Brain Training, Dopamine and Internet Porn

"Your Brain On Porn" is a fascinating site that explores the mental and physical effects of ubiquitously available Internet porn.

Interesting enough on it's own, but let's expand the definition of porn to all of the insane amounts of novel info candy on the Internet (lol cats, design "porn," gossip, dumbed down info-tainment etc) and what kind of implications do you see?

Your Brain On Porn (mildly NSFW because of subject matter)

A Map of the Future

From Lapham's Quartely's "The Future" issue - a map of change that is predicted to happen around the earth by the year 2050.

Reading List: "Spaces Speak, Are You Listening?: Experiencing Aural Architecture"

Looks very interesting.

We experience spaces not only by seeing but also by listening. We can navigate a room in the dark, and "hear" the emptiness of a house without furniture. Our experience of music in a concert hall depends on whether we sit in the front row or under the balcony. The unique acoustics of religious spaces acquire symbolic meaning. Social relationships are strongly influenced by the way that space changes sound.

In Spaces Speak, Are You Listening?, Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter examine auditory spatial awareness: experiencing space by attentive listening. Every environment has an aural architecture.The audible attributes of physical space have always contributed to the fabric of human culture, as demonstrated by prehistoric multimedia cave paintings, classical Greek open-air theaters, Gothic cathedrals, acoustic geography of French villages, modern music reproduction, and virtual spaces in home theaters. Auditory spatial awareness is a prism that reveals a culture's attitudes toward hearing and space. Some listeners can learn to "see" objects with their ears, but even without training, we can all hear spatial geometry such as an open door or low ceiling.

Integrating contributions from a wide range of disciplines--including architecture, music, acoustics, evolution, anthropology, cognitive psychology, audio engineering, and many others--Spaces Speak, Are You Listening? establishes the concepts and language of aural architecture. These concepts provide an interdisciplinary guide for anyone interested in gaining a better understanding of how space enhances our well-being.

Aural architecture is not the exclusive domain of specialists. Accidentally or intentionally, we all function as aural architects.

Spaces Speak, Are You Listening?: Experiencing Aural Architecture

Daily Links of Interest

1) "The Fund for American Studies found that most people would not be willing to give up the Internet for $1 million."

2) “Çurface is the brainchild of two British makers who’ve figured out how to make a durable, beautiful, malleable material out of melted plastic coffee cups and compressed coffee-grounds.”

3) There’s something interesting about this:

“Gossamer is a web browser for the TI-83+ through TI-84+SE calculators and, through the use of a number of fairly interesting network protocol APIs, it lets you see the text of almost any website right on the calculators tiny, pixelated screen.”

4) Sky Orchestra



5) "Less-populated areas or cities with a strong small business presence are relying more and more on cost-effective mass-communication tools for business news, customer support and acquisition, as well as networking,"

6) With a little beta augmented reality app magic, Public Ad Campaign and The Heavy Projects have turned billboards and phone booth ads of Times Square into art.

7) Meet the world’s first sport-utility bathrobe (via ACL)

8) Homeless Guy Magazine

9) The word "community" is derived from the Old French communité which is derived from the Latin communitas (cum, "with/together" + munus, "gift"), a broad term for fellowship or organized society.

Links: Instant Nostalgia, Vanishing Smells & Introvert Urbanism

"Drawn to organic and inorganic order, she constructs concrete hives for cities."

Jung Typology Test apparently I'm a INFJ

Divorce Lost Its Groove
Sex, love, and loneliness on the Internet.

The dangers of designing away risk

The art and science of carrying things

"When smells vanish, we lose a whole dimension of the world. Now there’s a movement to change that."

A way for writers to actually make money?

All counterfeit everything

Introvert Urbanism in Bangkok

"The Global Lab is a podcast about cities, global connectivity and the impact of technology produced by the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (UCL-CASA). Each episode features the latest news and perspectives from urban analysis, social complexity and innovation, as well as interviews with cutting-edge researchers from UCL-CASA and guests from further afield."

The power of instant nostalgia

The late adopter advantage

How they come to Hong Kong with literal bags of cash

Mind blowing and important:

I asked one of the sales kids if A Bathing Ape saw any customer backlash from being bought by I.T. He laughed and said no, in fact it’s the opposite. Bape is bigger than ever here in Hong Kong. Later, our local friends told us that’s true to an extent – Bape IS growing in popularity here but it’s not with the HK crowd, it’s the rich mainland Chinese who come here to buy up all the cool fashion to take back home. We heard stories of how they come to Hong Kong with literal bags of cash (because credit cards have a limit). They’ll walk up and down the luxury brand row, throw their bags on the counters, and snag the best of Chanel, Gucci, and Cartier with little care or consideration of price-tags. Another story of a guy walking into a Toyota dealership and buying 20 cars set at $70,000 USD each, all with cash. And it’s not just clothes and cars, it’s housing and property. There’s an actual term for it, the practice of mainland Chinese visiting Hong Kong realty, asking for the best residence on the market, and blindly purchasing with cash without visiting the pad first. The world is turning in this direction, not just economically, but culturally, as a by-product of the gold rush. Just look how much the U.S. news talked about Chinese artist Ai Wei-Wei this week, whom I previously only ever really heard about when I was in Hong Kong. It’s history in the making every day here.

via The Hundreds

Package-Free

A very fresh idea:

Soon to be the newest addition to the well-oiled Austin, Texas grocery store community — the town where Whole Foods was born — is the country’s first zero-waste, package-free grocery store, In.gredients. In.gredients is the product of a group of Austin-based entrepreneurs that envision a world without single-use food packaging; where you bring not only your own grocery bags to the store, but your own reusable containers to purchase your food from In.gredients’ bulk inventory. In their video (which you can watch after the jump) the group points out that in just making cookies, you throw away 13 pieces of non-recyclable single-use packages. And this is just a small part of the 570 million pounds of food packaging that Americans toss each day.

via