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The Danger Artist - The New Yorker - 0 views

  • It’s not true that Chris Burden, the profoundly satirical Los Angeles artist who died last week, of cancer, at sixty-nine, had himself shot in the arm for the performance work “Shoot,” in 1971. Rather, he was shot by a friend whose claim to be a marksman proved an overstatement. The .22 bullet was supposed to only graze Burden. The shooter missed. So Burden told me, years ago. He shared with others that he had been frightened of having himself crucified on a Volkswagen, for “Trans-Fixed” (1974), but was pleasantly surprised by how painlessly the thin nails passed through his hands. He went to extremes, but he wasn’t nuts. When, nearly naked and holding his hands behind him, he wriggled across fifty feet of broken glass in “Through the Night Softly” (1973), the glass was the crumbled safety kind—not that that made for comfort. He said that he liked how the scattered bits, glittering on the asphalt of a parking lot, in the black-and-white film of the event, resemble a starry sky.
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Henry Marsh's "Do No Harm" - The New Yorker - 1 views

  • Marsh, who is now sixty-five, is one of Britain’s foremost neurosurgeons. He is a senior consultant at St. George’s Hospital, in London, and he helped to pioneer a kind of surgery in which patients are kept awake, under local anesthesia, so that they can converse with their surgeons while they operate, allowing them to avoid damaging what neurosurgeons call “eloquent,” or useful, parts of the brain. Marsh has been the subject of two documentary films. Still, he writes, “As I approach the end of my career I feel an increasing obligation to bear witness to past mistakes I have made.” A few years ago, he prepared a lecture called “All My Worst Mistakes.” For months, he lay awake in the mornings, remembering the patients he had failed. “The more I thought about the past,” he recalls in his book, “the more mistakes rose to the surface, like poisonous methane stirred up from a stagnant pond.”
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Math Documentary 2015: NOVA - The Great Math Mystery full HD english subtitles - YouTube - 1 views

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Witness Accounts in Midtown Hammer Attack Show the Power of False Memory - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • There is no evidence that the mistaken accounts of either person were malicious or intentionally false. Studies of memories of traumatic events consistently show how common it is for errors to creep into confidently recalled accounts, according to cognitive psychologists.“It’s pretty normal,” said Deryn Strange, an associate psychology professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “That’s the hard thing to get our heads around. It’s frightening how easy it is to build in a false memory.”
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This War Of Mine - 0 views

  • This War Of Mine provides an experience of war seen from an entirely new angle. For the very first time you do not play as an elite soldier, rather a group of civilians trying to survive in a besieged city. During the day snipers outside stop you from leaving your refuge, so you need to focus on maintaining your hideout. At night you get a chance to scavenge nearby locations for items that will help you stay alive. Make life-and-death decisions driven by your conscience. Try to protect everybody from your shelter or sacrifice some of them to endure the hardships. During war, there are no good or bad decisions; there is only survival. The sooner you realize that, the better.
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What is the role of memory in a digital age? - BBC News - 0 views

  • The digital age is also raising broader philosophical questions about memory. How much do we need to remember when it can be effortlessly recalled for us by a machine? If the use of search engines for retrieving facts is allowed at some point in the future, exams themselves might have to change.
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Cass Sunstein on Taylor Swift, Pandora-ization, and why choosing not to choose is somet... - 0 views

  • Sunstein zeroes in on a particular kind of nudge, a default setting, which is extraordinarily effective at shaping outcomes. He argues that defaults are perhaps the best of all nudges. For one thing, they can always be over-ridden, thereby preserving the ability to choose. They also, he says, preserve a certain kind of liberty that people lose when they’re forced to make a decision: the freedom not to choose.
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Do You Believe In Magic? Interview with Dr. Paul Offit - CSI - 0 views

  • I think there is something to be said for the placebo response, which is unfortunately named. I think when people hear the word “placebo,” they assume that it's dismissive, trivializing, that it's just all in my head and that it's not real. I think that in fact, the placebo response can be a physiological response. I think believing that you are about to be helped in some way goes a long way to being helped in some way.
  • If you believe that human anatomy has nothing to do with rivers in China or days of the year, then there's nothing accurate about acupuncture. Indeed, if you look at people who benefit from acupuncture, it doesn't matter where you put the needles. In fact, it doesn't even matter whether you put the needles under the skin! Even these retractable needles seem to work, so‑called “acupressure.” That is interesting!
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UBC student writes 52,438 word architecture dissertation with no punctuation - not ever... - 1 views

