Blood In the Streets

Banksy

Photographic Mugs

Just a week ago, we walked into our local cafe, and our barista handed us our latte in a mug that looked just like a lens. She even topped it off with camera-shaped latte art and creamer in a film canister.

We just about died, but then we woke up instead.

Desperate for our dream to come true, we wished on shooting stars, wishbones, found pennies, fallen eyelashes, and sure enough, it worked.

Behold, our Camera Lens Mugs that look JUST LIKE your favorite lens.

Both "Nikon" and "Canon" mug models are equipped with an easy to clean, heat preserving, stainless steel lining. Also, a lens-cap lid (omg), rubber-grip focus and zoom rings (omg), and an auto-focus switch that actually switches (OMG)! To top it off, the "Nikon" mug zooms when you twist its grip.

Mugs that are so realistic, you might have to use post-its just to remind yourself which is for coffee and which is for taking photos. (Please note: Photojojo is not responsible for any liquid damage that may occur as a result of improper labeling).

Now, picture yourself sipping on a sweet tea vodka while basking in the sun or having the coolest desk in the office with your lenticular jelly-bean holder or scooping a delicious ice-cream fudge sundae out of your amazingly versatile lens mug. You can even turn it into a nifty flower-pot!

Consider yourself set for all future fellow photo friends' birthdays/graduations/weddings/long-lost-sibling-reunions. It's the best gift they'll get.

Hear, hear! You are hereby proclaimed King/Queen of camera-geek-dom, and the Camera Lens Mug is your chalice.






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Backcountry

Jake Blauvelt-Whistler Backcountry-011’

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Electronic Daisy Carnival

The 15th Anniversary of Electric Daisy Carnival offers a high-spirited landscape full of new adventures, expanded possibilities and exciting ways to grow together in celebration through music and art.

The Thousand Word Stare

by Mark O'Connell

I used to be the kind of reader who gives short shrift to long novels. I used to take a wan pleasure in telling friends who had returned from a tour of duty with War and Peace or The Man Without Qualities with that I’ve-seen-some-things look in their eyes—the thousand-page stare—that they had been wasting their time. In the months it had taken them to plough through one book by some logorrheic modernist or world-encircling Russian, I had read a good eight to ten volumes of svelter dimensions. While they were bench-pressing, say, Infinite Jest for four months solid, I had squared away most of the major Nouveau Romanciers, a fistful of Thomas Bernhards, every goddamned novel Albert Camus ever wrote, and still had time to read some stuff I actually enjoyed.

I was a big believer, in other words, in the Slim Prestige Volume. Nothing over 400 pages. Why commit yourself to one gigantic classic when you can read a whole lot of small classics in the same period of time, racking up at least as much intellectual cachet while you were at it? I took Hippocrates’ famous dictum about ars being longa and vita being brevis as a warning against starting a book in your twenties that might wind up lying still unfinished on the nightstand of your deathbed. Aside from the occasional long novel––one every twelve to eighteen months––I was a Slim Prestige Volume man, and that seemed to be that.

Even when I went back to college in my mid-twenties to do a PhD in English literature, I still relied on a kind of intellectual cost-benefit analysis that persuaded me that my time was better spent broadening than deepening—or, as it were, thickening—my reading­­. Had I read Dostoevsky? Sure I had: I’d spent a couple of rainy evenings with Notes From Underground, and found it highly agreeable. Much better than The Double, in fact, which I’d also read. So yeah, I knew my Dostoevsky. Next question, please. Ah yes, Tolstoy! Who could ever recover from reading The Death of Ivan Illych, that thrilling (and thrillingly brief) exploration of mortality and futility?

There’s a memorable moment in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 where Amalfitano, the unhinged Catalan professor of literature, encounters a pharmacist working the night shift at his local drug store whom he discovers is reading his way diligently through the minor works of the major novelists. The young pharmacist, we are told, “chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pécuchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers.” This causes Amalfitano to reflect on the “sad paradox” that “now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.”

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Gut Feeling

For the first time, researchers at McMaster University have conclusive evidence that bacteria residing in the gut influence brain chemistry and behaviour.

The findings are important because several common types of gastrointestinal disease, including irritable bowel syndrome, are frequently associated with anxiety or depression. In addition there has been speculation that some psychiatric disorders, such as late onset autism, may be associated with an abnormal bacterial content in the gut.

