Nate Haduch

'Game of Thrones' Men, by Hotness | The Hairpin:

thehairpin:

meredithknowseverything:

Jojen Reed should be a little higher, but I’m on board mostly.  Stannis and Renly should be higher than Littlefinger, obviously.

#JaquenAutoReblog

More more more … I want to quit my life and read the comments here for the rest of it

Amy Poehler went on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon on Friday and played a game show, sang, and posed for a 1930s magazine cover. Check out videos of the rest of her appearance below. It's a fun time.

Poehler, Fallon, and Michael Buble dressed as chickens performing an all-clucking cover of Fun.'s "Some Nights"

Poehler talking about Boston

Poehler and Fallon playing the game show Password

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Just nine days ago, evidence of a new album from Scottish chill-out producers Boards Of Canada, who have been silent for the seven years since 2006′s Trans Canada Highway EP, existed only in the form of cryptic hints, mostly-silent 12″ singles distributed across the globe on Record Store Day. Since then, there have been further clues and a commercial on the Cartoon Network. And now the duo has come out an dropped the subterfuge, announcing that they’ll release Tomorrow’s Harvest, their fourth album, in a mere two months. Check out the tracklist below.

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NBC announced an impressive roster of guests for this season's final episodes of SNL today. Kristen Wiig and Ben Affleck will be joining previously-announced Zach Galifianakis as hosts of the last string of episodes. Here's the lineups for those shows:

May 4th – Zach Galifianakis with musical guest Of Monsters and Men
May 11th – Kristen Wiig with Vampire Weekend
May 18th – Ben Affleck with Kanye West

This will be former cast member Kristen Wiig's first time hosting the show. She departed SNL last May after seven seasons to focus on her movie career. She is the first former cast member to host for the first time since Maya Rudolph and Jimmy Fallon did so last season. With his May 18th appearance, Ben Affleck will be joining the Five-Timers Club, a prestigious group of SNL hosts who have done the show five times. It seems awfully soon to induct another member into the Five-Timers Club after Justin Timberlake just joined a month ago and was the subject of an elaborate Five-Timers Club sketch featuring Steve Martin, Alec Baldwin, Tom Hanks, Paul Simon, Chevy Chase, Candice Bergen, Dan Aykroyd, and Martin Short. They're really gonna have to pull out all the stops during Affleck's monologue May 18th to top that one.

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"Sandwell District is dead." That's the message that sits at the top of the techno collective's Tumblr page. It's typic..

Here's Tig Notaro on Conan last night in one of the funniest late night appearances I've seen in a while – and one that clearly impressed Conan a lot. Somebody put her on TV more often.

Part two is below:

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Here's a list of business ideas that seemed outlandish, ridiculous, and even downright stupid. See if you can match some of them to the billion dollar businesses they became before you click through.

Airlines are cool. Let's start one. How hard could it be? We'll differentiate with a funny safety video and by not being a**holes.

It will be ugly. It will be free. Except for the hookers.

We are building the world's 20th search engine at a time when most of the others have been abandoned as being commoditized money losers.

Give us all of your bank, brokerage, and credit card information. We'll give it back to you with nice fonts. To make you feel richer, we'll make them green.

It is like email, SMS, or RSS. Except it does a lot less.

The world needs yet another Myspace or Friendster except several years late. We'll only open it up to a few thousand overworked, anti-social, Ivy Leaguers. Everyone else will then join since Harvard students are so cool.

Tags: business   lists

Ricin (on Breaking Bad) via Breaking Bad Wiki Ricin is one of the most poisonous substances on Earth, it's scarily easy to make, and somebody is mailing it to the President and at least one U.S. senator. What it is, how it works, and more, inside.

Yesterday, an envelope addressed to Senator Roger Wicker, Republican of Mississippi, was found to contain a white granular substance that was identified as ricin. Today, a similar letter addressed to President Obama was found. These envelopes were intercepted off-site--they never got anywhere near their targets--but as a precaution, Capitol Police have shut down mail service until they can figure out what's going on.

In the meantime, let's talk about ricin!

How poisonous is it?
Oh, man. Very. It's dangerous in just about any way it gets into your system, though ingesting (eating) it is about the least dangerous way. Injecting or inhaling requires about a thousand times less ricin to kill a human than ingesting, and that's a very small amount indeed. An average adult needs only 1.78mg of ricin injected or inhaled to die; that's about the size of a few grains of table salt--which ricin resembles visually.

How does it work?
Ricin, a toxic protein, infects cells, blocking their ability to synthesize their own protein. Without cells making protein, key functions in the body shut down; even in survivors, permanent organ damage is often the result of ricin poisoning. It's a highly unpleasant way to be poisoned: within six hours, according to the Center for Disease Control, victims who have ingested ricin will feel gastrointestinal effects like severe vomiting and diarrhea, which can lead to serious dehydration. Then the ricin infects the cells of the vital gastrointestinal organs as they pass through the body, leading to the failure of the kidneys, liver, and pancreas.

Inhalation of ricin has a different effect, since the ricin proteins aren't interacting with the same parts of the body. Instead of gastrointestinal problems, you'll develop a vicious, bloody cough, your lungs will fill with fluid, and eventually you'll lose your ability to breathe, causing death. Injection, too, is different, depending on where you've been injected, but will generally result in vomiting and flu-like symptoms, swelling around the place of injection, and eventually organ failure as your circulatory system passes the protein around the body. Death from inhalation or injection usually occurs about three to five miserable, agonizing days after contact.

Interestingly, there aren't any immediate symptoms, and indeed there can be a significant delay before symptoms show themselves, up to a day or two.

Exposure on the skin is generally not fatal, though it may cause a reaction that can range from irritation to blistering.

That sounds...horrible. Is there an antidote, at least?
Haha. No. The US and UK governments have been working on an antidote for decades--here's a nice article describing the progression of one such antidote--but there isn't one available to the public. The CDC's website states bluntly, "There is no antidote for ricin toxicity." There are some steps you can take if you get to a hospital immediately; for ingestion, a stomach pump can sometimes prevent the ricin from reaching the rest of the gastrointestinal system at its full force. But...that's about it, really.

How does it stack up against other poisons?
Well, that depends on what your aim is. Ricin is much easier to produce than other popular biological weapons like botulinum, sarin, and anthrax, but it is not as potent as any of those, which limits its effectiveness as a weapon. It also is not very long-lived; the protein can age and become inactive fairly quickly compared to, say, anthrax, which can remain dangerous for decades. There were experiments back around World War I attempting to make wide-scale ricin weapons, packaging it into bombs and coating bullets in it, but these proved not particularly effective and also violate the Hague Convention's agreements on war crimes, so the US discarded ricin.

It's much more effective, weapon-wise, as a close-contact, small-target weapon--by injecting, as with Georgi Markov, or by putting small particles into an aerosol spray and blasting a target. It's also not contagious, which limits its effectiveness as a tool of biological warfare. But it's considered highly dangerous partly because it's still outrageously toxic and partly because it takes no great skill to produce.

So it's not hard to make?
Well...no. Like, not at all. It's made from the byproduct of the castor oil manufacturing process. You take the "mash" of the castor oil seeds, which contain around 5-10 percent ricin, and perform a process called chromatography. Chromatography is a blanket term for a set of techniques used to separate mixtures, usually by dissolving in liquid or gas. The US government has done its best to eradicate recipes for ricin from the internet, sort of; a patent was filed back in 1962 for ricin extraction, and the Patent Office took it off the publicly available server in 2004 for safety reasons. That said, the recipe is super easy to find; here at the PopSci offices, I'm blocked from listening to Rdio on my work computer, but I found a recipe to make an outrageously deadly poison in about a minute.

The techniques involved are undergraduate-level chemistry, creating a slurry with the castor bean mash and filtering with water and then a few easily-found substances like hydrochloric acid.

It comes from castor beans?
Ricin is a highly toxic protein that's extracted from the seed of the castor plant, often called a "castor bean" or "castor oil bean," despite not technically being a bean. The castor plant is extremely common; it's used as an ornamental plant throughout the western world, prized for its ability to grow basically anywhere as well as its pretty, spiky leaves and weird spiny fruits. It's also an important crop; the seeds are full of oil, and castor oil is used for lots of legitimate purposes. It's a common laxative, for one thing, and since it's more resistant to high temperatures than other kinds of vegetable oils, it's a nice alternative to petroleum oil in engines.

