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| Monday, July 13th, 2009 | |
boingboing_net
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9:42a |
How cats manipulate us
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/SWLkT6_VNXI/how-cats-manipulate.html A new study in the journal Current Biology looks at how cats manipulate us. University of Sussex psychologist Karen McComb, an expert in animal communications, identified how cats add an urgent, whining meow to their normal purr to get what they want. From a press release:
"The embedding of a cry within a call that we normally associate with contentment is quite a subtle means of eliciting a response," said Karen McComb of the University of Sussex. "Solicitation purring is probably more acceptable to humans than overt meowing, which is likely to get cats ejected from the bedroom." She suggests that this form of cat communication sends a subliminal sort of message, tapping into an inherent sensitivity that humans and other mammals have to cues relevant in the context of nurturing their offspring...
McComb said she thinks this cry occurs at a low level in cats' normal purring, "but we think that cats learn to dramatically exaggerate it when it proves effective in generating a response from humans."
" House cats know what they want and how to get it from you"
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boingboing_net
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9:19a |
Dog sleep disorders in Disney films
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/sntF12yAMqo/dog-sleep-disorders.html University of Barcelona researchers noted that dogs in classic Disney films frequently seem to exhibit REM behavior disorder (RBD). Below is the full abstract for their scientific paper, published in a 2007 issue of the journal Sleep Medicine:
During a viewing of Disney's animated film Cinderella (1950), one author (AI) noticed a dog having nightmares with dream-enactment that strongly resembled RBD. This prompted a study in which all Disney classic full-length animated films and shorts were analyzed for other examples of RBD. Three additional dogs were found with presumed RBD in the classic films Lady and the Tramp (1955) and The Fox and the Hound (1981), and in the short Pluto's Judgment Day (1935). These dogs were elderly males who would pant, whine, snuffle, howl, laugh, paddle, kick, and propel themselves while dreaming that they were chasing someone or running away. In Lady and the Tramp the dog was also losing both his sense of smell and his memory, two associated features of human RBD. These four films were released before RBD was first formally described in humans and dogs. In addition, systematic viewing of the Disney films identified a broad range of sleep disorders, including nightmares, sleepwalking, sleep related seizures, disruptive snoring, excessive daytime sleepiness, insomnia and circadian rhythm sleep disorder. These sleep disorders were inserted as comic elements. The inclusion of a broad range of accurately depicted sleep disorders in these films indicates that the Disney screenwriters were astute observers of sleep and its disorders.
" REM sleep behavior disorder and other sleep disturbances in Disney animated films" (via NCBI ROFL)
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boingboing_net
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9:16a |
Backwoods Home Magazine: "Imagine Martha Stewart as a gun-toting Libertarian"
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/5Rx0rkPfmBE/backwoods-home-magaz-1.html My friend Erik Knutzen reviewed Backwoods Home Magazine for Cool Tools:
 Imagine Martha Stewart as a gun-toting Libertarian and you’ll have good notion of the editorial outlook of Backwoods Home Magazine. What makes this magazine useful, regardless of your political persuasion, is the wealth of information written by practitioners in the arts of self-reliance. You’ll find articles on everything from growing vegetables to baking bread to, yes, cleaning your Glock. Even if you live in the city there’s plenty to learn in the pages of BHM, in particular from Jackie Clay, Backwoods Home’s resident advice columnist. Clay can parse out and troubleshoot what have become almost lost arts, things like food preservation, soap making and small-scale poultry keeping. The rambling, unedited reader letters and the thrift-store-painting cover art are endearing bonuses.
(Don Childers' illustration of military pig slaughter from "Preparing for Civil Unrest," by Claire Wolfe)
Backwoods Home Magazine
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boingboing_net
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9:21a |
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boingboing_net
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8:37a |
Scientists search for a 3-foot, spitting earthworm
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/xhAVZwnDPeo/scientists-search-fo.html A massive earthworm is terrifying folks in the Palouse region of the northwestern United States. OK, well maybe that's a slight exaggeration, but researchers are spending the summer seeking a mysterious, legendary 3-foot spitting worm in the rural areas from Washington to Idaho. From the Associated Press:
The worm is said to secrete a lily-like smell when handled, spit at predators, and live in burrows 15 feet deep. There have only been four sightings.
