When I was in graduate school, my professors told me that there was no reality outside of language, that the desk where I was sitting, frantically scribbling notes, didn't exist unless I called it a desk, and for quite a while I believed them.

I didn't understand then that theirs was a belief system that, among other things, let us all off the hook. If there were no desks, then certainly there were no polluted rivers; if there were no chairs there was no poverty; if there were no walls and windows, there was no pain or violence in our homes. If the world could only be talked—or written—into being, we would only have to take responsibility for what we said, and never what we did.

• Alpha Romeo Carabo by Bretone Studio

The noun ‘sin’ is feminine in German (die Sünde) but masculine in Russian (rpex). (…)

They investigated 790 paintings of German, French, Italian and Spanish artists that represent a personification of abstract entities such as sin, love, time and justice. Afterwards they compared the personified gender with the grammatical gender of the artist’s mother tongue.

What they found out: Personified gender matched the grammatical gender in 78% of the cases. (…)

It may give answers to German women who always have to wonder why southwestern European men are so much more charming: In Italiy, France and Spain the sin is a man. more: art as grammer

.. and I wonder what it means to want to have your needs anticipated. I think it means: not having to confront him or yourself with the reality that you are a person with needs.

Most of the time, I just work on being invisible with a lie I keep telling myself that maybe one day he will wake up magically enlightened and will consider the fact that what he wants might not be the same as what I want at all.. and so he will ask me and then actually have the energy to carry on with my desires..

but even when I ask, I usually get ignored or questioned... So why bother..

I am really tired. Should go to bed.

• diary, 2009

Q: What are some actual examples of the law of unintended consequences in action?

A: American citizens often complain about how high CEO salaries are. The SEC attempted to mitigate this, and required CEO salaries to be publicly disclosed. As a result, they increased approximately three-fold between 1976 and 1993, going from 36 times the average worker pay to 131 times the average worker pay. “It encouraged other CEOs to demand higher pay, since now they had hard data telling them they were underpaid.”

When San Francisco banned giving away toys with happy meals that exceeded a certain percentage of fat, McDonald’s responded by offering the toys with purchase of a happy meal and a 10 cent contribution to charity. They also stopped selling the toys without happy meal purchase, meaning you now have to buy the meal to get the toy.

"I've yet to hear a man asked how he's going to combine work & family." - Gloria Steinem, 1972.

2012, still waiting.

Ask a social scientist about the keys to happiness and you’re likely to hear that it’s better to buy experiences than buy possessions. What you’re unlikely to hear is a good explanation for why experiences make people happier.

Two Cornell psychologists, Emily Rosenzweig and Thomas Gilovich, attempted to answer this question by examining regret rather than satisfaction in the aftermath of a purchase. They theorized that with material purchases the strongest regret stems from action (i.e. buying the wrong thing), whereas with experiential purchases the strongest regret comes from inaction (not having the experience.) The result is that those who make a purchase are more likely to feel regret when buying a material good, and therefore buying a material good leads to comparatively less happiness.

We've sort of been dropping the ball here on the blog.

We still love it, and we have been working a lot on it (in our minds)

If you want to know what we're up too.. its worth checking out our twitter feed, dropping us an email so we update this more or more interesting is you can always stalk us.. we'll be here for most of January and Feb 2012... Bringing us baked goods is always a nice intro.. don't you think?

It's like that David Foster Wallace thing: If you worship money, you'll always feel poor. If you worship beauty, you'll always feel ugly. If you worship power, you always feel powerless. I worship innovation and I always feel like I'm not doing enough new stuff. That's my impulsiveness.

• Tom Sachs

We're half way into a hackathon workshop week here at HyperWerk. We have been honored and amazed by the energy and students here..

Half way into the workshop week, they've already got a running system. Total Win.

More photo documentation of the week is here.

by Fabian Ciraolo

A while back, at the entrance of a gym, there was a picture of a very thin and beautiful woman. The caption was "This summer, do you want to be a mermaid or a whale?"

The story goes, a woman (of clothing size unknown) answered the following way:

"Dear people, whales are always surrounded by friends (dolphins, seals, curious humans), they are sexually active and raise their children with great tenderness. They entertain like crazy with dolphins and eat lots of prawns. They swim all day and travel to fantastic places like Patagonia, the Barents Sea or the coral reefs of Polynesia. They sing incredibly well and sometimes even are on cds. They are impressive and dearly loved animals, which everyone defend and admires.

Mermaids do not exist.

But if they existed, they would line up to see a psychologist because of a problem of split personality: woman or fish? They would have no sex life and could not bear children. Yes, they would be lovely, but lonely and sad. And, who wants a girl that smells like fish by his side?

Without a doubt, I'd rather be a whale.

At a time when the media tells us that only thin is beautiful, I prefer to eat ice cream with my kids, to have dinner with my husband, to eat and drink and have fun with my friends.

We women, we gain weight because we accumulate so much wisdom and knowledge that there isn't enough space in our heads, and it spreads all over our bodies. We are not fat, we are greatly cultivated. Every time I see my curves in the mirror, I tell myself: "How amazing am I ?! "