Rats Reverse Call Psychological Lines

Psychological Therapy 32 Times More Effective At Increasing Happiness As Money (ScienceDaily): Or, more accurately, people tell researchers that they get about the same increase in happiness from 4 months of therapy as you do from winning $50,000AU in the lottery. Perhaps psychologists are undercharging. [via]

Crawling Around With Baltimore Street Rats by Abigail Tucker (Smithsonian): Despite their ubiquity and their danger to us (hello, plague?), common street rats are actually very under-studied in the urban ecosystems they mostly live in. [via]

Green Lines by Beth Daley (Boston Globe): Those corridors through the wilderness with the high voltage power lines? Turns out they’re better for the environment than you’d think.

The World’s Brainiest Call Girl by Olivia Cole (The Daily Beast): The whole ‘Secret Diary Of A Call Girl author being outed as a research scientist’ thing is very fascinating for some reason. As is the guy who figured it out in 2004 and kept it secret.

Reverse Engineering by Jonah Lehrer (The Frontal Cortex): Turns out that the claims of computer simulations of the amount of neurons in a cat’s brain are a bit overhyped.

Father Heroism Wrecked Testicle Burden

Who Knew I Was Not The Father? by Ruth Padawer (New York Times Magazine): In-depth article examines the legal, ethical, and emotional ramifications of modern DNA-based paternity testing. For example, men who discover after a few years that their child is not their own are still legally required to pay child support, even if their wife then marries the biological father.

Addicted To Being Good? The Psychopathology Of Heroism by Andrea Kuszewski (IEET): The only difference between the personality of the hero and the personality of the psychopath is that the hero cares about people other than themselves (this is perhaps not surprising to fans of Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies).

Why Do Human Testicles Hang Like That? by Jesse Bering (Scientific American): An article about sugalumps that’s not bollocks but is based on ballsy scientific research. [via]

The Burden Of Being Rudd by Shaun Carney (The Age): A somewhat perceptive analysis of how Australia’s Labor government is going after 2 years, in the lead up to an approaching election. [via]

Wrecked by Nicola Twilley (Edible Geography): Bottles of wine recovered from a Swedish shipwreck in 1916 get sold for $35,000US - and are still drinkable. [via]

“The vast majority of what we say and hear is what we say and hear every day of our lives. This is not a cause for alarm. One of the very many false ideas about language is that its primary function is to express information or communicate thoughts. Speech has many functions, but surely a large part of it is more like the grooming behavior of chimpanzees or the shepherding behavior of dogs than it is like reasoned discourse among parliamentarians. We bark so that our kids get out the door in time to get on their bus and so that they feel safe and loved; we purr so that our colleagues and coworkers know we’re on the job and ready to be called on. The bulk of what we say and do each day is more like the grunts and signals baseball players use to indicate who’ll catch the pop fly than it is like a genuine conversation.”

Out Of Our Heads, Alva Noë, p. 107.

There’s reasoned discourse among parliamentarians?

(Noë’s book is a well-written and accessible defense of the mind-as-relation theory in the area of philosophy of mind, which I am sympathetic to.)

Cognitive Predators Unearth Death Drug

The Cognitive Benefits Of Time-Space Synaesthesia by Mo (Neurophilosophy): ”When someone mentions a year, I see the oval with myself at the very bottom, Christmas day to be precise. As soon as a month is given, I see exactly where that month is on the oval. As I move through the year, I am very aware of my place on the oval at the current time, and the direction I am moving in.” Time-space synaesthesia like this may underlie the abilities of people with exceptional autobiographical memories.

Meet The Predators by Thomas Macaulay Millar (yesmeansyesblog): Who are the people most likely to rape, how do they behave, and what can we do to stop them? [thanks to Frances]

Fossil Hunters Unearth Galloping, Dinosaur-Eating Crocodile In The Sahara by Ian Sample (The Guardian): I wonder who would win in a fight between a galloping dinosaur-eating crocodile and a hippo? Crikey. [via]

The Drug Does Work by Ed Cumming (More Intelligent Life): 10% of students at Cambridge have apparently taken modafinil, a drug that doesn’t make you smarter, but improves your concentration - thus improving your grades. Of course, nobody really knows about its long term side effects. [via]

The Death of Mistakes Means The Death Of Rock by Douglas Wolk (Monitor Mix/NPR): In a studio with Pro Tools and a good producer/engineer, it’s easy for musicians to fix every flaw in their performances - I certainly have. Wolk argues that this is the death of rock, which is not about perfect performances. Well, sort of. The facilitation effect, in psychology, is that, when it comes time to perform - when people are watching, when you’re under pressure - people who are experts/good at what they do will usually play better. But people who aren’t that good at what they do will play worse under pressure. ProTools alleviates the pressure in the studio - you don’t have to play good, just good enough for the engineer to fix. So you’re not going to get quite the same quality of performances. So Pro Tools really can improve bands that have major flaws (engineers will usually leave in mistakes in truly awful performances, they’re under time pressure too). But it brings down the quality of the really good bands. [via]

