Good Reads

http://www.gq.com/images/entertainment/2013/02/burning-man/burning-man-02.jpg

It's something we've all been meaning to do. The father-son bonding adventure. You know: The big fishing excursion, The road trip down Route 66. Last year, Wells Tower took a completely different approach with his dad: Burning Man, the world's largest chemically enhanced self-expression festival. They went to witness the Slut Olympics. They went to see the art. They went to discover what draws 60,000 people to one of the least hospitable places on Earth. Then they set up camp and took off their clothes. And things got truly interesting​
- read the full article The Old Man at Burning Man (from GQ)
 
http://www.wired.com/magazine/wp-content/images/19-07/ff_feedbackloop_f.jpg?kdk

In 2003, officials in Garden Grove, California, a community of 170,000 people wedged amid the suburban sprawl of Orange County, set out to confront a problem that afflicts most every town in America: drivers speeding through school zones.
[...]
So city engineers decided to take another approach. In five Garden Grove school zones, they put up what are known as dynamic speed displays, or driver feedback signs: a speed limit posting coupled with a radar sensor attached to a huge digital readout announcing “Your Speed.”

The signs were curious in a few ways. For one thing, they didn’t tell drivers anything they didn’t already know—there is, after all, a speedometer in every car. If a motorist wanted to know their speed, a glance at the dashboard would do it. For another thing, the signs used radar, which decades earlier had appeared on American roads as a talisman technology, reserved for police officers only. Now Garden Grove had scattered radar sensors along the side of the road like traffic cones. And the Your Speed signs came with no punitive follow-up—no police officer standing by ready to write a ticket. This defied decades of law-enforcement dogma, which held that most people obey speed limits only if they face some clear negative consequence for exceeding them.

In other words, officials in Garden Grove were betting that giving speeders redundant information with no consequence would somehow compel them to do something few of us are inclined to do: slow down.

The results fascinated and delighted the city officials. In the vicinity of the schools where the dynamic displays were installed, drivers slowed an average of 14 percent. Not only that, at three schools the average speed dipped below the posted speed limit. Since this experiment, Garden Grove has installed 10 more driver feedback signs. “Frankly, it’s hard to get people to slow down,” says Dan Candelaria, Garden Grove’s traffic engineer. “But these encourage people to do the right thing.”
[...]
The signs leverage what’s called a feedback loop, a profoundly effective tool for changing behavior. The basic premise is simple. Provide people with information about their actions in real time (or something close to it), then give them an opportunity to change those actions, pushing them toward better behaviors. Action, information, reaction. It’s the operating principle behind a home thermostat, which fires the furnace to maintain a specific temperature, or the consumption display in a Toyota Prius, which tends to turn drivers into so-called hypermilers trying to wring every last mile from the gas tank. But the simplicity of feedback loops is deceptive. They are in fact powerful tools that can help people change bad behavior patterns, even those that seem intractable. Just as important, they can be used to encourage good habits, turning progress itself into a reward. In other words, feedback loops change human behavior. And thanks to an explosion of new technology, the opportunity to put them into action in nearly every part of our lives is quickly becoming a reality.​
- read the full article Harnessing the Power of Feedback Loops (from Wired)
 
I scored 500

Amongst the thousands of languages spoken across the world, here are just seventy. How many can you distinguish between?​
- click to play The Great Language Game (from greatlanguagegame.com)
 
It's something we've all been meaning to do. The father-son bonding adventure. You know: The big fishing excursion, The road trip down Route 66. Last year, Wells Tower took a completely different approach with his dad: Burning Man, the world's largest chemically enhanced self-expression festival. They went to witness the Slut Olympics. They went to see the art. They went to discover what draws 60,000 people to one of the least hospitable places on Earth. Then they set up camp and took off their clothes. And things got truly interesting​
- read the full article The Old Man at Burning Man (from GQ)


A Fascinating Account Of Burning Man From An Unexpected Source

Willis Eschenbach is a polymath, an autodidact and a raconteur of the first order. In the course of a varied and adventurous life, he has been places and done things that are amazing. Given all that, I never expected to be surprised by further revelations. I was wrong— this is the last place I'd expect him to visit.



http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/burn-12-art-car-sailing-ship.jpg?w=640&h=553


 
http://www.stuff.co.nz/life-style/love-sex/9128670/Female-orgasm-mystery-to-men


"Why do women orgasm? "Because it's a pleasant sensation!" comes the obvious answer.

