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History, Travel, Arts, Science, People, Places. How to Snap Back to Reality when "Escapism" Becomes “Avoidance” History, Travel, Arts, Science, People, Places. ELI5: Why does a white noise, such as a ceiling fan, help me fall asleep, but random noises annoy me while trying to sleep? : explainlikeimfive. Donald Trump's supporters on Reddit explain why they support Trump — and it's fascinating. Holy s**t, Prague's historical toilet museum is incredible. People desperately wrapped themselves in a line around the building. They simply had to go, obeying a primal urge that has escalated with each passing moment. The museum took matters into its own hands that fateful Prague Museum Night, employing a hurdy-gurdy player to appease the masses with generic songs cranked out just before its entrance, perhaps as a distraction.

Though the breathtaking exhibits of nearly fifty local museums were free and open to the public on this occasion, this unique, important, and unifying institution had drawn the biggest crowd by far. April Siese This hyped-up haven is the Museum of Historic Chamber Pots and Toilets, dedicated not just to shit but the tools we use to help us shit. I had a chance to make it into this scene after the crowds had been relieved, because a four-hour wait to see an excrement container just kind of seemed like bullshit. There's a history to each toilet and chamber pot, of course.

Souvenirs sadly aren't that plentiful, though. Quora. 6 stoner references in the plays of William Shakespeare. The literary Internet was recently stunned—or totally stoked—at the revelation that William Shakespeare might have been a stoner. The evidence came in the form of cannabis residue found on early 17th-century pipes unearthed in the playwright and poet's Stratford-upon-Avon garden. The discovery prompted many to speculate that the father of modern English may have composed his greatest works under the influence.

But we hardly need archaeologists to tell us this. The Bard's oeuvre is packed with countless references to his marijuana habit. To wit: 1) Much Ado About Nothing: Act V, Scene II MARGARET: Will you then write me a sonnet in praise of my beauty? This is considered by most scholars to be Shakespeare's clearest admission that he could not write his famously flowery lines without getting completely blunted first. 2) All's Well That Ends Well: Act II, Scene I Why render the number 24 as the awkward and wordy "four and twenty"? 3) Hamlet: Act IV, Scene IV 5) Julius Caesar: Act II, Scene I. Story of My Life: How Narrative Creates Personality. In Paul Murray's novel Skippy Dies, there’s a point where the main character, Howard, has an existential crisis.

“‘It’s just not how I expected my life would be,'" he says. “‘What did you expect?’” A friend responds. “Howard ponders this. But it's not stupid at all. “Life stories do not simply reflect personality. In the realm of narrative psychology, a person’s life story is not a Wikipedia biography of the facts and events of a life, but rather the way a person integrates those facts and events internally—picks them apart and weaves them back together to make meaning. “Sometimes in cases of extreme autism, people don’t construct a narrative structure for their lives,” says Jonathan Adler, an assistant professor of psychology at Olin College of Engineering, “but the default mode of human cognition is a narrative mode.” When people tell others about themselves, they kind of have to do it in a narrative way—that’s just how humans communicate.

It’s hardly a simple undertaking. The Boozy Underbelly of Saturday Morning Cartoons. For generations of American children, Saturday mornings have been synonymous with slurping down heaping bowls of sugar-laced cereal, wearing dinosaur-themed footie pajamas and—most importantly—watching cartoons. This animated sunrise ritual is nothing short of a transcendent experience for any child under the age of 10, hypnotizing even the bounciest kid into a slack-jawed trace. Similarly, even the mere mention of Loony Tunes or Hanna-Barbera is enough to illicit wistful, nostalgic sighs from most grown adults.

"Ah, yes, the cartoons of my youth," a Baby Boomer might muse, visions of Porky Pig dancing in his or her head. "Those shows were full of goofy antics, silly misadventure, mild political commentary … and copious amounts of alcohol. " Wait, what? The majority of us might more clearly remember Wile E. Scenes from Daffy Duck and Looney Tunes. ... animators had free reign to make their cartoons as sopped with gin, beer, and whiskey as their hearts desired. Be More Likable In Conversation by Making the Other Person an Expert. Romantic Phrases that Melt Hearts. Think tanks weather predixtion for 2016.

