New York University has advice for international students in dealing with US Americans. A handy guide is posted on their website.
Americans generally believe the ideal person is self-reliant. Most Americans see themselves as separate individuals, not as representatives of a family, community or other group. They dislike being dependent on other people, or having others depend on them. Some people define this trait as selfishness. Others see it as a healthy freedom from the constraints of family or social class.
How is this value manifested into behavior? In individualist cultures, such as the U.S., it is assumed that people need to be alone some of the time and prefer to take care of problems by themselves. Another expectation is that people are ready to "do business" very soon after meeting, without much time spent on preliminary conversation. Also people act competitively, are proud of their accomplishments and expect others to be proud of their own accomplishments.
Reading this makes the USA seem like a strange, exotic culture. Which I suppose it is if you weren't born and raised here. Link -via Breakfast Links
Photographer Horace Warner took hundreds of pictures of street urchins in the East End neighborhood of Spitalfields in 1912. At the time, it was one of London's harshest slum areas, but has been gentrified in the past few decades. These photographs are a peek into the world that inspired Charles Dickens.
Little is known of Horace Warner and nothing is known of his relationship to the nippers. Only thirty of these pictures survive, out of two hundred and forty that he took, tantalising the viewer today as rare visions of the lost tribe of Spitalfields Nippers. They make look like paupers, and the original usage of them to accompany the annual reports of the charitable Bedford Institute, Quaker St, Spitalfields, may have been as illustrations of poverty – but that is not the sum total of these beguiling photographs, because they exist as spirited images of something much more subtle and compelling, the elusive drama of childhood itself.
It's time for the Name That Weird Invention! contest. Steven M. Johnson comes up with all sorts of crazy ideas in his Museum of Possibilities posts. What should we name this one? The commenters suggesting the funniest and wittiest names will win a free T-shirt from the NeatoShop. Put on your thinking cap and leave an entry in the comments.
Contest rules: one entry per comment, though you can enter as many as you like. Please make a selection of the T-shirt you want (may we suggest the Science T-shirt, Funny T-shirt, and Artist-designed T-shirt categories?) alongside your entry. If you don't select a shirt, then you forfeit the prize. Good luck!
Update: First prize for naming it and a t-shirt goes to Scott-O, who calls it Asscender. Second prize is awarded to ed4linda for calling it the SUC: Sport Utility Compact-o-van. However, ed4linda did not select a t-shirt.
During April and May, Steven will be off writing a book describing his techniques for thinking up whimsical product concepts, and will not be submitting images to Neatorama.com. The Name That Wierd Invention contest will resume Monday, May 30.
In 1905, a painting shown in Paris shocked the public. Critics reviled it; religious and conservative moralists made speeches against it. The artist who painted it was vilified as a "wild beast" and a victimizer of women. But the painting could hardly be called pornographic. It wasn't even a nude; it was only a portrait of a fully-clothed woman with a hat.
THE EXHIBIT
While a group of nontraditional painters prepared for a fall exhibit in Paris, their president, Monsieur Jourdain, urged them not to show Woman with a Hat. Jourdain considered himself a forward thinker who fought against the narrow-minded traditions of France's powerful art establishment. But he also knew trouble when he saw it. He warned the group that this modernistic work, by a struggling artist named Henri Matisse, would ruin their exhibition.
THE WILD BEASTS
When Le Salon des Independents opened its doors and Parisians got their first look at Woman with a Hat, they either howled with laughter or gaped in horrified shock. The entire exhibition was derided. Matisse's painting became the star clown in a three-ring joke. The verdict of the public, and most of the art critics, came in loud and clear. Woman with a Hat was outrageous "barbouillage et gribouillage" (smears and scribbles). It was called barbaric. It was an insult to women as well as to art. Matisse and the rest were nothing but fauves ...wild beasts.
THE PAINTING
Woman with a Hat was a portrait of Matisse's wife, Amelie, wearing an enormous, feathered hat. Critics thought the painting looked strangely unfinished and crude. What shocked them most were those odd, clashing colors that decorated the feathers of Madame Matisse's hat and illuminated her face. Parisians might be sophisticated, but this painting confused and repelled them. Amelie Matisse was a respectable brunette, but in the portrait she sported brick red hair, an unnatural slash of dark green creasing her forehead, and mint green shading on the bridge of her nose. How could a man paint his wife in such a fashion? Rumors began to fly that all was not well in the marriage of Henri and Amelie.
