Why we buy crap we don't need.

Subliminal messages are everywhere in pop culture

Posted Thu Dec. 16, 13:02:36 PST 2004
By Gavin Cook of The Campanile

In the late 1950s, an experiment was performed that would affect the world, even though it went relatively unnoticed. In Fort Lee, New Jersey, a movie theater ran the messages "Eat Popcorn" and "Drink Coke" every five seconds throughout the movies they showed. In six weeks, the sales of Coca-Cola went up 18 percent while popcorn sales rose an astronomical 58 percent.

Why would moviegoers accept these advertisements and not simply storm out of the theater, annoyed and resolute not to purchase any soda or popcorn?

The reason is these messages were only flashed for three-tenths of a millisecond, or one 3000th of a second, a time that does not allow the moviegoer to consciously "see" the message.

This was the birth of subliminal messages and the beginning of a new era.

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Why Debt Slaves Act Retarded

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Why play a losing game? Study uncovers why low-income people buy lottery tickets
Science Codex
July 24, 2008

Although state lotteries, on average, return just 53 cents for every dollar spent on a ticket, people continue to pour money into them — especially low-income people, who spend a larger percentage of their incomes on lottery tickets than do the wealthier segments of society. A new Carnegie Mellon University study sheds light on the reasons why low-income lottery players eagerly invest in a product that provides poor returns.

In the study, published in the July issue of the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, participants who were made to feel subjectively poor bought nearly twice as many lottery tickets as a comparison group that was made to feel subjectively more affluent. The Carnegie Mellon findings point to poverty's central role in people's decisions to buy lottery tickets.

"Some poor people see playing the lottery as their best opportunity for improving their financial situations, albeit wrongly so," said the study's lead author Emily Haisley, a doctoral student in the Department of Organizational Behavior and Theory at Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business. "The hope of getting out of poverty encourages people to continue to buy tickets, even though their chances of stumbling upon a life-changing windfall are nearly impossibly slim and buying lottery tickets in fact exacerbates the very poverty that purchasers are hoping to escape."
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Vibrations return to Northern Star

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The Pole star comes to life again
PhysOrg.com
The Northern Star, whose vibrations were thought to be dying away, appears to have come to life again.
An international team of astronomers has observed that vibrations in the Pole star, which had been fading away to almost nothing over the last hundred years, have recovered and are now increasing. And the astronomers don't know why.

[The Pole star comes to life again]
Plot of decrease over 100 years of amplitude of 4-day light variation of Polaris and of the increase since 2000. Observations before 2000 from other work, observations after 2000 from this work.
Click here to enlarge image
The discovery will be announced during the "Cool Stars 15" conference at the University of St Andrews. Dr Alan Penny from the School of Physics and Astronomy will present results of the recovery to around 350 international delegates at the meeting that runs from July 21-25.

The astronomers were watching Polaris in the expectation that they would catch the star switching off its vibrations completely when they made the surprising observation of its revival.

Dr Penny explained, "It was only through an innovative use of two small relatively unknown telescopes in space and a telescope in Arizona that we were able to discover and follow this star's recovery so accurately."
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Man Still Evolving?

From Best Free Documentaries:

Homo Futurus

This is a documentary about a controversial theory regarding the mechanism that drove the evolution of humans from primates to modern man; challenging the presently accepted evolutionary premise. It also speculates on humanity's future evolutionary path.
More Free Documentaries:

Television Under The Swastika

Civilization - The Reich Underground

Decoding Ferran Adria

APS issues Global Warming Gag Order

American physicists warned not to debate global warming
By Andrew Orlowski →
July 21, 2008

Nail down your security priorities. Ask the experts and your peers at The Register Security Debate, September 24 2008.

Bureaucrats at the American Physical Society (APS) have issued a curious warning to their members about an article in one of their own publications. Don't read this, they say - we don't agree with it. But what is it about the piece that is so terrible, that like Medusa, it could make men go blind?

It's an article that examines the calculation central to climate models. As the editor of the APS's newsletter American Physics Jeffrey Marque explains, the global warming debate must be re-opened.

"There is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the IPCC conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for the global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution. Since the correctness or fallacy of that conclusion has immense implications for public policy and for the future of the biosphere, we thought it appropriate to present a debate within the pages of P&S concerning that conclusion," he wrote.
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What do you mean the aliens can't hear us?

Two-light years and then… enjoy the silence
Mori - forgetomori.com
June 19th, 2008

In the breathtaking opening of the movie “Contact” – adaptation of the even more inspiring original Carl Sagan novel – we travel from Earth, faster than the speed of light and listening to the reverse history of our electromagnetic transmissions through the Universe.

From the Spice Girls (1997…) to the first radio broadcasts, we get farther and father from our Pale Blue Dot, seeing even bigger spaces full of billions and billions of stars in the Cosmos.

The scene is literally poetic, namely it involves a big deal of poetic license, as we listen to transmissions from decades ago while still in the outer solar system – Pluto is not that far. It even has a small joke, as the Face on Mars make a very brief appearance.

But the cold (and perhaps surprising) hard fact is that the scene is impossible. No, not only because it’s impossible to travel faster than light, but because our radio transmissions have a very limited range, and our first radio transmissions are not in some place tens of light-years away. In fact the range of our transmissions is just… well, if you read the title you already know it.

Two light-years for almost all of our transmissions. After that, even ginormous antennas turned exactly to our planet and listening to the right frequencies applying the necessary corrections would not be able to capture an intelligible signal. Even a 3.000 km antenna wouldn’t be enough to capture our TV transmissions from a distance greater than only 0,01 light-years away!
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Astounding lizard evolution 1971-present

From Pharyngula: Still just a lizard

Here's the story: in 1971, scientists started an experiment. They took 5 male lizards and 5 female lizards of the species Podarcis sicula from a tiny Adriatic island called Pod Kopiste, 0.09km², and they placed them on an even tinier island, Pod Mrcaru, 0.03km², which was also inhabited by another lizard species, Podarcis melisellensis. Then a war broke out, the Croatian War of Independence, which went on and on and meant the little islands were completely neglected for 36 years, and nature took its course. When scientists finally returned to the island and looked around, they discovered that something very interesting had happened.

<...>
The transplanted P. sicula thrived and swarmed over the island of Pod Mrcaru, but they were different, and they had evolved in multiple ways.

The original P. sicula were insectivores who occasionally munched on a leaf; approximately 4-7% of their diet was vegetation. The P. sicula of Pod Mrcaru, though, had adopted a more vegetarian diet: examining their gut contents revealed that 34% of their diet was plants in the spring, climbing to 61% in the summer…and much of this diet was hard-to-digest stuff, high in cellulose. This is a fairly radical shift.

There were concomitant changes. The lizards' skulls were wider, deeper, and longer, and they had stronger bites — a necessity for chomping off bits of tough plants, instead of soft mosquitos. Instead of chasing bugs, they're browsing stationary plants, and their legs are shorter and they are slower. Population densities are higher. The Pod Mrcaru lizards no longer seem to defend territories, so there have been behavioral changes.

Still just a lizard, I know.

Now here's something really cool, though: these lizards have evolved cecal valves. What those are are muscular ridges in the gut that allow the animal to close off sections of the tube to slow the progress of food through them, and to act as fermentation chambers where plant material can be broken down by commensal organisms like bacteria and nematodes — and the guts of Pod Mrcaru P. sicula are swarming with nematodes not found in the guts of their Pod Kopiste cousins.

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