History, Travel, Arts, Science, People, Places. FYI, See Below. Technology The purpose (and the sorrow) of the worst kind of email—the passive-aggressive forward Please consider disabling it for our site, or supporting our work in one of these ways Subscribe Now > Email is the worst, but some emails are worse than others. The worst emails are forwards. Most work emails are purely defensive missives. Email has become the primary brick out of which such fortresses are fashioned. Somehow, this logic persists even despite the tragedy of the commons it produces. Amidst this dour situation, a special type of email emerges: the corporate forward. Some email forwards make specific requests and thereby consummate delegation. But a special variety of email forward always acts malignantly, as passive-aggressive labor. The gentler and more ambiguous of the two is the FYI.

It doesn’t really matter what the forward actually includes. This is what the corporate forward does. The granddaddy of perlocutionary email forwards is See below. Why? Seven Things Your IT Department Wishes You Knew About Tech Support. Better Than Raising the Minimum Wage. 3tva8TY.jpg (JPEG Image, 2448 × 3264 pixels) - Scaled (30%) DTAOL. “So many books, so little time.” ― Frank Zappa Earlier this week, the US Director of National Intelligence released a list of books and documents seized from Osama Bin Laden’s hideout in 2011. The list is much as you’d expect from the library of a sexually frustrated bore: A teetering pile of Chomsky and Palast, boxes bursting with conspiracy literature and military porn, along with reports from the Heritage Foundation and a guide to the video game Delta Force Extreme 2 (“The long awaited sequel to Delta Force: Xtreme.

More terrains, more maps, more weapons, more action!”) There's bathos and black comedy too: A blank Al Queda application form (actual question: “who should we contact in case you become a martyr?”) , a few scanned pages from the Guinness Book of Records (Uncle Sam declined to share which record Bin Laden was hoping to beat. Buried deep in a list headed “media articles” is this tantalizing bullet point: “Time [magazine], part of an article on a dive of America Online’s stock” Theorizing the Drone. Grégoire Chamayou | A Theory of the Drone | The New Press | January 2015 | Translated by Janet Lloyd | Originally published in France as Théorie du Drone by la Fabrique Editions, Paris, 2013 | 28 minutes (7,693 words) Below are four chapters excerpted from the book A Theory of the Drone, by French philosopher Grégoire Chamayou, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky.

Pattern-of-Life Analysis Enemy leaders look like everyone else; enemy combatants look like everyone else; enemy vehicles look like civilian vehicles; enemy installations look like civilian installations; enemy equipment and materials look like civilian equipment and materials. —American Defense Science Board “It is the strangest of bureaucratic rituals,” write two New York Times reporters. The criteria that go into making these lists of people condemned to death without trial remain unknown. The administration refuses to provide any information on this subject. Vulnerabilities Drones and Kamikazes Like this: Waiting for the Weekend - Witold Rybczynski. The word "weekend" started life as "week-end" but lost its hyphen somewhere along the way, ceasing to be merely the end of the week and acquiring, instead, an autonomous and sovereign existence.

"Have a good weekend," we say to one another—never "Have a good week. " Where once the week consisted of weekdays and Sunday, it now consists of weekdays and weekend. Ask most people to name the first day of the week and they will answer, Monday, of course; fifty years ago the answer would have been Sunday. Wall calendars still show Sunday as the first day of the week, and children are taught the days of the week starting with Sunday, but how long will these conventions last? Sunday, once the day of rest, has become merely one of two days of what is often strenuous activity.

Although we continue to celebrate the traditional religious and civic holidays—holy days—these now account for only a small portion of our total nonworking days, and are overshadowed by the 104 days of secular weekends. City in the sky: world's biggest hotel to open in Mecca | Art and design. Four helipads will cluster around one of the largest domes in the world, like sideplates awaiting the unveiling of a momentous main course, which will be jacked up 45 storeys into the sky above the deserts of Mecca. It is the crowning feature of the holy city’s crowning glory, the superlative summit of what will be the world’s largest hotel when it opens in 2017.

With 10,000 bedrooms and 70 restaurants, plus five floors for the sole use of the Saudi royal family, the £2.3bn Abraj Kudai is an entire city of five-star luxury, catering to the increasingly high expectations of well-heeled pilgrims from the Gulf. Modelled on a “traditional desert fortress”, seemingly filtered through the eyes of a Disneyland imagineer with classical pretensions, the steroidal scheme comprises 12 towers teetering on top of a 10-storey podium, which houses a bus station, shopping mall, food courts, conference centre and a lavishly appointed ballroom.

