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The old saying “Sally sold seashells by the seashore” has nothing on a tongue twister created by researchers at MIT. The verbal puzzle, “pad kid poured curd pulled cod,” tripped up test subjects who tried to spit it out so much, that psychologists believe it could be the toughest one there is to date.

“If anyone can say this [phrase] ten times quickly, they get a prize,” said Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel, a psychologist from MIT who specializes in speech errors as a way of understanding normal brain functions, and one of the creators of the mouth-boggling phrase.

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– http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/blog/2013/12/05/mit-tongue-twister-trickiest-to-say/

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On Friday, at 12 A.M., Beyoncé staged the death of several paradigms by releasing her album “Beyoncé” on iTunes. It has fourteen songs, with a full-blown music video—not a Vine or a MacBook confessional—for each one, plus a few extra videos. The bundle costs $15.99 and many, many people with computers bought it. Billboard now reports that “Beyoncé” is the “fastest-selling album ever in the iTunes store,” with almost nine hundred thousand copies sold since Friday. So, in secret, Beyoncé planned and executed an entire album, and somehow nobody leaked the news or the files. Artists have been practicing the sudden release for several years—Radiohead’s “In Rainbows” is often credited as the first significant example—but there’s never been an out-of-the-blue release of this scope and significance. In her sole statement, Beyoncé said she wanted to recapture the “immersive” experience of everyone hearing an album all at once. She got her wish.

So what died on Friday? Nothing: this drop was a demonstration, kind of like the Trinity test. Yes, social media promoted the release for free, meaning that marketing budgets could potentially shrink for incredibly famous people on major labels, like Beyoncé. Not everyone is building up to an instant profit on release day, and maybe no one who hasn’t first been pumped into the mainstream by the majors can expect such a response. But “Beyoncé” proved that we could be spared viral campaigns and fake leaks and Pepsi ads. It’s not surprising that “Beyoncé” is excellent (the pros often work better faster); what is exciting is watching the minor rearrangement within the Knowles-Carter universe, and then seeing the rippling effects throughout the critical community. It is now painfully clear that, just as there is no one way to release an album, there is no single critical response anymore. Years of message boards and blogs and tweeting set up a crossfire that is more interesting and robust than any single review ever will be. The only consensus is that Beyoncé matters—the rest is a firefight in your pocket.

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– http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/sashafrerejones/2013/12/beyonce-new-album-review.html

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Nirvana will be inducted, as was widely expected. But so will Kiss, the costumed and made-up stars of hard rock that been snubbed by the Hall of Fame for years.

The other stars being inducted in the 29th annual ceremony, to be held at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn on April 10, are Hall and Oates, Linda Ronstadt, Cat Stevens and Peter Gabriel, who is being recognized as a solo performer but has already been inducted as part of the band Genesis.

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– http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/17/nirvana-to-join-rock-hall-of-fame-alongside-kiss-at-barclays-center/?ref=todayspaper

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The record, “Beyoncé” (Columbia), appeared on Apple’s iTunes store at midnight on Thursday with no warning. Yet Apple reported on Monday that it became the fastest-selling album in its history, with 828,773 around the world in its first three days, including 617,213 in the United States. It reached No. 1 on iTunes’s sales rankings in 104 countries.

In the United States, where albums are typically released on Tuesdays, “Beyoncé” had the fourth-biggest opening-week sales of any album this year, after Justin Timberlake’s “The 20/20 Experience” (with 968,000 sales), Eminem’s “The Marshall Mathers LP 2” (792,000) and Drake’s “Nothing Was the Same” (658,000). It also performed far better than Beyoncé’s last album, “4,” which sold 310,000 copies in its first week two years ago.

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– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/17/business/media/apple-says-beyonce-set-a-record-on-itunes.html?ref=todayspaper

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Today’s patent mess can be traced to a miscalculation by Jimmy Carter, who thought granting more patents would help overcome economic stagnation. In 1979, his Domestic Policy Review on Industrial Innovation proposed a new Federal Circuit Court of Appeals, which Congress created in 1982. Its first judge explained: “The court was formed for one need, to recover the value of the patent system as an incentive to industry.”

The country got more patents—at what has turned out to be a huge cost. The number of patents has quadrupled, to more than 275,000 a year. But the Federal Circuit approved patents for software, which now account for most of the patents granted in the U.S.—and for most of the litigation. Patent trolls buy up vague software patents and demand legal settlements from technology companies. Instead of encouraging innovation, patent law has become a burden on entrepreneurs, especially startups without teams of patent lawyers.

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– http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303293604579252662325112076

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The average working adult in Atlanta’s suburbs now drives 44 miles a day. (That’s 72 minutes a day behind the wheel, just getting to work and back.) Ninety-four percent of Atlantans commute by car. They spend more on gas than anyone else in the country. In a study of more than 8,000 households, investigators from the Georgia Institute of Technology led by Lawrence Frank discovered that people’s environments were shaping their travel behavior and their bodies. They could actually predict how fat people were by where they lived in the city.

Frank found that a white male living in Midtown, a lively district near Atlanta’s downtown, was likely to weigh 10 pounds less than his identical twin living out in a place like, say, Mableton, in the cul-de-sac archipelago that surrounds Atlanta, simply because the Midtowner would be twice as likely to get enough exercise every day.

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– http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_eye/2013/12/10/why_cul_de_sacs_are_bad_for_your_health_happy_city_by_charles_montgomery.html

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The English “sorry” is a marker not of grace and decorum, but rather of a belief that one magic word has the power to decontaminate the world even as it both pacifies and reproves those who pollute it. “Sorry” is a mixture of decayed piety and passive-aggressive guile.

The stand-alone “sorry” was unknown to Shakespeare or Dr. Johnson. Only in the mid-19th century did it become common to say “sorry” rather than “I am sorry.” The adjective was divorced from the person feeling the sorrow, and soon ceased to signal even regret.

“Sorry” rose at the same time that the English began using “overfamiliar” as a term of reproach and “detachment” as a synonym for “aloofness.” Stand-alone “sorry” may have dressed like a gentleman, but his heart was made of India rubber.

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– http://app.nytimes.com/#2013/12/14/opinion/a-poor-apology-of-a-word

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