LHC Sister According To LSD Critic

In SUSY We Trust: What The LHC Is Really Looking For by Anil Ananthaswamy (New Scientist): A clear and fascinating story on the theoretical physics debates that the Large Hadron Collider is attempting to clear up. [via]

I’m A Culture Critic…Get Me Out Of Here by James Wolcott (Vanity Fair): “Reality TV looks in only one direction: down.” [via]

Do Blind People Hallucinate On LSD? by Vaughn Bell (Mind Hacks): Yes, blind people see visual hallucinations, but only if they lost their sight after infancy.

The Gervais Principle, Or The Office According To “The Office” by Venkatesh Rao (ribbonfarm.com): Rao treats the worldview of The Office (the US one, largely) as if it were a proper theory of management and corporate dynamics, with insightful results. [via; there’s also a Part II]

Sing A Song For Sister Suvi by Sean Michaels (McSweeneys): The bands that make it aren’t necessarily the ones who made the best music, or had the most potential, and Michaels lovingly details a band that led a brief flare of excitement before a too-early end. My own band, Sliced Bread, started off tentatively, haltingly, but we got better with every show, and, after a while we were starting to get positive reviews in the local street press, people came up after shows asking us if we had CDs for sale (we didn’t), and people I didn’t know came up to say nice things at gigs. But then I knew I was moving interstate soon, and that the drummer’s wife was getting close to giving birth (with the correlate of much less free time for him), and we didn’t try to get any more gigs for a while. We ended up recording an EP worth of material. Perhaps when I return to Sydney the band will become a concern again, but we’d have to rebuild old strengths, and may well head in another direction. [via]

Dear California Shoreline Army Hippos

God, The Army and PTSD by Tara McKelvey (Boston Review): Iraq war veterans have had it especially hard, because not only do they have to deal with the psychological fallout of fighting an unnecessary, pointless war (like Vietnam veterans) but because Bush-era officials seem to have believed that PTSD didn’t exist, and that the suffering soldiers just weren’t believing hard enough in God. [via]

Real-life Rolling Stones Creep Across Death Valley In California (telegraph.co.uk): Someone told Keith Richards there was an virtually unlimited well of heroin there. No, seriously, huge heavy rocks too big to lift are found to be slowly moving across the desert, and no-one’s quite sure why. [via]

On The Shoreline by various photographers (The Big Picture/Boston Globe): Another edition of The Big Picture, another bunch of great photos from around the world. This time it’s about the interface between land and water.

Dear People by Kurt Vonnegut (Letters Of Note): Scans of a letter home from Kurt Vonnegut to his family, written in December 1944, to inform them for the first time that he had he had been a prisoner of war in Dresden.

Caught On Camera: Hippos Kill Crocodile In Rare Clash by Jonathan Clayton (Times Online): For if you ever wanted to know who’d win a fight between a hippo and a crocodile. [via]

Cold-Blooded Shrink Mistakes Basic Difference

Its GDP Is Depressed, But Argentina Leads The World In Shrinks Per Capita by Matt Moffett (Wall Street Journal): And, like, proper shrinks - Freudians! Their equivalent of Dr Phil is, like, not only an actual psychologist (unlike Dr Phil) but is also serious about the dynamic unconscious and all that. Doesn’t seem to make them happier though… [via]

Humanity’s Other Basic Instinct: Math by Carl Zimmer (Discover Magazine): We humans have a surprisingly good intuitive mathematical sense. In other news, someone made a comic about Bertrand Russell, who famously, and usefully, proved that 1 + 1 = 2. [via]

Mistakes In Typography Grate The Purists by Alice Rawsthorn (New York Times): It didn’t even occur to me that you could love or hate typography until that whole anti-Comic Sans thing started up a few years ago.

Extinct Goat Tried Out Reptilian, Cold-Blooded Living (It Didn’t Work) by Andrew Moseman (80beats/Discover): Analysis of dwarf goat bones from Majorca reveals that the dwarf goats that evolved there were cold-blooded - being cold-blooded means you don’t have to eat as much.

Translation: What Difference Does It Make? by Victoria Poulakis (Northern Virginia Community College): Professor of English details just how much art and guesswork there is in translating Beowulf from ye olde English to modern English. Hey there, Biblical literalists! [via]

“Far from destroying the mystery of black singing, recording technology conveyed and conferred it, creating discs whose voices sounded peculiar and striking, muffled and contorted by the machine. It was perhaps no accident that [James McKune, who created much of the modern aesthetic that gets applied to the country blues] reserved his highest praise for Charley Patton, whose recordings are virtually unintelligible, owing in part to Patton’s slurred delivery, but largely to the ‘scratches, pops, clicks, and hiss’ that abound on his surviving 78s. Those layers of surface noise only intensified Patton’s aura of mystery, the magic to be found in those blank, black platters, whose spiral grooves, once set in motion, released haunting echoes from another world.”

