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52 Myths and Misconceptions. A little ass music: Hieronymus Bosch’s 500-year-old butt song from hell. Another mark in the “why the Internet rules” column: an Oklahoma college student named Amelia has transcribed the music written on the ass of a figure from the “Hell” panel of Hieronymus Bosch ’s famous triptych painting The Garden of Earthly Delights , and posted a recording of it to her Tumblr. Listen to it here. It’s not the most mind-blowing music you’ll hear in your life, I know, but it’s still wonderful that this was done.

There it is. Wonder why it took five centuries before someone played it? Music geeks may have noticed that the staff on the man’s butt (must resist obvious joke) has only four lines. If you’ll indulge a nitpick—on her blog, Amelia calls this “LITERALLY the 600-years-old butt song from hell.” If you’re curious to know more about the Bosch painting, it can be viewed at The Prado. Many thanks to Rob Galo for bringing this to my attention. This Is Why You're Late All The Time (And What To Do About It) Last week, HuffPost blogger Greg Savage asked the question, "How Did It Get to be OK for People to Be Late for Everything? " And if the 350,000 Facebook likes (and counting) on his post are any indication, he's not the only one wondering. Savage wrote: It's simply that some people no longer even pretend that they think your time is as important as theirs.

And technology makes it worse. It seems texting or emailing that you are late somehow means you are no longer late. But while the behavior of keeping someone waiting on you is, decidedly, rude, it doesn't necessarily mean your tardy friend is doing it on purpose, or that he or she is a rude, inconsiderate person -- in fact, there are several psychological and perhaps even physiological components that can contribute to being perpetually late. "Lateness is really a commonly misunderstood problem," says Diana DeLonzor, author of Never Be Late Again, who has conducted her own research on the perpetually tardy. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. No, you are not ‘running late’, you are rude and selfish | Career Insights. Man, do we HOPE we’re timely in passing this content onto to you.

Greg Savage, founder of Firebrand (an Aquent brand down under) posted this no-holds-barred post about the importance of showing up on time. We thought it was too good not to share. Greg, we should mention, has founded four incredibly successful staffing businesses and is a highly-sought after international keynote speaker. This post may offend some readers. But only because it’s going to cut close to the bone for many. And I don’t care if I sound old-fashioned, because actually it’s nothing to do with ‘fashion’ or ‘generation’. So here goes… How did it get to be “OK” for people to be late for everything? Because as far as I am concerned, it’s not OK. In recent years it seems that a meeting set to start at 9 am, for some people means in the general vicinity of any time which starts with the numeral ‘9’.

People drift in at 9.10 or 9.20, or even later. And it’s not only business. And it is not that we lead ‘busy lives’. Rubbish. New Clock May End Time As We Know It. Strontium atoms floating in the center of this photo are the heart of the world's most precise clock. The clock is so exact that it can detect tiny shifts in the flow of time itself. Courtesy of the Ye group and Brad Baxley/JILA hide caption itoggle caption Courtesy of the Ye group and Brad Baxley/JILA Strontium atoms floating in the center of this photo are the heart of the world's most precise clock. Courtesy of the Ye group and Brad Baxley/JILA "My own personal opinion is that time is a human construct," says Tom O'Brian. To him, days, hours, minutes and seconds are a way for humanity to "put some order in this very fascinating and complex universe around us. " We bring that order using clocks, and O'Brian oversees America's master clock.

"We can measure time much better than the weight of something or an electrical current," he says, "but what time really is, is a question that I can't answer for you. " The New Clock In fact, this knot of wires and lasers actually is the clock. The Antichrist of Early-20th-Century Photography. William Mortensen, “Untitled (staked witch scene)” (ca. 1927), silver gelatin print, montaged effect (all images courtesy Stephen Romano Gallery unless otherwise noted) Violence, nudity, and the occult collide in the photographs of William Mortensen, an American photographer who gained prominence in the 1930s and ’40s but today largely exists as an obscure name in the medium’s history. William Mortensen: American Grotesque, which recently opened at Stephen Romano Gallery, revisits Mortensen’s oeuvre in a solo show featuring over 50 of the artist’s works, some displayed for the first time.

On view are scenes of impending murder, sensual witches on brooms, and many portraits of young, nude women throwing coy glances at the camera. Before he fully turned his lens on the risqué, Mortensen built a reputation as a commercial photographer in Hollywood, where his unceasing interest in highly staged settings, post-production effects, and the growing cinematic genre of horror had its roots. The Medium Is the Message, 50 Years Later. He had a thing for clip-on neckties. He once said LSD was the lazy man’s form of Finnegans Wake. When deciding whether a book was worth reading, he’d flip through its table of contents then skip ahead to page 69. If page 69 offered no insight, he’d put the book down and move onto the next. In a 1951 letter to Ezra Pound, he described himself as an “intellectual thug.” That man was eclectic Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan, who lived from 1911 to the very last day of 1980, the same year CNN launched.

Along with the success of his 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy, which describes how changes in communication technologies (e.g. the printing press) fundamentally alter people’s orientation to the world, Understanding Media propelled McLuhan into the realm of pop-culture priesthood. Still, McLuhan had his detractors. “People who don’t like McLuhan in the academic world are either lazy, stupid, jealous, or some combination.” Feast Your Eyes on This Beautiful Linguistic Family Tree. 2873 260ShareNew When linguists talk about the historical relationship between languages, they use a tree metaphor. An ancient source (say, Indo-European) has various branches (e.g., Romance, Germanic), which themselves have branches (West Germanic, North Germanic), which feed into specific languages (Swedish, Danish, Norwegian).

