The period of anger

The period is pissed. It seems that using the period at the end of text messages is starting to be seen as passive aggressive.

The period was always the humblest of punctuation marks. Recently, however, it’s started getting angry. I’ve noticed it in my text messages and online chats, where people use the period not simply to conclude a sentence, but to announce “I am not happy about the sentence I just concluded.”


It’s just meta-data

Tell-all Telephone, just in case you were under the impression that it was fine to collect meta-data without any “personal data”.

Green party politician Malte Spitz sued to have German telecoms giant Deutsche Telekom hand over six months of his phone data. We combined this geolocation data with information relating to his life as a politician, such as Twitter feeds, blog entries and websites, all of which is all freely available on the internet. By pushing the play button, you will set off on a trip through Malte Spitz’s life.


Psilocybin makes the brain work less

Researchers at Imperial College London have been exploring the effects of psilocybin on the brain. A quote from professor David Nutt:

Psychedelics are thought of as ‘mind-expanding’ drugs so it has commonly been assumed that they work by increasing brain activity, but surprisingly, we found that psilocybin actually caused activity to decrease in areas that have the densest connections with other areas. These hubs constrain our experience of the world and keep it orderly. We now know that deactivating these regions leads to a state in which the world is experienced as strange.

Here are links to abstracts from the first and second study.



Rejection hurts

Researchers at the University of Michigan have found that rejection hurts, and not just in a metaphorical sense. The study found that “social rejection shares somatosensory representations with physical pain” (via nyt). Maybe artists, musicians and poets have been on to something all of these years.