Psychedelics are thought of as ‘mind-expanding’ drugs so it has commonly been assumed that they work by increasing brain activity, but surprisingly, we found that psilocybin actually caused activity to decrease in areas that have the densest connections with other areas. These hubs constrain our experience of the world and keep it orderly. We now know that deactivating these regions leads to a state in which the world is experienced as strange.
Here are links to abstracts from the first and second study.
Women shop, men stockpile. That’s one theory, anyway, of how men buy clothes differently from women. If women see shopping as an opportunity, a social or even therapeutic activity, the thinking goes, then men see it as a necessary evil, a moment to restock the supply closet.
I hate shopping, this is starting to look like a pretty good idea.
The Hangover Pt III chronicles Brett Martin’s journey through Tokyo with with Aziz Ansari, David Chang and James Murphy (from LCD Soundsystem). Crack a beer and take some time to follow the escapades of a true wolfpack.
We are not accustomed, here at GQ, to acting as a celebrity Make-A-Wish Foundation. But something about this tweet captured our attention. The grouping was unlikely, yet it made an instant kind of cosmic sense, as though you had been waiting for the picture long before it appeared. The Venn diagram of their fame might have a small overlap—I found that most people knew two of the three—but that intersection was a particular pocket of smart, inventive, forward-looking cool. The destination, too, made a certain intuitive sense, Tokyo being both a fun-house mirror of pop-culture iconography and a place where generations of Western seekers have gone to feel both reverently awed and gloriously disoriented.
Kane and Scher neither lifted nor dropped a single cat. Instead, they created a mathematical abstraction of a cat: two imaginary cylinder-like chunks, joined at a single point so the parts could (as with a feline spine) bend, but not twist. When they used a computer to plot the theoretical bendings of this theoretical falling chunky-cat, the motions resembled what they saw in old photographs of an actual falling cat. They conclude that their theory “explains the phenomenon under consideration”.
Every crossword in the Times is a collaboration between the puzzle-maker and the puzzle editor. On average, about half the clues are mine. I may edit as few as five or ten percent of the clues, or as many as 95 percent for someone who does a great puzzle but not great clues. Why accept a puzzle when I’m going to edit 95 percent of the clues? Well, if someone sends me a great puzzle with an excellent theme and construction, you want fresh, interesting, familiar vocabulary throughout the grid, I feel it would be a shame to reject it on account of the clues, because I can always change them myself.
In the years of IE 90% dominance there was nothing much to do but regard the browser as a “black box”, but now, with open source browsers having more than half of the usage share, it’s a good time to take a peek under the engine’s hood and see what’s inside a web browser. Well, what’s inside are millions of C++ lines…
I tend not to post anything that I haven’t consumed in its entirety, but exceptions can be made. As Justin pointed out, the article is a must-read for anyone interested in web development.
Eightface is a weblog by Dave Kellam. It's largely just a collection of links to things I find interesting, with some attempts at pithy commentary interspersed.