"The exciting results provide stimulus for further investigating a microbial component to the causation of behavioural illnesses," said Stephen Collins, professor of medicine and associate dean research, Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine. Collins and Premysl Bercik, assistant professor of medicine, undertook the research in the Farncombe Family Digestive Health Research Institute.

The research appears in the online edition of the journal Gastroenterology.

For each person, the gut is home to about 1,000 trillium bacteria with which we live in harmony. These bacteria perform a number of functions vital to health: They harvest energy from the diet, protect against infections and provide nutrition to cells in the gut. Any disruption can result in life-threatening conditions, such as antibiotic-induced colitis from infection with the "superbug" Clostridium difficile.

Working with healthy adult mice, the researchers showed that disrupting the normal bacterial content of the gut with antibiotics produced changes in behaviour; the mice became less cautious or anxious. This change was accompanied by an increase in brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), which has been linked, to depression and anxiety.

When oral antibiotics were discontinued, bacteria in the gut returned to normal. "This was accompanied by restoration of normal behaviour and brain chemistry," Collins said.

The Private Realm of Fantasy

by Tracy Clark-Flory

It's National Masturbation Month, which feels like it should be worthy of comment -- especially given that I'm on the "sex beat." But writing in defense of masturbation is so incredibly passe; it hardly seems a practice in need of month-long activism. Most of us have left behind the pathologizing Christine O'Donnells of the world and abandoned the mythology of hairy palms and blindness.

Pornography, the No. 1 sign of solo loving, is in no short supply -- and for the very low price of free. Even the title, National Masturbation Month, sounds like a relic from a priggish past -- one before the Rabbit became a household name. Cheap vibrators are now stocked at neighborhood drug stores and diamond-encrusted numbers are available in boutique sex shops. Porn and dildos have been democratized -- power to the people!

So, now what?

Well, we could stand to work on our uneasy relationship with that thing behind masturbation: fantasy. There may be unprecedented access to pre-packaged, quick-hit titillation and expert guidance on the bodily mechanics of personal pleasure, but the American erotic imagination is still congested with political correctness and shame. Masturbation has by no means conquered all social taboos -- will it ever, really? -- but when it comes to fantasy, we could all use some loosening up.

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A Genetic Archive

by Leonard Cassuto

If I told you that you have a virus, there's a good chance that you'd go running to your PC to check that your antivirus software is up to date. Perhaps you'd discover that your computer had been infected by a highly contagious bug -- a software microbe that threatened the health of your hard drive.

But a computer virus is just a metaphor for an actual living thing -- the most abundant form of life on earth. In "A Planet of Viruses," science journalist Carl Zimmer goes back to the source and surveys the world of real viruses in nature. His absorbing account combines epidemiology, marine biology, genetics, biochemistry, and population history (among other pursuits) as it hops from virus to notable virus -- only polio is oddly missing -- to tell a story that emphasizes both the long history of viruses and their fundamental importance to how humans have evolved and lived.

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Wikipedia and the Death of the Expert

"Learners are doers, not recipients."—Walter J. Ong, "McLuhan as Teacher: The Future Is a Thing of the Past"

by Maria Bustillos

It's high time people stopped kvetching about Wikipedia, which has long been the best encyclopedia available in English, and started figuring out what it portends instead. For one thing, Wikipedia is forcing us to confront the paradox inherent in the idea of learners as "doers, not recipients." If learners are indeed doers and not recipients, from whom are they learning? From one another, it appears; same as it ever was.

It's been over five years since the landmark study in Nature that showed "few differences in accuracy" between Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica. Though the honchos at Britannica threw a big hissy at the surprising results of that study, Nature stood by its methods and results, and a number of subsequent studies have confirmed its findings; so far as general accuracy of content is concerned, Wikipedia is comparable to conventionally compiled encyclopedias, including Britannica.

There were a few dust-ups in the wake of the Nature affair, notably Middlebury College history department's banning of Wikipedia citations in student papers in 2007. The resulting debate turned out to be quite helpful as a number of librarians finally popped out of the woodwork to say hey, now wait one minute, no undergraduate paper should be citing any encyclopedia whatsoever, which, doy, and it ought to have been pointed out a lot sooner.