Lessons on language families are often illustrated with a simple tree diagram that has all the information but lacks imagination. There’s no reason linguistics has to be so visually uninspiring. Also worth checking out is the page before the tree, where she gives a comparison chart of words in the Nordic languages, and illustrates what an outlier Finnish is with the concept of “meow.” Read Stand Still. These Guys Want to Hack Your Home. And You Should Let Them | Wired Enterprise. Web applications don’t have physical properties, so it can be hard to know what you can use them for. But by making it clear what different apps can do and how they can be stitched together, IFTTT makes it possible to use web applications in ways the original developers didn’t intend. IFTTT — and alternatives like the open source alternative Hugin or the business-oriented service Zapier — have become a standard part of the Quantified Self toolkit, letting users automate and analyze their lives.

This sort of thing is creeping into businesses, too. For example, the Portland, Oregon based mobile design and development firm Citizen has been building a system to analyze the effects of everything from lighting to exercise on employee productivity. Perhaps more importantly, IFTTT is giving power to people who don’t know the first thing about coding. There’s been a great push in recent years to train more people to program. At the moment, IFTTT only works with pre-selected services. Intelligence in the Human-Machine, Duet for Cello and Brainwaves. Listen To A Concert Cellist Play A Duet With Her Brain | WAMU 88.5 - American University Radio. Hunter S. Thompson's 1958 cover letter for a newspaper job. Intellect. Art. Texts : Essays: First Series : ART from Essays: First Series (1841) Ralph Waldo Emerson Give to barrows, trays, and pans Grace and glimmer of romance; Bring the moonlight into noon Hid in gleaming piles of stone; On the city's paved street Plant gardens lined with lilac sweet; Let spouting fountains cool the air, Singing in the sun-baked square; Let statue, picture, park, and hall, Ballad, flag, and festival, The past restore, the day adorn, And make each morrow a new morn.

So shall the drudge in dusty frock Spy behind the city clock Retinues of airy kings, Skirts of angels, starry wings, His fathers shining in bright fables, His children fed at heavenly tables. 'T is the privilege of Art Thus to play its cheerful part, Man in Earth to acclimate, And bend the exile to his fate, And, moulded of one element With the days and firmament, Teach him on these as stairs to climb, And live on even terms with Time; Whilst upper life the slender rill Of human sense doth overfill. ESSAY XII _Art_ Goodbye to MBTI, the Fad That Won't Die | Adam Grant. My name is Adam Grant, and I am an INTJ. That’s what I learned from a wildly popular personality test, which is taken by more than 2.5 million people a year, and used by 89 of the Fortune 100 companies. It’s called the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), and my score means that I’m more introverted than extraverted, intuiting than sensing, thinking than feeling, and judging than perceiving. As I reflected on the results, I experienced flashes of insight.

Although I spend much of my time teaching and speaking on stage, I am more of an introvert — I’ve always preferred a good book to a wild party. And I have occasionally kept lists of my to-do lists. But when I took the test a few months later, I was an ESFP. Now, if you’re an MBTI fan, you might say it’s typical of an INTJ to turn to science. 1. 2. 3. 4. Even introversion-extraversion, the trait the MBTI captured best, is incomplete. Caught in a Bad RomanceWhy does the MBTI remain so popular in spite of these problems? The Strange Tale of the North Pond Hermit. For nearly thirty years, a phantom haunted the woods of Central Maine.

Unseen and unknown, he lived in secret, creeping into homes in the dead of night and surviving on what he could steal. To the spooked locals, he became a legend—or maybe a myth. They wondered how he could possibly be real. Until one day last year, the hermit came out of the forest The hermit set out of camp at midnight, carrying his backpack and his bag of break-in tools, and threaded through the forest, rock to root to rock, every step memorized.

Candy! He could’ve used a little more luck. And there he was. Hughes used his cell phone, quietly, and asked the Maine State Police to alert trooper Diane Perkins-Vance, who had also been hunting the hermit. The burglar eased out of the dining hall, and Hughes used his left hand to blind the man with his flashlight; with his right he aimed his .357 square on his nose. The thief complied, no resistance, and lay facedown, candy spilling out of his pockets. "For how long? " A Legendary Dinner With Keats, Wordsworth, And Lamb (EXCERPT) If you could invite five people, living or dead, to a dinner party, who would you pick? It's a parlor game we've all probably played, and the answers usually throw together some highly unlikely dining companions -- Jesus and Eminem, Shakespeare and Hillary Clinton.

A few times in history, however, there have been actual dinner parties that almost could be an answer to this question. For example, on December 28, 1817, the artist Benjamin Robert Haydon held a dinner attended by not only the writer Charles Lamb, but both John Keats and William Wordsworth -- a gathering many poetry buffs would give up an appendage to have attended. In his new book The Immortal Evening: A Legendary Dinner With Keats, Wordsworth, and Lamb, excerpted below, Stanley Plumly brings that dinner to life, using it as a focal point to examine the careers of these great men and the relationships between them. While the exact day is unspecified, a meeting time is arranged in the last week of the year.