"Scientists have found that evolution is driving women to become ever more beautiful, while men remain as aesthetically unappealing as their caveman ancestors."

Has the following ever happened to you?
You meet someone of about your own age and are struck by how attractive that person is.  Then, a bit later, you meet that person’s parents and are amazed to find that they are particularly unattractive people.  “How is this possible?”, you ask.  “How can such a good-looking person be the progeny of such homely parents?”
I have had moments like that a number of times in my life.  And, most likely, they can be explained as a purely psychological phenomenon: something like the same color illusion, where minor/nonexistent differences are enhanced by contrast.
Nonetheless, it occurred to me a little while ago to ask a sort of audacious and perhaps silly question.  Namely, is there some reason why people tend to be more attractive than their parents?  Is it possible that each generation actually is more attractive than the previous?
Let me present a rough argument, given below, as to why that might be the case.  It’s a fairly unconvincing and perhaps completely meritless piece of speculation, but either way I’d be glad to hear your opinion.
A crude argument: genetics as a process of averaging

There has been a fair amount of research during the last decade which suggests that averageness is attractive, at least when it comes to facial features.  What I mean is this: if you take a bunch of faces and then you average their features together, the resulting “average” face will probably be more attractive than any of the individual faces that went into it.  There are lots of cool demos on the internet showing this phenomenon; they’re pretty fun to play around with.
There is, of course, an evolutionary argument for why this should be true: evolution tends to select for healthy traits and to weed out unhealthy ones, so it makes sense that we should be attracted to the “average” person who possesses good traits rather than to the “uncommon” person who possesses bad traits.  It’s not a terribly convincing argument, but then again I rarely feel very convinced by evolutionary arguments.
What I do know is that reproduction is itself sort of a process of averaging.  When two people produce a child, that child has some of the father’s attributes, some of the mother’s, and some that are a hybrid of the two.  So after many generations, a given child represents a kind of (stochastic) “average” of all the descendants whose genetic material contributed to its own.
So the basic argument is this: if averaging makes a face more attractive, and if every child is an average of his parents, then doesn’t that make a child likely to be more attractive than his parents?
Now, there may be some terrible flaw in my understanding of genetics (or aesthetics) here.  It does sound a little silly to claim that humans are getting relentlessly more attractive over time.  But you know, I never thought the Venus de Milo (supposedly the ideal of Grecian beauty 70 generations ago) was all that pretty.
http://gravityandlevity.wordpress.com/2010/06/08/is-every-generation-more-attractive-than-the-last-a-postulate/
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/beauty/article-1202381/Women-getting-attractive-evolutionary-beauty-race.html

Animal X - Doar tu si eu

Clona-Dime

Millennium - The Reconstruction Era

One of the many legacies of the Third Reich is its purge of private art collections. Up to 200,000 art works are thought to have gone missing during the war, says Katya Hills, client development manager at the London-based Art Loss Register, the world’s largest database of lost and stolen art.
The organization is currently on the hunt for 30,000 items listed as looted or missing from this era.
Below is a list—compiled by the Art Loss Register—of the most valuable and famous artworks to have been lost or stolen during World War II. Hills hopes that some of the works may be among the over 1,400 items revealed to have been found in the latest Nazi art bust.

