Warning: This Chinese New Year video might cause you to run for your hankie. From Bernas, a rice distribution company. -via The Daily What
Miss Cellania's Blog Posts
You've probably seen the ad for this underground missile base in New York state that's been on the market for some time. Now you have a chance to take a virtual tour! Scout from Scouting New York went to the site and the owners were gracious enough to let him look around and take plenty of pictures. There's a nice house on top, and part of the underground has been renovated for use as a modern living area. Then there are parts that recall the facility's original use during the Cold War. Link -via the Presurfer
Mashups of two different but familiar stories are a common basis for internet videos, often because they are just plain strange. Can you imagine any stranger combination than Mad Max and Kung Fu Panda? Wastelander Panda is the story of a fighting panda set in a post-apocalyptic world. Epic Films produced this as part of a TV series in development. -Thanks, Marcus!
This is the 1957 Aurora. We will never know what the public would have thought about it, as only one prototype was built, and it didn't work well enough to make it to its own press conference. Now wait, before you argue that the Aurora can't be the world's ugliest car, check out the huge collection of ugly cars at Dark Roasted Blend. They are all ugly in their own ways. Link
(Image credit: GATSBY Magazine)
Not the dance, that's merengue, which has plenty of chemistry, too. This concerns that delicious sweet fluff that tops your lemon meringue pie or the lightweight candy sold at bake sales. It's made by beating egg whites into a foam, which can then be cooked. But getting it right is tricky. It may help to know the scientific reasons it might not turn out they way you expected. Smithsonian's Food and Think blog tells you all about the meringue that went wrong. Link
(Image credit: Flickr user wiserbailey)
So far, three Republican presidential hopefuls have won one state primary or caucus each. Eventually, only one will be selected for the presidential race. Mental_floss looks back into previous election races for today's Lunchtime Quiz. You will be given ten politicians who ran for president unsuccessfully in the past, and you try to recall whether they ever won a state primary race or not. It's not easy! I was surprised to score 60%. Link
This little short film appears to be a teaser for a longer story by effects designer Aaron Sims. If he is trying to raise interest in getting a studio to fund a feature film, this is the way to do it. Wouldn't you like to see the rest of the story? Link -via Geeks Are Sexy
When I saw this at reddit, of course I entered the search term to see if it would autocomplete the same way for me, which it did, and the first search result is a Facebook page. Apparently, the phrase has been around for at least a few days. Link
Bird watchers and Harry Potter fans are delighted at the larger than usual number of snowy owl sightings in the lower 48 this year. Snowy Owls are native to the Arctic, but fly south every few years to let us admire them. This winter, they've been seen as far south as Hawaii!
Experts say that the birds don't seem to be particularly hungry or stressed, so that doesn't explain the move south. The owls are expected to return north as the seasons change. Link -via Holy Kaw!
(Image credit: Flickr user Ian Turk)
“A lot of people who have never seen one before have rushed out and seen multiples,” said Marshall Iliff, an ornithologist at Cornell and the project’s leader. “And photographers are having a field day.”
Additional hot spots include the mouth of the Columbia River in Washington State, with 10 to 13 birds; 20 at Lake Andes National Wildlife Refuge in South Dakota, and 30 in Boundary Bay, near Vancouver in British Columbia.
The owls are even showing up in urban and suburban areas, along highways, on signs and fence posts, and in other places where people can more easily spot them. It has been a good snowy owl year at Logan Airport in Boston, too. Because the airfield looks like tundra, snowy owls tend to flock there, and they must be trapped and removed.
“We’ve removed 21 so far this year, and the average is six,” said Norman Smith, who works for the Massachusetts Audubon Society and traps the birds. The most ever trapped was 43 in 1986, Mr. Smith said, “but the year’s not over.”
Experts say that the birds don't seem to be particularly hungry or stressed, so that doesn't explain the move south. The owls are expected to return north as the seasons change. Link -via Holy Kaw!
(Image credit: Flickr user Ian Turk)
Matt Mulholland (featured previously) sings all the vocal and instrumental parts as well on his very personal version of "Bohemian Rhapsody." This is from Mulholland's album of cover songs. Link -Thanks, Muzition!
At the end of June this year, those who do this sort of thing will add an extra second to the world's official clocks to keep us on the right track.