But scientists hope to change that this summer with researchers scouring the Palouse regoin in hopes of finally finding the giant earthworm. Conservationists also want the Obama administration to protect it as an endangered species, even though there is scant scientific information about its existence.
"It absolutely exists," insisted Jodi Johnson-Maynard, a University of Idaho professor who is leading the search for the worm.
Researchers looking for 3-foot, spitting worm under Northwest fields (Thanks, Bob Pescovitz!)
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boingboing_net
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8:16a |
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boingboing_net
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8:12a |
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boingboing_net
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7:52a |
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boingboing_net
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7:20a |
Science fiction publishing trends quantified
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/fHjp3JJUTN4/science-fiction-publ-1.html 
Strange Horizons's Valentin D. Ivanov has scraped Locus Magazine's "Notable Books" column going back to May 1998 and built a 10+ year dataset of genre popularity in science fiction, fantasy and horror. It's easy to get all impressionistic and say, "Oh, everything in the sf section is space opera these days," but that's as apt to be confirmation bias as fact. Here's the numbers.
How significant are these trends? Having only three measurements, we cannot provide rigorous answers, except for the major categories that are populated with sufficient numbers of books. A linear fit to the points in Figure 1 gives us the rate of increase of the number of books included in Locus Online reviews, averaged over the entire time period. For example, for SF it is 11.5 ± 0.9 books per year. In other words, the number of the reviewed SF books has increased on average by 11-12 every year between 1998 and 2007. The rate for fantasy is 26.9 ± 7.7; for horror 3.1 ± 0.7; and for other books 4.1 ± 1.0 (all in units of books per year). The uncertainty margins are the formal fitting errors. The larger uncertainty in fantasy's growth rate reflects a systematic error due to the fact that this category has inflated only recently, and the linear model is not an adequate representation of its behaviour. Fantasy's lead over SF in terms of growth rate is a margin of about 15 books per year. The probability of this happening by chance is extremely small--about 1-in-1010. Therefore, we are likely facing a statistically significant nonrandom trend here.
It appears that the invasion of the sequels is truly happening. However, this result is not as obvious as the previous one--Figure 3 suggests that the proportion of sequels included in Locus Online reviews remains nearly constant after the 2001-2002 period. In other words, the changes are well within the expected random variations, shown in the plot with error bars.
A Statistical Study of Locus Online's "Notable Books"
( via Making Light)
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boingboing_net
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7:16a |
State Fair photos
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/P-q4Bclo680/state-fair-photos.html 
Marylin sez, "Joel Sartore's photos from various state fairs capture some bizarre moments: like hissing cockroaches from Madagascar pulling tiny tractors; Minnesota sisters with rainbow glitter pigtails; bleachers full of 8,400 Iowa fairgoers all about to bite into corndogs simultaneously; Minnesota Dairy Princess Kristy Mussman posing in a freezer so a sculptor can render her likeness in a giant slab of butter; contestants in a mother-daughter lookalike contest; volunteers in Iowa all slumped over in folding chairs at the suggestion of a hypnotist. Garrison Keillor wrote the state fair feature story in the August issue on National Geographic, enumerating the Ten Chief Joys of the State Fair."
The Ten Chief Joys of the State Fair are:
1. To eat food with your two hands.
2. To feel extreme centrifugal force reshaping your face and jowls as you are flung or whirled turbulently and you experience that intense joyfulness that is indistinguishable from anguish, or (as you get older) to observe other persons in extreme centrifugal situations.
3. To mingle, merge, mill, jostle gently, and flock together with throngs, swarms, mobs, and multitudes of persons slight or hefty, punky or preppy, young or ancient, wandering through the hubbub and amplified razzmatazz and raw neon and clouds of wiener steam in search of some elusive thing, nobody is sure exactly what.
