I like the phrase ‘the contingent claim upon the future represented by the words “I do”’ – makes me think about option values, vega and theta of marriage/divorce… There should be psychology studies where people report their happiness at regular intervals, so we can estimate the underlying processes, is marriage satisfaction a Levy process?
interfluidity » “Marriage promotion” is a destructive cargo cult January 28, 2014
The answer to ‘why does anything exist at all?’; the immanent indivisible; the prime mover, the one absolute, the first cause, the ultimate reality, the necessary whereupon the contingent continges, the unbegotten begetter, the unmade maker; the perfect archetype, the highest form of the good; the cause of all other ideas, the origin of mind and volition, the prior to all subsequent, the legislator of physics, the conscious and intelligent mind [which] is the matrix of all matter; the alternative to ‘turtles all the way down’; the ‘I AM that I AM’.
(128) Paul Smith's answer to God: What is God? - Quora January 21, 2014
Thus, on average, one changes the guess at the maximum of an array of sizenless than lnn=.693·log2ntimes. So, for example, ifn= 210, the guesschanges about 10 times
lec4.pdf January 21, 2014
They found that successful books made great use of conjunctions to join sentences ("and" or "but") and prepositions than less successful books. They also found a high percentage of nouns and adjectives in the successful books; less successful books relied on more verbs and adverbs to describe what was happening. More successful books relied on verbs describing thought processes rather than actions and emotions. The results varied by genre, but books that are less successful, the researchers reported, used words like "wanted," "took" or "promised." Successful authors employed "recognized" or "remembered." "It has to do with showing versus caring," Choi said. "In order to really resonate with readers, instead of saying 'she was really really sad,' it might be better to describe her physical state, to give a literal description. You are speaking more like a journalist would."
Computer Algorithm Seeks To Crack Code Of Fiction Bestsellers | Inside Science January 19, 2014
A few years later, on 22 September 1979, a US satellite, Vela 6911, detected the double-flash typical of a nuclear weapon test off the coast of South Africa. Leonard Weiss, a mathematician and an expert on nuclear proliferation, was working as a Senate advisor at the time and after being briefed on the incident by US intelligence agencies and the country's nuclear weapons laboratories, he became convinced a nuclear test, in contravention to the Limited Test Ban Treaty, had taken place.It was only after both the Carter and then the Reagan administrations attempted to gag him on the incident and tried to whitewash it with an unconvincing panel of enquiry, that it dawned on Weiss that it was the Israelis, rather than the South Africans, who had carried out the detonation."I was told it would create a very serious foreign policy issue for the US, if I said it was a test. Someone had let something off that US didn't want anyone to know about," says Weiss.Israeli sources told Hersh the flash picked up by the Vela satellite was actually the third of a series of Indian Ocean nuclear tests that Israel conducted in cooperation with South Africa."It was a fuck-up," one source told him. "There was a storm and we figured it would block Vela, but there was a gap in the weather – a window – and Vela got blinded by the flash."
The truth about Israel's secret nuclear arsenal | World news | The Guardian January 19, 2014
The British were kept out of the loop, being told at different times that the huge construction site was a desert grasslands research institute and a manganese processing plant. The Americans, also kept in the dark by both Israel and France, flew U2 spy planes over Dimona in an attempt to find out what they were up to.The Israelis admitted to having a reactor but insisted it was for entirely peaceful purposes. The spent fuel was sent to France for reprocessing, they claimed, even providing film footage of it being supposedly being loaded onto French freighters. Throughout the 60s it flatly denied the existence of the underground reprocessing plant in Dimona that was churning out plutonium for bombs.
The truth about Israel's secret nuclear arsenal | World news | The Guardian January 19, 2014
Milchan, who then ran the family fertiliser company, never looked back, playing a central role in Israel's clandestine acquisition programme.He was responsible for securing vital uranium-enrichment technology, photographing centrifuge blueprints that a German executive had been bribed into temporarily "mislaying" in his kitchen. The same blueprints, belonging to the European uranium enrichment consortium, Urenco, were stolen a second time by a Pakistani employee, Abdul Qadeer Khan, who used them to found his country's enrichment programme and to set up a global nuclear smuggling business, selling the design to Libya, North Korea and Iran.For that reason, Israel's centrifuges are near-identical to Iran's, a convergence that allowed Israeli to try out a computer worm, codenamed Stuxnet, on its own centrifuges before unleashing it on Iran in 2010.