By 2009 the complaints had more or less faded away, and nowadays what you have is college librarians writing blog posts in which they continue to reiterate the blindingly obvious: "Wikipedia is an excellent tool for leading you to more information. It is a step along the way, and it is extremely valuable."

Wikipedia's Rough Riders

How come Wikipedia hasn't turned into a giant glob of graffiti? It certainly would have by now, were it not for the multitude of volunteer sheriffs of the information highway who ride around patrolling the thing day and night.

There is a bogglingly complex and well-staffed system for dealing with errors and disputes on Wikipedia. There are special tools provided to volunteers for preventing vandalism, decreasing administrative workload and so on:  rollbacker, autopatroller and the like. Then there are nearly two thousand administrators, who are empowered to "protect, delete and restore pages, move pages over redirects, hide and delete page revisions, and block other editors."

Robo Dog

by Elbert Chu

Since the moment it was revealed that the "nation's most courageous dog" served alongside the 80 Navy SEALs who took out Osama bin Laden, America's fascination with war dogs has hit a fevered pitch. And while the heart-tugging photos of these four-legged heroes are worth a look, so is the high-tech gear that helps them do their job.

Last year, the military spent $86,000 on four tactical vests to outfit Navy Seal dogs. The SEALs hired Winnipeg, Canada-based contractor K9 Storm to gear up their four-legged, canine partners, which it has used in battle since World War I. K9 Storm’s flagship product is the $20,000-$30,000 Intruder, an upgradeable version of their doggie armor (you can check out the full catalogue here). The tactical body armor is wired with a collapsible video arm, two-way audio, and other attachable gadgets.

"Various special ops units use the vest, including those in current headlines," says Mike Herstik, a consultant with International K-9, who has trained dogs from Israeli bomb-sniffing units to the Navy SEALSs. "It is much more than just body armor."

The big idea behind the armor add-ons boils down to a simple one: the key to any healthy relationship is communication. Each dog is assigned one human handler. To operate efficiently in a tactical situation, they need to be connected.

So how much high-tech connectivity does a dog get for $30,000 anyway?

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Too Young To Wed

by Cynthia Gorney

Because the wedding was illegal and a secret, except to the invited guests, and because marriage rites in Rajasthan are often conducted late at night, it was well into the afternoon before the three girl brides in this dry farm settlement in the north of India began to prepare themselves for their sacred vows. They squatted side by side on the dirt, a crowd of village women holding sari cloth around them as a makeshift curtain, and poured soapy water from a metal pan over their heads. Two of the brides, the sisters Radha and Gora, were 15 and 13, old enough to understand what was happening. The third, their niece Rajani, was 5. She wore a pink T-shirt with a butterfly design on the shoulder. A grown-up helped her pull it off to bathe.

The grooms were en route from their own village, many miles away. No one could afford an elephant or the lavishly saddled horses that would have been ceremonially correct for the grooms' entrance to the wedding, so they were coming by car and were expected to arrive high-spirited and drunk. The only local person to have met the grooms was the father of the two oldest girls, a slender gray-haired farmer with a straight back and a drooping mustache. This farmer, whom I will call Mr. M, was both proud and wary as he surveyed guests funneling up the rocky path toward the bright silks draped over poles for shade; he knew that if a nonbribable police officer found out what was under way, the wedding might be interrupted mid-ceremony, bringing criminal arrests and lingering shame to his family.

Rajani was Mr. M's granddaughter, the child of his oldest married daughter. She had round brown eyes, a broad little nose, and skin the color of milk chocolate. She lived with her grandparents. Her mother had moved to her husband's village, as rural married Indian women are expected to do, and this husband, Rajani's father, was rumored to be a drinker and a bad farmer. The villagers said it was the grandfather, Mr. M, who loved Rajani most; you could see this in the way he had arranged a groom for her from the respectable family into which her aunt Radha was also being married. This way she would not be lonely after her gauna, the Indian ceremony that marks the physical transfer of a bride from her childhood family to her husband's. When Indian girls are married as children, the gauna is supposed to take place after puberty, so Rajani would live for a few more years with her grandparents—and Mr. M had done well to protect this child in the meantime, the villagers said, by marking her publicly as married.

