How do you know when you are truly in love?  Scientists from Stony Brook University in New York claim they have discovered true love.

Previous research suggested that the first stages of romantic love, a rollercoaster ride of mood swings and obsessions that psychologists call limerence, start to fade within 15 months. After 10 years the chemical tide has ebbed away.

The scans of some of the long-term couples, however, revealed that elements of limerence mature, enabling them to enjoy what a new report calls “intensive companionship and sexual liveliness”.

The researchers nicknamed the couples “swans” because they have similar mental “love maps” to animals that mate for life such as swans, voles and grey foxes.

The reactions of the swans to pictures of their beloved were identified on MRI brain scans as a burst of pleasure-producing dopamine more commonly seen in couples who are gripped in the first flush of lust.

“The findings go against the traditional view of romance – that it drops off sharply in the first decade – but we are sure it’s real,” said Arthur Aron, a psychologist at Stony Brook.

Link to full article

Watercliffe Meadow opened its doors in September.  It has 500 students, classrooms, teachers and a playground.  Technically, it is a school, but calling it a "school" has been forbidden because of its 'negative connotations'. 

'We decided from an early stage we didn't want to use the word "school",' she [Linda Kingdon, headmistress] said yesterday. 'This is Watercliffe Meadow, a place for learning. One reason was many of the parents of the children here had very negative connotations of school.

'Instead we want this to a be a place for family learning, where anyone can come. We were able to start from scratch and create a new type of learning experience. There are no whistles or bells or locked doors.

So would a student get expelled if he or she called it "school"?  Seriously, a school is a school.

Link

Check out the Flickr Pool dedicated entirely to Far Side reenactments.  Have a laugh!  Link.

[Pictured, "First Pants THEN shoes" by Tim Orval]

I was reading this CNN article written by Maureen Salamon and it got me thinking...  What wouldn't you do in front of your spouse? 

Would you fart or belch in front of your spouse? 

Would you let your spouse see you going to the bathroom?  (Number 1?  Number 2?  Or both?)

Would you sing to your spouse even though you know you have a terrible voice?  What about dancing?

Would you pick your nose?  Pick a wedgie?  Pop a zit?  Pick your teeth?

So what are your boundaries?  Share them in the comments.

Are you wondering what to get your young evil genius for the holidays?  You could get your little one the unoriginal alphabet blocks -- you know, "A" is for apple.  Or you could get her alphabet blocks that other kids in her play group will drool over.  A Young Mad Scientist's First Alphabet Blocks has made the alphabet just a bit more interesting.  Link.

You may remember me from my previous Chinglish posts on Blogcadre. Well I have since moved to India and will be sharing a few cultural and life tidbits with you...taking into consideration spontaneous power cuts and ungodly slow internet connections.

Have you ever tried to make the perfect pizza with fresh ingredients without the chewy crust?  Skip eating out and delivery and try this pizza hack over at Serious Eats.  You'll only need a cast-iron skillet and your oven's broiler.  Link.

Lolz, this made me laugh today. Thought I'd share!"More than $200,000 worth of inflatable breasts have been lost en route to Australia. The men's magazine "Ralph" was planning to use the breasts as a free gift to readers in the January issue. The container left Beijing by ship two weeks ago but turned up empty in Sidney, according to a spokeswoman for the magazine.

"Ralph" editor Santi Pintado urges anyone with information about the bo

The Yahoo! Messenger folks gave our team at Colle+McVoy an opportunity to do something fun and original for the holidays. Four weeks later, the Emoticarolers were born! You can create your own lyrics for one of three holiday tunes, choose between a number of characters, and the Emoticarolers will sing a custom carol to your friends.

We tackled some really interesting challenges with this one: an aggressive schedule, finding a reliable way to do text-to-song, and creating a user interface that makes it as simple as possible to enter lyrics to replace the words of well known tunes.

The timeline was the most familiar of these challenges and we're getting to be pretty good with turning awesome stuff around quickly (I don't mind bragging about this too much - our team rocks).

On the text to song side, the biggest hurdle was dealing with the fact that doing text to speech for each of the 4 voices and then compiling all the audio into one mp3 output track is a massive CPU consuming task. So all the technicalities of text-to-song aside, this had to be built in a way that we can just throw servers at it if we get a big spike in traffic. It needs to do this without any bottleneck point, storing data for tons of users, and it needs to start up and shut down extra servers as needed so that we can accommodate load spikes without costing more than necessary.

The most unforeseen challenge, however, was getting the UI right for song entry. Just entering a song into a big input field made it difficult for the user to match their lyrics to the right notes in the song. On the other hand, the notes are all syllable dependent—what if you want to shove a 2 syllable word into a one syllable slot?

We ended up using an interface similar to MadLibs, where you match your input with the words you are attempting to replace. The system will determine the number of syllables you entered, compare that against what it expected for that word replacement, and figure out how to make any note timing adjustments, if necessary. You still have to do some phonetic spelling if you're doing any serious funny business, but it works pretty darn well, and messing with the language really ends up being half the fun.

Give it a shot, send it around, and let me know what you think. We're all pretty stoked with how it turned out, and we're looking forward to hearing people's feedback.

Happy holidays BlogCadre!

View or edit this song
Emoticarolers.com

For the past several winters Art Shanty Projects has found its home on Medicine Lake.  This year our pals from Mount Holly, MN are participating and blogging about their experience.

One of the great pleasures in ice fishing is spending time in close quarters with your closest friends playing cards with a beat up deck of cards that smell like an eelpout and talking and laughing.

Nowadays, we hardly sit at the same table and interact face to face with each other. As families, we eat in shifts or on the fly. We communicate more through our phones and email than we do with our own smiles, eyes and touch.. With the increasing popularity of video game systems, gameplay has become less intimate as people sit on a sofa facing the television instead of each other.

By creating 5 tiny little dicehouses designed around 2-4 people sitting close together playing games together, we hope to rekindle the warmth and art of face to face interaction and gameplay for our visitors.

Each dicehouse will be heated exclusively by the warmth of conversation and the closeness of the people within it.

dICEHOUSES bLOG
Art Shanty Projects