It Takes 224 Tweets, 70 Facebook Messages, and 30 Phone Calls For a Couple to Fall In Love Unsurprisingly, twitter and text messaging have surpassed the telephone as the most common way for burgeoning couples to communicate. A new study shows just exactly how these advances have changed how couples fall in love — and how fast. According to the research, while Twitter is an increasingly popular way for couples to flirt, it’s not the most efficient way to really cement a relationship. It takes 224 tweets — at 140 characters per tweet, that’s roughly 39 pages, the size of a novella — in order for a couple to fall in love. Compare that to 37 emails and just 30 phone calls (of, one assumes, varying lengths). Couples 55 and older (who were dating in the 70s and 80s) said it took about two and a half months to fall in love using old-school communication. Next time you send someone a flirty DM, maybe keep track of how many it takes until you’re official? [Telegraph UK] Plus:
This Is How Cats See the World - Wired Science The blurriness at the edge of the photos represents the area of peripheral vision in humans (20 degrees, top) and cats (30 degrees, bottom). [High-res image] Cats can't clearly focus on objects that are more than 20 feet away. [High-res image] Cats' color vision is less vibrant than humans', a result of different densities of photoreceptors in their retinas. [High-res image] Cats' visual fields span 200 degrees; humans can only see 180 degrees. [High-res image] Cats can see much better in dim light than humans can. The blurriness at the edge of the photos represents the area of peripheral vision in humans (20 degrees, top) and cats (30 degrees, bottom). No one ever talks about what the world looks like if you’re a cat. But we rarely consider how the internet’s favorite subject sees the world. For starters, cats’ visual fields are broader than ours, spanning roughly 200 degrees instead of 180 degrees, and their visual acuity isn’t as good.
How a Radical New Teaching Method Could Unleash a Generation of Geniuses | Wired Business He started by telling them that there were kids in other parts of the world who could memorize pi to hundreds of decimal points. They could write symphonies and build robots and airplanes. Most people wouldn't think that the students at José Urbina López could do those kinds of things. Kids just across the border in Brownsville, Texas, had laptops, high-speed Internet, and tutoring, while in Matamoros the students had intermittent electricity, few computers, limited Internet, and sometimes not enough to eat. "But you do have one thing that makes you the equal of any kid in the world," Juárez Correa said. "Potential." He looked around the room. Paloma was silent, waiting to be told what to do. "So," Juárez Correa said, "what do you want to learn?" In 1999, Sugata Mitra was chief scientist at a company in New Delhi that trains software developers. Over the years, Mitra got more ambitious. Over the next 75 days, the children worked out how to use the computer and began to learn.
Mystery Tome The image above – click here for a larger version – is from a book called the Voynich Manuscript. Nearly everything about the book is a mystery. We don’t know who wrote it. The manuscript is, in its current state, 240 pages of vellum (a type of parchment). The manuscript has some striking features, suggesting that it actually does mean something — at least to the author. But to date, no one knows what it all means. Theories as to the manuscript’s origins are as infinite as the mysteries the book provides. In all, the Voynich manuscript is considered by many to be the world’s most mysterious publication. (Scans of the entire Voynich manuscript are available here, via Wikimedia Commons.) Bonus fact: Roger Bacon, one of the earliest advocates for the modern-day scientific method, had calendars as a particular interest — he found the now nearly-defunct Julian calendar to be a mathematical abomination.
We Watched the Ghosts of Google Street View Come to Life Photo: Derek Mead Paolo Cirio brings ghosts to life. At least, he pulls them out of their eternal resting places in the digital expanse of Google Street View and paints them into three-dimensional reality. Since last year, the Turin-born artist has been creating life-sized portraits of pedestrians, city-dwellers, and anyone else caught by the roaming eye of Google's slow-cruising surveillance mobiles. The ghosts have haunted the streets of London, Berlin, and New York City. It's a blunt but clever undertaking. The work has alternatively received an enthusiastic response from fans who cheer the conceptual statement, and has been the center of controversy in places where blanket surveillance and blatant privacy invasion are more contentious than here in the United States, where we're more eager to trade online security for convenience. I was introduced to Cirio's work last month, so I sent him an email to learn more. Cirio in Brooklyn, by Derek Mead "They come from the past," he says.
Look Inside the Extremely Rare Codex Seraphinianus, the Weirdest Encyclopedia Ever | Underwire A couple having sex metamorphoses into a crocodile. Fish eyes from some weird creature float on the surface of the sea, staring at me. A man is riding his own coffin. Like a guide to an alien world, Codex Seraphinianus is 300 pages of descriptions and explanations for an imaginary existence, all in its own unique (and unreadable) alphabet, complete with thousands of drawings and graphs. The author, Luigi Serafini, born in Rome in 1949, is an Italian architect-turned-artist who also worked in industrial design, painting, illustration and sculpture, collaborating with some of the most prominent figures in contemporary European culture. Serafini’s amazing studio, a few steps from the Pantheon in the center of Rome, reveals everything about his fantasy world. Luigi Serafini: I see many similarities between WIRED and the Codex; they both are the product of a generation that chose to connect and create a network, rather than kill each other in wars like their fathers did. — Luigi Serafini
The Weird, Terrifying Physics Of iOS 7 Futuristic water-recycling shower cuts bills by over $1,000 Swedish designer Mehrdad Mahdjoubi has developed a shower that recycles waterOrbSys Shower saves more than 90% water and 80% energy while you washIt could save users over $1000 a year and help people living in areas with a shortage of water (CNN) -- In space, astronauts go for years without a fresh supply of water. Floating in a capsule in outer space they wash and drink from the same continuously recycled source. This was the concept behind the OrbSys Shower -- a high-tech purification system that recycles water while you wash. So how does it work? OrbSys shower recycles water as you wash Inventor claims there is no compromise on water pressure The closed loop system Read: Green machine -- Intelligent robot system recycles waste As a result, it saves more than 90% in water usage and 80% in energy every time you shower, while also producing water that is cleaner than your average tap. Mahdjoubi proposed the OrbSys shower while studying Industrial Design at the University of Lund in Sweden.