May 09, 2008
Pancrat/flickr
Over the course of human history, the methods used to determine if someone is telling the truth have ranged from horrific to downright silly. The legend of La Bocca della Verita holds that if someone fibs with their hand in the mouth, it gets bitten off.
More recent research looks at brain activity during deception. We also interviewed Britton Chance about the possibility of remote lie detection using infrared examination of brain activity. New research directs our attention to the skin, where sweat gland activity may be detected from a distance. The helical structure of a sweat gland allows it to behave like an antenna for electromagnetic frequencies in the range of 100 GHz.
Skeptics note that this is just another way to detect stress, not lies. Even the researchers say the most appropriate application of the technology is to monitor medical patients or athletes.
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Posted by Justin Paul under:
Mouse in amaze
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The Centrifuge
May 08, 2008
Hello Jad here.
First off, thanks to everyone who sent me Starbucks cards for my birthday (what a nice surprise!)
And while we’re on the subject of ME, let me say a few words about about narcissism. Actually, no. What I’d really like to do is to play you a song I’ve had on repeat for the last month, a song about a boy who falls in love with another boy who lives in a river.
The singer of the song (Bradford Cox, of Atlas Sound) seems to be doing his own spin on the classic Narcissus myth.
Here’s an excerpt from Ovid’s version, written in 8 AD…
“While he is drinking he beholds himself reflected in the mirrored pool—and loves; loves an imagined body which contains no substance…He cannot move, for so he marvels at himself…consumed, and slowly wasted by a hidden flame…And in his body’s place a sweet flower grew, golden and white, the white around the gold.”
In Ovid’s telling, poor forlorn Narcissus stares so long at the `stranger’ in the water that he turns into a flower. A nice notion.
But why? What exactly is so nice about a guy so entranced with his own reflection that he starves and then drowns? Seems deranged to me.
Well, it turns out Ovid’s is not the only verison.
In 1896, two Oxford archaeologists discovered a giant rubbish heap outside the town of Oxyrhynchus, Egypt containing 7 centuries of trash (Grocery lists, census forms, porn, you name it). The dump was packed up into boxes, shipped to England, and for the past hundred years, scholars at Oxford have been working to read it all (much is very very faded). Recently, a guy named Ben Henry discovered a scrap of papyrus which contains the earliest known version of the Narcissus myth. The poem was written fifty years before Ovid, likely by a fellow named Parthenius. And Parthenius takes a much less romantic view of Narcissus.
Here listen…
If you do not see flash audio player please install the latest flash player.
In Parthenius’ version, before turning into a flower, Narcissus drowns in a pool of his own blood.
My guess is that Ovid read this version and thought “oh dear, that will never sell!” And so he did what Hollywood producers do all the time nowadays: he sanitized the ending.
But I think Parthenius had it right: obsessive self love can only end badly. With blood, not flowers.
Still, this song is amazing. It’s called River Card by Atlas Sound (a solo project from Bradford Cox of the band Deerhunter). Let me know what you think of it…
If you do not see flash audio player please install the latest flash player.
[1]
Posted by Radiolab under:
Jad's Musings
May 07, 2008
Isabella Rosellini stars in these gorgeous and bizarre bug sex videos. (She also wrote and directed these short films.) I will warn you, they are disturbing at times…but only in a nature-is-so-strange-as-to-be-utterly-unreal way.
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Posted by Ellen Horne under:
The Centrifuge
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