Wait, but you can eat it? So how is this a poison?
Ah, yes. Castor oil is perfectly safe, according to the FDA and your grandma, but ricin is not castor oil. Castor seeds are still poisonous; this study says that a lethal dose of castor seeds for adults is about four to eight seeds. But the oil itself does not contain ricin; the ricin protein is left behind in the "castor bean mash" after the oil is extracted from the seed. Poisoning from eating the seed itself is rare.

Have there been cases of ricin poisoning in the past?
You mean, beyond the several times it's been featured as a major plot point in Breaking Bad? Sure! The most famous is probably the assassination of Georgi Markov in 1978. Markov was a Bulgarian novelist, playwright, journalist, and dissident, and was murdered by the Bulgarian secret service, with assistance from the KGB, by ricin injection. He was crossing a bridge when he was jabbed in the leg with an umbrella, which delivered a ricin pellet into his bloodstream. He died three days later of ricin poisoning.

There are plenty of incidents of people arrested for attempting (or, more often, succeeding) to make ricin; it's a pretty easy poison to make. In fact, there was even another ricin-in-the-envelope attempt made back in 2003--a person identifying as "Fallen Angel" sent letters filled with ricin to the White House, apparently as a result of some new trucking regulations (seriously). "Fallen Angel" was never found, but the letters were intercepted and did not cause any injury.

How dangerous are these envelopes filled with ricin?
The envelope strategy has more to do with potential ease of getting the poison close to targets than its strength as a delivery system. If you're targeting the President of the United States, it's easier and more anonymous to mail a letter than to try to get close to him with an umbrella modified for ricin-stabbing. But it's not a great way to poison someone with ricin. Assuming the letter actually got into the target's hands, of the three ways ricin can get into a person's system (inhalation, injection, ingestion), only one--inhalation--is really possible, and it's not that likely.

Inhalation as a weapon is best accomplished through a mist, ideally delivered through an aerosol. But that's not possible in a letter full of powder. It's possible that small granules of ricin could be released into the air and inhaled when handling the letter, but it is not an effective way to poison someone. And whoever's sending these letters evidently doesn't know that the government set up an elaborate mail-screening system after the 2001 Anthrax scare.

All the late night hosts addressed the Boston tragedy on their shows last night, but Craig Ferguson discussed the day's horrific events in a particularly heartfelt and compelling way. Full video of the opening to his show is embedded above.

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James Gulliver Hancock is on a mission to draw all the buildings in New York City.

Hancock's blog has spawned a book and prints are available as well. (via brain pickings)

Tags: architecture   art   books   illustration   James Gulliver Hancock   NYC

Sometimes TV shows drag their unfunny, uninteresting, yet highly rated feet across our living rooms for years. “Who let this happen?” we cry in vain. Other times, the powers that be get things right. That’s where “Brilliantly Canceled” comes in, looking at the shows that didn’t make it past their first season and saved us all a ton of grief.

We all have our favorite alternate history scenarios: What if Columbus wasn't bad at his job and didn't accidentally discover America? What if Kennedy invaded Cuba? What if Lucky Louie wasn't canceled after thirteen episodes?

That last one might not seem to be as historically important as the others, but consider the repercussions of what a renewal to Lucky Louie would have brought: Louis C.K. said unequivocally on WTF with Marc Maron that had his show been brought back for a second season, he would have quit stand-up comedy and supported himself and his family starring in and co-executive producing the HBO series, under the belief that had it been renewed once, it would have lasted ten seasons (tell that to Mike White and Laura Dern.) While waiting for the show to premiere after all of the episodes were taped in the spring of 2006, C.K. went on tour to build his hour for Shameless, which we now know was the beginning of C.K.'s ascent to achieving comedy deity status. Instead, had Lucky Louie not received mixed reviews from critics and retrieved some more eyeballs, Shameless would have served as a really funny hour long commercial on HBO for season 2. C.K. would have hung up the mic unknowingly at the start of his creative apex. Even if the show didn't last beyond 2007, the momentum that was built from living and breathing stand-up comedy would have been derailed, and it's unlikely Chewed Up, Hilarious, Live at the Beacon Theater, WORD – Live at Carnegie Hall, this Saturday's Oh My God, and the historic television series Louie — which was created and funded off of all of the stand-up success — would have ever existed. (We would still be speaking English, but presumably a less funny English.)

This raises another question: What exactly was Lucky Louie, besides an unknowing Lee Harvey Oswald?

Some of you already know that it was Louis C.K.'s reaction to what he felt was the unacceptable direction that sitcoms took beginning in the 1980s, when they became more elaborate, phony, and hollow. But instead of shooting a single camera comedy without a studio audience, which was well on its way to becoming the "right" way to do things in the mid 2000s, Lucky Louie was a multi-cam that went out of its way to make the sets as unadorned as possible, keeping all of the audience reactions, for better or worse: if there was an extended applause break because C.K. fired off a particularly inspired one liner, the cast had to wait a few extra beats. If Laura Kightlinger mused that "She's a teenager, not a person" and there was dead silence where it is very likely the writers believed a decent sized laugh would appear, the cast just kept on going.

C.K. had The Honeymooners (with a lot more profanity) in mind, but because the pilot episode dealt with socioeconomic and race issues, the comparisons to All in the Family and Roseanne cropped up, muddling the conceit a little bit for critics. Coincidentally, the pilot episode was really, really good, and really funny. The very first scene was basically C.K.'s first memorable stand-up bit: "Why?" — which was from Louis's HBO One Night Stand half-hour the year before. On Lucky Louie, it gave the audience the background information on the characters of Louie and his wife Kim without them being aware of the exposition being exposition even before the title credits.

Louie, a part-time mechanic, and his wife Kim (Pamela Adlon), a nurse, had trouble making ends meet just to raise one daughter, Lucy, but it is revealed that the only reason why Kim suddenly wanted to have sex with her hubby is because she wanted another child. Even though sex with Kim is so rare that Louie doesn't really think twice to trying to masturbate in the closet a minute after Lucy's birthday party concluded, he understandably didn't want to be raising two children on the street. The jokes were all there, and the audience was very receptive, particularly to the lines C.K. lifted from his tested and refined One Night Stand and future Shameless specials. Meanwhile, Louie and his family kept accidentally insulting their new black neighbors. First, Lucy openly hated a Barbie doll she received because it was black. Then Louie was caught by Walter (Jerry Minor) trying to throw out the black doll (the white doll was also in the trash bin), and later he completely forgot that he had invited Walter and his family to dinner. Walter eventually confronted Louie about his motivations behind trying so hard to just make a black friend. Little Lucy had first seen a black man working on a refrigerator, and the next time she saw one she pointed and said "refrigerator" — Louie just wanted Lucy to have an African-American around so she wouldn't do that anymore. It was Classic C.K.: touching and weird.

After that, virtually all of the episodes focused primarily on the volatile marriage between Louie and Kim. While their standing in the upper lower class/lower middle class remained somewhat a part of the narrative and was the underlying cause for a few of their problems, race did not seem to be. Instead, Louie and Walter gradually developed a friendship and a two-person ad hoc think tank determining how exactly to deal with their annoyed wives, which is touching and kind of depressing.

Walter would eventually get the last laugh. In the final episode to air, "Kim Moves Out," Jerry Minor's character and his wife Ellen (Kim Hawthorne) argue over something seemingly minor but really very important: Walter thinks his Bill Cosby impression is spot-on and worthy to be exhibited at social gatherings; Ellen believes the exact opposite. This was first revealed at a building party, when Ellen openly forbade Walter to do it. With the rest of the episode having to do with Kim moving out, Walter and Ellen supplied the hilarious B story with three scenes on their own, interspersed throughout the half hour. In the first scene, the two are in bed when they continue to fight about it. Ellen earnestly believed that if he had done the Cosby impression they would lose all respect from the neighbors for life. The second time, Walter stole a moment alone to contort his face like Cosby in front of a mirror, before Ellen called for him from the other room. In the post-credits scene, after the heavy A-story had concluded, in the final scene from the series, we finally witnessed and heard Minor's impression (good, but not ground-breaking.) Of course, Ellen caught him, but Walter, in a rare and possibly only moment of triumph, told her to kiss his ass in the Cosby voice. We never find out if he ended up killed by his wife's hand moments later, but it is obvious that Kim Hawthorne found it difficult to hide a smile.