State Fair Joys
Take in the State Fair (Keillor)
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boingboing_net
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6:37a |
Recently on Offworld: driving bear sims, gallery hung Halo 3, @petermolyneux2
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/XAWCZTGg46E/recently-on-offworld-63.html  Recently on Offworld we got a number of indie surprises, as our early Gimme Indie Game featured favorite Enviro-Bear 2000: Operation: Hibernation made a sudden appearance on iPhone as Enviro-Bear 2010 (above). Inarguably the best game about bears driving cars (prove us wrong!), it's an even better game on the iPhone than the PC original, and quickly became both a weekend favorite, and an immediate viral hit.
We also saw Saelee Oh and Anna Anthropy's artXgame Octopounce -- the best of the games originally released for Giant Robot's Game Over/Continue show -- released for free, and were able to watch the entire hour-long meeting between Passage creator Jason Rohrer and design vet Chris Crawford for German TV program Into the Night With.
Elsewhere, Nintendo announced plans to make its early LCD Game & Watch games available as handheld DSiWare downloadables, Valve released a new look at the rainy days of Left 4 Dead 2, Capcom brought Street Fighter II CE to your web browser, and Bungie turned your best Halo 3 screenshots into canvas-printed fine art.
Finally, we got a sneak peek at all the Ghostbusters appearing in LittleBigPlanet, found our new favorite fake-twitter-follow poking gentle fun at Natal and Milo at @petermolyneux2, and our themed 'one shots' for the day: the ESRB's impossible task at rating Scribblenauts (with imagined steak/baby/lion violence), and Scribblenauts-themed Street Fighters.
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boingboing_net
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6:02a |
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bruce_schneier
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12:26p |
Strong Web Passwords
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/07/strong_web_pass.html Interesting paper from HotSec '07: "Do Strong Web Passwords Accomplish Anything?" by Dinei Florêncio, Cormac Herley, and Baris Coskun.
ABSTRACT: We find that traditional password advice given to users is somewhat dated. Strong passwords do nothing to protect online users from password stealing attacks such as phishing and keylogging, and yet they place considerable burden on users. Passwords that are too weak of course invite brute-force attacks. However, we find that relatively weak passwords, about 20 bits or so, are sufficient to make brute-force attacks on a single account unrealistic so long as a "three strikes" type rule is in place. Above that minimum it appears that increasing password strength does little to address any real threat If a larger credential space is needed it appears better to increase the strength of the user ID's rather than the passwords. For large institutions this is just as effective in deterring bulk guessing attacks and is a great deal better for users. For small institutions there appears little reason to require strong passwords for online accounts. |
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boingboing_net
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4:46a |
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boingboing_net
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1:03a |
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homestar_rss
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9:00a |
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dictionary_wotd
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12:00a |
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dictionary_wotd
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12:00a |
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dilbertdaily
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12:00a |
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_dilbert_strip
[ brianbot ]
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2:30a |
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apod
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5:02a |
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| Sunday, July 12th, 2009 | |
boingboing_net
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3:18p |
Swearing mitigates pain
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/dmKzNQkIRSE/swearing-mitigates-p.html Some experimental evidence to suggest that swearing makes pain less traumatic, though the mechanism by which is does this shit is unclear:
The study, published today in the journal NeuroReport, measured how long college students could keep their hands immersed in cold water. During the chilly exercise, they could repeat an expletive of their choice or chant a neutral word. When swearing, the 67 student volunteers reported less pain and on average endured about 40 seconds longer.
Although cursing is notoriously decried in the public debate, researchers are now beginning to question the idea that the phenomenon is all bad. "Swearing is such a common response to pain that there has to be an underlying reason why we do it," says psychologist Richard Stephens of Keele University in England, who led the study. And indeed, the findings point to one possible benefit: "I would advise people, if they hurt themselves, to swear," he adds.
Why the #$%! Do We Swear? For Pain Relief
( via /.)
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boingboing_net
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2:58p |
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natfriedman_rss
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12:39a |
How to log your life
http://nat.org/blog/2009/07/how-to-log-your-life/ http://nat.org/blog/?p=909 Back in 1997, when I was in college, I wrote a little script to monitor my screensaver and record when I was idle. It generated a graphic that allowed me to visualize how much time I had spent at the computer in the previous 12 hours. And of course, the image was available on my web server so everyone on the internet could study my habits. I called it “natstat,” and I remember taking pride in how few sleep gaps there were.
