All content available on this site is provided under the terms defined in the Legal Notice at the top of the table. In a nutshell: please cite me if you use any of these sounds for research, and commercial users must apply for a different license. This table contains a database of sound events with corresponding movies, pictures, and descriptive text. Sounds are 16-bit, 44.1kHz .wav files, movies are .mov, pictures are .jpg, and text is .rtf (Many of the original sounds were recorded in 24bit, 96kHz format.)

insert one per vagina

The eclipses in binary stars give precise information of orbital period changes. Goodricke discovered the 2.867 days period in the eclipses of Algol in the year 1783. The irregular orbital period changes of this longest known eclipsing binary continue to puzzle astronomers. The mass transfer between the two members of this binary should cause a long-term increase of the orbital period, but observations over two centuries have not confirmed this effect. Here, we present evidence indicating that the period of Algol was 2.850 days three millenia ago. For religious reasons, the ancient Egyptians have recorded this period into the Cairo Calendar, which describes the repetitive changes of the Raging one. Cairo Calendar may be the oldest preserved historical document of the discovery of a variable star.

Dudes. Imagine life here in the US — or indeed, pretty much anywhere in the Western world — is a massive role playing game, like World of Warcraft except appallingly mundane, where most quests involve the acquisition of money, cell phones and donuts, although not always at the same time. Let’s call it The Real World. You have installed The Real World on your computer and are about to start playing, but first you go to the settings tab to bind your keys, fiddle with your defaults, and choose the difficulty setting for the game. Got it?
Okay: In the role playing game known as The Real World, “Straight White Male” is the lowest difficulty setting there is.
This means that the default behaviors for almost all the non-player characters in the game are easier on you than they would be otherwise. The default barriers for completions of quests are lower. Your leveling-up thresholds come more quickly. You automatically gain entry to some parts of the map that others have to work for. The game is easier to play, automatically, and when you need help, by default it’s easier to get.
Now, once you’ve selected the “Straight White Male” difficulty setting, you still have to create a character, and how many points you get to start — and how they are apportioned — will make a difference. Initially the computer will tell you how many points you get and how they are divided up. If you start with 25 points, and your dump stat is wealth, well, then you may be kind of screwed. If you start with 250 points and your dump stat is charisma, well, then you’re probably fine. Be aware the computer makes it difficult to start with more than 30 points; people on higher difficulty settings generally start with even fewer than that.
As the game progresses, your goal is to gain points, apportion them wisely, and level up. If you start with fewer points and fewer of them in critical stat categories, or choose poorly regarding the skills you decide to level up on, then the game will still be difficult for you. But because you’re playing on the “Straight White Male” setting, gaining points and leveling up will still by default be easier, all other things being equal, than for another player using a higher difficulty setting.
Likewise, it’s certainly possible someone playing at a higher difficulty setting is progressing more quickly than you are, because they had more points initially given to them by the computer and/or their highest stats are wealth, intelligence and constitution and/or simply because they play the game better than you do. It doesn’t change the fact you are still playing on the lowest difficulty setting.
You can lose playing on the lowest difficulty setting. The lowest difficulty setting is still the easiest setting to win on. The player who plays on the “Gay Minority Female” setting? Hardcore.
And maybe at this point you say, hey, I like a challenge, I want to change my difficulty setting! Well, here’s the thing: In The Real World, you don’t unlock any rewards or receive any benefit for playing on higher difficulty settings. The game is just harder, and potentially a lot less fun. And you say, okay, but what if I want to replay the game later on a higher difficulty setting, just to see what it’s like? Well, here’s the other thing about The Real World: You only get to play it once. So why make it more difficult than it has to be? Your goal is to win the game, not make it difficult.
Oh, and one other thing. Remember when I said that you could choose your difficulty setting in The Real World? Well, I lied. In fact, the computer chooses the difficulty setting for you. You don’t get a choice; you just get what gets given to you at the start of the game, and then you have to deal with it.
So that’s “Straight White Male” for you in The Real World (and also, in the real world): The lowest difficulty setting there is. All things being equal, and even when they are not, if the computer — or life — assigns you the “Straight White Male” difficulty setting, then brother, you’ve caught a break