I wrote final episode "to air" because of the existence of "Clowntime is Over," a never broadcast installment that is available on the DVD (and YouTube.) The only reason why HBO chose not to air it was probably due to it being kind of wildly out of tone from the rest of the series. For one thing, Louie at one point in "Clowntime is Over" admitted to being happy. For another, it is very weird, the only time in Lucky Louie's history that C.K.'s surrealist and silly comedic tendencies from his short films and early stand-up broke free from his old man bitterness: when the clown hired for Lucy doesn't show, Kim dressed Louie up with materials found in the apartment, giving birth to Mr. Pizza Box Man.

There was even a dance, not similar but not completely different from Britta Perry's classic pizza dance five years later (how nobody ever gif'd C.K.'s dance I have no idea. Bad internet.) Mr. Pizza Box Man was a hit, and C.K. started to earn money from making appearances. But then he tried to perform his weak shtick on some teenagers and lost all confidence. The story resolved itself when a frustrated Louie got in a brawl with two guys who made fun of him while waiting for a bus. In the B-story, Kim and Ellen's frustration over a ballet teacher not giving their kids any real ballet time without the offer in a refund resolved itself by — the two repeatedly shoving her. The last scene was simply Louie and Kim looking at each other and seeing that they were both beaten. The entire episode clocked in at twenty one minutes and thirty seconds, the shortest in the series.

As we know, the show Louie isn't afraid to be silly, so long as it's under some sort of dark cloud, and along with that sensibility Louis brought along some of the cast from Lucky Louie to his critically acclaimed FX series. Pamela Adlon — who I am always surprised to find was the voice of Bobby Hill no matter how many times I read it — played Pamela, the woman Louis eventually fell for in season two (spoiler: it didn't work out.) Nick DiPaolo, who appeared in two episodes as the building superintendent (his solution to changing a door lock was to switch it with the neighbor's door) occasionally pops up to bust Louis and some poker players' balls. Todd Barry showed up as a sarcastic (shocking) comic book store owner in "Long Weekend." (Barry's role of insulting Louis to no end was played on Lucky Louie by Jim Norton, who on the series always seemed to look like he had just walked out of a mental ward: when he graduated to jorts late in the series run, it was a marked sartorial improvement.) C.K. has yet to get Emma Stone on Louie — she is a lot busier than she was seven years ago when she was 17 years old, playing Laura Kightlinger's bratty daughter that had a tendency to sleep with middle-aged men from Freaks and Geeks and offered oral pleasure to C.K.'s character just for being nice.

C.K. is infamously a one-man writing staff on Louie, but had he not disliked the entire normal process of producing a comedy it is likely he would have retained some of the talent he had working for him: Mike Royce, former executive producer of Everybody Loves Raymond, had the same title on Lucky Louie, and penned the aforementioned Emma Stone episode "Get Out"; Dino Stamatopoulos was an original writer along with C.K. on Late Night with Conan O'Brien, wrote on Mr. Show, played Starburns and wrote on Community, and wrote the particularly funny episode "Control"; comedian Greg Fitzsimmons was a staff writer, as was Dan Mintz, who currently voices the great Tina Belcher on Bob's Burgers.

Ultimately, Lucky Louie was good, not great, and when you consider all of the things that took place as a result of it being cancelled, everything worked out pretty well for most everyone involved. The show probably deserves a little better than being known as a historical curiosity; instead it should get credit for its attempt at being something different, for being honest, for being honest to goodness funny (most important of all), and for not committing the sin most sitcoms it was commenting on while simultaneously celebrating it of making continuity errors. In fact, a few running gags that emerged throughout the series were surprising and pleasurable, even if they weren't necessarily on purpose — when food is thrown away, Louie always tried to eat it anyway; Rick Shapiro's breaking down a two word phrase shtick was treated a little differently all three times he did it, to increasingly humorous results; and my favorite, which was most likely an accident but added an unexpected level of nuance to the Louie character, Louie masturbating to Jessica Simpson and saying he wasn't "jerking off to her music," then in a later episode singing along to her sister Ashlee's "Boyfriend" to drown out his daughter's screaming. This intelligent treatment of a just-about-dead multicam sitcom format made the surprising news of C.K. attempting to develop a network sitcom starring Ashley Tisdale last year all the more intriguing, but ultimately CBS passed. Leave it to television to keep Louis C.K. humble.

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Christopher Abbott, who plays Marnie's on-again, off-again boyfriend Charlie on HBO's Girls, has left the series following creative differences with Lena Dunham, Page Six reports. Abbott has been a frequent recurring guest on the show since Season 1, but his role was looking as if it would be beefed up in the upcoming third season before this happened. Page Six's anonymous source told them, "They've just started work on Season 3, and Chris is at odds with Lena. He didn't like the direction things are going in, which seems a bit odd since the show put him on the map." There's no word on how much of Season 3 Abbott has filmed or whether he'll be written out of the show prior to or during the new season. Page Six also reports that Lena Dunham has "shaken up" the show's writing staff this season too, so there have been plenty of personnel changes in the show already at the top of the season.

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Kerry asks: What did people use for birth control before modern methods like the pill and condoms?

Pregnancy prevention around the world has a lengthy history that includes many effective yet sometimes lethal methods of early contraception.  Early contraceptive options offered an array of colorful, creative (and in some cases, incredibly smelly) choices that included innovative options in barrier devices, spermicides, and oral contraceptives.

Beyond these devices and substances, one of the oldest known methods still in use today was coitus interruptus (a.k.a. “Pull and Pray” or “Withdrawal”), with the earliest documented use of this being found in the Bible in a story estimated to have been written about 2500 years ago.  This is the tale of Onan, who was supposed to be getting his brother’s widow, Tamar, pregnant to provide an heir for his deceased sibling.  Instead, he simply had sex with her and withdrew “spill[ing] his seed on the ground” to make sure she wouldn’t get pregnant.

Surprisingly, while this method has something of a bad reputation as not being very effective, in fact, it’s about as effective both in real world use and “perfect world use” as modern latex condoms with an estimated “perfect” use failure rate of only 4%, compared to the condom’s 2%.  While “real world” numbers on condoms and coitus interruptus vary from study to study, on average it seems the withdrawal method has a “real world” failure rate of around 18%, give or take about 5%-10%, compared to the condom’s 17%, again give or take about 5%-10%.

It turns out, performing the withdrawal method “perfectly” isn’t too complex either- the withdrawal part being obvious and simply a matter of doing it.  Something slightly less obvious leads to the thing that is the primary reason for failure when people get the “withdrawal” part correct.  The reason is generally thought to be because of residual sperm in the male’s urethra from a previous, but very recent sexual encounter.  This problem can be gotten around simply by the man urinating between sexual encounters-  so not too complex a thing to get right.

Previous to the Roman Empire, evidence suggests that the withdrawal method was one of the primary forms of contraception used.  This fell out of popularity with the Romans who favored other methods available at the time, most of which have been lost to history, but from anecdotal evidence many of them seem to have been quite effective themselves. One that is known is that they used Queen Anne’s lace, which is still occasionally used as a form of contraception in some parts of the world, such as India, and has been shown to have anti-fertility properties.

After the fall of the Roman Empire, most methods of contraception fell out of practice in the Western world partially from the influence of Christianity, as birth control historically was seen as sinful within the church, and perhaps also simply because the knowledge of many of the effective methods was lost.  Around the early 19th century, however, the withdrawal method saw a huge resurgence and was one of the leading forms of contraception in the world until methods such as the modern condom and the pill were introduced.  Today, around 2.5% of the world’s population still uses the withdrawal method as the primary method of birth control and an estimated 52% of people have used it at least once as a method of birth control.

