the taste changed by up to 60 percent

No, no, no. The ratings changed by up to 60%. I tried (briefly) to find the article, but couldn't, so I can't say for sure what the findings were, but a rating change of 'up to 60%' could mean a number of different things. It sounds like it's the maximum difference in rating between two different music conditions, but maybe it's an outlier (e.g., maybe the other rating differences were only 5%). Not so interesting if it was just one guy who like rockin' out to Paul McCartney and the Wings while sipping his Cabernet.

anything out of a box.

Maybe the best wine I've ever had came out of a box (at a bistro in Paris), and I've never liked Black Flag...

As The Onion reported in February:

WASHINGTON— Jaded by the sight of what it deemed "run-of-the-mill" orifices, the nation's pornography-saturated populace released a statement Monday demanding a new bodily opening to leer at. "At this point, staring at an anus, vagina, or beckoning mouth has become so commonplace that it is no more titillating than ogling, say, the human elbow," the statement read in part, its list of demands specifying that the new orifice, wherever its location on the body, must be concealed by some sort of clothing or shroud during the majority of the day, so that the viewer grows more eager for its eventual revelation when its covering is seductively removed. "If at all possible, we'd prefer some sort of self-moistening orifice that grips tightly enough to constrain fingers and foreign objects, but also gapes wide enough to fit a human head." According to pornographic historians, there hasn't been a public outcry like this since 1989, when the nation's mainstream pornographic-film industry pacified its audience by unveiling the first penetrable asshole.

I feel compelled to mention Gogol Bordello's buddies the Balkan Beat Box.

Balkan Beat Box is so very much better than Gogol Bordello, who I think has too much mediocre punk and too little eastern European weirdness. My reaction to Gogol Bordello was to turn it off and listen to either 'standard' eastern European music or 'standard' punk.

G Jules, the argument about the reason for climate change is far from being a distraction. If people cause it, then there's reason to think that we can reverse it (which may or may not be worth the cost), whereas if it's due to, e.g., solar activity, what could we possibly do to be "keeping the world in a state capable of maintaining our continued existence"?

There is a two page article in the March issue of Physics Today [sorry, but the article is only available to subscribers] discussing periodic variation in solar activity and its relationship to periodic variation in Earth's climate. One of the points made is that modeling periodicity allows researchers to account for (or at least describe) observations that linear models (e.g., correlation) miss.

I would also like to second the objections to the use of terms like 'denialists'. Climate science is still pretty young, and skepticism of the most dire predictions is, in my opinion, still warranted.

The kicker? None of the subjects even knew that coat hangers were going to be used.

This would be a better kicker if the people did know that on, say, half the trials, er.., songs, there was a coat hanger while on the other half, there was a monster cable, yet they still couldn't tell the difference.

To be specific: the part of the brain associated with taste did not change, but the part of the brain associated with how much we enjoy that taste did change. Expectation changes perception at a very real physiological level.

I loves me some high-tech phrenology.

Svankmajer also has an amazing movie called Little Otik that doesn't appear on his site. It's based on a Czech fold tale, and it's truly demented.

Oh, and I hope Burton doesn't screw Alice up.