[Interesting. -egg]
Tastemaker X: faux stock exchange game for music fans:

Tastemaker X is a new mobile social game that creator Marc Ruxin says lies somewhere between “Hollywood Stock Exchange for music and fantasy sports for music.” Marc is a veteran media industry future-thinker who happens to have excellent taste himself in music (and books and films), so if anyone can pull off a music discovery system wrapped in a massively multiplayer game, it’s him. At left is Marc talking about Tastemaker X and the gamification of culture at the recent ad:tech conference. Tastemaker X

[Also tasty, I believe, and easy to cultivate on small artificial islands. -egg]

Snails inadvertantly massage woman’s face:
At a beauty salon in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, an employee performs a “medical-cosmetic” massage on a client using African snails. The salon is the only one in the region using the “snails method”, which owner Alyona Zlotnikova claims can speed skin regeneration and eliminate wrinkles. Photo: REUTERS/Ilya Naymushinclaimed.

[What an utterly charming installation piece. Boy, I’m sure glad *I* didn’t have to wire up all those damn cats. -egg]

Army of Lucky Cats:
Boris Petrovsky writes: “The Maneki Neko (jap., literally Beckoning Cat; aka Lucky Cat, Money Cat) is a common Japanese figurine which is believed to bring luck, attract customers and bring prosperity. The Lucky Cat waves with the raised left paw and holds a historic coin in front of itself with the right one. The Lucky Cat as talisman and selling product is wide-spread in Asia and meanwhile almost all over the world.”
The video of Boris’s installation was shot and edited by Nina Martens; view it at Vimeo [via Creative Applications]

What ‘Brain Food’ Actually Does for Your Brain [Health]:

You should eat salmon before a test, berries to prevent Alzheimer’s, or a vitamin supplement to increase your memory. You’ve heard the term “brain foods” since you were a kid, but how much do you really know about them? More importantly, is there really a way to boost your brain power just be eating a certain type of diet? We talked with two experts to unravel the myths and unpack the facts about how much food can really impact your brain. More »

Why Bringing in a Third Party is the Best Way to Reach a Fair Agreement [Negotiation]:

Compromise is hard whether it’s something as complicated as a salary or as trivial as who does the dishes on Tuesday night. The reason is that we’re all pretty certain we’re right and Scientific American recommends using that righteousness, aka the self-serving bias, to reach a fair compromise by adding in a third party. More »

On the history of books bound in human flesh:

From “the chirurgeon’s apprentice,” a fascinating and squick-inducing blog/website devoted to chronicling “the horrors of pre-anaesthetic surgery,” an entry about the history of books bound in tanned human skin. Snip from details about the image shown above:

And then there were books which claimed to be made from the human flesh but were, in fact, not. One example comes from the Wellcome Collection in London [left]. It is a curious little notebook which professes to be ‘made of Tanned skin of the Negro whose Execution caused the War of Independence’. Presumably, this refers to Crispus Attucks, a dockworker of Wampanoag who was the first person killed by the British during the Boston Massacre. Immediately following his death, Attucks was held up as an American martyr. As a consequence of its alleged origins, this notebook has become a symbol of the American Revolution.

More. And if you enjoy tweets about 17th-century surgery, you’ll want to follow Lindsey Fitzharris, the medical historian behind the “Chirurgeon’s Apprentice” website. (via Vaughan Bell)

Algorithms for smart sand that sculpts itself:

Above is an example a “smart pebble,” outfitted with a microprocessor and magnets, that MIT researchers are using to prototype algorithms for “smart sand” that could form into any shape. Sure, it’s early days. But still! Smart sand! From MIT:

At the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in May — the world’s premier robotics conference — (MIT’s Distributed Robotics Laboratory) researchers will present a paper describing algorithms that could enable such “smart sand.” They also describe experiments in which they tested the algorithms on somewhat larger particles — cubes about 10 millimeters to an edge, with rudimentary microprocessors inside and very unusual magnets on four of their sides.
Unlike many other approaches to reconfigurable robots, smart sand uses a subtractive method, akin to stone carving, rather than an additive method, akin to snapping LEGO blocks together. A heap of smart sand would be analogous to the rough block of stone that a sculptor begins with. The individual grains would pass messages back and forth and selectively attach to each other to form a three-dimensional object; the grains not necessary to build that object would simply fall away. When the object had served its purpose, it would be returned to the heap. Its constituent grains would detach from each other, becoming free to participate in the formation of a new shape.

“Self-sculpting sand“