But as an answer, pleasure fails to finish the job. One is then left asking why orgasms are pleasant. Science is a lot like talking to a four-year-old, where every explanation is met with the same question - "Why?"

One popular theory for the evolution of the female orgasm holds that all those tremors and twitches function to retain sperm. It's based on the rather racy idea that women have - or historically had - sex with so many guys they need a physiological mechanism to help them decide which man's sperm to use for conception.

One way this can happen is for the uterus to contract during orgasm and suck up the sperm, drawing it closer to the egg. The body decides whose sperm to use by stacking the fertilisation lottery in favour of the better lover. But, depending as this does on a rampant sperm competition and complex uterine mechanics, it is too complicated by half.

How about the revolutionary idea that orgasms are pleasant to act as a reward? Payback for doing what's good for the species?"
 
http://www.stuff.co.nz/life-style/love-sex/9128670/Female-orgasm-mystery-to-men


"Why do women orgasm? "Because it's a pleasant sensation!" comes the obvious answer.

But as an answer, pleasure fails to finish the job. One is then left asking why orgasms are pleasant. Science is a lot like talking to a four-year-old, where every explanation is met with the same question - "Why?"

One popular theory for the evolution of the female orgasm holds that all those tremors and twitches function to retain sperm. It's based on the rather racy idea that women have - or historically had - sex with so many guys they need a physiological mechanism to help them decide which man's sperm to use for conception.

One way this can happen is for the uterus to contract during orgasm and suck up the sperm, drawing it closer to the egg. The body decides whose sperm to use by stacking the fertilisation lottery in favour of the better lover. But, depending as this does on a rampant sperm competition and complex uterine mechanics, it is too complicated by half.

How about the revolutionary idea that orgasms are pleasant to act as a reward? Payback for doing what's good for the species?"

a really good orgasm gets the milking spasms going on, and all your cooch needs to do is drink. like a vice clamp. then there's jerks and everything in an attempt to get to any reserves. that's where the squirting confuses me. at first i thought it was to push the sperms out, but now i think it's to dilute them, allowing for a more fluid entry.
 
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Poking fun at new words added to various dictionaries is a time-honored journalistic tradition, nearly as well-loved as writing about nomenclature after the Social Security Administration's annual release of the country's most popular names.

And for good reason: Everyone uses words and everyone has a name. It doesn't get more universal than the language we share. So, today, when the Oxford Dictionaries Online (not the OED) added bitcoin and hackerspace and emoji and TL;DR, everyone had some fun arguing about whether all the additions were appropriate. On one side are the traditionalists, who would prefer English remain the same as it's always been, where "always" is defined as whenever that person was 23. On the other side are the people who are right. This is literally a never-ending debate, and yes I just used literally to mean figuratively and you still knew what I meant.

But, question! Many of the words entering our dictionaries have a distinctively technological flavor. They are things we use to describe our interactions with machines, or are used almost exclusively in mediated realms like Gchat. So, if our language is being partially forced to find new ways to say things because we can do new things with technology, and we know technology obsolesces, then are we naming actions and ideas that will only exist until the next upgrade comes out?
[...]
In any case, we went back to the trove of equally excited articles about new words being added to dictionaries in the 1990s to see how the words had aged. Better than you'd think, I'd say.

Applet: This one caught on, didn't it? But only in its abbreviated form, app.

Boot Up: In the old days, a computer booting up could take a minute or two as technical arcana flashed up your monitor. That's not how most computers work anymore, and slowly, I think we're losing this word. And in its more figurative meaning — go through the turning-on process — we have "spin up" and "start up."

Browser: This one has stuck. It certainly is more likely to mean the piece of software we use to move around the web than someone looking through a store.

Cowabunga: This word has nothing to do with technology. Still. You kind of miss it, too, right? It wasn't the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles that initially popularized it, but rather surfers via the Howdy Doody Show. (How childhood dies.)

