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Misbehavior | Wolf Teeth

Women suffering from depression or demonstrating signs of “misbehavior”, such as not “taking proper care of her husband” were legally encouraged to submit into a psychiatric ward. Here, the narrow-minded 1930s would offer a smiling treatment used to condition a woman into always wearing a smile. Experts believed that if a woman saw herself smiling, it would become natural practice and she would be “cured.” This often went along with shock therapy.

The oldest partial set of dentures ever found date back to around 2500 BC. These were found in Mexico and were made from wolf molars.

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L'Inconnue de la Seine | CPR

L'Inconnue de la Seine (English: The Unknown Woman of the Seine) was an unidentified young woman whose putative death mask became a popular fixture on the walls of artists' homes after 1900. Her visage inspired numerous literary works. In the United States, the mask is also known as La Belle Italienne.

The face of the unknown woman was used for the head of the first aid mannequin Resusci Anne. It was created by Peter Safar and Asmund Laerdal in 1958 and was used starting in 1960 in numerous CPR courses. For this reason, the face has been called "the most kissed face" of all time.

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Eyes Without a Face |  Les Yeux Sans Visage

In 2001, on VH1 Storytellers, singer Billy Idol cited the film as giving him the idea for his song "Eyes Without a Face". The song, which has the film's original French title ("Les Yeux Sans Visage") as the recurring background chorus, takes the father-daughter relationship from the film and recasts it as the deteriorated relationship between the narrator and his lover. The song became Idol's first top-ten hit in the U.S.

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Lullaby | ghosts

Sofdu lengi, sofdu rótt, seint mun best ad vakna. Maedan kenna mun thér fljótt, medan hallar degi skjótt. Ad mennirnir elska, missa, gráta og sakna.

Sleep long, sleep tight, it is best to wake up late. The hardship will teach you soon, while the day turns to night, that people feel love, loss, sadness and longing.

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Sofur thu svid thitt Svartur i augum Far i fulan pytt Fullan af draugum

Sleep, you black-eyed pig. Fall into a deep pit of ghosts.

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Implicit Stereotypes |  Catoptric Tristesse 

An implicit stereotype is the unconscious attribution of particular qualities to a member of a certain social group. Implicit stereotypes are influenced by experience, and are based on learned associations between various qualities and social categories, including race or gender. Individuals' perceptions and behaviors can be affected by implicit stereotypes, even without the individuals' intention or awareness. Implicit stereotypes are an aspect of implicit social cognition, the phenomenon that perceptions, attitudes, and stereotypes operate without conscious intention. The existence of implicit stereotypes is supported by a variety of scientific articles in psychological literature. Implicit stereotype were first defined by psychologists Anthony Greenwald and Mahzarin Banaji in 1995.

Explicit stereotypes are the result of intentional, conscious, and controllable thoughts and beliefs. Explicit stereotypes usually are directed toward a group of people based on what is being perceived. An explicit stereotype example would be that all adolescent girls like to play with dolls and makeup.

Implicit stereotypes are associations learned through past experiences. Implicit stereotypes can be activated by the environment, and operate outside of intentional conscious cognition.For example, we can unconsciously stereotype all pitbulls as being dangerous. This stereotype may be associated with one event that we may have seen in the past, but the source of these associations may be misidentified, or even unknown by the individual who holds them, and can persist even when an individual rejects the stereotype explicitly.

Catoptric Tristesse  is the sadness of not knowing what people think about you.

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White Wilderness |  Kweit

A 1958 nature documentary called White Wilderness appeared to show lemmings committing suicide off of a cliff in the Arctic. The doc was popular and even won an Oscar, but the truth is that they faked the entire cliff-jumping scene. Producers shipped lemmings to Alberta to film it, and even used a turntable at some points to force the animals to fly off the cliff. Scientists have since proven that the entire myth of lemming suicide is a hoax.

Disney pushed the  lemmings

“White” comes from the Indo-European root kweit meaning “to shine”.

As well as generating the Sanskrit svetah, the Dutch wit and the German weiß, it also gave us the English word “wheat”, because of the white flour it produces.

“White” is also one of the oldest surnames in English, recorded in the Anglo-Saxon chronicles before AD 900 to describe either a baby (because they are unblemished) or for ethnic Saxons and Vikings because they were paler and blonder than their Celtic counterparts. White was first used as an adjective for the European “race” in 1600.

