Archive for June, 2011
Brain Scans Show Apple Products Triggering The Same Parts Of The Brain As Religion
Go figure — scans taken when Apple devotees were shown the company’s logo and products demonstrate that we literally worship our favorite brands. Digital Trends writes:
UK neuroscientists suggest that the brains of Apple devotees are stimulated by Apple imagery in the same way that the brains of religious people are stimulated by religious imagery.
Alex Riley contacted the editor of World of Apple, Alex Brooks, an Apple worshipper who claims to think about Apple 24 hours a day, which is possibly 23 hours too many for most regular people. A team of neuroscientists studied Brooks’ brain while undergoing an MRI scan, to see how it reacted to images of Apple products and (heaven forbid) non-Apple products.
According to the neuroscientists, the scan revealed that there were marked differences in Brooks’ reactions to the different products. Previously, the scientists had studied the brains of those of religious faith, and they found that, as Riley…
Silk Road: The Website With Every Illegal Drug Imaginable For Sale
Gawker reports on your aunt’s new favorite website, if your aunt loves tar heroin:
Silk Road, a digital black market that sits just below most internet users’ purview, does resemble something from a cyberpunk novel. Through a combination of anonymity technology and a sophisticated user-feedback system, Silk Road makes buying and selling illegal drugs as easy as buying used electronics—and seemingly as safe. It’s Amazon—if Amazon sold mind-altering chemicals.
Here is just a small selection of the 340 items available for purchase on Silk Road by anyone, right now: a gram of Afghani hash; 1/8th ounce of “sour 13″ weed; 14 grams of ecstasy; .1 grams tar heroin. A listing for “Avatar” LSD includes a picture of blotter paper with big blue faces from the James Cameron movie on it. The sellers are located all over the world, a large portion from the U.S. and Canada.
Getting to Silk Road is tricky. The URL…
Study: Advertising Plants Memories Of Experiences We Never Had
On the bright side, is it really such a bad thing to be implanted with false memories of, say, dancing with smiling, multicultural nu-ravers while drinking a refreshing Pepsi? Partial Objects explains:
A newly published study by two marketing professors suggests that advertising can create memories of experiences that never happened, simply by including sufficiently evocative imagery and descriptions in the ad:
Exposure to an imagery-evoking ad can increase the likelihood that consumer mistakenly believes that s/he has experience with the advertised product when in fact s/he does not. Moreover such a false belief produces attitudes that are as strong as attitudes based on true beliefs based on previous product experience, an effect that we label the false experience effect.
Advertising has always been an appeal to a fantasy, and this study seems to suggest that if the ad is created just right, that fantasy can be in the form of a desire to…
ACLU Pushes For Porn In Prisons
Photo: Olivier T (CC)
Is the restriction of pornography to inmates because of the lack of literary diversity offered in prisons or because of a possible porn/violence connection? ABC reports:
The American Civil Liberties Union is pushing for porn at a detention center in Moncks Corner, South Carolina.
The move came after reports surfaced that the facility only allowed inmates to read the Bible. But prison officials said that isn’t true and inmates have a wide variety of reading material at their disposal.
The ACLU said it wants prisoners to be able to read and view pornography. Lawyers for the jail said that just won’t happen.
“If they don’t like the wording in some of our policies, we’ll be happy to try and create better wording for them. But, there are certain issues that we’re just not going to be able to bend on,” said Sandra J. Senn, an attorney for the Hill-Finklea Detention Center in…
Is Ron Paul The New Chuck Norris?
International Business Times reports:
Move aside, Chuck Norris, Ron Paul Facts is now in.
Ron Paul, a Texas Congressman and 2012 presidential hopeful, has inspired a fiercely loyal following around the country with his straight-talking Libertarian approach.
The Federal Reserve? End it! … Income taxes? Don’t need it! … Troops abroad? Send them home! … The UN and NATO? Pull out of them!
On the Internet, Ron Paul is king. Back in the 2008 Republican presidential primaries, he became known for winning virtually every single internet and text message poll. This ardent online support in has spawned the “Ron Paul Facts” in 2011.
Below are some “facts” about Ron Paul, taken from the Ron Paul Facts website.
Ron Paul has no alarm clock, but instead wakes every morning to the call of freedom.
Ron Paul doesn’t go the gym. He stays fit by exercising his civil rights.
Ron Paul delivers babies without his hands. He simply reads them the Bill…
Woman Leaves Dentist Office With Foreign Accent
Photo: Heinz Hirndorf (CC)
When we leave the dentist after oral surgery it’s common to talk a little funny while the novocaine wears off, but Karen Butler left with a foreign accent. While this isn’t the first incident of its kind, it’s still a mystery as to why individuals develop accents or lose is From Jane Greenhalgh via NPR:
When Karen Butler went in for dental surgery, she left with more than numb gums: She also picked up a pronounced foreign accent. It wasn’t a fluke, or a joke — she’d developed a rare condition called foreign accent syndrome that’s usually caused by an injury to the part of the brain that controls speech.