In Search Of The Blues, Marybeth Hamilton (2007), p. 191.

When we listen to music, we often fill in the gaps. Half the time when you see a live band, the vocals aren’t loud enough. If you know what the singer sings from the album, you can fill in the gaps based on your knowledge; if you don’t, it’s often a bit of a blur. I’ve seen exciting, dynamic live bands that are partly exciting and dynamic because of that blur; when the album comes out and you can hear the words, the charm is gone, because things that seemed in flux  (but probably weren’t) are now fixed. What McKune and co do, in a way, is an example of that - the more lofi the music, the more gaps there are to fill in. Lofi fans want the music to be a little mysterious, because it means they can use their imagination to fill in the gaps.

Matrix Girl Renouncing Self-Critical Constantinople

Ghost In The Shell: Why Our Brains Will Never Live In The Matrix by Athena Andreadis (h plus): Humanity is simply too much a product of our biologies for the transhumanist fantasy of eternal life in the computer network to succeed. The objection also applies to souls in heaven, I suspect. [via]

Renouncing Islamism: To The Brink And Back Again by Johann Hari (The Independent): Disquieting, in depth, profiles/interviews of English-accented men who are former jihadis. If you ever had any doubt that neoconservative foreign policy incites terrorism, the article will kill that. [via]

You Are Kind, Strong Willed, But Can Be Self-Critical by Vaughn Bell (Mind Hacks): There’s a name for our willingness to see ourselves in vague, general statements: the Forer Effect.

The Sleeping Girl Of Turville: The True Story Of Someone Who Fell Asleep For Nine Years by Nell Rose (HubPages): Ellen Sadler was a real life Rip Van Winkle; she fell asleep in 1871 and woke up in 1880. [via]

Take Me Back To Constantinople by Edward Luttwak (Foreign Policy): Luttwak argues that people wondering how to keep the American Empire going should look to the lessons of Byzantine empire, which lasted a millennium. Of course, empires don’t last forever, and if you want to meet someone in Constantinople, she’ll be waiting in Istanbul. [via]

tomewing: treblekicker: Hollow Earth: First Sighting I for one am really looking forward to the 90s revival, not least as I want to know WHAT gets revived. It’s been going for YEARS! Baggy and madchester clubs from a few years ago, Bangface catering for the ‘ardkore retro crowd since, what, 05 or so, tracks like Livin’ Joy’s “Dreamer” massive floorfillers at pop clubs, some indie discos I don’t think ever stopped playing Britpop. It’s the late 90s revival you need to be watching out for now I suspect :) I have a printout of an email, dated August 15th 1999, which contained the lyrics of a song I wrote called “Retro Virus”. The central conceit of the song was seeing 80s nostalgia and making the connection that the pop music of the late 90s would be retro before too long. I’m not sure it’s actually a good song - I was 17 then, and I hadn’t quite mastered songwriting by that point. Parts of it now seem a little smarmy, and a little more unsophisticated than now. But here’s the chorus: So when will the 1990s club open its doorsPlaying everything from Puff Daddy to the Coors?And don’t even say the phrase “Billy Ray Cyrus”There’s no vaccine for the retro virus. I could rewrite the song fairly easily for the noughties. Maybe I will. After all, Miley Cyrus’s Party In The USA will be perfect retro night fodder in 10 years time.

tomewing:

treblekicker:

Hollow Earth: First Sighting

I for one am really looking forward to the 90s revival, not least as I want to know WHAT gets revived.

It’s been going for YEARS! Baggy and madchester clubs from a few years ago, Bangface catering for the ‘ardkore retro crowd since, what, 05 or so, tracks like Livin’ Joy’s “Dreamer” massive floorfillers at pop clubs, some indie discos I don’t think ever stopped playing Britpop. It’s the late 90s revival you need to be watching out for now I suspect :)

I have a printout of an email, dated August 15th 1999, which contained the lyrics of a song I wrote called “Retro Virus”. The central conceit of the song was seeing 80s nostalgia and making the connection that the pop music of the late 90s would be retro before too long. I’m not sure it’s actually a good song - I was 17 then, and I hadn’t quite mastered songwriting by that point. Parts of it now seem a little smarmy, and a little more unsophisticated than now. But here’s the chorus:

So when will the 1990s club open its doors
Playing everything from Puff Daddy to the Coors?
And don’t even say the phrase “Billy Ray Cyrus”
There’s no vaccine for the retro virus.

I could rewrite the song fairly easily for the noughties. Maybe I will. After all, Miley Cyrus’s Party In The USA will be perfect retro night fodder in 10 years time.