here’s another one :(

OPI “Dazzled By Gold”

the struggle of loving a polish that you can’t find ANYWHERE….

China Glaze “Millenium”, i NEED you in my life!

gangsterly:

how dreamy.

(Source: dearfuturegirl)

the-star-stuff:

10 Psychological States You’ve Never Heard Of — And When You Experienced Them

Everybody knows what you mean when you say you’re happy or sad. But what about all those emotional states you don’t have words for? Here are ten feelings you may have had, but never knew how to explain.

1. Dysphoria
Often used to describe depression in psychological disorders, dysphoria is general state of sadness that includes restlessness, lack of energy, anxiety, and vague irritation. It is the opposite of euphoria, and is different from typical sadness because it often includes a kind of jumpiness and some anger. You have probably experienced it when coming down from a stimulant like chocolate, coffee, or something stronger. Or you may have felt it in response to a distressing situation, extreme boredom, or depression.

2. Enthrallment
Psychology professor W. Gerrod Parrott has broken down human emotions into subcategories, which themselves have their own subcategories. Most of the emotions he identifies, like joy and anger, are pretty recognizable. But one subset of joy, “enthrallment,” you may not have heard of before. Unlike the perkier subcategories of joy like cheerfulness, zest, and relief, enthrallment is a state of intense rapture. It is not the same as love or lust. You might experience it when you see an incredible spectacle — a concert, a movie, a rocket taking off — that captures all your attention and elevates your mood to tremendous heights.

3. Normopathy
Psychiatric theorist Christopher Bollas invented the idea of normopathy to describe people who are so focused on blending in and conforming to social norms that it becomes a kind of mania. A person who is normotic is often unhealthily fixated on having no personality at all, and only doing exactly what is expected by society. 

4. Abjection
There are a few ways to define abjection, but French philosopher Julia Kristeva (literally) wrote the book on what it means to experience abjection. She suggests that every human goes through a period of abjection as tiny children when we first realize that our bodies are separate from our parents’ bodies — this sense of separation causes a feeling of extreme horror we carry with us throughout our lives. That feeling of abjection gets re-activated when we experience events that, however briefly, cause us to question the boundaries of our sense of self. Often, abjection is what you are feeling when you witness or experience something so horrific that it causes you to throw up. A classic example is seeing a corpse, but abjection can also be caused by seeing shit or open wounds. 

5. Sublimation
If you’ve ever taken a class where you learned about Sigmund Freud’s theories about sex, you probably have heard of sublimation. Freud believed that human emotions were sort of like a steam engine, and sexual desire was the steam. If you blocked the steam from coming out of one valve, pressure would build up and force it out of another. Sublimation is the process of redirecting your steamy desires from having naughty sex, to doing something socially productive like writing an article about psychology or fixing the lawnmower or developing a software program. If you’ve ever gotten your frustrations out by building something, or gotten a weirdly intense pleasure from creating an art project, you’re sublimating. 

6. Repetition compulsion
Ah, Freud. You gave us so many new feelings and psychological states to explore! The repetition compulsion is a bit more complicated than Freud’s famous definition — “the desire to return to an earlier state of things.” On the surface, a repetition compulsion is something you experience fairly often. It’s the urge to do something again and again. Maybe you feel compelled to always order the same thing at your favorite restaurant, or always take the same route home, even though there are other yummy foods and other easy ways to get home. Maybe your repetition compulsion is a bit more sinister, and you always feel the urge to date people who treat you like crap, over and over, even though you know in advance it will turn out badly (just like the last ten times). 

7. Repressive desublimation
Political theorist Herbert Marcuse was a big fan of Freud and lived through the social upheavals of the 1960s. He wanted to explain how societies could go through periods of social liberation, like the countercultures and revolutions of the mid-twentieth century, and yet still remain under the (often strict) control of governments and corporations. How could the U.S. have gone through all those protests in the 60s but never actually overthrown the government? The answer, he decided, was a peculiar emotional state known as “repressive desublimation.” Remember, Freud said sublimation is when you route your sexual energies into something non-sexual. But Marcuse lived during a time when people were very much routing their sexual energies into sex — it was the sexual liberation era, when free love reigned. People were desublimating. And yet they continued to be repressed by many other social strictures, coming from corporate life, the military, and the government.

