The Evolution of the Emoticon
i don’t care what you youngsters say, an emoticon must always have a nose and you must always type two spaces after a period 
( emoticon story via kottke )
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conflux
a curated confluence of curiousness.
- a 7th grader hypothesized that fast food restaurants' ice would contain more bacteria than the fast food restaurants' toilet water so he tested his hypothesis and and was right! anyone who has worked in the food service industry knows the ice machines are colonized and rarely cleaned so i wouldn't be surprised if these results extend outside of the fast food industry. and in related news, handbags have more bacteria than a toilet seat ( if you have in infant, think about that the next time you pull out a pacifier ). obviously, we need a comparative study to determine which has more bacteria, the inside of a handbag or ice at a fast food restaurant? #
- if what we perceive is "never quite now" because it takes a full 1/4 of a second for visual stimulus to reach the motor centers of your brain, how do we perceive a 100-mph fastball which will have will have traveled 15 feet before your brain perceives where it was? our helpful brains do a little predictive time-travelling and give us a glimpse of the future, "What we perceive doesn't necessarily have that much to do with the real world, but it is what we need to know to interact with the real world." not sure if that will make me more or less secure the next time i'm driving down the road at 60mph. #
- still no cure for cancer, but new research finds that bearded men are more attractive. now, some articles are running with the prove so-and-so wrong that my wooly mammoth beard is actually attractive angle but the original research shows that the effect peaks out at "heavy stubble" ( some old school web folks will be tremendously amused to see whose photo adorns the article in that last link ). so, if you're feeling a little inadequate about not being able to grow one of those awesome hipster beards - don't. and in quasi-related news, science proves, as with beards, bigger not always better in other areas. #
- i'm as much of a fan of pop neuroscience as the next person but new research published in the prestigious journal nature reviews neuroscience, "Power failure: why small sample size undermines the reliability of neuroscience", concludes that much of what's published is, well, worthless due to "low statistical power". a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away i was published in the official journal of the society of neuroscience and in a parallel universe i continued on attempting to get enough funding to support sample sizes large enough to be meaningful. #
- holy moley, kim gordon of sonic youth fame turned 60 yesterday. happy birthday! i can't possibly be the only man or woman of a certain age who crushed hard on kim as a teenager in the 80s and didn't realize she was in her 30s? truth be told i might still have a crush on her and who wouldn't - from the elle profile - "In that moment, Gordon was the ultimate hipster Renaissance woman I aspired to be, a feminist rebel who could make avant-garde art all day, then cook a killer dinner for her family at night." #
- a new take on the famous marshmallow experiment: "The capacity for delayed gratification is not wholly innate." #
- research on water fleas demonstrates that even low dose exposure to some pesticides "..can cause significant health problems for those organisms later in life –and affect their offspring and, possibly, their offspring’s offspring.". and lest you think this is limited to water fleas, this builds on research that has shown trangenerational effects in humans after exposure to vinclozolin, a common hormone-disrupting fungicide used on fruits and vegetables. see also how GMOs unleashed a pesticide gusher. #
- i subscribe to the embodied mind thesis which posits that the nature of the human mind is largely determined by the form of the human body and central to that theory is the concept of neurotransmission. i.e. we perceive and think through sensory tranmsissions integrated and mediated by neurons. so it's remarkable to see new research done on mouse chimeras which indicates that lowly "helper cells" called astrocytes, not just the number of neurons and their interconnections, might possibly be the key to human intelligence. according to one researcher, "It’s a stunning result. It provides the first unequivocal evidence that astrocytes may well have been one of the evolutionary drivers of human capabilities." and if peripheral cells like astrocytes might play a key role in human intelligence, what other cells might also be involved like, say, in the gut? related to the embodied mind this recent radiolab podcast, "speed" has a segment "never quite now" where they discuss the slowness of neurotransmission which happens at about 27 meters per second or 60 miles per hour which means usain bolt runs at about half the speed of his nerve transmission and it takes a full 1/4 of a second for visual stimulus to reach the motor centers of your brain which is about the same time as it takes to transmit a telegraph from new york to chicago. everything you experience has already happened! you're stuck in the past! contemplate what that means when you're driving down the road at 60 miles per hour! somehow, in my mind, this makes me wonder what do whales see ( and think )? #
- microsoft excel has previously been implicated in the “London Whale” trading debacle ( goose pimply truth quote on the article for anyone who works with the program every day, "While all software breaks occasionally, Excel spreadsheets break all the time. But they don’t tell you when they break: they just give you the wrong number." ). now it turns out there were erroneous excel calculations in a study used by politicians to support austerity policies that slash social programs( and lest you think this just affects the world of economics and finance, browse "gene name errors can be introduced inadvertently when using Excel in bioinformatics" ). and those were both user defined errors! some of us are old enough to remember the essay by joel spolsky, a former excel program manager, on an infamous excel 2007 bug where multiplying 77.1*850 yielded 100,000 and not the correct 65,535. how of of those do you think are still out in the wild. #
- one year ago leading insect experts issued an 'urgent' warning regarding the corn rootworm which had "found a chink in the armor" of genetically engineered crops through field-evolved resistance. and so, this spring, non-organic farmers - unsurprisingly - expect to use more soil insecticide with genetically modified hybrids ( which, of course, runs counter to the promise of bacillus thuringiensis gmos ). guess who makes money on both? the pesticide treadmill goes round and round and around. #
parallax
an intertwingularity of interestingness from elsewhere.-
Galibier by smashred
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Sleepy Hollow by maxxsmart
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Sperm whale calf by Justin Hart
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Fragile by Hengki Koentjoro
- The long lens experiment Shot with Black Magic Cinema camera and 5D mark II, using a 100mm Canon lens from a remote controlled helicopter in combination with the Freefly MoVI MR.
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Repairing the Station in Orbit by NASA Goddard Photo and Video
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“Ask me a question, I’ll tell you a story” by Griff~ography
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Judgement Day by D A Scott
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Spaceship Earth by Scot Taylor
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Sun Emits a Mid-Level Flare by NASA Goddard Photo and Video
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Galibier by smashred
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