Cypherpunk: In the early days of both computing and the Internet, cryptography to keep people from spying on you was all the rage. For obvious reasons, both the term and idea of cypherpunk are coming back, I think.​
 
My father rescued me time after time when I was lost in addiction. What kind of father will I be for my new daughter?

http://petercstenson.com/images/peter1.jpg

Only six months ago, I had envisioned parenthood like this: we’d be hip and we’d live in the city and we’d walk around as a young family drinking coffee and eating out. We wouldn’t dress our daughter in too much pink because we weren’t those kind of people. And there’d be no forced photographs. No books read about how to raise a baby, and no fights between my wife and me about parenting tactics. It’d be our lives as we knew it, only better with the accessory of a child.

It took me all of one night with my daughter to realise that shit was about me, not her.

A year after Jazz Fest, New Orleans, after two stints in rehab and being kicked out of high school and having made the trade from uppers to downers, and you have me at 17, once again run away, this time to San Francisco. I was still with the same girlfriend, only now she was sucking off this dude named Twig. I was a mess. I was seeing my self-proclaimed spirit animal (a clichéd crow) everywhere. I had broken into an Econo Lodge and climbed through the window, stripped down naked and cut a huge slice across my abdomen — attempting to free my soul — before lying down in a pool of blood and watching a documentary about Jesus.​
- read the full article Runaway feelings (from Aeon Magazine)
 
a really good orgasm gets the milking spasms going on, and all your cooch needs to do is drink. like a vice clamp. then there's jerks and everything in an attempt to get to any reserves. that's where the squirting confuses me. at first i thought it was to push the sperms out, but now i think it's to dilute them, allowing for a more fluid entry.

My theory is, orgasm moves the egg to the uterus before conception happens in the fallopian tubes. If it worked the other way females would stand on their heads to fuck.

I read a study years ago, violent rape often causes ovulation.

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12110-003-1014-0
 
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LOL!

http://news.mtv.ca/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/lol-face.jpg

The story I want to tell you is a simple story about myself and my son Luke. Some of you may have read about him over the years. I write about him often enough. And the truth is we’ve always been pretty good friends. Father and son, of course, but we’ve always shared a lot in common. We lived through Paris together, and we love football. I’ve taught him to love hockey; we even love the same hockey team, the Montreal Canadiens.

But recently he turned 12, and in New York City, because everything is a little accelerated, 12 is really thirteen. And when thirteen happens to kids, as you all know, something profound changes. They begin to become adolescents; they approach being teenagers. And the bond, no matter how strong it is, between a father and son, or a mother and son or daughter, begins to change. It begins to alter. And suddenly they become more distant from you.
[...]
Well, Luke is always insisting that I download software—Skype, or Limewire—and he insisted that I download AOL Instant Messenger, and I did. And I had it on my desktop. One day he comes in, I ask the question, he walks into his room, the door shuts, I go back to my little study, and I’m writing, and suddenly I hear a ping on my screen. And I look down, and it’s an instant message from Luke.

“Hey, Dad! Wuz up?”

And I write, “Nothing much. Wuz up with you?” And he says, “Oh, I had a terrible day at school.”

And right away—he’s 15 feet away from me—we have the conversation that he denied me at the door five minutes before. And I realized, of course, what it was really all about. The appeal of instant messaging is that you control—the child controls—the means of communication. You’re not accepting the three-fifteen third degree. You’re claiming the right to control your own conversations.
[...]
Now I loved instant messaging, once I’d gotten the hang of it. I loved the simplicity of it, I loved the autonomy of it, and I loved the language of abbreviations that instant messaging has. And Luke taught me all of the abbreviations: “brb” means “be right back,” “U2” means “you too,” “g2g” means “got to go.”

And then there was one that he didn’t even have to teach me because it was so self-evident and that was “LOL.” And I knew right away that it meant “lots of love” because he put it at the end of every message that he sent me. And even when I sent him a really sententious message (you know, one of those “Just do the things you’ve got to do, and then you’ll be able to do the things you want to do. I had homework too.”), he would always write back, “OK, Dad. LOL—Luke.” And I was really moved by this because even when I was lecturing him, he was able to absorb it in a mature way and send “lots of love” back to me as he thought about it. And I thought, This is such a beautiful telegraphic abbreviation for the twentieth century because it’s like a little arrow of love you can send out to anybody you know.

