Month: December 2010

Laurence Lowe profiles Michelito Lagravere, the 12 year-old Mexican bullfighter:

Ask him if he remembers his first kill and he says, "It was October 27, 2005, in my mother's home state of Tabasco. I was 6 years old." Four years later he tried to set a Guinness World Record for novice bullfighters (novilleros) by slaying six bulls in a single appearance—and succeeded, but Guinness refused to recognize it. ("We do not accept records based on the killing or harming of animals," its website explained.)

This past June, Michelito became the youngest matador ever to perform in the world's largest bullfighting arena; he was such a hit that he was invited back in August. That time, Michelito got knocked to the ground by a big black bull by the name of Manguero—coming dangerously close to catching its horn; but he managed to pick himself up, then to thrust his sword between the bull's shoulder blades. Manguero knelt in the sand and took his last breath, and as Michelito stood over his kill, his face smeared with blood, the crowd at Plaza Mexico went berserk.

Aurora Borealis timelapse HD – Tromsø 2010 from Tor Even Mathisen on Vimeo.

(Hat tip: Fubiz)

A noun.

"I’ll bet a hundred dollars that I can teach you—if you can’t even tune a guitar—the rock song of your choice in ninety minutes. I might need some preparation before we start the stopwatch, depending on the meaning of the word rock, and you might not articulate the hairier arpeggiations as dexterously as you’d like. But I’ll get a recognizable structure under your fingers: zero to sixty in ninety minutes.

I played music professionally, drunker than a boiled owl, for almost fifteen years. I can read treble clef OK, and I still have all my fingers. I could get a couple of pages of Bach’s Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue under my belt if I didn’t have anything else to do, but not in any kind of ninety minutes. And I guarantee you I could never learn it for piano, not in any convincing sense. I won’t live long enough. The mirror of art also shows us what we are not," – J D. Daniels.

Matt Schwartz reveals the tricks of the trade for a whole new generation of internet shoppers and bargain junkies:

[T]hanks to forums that aggregate the collective urge to save money, novice deal hunters have access to FAQs and tutorials addressing everything from the inventory cycle at Target to methods of handling hostile cashiers. For those who know where to look, these sites form a sort of WikiLeaks of secret deals, a searchable directory of rock-bottom prices and money-saving techniques as labyrinthine and cunning as the retail universe it seeks to map. In this world, each product has two prices. First there’s the suggested retail price—”a blatant lie,” as Jeffrey Tan, a top-ranking SlickDeals user, calls it—paid by everyone else. Then there’s the real price, available only to the deal-hunting elite.

Daniel Hamermesh argues for a smarter hotel pricing system:

I spent three nights recently in the guest house at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo.  Very pleasant — and it was priced at $20/night (obviously heavily subsidized).  In addition, however, there was a one-time $16 charge for cleaning at the end of my stay.

This pricing scheme was clever since cleaning of the room, and certainly of linens, is typically done in full only at the end of a several-day stay.  Why should someone pay the same per night for a one-day stay as for a three-day stay?  They shouldn’t.  Pricing like this in hotels more generally would reflect hotels’ costs more accurately and prevent long-stay guests from subsidizing short-stay guests.

A new website Spacelog lets you relive NASA's early missions by recreating the full transcripts. As Alexis Madrigal put it:

[T]hey've transformed the NASA transcripts into a series of searchable, linkable pages that look like Twitter conversations.

(Video from Al Reinert's amazing 1989 documentary For All Mankind)

Elizabeth Pisani explains (pdf) why large amounts of data collected by organizations like Google and Facebook could change science for the better, and how it already has. Here she recounts the work of John Graunt from the 17th century:

Graunt collected mortality rolls and other parish records and, in effect, threw them at the wall, looking for patterns in births, deaths, weather and commerce. … He scraped parish rolls for insights in the same way as today’s data miners transmute the dross of our Twitter feeds into gold for marketing departments. Graunt made observations on everything from polygamy to traffic congestion in London, concluding: “That the old Streets are unfit for the present frequency of Coaches… That the opinions of Plagues accompanying the Entrance of Kings, is false and seditious; That London, the Metropolis of England, is perhaps a Head too big for the Body, and possibly too strong.”

She concludes:

A big advantage of Big Data research is that algorithms, scraping, mining and mashing are usually low cost, once you’ve paid the nerds’ salaries. And the data itself is often droppings produced by an existing activity. “You may as well just let the boffins go at it. They’re not going to hurt anyone, and they may just come up with something useful,” said [Joe] Cain.

We still measure impact and dole out funding on the basis of papers published in peerreviewed journals. It’s a system which works well for thought-bubble experiments but is ill-suited to the Big Data world. We need new ways of sorting the wheat from the chaff, and of rewarding collaborative, speculative science.

Daniel Tomasulo explains why a bigger smile that extends to your cheeks, eyes and the crow's feet around them (known as a Duchenne smile) is more genuine than one that doesn't, and what that implies for your future happiness:

In the longitudinal study of Mills College graduates, Keltner and colleague LeeAnne Harker coded the smiles of 114 women who had their university yearbook photo taken sometime during 1958 and 1960. All but three of the young women smiled. However, 50 had Duchenne smiles and 61 had non-Duchenne, courtesy smiles.

The genuine smile group were more likely to get and stay married, and had higher score evaluations of physical and emotional wellbeing. Remarkably, Keltner’s study was able to find this connection more than 30 years after the college photos were taken.

This doesn't bode well for Nicole Kidman.

An Indian Kashmiri Shiite Muslim bleeds after flagellating himself with a cluster of knives during a religious procession in Srinagar on December 14,2010, held on the seventh day of Muharram, which commemorates the slaying of the Prophet Mohammed's grandson in southern Iraq in the seventh century. During the Shiite Muslim holy month of Muharram, large processions are formed and the devotees parade the streets holding banners and carrying models of the mausoleum of Hazrat Imam Hussain and his people, who fell at Karbala. Shiites show their grief and sorrow by inflicting wounds on their own bodies with sharp metal tied to a chain with which they scourge themselves in order to depict the sufferings of the martyrs. By Tauseef Mustafa/AFP/Getty Images.