“These are the last days of Mecca,” says Alawi. Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) linked to lower maternal 25(OH)D levels | Vitamin D Council. Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a controversial developmental neuropsychiatric disorder in which there are significant problems with executive functions (e.g. attention control and lack of inhibition) that cause attention deficits, hyperactivity or impulsiveness.

Its prevalence in children is between 1% and 8% depending on which diagnostic criteria are used. Signs and symptoms of ADHD include but are not limited to difficulty focusing, inability to follow instructions, frequent fidgeting and excessive chatting. ADHD was first identified to the 1920s and stimulants such as amphetamine were first used in the 1940s. One of the most dramatic and paradoxical clinical changes one can see in clinical psychiatry is the effect of speed (amphetamine, Ritalin, Adderall) on a child with ADHD. On the first visit the child is running around the office, into everything, cannot sit still etc., but after taking speed the child sits calm and still.

Dr. Dr. Want Great Longevity and Health? It Takes a Village. How Technology Influenced Generation X. We’re an enigma, those of us born at the tail end of the 70s and the start of the 80s. Some of the “generational” experts lazily glob us on to Generation X, and others just shove us over to the Millennials they love to hate – no one really gets us or knows where we belong. We’ve been called Generation Catalano, Xennials, and The Lucky Ones, but no name has really stuck for this strange micro-generation that has both a healthy portion of Gen X grunge cynicism, and a dash of the unbridled optimism of Millennials.

A big part of what makes us the square peg in the round hole of named generations is our strange relationship with technology and the internet. We came of age just as the very essence of communication was experiencing a seismic shift, and it’s given us a unique perspective that’s half analog old school and half digital new school. You Have Died of Dysentery We were the first group of kids who grew up with household computers, but still novel enough to elicit confusion and wonder. Stray cat enters the home of a blind dog and becomes his guide - CanCats.Net. Here we have a wonderful heart warming story of the bond that is possible between a cat and a dog. In 2012, a stray cat entered the home of a blind dog named Terfel, and became his seeing-eye guide. Terfel had been diagnosed with cataracts and was finding it very difficult to navigate around the house.

In fact, so bad was his condition the poor dog was confined to his basket to stop him from bumping into things. However, after his owner allowed a stray cat to enter her home the dog was given a new lease of life and an incredible new friend. Blind dog Terfel is finding his way around again thanks to a stray cat that entered his home. “One night a tomcat arrived here. He just stood there outside my front door and looked at me as to say: ‘I want to be a house cat, ‘” the dog’s owner, Mrs Godfrey-Brown, from Holyhead, North Wales told the Daily Post. Rather than fighting like the proverbial cat and dog, the cat immediately approached Terfel and seemed to sense his condition.

Report: German woman, 65, gives birth to quadruplets. But not for Annegret Raunigk. The 65-year-old German grandmother recently gave birth to quadruplets, making her the oldest woman ever to do so. The new arrivals increase her progeny to a total of 17 children. And let's not forget her seven grandchildren. Raunigk, a single mother, gave birth last week to three boys and one girl after a pregnancy of just under 26 weeks, the German broadcaster RTL reported. The newborns -- whose names are Neeta, Dries, Bence and Fjonn -- were delivered by C-section and are being kept in incubators for premature babies, according to RTL.

Daughter wanted a younger sibling Raunigk, a teacher from Berlin, made headlines 10 years ago when, at the age of 55, she gave birth to a daughter, Leila. "I myself find life with children great," Raunigk said earlier this year. To become pregnant, she used in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment with donated eggs that were fertilized. Indian woman holds record Her daughter Naveen will turn 7 later this year. The Simple Logical Puzzle That Shows How Illogical People Are. In the 1960s, the English psychologist Peter Wason devised an experiment that would revolutionize his field. This clever puzzle, known as the “Wason selection task,” is often claimed to be “the single most investigated experimental paradigm in the psychology of reasoning,” in the words of one textbook author. Wason was a funny and clever man and an idiosyncratic thinker.

His great insight was to treat reasoning as an enigma, something to scrutinize both critically and playfully. He told his colleagues, for instance, that he would familiarize himself with their work only after doing his own experiments, so as not to bias his own mind. He also said that before running experiments, researchers—quixotically—should never really know exactly why they were doing them. “The purpose of his experiments was not usually to test a hypothesis or theory, but rather to explore the nature of thinking,” a pair of his students wrote in Wason’s obituary. (He died in 2003.)

