The Goblin Shark. Its liver may account for up to a fourth of its weight. Found in deep sea but rare enough that little is really known about it other than its good looks.
An arresting image but no information about the type.
The Greenland Shark. Largest specimen ever caught was over 1000 kilograms. The flesh is poisonous.
So I might not want to be in the water but would love to be at this underwater restaurant in the Maldives.
I’ll be in Barcelona in a few days, and may in fact, ascend this wonder.
The package:
Opened:
From the land of intricate etiquette, cherry blossoms, budo, living treasures, sand gardens and ikebana. Of course.
Even for a simple counting task, pointing at the things we count makes it easier. But once again the question arises: how is it that simply pointing at things helps us count?
When viewers weren’t allowed to point, they nearly always nodded as they counted. What’s more, non-pointers who nodded were significantly more accurate than non-nodders. It’s beginning to look like the body movements themselves are somehow assisting in the counting process.
Could it be that the physical movement works like an abacus, actually totting up or simply that the extra movement provide a deeper processing. Other research has found that the more modalities involved in memorizing the more successful it might be.
To keep its reputation alive as an “idea factory,” four years ago the agency came up with the concept of creating the Müllers’ living room. Using mountains of statistical data, survey results, opinion polls, sales figures, together with home interviews with 20 real families, they built the average German living room, complete with the most popular German wallpaper, indoor plants and knickknacks on the sideboard. Jung von Matt’s creative and strategic teams now use the space for meetings. It gives them the sense that they are talking shop in the middle of the average German life, while gazing at the walls of the average German living room.
Anyone entering the room has the eerie sense that its occupants have left it only moments earlier, perhaps to make a sandwich in the kitchen or walk down to the basement to put the laundry in the dryer. But there is no kitchen or basement.
The room is updated periodically to conform to the latest trends and news headlines. Trainees at Jung von Matt double as “living room attendants.” Their job includes making sure that the TV program guide is always opened to the correct page, the plants are kept watered and the books on the shelves are current. “Moppel-Ich,” a bestselling diet book, was added in recent years (for Sabine Müller), along with the latest installments of the Harry Potter series, a book on the pleasures of quitting smoking, a smattering of popular self-help books and the latest bestsellers, next to a travel guide for the Mediterranean tourist haven of Mallorca — a little light reading for husband Thomas.
Average Germans Thomas and Sabine like to paint their walls yellow and decorate them with pictures of family and animals. A small collection of stuffed animals lined up on the back of the sofa provides the necessary dose of coziness.
Knowing all of these intimate details is as important to advertising agencies as it is to the companies that are their clients — because the average German rules the country’s economy, determining what is purchased and what is produced. Political parties are also keenly interested in finding out what Thomas and Sabine Müller are thinking and what they want out of life. Politicians want to be there for the Müllers, or at least create the impression that they identify with the typical German voter. Everything about their politics is geared toward the average voter at the political center, even though the center is gradually shrinking. And anyone in the media who fails to take note of what the average German likes to listen to, read and watch is doomed to fail.
Now, for me, this would make an interesting reality show where what you would be watching is a constantly updated statistical average. It would let you see where and how far you deviate from the norm and for those who care, it would be a way of making sure they stay on track. The downside is that if it became popular it might actually accentuate the means and further homogenize the population.
The house pictured above is the Simpsons house if it were real (an unfortunate average if it is). Here are a few more from there - from Geekologie
Vengeance Is Ours: What can tribal societies tell us about our need to get even? by Jared Diamond.
Daniel explained to me that Handas are taught from early childhood to hate their enemies and to prepare themselves for a life of fighting. “If you die in a fight, you will be considered a hero, and people will remember you for a long time,” he said. “But if you die of a disease you will be remembered for only a day or a few weeks, and then you will be forgotten.” Daniel was proud both of the aggressiveness displayed by all the warring clans of his Nipa tribe and of their faultless recall of debts and grievances. He likened Nipa people to “light elephants”: “They remember what happened thirty years ago, and their words continue to float in the air. The way that we come to understand things in life is by telling stories, like the stories I am telling you now, and like all the stories that grandfathers tell their grandchildren about their relatives who must be avenged. We also come to understand things in life by fighting on the battlefield along with our fellow-clansmen and allies.”
I like this article for a number of reasons. It gives me even more ammunition against the idea of tradition for its own sake being a good thing. Tradition means only that someone has done it before. Women were banished to the special hut whilst having their period; men could only rise to the level that their fathers had risen to; and the “reasonable” occurrences of murder and torture were all too many. This article is more than just that though, it also explores the natural tendency toward revenge, the problems when justice does not seem to have taken place and the role of the state in all this.
See the video below of Stephen Pinker’s TED talk on how post violent we really are. Its not only an eye opener but a challenge to the fear based media propaganda that is so easy to buy into.
I would also recommend Dan Gardner’s book Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear.
Gardner not only makes quite clear that we are living in a golden age in our freedom from pain and violence but how much of our skewed and baseless perceptions of everyday dangers are fed by the media. Its both entertaining and enlightening reading. As a member of the media, he has seen first hand how reports of decreasing crime do not make the front page but a single odd and unrepresentative tragedy can blossom into misguided public panic and unneeded legislation at the expense of true dangers.
This is science at its most entertaining and effervescent; Stoll talks about everything from astronomy to the KGB to his mother to why computers should not be in classrooms; and clearly this is one man who never could sit quietly at his desk. Its almost as though his body is connected to his mind with a bungee cord. (From the great TED talks).
