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Silent Like Sylvia

kateoplis: “We think we understand the rules when we become adults but what we really experience is a narrowing of the imagination.” — David Lynch   Painting: Jesùs Leguizamo
kateoplis: Just Look Me in the Eye Already ➜

kateoplis:

“Adults make eye contact between 30% and 60% of the time in an average conversation, says the communications-analytics company Quantified Impressions. But the Austin, Texas, company says people should be making eye contact 60% to 70% of the time to create a sense of emotional connection…

One…

(Source: The Wall Street Journal)

npr: (via 22 Maps That Show The Deepest Linguistic Conflicts In America) Joshua Katz, a Ph. D student in statistics at North Carolina State University, just published a group of awesome visualizations of a linguistic survey that looked at how Americans pronounce words.  Among the words he maps are crawfish, syrup, caramel, lawyer, mayonnaise and pecan. He also maps regions by how they refer to a carbonated beverage (the age-old soda or pop question) and how people address groups of two or more people — though as someone who spent time in Pittsburgh, yinz seems to be conspicuously absent. — heidi

edwardspoonhands:

macabrekawaii:

iheartchaos:

Guy stages a fake occult secret society meeting, then orders pizza

San Diego photographer Tim King recently hosted a secret society-themed party for eight of his friends, complete with robes, masks, and a soundtrack provided by the “chanting monks” Pandora station. Then he ordered a pizza delivery, turned on a video camera, and waited.

See this is a prank. It’s fun, it’s funny, it doesn’t hurt anyone, and it gives the guy getting pranked a good story to tell with no skin off his back.

I almost forgot that pranks could be funny. 

(via capucha)

kateoplis: The Banality of ‘Don’t Be Evil’ “THE New Digital Age” is a startlingly clear and provocative blueprint for technocratic imperialism, from two of its leading witch doctors, Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, who construct a new idiom for United States global power in the 21st century. This idiom reflects the ever closer union between the State Department and Silicon Valley, as personified by Mr. Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, and Mr. Cohen, a former adviser to Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton who is now director of Google Ideas. The authors met in occupied Baghdad in 2009, when the book was conceived. Strolling among the ruins, the two became excited that consumer technology was transforming a society flattened by United States military occupation. They decided the tech industry could be a powerful agent of American foreign policy. … “The New Digital Age” is, beyond anything else, an attempt by Google to position itself as America’s geopolitical visionary — the one company that can answer the question “Where should America go?” It is not surprising that a respectable cast of the world’s most famous warmongers has been trotted out to give its stamp of approval to this enticement to Western soft power. … The authors offer an expertly banalized version of tomorrow’s world: the gadgetry of decades hence is predicted to be much like what we have right now — only cooler. “Progress” is driven by the inexorable spread of American consumer technology over the surface of the earth. Already, every day, another million or so Google-run mobile devices are activated. Google will interpose itself, and hence the United States government, between the communications of every human being not in China (naughty China). Commodities just become more marvelous; young, urban professionals sleep, work and shop with greater ease and comfort; democracy is insidiously subverted by technologies of surveillance, and control is enthusiastically rebranded as “participation”; and our present world order of systematized domination, intimidation and oppression continues, unmentioned, unafflicted or only faintly perturbed.” Read on.