Very well made – and shocking.

This is how the male pufferfish attracts female mates:

Source: “Role of Huge Geometric Circular Structures in the Reproduction of a Marine Pufferfish” by Hiroshi Kawase, Yoji Okata, & Kimiaki Ito (2013).

IRONY (n.) – dropping your IPhone in Apple juice.

INTERNET (n.) – where grammar goes to die.

THERE (n.) – they same thing as “their” or “they’re”, especially if you’re an idiot.

LAUGHTER (n.) – when a smile has an orgasm.

Source: theberry.com

A nice way to circumscribe what we call self-serving biases and heuristics in psychology:

“It’s like you mortals have stockholm syndrome with your own histories!”
- Source: SMBC comics

“I hope that you are a disaster. I’m sorry, but I do. I hope that you are thunder and lightning. I hope you are a forest fire, I hope you kill the dead wood and burn off the rotting leaves. With the canopy gone, the sun can get in. You need new growth. I hope you’re terrible and broken and perfect.”

– Joey Comeau

“Guns require a finger to pull the trigger. The sad young man who did that in Newtown was clearly haunted by demons and no gun law could have saved the children in Sandy Hook Elementary from his terror. There is evil prowling in the world — it shows up in our movies, video games and online fascinations, and finds its way into vulnerable hearts and minds. As a free people, let us choose what kind of people we will be. Laws, the only redoubt of secularism, will not suffice. Let us all return to our places of worship and pray for help.”
- Texas Governor Rick Perry

It is very hard for me grasp that a person who (1) has these beliefs and (2) has openly shared them for decades was actually somehow elected into one of the highest political offices in the US, and even ran for presidency.

(Source: nydailynews.com)

A great and very inspiring blog post by David Cain about what he calls “9 mind-bending epiphanies”. I am usually allergic to other people sharing their wisdom, but this post is absolutely worth reading.

“4. Most of life is imaginary.
Human beings have a habit of compulsive thinking that is so pervasive that we lose sight of the fact that we are nearly always thinking. Most of what we interact with is not the world itself, but our beliefs about it, our expectations of it, and our personal interests in it. We have a very difficult time observing something without confusing it with the thoughts we have about it, and so the bulk of what we experience in life is imaginary things. As Mark Twain said: “I’ve been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.” The best treatment I’ve found? Cultivating mindfulness.”

“On Tuesday 10/30/12 The City of Ann Arbor will need to have access to your apartment to inspect all new windows. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.”

I could be worse. Imagine I would be living in NY City …

Also called: The Psychoanalysis Interest Group Incident

I lost faith in academia today. For a while. But then there was some hope.

Ok, that’s not what happened. Let’s put it the way it was: there was so much stupidity mental hilariousness coming from people who should know better that I feel the urge to write this down here in a hopefully funny way to get me through the day fairly unscathed.

As happens from time to time, I was invited to some kind of University of Michigan group or event via email. Together with many other people, that is. These emails usually go to lists, like anthropology-grad-students, psychology-undergrads, law-faculty, et cetera. I don’t mind getting these emails, a couple per day – it keeps me up to date. And more often than not, especially the interdisciplinary events are pretty amazing. I have my gmail filter set in a way that all these announcements don’t appear in my important inbox, and I read them when I feel like it.

However, today was different. A person wrote an email about a psychoanalysis interest group […], to many different mailing lists. There was a reply, and a short discussion started, about this interest group, and how important it is for everybody to really get to know more about psychoanalysis. I guess there were 5 replies or so. Obviously, people always replied to everybody. I don’t know what they thought, seeing email addresses like the ones mentioned above in the address field. Probably there wasn’t a lot of thinking going on.

In any case, at some point a bold student replied:

“Please stop “Replying to All”!!! Thanks!”

And I thought: YES. I want your babies, Shana. And I thought: that’s it then. Problem solved. That was about 17 hours ago. Emails still keep coming in, the last on about half an hour ago. But let’s not be too hasty. What happened next?
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