It's time again for fruit and veggie carving season. And what could be better than a carved brain. This time it's out of a watermelon. Enjoy! -via Neatorama-
When everyone thought extrasensory perception had disappeared into the same embarrassing past as phrenology it came back with a vengeance. In a recent article by Daryl Bem titled Feeling the future: Experimental evidence for anomalous retroactive influences on cognition and affect evidence was presented that some have found very hard to ignore. Others have completely trashed the experimental methods and statistics (obviously... it IS science after all). There are a number of available pdf's of both the article and the commentary floating around the internet if you do a google search.…
And you can too! All you have to do is win this gorilla costume. This is guaranteed to work in a women's locker room*. I can't vouch for its success rate in men's locker rooms since.. well... I don't really have to sneak in there. Anyway, all you have to do to have a chance of winning this amazing gorilla suit is to pre-order the new paper back version of Dan Simons' and Chris Chabris' book The Invisible Gorilla. If you're not into sick horrible ideas like sneaking into locker rooms (because clearly, that is the only thing you could possibly do with that costume) you could also pre-order…
-via neatorama and boingboing- Someone want to build me this table?
I was digging through some of my old blog posts and had almost totally forgot about this artwork I commissioned for the blog when I first started back on blogger. Check it out and then I'll fill you in on what I've been up to and why I've been so sparse over the last many months. I stopped blogging consistently a while back, and it was for a great reason, I promise! About a year ago, after I passed my prelims, I went on the job market. I interviewed for a couple academic positions (mainly liberal arts) and a number of industry/government jobs. I finally decided to 'sell out' and take the…
Or forced perspective. I suspect this is more sensitive to viewpoint than the previous post. -via BoingBoing-
These installations (or more precisely drawings on the floor and ceiling) take advantage of our use of textures to perceive a third dimension/depth out of monocular cues. I'm curious how effective they are from different viewpoints. Perhaps there are some accidental views that make the texture completely boring instead of completely cool. Here's some great examples: Check out bookofjoe for some more examples. -Via Neatorama-
There's a great blog called ionpsych being run by Dan Simons (of Invisible Gorilla fame). The posts are all by graduate students in a science writing for public consumption class. I'm glad people are starting to teach us overly technical scientists how to communicate in graduate school. I'm not aware of any other class out there dedicated to teaching psychology and neuroscience students how to best communicate their ideas to the world. Anyway, here's one of my favorite posts from Audrey Lustig: How do people judge fashion design? Fashion experts are notorious for using vague criteria,…
This counts as science right? -link-
So freakin' cool. Although... I can't even solve a real one - much less one that isn't visually as obvious. -via Neatorama-
Have I dominated you yet? This is why I walk around staring at people - World Domination. For the study, participants watched a computer screen while a series of colored ovals appeared. Below each oval were blue, green, and red dots; they were supposed to look away from the oval to the dot with the same color. What they didn't know was that for a split-second before the colored oval appeared, a face of the same color appeared, with either an angry, happy, or neutral expression. So the researchers were testing how long it took for people to look away from faces with different emotions.…
Just in case you're looking for something to write on your course evaluations. Or perhaps you are the instructor and you hope you don't get something like this (especially if you are young!) Via Texts From Last Night: I had to do a class evaluation today & the girl beside me didn't fill in any bubbles she just wrote in huge letters RETIRE across the whole sheet
-via toothpaste for dinner-
-Via Eurekalert- Los Angeles, CA (December 7, 2010) Most people feel chills and shivers in response to music that thrills them, but some people feel these chills often and others feel them hardly at all. People who are particularly open to new experiences are most likely to have chills in response to music, according to a study in the current Social Psychological and Personality Science (published by SAGE). Researchers Emily Nusbaum and Paul Silvia of University of North Carolina at Greensboro asked students about how often they felt chills down their spine, got goose bumps, or felt like…
Just be warned - there's a teensy (tinsy, teensie?) weensy bit of crude language. See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.
I now believe. -Via Surviving the World- (I really wish I could have just presented the first image and sent you there for the rest - but I'm too lazy to do image editing...)
Wow... just wow. -via The Spoiler-
Or is it a 'Holiday' miracle now? Anyway... Finally, Congress passes a piece of legislation that citizens on both the right and left side of the political spectrum can get behind. Late yesterday, Congress approved the CALM (Commercial Advertising Loudness Mitigation) Act, which "requires TV advertisers to ensure their ads don't play at a volume louder than regular TV programming." The new bill requires ad makers to use "industry technology" to prevent the volume annoyance from occurring. I CAN NOT WAIT! Oh and Obama better pass it. I'll be very upset if he doesn't.
Interesting... More recent research has revealed that chimpanzees and even dogs can catch yawns from those around them, including from humans, but little is known about why we yawn and why it appears to be so infectious. Psychologists at the University of Stirling, however, have now discovered that infants and young children are not prone to the contagious aspect of yawning. Instead, they only ever yawn spontaneously. Dr Jim Anderson, a reader in psychology at the University of Stirling who led the research, which is published in the Royal Society journal Biological Letters, believes the…