From the Columbia Business School Follies Spring 2012 Show

Apple iPhone Will Fail in a Late, Defensive Move: Matthew Lynn

Corn starch & water
Volcano
Mentos + Diet Coke, followed by soda bottle vortex
Pepper in a bowl of water
Moebius strip
Penny and nickel battery
Egg in a bottle
Soap, milk and food coloring
Crushed soda can
Film canister rocket
Liquid with layered colors
Cork rocket
Frozen bubbles
Supercooled water
Clouds in a bottle

Comfy USA
Comfy U.S.A. is designed for customers who want modern, trend appropriate clothes. Young in spirit, realistic in fit, they are timeless, ageless, clean and sophisticated. A new style for us, the Wideband Crop Pant pulls on for ease and comfort and has a full wide leg with gorgeous draping detail. The look of a skirt with the simplicity of a pant

Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.
Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it’s written.)
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.
Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,
Exiles, similes, and reviles;
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far;
One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
Gertrude, German, wind and mind,
Scene, Melpomene, mankind.
Billet does not rhyme with ballet,
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
Viscous, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward.
And your pronunciation’s OK
When you correctly say croquet,
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.
Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
And enamour rhyme with hammer.
River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb,
Doll and roll and some and home.
Stranger does not rhyme with anger,
Neither does devour with clangour.
Souls but foul, haunt but aunt,
Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant,
Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger,
And then singer, ginger, linger,
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age.
Query does not rhyme with very,
Nor does fury sound like bury.
Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth.
Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath.
Though the differences seem little,
We say actual but victual.
Refer does not rhyme with deafer.
Fe0ffer does, and zephyr, heifer.
Mint, pint, senate and sedate;
Dull, bull, and George ate late.
Scenic, Arabic, Pacific,
Science, conscience, scientific.
Liberty, library, heave and heaven,
Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven.
We say hallowed, but allowed,
People, leopard, towed, but vowed.
Mark the differences, moreover,
Between mover, cover, clover;
Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,
Chalice, but police and lice;
Camel, constable, unstable,
Principle, disciple, label.
Petal, panel, and canal,
Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal.
Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair,
Senator, spectator, mayor.
Tour, but our and succour, four.
Gas, alas, and Arkansas.
Sea, idea, Korea, area,
Psalm, Maria, but malaria.
Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean.
Doctrine, turpentine, marine.
Compare alien with Italian,
Dandelion and battalion.
Sally with ally, yea, ye,
Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key.
Say aver, but ever, fever,
Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver.
Heron, granary, canary.
Crevice and device and aerie.
Face, but preface, not efface.
Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass.
Large, but target, gin, give, verging,
Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging.
Ear, but earn and wear and tear
Do not rhyme with here but ere.
Seven is right, but so is even,
Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen,
Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk,
Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work.
Pronunciation (think of Psyche!)
Is a paling stout and spikey?
Won’t it make you lose your wits,
Writing groats and saying grits?
It’s a dark abyss or tunnel:
Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale,
Islington and Isle of Wight,
Housewife, verdict and indict.
Finally, which rhymes with enough,
Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough?
Hiccough has the sound of cup.
My advice is to give up!!!
English Pronunciation by G. Nolst Trenité

In political science, Duverger's law is a principle which asserts that a plurality rule election system tends to favor a two-party system. This is one of two hypotheses proposed by Duverger, the second stating that “the double ballot majority system and proportional representation tend to multipartism.”[1]

Real Wedding Album: Barbie & Ken!! (No, Really! It's Phenomenal!)

It’s one of the ironies of American history that when the Pilgrims first arrived at Plymouth rock they promptly set about creating a communist society.  Of course, they were soon starving to death.

Fortunately, “after much debate of things,” Governor William Bradford ended corn collectivism, decreeing that each family should keep the corn that it produced.  In one of the most insightful statements of political economy ever penned, Bradford described the results of the new and old systems.

Some believe that certified coffee is superior in some way. It is not. The small-scale farms whose local ecologies produce distinctive, niche coffee beans can’t operate on a scale that would justify official certification. As the German study notes, “Certified coffees have distinct production and marketing systems with different associated costs than the conventional system.”

Neither is certified coffee different at all. In fact, at Green Beanery we have received bags of coffee, some labelled fair trade, some not, grown on the very same farm and identical in every respect. The fair-trade certified farmer himself can’t tell which beans will be sold as fair trade and which not — that decision is made by the higher-ups.

