Coffee Helps You Stay Honest

Psychological Study

Caffeine--it's nature's wonder drug! And it's best consumed with coffee, often by spooning the grounds directly from the can into your mouth at 3 AM as a deadline nears.
It also makes you more honest. Well, kind of. Michael Christian, a professor of organizational behavior at the University of North Carolina, studied 171 sleep deprived nurses. Those who had some sweet, sweet caffeine flowing through their veins tended to be more honest than those who didn't. Anne Fisher of Forbes reports:

For this study -- which, by the way, wasn't sponsored by Starbucks -- volunteers who had been kept awake all night were divided into two groups. All were asked to chew gum in the morning, but one group got a plain wintergreen placebo, while the other chomped on gum laced with 200 milligrams of caffeine, or about the same amount that's in two cups of black coffee.
The participants were then put in situations where researchers "encouraged them to go along with a lie in order to earn some extra money," Christian says. "We tried to replicate a situation where a boss or a peer was pressuring them to cut ethical corners at work."
The results: Those who got the extra boost of caffeine consistently balked when researchers urged them to cheat, while those who were just exhausted -- and had chewed the non-caffeinated gum -- showed a marked willingness to cast conscience aside and go along with the deception.
Employers who want to reduce the likelihood of misbehavior should make sure people aren't putting in too many long hours without a break and "avoid scheduling tasks that require a great deal of self-control when looming deadlines make long hours unavoidable," the study concludes. Two other suggestions: Put in nap rooms at the office and don't skimp on the free coffee.

MERS and Death

An update on MERS — Scientists have been tracking Middle East respiratory syndrome since 2012. At New Scientist, Deborah MacKenzie looks at what's going on with the disease now — including a surge in cases and the identification of MERS patients outside the Middle East.

A fourth-year medical student writes about death — Med student Shara Yurkiewicz writes a heart-wrenching essay about watching a patient die during hip surgery.

Appeals court orders Obama administration to disclose the legal theory for assassination of Americans

The Obama administration has lost a high-stakes lawsuit brought against it by the New York Times and the ACLU over its refusal to divulge the legal basis for its extrajudicial assassination program against US citizens. The Obama administration declared that it had the right to assassinate Americans overseas, far from the field of battle, on the basis of a secret legal theory. When it refused to divulge that theory in response to Freedom of Information Act requests, the Times and the ACLU sued. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals has found in the Times's and ACLU's favor.

The Obama administration had insisted that the legal memo in question was protected as a national security secret. However, the court found that because the administration had made statements about the memo, assuring the public that the assassinations were legal, it had waived its right to keep the memo a secret. There's no work on whether the administration will appeal to the Supreme Court.

"After senior Government officials have assured the public that targeted killings are 'lawful' and that OLC advice 'establishes the legal boundaries within which we can operate,'" the appeals court said, "waiver of secrecy and privilege as to the legal analysis in the Memorandum has occurred" (PDF).
The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), which in a friend-of-the court brief urged the three-judge appeals court to rule as it did, said the decision was a boon for citizen FOIA requests.
"It's very helpful. We have a number of cases, including one of our oldest FOIA cases, that involves the warrantless wiretapping memos. The basic premise is when OLC writes a legal memo and when that becomes the known basis for a program, that's the law of the executive branch and cannot be withheld," Alan Butler, EPIC's appellate counsel, said in a telephone interview.

Obama ordered to divulge legal basis for killing Americans with drones

Convicted Terrorist Sentenced to Read Malcolm Gladwell Book

Malcolm Gladwell is a public intellectual famous for his broad-scope psychological and sociological books, such as The Tipping Point, Outliers, and Blink. His most recent book is entitled David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants. It's a study of how disadvantages can make people stronger. A US federal court recently sentenced Rebecca Rubin, a convicted terrorist, to read it as part of her punishment.
Between 1997 and 2001, she committed several acts of arson on behalf of environmental causes. US District Judge Ann Aiken sentenced Rubin to 5 years in prison, so she'll have plenty of time to get through the book.  Judge Aiken hopes that by reading the Gladwell book, "Rubin could learn non-violent means to protesting systems she perceives as unjust."