Not convinced? A Home Air Quality Monitor That Can Be Checked Out From The Library. The Speck air quality monitor costs $200, but is available to all through Pittsburgh's public library system. Carnegie Mellon University CREATE Lab hide caption itoggle caption Carnegie Mellon University CREATE Lab The Speck air quality monitor costs $200, but is available to all through Pittsburgh's public library system. Carnegie Mellon University CREATE Lab Air pollution comes from many sources — power plants, industrial production and fires, to name a few. In Pittsburgh, the most polluted city east of California, according the American Lung Association, avoiding dirty air while outdoors can be difficult, if not impossible.

But a new device, available through the public library system, helps people identify and reduce bad air quality inside their homes. John Horchner, one of those people, has been eagerly waiting to check out a Speck air quality monitor from Pittsburgh's Carnegie Library for a few weeks. "There is no such thing as moderate particles," Horchner insists. It’s Memorial Day weekend, and these mattress salesmen will not rest. Rollingstone. POng9wL. DEFINE_ME_WA. How to Build an Emergency Budget (and Why You Need One) Coil Your Extension Cords Like a Roadie with the Over-Under Method. Why You Shouldn't Try to Humblebrag in a Job Interview. 10 Valuable Lessons for First-Time Home Buyers. Delayed Umbilical Cord Clamping May Benefit Children Years Later. Quora. Fight Procrastination by Facing Your Discomfort Head On. Quora. 'Game of Thrones' Predictions: What's Going to Happen Next?

Tah5l8o. The New York Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia. Quora. DGTijRM. West Texas oilfield waste. Freefall slide. This Is the Story of the Hamburger -- Grub Street. Geometrical plants. Elon Musk's growing empire is fueled by $4.9 billion in government subsidies. Go Ask Alice. EmTech Digital Kicks Off with Advancements in Artificial Intelligence.

Glencoe, Scotland. Modern Design Tools: Adaptive Layouts. Mechanical_gifs. FBI behind mysterious surveillance aircraft over US cities. What We Can Learn From Insanely Rich Parents | TIME. Quora. Did America Win or Lose the Iraq War? Suzanne Sadedin's answer to How can I stop my son from saying no? Quora. Roots and Benefits of Costly Giving. Quora. How to Pay Off Debt and Still Take Your Dream Vacation. Microbes help produce serotonin in gut -- ScienceDaily. The Psychology Of Skyscrapers. America Isn’t the World’s Most Respected Country. But It Is a Superpower | TIME. Pretty soon millennials will buy everything online; Parachute raises $3.75M to check bedding off the list. Keep Yourself from Rambling with the "Traffic Light Rule" ELI5: Why do public toilet seats have a gap in the front and household toilet seats don't? : explainlikeimfive. Hidden Secret Passages by Creative Home Engineering.

How to Avoid the Most Common Grilling Mistakes. The Only Way to Stop Stressing About a Task Is to Finally Start It. An Obstacle Course to Benefit All Robot-Kind. U.S. Workers Ask: Where’s My Raise? Five Huge Industries That Never Saw Disruption Coming. The High Price Of What We Eat : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture. Exes Played "Truth Or Drink" And It Was Wonderfully Awkward. The Fisher Kings | Hakai Magazine.

The Graphic Shows the Best and Worst Sleeping Positions for Common Pains. How Mobile Phone Data Reveals the True Toll of Mass Layoffs. Aziz Ansari weighs in on modern love (and offers a stark lesson for consumer web startups) Quora. Why Inequality Matters. How To Make Your Batteries Last Longer. Science Magazine: Sign In. History, Travel, Arts, Science, People, Places. The Anti-Poverty Experiment. Wall Street gets the Clintons - Business Insider. Quora. Engaged? This is how much you’d make by skipping your wedding and investing instead. Why Doesn't the United States Use the Metric System?

ELI5:What is the "body buzz" you get from narcotics and hallucinogens and why hasnt someone made a safe drug that produces those effects yet? : explainlikeimfive. Quora. Move to Allow U.S. Oil Exports Accelerates. Lettuce eat: First space-grown vegetables on the menu for NASA astronauts. America's Slums Are Getting Worse As More People Live in Concentrated Poverty. Why Wal-Mart's Labor Issues Run Deeper Than Too Much Justin Bieber. Quora.