THE PAINTER
For Henri Matisse, the scandal was just another dark episode in a painful struggle. Born in Bohain, a poor unlovely, industrial town in northern France, Henri was already a lawyer when he dismayed his working-class parents by deciding that art was his life's true calling. Painting never came easily to Matisse; he studied constantly. When he failed to break into the prestigious mainstream of French art, his family labeled him an embarrassment with no talent. But Henri, as uncertain and depressed as he was, had bigger worries than rejection. By 1905, he was 35, a married man with three children -and he was broke.
He'd pinned his hoped on the 1905 exhibition. A hardworking perfectionist, Matisse believed that at last he was bringing something new and valuable to art -the joy of bright color. He painted Woman with a Hat to communicate his emotions and, he hoped, the soul of his subject. Matisse didn't portray the true colors of nature because he was determined to paint the colors of his heart.
THE MODEL
Amelie Matisse was a rebel with a cause, and her cause was her hubby's genius. Madame Matisse might not know art, but she knew Henri; whatever he did had to be great. Born in Toulouse in southwestern France, Amelie took Henri to he birthplace. When she showed her husband -a child of the cold, gray north- the hot colors of the south, she changed their lives, and the future of painting, forever.
Henri kept going back to the exhibit, fretting over the jeers and insults. But Amelie stayed at home. She never lost faith in Woman with a Hat. The world must change; she would not! And sure enough, slowly, the world changed.
THE BUYERS
Two American art lovers, Gertrude Stein and her brother, Leo, visited the exhibition again and again, mostly to see Woman with a Hat. They knew it was a complete break with tradition, but while others were horrified, they were impressed. A week before the exhibition closed, Leo offered to buy the painting for 200 francs. Henri could hardly wait to get rid of the unlucky canvas. His morale and his funds were very low. But Madame Matisse held out for 500 francs. The extra 200 francs would buy their daughter's clothing for the winter. She told her husband to sit tight.
Amelie's faith in the painting proved justified. Woman with a Hat became a turning point for Matisse. Leo Stein not only paid the 500, but he and Gertrude also promoted Henri Matisse among the people they knew (along with another artistic upstart named Pablo Picasso).
THE LEGACY
The artists of Le Salon des Independents eventually took on the term wild beast with pride, calling themselves the fauve movement. The fuss over Woman with a Hat made Matisse famous as well as notorious, and he became a leader of the French avant-garde. In time, the world became excited by Matisse's revolutionary vision of art. Critic praised him as the creator of modern painting, the liberator of color. In fact, Matisse was so famous and so well loved, that some young artists found him too respectable, too bourgeois.
As for Madame Matisse, she later said that she was at her best in crisis, "when the house burns down." It never surprised her that the world came around to her point of view. Years after her death, visitors at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art still cluster around her portrait, the delightful Woman with a Hat.
The book is a compendium of entertaining information chock-full of facts on a plethora of history topics. Uncle John's first plunge into history was a smash hit - over half a million copies sold! And this sequel gives you more colorful characters, cultural milestones, historical hindsight, groundbreaking events, and scintillating sagas.
Wanna know the secret of raven relationships? It's "never go to the nest angry."
A study by Orlaith Fraser of the University of Vienna in Austria revealed that a pair of ravens that got into a fight with one another reconcile later:
Plenty of primates and other mammals reconcile after a conflict, but previously no birds were known to do so, says Orlaith Fraser of the University of Vienna in Austria.
Monitoring a group of seven captive ravens (Corvus corax), Fraser and colleague Thomas Bugnyar found that pairs of birds were likely to be more friendly to each other if they had fought each other in the previous 10 minutes.
"It wasn't just standard friendly behaviour," Fraser says. Rather the ravens sat touching each other, and sometimes touched their beaks together or preened each other. Ravens are not tactile like primates, so sitting in contact is a strong social signal.