The truth about Israel's secret nuclear arsenal | World news | The Guardian January 19, 2014
In reality, though, neither US nor British intelligence believe Tehran has decided to build a bomb, and Iran's atomic projects are under constant international monitoring.The exotic tale of the bomb hidden in the desert is a true story, though. It's just one that applies to another country. In an extraordinary feat of subterfuge, Israel managed to assemble an entire underground nuclear arsenal – now estimated at 80 warheads, on a par with India and Pakistan – and even tested a bomb nearly half a century ago, with a minimum of international outcry or even much public awareness of what it was doing.Despite the fact that the Israel's nuclear programme has been an open secret since a disgruntled technician, Mordechai Vanunu, blew the whistle on it in 1986, the official Israeli position is still never to confirm or deny its existence.When the former speaker of the Knesset, Avraham Burg, broke the taboo last month, declaring Israeli possession of both nuclear and chemical weapons and describing the official non-disclosure policy as "outdated and childish" a rightwing group formally called for a police investigation for treason.
The truth about Israel's secret nuclear arsenal | World news | The Guardian January 19, 2014
It's called the "hollow face illusion," and it works because your brain assumes that anything resembling a face is convex, rather than concave. Even though the eye to your right is technically farther away from you, your brain believes that because the image is a face, it must actually be closer.
I Love Optical Illusions, But This Was SHOCKING. I’m Still Not Sure What Happened… | Distractify January 18, 2014
The president makes eye contact with me. “Great to see you,” says the president. The president extends his hand while simultaneously pivoting on his right foot. His hands grasp mine. They feel like the rough surface of your favorite baseball. Eye contact was broken mid-handshake. His hand trailed his turned body *which has already turned on the pivoted foot.* He greeted a couple across the way from me. This concludes my communication with the president of the United States.
What Happens When the President Sits Down Next to You at a Cafe - Robinson Meyer - The Atlantic January 18, 2014
While the eldest child is programmed for excellence and achievement, the middle child is raised to be understanding and conciliatory and the baby seeks attention. As a result, birth order is a powerful variable in the unfolding of your personality.
The Achiever, the Peacemaker and the Life of the Party: How Birth Order Affects Personality | Dr. Gail Gross January 16, 2014
I think Snapchat is a super interesting privacy phenomenon because it creates a new kind of space to communicate which makes it so that things that people previously would not have been able to share, you now feel like you have place to do so. And I think that’s really important and that’s a big kind of innovation that we’re going to keep pushing on and keep trying to do more on and I think a lot of other companies will, too. So just because Facebook’s attempt at ephemeral messaging Poke failed and its bid to acquire Snapchat was turned down, don’t expect it to bow out of this fight.
Zuckerberg Calls Snapchat A “Privacy Phenomenon” | TechCrunch January 16, 2014
“The argument is not working,” said Peter W. Singer of the Brookings Institution, a co-author of a new book called “Cybersecurity and Cyberwar.” “To the Chinese, gaining economic advantage is part of national security. And the Snowden revelations have taken a lot of the pressure off” the Chinese. Still, the United States has banned the sale of computer servers from a major Chinese manufacturer, Huawei, for fear that they could contain technology to penetrate American networks.
N.S.A. Devises Radio Pathway Into Computers - NYTimes.com January 16, 2014
The N.S.A. calls its efforts more an act of “active defense” against foreign cyberattacks than a tool to go on the offensive. But when Chinese attackers place similar software on the computer systems of American companies or government agencies, American officials have protested, often at the presidential level. Among the most frequent targets of the N.S.A. and its Pentagon partner, United States Cyber Command, have been units of the Chinese Army, which the United States has accused of launching regular digital probes and attacks on American industrial and military targets, usually to steal secrets or intellectual property.
N.S.A. Devises Radio Pathway Into Computers - NYTimes.com January 16, 2014
For the most part the songs are downtempo and patient.
▶ Brambles - In The Androgynous Dark - YouTube January 15, 2014
This is undeniably a night-time album, it has that still, peaceful quality to it, the same you get when you walk down a deserted street at night. And despite the slow pace, the music rarely seems melancholic - there's a sense of contentedness which pervades the album from beginning to end. Mark seems very at ease with life and there's a similar spirit to the music. It is deep, thoughtful and optimistic - in the words of Donal Whelan (who mastered the final album), "it's like being wrapped up in a warm blanket".
There is a slow Jazz vibe to In The Androgynous Dark, which has a feeling of reflection, of what might have been. It's a quiet and mournful trio of drums, piano and woodwinds (with some electronic atmospherics).
