Good Reads

[Laurel]

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/cartoon-noth-rabbit.jpg

“Laughter and mirth are not the same thing. I can elicit laughter by electrically stimulating parts of the brain,” the neurologist Richard Restak said the other night, onstage at the Rubin Museum. Beside him, at individual tables, sat three New Yorker cartoonists, Zach Kanin, Paul Noth, and David Sipress; a crowd of cartoon-and-neuroscience enthusiasts, many of them wearing colorful scarves and little glasses, were gathered in the audience. The event, part of the museum’s Brainwave festival, intended to explore the mental processes involved in creating and understanding cartoons; the crowd was eager to laugh—a screen showing E. B. White’s famous line about humor, dissection, a frog, and its innards went over big—but audience members soon found themselves quietly studying a diagram of the brain and hearing a speedy description of its parts and their functions.

“What happens in the brain when we look at a cartoon?” Dr. Restak asked. He showed a famous line drawing, “Cookie Theft,” which doctors have used to diagnose patients’ perceptive abilities. A kitchen scene, it depicts a few subtle disasters—a boy taking a cookie from a jar on a high shelf while falling off a stool; sibling coercion; a mother with a glazed expression drying a dish as a sink overflows into a puddle at her feet. “I’m going to ask for a volunteer to describe it. Whole books have been written about this picture. What do you see?”​

- read the full article This Is Your Brain on Cartoons (from The New Yorker)​

 

[Laurel]

Addendum

This is actually the best Danzig video on Youtube (#3 on the list below):
Shakira Featuring Danzig / Hips Dont Lie

- read the full article The 11 Most Glorious Danzig Videos on the Internet (from JadedPunk)

 

[Laurel]

http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/68950000/jpg/_68950882_de27.jpg

A full Moon can disturb a good night's sleep, scientists believe.

Researchers found evidence of a "lunar influence" in a study of 33 volunteers sleeping in tightly controlled laboratory conditions.

When the Moon was round, the volunteers took longer to nod off and had poorer quality sleep, despite being shut in a darkened room, Current Biology reports.

They also had a dip in levels of a hormone called melatonin that is linked to natural-body clock cycles.​

- read the full article Full Moon 'disturbs a good night's sleep' (from the BBC)​

 

[Laurel]

The rape joke is that you were 19 years old.

The rape joke is that he was your boyfriend.

The rape joke it wore a goatee. A goatee.

Imagine the rape joke looking in the mirror, perfectly reflecting back itself, and grooming itself to look more like a rape joke. “Ahhhh,” it thinks. “Yes. A goatee.”

No offense.

The rape joke is that he was seven years older. The rape joke is that you had known him for years, since you were too young to be interesting to him. You liked that use of the word interesting, as if you were a piece of knowledge that someone could be desperate to acquire, to assimilate, and to spit back out in different form through his goateed mouth.

Then suddenly you were older, but not very old at all.

The rape joke is that you had been drinking wine coolers. Wine coolers! Who drinks wine coolers? People who get raped, according to the rape joke.
...
The rape joke is that you asked why he did it. The rape joke is he said he didn’t know, like what else would a rape joke say? The rape joke said YOU were the one who was drunk, and the rape joke said you remembered it wrong, which made you laugh out loud for one long split-open second. The wine coolers weren’t Bartles & Jaymes, but it would be funnier for the rape joke if they were. It was some pussy flavor, like Passionate Mango or Destroyed Strawberry, which you drank down without question and trustingly in the heart of Cincinnati Ohio.

Can rape jokes be funny at all, is the question.

Can any part of the rape joke be funny. The part where it ends—haha, just kidding! Though you did dream of killing the rape joke for years, spilling all of its blood out, and telling it that way.

The rape joke cries out for the right to be told.

The rape joke is that this is just how it happened.

The rape joke is that the next day he gave you Pet Sounds. No really. Pet Sounds. He said he was sorry and then he gave you Pet Sounds. Come on, that’s a little bit funny.

Admit it.​

- read the full article A Poem By Patricia Lockwood (from The Awl)​

 

[Laurel]

The vagaries of human memory are notorious. A friend insists you were at your 15th class reunion when you know it was your 10th. You distinctly remember that another friend was at your wedding, until she reminds you that you didn’t invite her. Or, more seriously, an eyewitness misidentifies the perpetrator of a terrible crime.

Not only are false, or mistaken, memories common in normal life, but researchers have found it relatively easy to generate false memories of words and images in human subjects. But exactly what goes on in the brain when mistaken memories are formed has remained mysterious.