- Raphael, Portrait of a Young Man, 1513/14
Regarded by art historians as Poland’s most famous art loss from WWII, Portrait of a Young Man was taken from the Czartoryski’s family collection in Krakow to be placed in Hitler’s Fuhrer museum in 1939. It went missing at the end of the war, but unverified rumors suggest it was found in a Swiss bank vault last summer.
- Andreas Schlüter: The Amber Room, 18th Century (photo of reconstruction by Polly Gibson)
Dubbed the “Eight Wonder of the World”, this room was made with over six tons of amber and once belonged to the King of Prussia, Peter the Great. It’s thought to have been looted during WWII by the Nazis and taken to the city of Königsberg, never to be seen again. There is however a reconstructed version in the Catherine Palace in St. Petersburg, Russia.
- Vincent van Gogh, The Painter on the Road to Tarascon, 1888
Among van Gogh’s most cherished pieces, this is thought to have burned when the Allied bombed the town of Magdeburg, setting alight the museum it was housed in.
- Giovanni Bellini, Madonna with Child, c.1430
This was evacuated in the early 1940s from a museum in Berlin to be housed in a flak tower in Berlin-Friedrichshain, located within Russian control at the time. Most of the objects in the tower were either looted or presumed destroyed, including Bellini’s Madonna.
- Gustav Klimt, Portrait of Trude Steiner, 1900
A portrait of Viennese collector Jenny Steiner’s daughter, it was seized by the Nazis after she fled Austria in 1938 and subsequently sold in 1941 to an unknown individual, not to be seen since.
- Rembrandt van Rijn, An Angel with Titus’ Features
Stored in a Chateau in the French countryside, the Nazis seized it in 1943 and took it to Paris, where it was set aside for Hitler’s museum, along with 332 other works. 162 of these have been found since, but not this one.
- Peter Paul Rubens, The Annunciation
This painting went missing after it was forcibly sold through the art auctioneer Paul Graupe in Berlin in 1935.
- Canaletto, Piazza Santa Margherita
This Canaletto lived in the private collection of Jacques Goudstikker, whose gallery was seized and purged shortly after he fled the Netherlands in 1940. Parts of the collection have been returned to Goudstikker’s heirs since, but the hunt is still on for this one.
- Edgar Degas, Five Dancing Women (Ballerinas)
The Nazis managed to get a hold of this pastel drawing when they took the collection of Jewish art collector Baron Mór Lipót Herzog. His heirs filed a lawsuit against Hungary to seek the return of part of this collection, but this work is still missing.
- Pissarro, The Boulevard Montmartre, Twilight, 1897
This was part of a collection looted by the Nazis and subsequently sold through a Swiss art dealer in 1941. Though it’s shown up in almost every decade after the war, says Hills, its current location is an enigma.
http://world.time.com/2013/11/07/the-top-10-most-wanted-missing-art-works-from-world-war-ii/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_destroyed_libraries
http://www.policymic.com/articles/71193/5-historical-monuments-have-been-destroyed-forever-during-syria-s-civil-war
http://maca.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/search/collection/p132501coll33/page/1

The Promise - Michael Nyman

sick and renew :)

Why does practically everything take longer to create than to destroy?
Charlie, Leiden The Netherlands
Because the universe always tends towards a more disorganised state; check out the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
D. Morgan, Amsterdam NL
By definition, the process of creation has to be structured and logical in order that you have a useful end product. Distruction, however, can be random and incoherent. Actions which take little or no thought can be done much faster than those which must be carefully considered.
Rick Webber, London uk
Tattoos don't.
Mark Prosser, Berne Switzerland
Because of entropy. When you create something you need to arrange the parts very carefully in order to make sure that what you are creating is as you want it to be. This takes time. When you destroy something it does not matter where the constituent parts go, as long as they are removed from the previous ordered state. This can be done in a very short time.
Simon, Hinchley Wood UK
This is a complicated one - basically, entropy (or disorder) is always on the increase, so more work is required to create than to destroy - but this work itself causes more entropy in the universe as a whole (try searching on "Maxwell's demon" for a detailed explanation.)
Jeff Vagg, Beckenham Great Britain
Destruction is a more general term than creation. Take, for example, a cake. To create it, you must arrange its consituent parts in a specific fashion. to destory it, you need only to throw it into the cat's litter tray. But if its destruction were as thorough as its creation, that is, if it were to be seperated back out into its constituent parts, the process of cake destruction would take as long, if not much longer, than cake creation. Or, I could have simply said, "because creation is a finer and more exacting art than destruction," but then one should never begin a sentence with 'because', should one?
