10 Japanese Travel Tips for Visiting America With the help of Google Translate (and an ability to interpret completely random sentence structure), an American can find out what kind of advice the Japanese give to their own countrymen on how to handle the peculiarities of American culture. Here are some things to look out for if you are visiting America from Japan. 1. There is a thing called “Dinner Plates.” In Japan, each person eating gets as many individual dishes as needed for the meal. 2. In Japan, hip hop clothes are considered stylish. 3. Manners with cars in America are really damn good. 4. In the U.S., they do not have a sense of superiority if they are able to drink a large amount. 5. In America, whether you are a student, working person, or housewife, you carefully make room for leisure time, weekdays and weekends. See Also: 4 Russian Travel Tips for Visiting America 6. If you put your bent middle and index fingers of both hands in the air, you are making finger quotation marks. 7. 8. Cashiers are slow. 9. 10. See Also:
5 Surprising Ways Your Language Affects How You Think #2. Your Views Change With the Language You Use to Voice Them daboost/Photos.com Most of us took a second language in high school, then promptly forgot everything we learned in favor of bong-making methodology and Led Zeppelin lyrics. maltaguy1/Photos.comCertain foreign prisons go extra hard on you if you know only English. Recent studies have suggested that language may act as a cue to which cultural frame of reference a given interaction belongs in. For example: A test was applied to bilingual Arab Israelis who spoke both Arabic and Hebrew (two cultures that have famously held a little animosity toward each other over the years) that asked participants to record whether words had negative or positive connotations. University of MinnesotaBut fail the test in multiple languages? We can only assume about the finger snaps and sassy head wobble that accompanied the latter statement. #1. agsandrew/Photos.com Consider the tenses past, present, and future. No? Huh.
The 5 Best Pieces of Writing Advice I Didn't Get in School #2. Don't Be Consumed With Being Original (The "Ice Ice Baby" Test) I've never had writer's block for the same reason I've never had the lasagna at the Olive Garden: It just seems terrible and I don't want it. Blake Snyder wrote a great, but sometimes maligned, screenwriting book called Save the Cat, which includes his beat sheet where he lays out the essential framework of a three-act play or movie. Who can forget that scene where Elle Woods liberated Dachau? But how do you know when you're a plagiarist and when you're doing something that merely reflects other elements while retaining your own soul? Essentially, I think sampling in music is an excellent analogy. So yeah, before you kill your own ideas as cliche, maybe write them out a bit and see if you're building something worthwhile and new on the backs of your influences. #1. Of all the tips I learned on this list, this is the only one taught to me by a professor at an actual school.
If Your Friends Ever Say They Have ADHD, Just Show Them This. ADHD is about having broken filters on your perception. Normal people have a sort of mental secretary that takes the 99% of irrelevant crap that crosses their mind, and simply deletes it before they become consciously aware of it. As such, their mental workspace is like a huge clean whiteboard, ready to hold and organize useful information. ADHD people... have no such luxury. As such, if we're in the middle of some particularly important mental task, and our eye should happen to light upon... a doorknob, for instance, it's like someone burst into the room, clad in pink feathers and heralded by trumpets, screaming HEY LOOK EVERYONE, IT'S A DOORKNOB! It's like living in a soft rain of post-it notes. This happens every single waking moment, and we have to manually examine each thought, check for relevance, and try desperately to remember what the thing was we were thinking before it came along, if not. We rely heavily on routine, and 90% of the time get by on autopilot.
15 Remarkable Colorized Photos Will Let You Relive History One thing we really need to thank the internet for: colorized historical photographs. Of course, the phenomenon comes to us courtesy of Photoshop and the talented editors who transformed black-and-white images into digital works of art. We're just happy we get to feast our eyes upon them. Thanks to the Reddit community known as Colorized History, we have a plethora of polychromatic snapshots that bring history back to life. 1. Original Photograph by Toni Frissell. 2. Colorized by Paul Edwards 3. Colorized by Jordan J Lloyd 4. Colorized by Dana Keller 5. Colorized by Mads Madsen 6. 7. 8. Colorized by BenAfleckIsAnOkActor 9. 10. 11. 12. Colorized by Sanna Dullaway 13. 14. 15. Original Photograph by Frank Worth Photo. All captions provided by Jordan J Lloyd.
7 Things No One Tells You About Being Homeless #3. Your Free Time Becomes Your Enemy Stockbyte/Stockbyte/Getty Images What surprised me the most about being homeless was just how much time I had on my hands. Andreas Rentz / GettyYou'd let her do it. So ... what the hell do you do with yourself? Yep, having nothing to do and nowhere to go got so stressful that I ended up finding a good source of LSD (at a shitty little dive bar), and this became my last resort for filling time. Keystone-France / Gamma-Keystone / GettyFifty-two of these is basically a year's employment! And here's where I'll lose a lot of readers (think about the last time you considered giving money to a beggar, only to have a friend say, "He'll just use it to buy drugs!") And once again we see how a short-term problem can turn into a cycle that threatens to suck the rest of your life into it. Yuri Cortez / AFP / Getty Much like this cardboard tube has sucked up a homeless man. #2. Digital Vision/Photodisc/Getty Images David De Lossy/Photodisc/Getty ImagesAs was the car.