This has to be done every two or three years, so why not just adjust the length of a day or year or something? The detailed explanation is at Bad Astronomy. Link
This gets a bit detailed — which is where the fun is! — but in short it goes like this. We have two systems to measure time: our everyday one which is based on the rotation of the Earth, and a fancy-schmancy scientific and precise one based on vibrations of atoms. The two systems aren’t quite in synch, though, since the Earth counts a day as a tiny bit longer than the atomic clocks say it is. So every now and again, to get them back together, we add a leap second on to the atomic clocks. That holds them back for one second, and then things are lined up once again.
This has to be done every two or three years, so why not just adjust the length of a day or year or something? The detailed explanation is at Bad Astronomy. Link
Belly dancer Helena Vlahos has a unique talent for turning coins over with her abdominal muscles. And dollar bills, too! Kind of makes you want to start doing your crunches, doesn't it? Well, no, me neither. -via Metafilter
You've probably heard that the Kodak company has filed for bankruptcy. Kodak introduced its first camera 120 years ago, and revolutionized the way we see the world. The Kodak No.1 expanded photography from professionals to anyone who wanted to take a picture.
The idea was resurrected many years later with the "development" of the disposable film camera. Link -via the Presurfer
The Kodak produced circular snapshots, two and a half inches in diameter. The Kodak was sold already loaded with enough paper-based roll film to take one hundred photographs. After the film had been exposed, the entire camera was returned to the factory for the film to be developed and printed. The camera, reloaded with fresh film, was then returned to its owner, together with a set of prints. To sum up the Kodak system, Eastman devised the brilliantly simple sales slogan: ‘You press the button, we do the rest.’
The idea was resurrected many years later with the "development" of the disposable film camera. Link -via the Presurfer
Happy New Year! Today, communities celebrating Chinese New Year are welcoming the Year of the Dragon. Next Media Animation explains how the Chinese New Year celebration came to be celebrated with firecrackers. Link
by Marc Abrahams, Improbable Research staff
Some psychoanalysts can find meaning in the most ordinary-seeming bits of your life. Some discern it even in your intestinal rumblings. There’s a technical name for those digestive sounds: borborygmi. Several published studies tell how to interpret people’s gut feelings—how to translate those borborygmi into common everyday words.
In 1984, Prof. Dr. Christian Müller of Hôpital de Cery in Prilly, Switzerland, published a report called “New Observations on Body Organ Language,” in the journal Psychotherapy and Psychosomics.
Müller paraphrases a 1918 essay by someone named Willener that “concludes that the phenomenon generally known as borborygmi must be regarded as crypto- grammatically encoded body signals that could be interpreted with the help of [special] apparatus.” Müller laments that Willener’s “attempts to follow up on his theory were thwarted by the defects of recording techniques at that time.”
Happily, Müller himself had access to later, better equipment. “We have been trying at our clinic since 1980,” he writes, “to combine electromesenterography with Spindel’s alamograph, and in addition to use digital transformation for a quantitative analysis of the curves via computer.”
Müller reveals his greatest interpretive triumph:
This lovely piece of deadpan, intentional nonsense, I am told, was swallowed whole by some readers, and perhaps also some journal editors.
A few years later, Guy Da Silva, a Montreal psychoanalyst, published several apparently quite serious papers about the psychoanalytical significance of borborygmi.
The most accessible (in my view, anyway) is his “Borborygmi as Markers of Psychic Work During the Analytic Session: A Contribution to Freud’s Experience of Satisfaction and to Bion’s Idea About the Digestive Model for the Thinking Apparatus.” This professionally dense monograph appeared in a 1990 issue of the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis. Freud is Sigmund Freud, the psychoanalysis pioneer who lived in Vienna, Austria. Bion is Wilfred Ruprecht Bion, director of the London Clinic of Psycho-Analysis in the 1950s, and later president of the British Psycho-Analytical Society.
Guy Da Silva digested a little Freud together with a little Bion. He writes: “Borborygmi may signal the process and acquisition of new thoughts (symbolization) and the free associations derived from borborygmi often provide the key to the understanding of the session by linking the verbal flow of ideas to the underlying sensory and affective experience, thereby providing a ‘moment of truth’. Within the primitive maternal transference, borborygmi are often accompaniments to the fantasy or the hallucination of being fed by the analyst.”
The name Guy Da Silva will be familiar to some readers as the star of hundreds of psychologically gut-wrenching films, among them Beyond Reality 3, The Lube Guy, Attack of the Killer Dildos, and Porn-O-Matic 2000. But Guy Da Silva the actor and Guy Da Silva the psychoanalyst are not the same person, no matter how similarly stimulating their work may be.