Steve Ramirez, Xu Liu and other scientists, led by Susumu Tonegawa, reported Thursday in the journal Science that they caused mice to remember being shocked in one location, when in reality the electric shock was delivered in a completely different location.

The finding, said Dr. Tonegawa, a Nobel laureate for his work in immunology, and founder of the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, of which the center is a part, is yet another cautionary reminder of how unreliable memory can be in mice and humans. It adds to evidence he and others first presented last year in the journal Nature that the physical trace of a specific memory can be identified in a group of brain cells as it forms, and activated later by stimulating those same cells.

Although mice are not people, the basic mechanisms of memory formation in mammals are evolutionarily ancient, said Edvard I. Moser, a neuroscientist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, who studies spatial memory and navigation and was not part of Dr. Tonegawa’s team.​

- read the full article Scientists Trace Memories of Things That Never Happened (from The New York Times)​

 

[Laurel]

http://moreintelligentlife.com/sites/default/files/article-images/0314ILFE12_MIL.jpg

CLOSE YOUR EYES and picture this. You are walking in the sunshine under a blue sky. On one side of you is a green mass of palm trees, on the other the turquoise of the sea. And under your bare feet is sand, white sand—powdery and silky, soft yet firm—which yields and then holds as you step on it. It sends a sensual thrill from the soles of the feet up into your brain.

Now change the picture. Make the sand beneath you coarser. Turn it to gravel. Make it sharp. It doesn’t work, does it? The sand is essential to the scene. And even if you de-saturate the colour, even if you have rocky cliffs instead of palm trees to your left and a steely sea to your right, the sand under your feet—which may now be greyish—still makes you want to take off your shoes and wriggle your toes into it.

To the travel industry, every beach is white. And it is no coincidence that white sand is, for most of the developed world, a long-haul flight away and associated with wealth, just as a tan was in the early years of the jet engine. The things we desire, or are encouraged to desire, often follow the money.

The place the beach occupies in the Western imagination today has changed dramatically in the 300 years since "Robinson Crusoe" was published. Then it was a hostile, dangerous frontier, next to the wild unknown of the sea. It reeked of shipwrecks, invasions and the treacherous business of fishing. But it is telling that even then Daniel Defoe transposed the tale of Alexander Selkirk, in part his inspiration for Crusoe, from a temperate, rocky island off the coast of Chile to a sunny Caribbean one with beaches. Sailors exploring the South Pacific were understandably seduced, after many hard months at sea, by the warm waters, fresh food and sexual freedom of the islanders, and their tales travelled back to Europe. But the reality was that, until man’s dominion over nature became more assured—until sun cream and vaccinations against diseases—the tropical seaside was an unfriendly place to find yourself, sometimes fatally so.

Pale sand may be most prized, but sand of any shade has a hotline to our senses; we want to touch it and mould it and play with it. That is why hotels in the Caribbean don’t replace their beaches with concrete, even though they may be in annual danger of being whisked away by a hurricane. Perhaps warm sand beneath our soles triggers atavistic memories of our ancestral home in Africa, or perhaps it is simply the opposite of our hard, urban streets. Either way, sand exerts its magnetism with extra force at this time of year, the holiday season for the northern hemisphere. But what exactly is this stuff that draws us irresistibly to the coast? How did it develop the power to create new migration patterns in homo sapiens? And why has it lodged itself so firmly in our collective psyche?​

- read the full article THE MAGIC OF SAND (from The Economist / Intelligent Life)​

 

[Laurel]

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Observer/Pix/pictures/2011/9/21/1316604870780/five-members-of-scotts-ex-007.jpg
Frozen in time: the five members of Scott’s expedition who made it to the South Pole in 1912, but died on the return. From left: Oates, Bowers, Scott, Wilson and Evans. Photograph: Popperfoto/Getty Images

On 12 November 1912, a party of British explorers was crossing the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica when one of the team, Charles Wright, noticed "a small object projecting above the surface". He halted and discovered the tip of a tent. "It was a great shock," he recalled.

