They all say the same thing, according to David McCandless:
The bulk of the words in horoscopes (at least 90%) are the same. That’s not a full, proper statistical analysis. (If you are a statistician and you want to do a proper analysis, please get in touch) The cool thing is, once you’ve isolated the most common words, you can actually write a generic, meta prediction that would apply to all star signs, every day of the year.
Continuing the thread, Scott Adams envisions a future where digital composites of people can live forever online:
You'd run a program in the background that monitors your Facebook changes and all of your email conversations. Together with your photos, your resume, and all of your shopping and entertainment preferences, the program running in the cloud could piece together an avatar of you. … Artificial intelligence will get to the point where all you need to do is seed it with an individual's personality and it will do the rest. People of the future will be able to have extended conversations with loved ones who have passed. The generation who personally knew the departed might detect slight flaws in the personality of the digital copy, but to the third generation, great granddad's ghost would appear as real as anyone they know.
Jeffrey Young profiles MIT's Sherry Turkle, author of Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other. On the future of robot companionship:
During her research, Turkle visited several nursing homes where residents had been given robot dolls, including Paro, a seal-shaped stuffed animal programmed to purr and move when it is held or talked to. In many cases, the seniors bonded with the dolls and privately shared their life stories with them.
"There are at least two ways of reading these case studies," she writes. "You can see seniors chatting with robots, telling their stories, and feel positive. Or you can see people speaking to chimeras, showering affection into thin air, and feel that something is amiss."
A 12 year old explains the facts of life to her mother:
The Internet is a very beautiful thing if used properly.
When a person loves a funny video very much, he or she may want to share it with someone special to them. This is called linking and if done properly, it can bring people together in a very special union of love: usually the love of sneezing animals, or bed intruders, or Bill O'Reilly having a temper tantrum. But it's important to be sparing when you send your links. You don't want to become the neighborhood outbox, constantly forwarding yourself around. Nobody wants that kind of reputation. Trust me, you do not want to be known as a "spammer."
Now when someone has a lot of things they want to say, they may want to try blogging. Blogging is a kind of social intercourse, and should only be tried after years of experience with the Internet. Think of a blog as a newspaper that people actually read. It's a very personal thing, and you need healthy boundaries. For example, you can't go around blogging about the time I peed my pants when we went to see Ice Age like you told that woman in line at TJ Maxx yesterday.
Presidential candidate Manuel Alegre, supported by the socialist party and the extreme-left, kisses a red flower after a campaign rally in downtown Porto on January 21, 2011, a day before the first round of presidential elections. Alegre receives 22 to 25.6 of the vote according to the polls published by Portuguese media. Recent polls indicate a majority of Portuguese continue to support incumbent president. By Miguel Riopa/AFP/Getty Images.
Tracy Clark-Flory interviews Sheril Kirshenbaum, author of The Science of Kissing:
Certain parts of the female anatomy, especially with our primate ancestors, were enhanced with red, and it especially had to do with the female being ready to reproduce. As our ancestors began to walk upright, rather than males being attracted to the female's posterior, they began to focus on the breasts and the lips — they call this "genital echoes." In research on lip color, men consistently choose the women wearing the bright red lipstick as the most attractive — there's this power to making the lips slightly redder. There's a lot of evidence to back up the existence of the makeup industry.
Kirshenbaum also connects kissing to breastfeeding:
Nursing is a very pleasurable activity. The lips are so sensitive to stimulus, and the hormone oxytocin, which is involved in social bonding and attachment, is stimulated in the infant and the mother during nursing. We start to associate this bonding with lip pressure.
Carl Zimmer revisits one of evolution's "most durable mysteries" – the origin of feathers:
The closest living relatives of birds, dinosaurs, and pterosaurs are crocodilians. Although these scaly beasts obviously do not have feathers today, the discovery of the same gene in alligators that is involved in building feathers in birds suggests that perhaps their ancestors did, 250 million years ago, before the lineages diverged. So perhaps the question to ask, say some scientists, is not how birds got their feathers, but how alligators lost theirs.
TDW captions:
Behold: A flash based on a voice track about a review of another flash. May it allow you to live forever in the limitless shadow of its never-ending greatness.
John McKinney reports on the restorative benefits of nature. In one study:
Students were given long tests of sequences of numbers to repeat in reverse then sent on walks — half the study participants on a nature walk and half on a city walk. Upon re-testing, the nature walkers’ scores improved significantly while the city walkers’ did not. The experiment was repeated so that each student walked in nature and in the city, and everyone’s score was better after the nature walk.
Stow, Ohio, 3 pm
The Dish 