I did not really identify with the cool-hunting, brand-building, sneaker-collecting generation of professional consumers I worked over for trend-story ideas, but neither did my colleagues in the bureau seem to identify with the megalomaniacal talent agents and casino magnates or the disgruntled aerospace engineers and short sellers they talked to all day.
There are close to 650,000 foreclosed properties sitting on the books of lenders, according to RealtyTrac, a data provider. An additional 710,000 are in the foreclosure process, and according to the Mortgage Bankers Association, about 3.25 million borrowers are delinquent on their loans and in danger of losing their homes.
...at least so far, the most visible effect of the Citizens United decision has been not so much a flood of corporate cash into politics as a flood of cash from billionaire cranks into politics.From Wiki, just to refresh your memory:
David Koch " is skeptical about anthropogenic Global Warming, and thinks a warmer planet would be good because "[t]he Earth will be able to support enormously more people because a far greater land area will be available to produce food...dislikes President Obama's policies. "He's the most radical president we've ever had as a nation... and has done more damage to the free enterprise system and long-term prosperity than any president we've ever had."[15] Koch believes that Obama's father's economic socialism explains what Koch views as Obama's belief in "antibusiness, anti-free enterprise influences."[15] Koch believes Obama himself is a "hardcore socialist" who is "marvelous at pretending to be something other than that."
Sheldon Adelson owns and publishes "a free daily newspaper to compete with Israeli, a newspaper he had co-founded in 2006 but had left.[7] The first edition of the new newspaper, Israel HaYom, was published on July 30, 2007.According to Target Group Index(TGI) survey published in July 2011, Israel HaYom, which unlike all other Israeli newspapers is distributed for free, became the number one daily newspaper (on weekdays) four years after its inception."Just sayin'.
Some consider Noether’s theorem, as it is now called, as important as Einstein’s theory of relativity; it undergirds much of today’s vanguard research in physics, including the hunt for the almighty Higgs boson.One of my favorite NYT science writers, Natalie Angier, explains.
"In 1908, an unheralded and at the time unappreciated would-be astronomer, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, was employed as a 'computer' at the Harvard College Observatory. ('Computers' were women brought in to catalogue the brightness of stars recorded on the observatory's photographic plates; women were not allowed to use the observatory telescopes at the time.) Daughter of a Congregational minister and a descendant of the Pilgrims, Leavitt made an astounding discovery, which she further illuminated in 1912: she noticed that there was a regular relationship between the brightness of Cepheid stars and the period of their varieation. Therefore, if one could determine the distance to a single Cepheid of a known period (subsequently determined in 1913), then measuring the brightness of other Cepheids of the same period would allow one to determine the distance to these other stars!...Leavitt's discovery revolutionized the field. (Hubble himself, who was snubbed for the Nobel Prize, often said Leavitt's work deserved the prize, although he was sufficiently self-serving that he might have suggested it only because he would have been a natural contender to share the prize with her for his later work.) Paperwork had actually begun in the Royal Swedish Academy to nominate Leavitt for the Nobel in 1924 when it was learned that she had died of cancer three years earlier. By dint of his force of personality, knack for self-promotion, and skill as an observer, Hubble would become a household name, while Leavitt, alas, is known only to aficiaonados of the field."Lawrence Krauss, A Universe From Nothing
I have to say that the various accounts of what went wrong are converging on a very depressing picture, in which White House political “experts” actually believed that trying to please the Washington Post editorial page was a winning political move.From an earlier column on "most voters," vs. the Very Serious People:
What I learn from political scientists is that this is all fantasy — albeit a kind of fantasy beloved of political pundits, who love to imagine that complicated psychodramas are playing out in the minds of voters. Well, here’s a little secret: most voters don’t sit around reading Clive Crook columns or debating the Bowles-Simpson plan. They have a gut sense — things are getting better or they’re getting worse — and mainly vote on that basis. They’re not paying attention at all to this stuff.
Thirteen University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign scientists, all of whom skate for the Twin City Derby Girls.This entry courtesy of Anthrobrawlogist.
Top row, left to right: Therafist, clinical psychologist; Anthrobrawlogist, biological anthropologist; Snarker Posey, legal information scientist; Doc Dementer, educational psychologist; Oh No Bobo, veterinarian; Killy Love-less, social scientist; MRSA, microbiologist.
Bottom row, left to right: Jo Holley, evolutionary ecologist; Gaya Jenda, family scientist; Mrs. T, educational psychologist; F1, developmental psychologist; Punchwrap Supreme, reproductive toxicologist; Polly Nator, evolutionary biologist.