Why Yellow Fever Is Different than “Having a Type” Jun 03, 2013 at 6am I’m one of the many 20-something East Asian women living in the Bay Area. Because of that fact, I’ve lost count of how many guys have walked up to tell me that their ex-girlfriends are Asian. Racial pickup lines such as “Konichiwa, Hello Kitty!” Recently, a Tumblr called “Creepy White Guys” with screencaps of real messages received by Asian women from men on OkCupid rose to mainstream fame with BuzzFeed coverage. Last year the documentary Seeking Asian Female was released by local filmmaker Debbie Lum. However, what astonishes me to this day is when some of my educated and amicable guy friends and male coworkers say that they don’t understand what’s so bad about Yellow Fever. Let’s say you were born into a family of hardcore Giants fans.You had no personal choice in the matter. You grow up to be a handsome, confident man with various passions in life. Race to the Bottom Personal preferences in dating or sex are not the same thing as fetishes. Kink Con
5 Ways To Hack Your Brain Into Awesomeness Learn More While You Sleep So say you haven't followed that first step up there and choose to continue sleeping like other mere mortals. A very minor change in your schedule can still let you use your sleep patterns to your advantage, by making you smarter. Holy Shit, How Can I Do It? No, we're not talking about those scams where they have you put a tape recorder under your pillow and let it teach you Spanish while you're asleep. What scientists have found out is if you need to remember a bunch of information (say, for a big exam), do NOT study right up until time for the exam. Note: "Sleep on it" is simply an expression. They did a study at Harvard that proved this technique works. No, the participants who slept on it and had 24 hours for the information to fester in their brain did the best on the test, while those who only had 20 minutes did the worst. Wasting your time, nerds, go to sleep. How Does It Work? Believe Something Happened (That Totally Didn't) Memory is a funny thing.
5 Insane Ways Words Can Control Your Mind It Skews Your Perception of Time Picture, in your head, a timeline of your life. Your birth at one end, your death at the other, today somewhere in the middle. The night you burnt that clown's body, buried safely behind you. We're going to take a wild guess and say that you imagined that line running horizontally, your birth on your left, your death on your right. Most English speakers imagine time that way, and then when we talk about events we picture ourselves moving along it like we were walking down a path. It might be enough to get you through freshman philosophy though. Mandarin speakers, on the other hand, imagine time in a vertical sense. Now here's where it gets weird: They did an experiment at Stanford where they'd try to trip up this process by taking Mandarin speakers and having them arrange objects horizontally in a certain order, then asked them a series of time-based questions ("Does April come before or after March?"). They also often do this, whatever it is. Holy shit!
Stunning Portraits Of The World’s Remotest Tribes Before They Pass Away (46 pics) Living in a concrete box with hot water pouring from the tap, a refrigerator cooling our food and wi-fi connecting us to the rest of the world, we can barely imagine a day in a life of, say, Tsaatan people. They move 5 to 10 times per year, building huts when the temperature is -40 and herding reindeer for transportation, clothing and food. “Before They Pass Away,” a long-term project by photographer Jimmy Nelson, gives us the unique opportunity to discover more than 30 secluded and slowly vanishing tribes from all over the world. [Read more...] Spending 2 weeks in each tribe, Jimmy became acquainted with their time-honoured traditions, joined their rituals and captured it all in a very appealing way. All of his snapshots now lie in a massive book and will be extended by a film (you can see a short introduction video below). Source: beforethey.com Book: Amazon.com Kazakh, Mongolia Himba, Namibia Huli, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea Asaro, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea Chukchi, Russia
Genderqueer, Pansexual, LGBTQ: Will Gender Exist 100 Years From Now? - Rebooted In this article it is my hope to highlight some of the most important aspects of gender and sexual identity within the confines of hardcore science: psychology, biology, and sociology. It is my personal opinion that we have not figured out the science behind gender, rather it be sociological or biological in nature. This article is simply an overview of how modern day scientists and sociologists look at gender and sexual identity. For all I know, we are all born genderqueer and pansexual, but biological science is showing us the rainbow of diversity which comes along with being a sexually complicated evolved species. IEET Contributor Wes Strong wrote a follow up to this essay from a social constructivist point of view. The following is an updated version of a 2010 article "Will gender exist 100 years from now, or does it already not exist?" Introduction It has been claimed by biologists that the brains of females and males are different in obscure ways. Genetics Gender Identity and the DSM
6 Ridiculous Science Myths You Learned in Kindergarten Right around the time we learn to start questioning the ways of this wonderful world around us, our parents start packing us onto school buses every morning, because who the hell has time for all those obnoxious questions? Let the professionals address the budding curiosity of our children; we've got America's Next Top Model to watch. Teachers are better equipped to deal with those questions anyway, right? Right! Mostly. (We've got a lot more school-issued B.S. where that came from. #6. Feng Yu/Photos.com The Myth: As soon as we learn that the Earth rotates on its axis, we learn all the cool effects that this has on our lives. Hemera Technologies/Photos.com/GettyOn the equator, toilets don't flush at all. The Reality: The Coriolis effect is totally a thing, and it really does affect the direction in which things spin. Hubi/WikimediaSay, when you and your enemy exchange grenades on a merry-go-round. #5. Jeffrey Hamilton/Digital Vision/Getty Images Digital Vision. #4.