Emerson's peer and fellow transcendentalist Walt Whitman once famously wrote in his Leaves of Grass, "Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself, (I am large; I contain multitudes)."
Why Every American Should Take Their Next Vacation in Iran - PolicyMic January 14, 2014
Hamid Dabashi, a professor of Iranian studies at Columbia University wrote, "If jazz is the cadence of American culture …Persian poetry is the pulse of Iranian culture, the rhyme and rhythm of its collective memory." On the streets of Tehran, beggars hold small colored envelopes that contain poems by Hafez — the classic medieval Persian poet — fanned out like a deck of cards.
Why Every American Should Take Their Next Vacation in Iran - PolicyMic January 14, 2014
It's called "Return to Life." And you chronicle the stories of many children, including one that got a lot of national attention. It was the story of James Leininger. He was a boy who remembered being a World War II fighter pilot. Can you walk us through that case? TUCKER: Sure. So, James is the son of a Christian couple in Louisiana. And when he was little, he loved his toy planes. But also around the time of his second birthday having horrific nightmares four or five times a week of being a plane crash. And then during the day, he talked about this plane crash and said that he had been a pilot and that he had flown off of a boat. And his dad asked him the name of it, and he said Natoma. And he said he had been shot down by the Japanese, that he had been killed at Iwo Jima and that he had a friend on the boat named Jack Larsen. Well, it turns out that there was an aircraft carrier called the USS Natoma Bay that was stationed in the Pacific during World War II. In fact, it was involved in Iwo Jima. And it lost one pilot there, a young man named James Huston. James Huston's plane crashed exactly the way that James Leininger had described - hit in the engine, exploding into fire, crashing into the water and quickly sinking.
Searching For The Science Behind Reincarnation | WGBH News January 14, 2014
The richest member of Congress was, once again, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) chairman of the House Oversight Committee. Issa, who made his fortune in the car alarm business, had an average net worth of $464 million in 2012.
Millionaires' Club: For First Time, Most Lawmakers are Worth $1 Million-Plus - OpenSecrets Blog January 14, 2014
There are three important trends here. The first is that all of these countries, with the exception of Libya, are very poor. The second is that in most of them, economic growth is being driven by natural resources; often a single natural resource. The third, and maybe most important, is that many of the booms come from the sale of those natural resources to developing countries, often to a single developing country.
These 10 countries are set to be the fastest-growing economies in 2014 January 14, 2014
If it's 2 days that puts us about 26 years (2040) away, compared to the original assumption, which would put us 16 years away (2030), assuming "Moore's Law" continues to happen every 18 months (regardless of whether we'll be able to double the number of transistors per same amount of space anymore or not).
Supercomputer takes 40 minutes to simulate 1 second of a human brain | Hacker News January 13, 2014
And then there were the avalanches of "cocaine" – vitamin D powder hoovered up by Hill and DiCaprio line after cigar-fat line in every scene. "I snorted so much of that stuff that I got, like, bronchitis!" Hill laughs. "My lungs were filled with powder and I got really sick for a month and a half. But, I mean, I'd do it again in a second. The first time you snort fake cocaine in a Scorsese movie you feel like… I don't know!" He winces.
Jonah Hill: 'Snorting fake cocaine in a Scorsese movie is pretty iconic' | Film | The Observer January 12, 2014
Bauer and Larkina uncovered a paradox - at ages 5 to 7, the children remembered over 60 per cent of the events they'd chatted about at age 3. However, their recall for these events was immature in the sense of containing few evaluative comments and few mentions of time and place. In contrast, children aged 8 and 9 recalled fewer than 40 per cent of the events they'd discussed at age 3, but those memories they did recall were more adult-like in their content. Bauer and Larkina said this suggests that adult-like remembering and forgetting develops at around age 7 or soon after. They also speculated that the immature form of recall seen at ages 5 to 7 could actually contribute to the forgetting of autobiographical memories - a process known as "retrieval-induced forgetting".