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Epicurean |  Numbness

epicurean (plural epicureans)

One who is devoted to pleasure.

Modern accepted use of the terms epicurean and Epicureanism refers often to the appreciation of, and indulgence in good food (gourmet), luxury, hedonism, and sensual pleasure. This strays significantly from the original philosophic intent of Epicureanism. The philosophy indeed elevated pleasure and happiness as the most worthy pursuit, but specifically warned against fine food and frequent sex, for it could lead to dissatisfaction later. Instead, the goal was a long-term pleasure, marked by serenity and temperance, achieved through moderation rather than indulging. Modern senses of gourmet, luxury, hedonism, sensual pleasure and lust are mostly in contrast with the original ancient teachings.

Hypoesthesia (or hypesthesia) refer to a reduced sense of touch or sensation, or a partial loss of sensitivity to sensory stimuli. In everyday speech this is sometimes referred to as "numbness". Hypoesthesia is one of the negative sensory symptoms associated with cutaneous sensory disorder

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Counterfactual thinking |  Waiting

Counterfactual thinking is a concept in psychology that involves the human tendency to create possible alternatives to life events that have already occurred; something that is contrary to what actually happened. Counterfactual thinking is, as it states: "counter to the facts." These thoughts consist of the "What if?" and the "If I had only..." that occur when thinking of how things could have turned out differently. Counterfactual thoughts include things that could never happen in reality because they solely pertain to events that have occurred in the past.

Waiting is the rust of the soul.    

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

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Woolnerian tip | Titanic

Darwin's tubercle (or auricular tubercle) is a congenital ear condition which often presents as a thickening on the helix at the junction of the upper and middle thirds. 

 This atavistic feature is so called because its description was first published by Charles Darwin in the opening pages of The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, as evidence of a vestigial feature indicating common ancestry among primates which have pointy ears. However, Darwin himself named it the Woolnerian tip, after Thomas Woolner, a British sculptor who had depicted it in one of his sculptures and had first theorised that it was an atavistic feature.

It is considered that modern owners of Darwin’s tubercle also can define sounds of high frequency. Also they can define the direction of where the sound comes from well. According to various facts, they can distinguish particular sounds even in noisy places.

Thomas Woolner died instantly from a stroke at the age of 66 His wife Alice died in 1912. Their son, Hugh, travelled back to his home in New York from her funeral on the RMS Titanic. He survived the sinking of the ship.

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The Bechdel test | Alice

The rules now known as the Bechdel test first appeared in 1985 in Alison Bechdel's comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For. In a strip titled "The Rule", two women, who resemble the future characters Mo and Ginger, discuss seeing a film and the black woman explains that she only goes to a movie if it satisfies the following requirements:

The movie has to have at least two women in it,

who talk to each other,

about something besides a man.

Clearly, passing the Bechdel Test says absolutely nothing about whether or not a specific movie is positive in its portrayal of women. No, the Bechdel Test is only helpful on a larger scale. For example, how many movies passed the test in 2013 as opposed to 2000? Fifty? Thirty? …Four? More importantly, is the number higher now than it was thirteen years ago? The answer can help us understand the direction cinema is going in as far as representing women. 

In films, comments made by characters that refer to appearance are directed at women at a rate of five times that of comments directed at men.

Alice Guy-Blaché (July 1, 1873 – March 24, 1968) was the first female pioneer in early French cinema. She is revered as the first female director and writer of narrative fiction films, and is seen as a great visionary who experimented with Gaumont's Chronophone sound syncing system, color tinting, interracial casting, and special effects.

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Hasselblad |  Dark Chamber

There are 12 Hasselblad cameras on the surface of the moon. They were left there after the moon landings to allow for the extra weight of the lunar rock samples to be brought back.

The word camera derives from the latin word, “camera obscura”, translated to “dark chamber”.

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Τhe color of pomegranates | Սայաթ-Նովա

Poet as a Youth: In this healthy and beautiful life my share has been nothing but suffering. Why has it been given to me?

[...]

Your hair a halo, your eyes golden crystal. Your eyelids shaped from the wheel of the world’s most wonderful potter. Your eyelashes, arrows and knives.

[...]

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Sunset on Mars | Attach

The International Space Station orbits about 354 kilometers (220 miles) above the Earth and travels at approximately  27,700 km/hr (17,211 mph), so it takes about 92 minutes to circle the Earth once. For this reason, every 45 minutes the astronauts on-board see a sunrise or a sunset, with a total of 15 – 16 of each every 24 hours.

