{ Kazushi Takahashi’s tuna and shark metal sculptures | Kazushi Takahashi | via Ping Mag }

Dozens of partygoers at an outdoor rave near Moscow last week have lost partial vision after a laser light show burned their retinas, Russian health officials said. (…)

“They all have retinal burns, scarring is visible on them. Loss of vision in individual cases is as high as 80 percent, and regaining it is already impossible,” Kommersant quoted a treating ophthalmologist as saying.

Attendees said heavy rains forced organisers to erect massive tents for the all-night dance party, and lasers that normally illuminate upwards into the sky were instead partially refracted into the ravers’ eyes.

{ Reuters/Scientific American }

For a performer who has spent 25 years shocking audiences into submission, through her lyrics, actions and attire, Madonna’s latest stylistic reinvention is mostly shocking for not having teeth. The new Madonna look, as seen in paparazzi photographs taken on the streets of New York over the last couple of weeks, evokes a kind of athletic, campus-casual blandness, as if designed for anonymity at the gym.

In one photograph, taken on her way to dinner, she is wearing a loose blouse with saggy satin shorts and what appear to be cut-off sheer tights, maybe a pair of Miu Miu heels and a Louis Vuitton bag from last season. It is an outré look, but boring in light of the ever-changing styles Madonna created in the past. (…)

Last summer, Madonna’s positive Q score, a measure of familiarity and appeal, was 13, compared with an average positive score of 17 for most performers, and her negative rating (representing people who were turned off by her) was 39. That reveals a slight decrease in her popularity since 2000, when her positive rating was 14.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

~ There is no federal agency with regulatory authority or oversight of the US voting machine industry.

~ 80% of all votes in America are counted by only two companies: Diebold and ES&S.

~ The vice-president of Diebold and the president of ES&S are brothers.

~ Diebold is based in Ohio. None of the international election observers were allowed in the polls in Ohio.

~ ES&S is the largest voting machine manufacturer in the US and counts almost 60% of all US votes.

~ 35% of ES&S is owned by Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, who became Senator based on votes counted by ES&S machines.

~ Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, a long-time friend of the Bush family, was caught lying about his ownership of ES&S by the Senate Ethics Committee.

~ Senator Chuck Hagel was on a short list of George W. Bush’s vice-presidential candidates.

~ Diebold’s new touch screen voting machines have no paper trail of any votes. In other words, there is no way to verify that the data coming out of the machine is the same as what was legitimately put in by voters. Diebold also makes ATMs, checkout scanners, and ticket machines, all of which log each transaction and can generate a paper trail.

~ Diebold employs 5 convicted felons as developers. These are the people who write the voting machine computer code. Diebold’s Senior Vice-President, Jeff Dean, was convicted of 23 counts of felony theft in the first degree.

~ All — not some — but all the voting machine errors detected and reported went in favor of Bush or Republican candidates.

{ Facts About Voting In The United States }

A student from Gloucestershire has been charged more than $1,600 in bank fees and interest payments after going overdrawn by sixteen cents.

Until Wednesday, Carl Kopsho had no idea that the man who collected $800 from him every month was not legally his landlord.

Bill proposed to ban students from wearing bulletproof vests to school.

World leaders enjoy 18-course banquet as they discuss how to solve global food crisis.

A NASA contractor needs urine to test the toilets on the Orion space capsule. The demand is voluminous: nearly 8 gallons a day, including weekends.

Nebraska cop, family win $40K over urine-tainted food.

A woman was arrested on a charge of extortion after police said she brought a rat into an upscale restaurant in April, claimed it was in her meal and then sought $500,000 to keep quiet.

The handmade dolls, known as “reborn babies,” are sparking controversy because some of their buyers are bereaved parents, looking to feel something of what they lost.

China is the world’s largest importer of chicken feet and the United States is the world’s largest exporter.

For the first time in nearly a decade China is issuing new banknotes without the image of Mao.

Art auctions on cruise ships lead to anger, accusations and lawsuits.

Inferior electrical work by private contractors on U.S. military bases in Iraq is more widespread than the Pentagon has acknowledged, according to a published report.

The Countrywide V.I.P.-loan scandal went far beyond a few members of Congress. A look inside C.E.O. Angelo Mozilo’s secret effort to curry favor with lawmakers, politicians, and others who could influence the company’s fortunes.

Undersea volcanic activity triggered a mass extinction of marine life and buried a thick mat of organic matter on the sea floor about 93 million years ago, which became a major source of oil, according to a new study.

Tens of thousands of newly-born penguins are freezing to death as Antarctica is lashed by freak rain storms.

Decoding neural signals for speech may give voice to the voiceless.

Tarantino’s “Inglorious Basterds” script.

Ball bearings used to trigger (Roland TR-808) drum sounds.

Police officers have been warned to look out for a new knife which can inject a ball of compressed gas into its victim that instantly freezes internal organs… The American-made weapon is sold to hunters and divers and injects the frozen gas when the small handle-mounted trigger is pressed. Related: How to open a watermelon.

