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The tricky part in designing [the algorithm] was how to take something mysterious — human attraction — and break it into components that a computer can work with.

How OKCupid’s love-matching algorithms work. Also see the math of finding love and how one woman hacked the algorithms of online dating to find her soulmate.

love thought and opinion culture and society Carl Sagan

For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.

Carl Sagan

Charles Darwin love comics history and literature thought and opinion science and technology

Darwin’s timelessly amusing list of the the pros and cons of marriage, illustrated in a new graphic biography.

art and design love design Louise Fili stamps

For Valentine’s Day, a beautiful new USPS Love stamp from the ever-amazing Louise Fili, whose recent monograph was one of the best design books of 2012.

Pair with Fili’s wonderful Design Matters interview.

love photography art and design artists art black and white

The Sleep of the Beloved – breathtakingly tender timelapse portraits of sleeping couples by German photographer Paul Schneggenburger

(ᔥ My Modern Met)

love culture and society science and technology tech

Bad data in equals bad data out. Algorithms that dating sites have spent millions of dollars to refine aren’t necessarily bad. They’re just not as good as we want them to be, because they’re computing our half-truths and aspirational wishes.

Love in the Age of Data – how one woman hacked her way to happily ever after

science and technology psychology science love

Neuroinformaticians from Radboud University Nijmegen provide a mathematical model for efficient communication in relationships. Love affair dynamics can look like a sinus wave: a smooth repetitive oscillation of highs and lows. For some couples these waves grow out of control, leading to breakup, while for others they smooth into a state of peace and quietness. Natalia Bielczyk and her colleagues show that the ‘relationship-sinus’ depends on the time partners take to form their emotional reactions towards each other.

Mathematicians model love. For a less scientific take, see Julian Hibbard’s abstract diagrams of love, then wash down with the science of positivity resonance.

Neuroinformaticians from Radboud University Nijmegen provide a mathematical model for efficient communication in relationships. Love affair dynamics can look like a sinus wave: a smooth repetitive oscillation of highs and lows. For some couples these waves grow out of control, leading to breakup, while for others they smooth into a state of peace and quietness. Natalia Bielczyk and her colleagues show that the ‘relationship-sinus’ depends on the time partners take to form their emotional reactions towards each other.

Mathematicians model love. For a less scientific take, see Julian Hibbard’s abstract diagrams of love, then wash down with the science of positivity resonance.

love quote history and literature lit James Baldwin thought and opinion culture and society

James Baldwin adds to history’s most beautiful definitions of love with a conception of “love” beyond the boundaries of the personal, something neurobiology has seconded.

culture and society love science and technology science

Odds are, if you were raised in a Western culture, you think of emotions as largely private events. you locate them within a person’s boundaries, confined within their mind and skin. When conversing about emotions, your use of singular possessive adjectives betrays this point of view. You refer to ‘my anxiety,’ ‘his anger,’ or ‘her interest.’ Following this logic, love would seem to belong to the person who feels it. Defining love as positivity resonance challenges this view. Love unfolds and reverberates between and among people — within interpersonal transactions — and thereby belong to all parties involved, and to the metaphorical connective tissue that binds them together, albeit temporarily. … More than any other positive emotion, then, love belongs not to one person, but to pairs or groups of people. It resides within connections.

The science of love and how “positivity resonance” shapes the way we connect

Francis Bacon love history and literature culture and society history thought and opinion science and technology science

There was never proud man thought so absurdly well of himself, as the lover doth of the person loved; and therefore it was well said, That it is impossible to love, and to be wise.

Sir Francis Bacon, father of the scientific method, was born on this day in 1561 – celebrate with his thoughts on love.

art and design David Byrne books music thought and opinion culture and society love

The Möbius structure of relationships, one of David Byrne’s hand-drawn pencil diagrams of the human condition

love Samuel Beckett history and literature lit

When we say that love is ineffable, as Beckett knew, what we mean is that, when we love, we don’t know what the hell we are doing. We can’t stop talking through it, trying to figure it out. We think we ought to be talking about everything, doing everything, doing anything — breaking into spontaneous rage, talking about suicide, playing games, complaining about our boots — instead of just loving. We wait and wait and wait. Inevitably, boredom creeps in, terror creeps in. When you give yourself completely to another, as Vladimir and Estragon have done with each other, and you say, “Don’t leave me, you’re my only hope,” every day is a little more and a little less frightening, every day is a little more and a little less suicidal, every day is a little more and a little less. You could, like Vladimir or Estragon, easily be talked into hanging yourself from a tree by the only one who could save you from it. We must escape. We cannot. We can’t go on. We do.

Beautiful read on love in Beckett. Complement with literary history’s most timeless meditations on love.

(↬ Page Turner)