You know how when you’re stoned, all of a sudden, you can hear the refrigerator in the next room buzzing right in your ear?
While adults automatically block out irrelevant information, such as the hum of an air conditioner or the conversation of nearby strangers, babies take everything in: their reality arrives without a filter. … The hyperabundance of thoughts in the baby brain also reflects profound differences in the ways adults and babies pay attention to the world. … “This is the same ecstatic feeling that the Romantic poets were always writing about,” she says. “It’s seeing the world in a grain of sand.”
Odd that the Boston Globe wouldn’t bother to answer the reader’s most immediate question.
Given the longstanding and widespread sexual repression of women in both Western and Eastern societies, it is not surprising that only recently has anorgasmia (failure to experience orgasm) been identified and treated. Nonetheless, the real biological mystery isn’t why some women don’t climax, but why some do….
3. Best back-handed compliment (Ayn Rand)
I can only report that The End of Poverty, narrated throughout by Martin Sheen, puts Ayn Rand back on the map as an accurate and indeed insightful cultural commentator.
4. Psychology of self-castration
A large proportion (∼40%) of wannabes’ interest in castration was singularly of a fetishistic nature, and these men appeared to be at a relatively low risk of irreversible genital mutilation. … Nineteen percent of all wannabes have attempted self-castration, yet only 10% have sought medical assistance.
5. Snooty people HATE The Da Vinci Code
DVC was one of my finest Net Flix choices to date. And yet:
Salman Rushdie has called The Da Vinci Code “a book so bad that it makes bad books look good”, while the American grammarian Mark Lieberman has labelled Brown “one of the worst prose stylists in the history of literature”.
Maybe Salman should have waited for the movie, which by the way I bet Padma loooved.
A spokeswoman for Strathclyde Police confirmed: “At the time of the request, 10 (eight police officers and two police staff) had recorded their religion as Jedi.” … About 390,000 people listed their religion as Jedi in the 2001 Census for England and Wales. In Scotland the figure was a reported 14,000.
A Fistful of Science 