What books do you think would serve as effective criminal punishments?

Grave-Robbing Cannibal Brothers Arrested - Again

Alleged Grave-Robbing Cannibal Brothers Arrested -- Again

The two brothers stand accused of repeatedly eating dead people

Ziggy

Incredibly Realistic Sculpture Carved From A Single Block Of Wood

Creating highly detailed sculptures, with realistic fluid shapes and organic contours, out of wood is a feat in itself, but when you create each individual work out of one single piece of wood you’ve got some serious wood carving skills!
Stefanie Rocknak is one of these extremely talented wood carvers, and the beauty of her single block sculpture is not just in the execution, but the elegant simplicity and retention of the basswood's natural grain pattern as well.
The figure looks like he’s really splashing through a wooden wave, with face turned in mid-breath and a hand so realistic it even has creases in the palms.

The Post-Shooting Life of Sixteen Film Sets

Hollywood spends big bucks for lavish film sets on location. What happens to these sets when the movie wraps? Moving or reusing them costs more than they’re worth, but sometimes dismantling them is required by agreement. Often, they are just left as they are. And then? Some just fall into ruin, but others find a new life under the management of people who know an opportunity when they see one. Take, for example, Sweethaven, the seaside town that was the setting of the Robin William’s film Popeye.

Robert Altman’s 1980 film adaptation of the comic Popeye suffered at the box office, but the nation of Malta has done very well with the film’s set, turning it into the Popeye Village theme park.

The park preserves the original 20 buildings constructed for Popeye’s “Sweethaven” setting, and adds a museum devoted to the movie’s history. It also stages shows featuring Popeye and Olive Oyl, and scenic boat tours of the village and its bay.

Tourists can also visit The Shire in New Zealand, the Field of Dreams in Iowa, and several Tunisian places that were transformed into Tattooine for the Star Wars movies. Several Western towns are still in place as well, and you can read about them at Atlas Obscura.

An Energy Efficient Glow-In-The-Dark Highway

(Video Link)

Energy efficiency is a big part of “going green”, and delivering electricity to a long, lonely stretch of highway is not only a daunting dask- it’s simply inefficient.
With the advancement of solar power we may find better ways to bring electricity to rural areas, but a remote highway generally has little use for light, and typically needs to be lit up on the road itself more than the shoulders.
That’s what makes this highway in Oss, Netherlands so unique- the road markings glow-in-the-dark.
Studio Roosegaarde spent two years developing the idea of integrating photo-luminescent powder into the road paint, and their glowing highway innovation makes a drive in the dark seem like a trip into the world of Tron.

A City Intersection with No Traffic Lights

(YouTube link)

American drivers, imagine a busy intersection in a large city with no traffic lights and no traffic cops. This is the condition in many cities around the world. This intersection is in Meskel Square, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The thing that keeps drivers from constantly crashing is the idea that no one has any right-of-way, and you just go when you can, stop when someone is in front of you, and don’t hit anyone. Could the famously traffic law-abiding American drivers deal with such a system? Probably not, because we are concerned with who has the right-of-way, and tend to get a little hostile when someone causes us a two-second delay in our travels.

Daily Comic Relief

Art exhibition about urban legends

"Hearsay: Artists Reveal Urban Legends" is a new group exhibition at California State University, Fullerton's Begovich Gallery where artists were asked to create pieces about modern day myths that resonate with them in some personal way. More than three dozen artists participated including Boing Boing favorites like Ransom & Mitchell, Jeffrey Vallance, Robert Williams, and Victoria Reynolds. Above, Chris Farling's "Sewer Gator." Below, Lew Delport's "The Goatman" and Ransom & Mitchell's "Teke Teke." 