Because the fair-trade associations are intent on keeping the price of fair-trade coffee up, they limit the supply of coffee that can be labelled as certified. To the certified farmer’s chagrin, most of his fair-trade certified crop could end up being sold as uncertified conventional coffee.

And in this well-intentioned price-fixing game, the fair-trade farmer is the pawn and the joke is on the customer.

These student protesters in Bogota, Colombia have really got it going on, makeupwise.

Student protestors in Colombia know how to get attention (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

(Image: cropped, downsized thumbnail from a photo by AP Photo/Fernando Vergara))

Theology Redux
I
The Ju-Ju gave us these magic biscuits. If you eat them, you will live for ever.

II
That’s not quite right. If you do the magic dance the Ju-Ju taught us, you will live for ever. Eating biscuits is an important part of the ceremony, of course, but it is the whole dance that’s magic: there’s nothing special about the actual biscuits themselves.

III
That’s not quite right. The magic isn’t in the biscuit or the dance; the magic comes from fixing your mind on the Ju-Ju and submitting to him inwardly. The dance is just a way of helping you focus.

IV
That’s not quite right. Since the magic comes from fixing your mind on the Ju-Ju and submitting to him inwardly, there’s no real need for anything else. Some people say that we’ve gone away from the Ju-Ju by giving up eating magic biscuits and dancing magic dances, but that’s not really true. It's just that we’ve spotted that our whole life is part of the dance, and all the biscuits we eat are magical.

V
That’s not quite right. The magic doesn’t come from fixing your mind on the Ju-Ju or submitting to him; it comes from living as he did, and working to put his political principles into practice in today’s world. That’s what he meant by “dancing”. And “magic” biscuits are biscuits which you share with people who don’t have any biscuits of their own; and that applies to all other kinds of food as well. And "for ever" means “in a world where no one starves or begs for bread; where everyone gives what they can and takes what they need; where health care is free at the point of need; and where countries settle their problems without wars.”

VI
That’s not quite right. The Ju-Ju came to show people that their belief in magic biscuits, magic dances and living forever was completely wrong, and, in fact wicked: that the whole idea of a magic biscuits which makes you lived for ever is, in fact evil. He was only interested in sharing food, socialized medicine, and countries solving their problems without wars. Some bad people came along and added magic biscuits and magic dances to his supposed teachings for their own ends.

Welcome to glitch*BRGR!
We serve the cheapest food with the most energy! Go buy it at the auction house today!

Previous Next

Today, Gibson is lanky and somewhat shy, avuncular and slow to speak—more what you would expect from the lapsed science-fiction enthusiast he was in 1972 than the genre-vanquishing hero he has become since the publication of his first novel, the hallucinatory hacker thriller Neuromancer, in 1984. Gibson resists being called a visionary, yet his nine novels constitute as subtle and clarifying a meditation on the transformation of culture by technology as has been written since the beginning of what we now know to call the information age. Neuromancer, famously, gave us the term ­cyberspace and the vision of the Internet as a lawless, spellbinding realm. And, with its two sequels, Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), it helped establish the cultural figure of the computer hacker as cowboy hero. In his Bridge series—Virtual Light (1993), Idoru (1996), and All Tomorrow’s Parties (1999), each of which unfolds in a Bay Bridge shantytown improvised ­after a devastating Pacific earthquake transforms much of San Francisco—he planted potted futures of celebrity journalism, reality television, and nanotechnology, each prescient and persuasive and altogether weird.

Anki is a program which makes remembering things easy. Because it is a lot more efficient than traditional study methods, you can either greatly decrease your time spent studying, or greatly increase the amount you learn.
Anyone who needs to remember things in their daily life can benefit from Anki. Since it is content-agnostic and supports images, audio, videos and scientific markup (via LaTeX), the possibilities are endless. For example:

learning a language
studying for medical and law exams
memorizing people's names and faces
brushing up on geography
mastering long poems
even practicing guitar chords!