8. Aporia
You know that feeling of crazy emptiness you get when you realize that something you believed isn’t actually true? And then things feel even more weird when you realize that actually, the thing you believed might be true and might not — and you’ll never really know? That’s aporia. The term comes from ancient Greek, but is also beloved of post-structuralist theorists like Jacques Derrida and Gayatri Spivak. The reason modern theorists love the idea of aporia is that it helps to describe the feeling people have in a world of information overload, where you are often bombarded with contradictory messages that seem equally true.

9. Compersion
We’ve gotten into some pretty philosophical territory, so now it’s time to return to some good, old-fashioned internet memes. The word compersion was popularized by people in online communites devoted to polyamory and open relationships, in order to describe the opposite of feeling jealous when your partner dates somebody else. Though a monogamous person would feel jealous seeing their partner kiss another person, a non-monogamous person could feel compersion, a sense of joy in seeing their partner happy with another person. But monogamous people can feel compersion, too, if we extend the definition out to mean any situation where you feel the opposite of jealous. If a friend wins an award you hoped to win, you can still feel compersion (though you might be a little jealous too).

10. Group feelings
Some psychologists argue that there are some feelings we can only have as members of a group — these are called intergroup and intragroup feelings. Often you notice them when they are in contradiction with your personal feelings. For example, many people feel intergroup pride and guilt for things that their countries have done, even if they weren’t born when their countries did those things. Though you did not fight in a war, and are therefore not personally responsible for what happened, you share in an intergroup feeling of pride or guilt. Group feelings often cause painful contradictions. 

Image by Tom Wang/Shutterstock

the-star-stuff:

10 Incredibly Strange Brain Disorders

You’re used to relying on your brain. Whatever else happens, your personal lump of gray matter will take in the world, and respond to it in a fluid and predictable way. But actually, whatever your brain does is made up of many successive mental steps — and if just one of those steps fails, you’ll find yourself behaving very differently.

10. Astasia-Abasia Patients Are Always On the Verge of Falling

>Astasia-Abasia is also known as Blocq’s Disease, after Paul Blocq, the French doctor who first described it. It’s the inability to stand or walk properly, but there’s more to it. At first, a person with this condition appears very drunk. Patients lurch when they try to stand or walk. Patients seem dangerous to themselves. They overbalance extravagantly, always catching themselves at the last moment. But that’s the condition — they always catch themselves.

9. Anosognia Patients Are Unable to Recognize Their Own Injuries

Anosognia arises in conjunction with other injuries — generally strokes and blindness. People who have lost the ability to control one half of their body will say that they just don’t want to move that part of their body. They’ll say that that half of the body is really working normally, after all. When doctors show that it isn’t working, they’ll say that the body parts that the doctors are pointing to belong to someone else, or even that they have three hands, arms, or legs, and are moving the ones that the doctors don’t see. 

8. Broca’s Aphasia Patients Are Able to Do Everything But Speak

Patients with Broca’s Aphasia are able to write, to read, to listen and understand people, and are able to talk - but not able to form many coherent words. The condition is the result of an injury to Broca’s area, the patient’s ability to control what their mouths are saying goes away. Some patients are able to manage about four words, but most lose their ability to say what they want. 

7. Palinopsia Patients Literally Cannot Unsee Things

Palinopsia is not actually a medical disorder. It’s just the after-image that most people see after they look away from bright objects. Sometimes, though, it lasts a little too long. A seventy-three-year-old woman attended a Christmas party the day after a very bad headache and noticed that, after she looked at a Santa Claus who was working at the party, she saw a Santa beard on everyone’s face for the rest of the party. Days later she still saw people in red Santa hats and red Santa jackets walking around the streets.

6. Dysmimia or Amimia Patients Don’t Know if You Give Them the Finger

Dismimia is a weirdly specific little condition. There’s no way of knowing exactly what causes it, but it stops the sufferer from understanding hand gestures or hand signals. Common gestures for ‘wait,’ ‘stop,’ or ‘sit and spin,’ are suddenly incomprehensible. These gestures are lost even if the patient previously knew their meaning.