Finally! Shopping Center Introduces Passing Lane

I'm a fast walker. When I'm moving around, I'm trying to get at my destination, not enjoy the scenery. So shopping can be a frustrating experience when I get stuck behind someone waddling down the middle of a walkway at 1 MPH. This problem is especially aggravating when shopping carts are involved.
A mall in Sheffield, UK is now taking a bold stand against the human speed bumps that cause so much frustration for good and decent people in the world. After reading a complaint letter by 10-year old Chloe Nash-Lowe (who deserves some sort of Nobel Prize for her efforts), the managers of the Meadowhall Shopping Centre have created a passing lane. When you want to get around traffic clogs, get into the fast lane.
Now let's spread this great idea to sidewalks, grocery stores, and hallways everywhere. Forward!

A Bed And Breakfast Shaped Like A Beagle

Waking up with some hair of the dog that bit you last night means something completely different when you’ve just spent the night in a B&B shaped like a beagle.
This charming canine shaped cabin is called the Dog Bark Park Inn, it’s located in scenic Cottonwood, Idaho and it was built by chainsaw carvers Dennis Sullivan and Frances Conklin.
Each room is decorated with works by Sullivan and Conklin, which are all shaped like dogs of course, and the modest bed and breakfast has room to host four guests in the main beagle building called Sweet Willy.
There’s one major rule at the Dog Bark Park Inn- guests must love dogs, or else they’re barking up the wrong tree!

Living in an 84-square foot house

Dee Williams was diagnosed with a heart condition when she was 41. Faced with her mortality, she radically changed her life. She built a tiny house and reduced the number of things she owns to about 300. She wrote a book about her experience, The Big Tiny.

Time is precious, and she wanted to be spending hers with the people and things she truly loved. That included the beautiful sprawling house in the Pacific Northwest she had painstakingly restored—but, increasingly, it did not include the mortgage payments, constant repairs, and general time-suck of home ownership. A new sense of clarity began to take hold: Just what was all this stuff for? Multiple extra rooms, a kitchen stocked with rarely used appliances, were things that couldn’t compare with the financial freedom and the ultimate luxury—time—that would come with downsizing.
Deciding to build an eighty-four-square-foot house—on her own, from the ground up—was just the beginning of building a new life. Williams can now list everything she owns on one sheet of paper, her monthly housekeeping bills amount to about eight dollars, and it takes her approximately ten minutes to clean the entire house. It’s left her with more time to spend with family and friends, and given her freedom to head out for adventure at a moment’s notice, or watch the clouds and sunset while drinking a beer on her (yes, tiny) front porch.

The Big Tiny: A Built-It-Myself Memoir

Coming Tomorrow

Coming Tomorrow

• Scientists Create Solar Panel Window
• Appearance Of Night Shining Clouds Has Increased
• Bathing In The Sunset Of An 'Earth-Like' Alien World
• Before, During An After The Big Bang

And more ...

This horse is our Animal Picture, for today.

The Daily Drift

Gee whiz Charlie Brown ...!

 

Carolina Naturally is read in 198 countries around the world daily.   

Blow your horn ... !

Today is - Tuba Day

Don't forget to visit our sister blog: It Is What It Is

Some of our reader today have been in:

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Mishawaka, Wasilla, Alachua, Bithlo, Auke Bay, Modesto, Omaha, Tucson, Charlotte, Cullowhee, Apex, Payson and Sparta, United States

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Europe

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Dartford, Chester, Kent and Gosport, England

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Asia

Jodhpur, Kolkata, Bangalore, Thiruvananthpuram, Shillong, Mumbai, Jalandhar, Suratgarh, Chandigarh, Bhubaneshwar and New Delhi, India