Another contraception method that isn’t as new as many people think is the condom.  Although, early versions of the condom didn’t always cover the entire penis and, of course, they certainly weren’t made of latex. For example, love-making in Asia often relied on devices called glans condoms, which addressed only the head of the penis. Animal parts were a popular choice for making these condoms. The Chinese fashioned theirs out of lamb intestines, while the Japanese used tortoise shell (called ‘kabutoga’) or animal horn throughout the 1870s.

Animal offal is the internal organs and entrails of butchered animals, and not the first thing that comes to mind concerning birth control. But to the Europeans living during the mid-1700s, these organ meats were transformed into their way of preventing babies. Slaughterhouse workers would style early condoms out of sausage skins. Interestingly, Jules (Julius) Schmid, the creator of the now-infamous Sheik and Ramses brands of condoms was once a sausage-maker who made lamb-gut condoms in the 1880s.

Glans condoms were also made out of fabric. There are ancient accounts suggesting early Egyptians living around 1000 B.C. used linen sheaths during intercourse to protect against disease. In the 16th century, the Europeans also soaked linen sheaths in a chemical solution that was laid out to dry before use. Pieces of the cloth were measured to cover the glans of the penis, and later held in place with ribbon.

Fast-forward to one of the crowning achievements of the industrialized world, Charles Goodyear’s vulcanization of rubber in 1839 would eventually lead to the creation of the first rubber condom in 1844. Strips of raw rubber were wrapped around penis-shaped molds, which were later dipped in a chemical solution to cure the rubber. With a shelf life of a few months and being very durable, men could actually reuse these condoms!

In 1912, a new and improved way to manufacture condoms emerged – adding gasoline or benzene to the rubber to liquefy it. The latex condom was officially invented in 1920, and the consumers loved the stronger, thinner material with a shelf life of five years.

Inexpensive, easy to use, and effective at preventing the spread of certain diseases, condoms are now one of the most popular forms of contraception. However, despite the availability of some version of the male condom throughout much of history and the ease and free-ness of the withdrawal method, people still chose to find other methods for preventing pregnancy, some of which were not just bizarre, but downright dangerous.

Since women were historically viewed as playing a more significant role in getting pregnant, the number of available options for female birth control was much greater… and displayed a much higher level of inventiveness. For example, early topical and suppository contraceptives have included olive oil, pomegranate pulp, ginger, and even tobacco juice, which women would smear on and/or inside their vagina as an early spermicide.

According to the oldest recorded information regarding birth control, a document that is nearly 4000 years old- the Egyptian Kahun Gynecological Papyrus, which also happens to be the first known medical text- women used pessaries made out of crocodile dung and honey as a form of contraception. In hindsight, it was pretty smart to combine animal feces with an effective antibacterial substance (the honey- see why honey works as a good antibacterial agent and other medicinal purposes it can be used for here). In addition to physically preventing sperm from fertilizing an egg, the acidic properties of the dung may have served as an effective spermicide. In India, elephant dung has been used in this same manner.

Another method the text describes on top of the “crocodile dung” was the use of acacia gum, which is much less mentally repulsive and, indeed, does work as a spermicide.  It can even be found in some spermicide products today, unlike crocodile dung.

Fast forward a few thousand years and in 1832, Dr. Charles Knowlton popularized the method of syringe douching as a method of contraception, and throughout the U.S., women would use his douching mixtures comprised of vinegar, zinc sulfite and liquid chloride to prevent pregnancy. It wasn’t until after 1850 that hard rubber syringes came into play. Before that, early syringes were made out of horn, bone or pewter.

Douching kits and solutions were sold during the greater part of the 1900s. At one time, American women painfully turned to the popular household disinfectant Lysol as a method of contraception. From the 1930s through the 1960s, the Lysol disinfectant douche was a top seller in feminine hygiene products. Not only did the Lysol douche later prove ineffective as a spermicidal, but its use also led to toxic effects, such as inflammation, irritation and burning sensations of the vagina and cervix.

Getting away from Lysol, the first commercially produced birth control pill (called Enovid-10) made an appearance on the market in 1960. Just before the FDA approved the use of synthetic progesterone and estrogen in pill form that works to prevent ovulation in women, the market offered “female pills” with oftentimes unidentified ingredients or questionable herbal concoctions used to induce or speed up menstrual flow as a way to provoke a miscarriage.

In the mid-19th century, preparations of loose herbs, such as pennyroyal, rue, hellebore, mistletoe, foxglove, Queen Anne’s lace, bloodroot, ergot and different mint plants, were steeped in hot water (like a cup of tea) or dissolved in alcohol before consumption. While herbs, such as tansy and pennyroyal, may have had a reputation for possessing abortive properties, they also “worked” by poisoning the woman.

Going back much further with the liquid birth control concoctions, it was also an unfortunate habit of early physicians to use chemical-laden drinks that blended lethal substances (like arsenic, mercury and strychnine) with grains, fruits and oils. Early physicians would suggest women drink the poisonous mixtures as a way to disrupt their reproductive systems, usually in very controlled dosages so as to prevent pregnancy without killing the woman (often through inducing a miscarriage if a fertilized egg is present.)

For instance, Soranus, a Greek gynecologist practicing during the 2nd century A.D., told women to drink the water that blacksmiths used to cool metal as a birth control method. In 900 B.C., Chinese birth control experts advised women to swallow sixteen tadpoles fried in quicksilver (mercury) immediately after sex.  Successful results that came from drinking toxic ‘remedies’ sometimes came with damage to the liver, kidneys and other major organs. Some women would never again have children in the future – becoming sterile or worse, died… in both cases, I guess the methods were indeed super effective at preventing pregnancy…

Not every oral or liquid contraceptive method was deadly, although perhaps the effectiveness is questionable. Acidic fruits and vegetables often played a role in early birth control. To prevent pregnancy, Arabian women would eat mashed pomegranate mixed with rock salt and alum. During the 1400s, drinking raw onion juice was a trick of the Italians. In 1600, the French ate cabbage after intercourse.

One of the most effective (and safe) liquid remedies for birth control was most likely lemon juice as a topical remedy. Specifically, to create a physical barrier in the vagina, women would insert soft wool soaked in vinegar or lemon juice to prevent pregnancy. Positioning half a lemon in the vagina was also not uncommon, and serves as an example of an early form of the cervical cap.

Another seemingly very effective birth control method used by the Ancient Greeks was the Silphium plant, which is now unfortunately extinct, and became so because of its extreme popularity for medicinal purposes, mainly for birth control.  Why it became extinct when it was “more valuable than silver” was because of failure after failure to try to grow it away from its natural habitat of a small stretch of land in what is now Libya.  Because of the small area it could be grown successfully and the extreme demand, by the 2nd century BC, the plant became extinct.

We’ve come a long way from the near 4000 year old method of crocodile dung and honey and even the more modern method of Lysol douching, but it’s surprising to see that so many ancient methods for birth control seem to have been remarkably effective and some, such as the basic withdrawal method and Queen Anne’s Lace, are still chugging along today as effective means of birth control.  So if we take anything from this, it’s that apparently from the beginning people have been trying to “have their cake and eat it too” in regards to sex and potential babies.

If you liked this article, you might also like:

• Does Mountain Dew Really Lower Sperm Count?
• The Record for the Most Babies Born to One Woman is 69
• The Woman Who Carried a Fetus in Her Body for 60 Years
• The Youngest Person to Give Birth was Just 5 Years Old
• How Pregnancy Tests Work

Bonus Facts:

• The Comstock Law of 1873 controlled access to birth control and information for more than 50 years – it was even illegal for doctors to administer birth control. This law caused people to actually bootleg contraceptives. When Jules (Julius) Schmid first came to America from Germany in 1882, he was arrested under the Comstock Law for making condoms out of animal intestines.
• The first use of intrauterine devices dates back to the Middle Ages when Arab Bedouins would insert pebbles into the uteruses of their camels to prevent pregnancy during long, desert journeys. The pebbles caused a mild infection in the uterus that affected the fertilization and implantation of eggs. As for humans, it wasn’t until the 1960s in the U.S. that the IUD was an acceptable form of birth control for women. Over time, IUDs have been made out of suture materials, coiled metal wire, stainless steel, plastic, rubber, copper wire, and silver filaments.
• The most common form of female birth control is ‘the Pill,’ and you may wonder why men aren’t given the same contraceptive option. The male equivalent of ‘the Pill’ has been in the works since the 1960s, but men lack the cyclical, regulated reproductive system that a woman possesses. Females produce only one egg per month, and are fertile for only a short time in the cycle. It’s much easier for scientists to create a drug that controls this predictable process. Early tests of certain versions of the male Pill produced a high rate of permanent infertility, as well as other side effects, such as kidney failure, digestive issues, and even paralysis. In 1998, the World Health Organization (WHO) suggested that research cease on the concept because of its intolerable side effects.  Of course, if we’ve learned anything from history, it’s that mankind is incredibly inventive and is not afraid of a few deaths for the prospect of yet another effective birth control option.