Remember 204? a happier, more innocent time... Then a huge multinational corporation poured millions of dollars into a computer that would demolish me on national TV

From Ordinary Beans by Gwyn McVay:

The Demoness
She liked me to say poems,
other people’s at first,
then my own. That was scary,

not her skull necklace—I liked that;
but saying for her the plain words

that had to be right, or she’d hiss
like a tigress, whistle around her tusks,

and stomp on tortured souls. So I chased peacocks,
I cooked masalas that burned through the kettle,
I climbed trees with snakes. Love sonnets
she could take or leave. Her taste

changed daily under my tongue,
imported fish eggs, the next day
ordinary beans.
At the ghats
where bodies are burned, where she lay down
and wrapped her human-skin robe around her,

she said to me, All this time
it was my death song. Don’t worry—
I’m going with the Buddhists next time round.
You did all right, for a kid.

Oh, I said, and she burst into flame.
This painting is made of her stare.

rocess. For each of the 5,483 unique words in the book, we ran a search (using the Yahoo! Search API) that was filtered to just PDF files. We downloaded the top 10 to 15 hits for each word, producing 64,076 PDF files (some were no longer available, others were duplicates). Inside these PDFs were 347,565 subsetted fonts.

From those fonts, 55,382 unique glyph shapes were used to fill the 342,889 individual letters found in the Frankenstein text.

Second:
Carol and I were librarians at an infinite library where roughly 72% of books are Moby-Dick. Our library contains, within in its stacks, every edition of Moby-Dick that ever has been or will be or could be published. So does the main Library, of course, but at our branch the probability of coming across one of them is much higher.

The main Library, as I'm sure many of you know, is a sphere of infinite diameter packed with small, dimly lit hexagonal book-lined cells. Our branch in Dublin is a converted firehouse. Was. No, is. Inside is an endless labyrinth of whitewashed cinderblock rooms with all-weather carpeting and fluorescent lights. It has a faint smell of cat pee. We do not keep cats, out of consideration to our patrons with allergies or phobias; unfortunately, we suspect that a fractional but infinite number of the people squatting in the Branch Library stacks do.

In the Branch Library we have located two 1851 first editions of Moby-Dick from Harper and Brothers in the black cloth and orange endpapers, one with light foxing to title and text, the other significantly water-damaged and missing the front cover and part of the spine. We have also found a book that appears to be an 1851 first edition but contains no words, only hundreds of thousands of small hash marks with no meaning we can figure. We have found one volume of the three-volume slipcover with woodcuts by Rockwell Kent published in 1930, #496 in limited edition of 1,000 copies. Presumably the other two volumes are somewhere in the collection, and the 999 other copies of the set, and an infinite number of additional sets as well. We have found Moby-Dick in French, Swiss, Korean and a Vigenère encryption with several intentional misspellings to frustrate codebreakers (Carol cracked it). We have found a dog-eared Tor Classics paperback printed in 1996, signed by Herman Melville "with love to Kelly." We have found many, many copies of the CliffsNotes.

The readable Moby-Dicks, what we call the general-circulation copies, we used to shelve in the front rooms near the entrance for the convenience of our patrons. We were working very hard to make our library more convenient.

Dim objRecip As Recipient
Dim strMsg As String
Dim res As Integer
Dim strBcc As String
On Error Resume Next

' #### USER OPTIONS ####
' address for Bcc -- must be SMTP address or resolvable
' to a name in the address book
strBcc = "SomeEmailAddress@domain.com"

Set objRecip = Item.Recipients.Add(strBcc)
objRecip.Type = olBCC
If Not objRecip.Resolve Then
strMsg = "Could not resolve the Bcc recipient. " & _
"Do you want still to send the message?"
res = MsgBox(strMsg, vbYesNo + vbDefaultButton1, _
"Could Not Resolve Bcc Recipient")
If res = vbNo Then
Cancel = True
End If
End If

Set objRecip = Nothing

The Michelson-Morley experiment shows that the experimental outcome of an interference experiment does not depend on the constant velocity of the setup with respect to an inertial frame of reference. From this one can conclude the existence of an invariant velocity of light. However it does not follow from their experiment that a time-of-flight is reference frame independent. In fact the theory of special relativity predicts that the distance between the production location of a particle and the detection location will be changed in all reference frames which have a velocity component parallel to the baseline separating source and detector in a foton time-of-flight experiment. For the OPERA experiment we find that the associated correction is in the order of 32 ns. Because, judging from the information provided, the correction needs to be applied twice in the OPERA experiment the total correction to the final results is in the order of 64 ns. Thus bringing the apparent velocities of neutrino's back to a value not significantly different from the speed of light. We end this short letter by suggesting an analysis of the experimental data which would illustrate the effects described.

