Support Pullquote, upgrade to Pro!
(Or just tweet your Pullquote for free!)
With Pullquote Pro, you'll get to:
- share on Facebook
- schedule tweets
- tweet from multiple accounts
- edit quotes
- customize colors
- change fonts
- save and index quotes
- private quotes
Choose a plan: $5/month $50/year (includes free access to any new features)
Recent quotes:
What Are Sanderson’s Laws Of Magic? | Brandon Sanderson
The First Law
Sanderson’s First Law of Magics: An author’s ability to solve conflict with magic is DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL to how well the reader understands said magic.
The Second Law
Sanderson’s Second Law can be written very simply. It goes like this: Limitations > Powers
(Or, if you want to write it in clever electrical notation, you could say it this way: Ω > |
though that would probably drive a scientist crazy.)
The Third Law
The third law is as follows: Expand what you already have before you add something new.
Why Is the One Percent So Obsessed With Magic? | The New Republic
Religion and magic have a long and intertwined history; there is even evidence that Christ was thought of as a magician. (Cohen likes to tell a possibly apocryphal story about Catholic priests who used a trick in which they’d light urns of oil on fire, which would mix with hidden urns of water so that steam passed through hidden tubes, powering a pneumatic mechanical gear network that could open enormous stone doors at the back of the church—the priest would seem to have opened these heavy doors with fire from afar.) Religion is at once a feat of magic and a response to magic—Christians railed against Pagan “magic” while proclaiming the power of their own homegrown miracles. In 2005, the magician Brock Gill tried to replicate Jesus’ famous miracles for a BBC/Discovery Channel documentary, successfully turning water to wine and walking on water. “It’s possible that there was some type of trick because I was able to do it,” Gill said.
The Lab Coat Is on the Hook in the Fight Against Germs - The New York Times
This change took place in part because doctors wanted to spruce up their dubious reputation. Until the advent of such medical reformers as Abraham Flexner and Sir William Osler about 100 years ago, medical training in the United States was notoriously lax. Lectures, not clinical experience, were the norm. It was the age of horse sense and the quack.
So to more closely associate themselves in the public mind with sound science, physicians began donning the lab coats that were being worn by chemists and other laboratory types. These coats were generally beige. But white soon became the standard.
“Our notion since the 1880s, when the germ theory of disease began to take hold, is that microbes hide in dark, dirty places, and that white stands for purity, both material and moral,” said Guenter Risse, a physician and author of “Mending Bodies, Saving Souls: A History of Hospitals” (Oxford, 1999). “Wearing white coats was a symbol that you were clean.”
Visual illusion proves effective in relieving knee pain for people with osteoarthritis -- ScienceDaily
UniSA researcher and NHMRC Career Development Fellow, Dr Tasha Stanton says the research combined visual illusions and touch, with participants reporting up to a 40 per cent decrease in pain when presented with an illusion of the knee and lower leg elongated.
"We also found that the pain reduction was optimal when the illusion was repeated numerous times -- that is, its analgesic effect was cumulative," Dr Stanton says.
The small study -- 12 participants -- focused on people over 50 years with knee pain, and a clinical diagnosis of osteoarthritis.
Dr Stanton says the research provides "proof of concept" support that visual illusions can play a powerful role in reducing pain.
Even open-label placebos work, if they are explained -- ScienceDaily
For the first time, researchers from the University of Basel, along with colleagues from Harvard Medical School, have compared the effects of administering open-label and deceptive placebos. The team conducted an experimental study with 160 healthy volunteers who were exposed to increasing heat on their forearm via a heating plate. The participants were asked to manually stop the temperature rise as soon as they could no longer stand the heat. After that, they were given a cream to relieve the pain.
Some of the participants were deceived during the experiment: they were told that they were given a pain relief cream with the active ingredient lidocaine, although it was actually a placebo. Other participants received a cream that was clearly labeled as a placebo; they were also given fifteen minutes of explanations about the placebo effect, its occurrence and its effect mechanisms. A third group received an open-label placebo without any further explanation.
The subjects of the first two groups reported a significant decrease in pain intensity and unpleasantness after the experiment. "The previous assumption that placebos only work when they are administered by deception needs to be reconsidered," says Dr. Cosima Locher, a member of the University of Basel's Faculty of Psychology and first author of the study.
Humans rely more on 'inferred' visual objects than 'real' ones -- ScienceDaily
To make sense of the world, humans and animals need to combine information from multiple sources. This is usually done according to how reliable each piece of information is. For example, to know when to cross the street, we usually rely more on what we see than what we hear -- but this can change on a foggy day.
"In such situations with the blind spot, the brain 'fills in' the missing information from its surroundings, resulting in no apparent difference in what we see," says senior author Professor Peter König, from the University of Osnabrück's Institute of Cognitive Science. "While this fill-in is normally accurate enough, it is mostly unreliable because no actual information from the real world ever reaches the brain. We wanted to find out if we typically handle this filled-in information differently to real, direct sensory information, or whether we treat it as equal."
To do this, König and his team asked study participants to choose between two striped visual images, both of which were displayed to them using shutter glasses. Each image was displayed either partially inside or completely outside the visual blind spot. Both were perceived as identical and 'continuous' due to the filling-in effect, and participants were asked to select the image they thought represented the real, continuous stimulus.
"We thought people would either make their choice without preference, or with a preference towards the real stimulus, but exactly the opposite happened -- there was in fact a strong bias towards the filled-in stimulus inside the blind spot," says first author Benedikt Ehinger, researcher at the University of Osnabrück. "Additionally, in an explorative analysis of how long the participants took to make their choice, we saw that they were slightly quicker to choose this stimulus than the one outside the blind spot."
So, why are subjects so keen on the blind-spot information when it is essentially the least reliable? The team's interpretation is that subjects compare the internal representation (or 'template') of a continuous stimulus against the incoming sensory input, resulting in an error signal which represents the mismatch. In the absence of real information, no deviation and therefore no error or a smaller signal occurs, ultimately leading to a higher credibility at the decision-making stage. This indicates that perceptual decision-making can rely more on inferred rather than real information, even when there is some knowledge about the reduced reliability of the inferred image available in the brain.
"In other words, the implicit knowledge that a filled-in stimulus is less reliable than an external one does not seem to be taken into account for perceptual decision-making," Ehinger explains.
Fractal edges shown to be key to imagery seen in Rorschach inkblots -- ScienceDaily
"These optical illusions seen in inkblots and sometimes in art are important for understanding the human visual system," said Taylor, who is director of the UO Materials Science Institute. "You learn important things from when our eyes get fooled. Fractal patterns in the inkblots are confusing the visual system. Why do you detect a bat or a butterfly when they were never there?"
