Do you ever synaesthetically taste something you’ve never eaten before?
It can be difficult to articulate a particular sensation and compare it to a foodstuff. These things are specific and very, very complex. When I’ve taken part in research, I could write maybe half a page of A4 on a particular word’s effects.

Ever since I was young, I had a taste for the word ‘expect’ and I could never quite put my finger on what it was. One day, I bought a packet of Marmite-flavoured crisps. When I had one, it clicked – that’s the taste of “expect”! If I had to describe it I’d say it’s a bit tangy, slightly thick but crunchy.

I get lots of metallic tastes that I can’t describe, other than saying it’s smooth or rough. The name David gives me a very strong taste of cloth, a bit like sucking on a sleeve.

How has it affected your life?
When I was younger, I used to choose friends according to whether they tasted nice or not. When I got older, it used to affect my choice of girlfriend. Their name would be just as attractive to me as the way they looked or their personality.

The results showed significantly greater hippocampal atrophy in individuals reporting a life-changing religious experience. In addition, they found significantly greater hippocampal atrophy among born-again Protestants, Catholics, and those with no religious affiliation, compared with Protestants not identifying as born-again.

The authors offer the hypothesis that the greater hippocampal atrophy in selected religious groups might be related to stress. They argue that some individuals in the religious minority, or those who struggle with their beliefs, experience higher levels of stress. This causes a release of stress hormones that are known to depress the volume of the hippocampus over time. This might also explain the fact that both non-religious as well as some religious individuals have smaller hippocampal volumes.

The explanation Cochrane proposes is surprisingly straightforward for so unusual an outcome: that visual input comes in through the retinas of one girl, reaches her thalamus, then takes two different courses, like electricity traveling along a wire that splits in two. In the girl who is looking at the strobe or a stuffed animal in her crib, the visual input continues on its usual pathways, one of which ends up in the visual cortex. In the case of the other girl, the visual stimulus would reach her thalamus via the thalamic bridge, and then travel up her own visual neural circuitry, ending up in the sophisticated processing centers of her own visual cortex. Now she has seen it, probably milliseconds after her sister has.

The results of the test did not surprise the family, who had long suspected that even when one girl’s vision was angled away from the television, she was laughing at the images flashing in front of her sister’s eyes. The sensory exchange, they believe, extends to the girls’ taste buds: Krista likes ketchup, and Tatiana does not, something the family discovered when Tatiana tried to scrape the condiment off her own tongue, even when she was not eating it.

Even knowing about the tests and what Cochrane believed, I listened to the family’s stories with some amount of skepticism. Perhaps they were imagining it or exaggerating for the sake of a good story. Then in one of the many idle moments of the five days I spent with the family, the girls were watching television, and I absent-mindedly gave Tatiana’s foot, which Krista could not see, a little tickle. She turned to me and smiled, and then Krista spoke: “Now do me,” she said. Had she felt the sensation but wanted the emotional experience of knowing that she, too, was receiving that kind of playful attention?

"Get down on your knees, open your mouth, and ask Jesus to cum inside you."

After riffing on Paul Revere's ride during her bus tour last week--and making a couple of basic factual errors--Sarah Palin has responded by arguing that she got the facts right.

Paul Revere was "warning the British" that night, Palin says, refusing to admit that she just worded her riff badly.

(In general, the colonists who opposed the British were, in fact, "warning" the British that they weren't going to stand for the status quo.)

Sarah Palin's fans, meanwhile, have responded by trying to rewrite history, in this case on the Wikipedia page for Paul Revere.

Midwest security consulting firm Black & Berg issued a “Cybersecurity for the 21st Century Hacking Challenge,” offering $10k and a job at the company to the first person who could change their website’s homepage image.

The site is now adorned with the signature top hat and monocle guy of Lulz Security (previously). The hackers/comedians left a message saying: “Done, that was easy. Keep your money we do it for the lulz.”