Rob Redman, Brighton United Kingdom
Entropy!
Glyn Baker, S. Ockendon U.K
When you create something, you are concerned with the end state. This means that there is only one possible arrangement of the materials that will satisfy you, so you have to stick to the correct situation. When you destroy you are unconcerned about the fial state: any one of millions of different shapes of rubble lying around will do, so you need to take far less care. The entropy of the system (the number of possible orderings of the elements)is being reduced to one when you make, but increase when you destroy, and the natural behaviour of entropy in any system is to increase (ask a statistician why).
Jacob Steel, Cambridge England
Entropy. It takes more engery to create order than to create disorder. This is true for any system and it goes for the universe as a whole apparently, and is why an eventual 'winding-down' into cold and darkness is inevitable.
Martin Crawley, Lee-on-the-Solent UK
It doesn't. If I were to ask you to exactly recreate a particular pile of rubble, smashed window or torn shirt, you would find the task extremely difficult, if not impossible. The illusion that destruction is easier than creation reflects the fact that virtually all arrangements of matter are of little or no use to us. Thus, when I randomly rearrange a toaster (by hitting it with a mallet), although I have "created" something that would be very difficult to recreate consciously, the resulting object is of no use to us. Similarly, no permutation of lottery balls is any more or less likely than any other, but the ones we are interested in constitute a very small proportion of the possible outcomes. Creating any particular object is thus more difficult than obtaining any other arrangement of matter for the same reason that manually picking six balls from a pile of forty-nine is harder than just grabbing any old six.
Nick Hare, London
Entropy, the universal rule of order sliding towards chaos. Or gravity. Or the law of averages - more bad things than good: for example, Celine Dion's Greatest Hits; how long to create? 10 seconds to destroy.
David Neill, Stirling Scotland
I'm no physicist, but the way I understand it is based down something like this: Everything in the universe has a level of entropy or order. The higher the level of entropy the more order. Everything 'wants' to have a lower level of entropy or more disorder. This is basically because there are many more possible states of disorder than order. Does this make sense or is it just a jumbled mass of randomly assembled letters?
Rob, London UK
One of the frightening things about nuclear power stations is that they take almost infinitely longer to destroy than create (or use).
Jake Arnott, Bristol UK
How nice that - amid a population of contributors conditioned by physics - a person of metaphysical sensibilities (Nick Hare) contributed an answer. Not all creation is a process of rational thought - take the Surrealists for example, and the Oriental artists & poets. A masterwork can be created in the wink of an eye, no pre-defined outcome is necessary, or even desirable.
Nicola, Montreal Canada
Sorry Nicola, but in fact Nick Hare's contribution was the most mechanistic. Most other answers were conscious of the "human" view (as Nick says) that what we usually think of as "creations" have a purpose. This purpose could be practical or (in the case of works of art) aesthetic. Nick removed humanity and the physical world completely from the picture, reducing it to an issue of mathematics (specifically, probability). In my view, entropy is one of the many concepts originating in physics which enhance (rather than stifle) artistic endeavour. It's a shame that so many people are conditioned to see art and science as mutually exclusive.
Tim Waterfield, Cambridge England
I could create an argument with an ex girlfriend in a blink of an eye which could take 2 or 3 days to destroy.
Chris , Lyon, France
Believe you me, it is very easy to create a beer belly - it takes years of hard work and discipline to destroy it.
Oliver Benson, Luton, UK
Nick Hare's answer strikes me as being brilliant. I disagree with those responses which perceive entropy as being no more than a tendency to disorder. When entropy runs to completion energy/mass will be distributed evenly throughout the universe. How much more order do you want?
Foggy, Warrington UK
Because of our bad nature that pushes us to be destroyers rather than creators.
A. Ali, London UK
Creation is a positive term, loaded with notions of order and directed effort, while destruction implies disorder and a lack of concern. However, constructing a desired arrangement of matter, irrespective of what it looks like or what purpose it serves, generally takes longer than carelessly rearranging it. All other factors being equal, doing anything carefully, whether creating or destroying, generally takes longer than doing it carelessly.
John, London