BPS Research Digest: Childhood amnesia kicks in around age 7 January 9, 2014
Belfort is from beginning to end the Everyday Man, the common folk, and unlike Gekko does not fall from the sky-- the result is meant to be unsettling--how pitiful and gaudy are Belfort's taste for extravaganza, that we are thus all in this ugly game--willy-nilly--and here Scorsese shares Stone's folkloric shrugging of the shoulder that there is something beastial in all of us humans--that Wall Street is the manifestation of the grain of greed, the dram of evil in everyone--the final shot of the film is framed deliberately to look like the very people sitting in the movie theater--there is thus a metaphysical determinism in the film, a predestinarian theology that leaves the Wall Street standing there like that iconic bull in the financial District--totemic, irresistible, unchanging--and THAT is precisely a conclusion that the whole world today is revolting against-- while the very maddening logic of capitalism, its insanity, has become "natural" in this cinema and the culture it represents
Hamid Dabashi - saw Martin Scorsese's "The Wolf of Wall Street"... January 8, 2014
بهش میگی هیچ چیز خجالتآوری تو سکوت وجود نداره و اتفاقن آدم خوشمعاشرت کسیه که باهاش خیلی دراز ساکتی و تو این درازا احساس خفگی نمیکنی و به در و دیوار نمیکوبی و هرچه کمتر ازش "چه خبر" و "دیگه چه خبر" و "خب تعریف کن ببینیم" - کلمههای نحیفی که جز پر کردن قلابی سکوت کاری از دستشون برنمی یاد- میشنوی. میشینید بر و بر همو نگاه میکنید و گلای قالی رو نگاه میکنید و زیر ناخناتونو نگاه میکنید و انگشت میکشید رو میز و خاکی رو که جمع شده نشون هم میدید و نچنچ میکنید و تلویزیونی روشن نیست و هیچ ماسماسکی هم دستتون نیست و هیچ پناهگاه کاذبی وجود نداره، طوری که اصلن درستشم همینه.
Marzie Rasouli - شاید بهتر باشه مهمون که مییاد دستشو بگیری ببری... January 8, 2014
I prepared my breakfast of hard-boiled eggs a bit differently this morning. I added a teaspoon of baking soda to the boiling water. When the eggs were done, I cooled each one in ice water, then cracked both ends of the shell, held it in my fist and blew. Each time, the shell shook a bit and whistled, then out popped the egg, shell-less and delicious.
30-Something Everyday Tasks You Might Be Doing 'Wrong' : NPR January 5, 2014
وقتی به این موارد نگاه میکنیم میبینیم که آن شهرهایی که پایتخت از آن بیرون رفته مشکلاتش کماکان سرجای خودش باقی است. یعنی مشکل ریودوژانیرو، کراچی، لاگوس یا مشکل کوالالامپور سرجایشان باقی مانده. مشکل آلودگی، مشکل جرم خیزی، مشکل مسکن و ترافیک، یعنی ۴ دلیل عمدهای که معمولا آورده شده برای انتقال پایتخت.
انتقال پایتخت؛ نجات پایتخت یا نجات تهران؟ January 4, 2014
اگر نتایج آمارگیریهایی که الان در دسترس هست بپذیریم ۱۵ درصد جمعیت ایران در تهران متمرکز میشود. حال آن که ما میدانیم به لحاظ بودجه عمرانی حدود ۶۰ درصد مصرف میشود در تهران. یا حدود ۲۵ درصد تولید ناخالص داخلی در تهران ایجاد میشود و این باعث یک نابرابری در توزیع منابع شده که بخش عمدهای از این منابع هم رانتی است.
انتقال پایتخت؛ نجات پایتخت یا نجات تهران؟ January 4, 2014
اصلاً اشکال ترافیک تهران دو مطلب خیلی متفاوت است و نسبتاً کوچک است. یکی کمبود پارکینگ است و دومی رانندگی است. برعکس آن نظریاتی که حتی یک عده از کارشناسان میگویند که تهران تعداد خودرو خیلی زیاد است و خیابانهایش کم است، اصلاً این طوری نیست. تعداد خودروهای تهران نسبت به شهرهای مشابه نزدیک یک سوم یا کمتر است نسبت به شهرهای مترقی دیگر و ما در تهران خیابانها و جادههای عریض و خیلی خوب داریم. ولی بیشتر خیابانها دو طرفش پارکینگ است و عملاً از یک لین خیابان استفاده میشود.
انتقال پایتخت؛ نجات پایتخت یا نجات تهران؟ January 4, 2014
Some psychologists have dissented from the model precisely because they feel it neglects other domains of personality, such as Religiosity, Manipulativeness/Machiavellianism, Honesty, sexiness/seductiveness, Thriftiness, Conservativeness, Masculinity/Femininity, Snobbishness/egotism, Sense of humour, and risk-taking/thrill-seeking.[118][119]Dan P. McAdams has called the Big Five a "psychology of the stranger," because they refer to traits that are relatively easy to observe in a stranger; other aspects of personality that are more privately held or more context-dependent are excluded from the Big Five.
Big Five personality traits - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia January 2, 2014