The hack was inspired by a tweet from Black & Berg’s Joe Black, claiming that LulzSec’s hacking was bringing in clients for his company. Well, not anymore it’s not…

But, even then, I could only laugh at their platitudes. In those days, the cultural conservatives thought that KISS and Black Sabbath were going to impede my moral development. They wanted to protect me from sex when I had already been raped. They wanted to protect me from evil though a future serial killer had already abused me. They wanted me to profess my love for God without considering that I was the child and grandchild of men and women who’d been sexually and physically abused by generations of clergy.

What was my immature, childish response to those would-be saviors?

“Wow, you are way, way too late.”

Zombie letter in full

Dear Leicester City Council,
Can you please let us know what provisions you have in place in the event of a zombie invasion? Having watched several films it is clear that preparation for such an event is poor and one that councils throughout the kingdom must prepare for.
Please provide any information you may have.
Yours faithfully,
Concerned Citizen

"A paper street is a road or street that appears on maps but does not exist in reality"

"The first thing to remember is that it's not a graphic novel, it's a comic. People are so afraid to say the word "comic"."

Thus, I had serious issues with "Monster at the End of this Book". I was always very ill at ease with Grover, anyway. He caused terrible problems for everyone he encountered, and almost never showed remorse. Also, he couldn't seem to communicate without shouting and gesticulating wildly. I had real problems with the way he carried himself, so I knew going into the book that I probably wasn't going to like it much. What I didn't expect was to be profoundly affected, to the point of tears and sleepless nights, by a drawing of Grover [...]

In a landmark new documentary produced for YouTube, Adam Curtis has not examined his career and laid bare his style in the light of some confused academic papers he stumbled across on the internet. Instead, I have plundered various video archives and ripped him off, up, down, left, right and back again.

The Old, Used Tanning Bed
Arghhh!
I am so sorry
That the office is swamped like this!
Dinosaurs even?!
I'll try to run through some of these
In my head
Before responding.
And the old, used tanning bed
That my girls have used
A handful of times
In Juneau?
Yes,
We paid for it
Ourselves.

Interactive timeline comic about the Blackwater shootings in Nisoor Square, Baghdad in 2007, where 17 Iraqi civilians were killed. The comic takes our slogan 'there is more than one truth' to the next level, by showing several different perspectives on the incident pieced together from news reports and eyewitness testimony.

Unfortunately, not only is the death of a baby Juggalette one of the two or three worst things that happens to Juggalos and therefore no laughing matter, holding a faux Juggalo funeral apparently infringes on the Juggalo brand that Mssrs. J and 2 Dope have labored so intensively to cultivate over the years, leading them to seek their totally wicked, balls-out legal action.

These 9 drawings were done by an artist under the influence of LSD -- part of a test conducted by the US government during it's dalliance with psychotomimetic drugs in the late 1950's. The artist was given a dose of LSD 25 and free access to an activity box full of crayons and pencils. His subject is the medico that jabbed him.

Fagilyu Mukhametzyanov, 49, had been incorrectly declared by doctors but died for real when she heard mourners saying prayers for her soul to be taken up to heaven.

Devastated husband Fagili Mukhametzyanov, 51, had been told his wife had died of a heart attack after she'd collapsed at home suffering from chest pains.

But as mourning relatives filed past her open coffin they were shocked when the supposedly dead woman suddenly woke up and started screaming when she realised where she was.

"Her eyes fluttered and we immediately rushed her back to the hospital but she only lived for another 12 minutes in intensive care before she died again, this time for good," said Fagili, who now plans to sue the hospital.

11. Vladimir Nabokov on Ernest Hemingway (1972)

“As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early ‘forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it.”


3. Virginia Woolf on James Joyce

“[Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.”

Sneer is a free and open source sovereign computing platform. It runs on your machine (like Skype or Firefox) using the Java VM. It enables you to:

•Create your personal cluster by sharing hardware resources (CPU, disk space, network bandwidth) with your friends.
•Host your own social network, information and media.
•Create sovereign applications and share them with others.
•Download and run sovereign applications created by others, way beyond your wildest dreams.
You can do all these things directly with your peers, in an autonomous, sovereign way, without depending on online service providers such as email providers, Google, Facebook, etc.