Aura Urziceanu Mai ramai..

cameras in the cable box

Big Brother Alert: Cameras in the Cable Box to Monitor TV

DTV Cable Box with camera and mic in it? Check it out!

Camera in your cable boxes and satellite boxes

Video Camera in Cable Box System to Monitor Public

the "wow!!!" factor

Drywall Art Sculpture 


One Stroke Painting. Tagil roses. Tatyana Kudryavtseva

Making a steel door look like wood


New 3D Effect Technology on Stretch Ceiling Clipso with RGB 

BMW Museum - Kinetic Sculpture 

relocated nations for chasing the food

A hungry world: Lots of food, in too few places
Of the roughly 7 billion people in the world, an estimated 870 million suffer each day from hunger.That's hunger from malnutrition or not eating even the lowest amount of daily recommended calories—1,800—while often enduring food insecurity, or not knowing where the next meal is coming from.

The consistently massive population of hungry people—along with variables like severe weather and economic downturns—sometimes spark warnings that the planet faces impending food shortages.
And yet more people in the world—1.7 billion—are considered obese or overweight from a daily caloric intake that in some cases is at least six to seven times the minimum.
This paradox is nothing new, experts say. It just shows the problem isn't that we have too little food, it's what we do with the food we have.
"We have two or three times the amount of food right now that is needed to feed the number of people in the world," said Joshua Muldavin, a geography professor at Sarah Lawrence College who focuses on food and agricultural instruction.
(Read more: Who cares about calories? Menu labels don't work: Study)
"A lot of people aren't analyzing the situation correctly. We can deal with short-term food shortages after a disaster, but fixing long term hunger gets ignored," he said.
"We don't have food shortage problem," said Emelie Peine, a professor of international politics and economy at the University of Puget Sound.
"What we have is a distribution problem and an income problem," Peine said. "People aren't getting the food, ... and even if [they] did, they don't have enough money to buy it."
If there is enough food, a major problem causing scarcity is what we do with it, said Roger Johnson, president of the National Farmers Union, an advocacy group for U.S. farmers.
"Something in the area of up to half of all that's produced is wasted," said Johnson, who runs his own farm in North Dakota.
"In the undeveloped world, the waste happens before the food gets to people, from lack of roads and proper storage facilities, and the food rots," Johnson said. "In the developed world, it's the staggering amount of food that's thrown out after it gets to our plates."
Of the near billion who go hungry, some 852 million live in developing countries, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (WFO).
But the world's largest economy— and the richest country on Earth—is not immune from hunger.
An estimated one in six people, or some 50 million U.S.citizens, are unable to afford to buy sufficient food to stay healthy, according to the Department of Agriculture. Nearly 17 million are children.
"Our services are needed now more than ever," said Ross Fraser, a spokesman for Feeding America, a nonprofit hunger relief organization. "With so many people out of work, it's not hard to figure out why."
"Many low income seniors use us on regular basis. We serve some three million a year," Fraser said. "They have fixed incomes and with other costs they have like medical bills or just paying the rent, they're often in need of food assistance."
Seniors or anyone else trying to get a handle on food costs are constantly riding a see-saw of inflation.
In 2012, according to the WFO, global food prices rose to near-record levels, rising 6 percent last July alone.
But according to the Global Food Security Index, food and beverage prices worldwide should drop by 5.7 percent through 2013, mainly due to bumper crops of corn and wheat resulting from favorable weather conditions.
"Food inflation and scarcity go hand in hand," said Mary Lawton Johnson, a food specialist, chef and author based in Palm Beach, Fla.
"Given a natural disaster, food and other items naturally go up in price," she said. "Once that scarcity is gone, food inflation reduces."
Plenty of solutions?
Even if prices are not going through the roof, buying more nutritious food is still costly.
"It is ironic that good or healthier food like apples are more expensive than the food laced with sugars or fats," said Peine. "We need to be more thoughtful on what food we grow."
But the reason for the higher prices is fairly simple, said the National Farmers Union's Johnson.
"Crops like vegetables and fruits are more perishable, so they are more expensive to grow," he said. "Unlike other commodities, they are just less profitable for farmers."
A further irony in the world's hunger problem is that farmers—outside of developed countries—make up a majority of the world's poorest and hungriest people.
"Many farmers don't make enough to live on each year," Ron Johnson said. "Underdeveloped economies and some global trade are pushing them to the side."
The WFO cites various causes for hunger and food insecurity—poverty, war, climate change, shrinking land and water resources, economic and political disruption.
Suggested solutions are just as plentiful.
"We don't need more corn and soybeans, which have become part of the ethanol focus to be energy efficient, and for feeding livestock," Peine said. "What we do need is to produce food to eat rather than industrial commodities."
Technology could be a key to ending food scarcity, said Charlie Arnot, CEO of the Center for Food Integrity, a nonprofit group with business members including ConAgra and DuPont.
"We should be using more genetically modified crops that would produce stronger and sturdier crops," Arnot said.
"We need to move food from where it is to where it isn't and that means investing in agriculture development using the best technologies we have," Arnot added.
But technology comes with risk, said chef Mary Lawton Johnson.
"I'm not in favor of genetically modified foods to feed a starving world," she said. "The health side effects can be dangerous in my opinion."
"What we need is more localization of food-growing. Let the crops natural to the land grow instead of pushing crops that are not meant to be there," she said.
Food shortage solutions includes taming the investing markets, said Sarah Lawrence's Muldavin.
"The market trading of commodities is overboard and not helping food prices," said Muldavin. "Why does a bushel of wheat have to be traded five times a day?"
"I think we need to step out of the way of the market place and let it take its course," said Tim Richards, a professor of agribusiness at Arizona State University. "We're destroying local food markets around the world by forcing them to buy U.S. commodities."
"We should stop global government support for farmers. The market does a fantastic job of sorting out prices and food production," said Richards. "If we just stay out of the way, food shortages could be eliminated."
Change the food debate
Last October, the WFO issued a warning saying a global food crisis could happen in 2013. The alarm was over rising food prices, lack of grain reserves and extreme weather conditions.
All those conditions have receded this year as prices have pulled back, reserves have increased and some areas of the globe have seen better weather.
But eradicating world hunger won't be as simple as drought-ending rains or silos full of wheat, said Muldavin.
"A lot of folks have different opinions on how to solve the problem of hunger," he said. "But we have to reframe the debate from food shortages to understanding why so many people are not accessing good, nutritious food."
—By CNBC's Mark Koba.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/100893540

Nick Cave and Neko Case - She's Not There