These were things we learned in a Rajasthan village during Akha Teej, a festival that takes place during the hottest months of spring, just before the monsoon rains, and that is considered an auspicious time for weddings. We stared miserably at the 5-year-old Rajani as it became clear that the small girl in the T-shirt, padding around barefoot and holding the pink plastic sunglasses someone had given her, was also to be one of the midnight ceremony's brides. The man who had led us to the village, a cousin to Mr. M, had advised us only that a wedding was planned for two teenage sisters. That in itself was risky to disclose, as in India girls may not legally marry before age 18. But the techniques used to encourage the overlooking of illegal weddings—neighborly conspiracy, appeals to family honor—are more easily managed when the betrothed girls have at least reached puberty. The littlest daughters tend to be added on discreetly, their names kept off the invitations, the unannounced second or third bride at their own weddings.

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Transcending the Material

 

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Telomeres

Simple blood test can determine how long you have left to live

by Michael Krebs

A simple blood test that measures the length of telomeres will be able to determine with accuracy how much longer an individual has to live, but ethical and legal questions abound.

A new blood test that is expected to be widely available over the next five to ten years will be able to determine with a high degree of accuracy the speed within which an individual is aging, The Independent reported on Monday.

The relatively simple test analyzes the length of one’s telomeres, collections of DNA codes at the tips of the chromosomes.

Telomeres have been directly linked to the secrets of aging and to our propensity to get cancer; they protect the chromosomes and make it possible for our cells to multiply. “Telomeres have been compared with the plastic tips on shoelaces because they prevent chromosome ends from fraying and sticking to each other, which would scramble an organism’s genetic information to cause cancer, other diseases or death,” the University of Utah’s Genetic Science Learning Center states on their web site. “Yet, each time a cell divides, the telomeres get shorter. When they get too short, the cell no longer can divide and becomes inactive or ‘senescent’ or dies.”

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Like Shooting Fish In a Barrel

WikiLeaks cables show that it was all about the oil.

by  Kevin G. Hall

WASHINGTON — In 2006, three years after the Russian government had charged Mikhail Khodorkovsky — then the country's wealthiest businessman — with fraud and moved to break up his Yukos oil company, U.S. diplomats had had enough.

Gazprom, which grew out of the former Soviet Union's state gas ministry, had been busy buying up Yukos' far-flung empire, stoking American fears that soon Russia and its tough leader, Vladimir Putin, would control virtually all of the natural gas flowing to Europe.

The United States wanted to stop that from happening. So the American embassy in Slovakia hired a Texas-based oil consultant and began secretly advising the Slovakian government on how to buy the 49 percent stake Yukos had held in Transpetrol, the Slovakian oil pipeline company.

With no oil experience of its own, the Slovakian government didn't know how much it should pay. The consultant, who sat in on the negotiations, assured Slovakia's economy minister, Lubomir Jahnatek, that the $120 million price offered to the group disposing of Yukos' assets was a bargain. Gazprom was willing to pay far more.

"We have made it clear to all parties that we do not want to publicize our role as technical advisors," the embassy said in an Aug. 10, 2006, cable that outlined what eventually became a deal. "Jahnatek is clearly appreciative of the input provided by (the consultant), and will continue to look to him and the U.S. embassy for information as he faces the challenges to the deal in the coming weeks."

The communication, part of the cache of State Department cables that WikiLeaks passed to McClatchy and other news organizations, is just one indication of how the U.S. government over the years has maneuvered to influence the world's oil and natural gas markets.

With oil trading near $100 a barrel and gasoline near $4 a gallon at the pump, Americans can take solace in knowing that securing sources of oil has been a chief focus of U.S. embassies across the globe for years.

Of the 251,287 WikiLeaks documents McClatchy obtained, 23,927 of them — nearly one in 10 — reference oil. Gazprom alone is mentioned in 1,789.

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Beyond Happiness

by John Tierney

Is happiness overrated?

Martin Seligman now thinks so, which may seem like an odd position for the founder of the positive psychology movement. As president of the American Pyschological Association in the late 1990s, he criticized his colleagues for focusing relentlessly on mental illness and other problems. He prodded them to study life’s joys, and wrote a best seller in 2002 titled “Authentic Happiness.”

