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What is the secret to unlocking your personal potential and creating a more harmonious society? A San Francisco company says you can find it between every woman’s legs. Gawker’s Nitasha Tiku investigates, step by step.

My Life With the Thrill-Clit Cult

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A look at this week’s cover, “All Together Now,” by Chris Ware: http://nyr.kr/1gf3JkD

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38 Wonderful Words With No English Equivalent

Sometimes we must turn to other languages to find the perfect word.

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If a thousand lines of letters in UNIX qualifies as a technology (the computer code for a web page), then a thousand lines of letters in English (Hamlet) must qualify as well. They both can change our behavior, alter the course of events, or enable future inventions.

Kevin Kelly (via inthenoosphere)

You tell us - is literature technology?  Certain pieces of it certainly had an outsized impact on society.  What do you think?

(via npr)

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Kabul Afghanistan. November 2002. Seamus Murphy/VII. I took this picture in 2002, but I found it this year by chance, researching images for a magazine story and a book on Afghan women’s poetry. I was looking for something else and scanned it for the first time this year. I might never have seen it again, which makes it fresh for me. It was taken in the National Gallery in West Kabul in November, 2002, one year after the Taliban had fled the city in the wake of renewed foreign interest in Afghanistan after 9/11. It was part of an assortment of so-called ‘idolatrous’ art works in the gallery showing the human face that had been damaged by the Taliban. Feeling happy to have found examples of Taliban intolerance, I was anxious, as I posed the gallery-attendant, that the picture would be too contrived. Perhaps that’s one reason the image existed unscanned for years. Interesting how I see the picture differently now. Like many photographers, I remember clearly the day I took it; what was going on in my life, how I was feeling, what I was looking for, what seemed important to me to photograph at that time. It was late morning and I remember feeling hungry. All of this came tumbling back when I discovered the black-and-white negative and looked at it on a lightbox. Negative. Lightbox. To some, this might sound like another era. But, in addition to everything else it does, any photograph—taken in 2013, yesterday, a minute ago, or a hundred years ago—on the oldest or the latest technology, is inevitably a record of the past.—Seamus Murphy.

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The Year in Photojournalism

A number of photographers chose one image that particularly affected them over the past twelve months. Their responses ranged from photographs of Mars captured by a robot to a photograph of a recent issue of a French newspaper with no images at all. A look at the photos: http://nyr.kr/1cu1hGs

Kabul Afghanistan. November 2002. Seamus Murphy/VII.

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Dated 1872, its subject is the harbour of Le Havre in France, using very loose brush strokes that suggest rather than delineate it. Monet explained the title later:

Landscape is nothing but an impression, and an instantaneous one, hence this label that was given us, by the way because of me. I had sent a thing done in Le Havre, from my window, sun in the mist and a few masts of boats sticking up in the foreground. ... They asked me for a title for the catalogue, it couldn't really be taken for a view of Le Havre, and I said: 'PutImpression.' [1]

It was first displayed in 1874[2] during the first independent art show of the Impressionists (who were not yet known by that name). Critic Louis Leroy, inspired by the painting's name, titled his hostile review of the show in Le Charivari newspaper, "The Exhibition of the Impressionists", thus inadvertently naming the new art movement. He wrote:

Impression—I was certain of it. I was just telling myself that, since I was impressed, there had to be some impression in it … and what freedom, what ease of workmanship! Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape.

The painting was stolen from the Musée Marmottan Monet in 1985 by Philippe Jamin and Youssef Khimoun but recovered in 1990.[3] Since 1991 it has been back on display in the museum.[4]

Although it may seem that the sun is the brightest spot on the canvas, it is in fact, when measured with a photometer, the same brightness (or luminance) as the sky.[5] Dr. Margaret Livingstone, a professor of neurobiology at Harvard University, said "If you make a black and white copy of Impression: Sunrise, the Sun disappears [almost] entirely."[5]

Livingstone said that this caused the painting to have a very realistic quality, as the older part—shared with the majority of other mammals—of the visual cortex in the brain registers only luminance and not colour, so that the sun in the painting would be invisible to it, while it is just the newer part of the visual cortex—only found in humans and primates—which perceives colour.[5]

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Itching to see the space shuttle Endeavour in Los Angeles today? You’re in luck! Keep your eyes peeled for flyovers at familiar landmarks (Griffith Observatory, The Getty and Disneyland, among others) after 11:30 am, says NASA. Endeavour lands at LAX around 12:45 pm.

