it atop his Sopressata pies. When customers started requesting to-go ramekins of the condiment, Kurtz knew he had made something special, and began producing, bottling, and selling his hot honey out of the Paulie Gee's kitchen — which is still his home base.

The key to hot honey's appeal is its versatility. Like all the great condiments — Heinz ketchup, sriracha — you can drizzle hot honey on all sorts of things. Pizza (of course), fried chicken, fresh ricotta, hot biscuits, Brussels sprouts. The sweet-heat combo is universally appealing, but hot honey also had an added layer of depth thanks to the floral qualities of both the honey and the peppers used to infuse it. (Kurtz keeps his exact recipe a secret.)​
 
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Most young adults gain only about three pounds during their first year, about the same as those who don't attend college. So why is there such a strong misconception to the contrary?

Freshmen across the country are moving into their dorms this week, hanging up their Target Room Essentials™ curtains and sizing up their roommate's hygiene habits. They might also, on the advice of their forebears, stop to Google articles such as, "15 Ways to Fight the Freshman 15." In the course of this battle, they may vow to attend only the most rigorous Zumba sessions at the campus gym and to eat only the most reasonable servings of soft-serve from the campus soft-serve machine. At least until said machine is stolen by the Pi Kappa Phi brothers as part of an elaborate and tragically fatal prank.

It's of course good to exercise and use portion control. But either way, these students will probably not gain 15 pounds. They will gain, research shows, just 2.5 to six.

Indeed, the Freshman 15 is largely folklore, known perhaps more for its alliterative allure than its scientific veracity. In other countries the first-year weight gain is known as the more vague First Year Fatties, the more accurate Fresher Five, or, in the case of Australia, the more explicit-sounding "Fresher Spread."
[...]
As more and more magazines and newspapers covered the trend, they neglected to mentioned that it was scientifically unsubstantiated, as University of Oklahoma Library Sciences professor Cecelia Brown found in a 2008 review.​
- read the full article The Origin of the 'Freshman 15' Myth (from The Atlantic)​
 
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image courtesy Liz Henry (Flickr)

A team of researchers has successfully achieved brain-to-brain human communication using non-invasive technologies across a distance of 5,000 miles.

Humans just got a step closer to being able to think a message into someone else's brain on the other side of the world: in a first-of-its-kind study, an international team of researchers has successfully achieved brain-to-brain transmission of information between humans.

The team, comprising researchers from Harvard Medical School teaching affiliate Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Starlab Barcelona in Spain, and Axilum Robotics in Strasbourg, France, used a number of technologies that enabled them to send messages from India to France -- a distance of 5,000 miles (8046.72km) -- without performing invasive surgery on the test subjects.​
 
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