But now he regrets that title. As the investigation of happiness proceeded, Dr. Seligman began seeing certain limitations of the concept. Why did couples go on having children even though the data clearly showed that parents are less happy than childless couples? Why did billionaires desperately seek more money even when there was nothing they wanted to do with it?

And why did some people keep joylessly playing bridge? Dr. Seligman, an avid player himself, kept noticing them at tournaments. They never smiled, not even when they won. They didn’t play to make money or make friends.

They didn’t savor that feeling of total engagement in a task that psychologists call flow. They didn’t take aesthetic satisfaction in playing a hand cleverly and “winning pretty.” They were quite willing to win ugly, sometimes even when that meant cheating.

“They wanted to win for its own sake, even if it brought no positive emotion,” says Dr. Seligman, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. “They were like hedge fund managers who just want to accumulate money and toys for their own sake. Watching them play, seeing them cheat, it kept hitting me that accomplishment is a human desiderata in itself.”

This feeling of accomplishment contributes to what the ancient Greeks called eudaimonia, which roughly translates to “well-being” or “flourishing,” a concept that Dr. Seligman has borrowed for the title of his new book, “Flourish.” He has also created his own acronym, Perma, for what he defines as the five crucial elements of well-being, each pursued for its own sake: positive emotion, engagement (the feeling of being lost in a task), relationships, meaning and accomplishment.

“Well-being cannot exist just in your own head,” he writes. “Well-being is a combination of feeling good as well as actually having meaning, good relationships and accomplishment.”

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Grizzly Bear -- Ready, Able

[ed.  This is why acid was invented.]

'Go the F--- to Sleep': The Case of the Viral PDF

by Reyhan Harmanci

The phenomenon of music and video piracy has been around seemingly since the Internet's invention — it's a well-known scourge that has driven the recording industry to pricey lawsuits and the rest of the world to Pirate Bay and BitTorrent.

But it seems that book publishing has a new issue on its hands: the viral book PDF.

A few weeks ago, The Bay Citizen looked at the furor around a provocatively-titled "children's book for adults" — the illustrated "Go the Fuck to Sleep," written by a Bay Area author, Adam Mansbach, currently on the East Coast for two-year stint at Rutgers University. Galleys have not been distributed, so the only form that people have seen the book thus far has been as an emailed document.

It is now at the #1 spot on Amazon's bestseller list.

The book, now scheduled to hit stores on June 14, began attracting attention with a sudden, mysterious climb up the Amazon list after it had been posted for pre-sale earlier this year. While it's impossible to calculate the number of emailed documents shared, media outlets such as the New Yorker have begun to speculate that one of the biggest engines of its success has been booksellers and other industry folk circulating the 32-page PDF to the wider world.

This, of course, presents a challenge to Akashic Books, the independent publisher who is seeing unbelievable success with this slim, illustrated book —namely how to stop piracy of its intellectual property while not squashing healthy buzz. The book's success, while only existing in electronic form, seems fairly unprecedented: already, Fox 2000 has optioned the film rights and Mansbach appears to be poised for a national media tour.

"The copies have been proliferating since this craziness started," said Ibrahim Ahmad, senior editor at the Brooklyn-based press, "With a PDF, you can make so many duplicates and people have just been forwarding it."

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Cat Smiles

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Is Your Religion Your Financial Destiny?

by  David Leonhardt

The economic differences among the country’s various religions are strikingly large, much larger than the differences among states and even larger than those among racial groups.

The most affluent of the major religions — including secularism — is Reform Judaism. Sixty-seven percent of Reform Jewish households made more than $75,000 a year at the time the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life collected the data, compared with only 31 percent of the population as a whole. Hindus were second, at 65 percent, and Conservative Jews were third, at 57 percent.

On the other end are Pentecostals, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Baptists. In each case, 20 percent or fewer of followers made at least $75,000. Remarkably, the share of Baptist households making $40,000 or less is roughly the same as the share of Reform Jews making $100,000 or more. Overall, Protestants, who together are the country’s largest religious group, are poorer than average and poorer than Catholics. That stands in contrast to the long history, made famous by Max Weber, of Protestant nations generally being richer than Catholic nations.

Many factors are behind the discrepancies among religions, but one stands out. The relationship between education and income is so strong that you can almost draw a line through the points on this graph. Social science rarely produces results this clean.

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