And for the next six months I was infatuated with instant messaging and its power of emotional transmission, and I sent “LOL” to everybody I knew. My sister was getting divorced out in California, and I wrote to her, “We’re all behind you and beside you, LOL—your brother.” My father got ill, and I sent him “LOL” in Canada. Everybody I knew at work, at home—everyone—I sent them “LOL.” I was an instant messaging demon.​
- read the full article Adam Gopnik: I Didn’t Know What ‘LOL’ Meant (from The Daily Beast)
 
http://i-cdn.apartmenttherapy.com/uimages/kitchen/2012_09_06-romanianeggs.jpg

Why Americans refrigerate their eggs when the rest of the world doesn't

Short answer: In America, shit happens

hat tip to bg23 who posted this crap elsewhere

Years ago on one of my first trips out of the U.S. I walked into a cheese shop in France and was overpowered by the smell - not of rot, but the natural (very strong) aroma of cheese kept at room temperature. No coolers anywhere in the store. Totally horrified me at first, but then I thought it must be okay because you didn't hear about zillions of French people dying from cheese-related diseases. I was young. It was an eye-opening experience, made me start questioning how things are done where I'm from - which is sort of the point of traveling, seeing other places, even talking on the Internet to people from other cultures/countries.

A guy I know who worked as a butcher said pretty much what that article above does - that a lot of the overcooking and over-fridging we do is made necessary by sloppy processing. E coli, for example, wouldn't be an issue in properly butchered beef because the intestinal contents (where the bacteria dwell) wouldn't be in contact with the meat. But assembly lines and automated procedures in factory "farms" allow for plenty of slip-ups. Plus the cramped and horrifyingly filthy conditions which necessitate dosing the animals with buckets of antibiotics. It's pretty gross and scary. If burgers weren't so tasty, I might be really grossed out. :D

But I think people nowadays are way too germophobic for their own good. Kids (and adults, really) should be out playing and getting dirty, toughening their immune systems. It's healthy.
 
Semi-related

Modern cities and improved hygiene could be behind rising rates of Alzheimer's in Britain and the rest of the developed world, scientists have said.

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02661/tapwater_2661600b.jpg

Researchers have linked the "hygiene hypothesis" - the idea that lack of exposure to germs, viruses and parasites harms the immune system - to rising rates of dementia in richer nations.

A new study by Cambridge University compared dementia cases in 192 countries and found it was more common in those with better sanitation and less disease.

Countries where everyone has access to clean drinking water, such as the UK and France, have nine per cent higher Alzheimer's rates then average.

In comparison those where less than half have access, such as Kenya and Cambodia, have a significantly lower incident rate.

Taken together, infection levels, sanitation and urbanisation account for 43 per cent of the variation in rates of Alzheimer's between different countries, the study found.​
- read the full article Good hygiene may be to blame for soaring Alzheimer's (from The Telegraph)
 
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Rockstar's desire to create a fictional criminal underworld that's as authentic as possible persuaded the company to eschew voice actors, where possible, and hire "actual, real gang members" for Grand Theft Auto 5.

Speaking to Chicago radio station WGN, the game's contributing writer and producer "Lazlow" Jones said that thousands of hours of audio had been collected by going into people's houses and recording them speaking as they would in real life.

"When we record all these ambient characters we go towards authenticity," he said. "In the game there's these rival gangs. There's Black gangs, Latino gangs ... we recruited a guy who gets gang members, actual real gang members, like El Salvadoran gang dudes with amazing tattoos, one of which had literally gotten out of prison the day before.

"We get these guys in to record the gang characters because we don't want a goofy L.A actor who went to a fancy school trying to be a hard gang member. There's nothing worse than that, so just go find the terrifying people and say 'can you come in here please?'"