[Birth Control image via Shutterstock]

Expand for References

• 5 People Who Died During Sex (and 100 other Terribly Tasteless Lists) by Karl Shaw
• Ultimate Book of Bizarre Lists by Jamie Frater
• What Did We Use Before Toilet Paper? by Andrew Thompson
• Basic Information on Birth Control
• Early Condoms
• Douching and Spermicides
• Condoms and Sponges
• FDA Approves the Pill
• Deciding on Contraception
• The History of Contraceptives
• Crocodile Dung Used as Birth Control
• The Strange History of Birth Control
• Withdrawal Method
• Coitus Interruptus
• Silphium
• Ancient Egypt Kahun Gynecological Papyrus

After months of reports that NBC is replacing Jay Leno with Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show in 2014, it looks like Fallon has finally closed his deal and secured the new job. THR reports that Fallon has finalized his contract, but it's still unclear exactly when he'll be taking over for Leno, whose contract ends in September 2014. NBC has yet to confirm succession talks, despite Leno and Fallon discussing it and singing about it together on their shows. THR says that some NBC execs want Fallon to launch his Tonight Show, which will move the franchise to New York, in February to take advantage of the network's popular Winter Olympics airings, but NBC will have to pay Leno a large penalty if they shove him out before September. THR claims that Lorne Michaels, who produces Fallon's Late Night and will produce his Tonight Show too, wants his host to have more time than a February start date would give him.

It is odd that NBC is waiting so long to comment on the Tonight succession story when so many trusted news outlets are reporting it as official, but THR speculates that the network may be waiting until they've closed a deal with Fallon's Late Night replacement too. THR confirms The NY Post's story from last month that SNL's Seth Meyers is the far-and-ahead frontrunner for the job with a network source telling them, "It will be Seth unless something goes awry [in the dealmaking]." With the new Tonight and Late Night hosts looking pretty official at this point, there's still plenty of late night changes to speculate on for you late night speculation junkies, like: when Letterman's retirement will come, where Leno will go next (Fox?), and the wide open race for Meyers's spot behind SNL's Weekend Update desk.

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ha-ha: sunk fence.

Google is practically synonymous with “search” today. But back in 1999, Excite (better known today as Ask.com) was a bigger force in the online world. It was one of the most recognized brands of the 90s. In today’s digital environment, it’s almost unfathomable to think a company would pass up the chance to acquire Google. But to fully understand this story, it’s important that we take a step into the time machine and dive into the internet browse/search world of the 90s – the world that was dominated by Yahoo!, Lycos and…Excite.

Excite, Who?  With the end of college drawing near, six Stanford University students decided they really didn’t want to work for someone else and much preferred to work for themselves- thus began Excite. Set up in 1993, the company was known as Architext Software; their first mission was to build a search engine.

After a year of hard work on their product, in late 1994, Architext’s founders accepted an offer of funding from Stanford University alum, Vinod Khosla, on behalf of venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins. Over the next couple of years, Architext secured $3 million in funding and in October 1995, Architext was relaunched as Excite.com – a web search engine that was quickly selling million dollar advertising sponsorships. Upon launch, Excite.com had indexed 1.5 million pages. (For perspective on the amazingly rapid growth of the web, Google has indexed over 50 billion web pages as of March 2013).

In January 1996, George Bell was named the CEO of Excite and the company went public soon after, in April. Over the next couple of years, Excite continued to grow with revenues in excess of $150 million in 1998. Amidst this environment of continued growth, Excite merged with @Home and the merged company went on to buy and merge with a number of other brands. However, the company didn’t grow as planned and around 2001 began the death spiral of one of the first major search engines to be built. In March 2004, Excite was acquired by the Ask Jeeves (now Ask.com) network.

While Excite enjoyed its success in the 90s, a (then) less known brand made its way onto the tech scene. Founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1996, Google was meant to be a research project but quickly grew to something much more. By late 1998, Google had already indexed 60 million pages and was making a name for itself in tech circles as the “better” search engine – better and more technologically innovative than the well established brands of the time such as Yahoo!, Lycos and Excite.

While it has become the stuff of folklore today, in 2010 Vinod Khosla, of Khosla Ventures, recounted the time when Google was willing to sell for under $1 million but Excite wasn’t interested. Brin and Page were worried the search engine was taking away too much time from their research. Khosla (then partner at venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins) had convinced Brin and Page to sell Google for $1 million. However, George Bell, CEO of Excite, refused the offer. Following this, Khosla managed to convince the Google duo to drop their price to $750,000, but Bell still wasn’t interested.

After the rejection, Google went through multiple rounds of funding, within months raising about $25 million (including a substantial amount coming from Kleiner Perkins who had previously funded Excite as noted above). They continued to grow and refine their search engine and eventually went public in 2004 at an opening price of $85 per share. Today’s share price for Google is at about $812 with the company bringing in about $50+ billion in revenue a year these days. Yep…

Some have stated that this is one of the worst tech industry decisions of all time. After all, had Excite forked out $750K for Google back then, the company would have got their hands on one of the early iterations of the Google algorithm that makes their search results so good, and many felt better than what Excite was offering at the time.

On the flipside, of course,  in 1999 Google wasn’t the Google it is today and its advance since had a lot to do with the people who worked there in the early days, including Brin and Page, among others. They may or may not have chosen to continue on with the Excite owned Google and many of those later hired by Google that were an integral part of the growth of the company may or may not have joined the Excite team.  It’s entirely possible that Excite would have never achieved the success Google has in the search world, even if they’d bought Google.  Google is also about a lot more than search these days and predicting whether Excite would have mirrored those successes elsewhere is of course impossible.

Beyond that, with Excite and Yahoo flourishing with their own algorithms (incidentally Yahoo also turned down buying Google, as did AltaVista, when Brin and Page attempted to sell to those two), it would have been difficult to anticipate Google’s future dominance as a search giant. Given how hard Brin and Page shopped it around, it seems reasonable to think even they had no clue Google would soon rocket up to the peaks of the tech industry.  In retrospect, it’s easy to say it was a big blunder, but when seen in perspective of the tech scene of the late 90s, the decision isn’t totally indefensible.

If you liked this article, you might also like:

• Why a Typical Workday is 8 Hours Long
• Lamborghini Cars Were a Result of a Tractor Company Owner Being Insulted By the Founder of Ferrari
• Steve Jobs’ First Business was Making “Blue Boxes” That Allowed People to Get Illegal Free Phone Service
• The First Website Ever Made
• The Luckiest Building in Silicon Valley

Bonus Facts

• Before Google was called Google, in 1996 Page and Brin named their early search engine effort “BackRub”, which ran for about a year until it began using too much bandwidth for the University’s liking.
• When Page and Brin tried to find buyers to license their search technology, one portal CEO told them “As long as we’re 80 percent as good as our competitors, that’s good enough. Our users don’t really care about search.”
• The Google home page is so sparse because the founders weren’t terribly familiar with HTML and just wanted to create a workable interface that didn’t require much in the way of front-end coding skill or time.
• Every day Google answers more than one billion questions from people around the globe in 181 countries and 146 languages.