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Colombo, Sri Lanka

Kirtipur, Nepal

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Tokyo, Japan

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Shiraz, Iran

Africa 

Pretoria and Cape Town, South Africa

Cairo, Egypt

The Pacific

Makati, Quiapo and Manila, Philippines

Woolloongabba and Sydney, Australia

Today in History

1670		The Hudson Bay Company is founded.
1598		Henry IV signs Treaty of Vervins, ending Spain's interference in France.
1668		Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle ends the War of Devolution in France.
1776		France and Spain agree to donate arms to American rebels fighting the British.
1797		A mutiny in the British navy spreads from Spithead to the rest of the fleet.
1798		The black General Toussaint L'ouverture forces British troops to agree to evacuate the port of Santo Domingo.
1808		The citizens of Madrid rise up against Napoleon.
1813		Napoleon defeats a Russian and Prussian army at Grossgorschen.
1863		Stonewall Jackson smashes Hooker's flank at Chancellorsville, Virginia.
1865		President Andrew Johnson offers a $100,000 reward for the capture of Confederate President
1885		King Leopold II of Belgium establishes the Congo Free State.
1890		The Territory of Oklahoma is created.
1919		The first U.S. air passenger service starts.
1923		Lieutenants Okaley Kelly and John Macready take off from New York for the West Coast on what will become the first successful nonstop transcontinental flight.
1941		Hostilities break out between British forces in Iraq and that country's pro-German faction.
1942		Admiral Chester J. Nimitz, convinced that the Japanese will attack Midway Island, visits the island to review its readiness.
1945		Russian forces take Berlin after 12 days of fierce house-to-house fighting.
1946		Prisoners revolt at California's Alcatraz prison.
1968		The U.S. Army attacks Nhi Ha in South Vietnam and begins a fourteen-day battle to wrestle it away from Vietnamese Communists.
1970		Student anti-war protesters at Ohio's Kent State University burn down the campus ROTC building. The National Guard takes control of campus.

Non Sequitur

Apple Maps Discovers ‘Loch Ness Monster'

World Discovers Apple Maps

Could Apple Maps finally have discovered the existence of the Loch Ness monster? And, as a result, could the world finally recognize the existence of Apple Maps?

A satellite image (left) from Apple's version of Google Maps shows a mysterious white blob, with what appear to be a pair of flippers at its side, underneath the waters of Loch Ness in Scottish Highlands.

According to the totally-non-biased “experts” at the Official Loch Ness Monster Fan Club, a six month study has concluded the image is “likely” proof of the fabled monster's existence.

‘We've been looking at it for a long time trying to work out exactly what it is. It looks like a boat wake, but the boat is missing. You can see some boats moored at the shore, but there isn't one here. We've shown it to boat experts and they don't know what it is,” club president Gary Campbell told the Daily Mail. “Whatever this is, it is under the water and heading south, so unless there have been secret submarine trials going on in the loch, the size of the object would make it likely to be Nessie.”

Deep-sea biologist Andrew David Thaler said otherwise on Friday after taking a few minutes out of his day on Friday to study the image. Ironically, he used Google Earth to discredit the fan club's months of hard, analytical work.

“The accompanying image is a low-resolution satellite image of a boat wake, available, apparently, only on Apple Maps. There's really not deconstruction needed, it's a boat wake,” Thaler wrote on his blog.

He even found a handy-dandy GIF made from higher-resolution satellite images of what he believes is the very boat that created the wake in question.

While proving his point about the monster-sized boat wake, he also proved that Google is far better resource for monster hunters hunting monsters on their smartphone.

“Apple doesn't have it's own imaging satellites. The fact that the image only shows up in Apple Maps, not Google, is due to Apple either using a slightly different image set to stitch together a picture of the loch, or has a less robust algorithm for dealing with artifacts,” Thaler explained.

“Both the boat in the northern picture and the ‘ghost boat’ in the monster picture are about 20 meters long. There are no 20-meter long catfish. There are no whale sharks in Loch Ness (how would they survive in freshwater?). It's a boat,” Thaler continued. “If something looks exactly like a boat wake, in a place where there are plenty of boats, when a similar boat can actually be seen in the same region, it's a boat.”