If you cannot understand my argument, and declare "It's Greek to me", you are quoting Shakespeare; if you claim to be more sinned against than sinning, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you recall your salad days, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you act more in sorrow than in anger, if your wish is father to the thought, if your lost property has vanished into thin air, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you have ever refused to budge an inch or suffered from green-eyed jealousy, if you have played fast and loose, if you have been tongue-tied, a tower of strength, hoodwinked or in a pickle, if you have knitted your brows, made a virtue of necessity, insisted on fair play, slept not one wink, stood on ceremony, danced attendance (on your lord and master), laughed yourself into stitches, had short shrift, cold comfort or too much of a good thing, if you have seen better days or lived in a fool's paradise - why, be that as it may, the more fool you, for it is a foregone conclusion that you are (as good luck would have it) quoting Shakespeare; if you think it is early days and clear out bag and baggage, if you think it is high time and that that is the long and short of it, if you believe that the game is up and that truth will out even if it involves your own flesh and blood, if you lie low till the crack of doom because you suspect foul play, if you have your teeth set on edge (at one fell swoop) without rhyme or reason, then - to give the devil his due - if the truth were known (for surely you have a tongue in your head) you are quoting Shakespeare; even if you bid me good riddance and send me packing, if you wish I were dead as a door-nail, if you think I am an eyesore, a laughing stock, the devil incarnate, a stony-hearted villain, bloody-minded or a blinking idiot, then - by Jove! O Lord! Tut, tut! for goodness' sake! what the dickens! but me no buts - it is all one to me, for you are quoting Shakespeare.- Bernard Levin, quoted in The Story of English
Premiere Networks, which distributes Limbaugh as well as a host of other right-wing talkers, sent an email out to its affiliates early Friday listing 98 large corporations that have requested their ads appear only on “programs free of content that you know are deemed to be offensive or controversial (for example, Mark Levin, Rush Limbaugh, Tom Leykis, Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity).”Where can I buy me some of that social media? Oh, wait...
Academic life and family life are both built on love — the love of learning, the love of other people — but they survive on contention, renewing and extending quarrels from one generation to the next. Interpretation begets interpretation, and a father’s mistakes are corrected by the errors of his children. There is no reason to suppose, or to hope, that this will end. The substance of human existence is argument, and each of us has a footnote to contribute.
Azathoth – Rules all time and space from a black throne at the center of Chaos.
Charles V, the Habsburg emperor, is alleged to have said that he spoke French to men and Italian to women; he also revealed that he conversed with God in Spanish and with his horse in German.David Gilmour, The Pursuit of Italy
We talk of the Italian language and the Venetian dialect as if the second is a sort of deviant of the first whereas it is in fact much older, evolving from Latin centuries before the birth of Dante.Venetian is only one example. There are dozens of dialects alive and well in Italy, where half the population speaks a dialect at home and thousands and tens of thousands still speak German, French, Slav, Arabic, Spanish and variations in different parts of the country.
Prior to this morning, I was pretty sure I was the only one reading the Dish from Swaziland every day
With the help of the janitor he screwed onto the side of the desk a pencil sharpener—that highly satisfying, highly philosophical instrument that goes ticonderoga-ticonderoga, feeding on the yellow finish and sweet wood, and ends up in a kind of soundlessly spinning ethereal void as we all must.There are so many perfect things about that paragraph that I despair of ever writing even that much again. Maybe I'll try for a perfect sentence. Oh, wait...
31 films playing at this year’s South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas, were funded by Kickstarter donations, over 10 percent of those playing, along with 17 films at theSundance Film Festival.
When you look at the structure of the brain it's made up of neurons. Of course, everybody knows that these days. There are 100 billion of these nerve cells. Each of these cells makes about 1,000 to 10,000 contacts with other neurons. From this information people have calculated that the number of possible brain states, of permutations and combinations of brain activity, exceeds the number of elementary particles in the universe.Mindblowing, as they say. If you click the link, you will be at The Edge, which is a pretty cool place to be on a rainy day.
So if dismantling the facade of lies around, say, Bush's tax cut is so easy to do--and makes you the most talked-about newspaper writer in the country--why don't any other reporters or columnists do it themselves? Because doing so would violate some of the informal, but strict, rules under which Washington journalists operate. Reporters usually don't call a spade a spade, unless the lie is small or something personal. When it comes to big policy disagreements, most reporters prefer a he-said, she-said approach--and any policy with a white paper or press release behind it is presumed to be plausible and sincere, no matter how farfetched or deceptive it may be.