5. Verbal Dysdecorum Patients Can’t Censor Themselves

This syndrome was first observed in a Vietnam veteran who demonstrated exactly what happens when you don’t constantly censor yourself at your job: You get fired. You get fired over and over until finally someone sends you to a doctor. This particular case was steered towards psychology — rather than an etiquette book — because the soldier had been shot in the head years before. The right front part of the brain has something in it that allows people to consider their words and quietly keep the socially unhelpful ones inside. Other injuries to this area of the brain have caused similar responses. Some injuries expand beyond the verbal into actual social dysdecorum, which includes inappropriate and ill-considered actions, verging on complete sociopathy.

4. Dysantigraphia Patients Can’t Possibly Copy Their Neighbor’s Paper

A seventy-year-old man came into the doctor’s office one day with a rather strange condition. He had suffered a stroke, and had difficulty speaking - although he could speak. He had no problems with moving his limbs. He could read and write well, as long as what he was writing was dictated to him. When he was given a paper full of writing, and asked to copy it, he faltered after a few words, and after a line the entire process became impossible.

3. Amelodia Patients Can Never Name That Tune

The most famous case of amelodia was a retired 91-year-old musicologist. He was an accomplished musician who reported to his family that he’d recently heard an angelic choir singing to him. They responded appropriately by shoving him in a cab and rushing him to the hospital so fast that they left a cartoon dust trail behind them. At the hospital they found that he had no hearing problems, that he could, on a guitar, play many tunes from memory, that he could tell the difference between higher and lower pitched notes, and that he could easily tell the difference between discordant notes. He just couldn’t recognize any tune played to him, no matter how simple and well-known the tune was. The ability to audibly recognize a tune, and only the tune, was gone.

2. Anhedonia Patients Can’t Take Pleasure in Anything

The globus pallidus is the part of the brain that regulates when we get rewarded with a little burst of pleasure chemicals. Sometimes that burst can be in response to a pleasurable event, or a reward for doing something that we deem necessary, or even just the cessation of pain. Anhedonia happens when damage to the globus pallidus shuts off the reward system entirely. Often this is seen in recovering drug addicts - especially meth users. Sometimes strokes also do damage to the globus pallidus.

Those strokes that do hit that part of the brain are associated with greater and longer depressions than those that don’t. But anhedonia doesn’t have to be a ‘global’ response, cutting out all pleasure. It can take single pleasures away from people, too. There was one case in which a 71-year-old musician, stopped feeling a pleasure response when he listened to music. Although he had listened to music he enjoyed before he had a small stroke, afterwards he felt no emotional response to it whatsoever.

1. Jargonaphasia Patients Are Makeshift Gertrude Steins

This is a disorder that, in at least one of its forms, could have been lifted from an absurdist satire. No one entirely agrees on what jargonaphasia (or jargon aphasia) is. For some psychologists, it’s when a patient has lost the ability to form words entirely, and only utters a string of sounds that don’t resemble words at all. For some it’s when patients speak words, but without any sentence structure or grammar to give them meaning. The last understanding of the term is the most interesting. Patients can be said to be suffering from jargonaphasia when they incessantly use platitudes, cliches, and pleasantries to cover the fact that they’re saying nothing. This isn’t necessarily a contradiction; how many times in the last decade has the phrase, “Have a nice day,” conveyed any real meaning whatsoever? Stock polite terms and phrases are often the last thing that slips away from us, since we don’t put any thought into them and they become something like a reflex response. Théophile Alajouanine, a famous French neurologist, was a leading proponent of this view of jargonaphasia. He said that ‘incomprehensibility and lack of meaning, not articulatory loss or lack of proper grammatical sequencing,’ are the hallmarks of this disorder.

Looked at like this, the disorder is jargon in the most literal sense of the word. Lose a few points of grammar and you can still make your brain and your mouth work together to communicate what you’re thinking. Jargon is the destruction of any ability to use language to communicate, in a meaningful way, with the people around you, even if you keep talking in perfectly comprehensible English for hours.

>Top Image: Humantific

Via AJP, Bryn Mawr, NCBI three times, Pitt, Brainmusic, Review of Neurology, and The Medical Brief, Volume 2.

expose-the-light:

9 Equations True Geeks Should Know

The world’s complexities and uncertainties are distilled and set in orderly figures, with a handful of characters sufficing to capture the universe itself.