Sunday, we went to a wedding. Yes, I went to a wedding with skull makeup. Why, you ask. It was a zombie themed wedding and costumes were highly encouraged. My husband and I participated. Of course the entire wedding party was zombied out. Sadly, there were few zombified guest...oh well. What do you get for reading that spiel? You get a tutorial for how to do this skull makeup. It's different than the basic skull and sugar skull makeup I've done in the past. This is more anatomical and has shading. Not harder, but more accurate. Ok, enough rambling...time for the tutorial!

The cost-effectiveness estimate in question comes from the Disease Control Priorities in Developing Countries (DCP2), a major report funded by the Gates Foundation. This report provides an estimate of $3.41 per disability-adjusted life-year (DALY) for the cost-effectiveness of soil-transmitted-helminth (STH) treatment, implying that STH treatment is one of the most cost-effective interventions for global health. In investigating this figure, we have corresponded, over a period of months, with six scholars who had been directly or indirectly involved in the production of the estimate. Eventually, we were able to obtain the spreadsheet that was used to generate the $3.41/DALY estimate. That spreadsheet contains five separate errors that, when corrected, shift the estimated cost effectiveness of deworming from $3.41 to $326.43. We came to this conclusion a year after learning that the DCP2’s published cost-effectiveness estimate for schistosomiasis treatment - another kind of deworming - contained a crucial typo: the published figure was $3.36-$6.92 per DALY, but the correct figure is $336-$692 per DALY. (This figure appears, correctly, on page 46 of the DCP2.)

Not in Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business Class of 2013, according to an analysis of the class’s Facebook page by Poets&Quants. Commonly among the half dozen prestige firms that send vast numbers of MBA candidates to top business schools, they are surprisingly absent from the top 26 feeder companies for this year’s incoming class at Tuck.

Yet, just as surprising, the elite Wall Street firm of Goldman Sachs has one of the largest contingents at Tuck this year: The estimated nine students from Goldman make up the second largest group in the class behind only Deloitte with an estimated 10 first-years.

After Deloitte and Goldman, the largest number of students represented in the class are from Ernst & Young, Google, LEK Consulting, and PriceWaterhouse Coopers.

The composition of the Tuck class is exceptionally diverse: Besides the typical array of consulting and financial service firms, there are students from Hewlett-Packard, ExxonMobil, Pfizer, Hyundai, Tata Group, and Walt Disney Co.

SAMUEL L. IPSUM
MOTHERFUCKING PLACEHOLDER TEXT MOTHERFUCKER!
MAKE YOUR FUCKING CODE DUMB ASS

HOW MANY FUCKING PARAGRAPHS:WANT A MOTHERFUCKING HEADER TAG: ADD SOME FUCKING BITCHASS <P> TAGS:

COPY THE MOTHERFUCKING CODE BELOW AND PASTE IT WHERE YOU WOULD FUCKING LIKE IT TO APPEAR MOTHERFUCKER.

Research work on the photographic genetic similarities between members of same family

Lady Gaga Ditches Facial Prosthetics for Her New ‘Nymph’ Persona;

I want to share with you something I’ve learned. I’ll draw it on the blackboard behind me so you can follow more easily [draws a vertical line on the blackboard]. This is the G-I axis: good fortune-ill fortune. Death and terrible poverty, sickness down here—great prosperity, wonderful health up there. Your average state of affairs here in the middle [points to bottom, top, and middle of line respectively].

RT @sadoian: great NYTimes infographic on the state of our economic malaise:

Ravenclaw
55% Ravenclaw, 41% Hufflepuff, 50% Slytherin and 48% Gryffindor!






Or yet in wise old Ravenclaw,

if you've a ready mind,

Where those of wit and learning,

Will always find their kind;










         The cardinal traits of Ravenclaw are intellect, wit and openness to experience. They are the most introverted house of the four. Ravenclaws are more likely to prefer small gatherings of like-minded individuals and require recooperation after stressful social interaction. These individuals are intuitive creatures, the quintessential researchers. They lack the stubborn, strict, and rule-abiding qualities that would inhibit intellectual growth—one can't be too set in their ways if they are to be open to exploring new ideas and paths of thought.In contrast to Slytherin and Gryffindor, Ravenclaws in general are much more emotionally stable. Their reactions seem dampened compared to the sometimes dramatic responses of the other houses—they're much less likely to get offended, they're more open to criticism, not particularly argumentative and interested in hearing different points of view. They can at times seem to be less interested in people and more interested in their own inner world, and appear to be disconnected from the rest of humanity.