(Title image credit: Flickr user threefatcats. Captioning via Speechable.)
Visit their website for more research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.
Some psychoanalysts can find meaning in the most ordinary-seeming bits of your life. Some discern it even in your intestinal rumblings. There’s a technical name for those digestive sounds: borborygmi. Several published studies tell how to interpret people’s gut feelings—how to translate those borborygmi into common everyday words.
In 1984, Prof. Dr. Christian Müller of Hôpital de Cery in Prilly, Switzerland, published a report called “New Observations on Body Organ Language,” in the journal Psychotherapy and Psychosomics.
“New Observations on Body Organ Language,” Christian Muller, Psychotherapy and Psychosomics, vol. 42, nos. 1–4, 1984, pp. 124–6.
Müller paraphrases a 1918 essay by someone named Willener that “concludes that the phenomenon generally known as borborygmi must be regarded as crypto- grammatically encoded body signals that could be interpreted with the help of [special] apparatus.” Müller laments that Willener’s “attempts to follow up on his theory were thwarted by the defects of recording techniques at that time.”
Happily, Müller himself had access to later, better equipment. “We have been trying at our clinic since 1980,” he writes, “to combine electromesenterography with Spindel’s alamograph, and in addition to use digital transformation for a quantitative analysis of the curves via computer.”
Müller reveals his greatest interpretive triumph:
The presence of a negative transference situation was not difficult to deduce from the following sequence: ‘Ro… Pi… le… me… 1o…’. The following translation is certainly an appropriate rendering: ‘Rotten pig. leave me alone.’
This lovely piece of deadpan, intentional nonsense, I am told, was swallowed whole by some readers, and perhaps also some journal editors.
A few years later, Guy Da Silva, a Montreal psychoanalyst, published several apparently quite serious papers about the psychoanalytical significance of borborygmi.
The most accessible (in my view, anyway) is his “Borborygmi as Markers of Psychic Work During the Analytic Session: A Contribution to Freud’s Experience of Satisfaction and to Bion’s Idea About the Digestive Model for the Thinking Apparatus.” This professionally dense monograph appeared in a 1990 issue of the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis. Freud is Sigmund Freud, the psychoanalysis pioneer who lived in Vienna, Austria. Bion is Wilfred Ruprecht Bion, director of the London Clinic of Psycho-Analysis in the 1950s, and later president of the British Psycho-Analytical Society.
“Borborygmi as Markers of Psychic Work During the Analytic Session: A Contribution to Freud’s Experience of Satisfaction and to Bion’s Idea About the Digestive Model for the Thinking Apparatus,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, vol. 71, 1990, p. 641–59.
“The Emergence of Thinking: Bion as the Link Between Freud and the Neurosciences,” Guy Da Silva, in M. Grignon (Ed.) Psychoanalysis and the Zest for Living: Reflections and Psychoanalytic Writings in Memory of W.C.M. Scott, ESF Publishers, Binghamton, NY, 1998.
“Le Modèle Alimentaire dans la Théorie de la Pensée de Bion: Suivi d’une Application de ce Modèle dans l’Analyse d’un Patient,” Guy Da Silva, Symposium of the Société Psychanalytique de Montréal, Spring 1992.
Guy Da Silva digested a little Freud together with a little Bion. He writes: “Borborygmi may signal the process and acquisition of new thoughts (symbolization) and the free associations derived from borborygmi often provide the key to the understanding of the session by linking the verbal flow of ideas to the underlying sensory and affective experience, thereby providing a ‘moment of truth’. Within the primitive maternal transference, borborygmi are often accompaniments to the fantasy or the hallucination of being fed by the analyst.”
The name Guy Da Silva will be familiar to some readers as the star of hundreds of psychologically gut-wrenching films, among them Beyond Reality 3, The Lube Guy, Attack of the Killer Dildos, and Porn-O-Matic 2000. But Guy Da Silva the actor and Guy Da Silva the psychoanalyst are not the same person, no matter how similarly stimulating their work may be.
(Title image credit: Flickr user threefatcats. Captioning via Speechable.)
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This article is republished with permission from the September-October 2009 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. You can download or purchase back issues of the magazine, or subscribe to receive future issues. Or get a subscription for someone as a gift!Visit their website for more research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.
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