 NatStat 1997 I recently decided to get back into personal data tracking. This has become a popular thing to do in the last couple of years. At least two of my friends are maintaining massive spreadsheets to track their moods, diets, sleep, social and sexual activity, and other quantifiable life variables (they’re all quantifiable). I didn’t find this out because they announced it on their blogs (like I’m doing here), but it would come up in conversation, when someone might ask “What time do you usually wake up?” and one of my life-logger friends would respond “On average, at 9:27am, after 7.5 hours of sleep.”
 Probability that I was awake at any given time of day in February, 1997. There’s a navel-gazing aspect to life logging that can seem perverse or egotistical, like Howard Hughes storing his urine in jars, so I feel an obligation to explain myself. Why would anyone want to measure and record their life in meticulous detail?
The big answer is self-optimization: improving performance with metrics. Many of the life-quantification tools come from the health and fitness worlds: heart rate monitors, scales, pedometers. You might use a running log to give yourself positive reinforcement. Increase good habits, reduce bad ones. The act of recording is a daily reminder of your goals.
One of my life-logger friends told me: “I haven’t been feeling good lately. I don’t know if it’s my diet, or sleep or what. I decided to take an engineer’s approach to solving the problem.”
He set out to debug his life, recording dozens of variables in the hopes of finding correlations that he hadn’t noticed in the ebb and flow of daily life. That’s a big hope of life-quantifiers: gaining new insight into what makes us happy from a spreadsheet. Building your own personal Happiness Manual.
After reading Living by Numbers on a flight from Virginia to Munich, I decided it was time to give life logging another try.
So here’s what I’m doing.
First, I created a web form to collect some basic information. Google forms happen to be perfect for personal data tracking: loading a simple web form is a lot easier than opening a spreadsheet and filling in cells. Whenever data are submitted, they are automatically timestamped and logged in spreadsheet, which you can analyze at your leisure. I bookmarked the form on my computers and on my phone. Here’s a copy of my form (it’s a dummy; you won’t pollute my data).
 NatStat 2009 I don’t fill out the whole form every time, and I might submit it more than once a day. A new row is created in the spreadsheet every time you submit, so you can record partial data, and analyze it later. This form works fine on my phone, and it would be trivial to use programmatically.
I’ve started small, just putting in a few fields I think would be useful, but I’m sure the form will grow over time. I usually fill it in at the end of the day, and I probably spend 3-5 minutes a day on it.
Second, I’ve started recording my location using Google Latitude. Google does not store your location history, but there’s an easy way to record it for your own purposes. I run a cron job that uses curl to grab my current location from Google, timestamps it, and appends it to a file.
I haven’t done anything with this information yet, but I’m looking forward to plotting my position history in the future, creating a Nat probability cloud, etc.
Third, I’m using some cool gadgets to automatically record personal fitness information. These devices make it easy to collect, store and analyze various biometrics.
I have a GPS watch that I use for running and biking. It records my 3D position, speed, and heart rate. I can analyze and share my workouts online using a site like Garmin Connect. Here is a run from last year.
Tanita makes a line of scales that measure impedance between points on your feet to guesstimate your body fat and bone density. I am skeptical about the accuracy of these things, but my inner quantifier thinks they’re pretty neat, and I have one of their earlier models.
You might also be interested in measuring and recording your blood pressure, blood-oxygen saturation, and blood glucose levels, and there are devices that can do all of that for you too. Keeping a pulse oximeter next to your bed is an easy way to measure your resting heart rate first thing in the morning. And there is the fitbit, a little accelerometer that you keep clipped to yourself 24/7 to measure your movement throughout the day and night.
The fact that there’s so much of this stuff on the market is a good sign that the interest in life quantification is widespread.
What will I get out of all this? I don’t know. My greatest hope would be to come away with a better understanding of myself, my habits, and what makes me happy.
We are bad at remembering our emotions and state of mind, and we forget daily events. We have theories about ourselves, but does the data match? I sleep too much; I never used to get sick this often; I’m incredibly hard-working; I’m a lot happier than I used to be. These are the things we tell ourselves, but without objective data, without a reliable memory of our past, how can we know if they are true?
“No man remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself.”
— Thomas Mann
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boingboing_net
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5:27a |
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