Read more here. — rachel

Photo: Lars Plougmann/Flickr

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Look around—there's only one thing of danger for you here—poetry

Pablo Neruda 

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Death

This has been another post about death. 

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The only people I would care to be with now are artists and people who have suffered: those who know what beauty is, and those who know what sorrow is: nobody else interests me.

Oscar Wilde (via pessimisticallyoptimisticrealist)

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Interesting 

The Selfish Meme

This spring, a couple of neuroscience researchers at Harvard published a study that finally explained why we like to talk about ourselves so much: sharing our thoughts, it turns out, activates the brain’s reward system. As if to demonstrate the thesis, journalists and bloggers promptly seized the occasion to share their own thoughts about the study, often at a considerable cost to accuracy. “Oversharing on Facebook as Satisfying as Sex?” the Web site for the Today show asked.

Well, not really. The study, which combined a series of behavioral experiments and brain scans, didn’t suggest that anyone, in the lab or elsewhere, had found sharing on Facebook to be an orgasmic experience. What it did suggest was that humans may get a neurochemical reward from sharing information, and a significantly bigger reward from disclosing their own thoughts and feelings than from reporting someone else’s.

Read more. [Image: Nicholas Blechman]

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Colors blind the eye. Sounds deafen the ear. Flavors numb the taste. Thoughts weaken the mind. Desires wither the heart. The Master observes the world But trusts his inner vision. He allows things to come and go. His heart is open as the sky.

Tae Te Cheng

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by Sophie Bushwick 

For the New Caledonian crow, birdbrain is a misnomer: These members of the corvid family have proved their problem-solving and tool-wielding abilities again and again. The birds may have yet another impressive cognitive capacity, a new study suggests: causal reasoning. The ability to link an event with the mechanism that caused it, even if that mechanism is hidden, is the basis of modern science—and our most basic knowledge of the world around us. If New Caledonian crows are capable of causal reasoning as well, we can better trace and understand the evolution of this ability.

Researchers described how they tested the crows’ reasoning in theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. First, they let eight New Caledonian crows figure out how to use a tool to remove food from a hole in a box. Then the experiment began. The crows watched as a human entered their enclosure and stood by the box. But this motionless figure, eyes closed and hands in a neutral position, did not pose as much of a threat as the blue cloth hanging over one side of the enclosure. Through a gap in this bird blind, a stick emerged and poked at the hole in the box 15 times. Finally, the stick stopped moving and the non-threatening observer left the aviary.

Because the birds had to turn their heads away from the bird blind—where the probing stick had emerged—in order to nab a treat from the box, they were understandably cautious after the stick withdrew. Although they gradually went back to extracting food, they first inspected the bird blind and abandoned some preliminary probes of the food box. However, the birds were less wary and exhibited less testing behavior when they saw a second human enter the bird blind before the stick started moving, and leave the blind after the stick’s motion stopped. They recognized that the hidden human was the cause of the moving stick (even though, for consistency with the single-human situation, the stick was actually under the control of an experimenter outside the enclosure).

Understanding that a human was moving the stick, and that it would stop moving in the human’s absence, is more than a knowledge of cause and effect. Because the experimenter was invisible behind the bird blind, the crows did not actually see anyone moving the stick. And yet they could still infer that the human presence was responsible for the stick’s motion, which indicates that they can recognize even a hidden causal agent. This is a very impressive ability—until now, the authors write, “Although [research had suggested] animals can reason about the outcomes of accidental interventions, only humans have been shown to make inferences about hidden causal mechanisms.”

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Prince - Little Red Corvette

This song forever. 

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Old Lady Ruins Fresco, Claims Copyright, Demands Money

Via TechDirt:

Remember that sweet octagenarian lady in Spain who tried to restore a 19th-century fresco “Ecce Homo” and ended up producing something that the BBC’s Europe correspondent described as “a crayon sketch of a very hairy monkey in an ill-fitting tunic”?  …

According to a story pointed out to us by @sinkdeep, that sweet octagenarian lady is back, accompanied now by her lawyers, claiming copyright on her work and demanding a cut of the takings from the collection box that the church authorities have placed near the fresco …

More Here

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Life is full of moments that are good – winning a lottery, seeing a beautiful woman, a great dinner – but the whole thing is tragic. It’s an oasis that is very pleasant. Take a film like Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. This is a film of great tragedy, but there is a moment when he is sitting with the children and drinking milk and eating wild strawberries. But then that wonderful moment passes and you come back to what existence really is.

Woody Allen, The Talks, Interview July 2012 (via damnfinecupoftea)