          Ambition is secondary to them. Although they may strive to excel in school, knowledge and self-enrichment is the primary goal as opposed to simply wanting good marks. If they do happen to strive for excellence, it is because it fits with their other goals, not out of a desire to be superior or the best. Due to their intuitiveness and willingness to listen, Ravenclaws can be empathetic and make good advisors. They should generally leave leadership roles to people who are more extraverted and who would enjoy them more, however.

YOUR ANALYSIS (Vertical line = Average)


You scored 55% on Ravenclaw, higher than 67% of your peers.

You scored 41% on Hufflepuff, higher than 18% of your peers.

You scored 50% on Slytherin, higher than 62% of your peers.

You scored 48% on Gryffindor, higher than 40% of your peers.

from: 23 Ibbetson St, Somerville, MA 02143 to: Tuck School of Business, Hanover, NH

The collapse of empires is exceedingly difficult to understand. The author examined the distribution of imperial lifetimes using a data set that spans more than three millennia and found that it conforms to a memoryless exponential distribution in which the rate of collapse of an empire is independent of its age. Comparing this distribution to similar lifetime distributions of other complex systems—specifically, biological species and corporate firms—the author explores the reasons behind their lifetime distributions and how this approach can yield insights into empires.

Last day in melbourne. Rainbows!

I have seen this playing out already, so this is  less mad than it might initially seem:

I have this feeling that people are going to become more and more wary of direct face-to-face attention because it will seem like its wasted on them if it’s not mediated, not captured somehow in social networks where it has measurable value. I imagine this playing out as a kind of fear of intimacy as it was once experienced—private unsharable moments that will seem creepier and creepier because no one else can bear witness to their significance, translate them into social distinction. Recognition within private unmediated spaces will be unsought after, the “real you” won’t be there but elsewhere, in the networks.

Like many interesting scientific discoveries, this one was an accident. Sean Murphy, an undergraduate student, was working alone in the lab on a set of faces for one of his experiments. He aligned a set of faces at the eyes and started to skim through them. After a few seconds, he noticed that some of the faces began to appear highly deformed and grotesque. He looked at the especially ugly faces individually, but each of them appeared normal or even attractive. We called it the “Flashed Face Distortion Effect” and wanted to share it with the world, so we put it on YouTube.

The effect seems to depend on processing each face in light of the others. By aligning the faces at the eyes and presenting them quickly, it becomes much easier to compare them, so the differences between the faces are more extreme. If someone has a large jaw, it looks almost ogre-like. If they have an especially large forehead, then it looks particularly bulbous. We’re conducting several experiments right now to figure out exactly what’s causing this effect, so watch this space!

Here’s a chart Matt Cameron made based on Angus Maddison’s data (XLS). The definition of Western Europe here is Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK. The United States, it’s worth noting, was richer than most of these countries as far back as 1820. Presumably the reason we were so rich in 1820 is the same as the reason Australia was so rich in 1820—we were stealing valuable land from its indigenous occupants. And as you can see, the gap in per capita output long predates the emergence of the postwar welfare state.

Louis MacNeice - Snow

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes -
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's hands -
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

Free @aaronsw!
(see also here: )

Free @aaronsw!
(see also here: )

I feel like I've heard this before, but in the early days of Google, Sergey Brin ended his job interviews in an unusual manner.

Finally, he leaned forward and fired his best shot, what he came to call "the hard question."

"I'm going to give you five minutes," he told me. "When I come back, I want you to explain to me something complicated that I don't already know." He then rolled out of the room toward the snack area. I looked at Cindy. "He's very curious about everything," she told me. "You can talk about a hobby, something technical, whatever you want. Just make sure it's something you really understand well."

Many of us have been looking for these for a looooooog time, yesterday a random link lead me to them! Here are all Doctor Who Series 5 and almost all 6 (to date) transcripts!

I worship the old gods
You've probably never heard of them

Time until Sunday, 31 July 2011 at 8:25:00 PM (Boston time)

A surprising tasty cabbage recipe that holds up well to reheating.