Late in May, a public-relations company based in Paris created some user accounts on YouTube and posted four short videos. In each one, several young friends gather around a table and aim the antennas of their cell phones at a few kernels of popcorn.

Officially, Heineken will say they had absolutely nothing to do with.

Charlotte Kemp Muhl, Model, Musician, Total Douchebag, and Sarabeth DeLeury, Philosopher (are you fucking kidding me?) and Actress.

How to minimize sweating.

Nudists mobilize.

What’s wrong with Malay girls?

A quick guide to movie ratings.

Thank you for your continued readership.

Before writing a book, Michel Foucault used to write a draft, 500 or 600 pages of notes and first thoughts. Only when he was done with this first draft, did he start the actual book, meaning going to the libraries doing research and digging into the archives, spending months or years probing his subject. He was satisfied only when the final book was the opposite of the initial draft, when the final text was contradicting, almost point by point, the 500-page draft. Only then he knew his book was finished, when he wasn’t that guy who wrote the draft anymore. After he rewrote himself like he rewrote his draft.

Or John Maynard Keynes: ‘When the facts change, i change my mind. What do you do, sir?’

{ stereohell }

photo { The Cobra Snake }

photo { Mark Borthwick }

Artists both produce and consume their own work. Artists seek not only profit but also fame, critical praise, the satisfaction of creating works that speak to them personally, and the enjoyment that flows from artistic labor. Most generally, artists produce works of a type that please themselves in addition to pleasing the market.

Artists face choices between the pecuniary benefits of selling to the market and the nonpecuniary benefits of creating to please their own tastes. We examine how changes in wages, lumpsum income, and capital-labor ratios affect the artist’s pursuit of self-satisfaction versus market sales. Using our model of labor supply, we consider the economic forces behind the high/low culture split, why some artistic media offer greater scope for the avant-garde than others, why so many artists dislike the market, and how economic growth and taxation affect the quantity and form of different kinds of art.

We attempt to develop a general treatment of how producers weigh their own interests against those of the market when money and satisfaction conflict. (…)

Conclusion - Artists are not unique in deriving nonpecuniary returns from particular forms of labor or in desiring to choose projects of high satisfaction. Academicians, including many economists, also enjoy “working,” especially when they can work on projects of their own choosing. Other examples include chefs, architects, athletes, and volunteers of all kinds. Our model predicts that economic growth has and will increase the number of people entering these jobs and professions. Fogel (1999) argues that this shift from what he calls “earnwork” to “volwork” (work done in large part for pleasure even if it carries with it some payment), is in fact the major story of economic growth.

{ Tyler Cowen, An economic theory of avant-garde and popular art, or high and low culture, 2000 | via FindArticles | Continue reading }

artwork { Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled, 1985 | acrylic, oil, and oil painstick on wood, two pieces }

Marketers (and political pollsters) have sliced up the population into increasingly “microtargeted” segments. The three-network era of mass media, which helped create a national hearth of shared references and values, is long gone, displaced by a new media landscape that has splintered us into thousands of insular tribes. We can no longer even agree on what used to be called facts: Conservatives watch Fox; liberals watch MSNBC. Blogs and RSS feeds now make it easy to produce and inhabit a cultural universe tailored to fit your social values, your musical preferences, your view on every single political issue. We’re bowling alone — or at least only with people who resemble us, and agree with us, in nearly every conceivable way.

This separation into solipsistic blocs would perhaps not be so complete if people of different political views or cultural values at least lived within hailing distance, and encountered one another on the street or in the store from time to time. But, increasingly, they don’t. Over the last decade, as 100 million Americans have moved from one place to another, they’ve clustered in increasingly homogeneous communities. (…)

This intense geographic sorting helps account for an abiding weirdness in American politics. Congress is split right down the middle, or nearly so; the last two presidential elections have been achingly close; half the nation, almost by definition, must disagree with you politically — and yet you have probably met very few of your antagonists. “How can the polls be neck and neck,” the playwright Arthur Miller lamented during the 2004 election, “when I don’t know one Bush supporter?”

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

Getting some sun exposure clearly has its benefits; it increases your vitamin D levels and helps ward off insomnia and the blues. But nobody wants skin cancer, cataracts, wrinkles, sagging skin, and age spots. Most of us know enough to lather on the sunscreen before heading off to the pool or beach, but we may not use it when we’re, say, sitting in the shade for hours under a beach umbrella.

However, between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m., when the sun is at its strongest, you can get a fair dose of ultraviolet rays even when you’re not bathed in sunshine. Ultraviolet A rays, which tan and age the skin and raise skin cancer risk, are strong throughout the day and can reflect off of beach sand and water, exposing you even when you’re in the shade. They can also pass through office and some car windows. Sunburn isn’t a reliable guide to UV exposure. Sunburn-causing ultraviolet B rays are weak in the off-peak hours and don’t penetrate glass or reflect much off of surfaces, so you could be getting high amounts of UVA exposure even if you’re not getting a sunburn.

{ US News | Continue reading }