It's Monday, so come to the office prepared to battle interoffice memo shenanigans with the WTF Stamp from the NeatoShop. Got an outrageous expense report? Deal with it decisively in just a fraction of a second and with a smooth and satisfying "ker-chunk": Link | More fun and unusual Office Supplies
No stranger to controversy and publicity stunts, PETA is back - and this time, the animal rights group is putting money where its mouth is: PETA is offering a $1 million reward to the first scientist to produce and bring to market lab-grown meat.
Scientists around the world are researching or seeking the funds to research ways to produce meat in the laboratory—without killing any animals. In vitro meat production would use animal stem cells that would be placed in a medium to grow and reproduce. The result would mimic flesh and could be cooked and eaten. Some promising steps have been made toward this technology, but we're still several years away from having in vitro meat be available to the general public.
PETA is now stepping in and offering a $1 million reward to the first scientist to produce and bring to market in vitro meat.
On April 3rd, 1973, 38 years ago today, Martin Cooper made a phone call while walking down the street in New York City. At the time, he was the general manager of Motorola's communications division. He had promoted the idea that phone numbers shouldn't be tethered to a place, but to people. And they should be able to take their phones with them, anywhere they went.
When Martin Cooper made that first cell phone call, he did not make it to another cell phone. People didn't have them yet -- who could he call?
No, he made the cell phone call to a land line -- specifically, to the land line of his chief competitor at Bell Labs. Motorola had beaten Bell to become the first company to make personal cell phones work. Cooper, you might say, rubbed it in. Think how the Bell Labs research engineer must have felt when he heard Cooper calling him from the noisy streets of Manhattan.
That first cell phone was so big that it was often described as resembling a shoe, or a brick. It weighed 2½ pounds. Cooper would joke to friends and colleagues that the calls from that phone would have to be short in duration: Who had the strength to hold it to an ear for very long?
Cooper, now 82 years old, still works in communications. And he carries his cell phone with him everywhere -but not the 1973 model. Link -via reddit
If you'd like to hear stories about the dark side of humanity -- or just the stupid side -- talk to ER nurses. Oh, the tales that they can tell! Here's a comparatively mild example. Shawn needed to get a tiny hat to stay on his head. It was, of course, too small to stay on by itself. Did he acquire a larger hat? No. He used superglue to get the hat to stick. The next day, after the fancy dress party, he realized that he may have acted hastily and reported to the local hospital for assistance. This clip from a BBC Three program showed how the hospital staff tried to solve the problem. To Shawn's credit, he's a good sport about it.
What determined the length of the audio CD developed by Sony? It was based on the length of the longest recording of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Tyler Cowen quotes from Tim Büthe and Walter Mattli's book The New Global Rulers: The Privatization of Regulation in the World Economy:
Sony had initially preferred a smaller diameter, but soon after the beginning of the collaboration started to argue vehemently for a diameter of 120mm. Sony’s argument was simple and compelling: to maximize the consumer appear of a switch to the new technology, any major piece of music needed to fit on a single CD…Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was quickly identified as the point of reference — according to some accounts, it was the favorite piece of Sony vice-president Norio Ohga’s wife. And thorough research identified the 1951 recording by the orchestra of the Bayreuther Festspiele under Wilhelm Furtwängler, at seventy-four minutes, as the slowest performance of the Ninth Symphony on record. And so, according to the official history, Sony and Philips top executives agreed in their May 1980 meeting that “a diameter of 12 centimeters was required for this playing time.”
Amazon Link via Marginal Revolution | Photo by Flickr user Leo-setä used under Creative Commons license
YouTube user GatheringSticks is quite a garage machinist! He's built a functional single-shot 12 gauge shotgun from a pipe and a stapler. The firing pin is a sharpened drill bit and the shoulder rest is padded with a piece of a Croc.
In 2008, Sandra Critelli shot this excellent photo of Golden Rays off the Mexican coast:
She said: "It was an unreal image, very difficult to describe. The surface of the water was covered by warm and different shades of gold and looked like a bed of autumn leaves gently moved by the wind.
"It's hard to say exactly how many there were but in the range of a few thousand.
"We were surrounded by them without seeing the edge of the school and we could see many under the water surface too.
Golden Rays grow up to seven feet across and migrate within the Caribbean.