[Image via Shutterstock]

Expand for References

• Battelle, John. 2005. The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture. New York, NY: Penguin Group.
• The History of Google
• Excite, A Brief History
• The Size of the World Wide Web
• When Google Wanted to Sell
• When Excite Rejected Google
• Google Stock Index
• 20 Fun Facts About Google’s Early Days
• 50 Amazing Facts and Figures About Google
• Facts About Google and Competition

Looks Like Jell-O, Tastes Like Space Fuel A pellet of plutonium-238, the fuel source used in much of NASA's space exploration. Los Alamos National Laboratory Our dangerously depleted supply of spacecraft fuel just got a little bump from the Department of Energy.

For the first time in more than two decades, the United States can put a "Made in the USA" stamp on non-weapons grade plutonium, Discovery News reports.

Plutonium-238 is an important fuel source for the radioisotope power systems that are used in spacecraft like the Mars Curiosity Rover and the New Horizon spacecraft that's on its way to Pluto. As plutonium-238 decays, it gives off enough heat to generate electricity and keep all the expensive parts of a spacecraft warm in the cold, dark nether regions of deep space.

Until 1988, the U.S. produced its plutonium-238 (not to be confused with plutonium-239, the isotope in nuclear weapons) as part of its Cold War nuclear shenanigans. After the Savannah River Site, a major contributor of plutonium-238, shut down because of environmental issues, we turned to Russia for our plutonium needs, but that supply has run out as well.

Since 2009, we've been wringing our hands over how to get enough of the fuel to power our future space exploration. Congress threw NASA $10 million of its requested $30 million budget to start production, but denied the Department of Energy's funding requests three years in a row.

In April, officials at the DOE finally announced production was underway, but getting supplies up to snuff could take up to eight years.

That process seems to be off to a good start, luckily. Jim Green, director of NASA's Planetary Science Division, announced at a Mars exploration planning meeting that the DOE has successfully generated plutonium at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, according to Discovery News.

Green said he expects a little more than three pounds of plutonium to be generated per year. New supplies of plutonium could be mixed with the small existing supply of U.S. plutonium to bring the depleted plutonium up to the necessary energy density.

[Discovery News]

Beersci Logo Todd Detwiler It certainly looks that way if you hang around beer people.

Modern-day hopheads--the beer drinkers who gleefully, obsessively seek out hoppier and hoppier brews--don't usually start out that way. Most people have a natural aversion to bitter compounds--useful for avoiding eating lethal doses of poisons in the wild. No, one must work one's way up to hops: Start off drinking beers with lower IBUs (International Bitterness Units, one measure of how bitter a beer is), be them ambers, lagers, brown ales, or stouts. Next, try a pale ale. Then try many pale ales. Then discover the IPA -- and with it, become obsessed with hop varietals such as Simcoe (piney aroma) and Amarillo (fruity aroma). Be happy with that for a while. Maybe try a double IPA (twice the malt, twice the hops as a regular IPA), which may or may not be successful, depending on whose you drink. Begin to love being punched in the face with a fist of hops. Become obsessed with IBU ratings. Buy the hoppiest beers one can find, even if they don't actually taste all that good. Despair.

Back in 2005, a pair of California-based brewers (Vinnie Cilurzo of Russian River and Matt Brynildson of Firestone Walker) came up with a tongue-in-cheek definition for this hop passion. They called it the lupulin threshold shift, describing it as "when a double IPA just isn't enough." (Lupulin glands on the hop cones hold the main hop compounds that eventually contribute flavor and bitterness to beers.) I've seen many a beer drinker ask why they feel compelled to seek out ever-hoppier beers. Could it be that their brains and tastebuds are addicted to the hop?

While pushing the hop envelope -- and one's tastebuds -- is an escalating practice, are hops actually addictive? The answer is no. You can cut hops out of your diet with no adverse physical reactions just like you can do the same for curry or bacon cheeseburgers or any number of other food items for which one occasionally develops cravings. Gustatory cravings are not the same as caffeine jags, nic fits or heroin jones. Although recent research seems to suggest that certain "psychological" addictions might be more similar to physical addictions than previously thought, the mechanism of opiate or nicotine addiction is generally quite different on a molecular level. Let's look, for example, at nicotine. The nicotine molecule binds to receptors in the brain called nicotinic acetylcholine receptors. When those receptors activate, dopamine accumulates in certain parts of the brain, which either directly or indirectly signals reward or reward expectation. Frustrated reward kicks off another biochemical pathway leading to the physical effects of withdrawal. Re-addition of the chemical quells the withdrawal, reinforcing the physical addiction. With something like a food addiction (aka compulsive overeating), the initial chemical event -- e.g. the binding of nicotine to a nicotinic receptor -- is absent. That said, a dopamine reward mechanism is still triggered, which reinforces the behavior. Further, recent research shows that compulsion -- frequently thought to be only a hallmark of the so-called psychological addictions -- actually plays a role in physical addictions as well. So, while you might be getting addicted to the alcohol in beer (another physical addiction), you're not ever going to become physically dependent on humulones.

So, what's going on with the whole hop-escalation thing, then? I've seen some scientists suggest that the culprit is sensory adaptation and habituation. Adaptation occurs when your perception of taste or smell dissipates over the course of exposure to the sensation. Adaptation happens quickly, usually over a few minutes, and reverts to the normal sensitivity within an hour or so. Habituation, on the other hand, means that for a long time after the initial exposure, sensitivity to the sensation remains diminished. Research indicates, for example, that capsaicin exposure has both an adaptation element (the heat in that salsa will only be bad for about 15 minutes), and a habituation element (for about a week afterward, that salsa will remain less "hot" to the test subject, which scientists suspect is why some people can tolerate much hotter foods than others).

I've found a fair bit of research out there on both bitter taste habituation and olfactory habituation; both kinds are important when dealing with hops, since "hoppiness" is really a mixture of an aroma experience and a bitter taste experience. In the case of olfactory adaptation and habituation, the mechanisms of change appear to be quite different. In a paper published in 2010, for example, the quick adaptation occurred mostly due to synaptic adaptation in the brain's cortex. With the long-term habituation, on the other hand, related changes occurred in the olfactory bulb rather than the brain. Anyway, so while I haven't seen much literature on hop bitterness and aroma adaptation and/or habituation, I wouldn't be surprised if there was an element to both driving the desire to drink 1,000-IBU** beers.

**It is not technically possible to brew a 1,000-IBU beer, but that doesn't stop brewers from engaging in a bit of exaggerated labeling.

If Only He Had Worn Glasses Dreamstime Unemployed? Maybe you should have worn glasses to your interview.

As an intern facing impending graduation and no firm job prospects, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that trying to land a job is more of an art than a science. After all, most of the advice floating around on nailing job interviews and increasing employability hews more to the "listen to what this executive says" side of the spectrum than the randomized double-blind trials side. Vagaries abound. "Stand out." "Do your research." Sure.

The science that is out there doesn't help much, either. Most of what aids or destroys you in your job hunt, it seems, are factors outside of your control, and some of this stuff is downright confusing. Are you too beautiful for the task at hand? Not beautiful enough? What's an enterprising job seeker to do?

According to the latest scientific research, all of these things:

Be good at annoying puzzles.
Think about the last time you felt powerful.
Wear glasses.
Have a firm handshake.
Have cross-cultural experience.
Have the same relationship status as your interviewer.
Be culturally similar to your employer.
Have a plan.
Love yourself.
Be a handsome man.
Don't be an attractive woman.
Really, don't be an attractive woman.
Don't have acne.
Don't be pregnant.
Don't be too skinny.
Don't be too fat.
Really, don't be too fat.
Don't say you are "creative" or have "extensive experience."
Be old.
Wait, no, don't be old.
Don't order wine at dinner.
Don't interview on the same day as your toughest competition.

Today on Toothpaste For Dinner: a riddle for you

Audio Data Compression Moehre1992 All of the compression algorithms are based on outdated understanding of how the human ear works.

Those music files -- be they MP3, AAC or WMA -- that you listen to on your portable music players are pretty crap when it comes to accurate sound reproduction from the original recording. But just how crap they really are wasn't known until now.