Plenty of interesting news in the world today…
Apparently the jumbo squid’s beak is made of one of the hardest substances known, able to shear through the spine of foes but until now scientists were stumped as to how it was able to do this and yet maintain integrity at the base…why did it not shear right off. Seems there is a changing gradient of stiffness throughout the structure. “Scientists estimate that more than ten million squid live in a 25-square-mile (65-square-kilometer) area in the Gulf of California.”
And it seems that our beaks function better after -well you see the headline. I do believe I see a marketing opportunity here. Either a portable nose prod to take to dinner to get the full experience, or perhaps packaged with good bottles of wine.
The punchline is that (and maybe a punch in the nose would also have worked then) fear is the motivator.
In order to cut down on unnecessary infections, when you are planning to have yourself nailed to a cross, make sure to sanitize your nails, and the whips too, if you are into flagellation.
Just ran across this when I was looking at crucifixion images. Hadn’t seen it before but I like it.
I was looking at the International Herald Tribune for the first time in what must have been close to ten years and ran across an article entitled East and West part ways in test of facial expressions. Oddly enough, the origin of the research came not one kilometer from where I was sitting -from a building I had once been quite familiar with, the Bio-Psych Building at the University of Alberta.
If one extrapolates from this study, people in the West will find it sufficient to only look at a person’s face to gauge their mood while people in the East will also take the expressions of those around the person into arriving at a judgment. It was also found that if asked to take a portrait, the Western photographs would have the subject taking up much more of the frame than in the Eastern ones. It was also said that generally in Eastern art, subjects tended to be smaller than those in Western art, and to blend in with other figures.
Though you might be able to generalize somewhat in this manner the latest art coming out of China appears to be becoming more individualistic.
And if you go back to artists like Breughel you have a sort of communitarian approach to the image.
In fact, just now for the first time I see the Breughel as looking rather Japanese.
And I have noticed that though Japanese films seem to have a little more of an individualistic bent than Chinese, the films of the last few years, especially out of Hong Kong, are breaking away somewhat from the power of the crowd. I had always found it odd, from my Western perspective, how vulnerable the strong Chinese hero was to the finicky influence of the masses. But the films now seem to more often have stand alone characters. (There is still a remarkable number of innocent bystanders still sacrificed to little regret and great wailing if one of the main characters stubs a toe but that too will probably change).
But back to the study. What is really interesting about this from an information gathering standpoint is that it implies that you could determine the mood of the subject even if they were not available to you, as long as you could see the people standing around them. Unless of course you were dealing with a Western subject.
I guess the problem would be if you were a Westerner you wouldn’t pick up the clues from the friends so you could not perform that trick, and if you were Eastern you might be slightly at a loss trying to read a Westerner standing alone in the middle of a room.
The above was arrived at via SciencePunk. What you are looking at is a visualization of the oceans and the atmosphere gathered into drops and displayed against the earth; oceans on the left, atmosphere on the right.
I find this almost but not quite as amazing as the galactic objects comparisons reported on here.
A little closer to home is the large/small dog comparison, and this disparity has scientists arguing over whether they really should be considered the same species. What seems to keep the family together is that all breeds are compatible. (In the case below I think we might try to avoid testing the hypothesis.)
And finally, the largest and smallest fish.
1.
The image above is part of the article at the NYT Dot Earth blog, this one entitled Yellowstone’s Departed: Bison Calves Head to Slaughter, a Long-Lost Hare. but let’s file this one under Who Died and Made Us God.
Its about the resurgence in the Yellowstone bison herds which is then thought to necessitate a cull (let’s just call the cull a kill) to keep some sort of balance and not annoy ranchers in the area who prefer animals with preordained lifespans. I’ve always found it absurd that a species is protected once it goes below a certain figure, then if it is not only successful in rebounding but actually thrives, it needs to be brought back down to a proper level. A proper level? What 1 per every billion people?
2.
Can scientists dance? The answer is mostly NO. The winner of this little contest is endearing but for the most part we have to say Keep your day jobs….please!
3.
Here are the first two paragraphs from a disturbing article entitled The world’s rubbish dump: a garbage tip that stretches from Hawaii to Japan
A “plastic soup” of waste floating in the Pacific Ocean is growing at an alarming rate and now covers an area twice the size of the continental United States, scientists have said.
The vast expanse of debris – in effect the world’s largest rubbish dump – is held in place by swirling underwater currents. This drifting “soup” stretches from about 500 nautical miles off the Californian coast, across the northern Pacific, past Hawaii and almost as far as Japan.
And another article on the same for those who feel they are a little too upbeat today.
4.
Let’s finish on an upbeat. This astounding image is by Nick Brandt at the Young Gallery site: go and browse.
5.
And here is a photograph I keep going back to look at at Journey of the Mind’s Eye.
Well, now over at New Scientist, they are reporting on another one of those poor folks who fell asleep with The Matrix on repeat and now thinks that there is a good chance that our reality is someone else’s video game or simulcrum of some sort. Seems we were just talking about this not too long ago. But I guess there’s nothing that has legs quite like a really bad idea. New Scientist is nicely skeptical and appropriately takes a swath or two with the handy Occam.
In other news over there, they talk about hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia “defined as a persistent, abnormal, and unwarranted fear of long words”. And this is really fun because just naming your condition will throw you. A second item concerns evangelicals donating 5000 miniature bibles to the soldiers in Iraq, but you need a microscope to read the damn things (made of microfilm probably so you can’t use it for rolling papers).