  • A 61-year-old architect from the Nisga’a First Nation, Stewart explains that he “wanted to make a point” about aboriginal culture, colonialism, and “the blind acceptance of English language conventions in academia.”
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Our Biased Brains - NYTimes.com - 4 views

  • The human brain seems to be wired so that it categorizes people by race in the first one-fifth of a second after seeing a face. Brain scans show that even when people are told to sort people by gender, the brain still groups people by race.
  • White American kids disproportionately judged that the people who were smiling were white and that those who were frowning were Asian. When the experiment was conducted in Taiwan with exactly the same photos, Taiwanese children thought that the faces when smiling were Asian, when frowning were white.
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Why Marvel's Female Superheroes Look Like Porn Stars - The New Yorker - 3 views

  • Last week, Marvel launched a new Avengers movie, “Age of Ultron,” and this month it’s launching a new comic book, “A-Force.” Ultron is a robot with artificial intelligence who believes that the only way to achieve peace on earth is to exterminate the human race. The A-Force is a race of lady Avengers, led by She-Hulk, who come from a “feminist paradise,” but I don’t know what that could possibly mean, because they all look like porn stars.
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Laïcité and the Skirt - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • In most Western democracies, separation of church and state generally means that the government leaves people free to observe their religion’s traditions, diets or dress codes, so long as they do no harm to other groups. In France, however, the stern code of secularism known as laïcité often seems to cross from protecting religious expression into imposing a state-defined secular behavior — most often on the country’s sizable Muslim population. The latest example came when a school in northeastern France twice sent a 15-year-old Muslim girl home for wearing a skirt that was deemed too long.
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Why 'Natural' Doesn't Mean Anything Anymore - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • It seems that getting end-of-life patients and their families to endorse “do not resuscitate” orders has been challenging. To many ears, “D.N.R.” sounds a little too much like throwing Grandpa under the bus. But according to a paper in The Journal of Medical Ethics, when the orders are reworded to say “allow natural death,” patients and family members and even medical professionals are much more likely to give their consent to what amounts to exactly the same protocols.
  • So does this mean that, when it comes to saying what’s natural, anything goes? I don’t think so. In fact, I think there’s some philosophical wisdom we can harvest from, of all places, the Food and Drug Administration. When the federal judges couldn’t find a definition of “natural” to apply to the class-action suits before them, three of them wrote to the F.D.A., ordering the agency to define the word. But the F.D.A. had considered the question several times before, and refused to attempt a definition. The only advice the F.D.A. was willing to offer the jurists is that a food labeled “natural” should have “nothing artificial or synthetic” in it “that would not normally be expected in the food.” The F.D.A. states on its website that “it is difficult to define a food product as ‘natural’ because the food has probably been processed and is no longer the product of the earth,” suggesting that the industry might not want to press the point too hard, lest it discover that nothing it sells is natural.
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Five reasons why we should still read maps - BBC News - 0 views

  • But now experts say a reliance on sat-navs and smartphone map apps is undermining map-reading skills. So here are five reasons why you should love maps and resist the easy attraction of the sat-nav.
  • They have to be used in conjunction with the physical world, be that reading a sign, noticing a church (with or without a spire of course) or identifying that big hill on your right. This process of using your eyes and engaging your brain leaves memories and knowledge of the world around you. With sat-nav as a guide, nothing is learned nor loved about the journey.
  • Maps are a partner to our intellect, not a replacement.
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  • Maps are beautifulThe Mappa Mundi in Hereford Cathedral shows the history, geography and destiny of Christian Europe as understood in the late 13th Century with pictures of the Pillars of Hercules, the Golden Fleece and a man riding a crocodile. Star maps use images of bears and gods to decipher the random. The London Tube map is a design icon. Maps are eminently practical, but their intriguing visual imagery is a pinnacle of art.
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Mathematicians and Blue Crabs - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • The math behind these formulas may be elegant, but applying them is more complicated.
  • Although a definitive cause has yet to be identified, one thing is clear: Mathematical models failed to predict it.
  • For instance, it was long believed that a blue crab’s maximum life expectancy was eight years. This estimate was used, indirectly, to calculate crab mortality from fishing. Derided by watermen, the life expectancy turned out to be much too high; this had resulted in too many crab deaths being attributed to harvesting, thereby supporting charges of overfishing.
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  • Randomness is built into biological processes, so predicting a population is never going to be like calculating the interest on a bank account. The best we can do is use available science to make educated guesses about various outcomes. “The models we use are not universally predictive in the sense that Newton’s laws are; they are more like the weather forecast,” says Dr. Miller.
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