You remember Friendster, right?  No?  It is a social media cautionary tale about hubris and taking the money while it's good.    Friendster was one of the original social media networks, long before Facebook, and in 2003 they were offered $30 million in pre-IPO Google stock and in 2008, a year before it sold for under $30 million, Friendster turned down a $150 million buyout.   The Google stock would have been worth $200-800 million.  Basically, it was run stupidly.   When you get acquired by Kuala Lumpur-based MOL, a payment systems seller heard of nowhere outside Asia, you have fallen far.

I don't think this needs a lot of introduction - but if it does, they are talking about electro-surgery instead of old-fashioned scalpels.  Electro-surgery, which uses concentrated electric currents, has been around since 1914 but this is a new ... area of experimentation.

Who are the test subjects for this?  And why not use a laser?   You'll have to read to find out, but Dr. Tsai said no penises were harmed during the course of the experiment.

In case you are one of those people running out to buy a copy of Andrew Morton's new unauthorized (whatever that means) biography of Angelina Jolie and are unsure of the many subtexts that just have to exist in each event of her life because she is famous, Jen Chaney and Liz Kelly of the Washington Post are here to help guide you with meaningful questions to ask at the next Book Club meeting.   Take that, Oprah!

You can probably even relate the events to your own life to make it more interesting.  To wit:

Did you let your 14 year old daughter take over your bedroom and have her boyfriend move in with you?  

... no, better, if only we had an open source, downloadable, multi-scale, virtual catalog of the mouse brain and its cellular constituents.

Wait, now we do!

Well, now there are 7 stages of Mitosis;  Interphase, Prophase, Metaphase, Anaphase, Telophase, Cytokinasis and ...

... Delicious!


Kevin Van Aelst art - see more here.

via It Takes 30, from the Department of Systems Biology @ Harvard Medical School

As so often with mathematical treatments of complex problems, one of the key benefits of creating the model is that it forces you to make explicit your assumptions.

The 1960s were a great decade - the 1960s that the '60s would become famous for (drugs, riots, protests) didn't really happen until the end and, as David Crosby replied when asked to disclose one thing people did not know about the '60s stated, "They happened in the '70s" - and its mystique has become even greater with the gentle misogyny and rampant chain smoking of "Mad Men".

But there was cool science too.  At Psypost, they write of a Journal of Personality and Social Psychology study that set out to find what we could learn about men from what they preferred in women - like the size of butts or boobs.  

The article we all wanted to write, but it isn't science and we feel guilty wasting the audience's time complaining about people they never run across but we see day ... after day ... after day ... 

They subscribe to our Twitterfeed, they want to write to us on Facebook, they can show us how to make money if we just bookmark them.

No one knows what they actually do is just 1 of the 5 signs.  You have to read for the rest ...

H/T Jennifer Ouellette at Cocktail Party Physics.

British nanny Nicola Paginton, age 30, suffered a sudden heart arrhythmia, likely caused by "her activity before death", says the coroners report.  

A heart attack at such a young age?   What was that activity?  I am not writing it here but you can go read about it. 



I guess all British nannies look like this?  It explains why American men are not allowed to have them.