Tab-A-Day

Something slightly interesting, every day.

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Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community is a 2000 nonfiction book by Robert D. Putnam. It was developed from his 1995 essay entitled Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital. Putnam surveys the decline of "social capital" in the United States since 1950. He has described the reduction in all the forms of in-person social intercourse upon which Americans used to found, educate, and enrich the fabric of their social lives. He believes this undermines the active civil engagement which a strong democracy requires from its citizens.

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In biology, Bateman's principle suggests that in most species, variability in reproductive success, or "reproductive variance," is greater in males than in females. This is ultimately a consequent of anisogamy. Females, especially mammalian females, almost always invest more energy into producing offspring than males invest. Bateman's principle anticipated and is consistent with Robert Trivers's theory of Parental investment—in most species females are a limiting factor over which males will compete. This competition results in some males being more successful than others, leading to greater reproductive variance among males than females. It is named for English geneticist Angus John Bateman (1919–1996).

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Assortative mating is a mating pattern and a form of sexual selection in which individuals with similar genotypes and/orphenotypes mate with one another more frequently than would be expected under a random mating pattern. Examples of similar phenotypes include, but are not limited to, body size, skin coloration/ pigmentation, and age. Assortative mating, also referred to as positive assortative mating or homogamy, may increase genetic relatedness within the family. Assortative mating can be contrasted with disassortative mating (also known as negative assortative mating or heterogamy) in which individuals with dissimilar genotypes and/or phenotypes mate with one another more frequently than would be expected under random mating. Disassortative mating reduces the genetic similarities within the family. Positive assortative mating occurs more frequently than negative assortative mating. In both cases, due to the nonrandom mating pattern, there is a deviation from the Hardy–Weinberg principle.

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Limerence (also infatuated love) is a state of mind which results from a romantic attraction to another person and typically includes obsessive thoughts and fantasies and a desire to form or maintain a relationship with the object of love and have one's feelings reciprocated. Psychologist Dorothy Tennov coined the term "limerence" for her 1979 book, Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love, to describe a concept that had grown out of her work in the mid-1960s, when she interviewed over 500 people on the topic of love.[1]

Limerence has been defined by one writer as "an involuntary interpersonal state that involves intrusive, obsessive, and compulsive thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that are contingent on perceived emotional reciprocation from the object of interest".[2]

Limerence, which is not exclusively sexual, has also been defined in terms of its potentially inspirational effects and in relation to attachment theory. It has been described as being "an involuntary potentially inspiring state of adoration and attachment to a limerent object involving intrusive and obsessive thoughts, feelings and behaviors from euphoria to despair, contingent on perceived emotional reciprocation".[3]

Attachment theory emphasizes that "many of the most intense emotions arise during the formation, the maintenance, the disruption, and the renewal of attachment relationships".[4] It has been suggested that "the state of limerence is the conscious experience of sexual incentive motivation" during attachment formation, "a kind of subjective experience of sexual incentive motivation"[5] during the "intensive ... pair-forming stage"[6] of human affectionate bonding.

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Make, Market, And Sell Your Game In 3 Months Or Fewer

Hello everyone! Recently, Alejandro Hitti and myself were asked to give a guest lecture to a group of junior and senior undergrads at DigiPen Institute of Technology. We had prepared the talk for G...

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Leather is a durable and flexible material created by tanning animal rawhide and skin, often cattle hide. It can be produced at manufacturing scales ranging from cottage industry to heavy industry.

People use leather to make various goods—including clothing (e.g., shoes, hats, jackets, skirts, trousers, and belts), bookbinding, leather wallpaper, and as a furniture covering. It is produced in a wide variety of types and styles, decorated by a wide range of techniques.

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Tanning is the process of treating skins and hides of animals to produce leather, which is more durable and less susceptible to decomposition. Traditionally, tanning usedtannin, an acidic chemical compound from which the tanning process draws its name (tannin is in turn named after an old German word for oak or fir trees, from which the compound was derived). Coloring may occur during tanning. A tannery is the term for a place where the skins are processed.

Tanning hide into leather involves a process which permanently alters the protein structure of skin. Making "rawhide" (untanned but worked hide) does not require the use of tannin. Rawhide is made by removing the flesh and fat and then the hair by use of an aqueous solution (this process is often called "liming" when using lime and water or "bucking" when using wood ash (lye) and water), then scraping over a beam with a somewhat dull knife, then drying. The two aforementioned solutions for removing the hair also act to clean the fiber network of the skin and allow penetration and action of the tanning agent, so that all the steps in preparation of rawhide except drying are often preludes to the more complex process of tanning and production of leather.

Tanning can be performed with either vegetable or mineral methods. Before tanning, the skins are unhaired, degreased, desalted and soaked in water over a period of 6 hours to 2 days. To prevent damage of the skin by bacterial growth during the soaking period, biocides, typically dithiocarbamates, may be used. Fungicides such as 2-thiocyanomethylthiobenzothiazole may also be added later in the process, to protect wet leathers from mold growth.

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Homogamy is marriage between individuals who are, in some culturally important way, similar to each other. Homogamy may be based on socioeconomic status, class, gender, ethnicity, or religion,[1] or age in the case of the so-called age homogamy. It is a form of assortative mating.

It can also refer to the socialization customs of a particular group; such that people who are similar in religion, class, gender, or culture tend to socialize with one another.

Homogamy has been suggested as a term for same-sex marriage or other union, and heterogamy as a term for marriage or union between people of different sexes.

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Neuroscientists Confirm That Our Loved Ones Become Ourselves

Self-identity is entwined with the people you empathize with at a neural level.

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How Humans Created Cats

Following the invention of agriculture, one thing led to another, and ta da: the world's most popular pet.

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My late wife, Jennifer, was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2008, five months after our wedding, and she died on December 22, 2011. Thankfully Jennifer allowed me to photograph of day to day life. Our hope was that we could provide a better understanding of the reality of life with cancer.

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Film noir (/fɪlm nwɑr/; French pronunciation: ​[film nwaʁ]) is a cinematic term used primarily to describe stylish Hollywood crime dramas, particularly such that emphasize cynical attitudes andsexual motivations. Hollywood's classical film noir period is generally regarded as extending from the early 1940s to the late 1950s. Film noir of this era is associated with a low-key black-and-white visual style that has roots in German Expressionist cinematography. Many of the prototypical stories and much of the attitude of classic noir derive from the hardboiled school ofcrime fiction that emerged in the United States during the Great Depression.

The term film noir, French for "black film",[1] first applied to Hollywood films by French critic Nino Frank in 1946, was unrecognized by most American film industry professionals of that era.[2]Cinema historians and critics defined the category retrospectively. Before the notion was widely adopted in the 1970s, many of the classic films noirs[a] were referred to as melodramas. Whether film noir qualifies as a distinct genre is a matter of ongoing debate among scholars.

Film noir encompasses a range of plots: the central figure may be a private eye (The Big Sleep), a plainclothes policeman (The Big Heat), an aging boxer (The Set-Up), a hapless grifter (Night and the City), a law-abiding citizen lured into a life of crime (Gun Crazy), or simply a victim of circumstance (D.O.A.). Although film noir was originally associated with American productions, films now so described have been made around the world. Many pictures released from the 1960s onward share attributes with film noir of the classical period, and often treat its conventions self-referentially. Some refer to such latter-day works as neo-noir. The clichés of film noir have inspired parody since the mid-1940s.

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