Space has no "up" or "down," but it does have microgravity. As a result, astronauts are weightless and can sleep in any orientation. However, they have to attach themselves so they don't float around and bump into something. Space station crews usually sleep in sleeping bags located in small crew cabins. Each crew cabin is just big enough for one person.

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Lorem Ipsum |  L’Oubli d’être en Vie

Contrary to popular belief, Lorem Ipsum is not simply random text. It has roots in a piece of classical Latin literature from 45 BC, making it over 2000 years old. Richard McClintock, a Latin professor at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, looked up one of the more obscure Latin words, consectetur, from a Lorem Ipsum passage, and going through the cites of the word in classical literature, discovered the undoubtable source. Lorem Ipsum comes from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum" (The Extremes of Good and Evil) by Cicero, written in 45 BC. This book is a treatise on the theory of ethics, very popular during the Renaissance. The first line of Lorem Ipsum, "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet..", comes from a line in section 1.10.32.

The standard chunk of Lorem Ipsum used since the 1500s is reproduced below for those interested. Sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 from "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum" by Cicero are also reproduced in their exact original form, accompanied by English versions from the 1914 translation by H. Rackham.

Section 1.10.32 of "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum", written by Cicero in 45 BC

"Sed ut perspiciatis unde omnis iste natus error sit voluptatem accusantium doloremque laudantium, totam rem aperiam, eaque ipsa quae ab illo inventore veritatis et quasi architecto beatae vitae dicta sunt explicabo. Nemo enim ipsam voluptatem quia voluptas sit aspernatur aut odit aut fugit, sed quia consequuntur magni dolores eos qui ratione voluptatem sequi nesciunt. Neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit, sed quia non numquam eius modi tempora incidunt ut labore et dolore magnam aliquam quaerat voluptatem. Ut enim ad minima veniam, quis nostrum exercitationem ullam corporis suscipit laboriosam, nisi ut aliquid ex ea commodi consequatur? Quis autem vel eum iure reprehenderit qui in ea voluptate velit esse quam nihil molestiae consequatur, vel illum qui dolorem eum fugiat quo voluptas nulla pariatur?"

1914 translation by H. Rackham

"But I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete account of the system, and expound the actual teachings of the great explorer of the truth, the master-builder of human happiness. No one rejects, dislikes, or avoids pleasure itself, because it is pleasure, but because those who do not know how to pursue pleasure rationally encounter consequences that are extremely painful. Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but because occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure. To take a trivial example, which of us ever undertakes laborious physical exercise, except to obtain some advantage from it? But who has any right to find fault with a man who chooses to enjoy a pleasure that has no annoying consequences, or one who avoids a pain that produces no resultant pleasure?"

image:

L’Oubli d’être en Vie, 1967 Marcel Mariën

“It's so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.” ― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

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Tower of Kalla | To kill the ocean

The Roman historian Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus wrote a story about the emperor Caligula, who lined up his soldiers and artillery on the beach and declared war on Neptune, god of the sea. After that he claimed victory over the ocean and commanded his men to collect shells as war booty. As a monument to this victory he built a tall lighthouse. This story resulted in a search for Caligula's lighthouse. In the 16th century, when many early tourists came to see the Brittenburg at low tide, people from Katwijk reported that their fishing nets were regularly stuck behind the stones of what they called "Kalla's tower" (Kalla = Caligula). 

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The hedgehog's dilemma | Milk

The hedgehog's dilemma, or sometimes the porcupine dilemma, is a metaphor about the challenges of human intimacy. It describes a situation in which a group of hedgehogs all seek to become close to one another in order to share heat during cold weather. They must remain apart, however, as they cannot avoid hurting one another with their sharp spines. Though they all share the intention of a close reciprocal relationship, this may not occur, for reasons they cannot avoid.

Hedgehogs are lactose intolerant.

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katzenklavier |  Toxoplasma

The katzenklavier (“cat piano”) was a musical instrument made out of cats. Designed by 17th-century German scholar Athanasius Kircher ( Nine inch tails)  , it consisted of a row of caged cats with different voice pitches, who could be “played” by a keyboardist driving nails into their tails.  

The tiny parasite Toxoplasma gondii can only breed sexually when in the guts of a cat. To this end, when it infects rats, it changes their behaviour to make them less scared of cats.