Audio data compression, at its heart, is pretty simple. A piece of software compresses a piece of digital audio data by chopping out redundancy and approximating the audio signal over a discrete period of time. The larger the sample time-period, the less precise the approximation. This is why an MP3 with a high sampling rate (short sample times) is of higher quality than an MP3 with a low sampling rate.

To test if the human ear was accurate enough to discern certain theoretical limits on audio compression algorithms, physicists Jacob N. Oppenheim and Marcelo O. Magnasco at Rockefeller University in New York City played tones to test subjects. The researchers wanted to see if the subjects could differentiate the timing of the tones and any frequency differences between them. The fundamental basis of the research is that almost all audio compression algorithms, such as the MP3 codec, extrapolate the signal based on a linear prediction model, which was developed long before scientists understood the finer details of how the human auditory system worked. This linear model holds that the timing of a sound and the frequency of that sound have specific cut-off limits: that is, at some point two tones are so close together in frequency or in time that a person should not be able to hear a difference. Further, time and frequency are related such that, a higher precision in one axis (say, time) means a corresponding decrease in the precision in the other. If human hearing follows linear rules, we shouldn't hear a degradation of quality (given high enough sampling rates -- we're not talking some horrible 192kbps rip) between a high-quality file and the original recording.

The experiment was broken up into five tasks that involved subjects listening to a reference tone coupled with a tone that varied from the reference. The tasks tested the following:

1) frequency differences only
2) timing differences only
3) frequency differences with a distracting note
4) timing differences with a distracting note
5) simultaneously determining both frequency and timing differences

I don't think it will come as a surprise to a lot of audiophiles, but human hearing most certainly does not have a linear response curve. In fact, during Task 5 -- what was considered the most complex of the tasks -- many of the test subjects could hear differences between tones with up to a factor of 13 more acuity than the linear model predicts. Those who had the most skill at differentiating time and frequency differences between tones were musicians. One, an electronic musician, could differentiate between tones sounded about three milliseconds apart -- remarkable because a single period of the tone only lasts 2.27 milliseconds. The same subject didn't perform as well as others in frequency differentiation. Another professional music was exceptional at frequency differentiation and good at temporal differentiation of the tones.

Even more interesting, the researchers found that composers and conductors had the best overall performance on Task 5, due to the necessity of being able to discern the frequency and timing of many simultaneous notes in an entire symphony orchestra. Finally, the researchers found that temporal acuity -- discerning time differences between notes -- was much better developed than frequency acuity in most of the test subjects.

So, what does this all mean? The authors plainly state that audio engineers should rethink how they approach audio compression -- and possibly jettison the linear models they use to achieve that compression altogether. They also suggest that revisiting audio processing algorithms will improve speech recognition software and could have applications in sonar research or radio astronomy. That's awesome, and all. But I can't say I look forward to re-ripping my entire music collection once those codecs become available.

Artist Rutherford Chang only collects first pressings of The Beatles' The White Album on vinyl. Dust & Grooves recently interviewed Chang about his collection.

Q: Are you a vinyl collector?

A: Yes, I collect White Albums.

Q: Do you collect anything other than that?

A: I own some vinyl and occasionally buy other albums, but nothing in multiples like the White Album.

Q: Why just White Album? why not Abbey road? or Rubber Soul?

A: The White Album has the best cover. I have a few copies of Abbey Road and Rubber Soul, but I keep those in my "junk bin".

Q: Why do you find it so great? It's a white, blank cover. Are you a minimalist?

A: I'm most interested in the albums as objects and observing how they have aged. So for me, a Beatles album with an all white cover is perfect.

Q: Do you care about the album's condition?

A: I collect numbered copies of the White Album in any condition. In fact I often find the "poorer" condition albums more interesting.

Chang's collection is currently on view at Recess in Soho, NYC until March 7th. Gotta get down there and see this. (via mr)

Tags: art   music   NYC   Rutherford Chang   The Beatles

Everyone enjoy this moment, since we may never again get to see Joanna Newsom’s name on the Us Weekly website. According to that venerable institution, Newsom and her boyfriend of five years, SNL vet and Lonely Island lead Andy Samberg, are engaged. Us Weekly also has a bunch of quotes from an anonymous friend who’s apparently delighted to discuss the particulars of their relationship: “He liked her music and would go to her shows. He had the biggest crush on her.” Stars: They’re just like us!

That same source also has things to say about Newsom’s feelings re: Samberg: “She respects what he does with his songs. She’s so proud of everything that he has accomplished… They have great chemistry.”

Let’s all take a moment to imagine now the next Bill Callahan album will sound.

One of the most popular recurring SNL hosts of recent years is returning to the show next month. Justin Timberlake, who's previously served as SNL host four times, is set to do it again on March 9th (and also double as musical guest), joining the show's esteemed Five-Timers Club. Timberlake will be spending a lot of time in 30 Rock this March, as he's also appearing as a guest on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon for an entire week (March 11-15th) following his SNL episode. This is all to promote his new album The 20/20 Experience, which comes out on March 19th and features the hit single "Suit & Tie." Justin Timberlake is the fourth musician to host SNL this season, following Bruno Mars, Adam Levine, and Justin Bieber. Despite how it looks, non-musicians are still allowed to host the show these days.

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The Nielsen Company has been the only arbiter of TV ratings for decades now (and an absurdly inaccurate one at that), and now the company is expanding to account for streaming (Netflix, Amazon) ratings too, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Beginning this fall, Nielsen will begin measuring data from Netflix, Amazon, and TV-enabled video game systems (XBox, PlayStation). They hope to start measuring iPad viewership sometime this year, as well. Despite Nielsen making this move, they'll only be able to measure how much time is being spent on Netflix, for example, and won't be able to collect data/release ratings on shows unless Netflix gives them permission. Oh, and this whole streaming measurement service will only cover the paltry 23,000 homes that Nielsen already samples. So, if you're not part of the 0.007% (seriously) of the US population that Nielsen bases all measurements of US TV viewership on, then this probably doesn't impact you or anyone you've ever met, probably. Congrats to that 0.007% for continuing to get to dictate what the 99.993% get to watch on TV!

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Some enterprising genius has registered the domain for Guy Fieri's (famously panned) restaurant in Times Square and put up a fake menu chock full of hilarious foodstuffs. For instance, the Hobo Lobo Bordello Slam Jam Appetizer:

We take 38 oz of super-saddened, Cheez-gutted wolf meat, lambast it with honey pickle wasabi and pile drive it into an Ed Hardy-designed bucket. Sprayed with Axe and finished with a demiglaze of thick & funky Mushroom Dribblins.

Also, "Add a Cinnabon and two more Cinnabons $4.95". Also, "superbanged". Also, "ranch hose".

Update: Copy for parts of the menu were crowdsourced from Twitter. Which doesn't make it any less funny...just that the person who made it is not an "enterprising genius". (via everyone)

Tags: food   Guy Fieri   restaurants

Social Oscars screenshot The Social Oscars is one of several statistical models now at work predicting this year's Oscar winners. Screenshot from the Social Oscars by Brandwatch and The Credits Choose your favorite data-driven model for predicting Oscar wins.

Forget what movie you actually liked. And forget the experts. The hot new way to predict winners is by using quantifiable data and rigorous statistical analyses. As one quantitative Oscar-predictor wrote in the Huffington Post, "This method is entirely mathematical: no personal hunches are taken into account." A little impersonal, but hey. This is life in the Nate Silver era. Herewith is our guide to some of the top mathematical models for predicting the Oscars:

PredictWise

Who
PredictWise is run by David Rothschild, an economist now with Microsoft Research.

How it works
PredictWise's Oscar projections combine data from several prediction markets, as well as data gathered from a game people can play to help with Rothschild's research. PredictWise's political forecasts use some numbers that don't apply to the Oscars, such as past election results and the state of the economy.

Past performance
Rothschild correctly predicted 50 out of 51 jurisdictions (the 50 states plus Washington, DC) in last year's election, but he doesn't seem to have tackled the Oscars before.

The predictions
Argo for best picture, Steven Spielberg (Lincoln) for best director, Daniel Day-Lewis (Lincoln) for best actor and Jennifer Lawrence (Silver Linings Playbook) for best actress. See the rest here.