With his companions, Wright had been searching for Captain Robert Falcon Scott who, with four colleagues, had set off to reach the South Pole the previous year. The team, from the Scott expedition base camp, knew their comrades were dead: their provisions would have run out long ago. But how and where had Scott perished?​

- read the full article Scott of the Antarctic: the lies that doomed his race to the pole (from The Observer)​

 

[Laurel]

In my opinion, these photos are selling false or exaggerated promises of what 90 days, etc., of their program can achieve. Long-lasting results take years of consistency, hard work and dedication. Results that happen quickly are often temporary, and this is another factor that needs to be taken into account when looking at these transformations. Did the individual cut calories to starvation levels or cut out entire food groups to reach a very low body fat percentage for the photo shoot, only to rebound a few days or weeks later? This must be considered when setting your goals and expectations based on someone's program.
...
Just a few weeks ago I took another series of photos in an attempt to be a little more deceptive. I wanted to show a series of progressions that look like a few months of hard work and dieting. I'm about 200 pounds and 19 percent body fat in this photo series. This took under an hour to produce.

http://images.huffingtonpost.com/2013-07-24-ADixonTransform2.jpg​

- read the full article Seduced by the Illusion: The Truth About Transformation Photos (from The Huffington Post)​

 

[Laurel]

Since 9/11, Afghanistan's national sport of buzkashi has become as complicated as the country itself

http://a.espncdn.com/photo/2011/0908/300x200_buzkashi5.jpg

There aren't a lot of bats, balls or rackets in northern Afghanistan. There are goats, horses, men and dusty plains, and they have been there ever since Genghis Khan and his Mongol horde swept into the neighborhood in the 13th century. Their game, then, is simple. Men on horseback grab a goat from a chalk circle, carry it around a pole and drop it into another circle. No downs, innings, line judges or refs. Sometimes there are teams, and sometimes there aren't. Sometimes the field is 200 meters by 200 meters, and sometimes it isn't. And the goat? The goat might be a calf, but it's always dead, just lying there with its head and hooves cut off.

Grab the goat, bring it around the pole and put it in the circle. That's buzkashi.

The game sounds simple until you hang out with Mohammad Hasan Palwan. "Palwan" means strongman in Dari, the Persian language of Afghanistan. That's what people call him. The strongman. For a strongman, he's hardly big like American athletes, not like Ndamukong Suh or Blake Griffin. He's tall and wiry with brown-green eyes and a neat mustache. For an athlete at the top of his game, he's old -- maybe 42 or 43. He's not sure because he doesn't know his birthday. His hands, though, are giant and covered with a thousand small scars. His fingers are crooked, knobby and gnarled, like a pair of moving ginseng roots. Palwan has broken them all. And his ribs. And his arms. And his legs. And his jaw.​

- read the full article Rider in the storm (from ESPN)​

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/20161

Eine Kleine Nacht Bastiat...

 

[Laurel]

http://mentalfloss.com/sites/default/files/styles/article_640x430/public/adams.png

A man whose wit was matched only by the looseness of his tongue, the combative John Adams quickly acquired a hefty reputation for articulate jabs and razor-sharp put-downs at the expense of his allies and (numerous) rivals alike, including some of the most celebrated figures in American history (Bob Dole once described him as “an eighteenth-century Don Rickles”). Here are some of his best zingers:

1. On Benjamin Franklin

“His whole life has been one continued insult to good manners and to decency.”​

2. On Alexander Hamilton

“That bastard brat of a Scottish peddler! His ambition, his restlessness and all his grandiose schemes come, I'm convinced, from a superabundance of secretions, which he couldn't find enough whores to absorb!”​

3. On Thomas Paine's Common Sense

“What a poor, ignorant, malicious, crapulous mass.”​

- read the full article 7 of John Adams' Greatest Insults (from Mental Floss)​

 

[Laurel]

http://www.theblackpooltower.com/images/slideshows/burger-kitchen/small/burger.jpg

A week tomorrow, at an exclusive west London venue, the most expensive beefburger in history will be nervously cooked and served before an invited audience. Costing somewhere in the region of £250,000, the 5oz burger will be composed of synthetic meat, grown in a laboratory from the stem cells of a slaughtered cow.

The scientist behind the "in vitro" burger believes synthetic meat could help to save the world from the growing consumer demand for beef, lamb, pork and chicken. The future appetite for beef alone, for instance, could easily lead to the conversion of much of the world's remaining forests to barren, manicured pastures by the end of this century.

The precious patty will be made of some 3,000 strips of artificial beef, each the size of a rice grain, grown from bovine stem cells cultured in the laboratory. Scientists believe the public demonstration will be "proof of principle", possibly leading to artificial meat being sold in supermarkets within five to 10 years.​

- read the full article 'In vitro' beef - it's the meat of the future (from The Independent)​

 

[Laurel]

http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/18v2pj8gwovd2jpg/ku-xlarge.jpg

Reddit recently asked their users, "What's the best horror story you can come up with in two sentences?" And their responses were terrifying! Who knew we could be so scared by such small stories? It's absolutely brilliant and here are a few of our favorites.