For your enjoyment, the Wired Science team has gathered nine of our favorite equations. This article was published November 4, 2011. Some represent the universe; others, the nature of life. One represents the limit of equations.

1. Euler’s Identity

   Also called Euler’s relation, or the Euler equation of complex analysis, this bit of mathematics enjoys accolades across geeky disciplines.

Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler first wrote the equality, which links together geometry, algebra, and five of the most essential symbols in math — 0, 1, i, pi and e — that are essential tools in scientific work.

Theoretical physicist Richard Feynman was a huge fan and called it a “jewel” and a “remarkable” formula. Fans today refer to it as “the most beautiful equation.”

2. The Entire Universe in Figures: Friedmann Equations

    Derived from Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, the two Friedmann equations describe the life of the entire universe, from fiery Big Bang birth to chilly accelerated expansion death.

3. Boltzmann’s Entropy Formula

  Nature loves chaos when it pushes systems toward equilibrium, and geeks call this universal property entropy.

The equation describes the tight relationship between entropy (S), and the myriad ways particles in a system can be arranged (k log W). The last part is tricky. k is Boltzmann’s constant and W is the number of microscopic elements of a system (e.g. the momentum and position of individual atoms of gas) in a macroscopic system in a state of balance (e.g., gas sealed in a bottle).

4. Electricity and Magnetism: Maxwell’s Equations

  Without these four equations, every lolcat on the Internet couldn’t exist. First put together by James Clerk Maxwell in 1861, the formulas describe all known behaviors of electricity and magnetism and show the relationship between the two forces. They state that a moving electric charge will generate a magnetic field while a shifting magnetic field similarly creates an electric field.

5.  Certain Uncertainty: Schrödinger Equation

     Erwin Schrödinger’s famous equation reigns supreme over the smallest objects in the universe. It illustrates how subatomic particles change with time when under the influence of a force. Any particular atom or molecule is described by its wavefunction, the probability of where and when the particle appears, represented by the Greek letter psi.

6. All Life Is an Island: Island Biogeography

   Though physicists can describe the universe’s expansion in a few lines, the basic properties of life on Earth are far harder to quantify. During the latter half of the 20th century, biologists arrived at the theory of island biogeography, which described the dynamics of animal populations on islands.

7. The Essence of Evolution: Nowak’s Evolvability

    At its most basic level, life is what replicates itself — but how did it begin? It’s the ultimate chicken-and-egg problem, and one that scientists studying what’s called pre-life try to answer. On the left side of the equation, proposed by Harvard University mathematical biologist Martin Nowak, is a symbol representing all possible strings of molecules; at right are the speed of chemical reactions, the tendency of shorter strings to be more common than longer strings, selection pressures and fitness ratings. As Nowak has shown, all that’s necessary for life to emerge are molecules subject to forces of selection and mutation. If those conditions are met, self-replication will emerge with the inexorability of gravity.

8. The Razor’s Edge of Outbreak: R-Nought

    Brought to mainstream attention by the thriller Contagion, R0, pronounced R-nought, is a very simple figure: It refers to the average number of people an individual infected with a pathogen will go on to infect. If it’s less than one, the disease will burn itself out; if greater than one, it will spread. In a world where a flu virus from Mexico can infect millions of people around the world in a matter of months, this equation is as symbolic as it is straightforward.

9. Hot or Not: The (Limited) Mathematics of Beauty

    Not everything can be quantified, especially when it comes to matters of the human heart and mind. For decades, psychologists and biologists have tried to represent physical beauty in formula form; but even if some tendencies emerge when hundreds of individual preferences are measured, what any one individual considers beautiful is impossible to predict.

At right is an equation from an unpublished attempty by Israeli computer scientists to design a program capable of quantifying the attractiveness of a face. “Y” is the empirical beauty score; at right, various measurements of how different features in a face compared to a baseline face. The program was brilliantly coded, but it didn’t work very well.

happy 90th birthday, betty white. trillest white lady EVER.

(Source: jonwithabullet)

mmhmm.

i NEED that sweater!

mischief & a flawless red lip…

you’re starting to make a fan out of me, robyn…