Ben Zauzmer

Who
Zauzmer is a Harvard sophomore who blogs for the Huffington Post.

How it works
Zauzmer's model uses critics' scores, other award shoes and guild awards from the past 15 years, he wrote in the Huffington Post.

Past performance
Last year, of the 20 categories for which Zauzmer offered a prediction, he was correct for 15, including popular categories such as best picture, best director, best actor and best actress.

The predictions
Argo for best picture, Ang Lee (Life of Pi) for best director, Day-Lewis for best actor and Lawrence for best actress. See the rest here.

Peter Gloor

Who
Gloor is a researcher at MIT who studies the wisdom of the crowd in projects such as Wikipedia.

How it works
Gloor runs a statistical analysis on data that include some of the prediction markets PredictWise uses. His analysis also takes into account IMDb comments; however, unrelated comments such as those about actors' dating lives give the model trouble, Gloor told Vanity Fair.

Past performance
Last year, Gloor's model correctly pinned the best picture and best director wins, as well as 70 percent of the acting categories.

The predictions
Sadly, Gloor and his students didn't submit predictions for this year, as they're too involved in other projects.

The Social Oscars

Who
The Motion Picture Association of America apparently wanted in on the game. The association hired a data scientist, Edward Crook, to put together quantitative measures of public opinion, as culled from the Internet.

How it works
Crook's program pegs a "critics' choice" and "public choice" for each Oscar category by analyzing text from the Internet, including professional reviews, Facebook comments, tweets and forum posts. The program updates continually, so choices may change over time.

Past performance
This is a first-time effort for the Motion Picture Association of America.

The predictions
See the latest predictions here.

Farsite Forecast

Who
Farsite is an Ohio-based consultancy that makes statistical models.

How it works
The Farsite website doesn't offer an explanation of what data sources its model uses, but the New Scientist reported that critical sentiment and the Writer's Guild of America awards play roles.

Past performance
Oscar-predicting is a new venture for Farsite.

The predictions
Argo for best picture, Spielberg for best director, Day-Lewis for best actor and Lawrence for best actress. See the rest here (in the right sidebar).

The verdict

My pick for best model--based mostly on my gut--is Zauzmer, as he's done a fine job predicting the Oscars before. Meanwhile, the Social Oscars offers a cool way to see critics' and popular favorites, which the actual Oscars often snub.

Coffee beans Dreamstime

Coffee isn't just warm and energizing, it may also be extremely good for you.

In recent years and decades, scientists have studied the effects of coffee on various aspects of health and their results have been nothing short of amazing.

Here are 7 reasons why coffee may actually be one of the healthiest beverages on the planet.

1. Coffee Can Make You Smarter

Coffee doesn't just keep you awake, it may literally make you smarter as well.

The active ingredient in coffee is caffeine, which is a stimulant and the most commonly consumed psychoactive substance in the world.

Caffeine's primary mechanism in the brain is blocking the effects of an inhibitory neurotransmitter called Adenosine.

By blocking the inhibitory effects of Adenosine, caffeine actually increases neuronal firing in the brain and the release of other neurotransmitters like dopamine and norepinephrine (1, 2).

Many controlled trials have examined the effects of caffeine on the brain, demonstrating that caffeine can improve mood, reaction time, memory, vigilance and general cognitive function (3).

Bottom Line: Caffeine potently blocks an inhibitory neurotransmitter in the brain, leading to a net stimulant effect. Controlled trials show that caffeine improves both mood and brain function.

2. Coffee Can Help You Burn Fat and Improves Physical Performance

There's a good reason why you will find caffeine in most commercial fat burning supplements.

Caffeine, partly due to its stimulant effect on the central nervous system, both raises metabolism and increases the oxidation of fatty acids (4, 5, 6).

Caffeine can also improve athletic performance by several mechanisms, including by mobilizing fatty acids from the fat tissues (7, 8).

In two separate meta-analyses, caffeine was found to increase exercise performance by 11-12% on average (9, 10).

Bottom Line: Caffeine raises the metabolic rate and helps to mobilize fatty acids from the fat tissues. It can also enhance physical performance.

3. Coffee May Drastically Lower Your Risk of Type II Diabetes

Type II diabetes is a lifestyle-related disease that has reached epidemic proportions, having increased 10-fold in a few decades and now afflicting about 300 million people.

This disease is characterized by high blood glucose levels due to insulin resistance or an inability to produce insulin.

In observational studies, coffee has been repeatedly associated with a lower risk of diabetes. The reduction in risk ranges from 23% all the way up to 67% (11, 12, 13, 14).

A massive review article looked at 18 studies with a total of 457.922 participants. Each additional cup of coffee per day lowered the risk of diabetes by 7%. The more coffee people drank, the lower their risk (15).

Bottom Line: Drinking coffee is associated with a drastically reduced risk of type II diabetes. People who drink several cups per day are the least likely to become diabetic.

4. Coffee May Lower Your Risk of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's

Not only can coffee make you smarter in the short term, it may also protect your brain in old age.

Alzheimer's disease is the most common neurodegenerative disorder in the world and a leading cause of dementia.

In prospective studies, coffee drinkers have up to a 60% lower risk of Alzheimer's and dementia (16, 17, 18).

Parkinson's is the second most common neurodegenerative disorder, characterized by death of dopamine-generating neurons in the brain. Coffee may lower the risk of Parkinson's by 32-60% (19, 20, 21, 22).

Bottom Line Coffee is associated with a much lower risk of dementia and the neurodegenerative disorders Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

5. Coffee May be Extremely Good For Your Liver

The liver is a remarkable organ that carries out hundreds of vital functions in the body.

It is very vulnerable to modern insults such as excess consumption of alcohol and fructose.

Cirrhosis is the end stage of liver damage caused by diseases like alcoholism and hepatitis, where liver tissue has been largely replaced by scar tissue.

Multiple studies have shown that coffee can lower the risk of cirrhosis by as much as 80%, the strongest effect for those who drank 4 or more cups per day (23, 24, 25).

Coffee may also lower the risk of liver cancer by around 40% (26, 27).

Bottom Line: Coffee appears to be protective against certain liver disorders, lowering the risk of liver cancer by 40% and cirrhosis by as much as 80%.

6. Coffee May Decrease Your Risk of Dying

Many people still seem to think that coffee is unhealthy.

This isn't surprising though, since it is very common for conventional wisdom to be at exact odds with what the actual studies say.

In two very large prospective epidemiological studies, drinking coffee was associated with a lower risk of death by all causes (28).

This effect is particularly profound in type II diabetics, one study showing that coffee drinkers had a 30% lower risk of death during a 20 year period (29).

Bottom Line: Coffee consumption has been associated with a lower risk of death in prospective epidemiological studies, especially in type II diabetics.

7. Coffee is Loaded With Nutrients and Antioxidants

Coffee isn't just black water.

Many of the nutrients in the coffee beans do make it into the final drink, which actually contains a decent amount of vitamins and minerals.

A cup of coffee contains (30):

6% of the RDA for Pantothenic Acid (Vitamin B5).
11% of the RDA for Riboflavin (Vitamin B2).
2% of the RDA for Niacin (B3) and Thiamine (B1).
3% of the RDA for Potassium and Manganese.

May not seem like much, but if you drink several cups of coffee per day then this quickly adds up.

But this isn't all. Coffee also contains a massive amount of antioxidants.

In fact, coffee is the biggest source of antioxidants in the western diet, outranking both fruits and vegetables combined (31, 32, 33).

Bottom Line: Coffee contains a decent amount of several vitamins and minerals. It is also the biggest source of antioxidants in the modern diet.

Take Home Message

Even though coffee in moderate amounts is good for you, drinking way too much of it can still be harmful.

I'd also like to point out that many of the studies above were epidemiological in nature. Such studies can only show association, they can not prove that coffee caused the effects.

To make sure to preserve the health benefits, don't put sugar or anything nasty in your coffee! If it tends to affect your sleep, then don't drink it after 2pm.

At the end of the day, it does seem quite clear that coffee is NOT the villain it was made out to be.

If anything, coffee may literally be the healthiest beverage on the planet.

This article was republished with permission from Authority Nutrition.