I just saw my reflection blink. -marino1310

I begin tucking him into bed and he tells me, “Daddy check for monsters under my bed.” I look underneath for his amusement and see him, another him, under the bed, staring back at me quivering and whispering, “Daddy there’s somebody on my bed.” - justAnotherMuffledVo

The doctors told the amputee he might experience a phantom limb from time to time. Nobody prepared him for the moments though, when he felt cold fingers brush across his phantom hand. -Gagege​

- read the full article Two-Sentence Horror Stories are actually pretty chilling (from io9)​

 

[KRCummings]

http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/18v2pj8gwovd2jpg/ku-xlarge.jpg

Reddit recently asked their users, "What's the best horror story you can come up with in two sentences?" And their responses were terrifying! Who knew we could be so scared by such small stories? It's absolutely brilliant and here are a few of our favorites.

I just saw my reflection blink. -marino1310

I begin tucking him into bed and he tells me, “Daddy check for monsters under my bed.” I look underneath for his amusement and see him, another him, under the bed, staring back at me quivering and whispering, “Daddy there’s somebody on my bed.” - justAnotherMuffledVo

The doctors told the amputee he might experience a phantom limb from time to time. Nobody prepared him for the moments though, when he felt cold fingers brush across his phantom hand. -Gagege​

- read the full article Two-Sentence Horror Stories are actually pretty chilling (from io9)​

No sleep for me tonight. Thanks.

 

[Laurel]

This one gave me the chills:

I begin tucking him into bed and he tells me, “Daddy check for monsters under my bed.” I look underneath for his amusement and see him, another him, under the bed, staring back at me quivering and whispering, “Daddy there’s somebody on my bed.”​

- read the full article What is the best horror story you can come up with in two sentences. (from Reddit)​

 

[KRCummings]

This one gave me the chills:

I begin tucking him into bed and he tells me, “Daddy check for monsters under my bed.” I look underneath for his amusement and see him, another him, under the bed, staring back at me quivering and whispering, “Daddy there’s somebody on my bed.”​

- read the full article What is the best horror story you can come up with in two sentences. (from Reddit)​

I know, that's the one that did it for me. Fucking creepy.

 

[Laurel]

This doesn't belong on this thread, but: it's been a long time since I've seen a truly scary movie.

I did watch this movie last night - which was not scary, but hilariously funny and awesome.

 

[Lorilei]

This one gave me the chills:

I begin tucking him into bed and he tells me, “Daddy check for monsters under my bed.” I look underneath for his amusement and see him, another him, under the bed, staring back at me quivering and whispering, “Daddy there’s somebody on my bed.”​

- read the full article What is the best horror story you can come up with in two sentences. (from Reddit)​

Holy shit.

 

[Laurel]

For real!

This one scares me too, as it reminds me of The Vanishing (the original, not the extremely shitty remake):

I can't move, breathe, speak or hear and it's so dark all the time. If I knew it would be this lonely, I would have been cremated instead.​

- read the full article What is the best horror story you can come up with in two sentences. (from Reddit)​

 

[Laurel]

This one's pretty good, too.

I woke up to hear knocking on glass. At first, I though it was the window until I heard it come from the mirror again.​

 

[Lorilei]

It's been watching me for hours now... Sometimes I catch glimpses of its reflexion on the computer screen, but I dare not turn around...

There was a picture in my phone of me sleeping. I live alone.

Gah!!

 

[pete]

damn, this shit is skeevin' me out!

 

[KRCummings]

damn, this shit is skeevin' me out!

I know, right? Creepy ass shit.

 

[Laurel]

Gah!!

Ooh, those are good ones! I'm going to send them to someone I know who's convinced that horror stories involving modern tech suck at being scary.

 

[Laurel]

http://www.trbimg.com/img-5137d2bd/turbine/la-heb-youthful-brain-20130306-001/600/600x277

Adults (especially parents) often find fault with the teenage brain. But they should admit that it is a powerful learning machine--and that sometimes, the grown-ups wish they could recapture its nimbleness. New research, conducted by researchers at Yale University and published Wednesday in the journal Neuron, homes in on the genetic and chemical mechanics that could make that possible.
...
"It’s about going from adulthood back to adolescence, and in general that’s something we would not want to do," said Strittmatter, a neurologist who directs Yale School of Medicine's program on neuroscience, neurodegeneration and repair. "But in some cases, it could prove very helpful."

In response to the world around it, the adolescent brain is a marvel of regeneration, wiring and rewiring itself constantly as its owner learns and refines the motor, social and perceptual skills that will form the foundation of his or her adult behavior. That ability to adapt, respond and repair on a dime is called plasticity.​

- read the full article Researchers find chemical secret to recapturing youthful brain (from Los Angeles Times)​