Adapted from a Swedish cooking book.

They mixed together worms and germs in several different arrangements and let them duke it out for 30 worm generations. In each trial, the worms were either sexual or asexual.  In some trials, the bacteria coexisted with the worms for the whole experiment, so that they could evolve along with the worms. In other trials, the worms were repeatedly presented with the same, fixed strain of S. marcescens. In other words, the bacteria could not evolve. And in control experiments, the worms enjoyed a Serratia-free life.
As this graph to the left shows, the asexual worms that faced co-evolving germs were annihilated in just 20 generations. (“Obligate selfing” means no sex.) If the germs couldn’t evolve, however, the asexual worms did fine. The scientists also tested the bacteria for deadliness after the experiments were over. They found that the bacteria that were allowed to co-evolve with the asexual became much deadlier. The co-evolving sexual worms, on the other hand, suffered far lower mortality rates from their germs.
In another experiment, the scientists started out with ordinary worms, which only had sex about 20 percent of the time they reproduced. Again, they exposed the worms to unchanging bacteria, or co-evolving ones, or no bacteria at all. The graph to the right says it all. The worms not exposed to the bacteria went on having infrequent sex. The worms that could evolve but faced fixed bacteria had more sex for a while, but eventually crashed back down to their original levels. The coevolving worms, on the other hand, became mostly sexual.

excellent! this calls for a drink

Now picture you are in a room with 10 people screaming. You hate it when people scream, and you can pay a person to get them to stop screaming. Would you pay in a similar way to the cake example? Would you pay a $1 to get the first person to stop screaming, and a penny for the 10th person to stop screaming?
No. Getting one person to stop screaming would make very little difference in how much you dislike being in the room. Modern psychology tells us you might not even notice it. You’d probably only pay a penny to get that first guy to stop screaming. However getting the second guy to stop screaming might be worth 10 cents. And the last guy, the difference between some screaming and no screaming, might be worth the full dollar to you. The more quiet it got, the more a marginal difference in how quiet it is would be worth to you. There’s increasing returns to this good; the 10th guy not screaming is worth more than the first guy not screaming, which is the exact opposite dynamic of the 10th cake being less delicious than the first.

As we've come to depend on a handful of commercial varieties of fruits and vegetables, thousands of heirloom varieties have disappeared. It's hard to know exactly how many have been lost over the past century, but a study conducted in 1983 by the Rural Advancement Foundation International gave a clue to the scope of the problem. It compared USDA listings of seed varieties sold by commercial U.S. seed houses in 1903 with those in the U.S. National Seed Storage Laboratory in 1983. The survey, which included 66 crops, found that about 93 percent of the varieties had gone extinct. More up-to-date studies are needed.

Hey y'all. Long time no see. For the past four years, I've been working slowly but obsessively on a very odd project. Bit by bit I’ve dissected Obama’s self-read autobiography into thousands of very short phrases, usually one to ten words or so, and have used these snippets to tell a completely different story from the original. I’ve then set the story to music. The story is called Son Of Strelka, Son Of God. Broadly speaking, it tells the story of an ugly dog-faced demigod who recreates the world after it is destroyed. It's about thirty minutes long, and lies in some weird grey area between audiobook and electronic music.

rt-achievements is an extension which adds Xbox-style achievements to Request Tracker. It was inspired by this SomethingAwful forums thread.

Given only an image of a chart, estimate the data associated with it

Just backed a zoetrope startup via @kickstarter (how cool!)

Arania 9 hours ago
I'm a kickarse executive-level admin assistant in Boston.  My specialty is legal secretarial, but those kinds of skills and expertise can transfer to any type of office admin.  I can organize the heck out of you, do your documents, client contact, calendar management, travel and conference arrangements, records management both electronic and paper (a.k.a. doing your filing).  In other words, I run the minutae of your life so you can get on with your real work. In the legal profession, I can do electronic filing of court documents, maintain brief indexes and all that there.  I'm looking for a job where I can do those things in an environment that lets me be part of a team, not just a faceless peon.  I could also do office management. 

I don't have a car, so I have to keep my search to where I can use the T in the Boston area.

I've been out of work since the end of 2008.  I was in investment management law, and the powers that be laid off almost our entire department.

A world where there are waiting periods for war, not abortion