There is indeed a self, says Damasio, “but it is a process, not a thing, and the process is present at all times when we are presumed to be conscious.”Just the other day, I found someone who argued that consciousness wasn't much good for anything from an evolutionary standpoint and that there's no reason to believe that something like human intelligence is evolutionary progress rather than just a dead-end side road. (Although I must say his reasoning that dung beetles or whatever would have consciousness if it was such a good thing didn't really resonate. Maybe the dung beetle is just waiting to see how it turns out for us.)
the reason why conscious minds prevailed in evolution was the fact that consciousness optimized life regulation.”
"Let's be honest about all this: people think of breast cancer as a charity, but it's really a major business."
Sixty-eight percent of CatholicYeah, that's right, 68 percent.
women use highly effective methods: sterilization
(32%, including 24% using female sterilization,) the
pill or another hormonal method (31%) and the IUD
(5%).
"Politicians are people who, when they see the light at the end of the tunnel, go out a buy more tunnel." --John QuintonI don't know who John Quinton is or was.
In 1983, British singer Elvis Costello, a longtime fan of Baker, hired the trumpeter to play a solo on his song "Shipbuilding", from the album Punch the Clock. The song was a top 40 hit in the UK, and exposed Baker's music to a new audience. Later, Baker often featured Costello's song "Almost Blue" (inspired by Baker's version of "The Thrill Is Gone") in his live sets, and recorded the song on Let's Get Lost, a documentary film about his life.
There are hundreds of thousands of these foreigners in Israel; in 2010, the first victim of a Hamas rocket attack after the previous year’s Gaza War was a man named Manee Singueanphon, not Moshe Cohen.From an article, oddly, about eating in Israel.
So what this book does quite brilliantly is show that there was actually a high degree of intentionality in creating the crisis...Lloyd Blankfein doesn’t get up in the morning and say, “OK. How are we going to defraud people today?” but I do think the relationship of these banks to social rules is fairly dodgy. Rules are viewed as potential obstacles that you try to get around if that maximises your profit. This is a deeper social issue that I think has to do with the economisation of a lot of thinking. Economists have this model of rational utility maximisation – that social benefit comes out of everybody pursuing their private rational self-interest. This has shaded over – imperceptibly over the past couple of generations – to a downplaying of social norms as constraints on behaviour. You see this in a number of places. In business schools, for example. Back in the 1960s and 70s, business schools regarded themselves as professional schools along the lines of law schools or architecture schools. They were meant to inculcate a certain sense of professional responsibility, that you have obligations to society at large. But as a result of the economisation of a lot of what was taught in these schools, individual profit maximisation began to displace this normative sense, and this spilled over into the behaviour of the people who went on from these programmes into the financial sector. In their minds, they weren’t deliberately trying to defraud people, but if they saw an opportunity to take advantage of less sophisticated buyers of subprime mortgages, they would go ahead and do it.
Obama’s auto bailout, just by itself, saved a lot more jobs than Apple’s US employment.
What people haven't seemed to notice is that on earth, of all the billions of species that have evolved, only one has developed intelligence to the level of producing technology. Which means that kind of intelligence is really not very useful. It's not actually, in the general case, of much evolutionary value. We tend to think, because we love to think of ourselves, human beings, as the top of the evolutionary ladder, that the intelligence we have, that makes us human beings, is the thing that all of evolution is striving toward. But what we know is that that's not true. Obviously it doesn't matter that much if you're a beetle, that you be really smart. If it were, evolution would have produced much more intelligent beetles. We have no empirical data to suggest that there's a high probability that evolution on another planet would lead to technological intelligence. There is just too much we don't know.The philosophy of physics. I didn't even know there was such a thing. And I thought the multiple universe thing was pretty much accepted. There is just too much I don't know.
Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth. What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness.
Eighty five percent all the gravity in the universe comes from something about which we know nothing. ...Neil deGrasse Tyson
[Add that to dark energy and] it is ninety six percent of the universe. Everything we know and love--electrons, protons, neutrons, light, black holes, planets, stars, everything we know and understand--occupies four percent of the universe. Dark matter and dark energy is everything else.
This is not your average surfing video. This astounding footage was shot on August 27th, 2011 by cinematographer Chris Bryan at Teahupo’o, a small village off the coast of Tahiti. At the time these guys hit the water the French Navy had declared the day a double code red prohibiting and threatening to arrest anyone entering the water. Watch and you’ll see why. This is probably the most terrifying yet beautiful surfing video I’ve ever seen. (via stellar)
One of Frederica Sagor Maas' scripts launched Clara Bow. Maas eventually quit the movie business in disgust and much later wrote a scathing book about the industry.And while we're at it, throw in Eve Arnold, too. Although she only lived to 99.