The voice actors are often ready to contribute their own take on the scripts, said Lazlow. "They look at the lines and say, 'I wouldn't say that,' so we say, 'OK, say what you would say.' Authenticity.​
- read the full article How gang members helped make Grand Theft Auto 5 (from Polygon)
 
http://cdn.theatlanticcities.com/img/upload/2013/09/05/shutterstock_121646098_1/largest.jpg

How Biofuel Technology Turned Restaurant Grease Into Gold

Back in my high school fast-food days, restaurant grease was a nuisance. No more.

-read more ♪The Grease Police They Live Inside Of My Trap ♪♪

Da fuck!??

the article said:
Indeed yellow grease, which can be used to make animal feeds, detergents, and biodiesel fuel, fetches between 30 and 40 cents per pound. Interest in biodiesel, in particular, has transformed grease into a valuable waste product. Restaurants that once paid to have the stuff removed now receive competing bids from hauling companies and renderers, which turn yellow grease into biofuels.

Hence the theft, which has become a multi-million dollar problem over the last decade, according to the National Renderers Association. Greensworks Holdings, a group of companies that collect yellow grease from 13,000 restaurants around the Northeast, told the Philadelphia Inquirer last summer they lose cooking oil from about 1,000 of those establishments each month.

"They come in the dark of night, when nobody's looking," says Tom Cook, president of the National Renderers Association. "They just stick their vacuum into the grease container, and when our member comes to collect, they're looking into an empty container."

Someone should make a movie about this. Dog Day Afternoon, only with used cooking grease.
 
http://media.npr.org/assets/img/2013/07/31/camping6toned_wide-af23c510f29abdf5080278343def3317fbe8ba33-s4-c85.jpg

Too much artificial light at the wrong time can change sleep patterns and make us groggy in the mornings, scientists Thursday in the journal Current Biology.

They found that a week of camping — completely away from all electrical lights and computers — quickly synchronizes the body's internal clock to the sun. And it helps night owls, who have problems getting up, rise earlier and be more energetic in the morning.

The study is small. Just eight people took time off from their busy schedules to camp in Colorado's dazzling (all in the name of science, of course).

But the findings support those from previous studies and offer some easy tips to help us all become morning people.​
- read the full article Want To Be A Morning Person? Take A Few Tips From Campers (from NPR)
 
http://www.theawl.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Screen-Shot-2013-09-05-at-4.11.20-PM-e1378411917170.jpg
Kathy Andersen, author, Change Your Shoes, Live Your Greatest Life

If you find yourself writing a book review and publishing it on the Internet, chances are that digital marketers will track down your e-mail address and mark you for public-relations campaigns. Being marketers, they’ll know to focus most of their e-mails on books you might want to review. Being digital, they’ll assume that their audience lacks all but the most basic forms of taste and intelligence and may "Care to speak with Sheila on feeling good in the bedroom (in more ways than one)" or want to follow "a wise and wild path for navigating the dating world AFTER Divorce (and in your FORTIES!)." Such is the stupid online marketing of stupid books, the literary equivalent of pop-up ads for penis enhancement and for sexy singles NEAR YOU.

"Mr. Adam Plunkett Freelance Writer," they will write, "Can we interest you in doing a review of this inspiring and enjoyable children's book?" This "compelling and inspiring personal story" ("with exceptional expertise")? This "inspiring children’s book encourages big dreams and confidence." This "new breed of an erotic novel"—"based heavily on sexting and mysterious hotel encounters" between "Ellie and Monsieur"—is "sharper, sexier, and penetrating" (for the worrisome few of us tired of dull penetration). "With a striking afterword by Jesse Ventura," this book "will have you realizing that what the government tells you is not always what should be believed." "The Untold Story of Scarface" will tell you "The real story of how his face was scarred" ("And much, much more!"). This author, "a highly successful Ivy League attorney from Beverly Hills, who’s [sic] book has been described as ‘Sex and the City for the next generation’ would love to discuss with you:"

• Internet dating gone wrong. Real wrong!
• Finding true love
• Etc.

In "this Emmy award winning writer’s new book… there are warm moments supplied by Lloyd Beecham’s daughter Charlotte until fate kills her one summer day." "Five Stars!" writes "Amazon reviewer – Polly G.," the only critic whom the book’s marketers quote.​
- read the full article The Stupid Online Marketing of Stupid Books (from The Awl)
 
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