Butler was born in Bloomington, Ill., and moved to Oregon when she was a baby. She’s never traveled to Europe or lived in a foreign country — she’s an American, she says, “born and bred.”
But she doesn’t sound like…
Do UFOs Now Prefer To Visit Asia?
We already knew that China will soon overtake the U.S. as the world’s largest economy, but today comes news that we have fallen behind the East in a more important area, reports the Wall Street Journal:
Trackers at the Mutual UFO Network, one of the oldest unidentified-flying-object research organizations in this world, say that since the slump of the Western banking system in 2008, UFO sightings among Asia’s fast-growing economies have accelerated. Suspicious UFOs have shut down airports in China, buzzed resorts in Borneo and lit up the night sky in Myanmar.
“It’s not surprising, really,” says Debhanom Muangman, a 75-year-old Harvard-educated physician and one of Thailand’s leading UFO investigators. “Aliens have been coming to Asia for decades, but now they sense a change. This is where the progressive countries are, so they are coming here much more often now.”
Still, these aren’t American-style alien encounters. The aliens that Thai researchers say they…
7 Ways The Hedge Fund Industry Is Built On Fraud, Lying, And Stealing
Could the entire hedge fund industry rest upon tens of thousands of instances of lying, cheating, and stealing? Well, at least they’re immensely generous (with their political donations). Via Guernica:
1. Insider Trading. If the Feds could tape every hedge fund we’d get an earful of how hedge funds use “expert networks” to transfer bits of illegal information that provide hedge fund managers with knowledge of events that are sure to move markets and make them a bundle.
2. Ponzi Schemes. Madoff isn’t the only one. Hedge funds and Ponzi schemes are made for each other since the funds are designed to evade so many disclosure regulations. It’s virtually a sure thing that every new year will reveal another Ponzi scheme through which a hedge fund steals money from investors and then uses new investor money to pay returns to the old investors.
3. Tax Evasion. No surprise here. Wherever you find billionaire financiers,…
Pentagon To Consider Cyberattacks As Act Of War
David E. Sanger and Elisabeth Bumiller write in the New York Times reports:
The Pentagon, trying to create a formal strategy to deter cyberattacks on the United States, plans to issue a new strategy soon declaring that a computer attack from a foreign nation can be considered an act of war that may result in a military response.
Several administration officials, in comments over the past two years, have suggested publicly that any American president could consider a variety of responses — economic sanctions, retaliatory cyberattacks or a military strike — if critical American computer systems were ever attacked.
The new military strategy, which emerged from several years of debate modeled on the 1950s effort in Washington to come up with a plan for deterring nuclear attacks, makes explicit that a cyberattack could be considered equivalent to a more traditional act of war. The Pentagon is declaring that any computer attack that threatens widespread civilian…
New Zealand Truck Driver Nearly Pops After Getting Air Hose Lodged In …
Photo: Andrew Magill (CC)
Michael Sheridan writes in the NY Daily News:
A truck driver in New Zealand nearly popped after an air hose accidently got lodged in his buttocks.
Steven McCormack says he is “lucky to be alive” after the bizarre accident on Saturday landed him in intensive care at a hospital in Whakatane, on the North Island’s east coast.
“I felt the air rush into my body and I felt like I was going to explode,” he told 3News in New Zealand on Tuesday.
The 48-year-old was at Waiotahi Contractors where he worked, standing on the rigging between his truck and the trailer when he slipped and fell.
He landed on the hose connected to the semi’s airbrakes and broke it. The nozzle pierced his left buttocks and air from the tanks pumped into his body at 100 pounds per square inch.
“I was blowing up like a football,” he said. “I had no choice…
Nazis Tried To Train Dogs To Read And Talk In Effort To Win WWII
The ultimate goal of a large-scale project known as “Wooffan SS” was for dogs to take over as SS officers, spies, and concentration camp guards. The Telegraph sifts through the sordid kennel of history:
The Germans viewed canines as being almost as intelligent as humans and attempted to build an army of fearsome ’speaking’ dogs, extraordinary new research shows. Hitler hoped the clever creatures would learn to communicate with their SS masters — and he even had a special dog school set up to teach them to talk. The incredible findings show Nazi officials recruited so-called educated dogs from all over Germany and trained them to speak and tap out signals using their paws.
The Germans hoped to use the animals for the war effort, such as getting them to work alongside the SS and guard concentration camps to free up officers. The bizarre ‘Wooffan SS’ experiment has come to light after years…
Video: Disturbing Abuse Of Australian Cattle At Slaughterhouses
Animals Australia and RSPCA Australia have launched a public campaign against the torture cattle endure during live export. The campaign asks the Live Export organization to reconsider the trade of living animals because of the cruel way they are treated before being slaughtered.
Note, they are not necessarily advocating vegetarianism or the elimination of slaughterhouses (although there are many benefits to reducing industrialized slaughterhouses including cutting down on pollution, increase agricultural land and reduction of animal cruelty), but they argue the unfair treatment of live animals being exported to other countries.
Warning: The video below include graphic material that may be difficult to watch.
